This week in the news, listen to CHC Policy Chair and Abode Communities CEO & President Robin Hughes testify before a Joint Senate Committee on best practices for addressing the state’s affordable housing shortage. The San Francisco Chronicle reports California lawmakers have introduced more than 200 bills this year just focused on California’s housing crisis, and as Marina Wiant noted in the story, it will be interesting to see how far lawmakers are willing to push to take advantage of Governor Newsom’s commitment to build 3.5 million homes by 2025. Finally, KPCC looks at the politically-charged idea of removing parking requirements for new development after the San Diego City Council removed the requirement during their Monday meeting.

CHC AT THE CAPITOL

Senate Housing Committee, Governance and Finance Committee Joint Oversight Hearing
Cal Channel
CHC Policy Chair and Abode Communities CEO & President Robin Hughes testified before the Senate Housing Committee, Governance and Finance Committee Joint Oversight Hearing. Their agenda topic: “Addressing California’s Housing Shortage: How Can We Create Environments to Facilitate Housing Development?” Robin shared recommendations on best practices for stimulating affordable housing production, including the need for innovative zoning solutions and regulations and ensuring predictable and reliable sources of funding. Her testimony starts at 1:53:50.

STATE HOUSING POLICIES

California lawmakers target cities’ ability to block new housing
San Francisco Chronicle
Build, build, build. The spirit of housing construction has imbued the state Capitol with renewed fervor this year as Gov. Gavin Newsom and coastal lawmakers push for policies to spur what they say is badly needed development to get soaring rents and home prices under control. Advocates who work on housing issues in California say the topic is taking center stage like never before, with more than 200 bills introduced this session.

Gavin Newsom Called This City Out on Affordable Housing. Its Leaders Weren’t Mad.
New York Times
When he took office this year, Gov. Gavin Newsom inherited an expansive, consuming problem. The state doesn’t have enough housing, and what housing it does have is rapidly becoming too expensive for most people who live and work in the state. Legislators have tried to make a dent in various aspects of the crisis. Today, my colleague Jennifer Medina explores how one of Mr. Newsom’s efforts is playing out in a Southern California city.

Newsom housing plan may have fatal flaw
CALmatters
As California’s housing shortage deepened in the last decade, Jerry Brown made only token efforts to address it. However, his successor as governor, Gavin Newsom, promises to confront it head-on, even pledging during his campaign to build 3.5 million new units in six years, which would require annual production to quadruple. That’s patently impossible to achieve, but he’s taking a stab at making good on his promise with a carrot-and-stick approach.

Here’s what you need to know about the controversial Bay Area housing plan
San Francisco Chronicle
Democratic Assemblyman David Chiu stepped into a political typhoon Thursday, when he introduced a state bill to create a Bay Area housing authority that would put tax measures on the ballot. To Chiu and other housing advocates, this is the first step toward filling the state’s 3.5 million-home deficit, and developing communities in which families can afford to live near jobs, schools and hospitals. “Right now, people have to drive farther to work, they can’t get their kids into good schools and they live far away from services,” said Matthew Lewis, spokesman for the pro-housing advocacy group California YIMBY. “We know, by every metric, that’s what is freaking Californians out.”

“Talk Policy to Me” Episode 210: Why CA is in a housing crisis
UC Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy
NIMBYism, geographical limitation, and weaponized policies have led the state to the biggest housing crisis in state history. Can state-level policies fix a very local problem? California housing is an undeniable problem. Rents are too high and there is not enough housing for those who need it in the places they want it. But how did we get here?

Who is going to build California’s needed housing?
KCBX
This month San Luis Obispo will host a housing summit, featuring the state lawmaker behind a push to override local zoning laws and build high-density housing near centers of public transportation and jobs. And recently San Luis Obispo County officials signed an agreement with Central Coast builders and nonprofits dedicating themselves to building a lot more affordable housing in the coming years. What’s not being talked about is how the planned construction is actually going to get done, when there currently are not enough construction workers to build all those new housing units.

Editorial: California cities won’t build enough housing. Sacramento’s process for identifying the worst offenders needs to be fixed — and enforced
San Francisco Chronicle
To solve California’s housing crisis, it’s vital for the state to know which cities and counties are developing their fair share of housing — and which ones are not. Supposedly, the state can learn this information by looking at a city or county’s progress toward meeting the goals of its Regional Housing Needs Assessment (RHNA). RHNA is a statewide program that determines a region’s housing development targets for four different income levels over cycles of five and eight years.

