MEDA lays off 12, cuts pay despite city rescue package

In the Mission District, where one nonprofit can help steer tenants, borrowers and affordable-housing projects at once, MEDA has started shrinking even as it keeps building. The Mission Economic Development Agency laid off 12 staffers on April 20 and cut pay for remaining employees, including one worker whose salary fell by 43 percent, despite the city’s $37.8 million rescue package for troubled MEDA housing units.

The cuts matter because MEDA is not just another housing developer. The organization says it has operated since 1973, working alongside Latino and working-class families in the Mission, and it has built and preserved more than 2,500 affordable homes since 2014. It also says its Fondo Adelante lending arm has deployed about $18.2 million in loans to more than 600 small businesses since 2015. That mix of housing, lending and neighborhood advocacy has made MEDA a stabilizing institution in a part of San Francisco where displacement pressure has long been intense.

The layoffs also land at a moment when the city’s housing-support network is already under stress. In late April, reports said San Francisco was facing a two-year deficit of about $650 million and that 127 city employees had received layoff notices. In March, Mayor Daniel Lurie asked the Department of Public Health for another $40 million in cuts. Against that backdrop, MEDA’s payroll reduction looks less like a one-off personnel move than another sign that the agencies and nonprofits holding up the city’s safety net are being forced to tighten at the same time.

Even so, MEDA’s development pipeline remains active. On April 23, MEDA and Mission Housing Development Corporation broke ground on La Maravilla at 2970 16th Street, near 16th Street BART. The project will bring 136 permanent supportive housing units, on-site services and a behavioral health center. A week earlier, on April 16, 2025, MEDA and Chinatown Community Development Corporation broke ground on Casa Adelante at 1515 South Van Ness, a 168-unit permanently affordable project with 120 apartments for households earning 25 percent to 80 percent of area median income, 42 units for families exiting homelessness and five units for low-income HIV-positive households.

The city also selected MEDA and Mission Housing in December 2023 to lead development of about 350 permanently affordable homes at 1979 Mission Street, one of the neighborhood’s largest housing proposals. That ongoing work shows why MEDA’s financial strain is being watched so closely in the Mission: if the organization cannot keep its staff and programs stable, the impact could reach tenants, small-business owners and the affordable-housing projects meant to keep the neighborhood from slipping further out of reach.