San Francisco could face the loss of state funding and other consequences from California housing regulators if the city can’t come up with a viable plan to build more than 82,000 new homes this decade, which is a lot more than years past.
But as usual, City Hall is deadlocked, punting major policy matters to voters in November and hoping the ballot box will break the logjam.
Mixed in with Sacramento’s tough talk, however, is some significant progress. Last week, lawmakers in the Capitol delivered a raft of new housing bills to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s desk that could spur a lot more building.
Pending the governor’s signature, some bills would undo kinks in the pipeline, and others aim to crank it closer to full blast.
By-right goes right by
For housing developers, no plum is sweeter than the “by-right” designation, the all-access badge to skip past most major procedural hurdles around new construction, including CEQA reviews that have sent so many projects to an early grave.
AB 2011 and its partner bill SB 6, put up by East Bay Assemblymember Buffy Wicks and other senators, grants by-right status to new housing projects on underutilized commercial land near transit corridors. Builders must also agree to pay union wages and meet other labor standards. (Those latter provisions were a boon to labor interests that otherwise might not have backed the bills, and whose initial skepticism kept both bills’ fates in limbo for months.)
Projects must also meet a specific formula of “mixed income” housing units, with at least 15 percent set aside for “lower-income households” or 13 percent reserved for a combination of “very low income” and “extremely low-income” tenants. Projects with 100 percent affordable housing will also be good to go.
The bills’ backers dream of transforming blighted strip malls into reams of new homes. Berkeley-based analysis firm Urban Footprint estimates that the deal could boost “market-feasible housing development opportunities” by 1.6 million to 2.4 million new homes across the state, with caveats that potential new development is not the same thing as units actually built when the time comes.
In San Francisco, AB 2011 could be the tool that finally cracks open corridors in certain development-phobic neighborhoods. Virtually every city lot is within half a mile of a major transit hub, and taking CEQA review away from housing opponents would leave them with a lot fewer teeth.
Erasing red lines
For decades in the Golden State, Article 34 of our constitution demanded that a majority of voters approve any new public housing in a city. Dating to 1950, it’s been called an “anti-black housing law,” a “racist relic,” and a “red-baiting campaign” — and that’s just in the past six months.
The state Senate took a big step toward doing away with Article 34 with a referendum that will go before voters in 2024. It will need a simple majority to pass. Something tells us 2024 is going to be a high-turnout year for California voters. Call it a hunch.
Back in 2020, SF voters approved the creation up to 10,000 new units of public housing–only a fraction of what the city needs in terms of low-income housing, but still a big move, seeing how “public housing” was practically a dirty word (or words) in almost every major city just a generation ago.
That SF proposition, championed by Sup. Dean Preston, included no specific proposals or budgets, but Preston also authored a property sales tax, Prop I, to fund future public housing (or “social housing,” as it’s now known). It was approved without a two-thirds majority, which means the money isn’t officially earmarked for public housing, setting up budget clashes like the one last spring.
With Article 34 in play, neighborhood naysayers can still bat down new public housing indefinitely — unless state voters do away with it next year.
No parking
The push not just for more housing, but for housing that addresses climate change is at the heart of AB 2097. The bill bars local legislatures from imposing minimum parking requirements on new housing projects located within half a mile of a “major transit stop” (legally defined here, for the curious).
It will have no effect on San Francisco, which did away with minimum parking requirements years ago in a rare case of the city being much more aggressive on a housing issue than the state.
But it could have significant effects in surrounding areas, which is important if the Bay Area is to get serious about moving people out of cars, the largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, and onto public transit.
State housing watchdogs, including the California attorney general, have served notice that SF’s housing practices are unacceptable.
The bill has a loophole in cases where “not imposing or enforcing minimum automobile parking requirements on the development would have a substantially negative impact … on the public agency’s ability to meet its share of specified housing needs or existing residential or commercial parking,” but frankly it’s hard to imagine many such examples.
In any case, developers can close the loophole by pricing 20 percent of their units for moderate-income or poorer households, and it does not apply to projects with 20 units or fewer to begin with.
High-speed grannies
Conventionally, accessory dwelling units — or good old “granny flats” — are created as add-ons to existing buildings, but under AB 2221 builders could include an ADU as part of their initial proposal.
This is a time-saver: Instead of getting permission to build a house, then going back for extra permission to build another apartment on the property months or years later, a builder can do both at once.
This law also axes a favorite NIMBY trick by blocking the use of “setback” rules (the laws that govern how close to the property line you’re allowed to build), as certain housing gremlins have been known to flog those standards to block ADU construction.
Smashing local idols
Even with the world convulsed by the coronavirus, rents are back to pre-pandemic levels. Yet SF officials, often swearing they support more housing, remain too tentative, evaluating projects on a case-by-base basis and rejecting some housing outright rather than taking the “every unit counts” approach that housing hawks push for.
State housing watchdogs, including the California attorney general, have served notice that SF’s housing practices are unacceptable.
Local control has always been the grand ideal of Bay Area housing policies, with San Francisco seeking as much discretion as its suburbs. But with the crisis only getting worse, Sacramento has never come closer to smashing those status quos, with lawmakers like Toni Atkins of San Diego, Berkeley’s Wicks, as well as SF’s own Scott Wiener and David Chiu (currently the city attorney) chipping away at the crisis one bill at a time.
Until mayors and supervisors and plenty of neighbors prove they’re up to the task of doing what the city needs, Sacramento will be watching.