Mayor Daniel Lurie announced Monday that he signed the Slashing Housing Appeals and Delays Everywhere Act, a new law aimed at stripping away one of the more unusual obstacles to building housing in San Francisco: the shadows a building might cast. The legislation halves the allotted time for certain appeals and removes review processes that supporters say have obstructed or delayed housing projects for years.
“I signed the Slashing Housing Appeals and Delays Everywhere (SHADE) Act, legislation that makes it easier to build housing,” Lurie wrote in a post on X announcing the signing, adding that “this new law will make the environmental review process faster and less expensive while maintaining strong environmental protections.” The bill was written by District 5 Supervisor Bilal Mahmood, and the Board of Supervisors approved it in a 10-1 vote, with Supervisor Connie Chan casting the lone dissenting vote, according to Mission Local.
The law changes how San Francisco implements the California Environmental Quality Act, the 1970 state statute that requires environmental impact reports for planned developments, per the same outlet's reporting. It removes processes that Mahmood said obstructed or delayed development projects, including shadow review, while cutting the allotted time for certain appeals in half. Developers will still need to submit a shadow analysis for any building that would cast a shadow on a city park, the report notes.
A SoMa Project Stalled for Years Over Shadows
Among the projects that illustrate the stakes is 469 Stevenson, a proposed 495-unit complex on the site of a parking lot in SoMa that has been stalled for years because of shadow concerns, Mission Local reported. Mahmood has pointed to cases like this as evidence that shadow-based appeals have slowed housing production across the city, though the exact scale of that impact has been described differently across accounts.
Mahmood said shade-related appeals had slowed more than 2,000 housing units across a dozen city projects since 2017, according to the Mission Local report. Separately, the San Francisco Chronicle reported Mahmood saying CEQA appeals involving shadow analysis had delayed or stalled 2,195 housing units citywide over the preceding decade, and in earlier Chronicle reporting, 11 appeals since 2017 were tied to roughly 2,000 proposed units. A city planner, however, told Mission Local that 18 projects over the previous six years had faced appeals mentioning shade, and in 14 of those cases, shadows were not the primary reason for the appeal.
Critics Warn of a Shrinking Public Voice
Not everyone welcomed the change. Development critic Bridget Maley argued that the law's reduction of appeal times “will limit the public's voice” in the environmental review process, according to Mission Local's reporting. Her objection centers on the same shortened appeal windows that Mahmood and the mayor have framed as a fix for a system that let shadow concerns block or delay housing for years.
The Chronicle has also reported that San Francisco is the only major California city that allows residents to appeal housing projects based on the shadows they would cast — a distinction that helps explain why the SHADE Act targeted this specific review process rather than CEQA appeals more broadly.
Part of a Broader Push to Speed Up Permits
The SHADE Act arrives amid a wider effort by Lurie's administration to cut through San Francisco's notoriously slow permitting system. According to KQED, a city study found that the average timeline for approving new-housing permits fell from 605 days to around 280 days between January 2024 and August 2025, with permits filed during that window averaging just 114 days. Still, the station reported a backlog of more than 1,300 applications awaiting approval, with those pending permits averaging 1,489 days — more than four years — as of October 29.
KQED's reporting also places San Francisco's permitting pace behind other cities even after the improvement: average approval times ran 134 days in San Diego and 91 days in Austin, Texas, compared with roughly 280 days in San Francisco. The station noted Lurie had already launched the PermitSF initiative to centralize the city's housing-permit application process. San Francisco is also required to allow for more than 80,000 new housing units by 2031 under a state mandate, per KQED.
The California Department of Housing and Community Development has separately flagged supplemental environmental-review requirements not required by CEQA, including shadow and wind studies, as targets for elimination, though that agency guidance is distinct from the city's own SHADE Act process. For now, the law's practical effects on San Francisco's housing pipeline remain to be seen as the city works through the backlog of pending projects, including 469 Stevenson.
