22-05-2025
- Business
- San Francisco Chronicle
S.F. public housing leader leaves after stabilizing troubled agency
San Francisco Assessor-Record Joaquin Torres is stepping down from his position as president of the Housing Authority Commission, a 12-year tenure during which the long-troubled public housing agency was expanded and reorganized.
Douglas Shoemaker, the former president of Mercy Housing California, will replace Torres, Mayor Daniel Lurie said Wednesday.
Lurie thanked Torres for his service on the commission and said in a statement that the number of families served by the housing authority during Torres' tenure had increased by 20% to 16,545 households. He said Shoemaker brings 'unmatched experience and a lifelong commitment to affordable housing and the families who benefit from it to the Housing Authority.'
Torres' stint on the commission was unusual because department heads and elected officials rarely volunteer as commissioners. And over the last seven years, Torres has been both: he directed the Office of Economic and Workforce Development from 2018 to 2021 and has been San Francisco Assessor-Recorder since 2021.
Yet Torres continued to lead an underfunded agency that houses some of the city's poorest residents in public housing from Potrero Hill to Sunnydale to Hunters Point.
'A lot of people serve on commissions just for their resume or just to say they did,' said Sam Moss, executive director of the nonprofit Mission Housing. 'Joaquin really cares and anyone who works with the housing authority knows things are much better than they were 12 years ago because of him.'
Torres came to politics late — he spent more than a decade as a stage actor in New York —and credits the housing authority role with forcing him to grapple with how the government can address some of the city's most 'intractable problems.'
'Every part of who I am as a public servant is grounded in the work of the housing authority,' he said.
When he joined the commission, the authority had more than $270 million of unfunded capital needs and was running a multi-year deficit. Over the next few years, he led the authority through a restructuring, with affordable housing developers taking over management of the portfolio under a 'rental assistance demonstration' program, known as RAD.
RAD converted its public housing stock to Section 8 vouchers, which allowed the nonprofits to access low-income housing tax credits for the first time. More than $1 billion in tax credits were invested in rehabbing thousands of units. The program also allowed the city to increase the number of families getting Section 8 vouchers from 8,000 in 2013 to 15,000 today.
Malcolm Yeung, CEO of Chinese Community Development Center., which operates some housing authority properties in Chinatown, said Torres' calm demeanor made him uniquely suited to 'overseeing a wholesale reimagining' of an agency that had long been the target of criticism and complaints.
'Rarely, if ever, did I even see Joaquin defensive,' and Yeung.
Torres pushed to get families living in Chinatown SRO into Section 8 multi-bedroom apartments, decreasing the number of households with children living in cramped hotel rooms from 600 to fewer than 100, Yeung said.
Still,the housing authority has not been immune to allegations of mismanagement during Torres' tenure. One of Torres' most significant decisions came in 2013, just two months after he had been appointed, when the commission fired the authority's director after a scathing federal audit. In 2018, the agency faced a $30 million deficit and had to be bailed out by the city and federal government. More recently, a fire in a vacant unit at the Potrero Hill Annex underscored widespread issues with squatters living in units slated for demolition.
In addition, the city's plan to create mixed-income neighborhood by adding market-rate and affordable projects to public housing – dubbed HOPE SF — has so far failed to attract market-rate developers at the three locations where that kind of development was planned: Potrero Hill, Sunnydale and the Bayview.
Public housing residents still show up at commission meetings and describe deplorable conditions in some developments including leaky pipes, mold, squatters and drug activity.
Torres said his years as a stage actor prepared him for what has been his longest role.
'The lesson of that work is being able to understand what it means to stand in someone else's shoes, to be present with someone when they are talking about really undignified situations,' he said.
Torres doesn't minimize the problems but says he has done his best to address them and that he is confident that the authority is on solid footing as he moves on.
'We have not found a perfect solution,' he said. 'You can't consider the mission ever accomplished when it comes to public housing.'
