For the better part of a decade, the main driver of San Francisco housing legislation has not come from San Francisco. Instead, state policymakers to the northeast have pushed SF and other California cities to build more and build faster.
However, the legislature in Sacramento is a bruising gauntlet where even seemingly popular bills can end up chloroformed or, if they pass, watered down in disappointing ways.
Like turtle hatchlings scrambling through sand to the ocean, only a handful of these bills usually make it to the governor’s desk every year.
Some of them will have a direct effect on San Francisco. Two weeks ago we reported how, even with a sudden thirst to turn SF offices into housing, state lawmakers are still outpacing the city. Assemblymember Matt Haney’s AB 1532 for “adaptive reuse” of office buildings has details, while the city’s Planning Department is still working on a plan, and SF supervisors are in wait-and-see mode.
(There are parallel bills in the works from Mayor London Breed and two supervisors to speed up citywide building permits; it’s not yet clear how they’ll address downtown office conversions.)
With the new legislative session in swing, let’s round up other nascent bills joining the fray. This is not a comprehensive summary, but rather a survey of bills most likely of intense interest to SF housing hawks.
[Editor’s note: We will update this story with new bills as they emerge. For alerts about updates to all our stories, please subscribe to our newsletter.]
423 is the new 35: Passed in 2017, Senate Bill 35 from SF’s Sen. Scott Wiener remains the most consequential piece of housing legislation in our lifetimes. It was this new law (Wiener introduced the earliest version just hours after first being sworn into office) that let certain projects bypass local delays if their cities aren’t meeting state housing goals. It was this threat of the builder’s remedy that sent SF scrambling to create a new and historically development-focused Housing Element this year.
But SB 35 was not designed to last forever, sunsetting in 2025. To get ahead of the game, Wiener recently put forth SB 423, which would make SB 35 permanent. SB 35 was a tough sell last time around (hence the sunset provision), but Wiener is betting the legislation will have sufficiently changed the state’s political calculus to set it up for the long haul; without it, California cities may be left free to backslide into old habits of letting housing goals gather mothballs.
Fillmore fill-in: Wiener is also pitching an SF-specific housing law that aims to return a chunk of missing housing stock that went delinquent in the 1970s.
The San Francisco Replacement Housing Act (SB 593) pushes to build 5,842 new affordable homes in SF. Why that specific number? It’s how many houses Wiener says were demolished in ill-conceived and frequently racist “urban renewal” schemes of the last century without being replaced.
Although Wiener couches SB 593 as a response to a specific injustice that hollowed out Black culture in the Fillmore, the bill does not say where the new homes should be built or who they’ll rent to, focusing only on funding fill-in for the lost housing stock. SF Planning director Rich Hillis tells The Frisc that building housing for specific demographics, or even specific people, can be legally dicey and requires delicate legislation.
Right stuff: “Housing is a human right” has been a common activist slogan for years, and under the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, it’s true — but not under any U.S. law.
Matt Haney, one of two SF representatives in the Assembly, proposes ACA 10, a state constitutional amendment that would declare all Californians’ right to a home and establish an “obligation of state and local jurisdictions to respect, protect, and fulfill this right, on a non-discriminatory and equitable basis.”
In its current form, ACA 10 doesn’t have teeth: no specifics about monitoring compliance with the obligation, and no word about penalties. The hope is that it might bolster state action against cities still dragging their feet on development.
Supermajority rules: ACA 1 (the product of a trio of lawmakers including, once again, Haney) is a proposed constitutional amendment to cut down, but not completely eliminate, supermajority vote rules for certain tax measures, including those directed at new housing.
As it stands, cities need a two-thirds vote to pass general obligation bonds and special taxes. About half these votes fail. But something like 80 percent of the measures manage to clear at least 55 percent of the vote, which is where ACA 1 would reset the bar for bonds and taxes that fund public infrastructure, including affordable housing for households that earn up to 150 percent of area median income.
Ironically, perhaps, this amendment needs two-thirds approval in both the Senate and Assembly to go before voters, although voters can ratify it with a simple majority.
