Are ‘They’ Coming for Your Home?
Read This Story Or I’ll Build Something Really Squalid Next to You.
Having a roof over your head represents the nexus of tough challenges California is facing; homelessness, climate change, poverty, and racism.
After years of talk, talk, and more talk, it appears as though changes are on the horizon. Already opportunists are circling Sacramento, ready to cash in on fears of what change could bring. Expect to see efforts to overturn newly-enacted legislation on the 2022 ballot.
Here’s what just happened.
Gov. Gavin Newsom has signed off on a package of bills aiming to boost housing production, including two of the year’s most controversial proposals: one curbing single-family zoning in most neighborhoods statewide and another allowing local governments to build up to 10 units on single-family lots near public transit.
His office says the package, dubbed the California Comeback Plan, will lead to over 84,000 new housing units and exits from homelessness, including $1.75 billion in additional affordable housing funding for the new California Housing Accelerator.
SB 8 extends the Housing Crisis Act of 2019 to 2030 to jumpstart more housing production. It accelerates the approval process for housing projects, curtails local governments’ ability to downzone and limits fee increases on housing applications.
State Senate President pro Tempore Toni G. Atkins’ SB 9 gives homeowners additional tools to add critically needed new housing and help ease California’s housing shortage by facilitating the process for building a duplex or splitting a current residential lot. It includes provisions to prevent the displacement of existing renters and protect historic districts, fire-prone areas and environmental quality. Months of negotiations led to the inclusion of provisions to prevent the displacement of existing renters and protect historic districts, fire-prone areas and environmental quality.
Senator Scott Wiener’s SB 10 creates a voluntary process for local governments to access a streamlined zoning process for new multi-unit housing near transit or in urban infill areas, with up to 10 units per parcel.
At the root of opposition to changes in how housing gets built are two words that mean entirely different things, depending on who is uttering them: affordable housing.
The Los Angeles-based Housing Is a Human Right Group opposes much of what's gained serious consideration in the way of reform on the basis of “we know trickle-down doesn’t work.” Indeed, the vast majority of proposals have increasing supply as their basis.
The group has grown out of past efforts by the AIDS Hospice Foundation. Their LGBTQ-framed perspective focuses on tenants, healthcare issues, and fighting gentrification.
They have a poor track record when it comes to ballot issues, a mixed record on litigation, and an inability to successfully engage in the coalition building needed to promote social change.
Livable California, based in the Bay Area, would agree with the trickle down assessment. Their approach is that housing should be a local issue, and state-wide mandates will simply facilitate an explosion of luxury developments, doing nothing to help the people who need it the most.
Let’s face the facts, folks. Locally directed housing policy is what got us where we are. Dig a little deeper with this group and the “quality of life” issue looms large. When it comes to affordable housing, it always needs to be somewhere else and is a threat to the natural order of things when such ideas are near their domains.
Since 1950, it’s been constitutionally illegal to build a publicly-funded low-income rental housing project in California unless it had been approved under a referendum submitted to the voters of the city in which the project is located. Two recent attempts at getting this bit of racist legacy on the ballot via the legislature have failed.
The reality in California and much of the rest of the country is that single family homes are the default under zoning laws, other residential uses are prohibited or severely limited. What’s going on at the statewide level are changes making it allowable (with restrictions for fire dangers & historic preservation) to build more densely. Nowhere do these laws say single family construction is banned.
The bills passed in Sacramento in recent years don’t build any affordable housing, though there is a money pot for other entities to tap into..
However, here in San Diego, there are some ideas on the table making affordability part of the city’s landscape.
Getting ideas to action and not letting good be the enemy of perfect aren’t easy asks, but for these or any other ideas to succeed, people need to be aware of their potential.
City Councilmember Joe LaCava is leading the charge on a proposal to designate 300 acres of public land for housing, allowing for construction of up to 10,000 homes that could be built much faster and cheaper than usual.
A public land trust to make housing cheaper, an infrastructure fund to overcome hurdles, pre-approved architectural prototypes, and pre-zoning to accelerate financing would reduce the construction cost per unit from the current $550,000 to about $300,000
La Cava’s proposal would enable creation of a public land trust with no expiration date, lowering the cost of housing by allowing people to purchase only their house — and leaving the (government supplied) land owned by a nonprofit instead of developers or homeowners.
From the Union-Tribune:
“We know the current process by which the city and other public agencies develop public land is not as effective as it could be,” LaCava told the City Council’s Land Use and Housing Committee on Thursday. “We tend to work in silos, selling and developing properties one by one.”