With a whopping 2,628 bills pending, here’s the one most popular among California legislators
CALmatters
Nobody can say California lawmakers haven’t kept busy. Between their December swearing-in and a late-February cutoff, they introduced an average of more than 32 bills a day. Now they face a June deadline to decide which of those 2,628 ideas will advance out of either the Assembly or state Senate. Many are mere placeholders. In the coming months they will be fleshed out, amended, and/or gutted. New authors will hitch themselves to clear political winners, while more controversial bills may see their backers back down.

HOUSING CRISIS

Bay Area’s High Cost Of Living Squeezes Restaurant Workers, Chefs And Owners
NPR
Every morning at around 5 a.m., Armando Ibarra wakes up in the back of his van. He has been living there for the past couple of years. On his dashboard rests a holy candle. A rosary hangs from the rearview mirror. Ibarra walks over to his job at a chain hotel near San Francisco’s airport. He says that at least he can wash up there. “I take a shower, drink my coffee, smoke a cigarette and ready to work.” The hotel restaurant where Ibarra works as a food runner boasts creative, artisanal and healthy meals.

The ‘heartbreaking’ decrease in black homeownership
Washington Post
Vanessa Bulnes and her husband, Richard, bought their house on 104th Avenue in East Oakland, Calif., in 1992. The modest two-bedroom property is where they lived for 20 years, raising three children, and where Vanessa made a living running an in-home day-care center. Neighbors in the mostly African American community often saw her planting vegetables in the backyard, with her kids in tow.

LOCAL HOUSING INITIATIVES

San Diego moves to eliminate parking requirements for new housing. Is LA next?
KPCC
San Diego City Council voted Monday to nix the minimum parking requirement for new housing developments. The change comes as the city aims to address housing shortage and move away from a car-oriented city plan. The new policy will allow developers to build condominium or apartment buildings without parking spots if the property is located within a half-mile distance from a major public transit stop.

San Francisco opens new affordable housing building for low-income, previously homeless families
ABC San Francisco
More than 5,000 people in San Francisco applied for an affordable housing unit in a newly built apartment building south of Market. Through a lottery system, only 83 families were lucky to get their own unit. That’s San Francisco’s reality when it comes to affordable housing. Yet the city, with the help of non-profits and the private industry is becoming a model for other cities when it comes to finding a solution to the housing crisis.

Fight over CASA: Some cities push back against plan to overhaul Bay Area housing market
Mercury News
From Cupertino to Pleasanton, small cities around the Bay Area are challenging a massive regional plan to fix the housing crisis, worried they will lose control over what gets built within their borders and be forced to pay for solutions they don’t want. Officials are gearing up for what promises to be a long and contentious battle over the “CASA Compact” — a set of 10 emergency housing policies that could force Bay Area cities to impose rent control, allow taller buildings, welcome in-law units and pay into a regional pot to fund those changes.

Neighborhood-preference program for affordable housing proves effective
San Francisco Chronicle
A San Francisco program meant to protect people in close-knit neighborhoods from being uprooted by gentrification and soaring housing costs appears to be working some two years after it began. City supervisors created the Neighborhood Resident Housing Preference plan in late 2015. It requires 40 percent of units in new affordable housing developments funded by the city and private sources to be reserved for people living in the supervisorial district where the projects are built or within a half-mile of them.

Los Angeles City Councilmember says transit density bill threatens single-family neighborhoods
Curbed Los Angeles
Los Angeles City Councilmember Paul Koretz, who represents neighborhoods in the Valley and Central Los Angeles, including Bel Air, Westwood, and Encino, is registering his opposition against a state bill that would allow taller apartment and condo buildings near rail stations in California cities. In a statement released Thursday, Koretz said Senate Bill 50 threatens single-family neighborhoods, and he’s asking the full City Council to take a stand against the legislation.

HOMELESSNESS

California will audit school districts to find out how many homeless students there are
Orange County Register
In California, schools are legally required to identify homeless students, provide services to those students and report the data back to the state, yet a quarter of all schools in the state say that none of their students are experiencing homelessness. An audit of school districts aims to find if that answer is accurate. The audit, approved unanimously Wednesday, March 6 by the Joint Committee on Legislative Audit, will study barriers that schools face in identifying students experiencing homelessness, why (and if) those students are going unreported, and best practices to identify and provide services to them.

Community colleges can cost more than universities, leaving neediest students homeless
Los Angeles Times
For Anthony Phillip White II, being in community college while homeless was exhausting, embarrassing — and eventually unrealistic. Just out of a four-year stint in the Marines, White moved to Oceanside in 2014 to attend MiraCosta Community College. A single father, he planned to share a home with friends and his then-5-year-old son Trey as he sought to become the first in his family to earn a college degree.