This week in the news, Governor Newsom scaled back his plan to tie transportation funding to local housing goals after receiving feedback from many legislators, as reported by the Los Angeles Times, pushing implementation until 2023. Sen. Nancy Skinner makes the case for supporting more multifamily residences in her op-ed in The San Francisco Chronicle, sharing how they tend to be more affordable than single-family homes for families and communities. Finally, CALmatters interviewed San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer, who is urging fellow Republicans to embrace more housing development and says he is embracing a “YIMBY” attitude.

STATE HOUSING POLICIES

Newsom delays threat to block transportation funds to cities that flunk housing goals
Los Angeles Times
In his first week in office, Gov. Gavin Newsom sent a strong warning to cities and counties: He was coming for their road repair dollars if they didn’t meet state goals for new housing. “If you’re not hitting your goals, I don’t know why you get the money,” Newsom said when he announced his budget plans in January. Two months later, Newsom is setting aside plans to withhold state transportation dollars from local governments for four years. The move, which comes after fellow Democrats pushed back on the idea, is part of a larger acknowledgment that revamping how California plans for growth will be more arduous than the governor implied on the campaign trail.

Sen. Scott Wiener makes sweeping revisions to transit-housing bill
Curbed San Francisco
Change is coming to SB 50, the major transit-housing bill that could radically alter zoning standards across California by zapping “hyper-low-density zoning” near major transit hubs out of existence, resulting in more housing development near bus and rail lines. On Tuesday, Sen. Scott Wiener, the SF-based lawmaker who composed the bill, announced a series of amendments to his work. The new version of the bill (available in full here) makes a few key changes ahead of upcoming Committee on Housing hearings.

HOUSING CRISIS

43% of voters in California say they can’t afford to live there—and the problem may be bigger than housing
CNBC
A full 43 percent of Californian voters, and an astounding 61 percent of those aged 18 to 34, feel they can’t afford to live in the state, according to a recent Quinnipiac University poll. And over three-quarters of voters agree that there’s a “housing crisis.” The median value for a house in the Golden state is about $550,000, according to real-estate website Zillow. That’s more than twice the national median.

Forget YIMBY vs. NIMBY. Could PHIMBYs Solve the Housing Crisis?
KQED
The housing crisis has given rise to acronyms that define the battle over new developments: “Yes in My Backyard” (YIMBYs) vs. “Not In My Backyard” (NIMBYs). And now there’s a new acronym: PHIMBY, as in “Public Housing in My Backyard.” “Some of my comrades down in the L.A. chapter of DSA (Democratic Socialists of America) came up with PHIMBY when we were writing a response to Senate Bill 827,” says Shanti Singh, co-chair of the San Francisco chapter of the DSA.

‘It’s great having people here when I come home’: Behind the rise of co-living
San Francisco Chronicle
It was a typical group-house scene: As evening rain pelted their Lake Merritt neighborhood, Randy Jordan spun a Stevie Wonder record on a turntable, while Carissa Villafaña sauteed vegetables and Jessica Bruno lounged on a leather sofa. Their other housemates were out for the evening. “I love co-living,” said Bruno, 28, a tech saleswoman who moved into the six-bedroom house when it opened in August. “It’s great having people here when I come home.”

Open Forum: Bring back the ‘missing middle’ housing
San Francisco Chronicle by Senator Nancy Skinner
Tucked into neighborhoods throughout Oakland, Berkeley and many other Bay Area cities are small, beautiful duplexes, triplexes and fourplexes. These multifamily residences tend to be more affordable than single-family homes and were a major housing type in U.S. urban areas before World War II. But since the 1960s and ’70s, this type of essential housing has become illegal in neighborhoods throughout the Bay Area and nation because it exceeds the density allowed. That’s why it’s now called “missing middle” housing. It’s time we brought it back.

RENT CONTROL/BALLOT INITIATIVES

After ballot failure, there’s a new bid to control what California landlords can charge tenants
Los Angeles Times
In the wake of a failed ballot measure to expand rent control, California Democratic lawmakers are introducing a host of new measures that aim to increase protections for tenants. The bills, unveiled Thursday, include efforts to prevent landlords statewide from raising rents above a to-be-determined level, and to let cities and counties restrict rents on more apartments than currently allowed.

LOCAL HOUSING INITIATIVES

San Diego’s mayor explains why he became a “YIMBY”
CALmatters
San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer has a message for his fellow California Republicans when it comes to grappling with the state’s housing crisis: Embrace more development. “This is not a partisan issue,” Faulconer, the only GOP mayor of an American city with more than one million residents, said on Gimme Shelter, The California Housing Crisis Podcast. “This is what we should be doing in San Diego to fix the problem

FEDERAL HOUSING POLICIES

As affordable housing crisis worsens, Trump proposes more cuts
Curbed
The cost of fixing the nation’s widening affordable housing shortage measures in the billions of dollars. But if the healthcare costs that come with this lack of housing security are factored in, replenishing and expanding our low-income housing stock becomes an even better investment. During a press call about The Gap—the National Low-Income Housing Coalition’s annual report on the state of the nation’s housing—Diane Yentel, president and CEO of the NLIHC, described a situation at a breaking point.

HOMELESSNESS

Are California Schools Undercounting Homeless Students?
KQED
You can measure Cheryl Camany’s success identifying homeless students by the stacks of pink paper piled around her office. Each slip of paper is a residency questionnaire parents fill out for their children at the beginning of the school year, and each offers a clue to just how many students in the Salinas City Elementary School District don’t have stable living conditions. In the last four years, the number of K-12 homeless students in California has increased by more than 20 percent.

Aging onto the street
San Francisco Chronicle
For the past six years, Joe White has been waking up every morning in a parking lot in downtown Oakland. Some days, it’s freezing. Other days, he’s baking, drenched or, sometimes, tolerably comfortable. One constant is the asphalt: It’s always hard. And food, which White has to protect from the rats that squirm through the hole they’ve chewed through his tent door, always requires a hunt. But he’s OK, he says. He’s tough, and he has to be. He’s 68 years old.