NOAHs ark: Usually the phrase “affordable housing” refers to subsidized housing units, but housing researchers also designate certain homes as so-called naturally occurring affordable housing, or NOAHs. These are homes that are unregulated, but happen to be priced significantly below market rates — to the tune of more than a million units statewide.
But as market rates soar, landlords are likely to charge more for their NOAHs, eventually bumping rents up out of affordability. SoCal Senator Anne Caballero’s SB 225 would set up a state fund, dubbed the Community Anti-Displacement and Preservation Program (CAPP), to let cities buy unsubsidized affordable housing and subsidize it, insulating these units from the ups and downs of the market by whatever means each municipality employs for their usual affordable housing stock.
Buy the way: If there’s one thing renters dread more than a rent hike, it’s seeing their home go up for sale. Under the “Stable Homes Act” (AB 919 via San Jose-based Assemblymember Ash Kaira), landlords who want to sell a rental property would have to allow cities, housing nonprofits, and even tenants themselves the first opportunity to buy, or at least the chance to match other offers.
Of course, if renters could afford to buy their homes, they probably wouldn’t be renters, and both cities and nonprofits are always strained for funds; SF’s own Small Sites fund is troubled enough that both the mayor and several SF supervisors have called it “broken.” Still, this proposal would give at least some parties a fighting chance and preserve some units.
God’s house: California’s religious institutions and universities sometimes own a lot of land and sometimes want to build affordable housing on it. Under Wiener’s SB 4 the state would grant them “by right” permission to build, meaning local zoning prohibitions would not apply.
Under the current version, 20 percent of the proposed homes could be priced for “moderate income” households and 5 percent set aside for staff; the rest would be priced for some of the state’s lowest-income earners.
If this sounds familiar, it’s because Wiener tried to do this very thing before in 2020. That bill, SB 899, received five unanimous votes, one of them in the full Senate, but still never managed to become law, falling prey to the equivalent of a pocket veto. Wiener must feel sanguine about its odds to reintroduce it now.
As much as the last attempt was an illustration of how dysfunctional (and just plain bizarre) the California legislature can be, it’s noteworthy that Sacramento still manages to furnish us with more ambitious and effective housing law than our comparably simple local system.
Homes For the 15-minute city: San Diego County-area rep Chris Ward’s AB 68 bill presses the cause of climate change toward housing development by granting “ministerial” rights to any project on a “climate-smart parcel” — generally those close to major transit lines and job centers and other areas that discourage sprawl and long commutes.
Ministerial review is a huge carrot for developers, because it allows them to skip over CEQA, the state environmental bill that provides opponents a volume of potential appeals to scuttle a new project. Cities already have the right to designate certain projects as ministerial, but a blanket statewide standard carries more weight. [Added on 3/24/23.]
Thinking small: Micro-housing as a means of homeless relief is starting to catch on. SF has one site, 33 Gough, where the pint-sized cabins provide individuals heat, locks, and privacy.
The problem is that these prefab homes, while a welcome step up from outdoor camping, don’t legally qualify as housing. Under San Mateo-based Sen. Josh Becker’s SB 634, residents could identify structures as long-term homes and not be subject to time limits applied to emergency housing. If the cabin is moved to a new lot, they’d have the option of moving with it. [Added on 3/24/23.]
Arresting development: Presently, over 140 California cities have so-called crime-free housing laws — ordinances that require private landlords to automatically evict tenants who are arrested on suspicion of any crime.
Some are so broad that just the suspicion of criminality can trigger eviction, even without an arrest. In many cases, landlords themselves are subject to prosecution if they don’t evict, and can be barred from renting to anyone with an arrest record.
San Francisco does not have a “crime-free housing” law, but Antioch, Fairfield, and San Leandro do. AB 1418 would kibosh mandatory evictions, although some forms of housing penalties for those accused of crimes could remain on the books.
Most of these proposals in their present form look ambitious, but when the final package of housing bills hits the governor’s desk later in 2023, we may not recognize the product at the other end of the process. There’s always next year.
Adam Brinklow is a staff writer covering housing and development for The Frisc.