City Council Candidate (District 6) Joel Day has another idea. It also requires government agencies to work together to leverage their power: social housing.
He correctly recognizes that the “market” can't build housing as fast as we need it. And, given the failure of “trickle down,” why would we expect it to?
From Times of San Diego (read the article at the link if you want to know more):
This social housing would create revitalized urban villages that vary in size and scope, but target an economically diverse and sustainable mixture of residents. As an example, 25% could be rentals for residents earning 100-140% of the area median income, prioritizing public workers like teachers, police, and healthcare workers to comfortably live in the neighborhoods they serve. We should target another 25% of these new homes for greatest affordability, financed by expanding established mechanisms like project-based HUD and VA housing vouchers.
Such a program should include homes made available for purchase at both deed-restricted affordable and market rates. A broad mixture of renting and sales will allow for revenue neutrality for the city, while the land itself will constitute the principal subsidy.
To help fund a robust social housing agenda, our city should join the county, community colleges, transit systems and school districts to establish a multi-jurisdictional public land bank. Such a public bank should have the ability to secure general-obligation bonds, obtain property, lease property, and the ability to hold underdeveloped land-tax free for future development as a hedge against gentrification.
Mayor Todd Gloria has the ‘Homes for All of Us’ project, which sets out to let us know what the City of San Diego could do. There are a lot of pieces in there, and I’m not sure what he can do without the City Council.
If you interviewed each member of the San Diego City Council, you’d come away believing they were committed to being part of the solution when it comes to housing.
When it comes down to it, things aren’t so clear.
Take Council District 5’s Marti Von Wilpert. She was the sole vote against The Trails, a project to be built on the former Carmel Mountain Ranch Golf Course.
I’ll grant there was community opposition, but hey, a project is near the Sabre Springs Transit Center, includes 8 acres of new parks, 5 miles of trails and 110 acres of open space, plus housing (with an affordable component) for nearly 2,400 new residents.
And “community character” in Carmel Mountain Ranch sounds like the siren call of NIMBYism to me. If you want to get rid of the homeless guy shitting in your yard, building more housing in every neighborhood of the city has to be part of the solution.
Speaking of homeless people, the San Diego Housing Commission, an independent agency with a big role to play in the future of affordable housing, is just a mess. An okay (short-term) idea --buying up underused motels to get people off the street-- has blown up into a typical San Diego mess.
You’d think, with the spotlight focused on the agency actually doing something, they wouldn’t screw it up. After all, these are the folks who get named in every ballot proposition as stewards of the public’s money.
From Voice of San Diego:
A broker working with the San Diego Housing Commission made a significant financial investment in the company that owned one of the hotels he helped the agency acquire to convert into low-income housing. He invested in the company before the Housing Commission negotiated the final deal.
The city has since accused the broker of making fraudulent misrepresentations and violating state law.
But now that conflict-of-interest case has ignited its own conflict behind closed doors at the city. The fight has revealed a significant lack of trust between the city attorney and Housing Commission and others.
Now, the City Attorney’s office is embroiled in this mess. Meanwhile, less real work gets done.
In what may be a temporary setback, City Council member Vivian Moreno, acting in her capacity as a member of the Metropolitan Transit System board, led the effort to delay an affordable housing project at a South Bay trolley station over concerns about the loss of parking.
Parking? I thought we were winning the battle over automobile supremacy in San Diego.
A 2019 survey of transit riders found the availability of parking at transit stations ranked last among their biggest obstacles to riding transit more often.
Via KPBS:
The project would build 390 affordable apartments — 288 for low-income households and 102 for moderate-income households — on the four acre parking lot at the Palm Avenue trolley station in San Diego's Palm City neighborhood. It would also include ground-floor retail, a child care facility and outdoor recreation space.
MTS has been in negotiations with developers National CORE and Malick Infill over the project since March 2019. It estimates at completion the project would provide affordable housing for 1,410 people.
Housing isn’t easy. It’s deeply personal for most people. It represents a primary source of wealth for many of us.
I know I’ve just touched on a number of areas that deserve more explanation. The problem is, nobody reads these kinds of articles until they hear something they don’t understand is coming near their home.
We can not solve the problems of inequity, homelessness, and environmental degredation with dumb ass excuses. Don’t like an idea? Fine. Not solving it isn’t an option. Pushing it off elsewhere won’t work.
Consider the possibilities of “We” over “Me”
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Email me at WritetoDougPorter@Gmail.com