If Mayor Lee's $250 million housing bond measure gets approved by voters in November, there will for the first time ever be public money going to below-market-rate rental housing geared specifically to residents who aren't low-income by any stretch. In order to help combat the runaway prices of rents in new building, the mayor's proposal would take a chunk of that money to give to developers to subsidize BMR units for households making between $100,000 and $140,000 a year. As the Business Times reports, "City officials want to stem the exodus of residents who earn too little to afford new luxury housing but too much to take advantage of low-income housing programs." However all this will likely do is create a new demographic of people who, by the thousands, will enter lotteries for the trickle of BMR units that currently come on the market each year.

The bond measure would help to construct or rehabilitate 30,000 housing units by 2020 for people with middle or low incomes, with half of those units, presumably, fitting a "middle" bracket. The exact details have not yet been worked out, but it seems likely that the program could help create a couple hundred new units restricted for middle-income earners.

Mayor Lee is set to unveil the plan at today's Board of Supervisors meeting, but also making a dueling proposal will be Supervisor John Avalos, as the Chron reports. Avalos is playing politics here, hoping to pressure Lee into putting a larger bond measure on the ballot by proposing his own, competing, $500 million bond. He says, "I’m interested in one measure going to the ballot, so I want to come to a consensus," openly admitting that he hopes to compromise at $350 million.

Most of the money Lee is proposing for his bond — as much as $200 million of it — will be going to rehabbing public housing ($50M), and building new low-income housing for households earning less than $63,000 per year ($100M to $150M). That doesn't leave a lot for these middle-income subsidies, but it will at least increase the pipeline of units that are below-luxury-rate.

The mayor already had a majority of the Supervisors in support of his measure as of today (London Breed, Julie Christensen, Malia Cohen, Mark Farrell, Katy Tang and Scott Wiener), but in the November election it will require a two-thirds majority of voters to support it.

Previously: Middle Class Screwed In Current S.F. Housing Market