San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown opened a breakfast meeting of the Conference of Mayors and Mortgage Bankers Association of America (MBAA) by saying that "the nation has done a pretty good job on low income housing but not on affordable housing." The mayor's statement echoed a recent National Housing Conference report which found; 14 million people not being served by housing programs; families paying more than 50 percent of their income for housing; and, 3 million people living in substandard housing.

The breakfast meeting held November 2 was hosted by Mayor Brown was the fourth and final meeting held by the Conference of Mayors and the Mortgage Bankers to identify issues in city revitalization and to develop policy options that will be presented to the new administration and congress. The other meetings were held in Charlotte, Rochester (NY), and Minneapolis.

Mayor Brown described the various efforts that San Francisco has undertaken to provide more affordable housing, such as a $100 million bond measure that will leverage $500 million, a hotel tax fund for affordable housing, and a partnership with Fannie Mae. All of this, he said, has produced 5500 units, "which is below what needs to be done, but is more than in the past." Mayor Brown added that "social services appropriate for this housing" must also be provided. Nearly 30 participants offered comments during the two hour meeting. James M. Murphy, Vice President of the Mortgage Bankers and President of New England Realty Resources, Inc., said that "we must come together and educate Congress on the problem of affordable housing." Steven Hornburg, Executive Director of the Research Institute for Housing America (RIHA), who facilitated all four mayors and mortgage bankers meetings, summarized the wide ranging discussion of the breakfast meeting as having covered the following major points:

• There is a need to provide more resources for existing housing tools, and that these tools need to be adjusted to existing realities, one of which is that the affordable housing crisis now extends beyond low income into middle income. Non-traditional tools must be developed and existing tools must be pushed into new forms.
• There must be the realization that we need to develop social services along with the new housing that is built.
• There must be research to develop new forms or types of lending. New risk sharing tools must also be developed.