A Not-Really-Radical Radical Idea About Housing
Having a roof over one’s head has become a critical issue in the upcoming 2020 San Diego mayoral contest. San Diego City Council member Barbara Bry started a political squabble on the subject by dashing off an email with the header “They’re coming for our homes.”
Given her La Jolla political base and the need to differentiate herself from Assembly member Todd Gloria in the contest, this was a move that should have surprised nobody. Having used the loaded “they” word and suggesting something being “taken,” Bry struck a chord with those with low fear or flight threshold.
She later clarified her stance, saying the “they” was a reference to those big gubmit types in Sacramento, supported by local YIMBYs (Yes In My Back Yard), who (wink, wink) were obviously just tools for evil land developers.
Whew! I thought for a moment she was referring to the thundering herds of brown and poor people yearning to bring back yard chickens and quinceañeras to the McMansions of Carmel Valley.
It turns out everybody in politics is in favor of more housing... Having places for people to live, not so much.
Both Bry and Gloria had op eds in last weekend’s Union-Tribune.
Bry insists neighborhood decision making must be preserved, along with increasing density, improving transit, adding jobs downtown, and loads of the almighty tax credits.
Gloria maintains building more homes or protecting neighborhood character need not be contradictory. He supports legislation cutting red tape and encouraging a common sense approach to densification.
Those are all great sounding platitudes. And then there is reality.
The single family home central to the image of the Golden State’s suburban utopia stands in the way of resolving both the housing and climate change crises. Currently, it is illegal to build anything but single dwellings designed for single families --maybe with an in-law unit-- in roughly 80% of California's residential neighborhoods.
Legislation challenging that reality is a third rail. State Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) has tried. Twice.
From the Mercury News:
Senate Bill 50, which would have allowed fourplexes in neighborhoods zoned for single-family homes and forced cities to approve taller, denser residential buildings near transit stops, was one of the most-watched — and hotly debated — bills of the year. It also was the cornerstone of a group of bills seeking to reform everything from renter protections to residential development, part of an effort to ease the affordable housing shortage that for years has been driving Californian’s costs up and quality of life down. The effort has been taking place under a governor who has made housing a priority and specifically asked for housing bills to sign.
But SB 50 divided the state, pitting slow-growth groups against YIMBYs, developers against anti-gentrification advocates, and local mayors against state legislators.
It all came to a head Thursday. Moments before the bill was set to undergo a crucial vote in the Senate Appropriations Committee, the committee chair, Sen. Anthony Portantino, D-La Cañada Flintridge, announced SB 50 would join a handful of measures to become “two-year bills.” That means SB 50 will be held for the rest of the year and come back for a vote in January 2020.
As is true with the economy in general, trickle down doesn’t work. Building more luxury housing doesn’t help those down the economic ladder. It creates investment opportunities, not places to live.
In the world of housing wonks, trickle down goes by the more genteel term ‘filtering.’ As in as rich people move up into new luxury homes, less rich people will take the residences left behind, and even less rich people will take those properties. Etcetera, etcetera.
But things don’t work that way. The rich don’t always buy real estate to live in. They just end up owning more. Land and buildings, after all, are a safe place to park wealth and often offer tax advantages.
The process of properties moving down in affordability and/or incomes moving up to a level of being able to afford better housing can take decades. We don’t have decades.
Furthermore, building luxury housing is simply more profitable for developers. Why would we expect them to make less money for their efforts?
The devaluation of the workforce has made it necessary for many homeowners to repurpose their dwellings to provide enough income to maintain their current existence. Investors are taking multi unit properties out of the rental and into the AirBnB-type marketplaces.
Hedge funds and other financial vehicles bought up large amounts of property at discounted prices during the last real estate bust and now are squeezing tenants living with three decades of wage stagnation with fees and rent increases to satisfy the need for ever-increasing returns. It’s a vicious cycle.
Homeless populations throughout the state have skyrocketed. People simply can’t afford a place to live. Some politicians like to avoid the truth by blaming substance abuse and mental health issues despite the fact that a majority of the unhoused don’t (yet) fit into those categories. After six months of living on the street humans are re-socialized simply as a matter of survival.
An underappreciated fact of the housing shortage is the doubling up of residential occupancy. Immigrant families are sharing apartments. Millennials are moving in with their parents. Seniors are moving in with their children. Many are just one crisis away from living on the streets.
Things have gotten to the point where doing something --anything-- to put roofs over people’s heads must happen. And soon. All-of-the-above solutions (more transit, higher buildings, more tax credits) take years, even decades. That’s assuming they’re not fought by people using code words to defend their racial and class privileges.
Not helping matters are the entities trying to exploit the crisis.
Voice of San Diego has an op ed this week from the Building Industry Association of San Diego blaming CEQA for abuse employed by labor union representatives to strongarm developers into agreeing to project labor agreements. Or, put another way, we might/maybe build more housing if we could just pay less money for wages or hire undocumented workers.
Last week, VOSD had another op ed from a developer sponsored pr firm executive arguing that building luxury homes and increasing sprawl will solve both the affordable housing crisis AND give us less air pollution.
The present reality is that any proposed changes to the way things are (other than “build more, but somewhere else”) will run into a buzzsaw of opposition. Either it’s ‘the state is coming to take away your property rights’ or ‘displacement will increase homelessness’ used to inflame passions. And there are a sh*tload of falsehoods typically packed into those arguments.
At the heart of our problem is the assumption that housing is a market, not a human right. If the market is unwilling or unable to provide access to places to live, then it’s up to another entity to make that happen.
This doesn’t mean building Stalinist cement ghettoes surrounded by barbed wire and run by gangs. It does mean leaders have to stand up and tell the truth.
Two decades ago universal healthcare was considered a taboo subject. Now it’s just a matter of when, not if. Even if the administration’s lawyers get Obamacare declared unconstitutional.
I’ll leave you with this quote from Inequality.org:
Instead, we must massively expand the non-profit financing, development, and construction of social and public housing. We must protect land and housing from the vagaries of the market by creating community land trusts, cooperative housing, and mutual housing on a large-scale. Other rich countries have done it. Sweden addressed its dire postwar housing shortage with hundreds of thousands of cooperatives and an even more massive boom in public housing construction. Thanks to these policies – along with strong rent regulations – a much larger swathe of its population enjoys extremely low housing costs than in the U.S.
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Lead photo by Doug Porter