Achieving racial equity would mean living in a world where race is no longer a factor in the distribution of opportunity. The 10-Year Capital Plan strives to fund projects to promote equity in the services delivered by the City’s facilities and infrastructure. This is reflected in the funding principles of this Plan and department efforts that inform capital investment priorities (Funding Principle 2: Protects Life Safety and Enhances Resilience, Including Racial Equity).
Department Equity Plans include the Planning Department's Racial and Social Equity Action Plan, Recreation and Park Department’s Equity Zone metrics, Muni Service Equity Strategy, and Department of Public Health’s Community Health Needs Assessment.
Planning Department Efforts
The San Francisco Planning Department plays a key role in reducing racial and social inequities across the city through proactive policies and community-led initiatives. A major component of this includes zoning changes to add an additional 82,000 units of housing and over 300,000 residents over the next eight years, increasing housing affordability for low- and middle-income households. These zoning changes focus on neighborhoods with concentrations of resources to support positive economic, educational, and health outcomes for more families. The additional units and households may bring neighborhood benefits as well as new infrastructure investment needs. The Economic and Neighborhood Development, Affordable Housing, Infrastructure and Transportation chapters provide additional information on these changes and how they will be funded.
Another Planning Department effort is the Racial and Social Equity Action Plan. The Action Plan provides tools and guidelines to apply an equity perspective to the department’s budgeting, planning, and project reviews. The goal of this approach is to ensure that investments in infrastructure, facilities, and services are prioritized to meet the needs of historically marginalized communities, with a focus on equitable access to cultural resources, economic opportunities, and affordable housing.
The Planning Department also developed the City’s first Environmental Justice (EJ) Element of the General Plan through a collaborative process with community-based organizations. This framework proposes policies that ensure the residents of communities that face the highest burden from historic chronic patterns of disinvestment are centered in receiving new services and amenities during the future development of the city. The EJ Communities Map uses a variety of environmental and socioeconomic information to determine where residents face the top one-third of cumulative environmental and socioeconomic burdens across the City. The EJ Communities include areas of Bayview Hunters Point, Chinatown, Excelsior, Japantown, Mission, Ocean View-Merced Heights-Ingleside, Outer Mission, Potrero Hill, SoMa, Tenderloin, Treasure Island, Visitacion Valley, and Western Addition.
Office of Resilience and Capital Planning (ORCP) Efforts
ORCP evaluates capital budget requests for their impact on climate and equity. Equity-focused projects are either located within Environmental Justice (EJ) communities or serve vulnerable populations directly. Many of these projects involve extensive community engagement to ensure their design aligns with local needs. Recent examples of projects strongly connected to equity goals include the renovation and retrofitting of community health clinics, opening the new India Basin Park, connecting nearly 20,000 units of affordable housing to free broadband internet, delivering hundreds of new permanent supportive housing units, and beginning renovations of two of the City’s neighborhood cultural centers. In FY25, approximately 19% of the Capital Budget was dedicated to projects that advance equity.
In order to continue funding projects that contribute to a more equitable San Francisco, this Plan calls for significant investments in areas where racial disparities continue to be significant, including public health and affordable housing. More on the City’s efforts to address affordability can be found in the Affordable Housing Chapter and address health equity in the Health and Human Services Chapter.
