This week in housing news, the Los Angeles Times covers the disproportionate impact of the housing crisis on seniors—a group greatly affected by even the smallest rent increases, especially those living on fixed incomes. In 2016, 35% of renters ages 65 to 79 spent more than half their income on rent, a number that climbed to 42% for renters 80 or older. With California’s population continuing to age and housing prices going up, the number of seniors experiencing homelessness also keeps rising. In 2018 “the tally of homeless people 62 and older in the greater Los Angeles area surged 22%, to nearly 5,000.” Solutions highlighted in the article: tougher anti-rent gouging legislation, new rules preventing unjust evictions, and, most importantly, more affordable housing.

The San Jose Mercury News editorial board writes in support of expediting construction of accessory dwelling units as an important part of the city’s housing strategy. Mayor Sam Liccardo of San Jose is supporting measures to streamline the permitting and approval process of these backyard homes, and several bills moving through the Capitol are also seeking to accelerate ADU development. According to the Mercury News, the average cost of building an apartment in San Jose is $650,000-$700,000 per unit, whereas the cost of an ADU is $200,000-$250,000. “It’s imperative that San Jose make progress on the mayor’s goal of building 25,000 units—including 10,000 affordable homes,” says the editorial board. “Easing the process by which residents can build granny flats should be a key strategy for achieving those targets.”

Lastly, CalMatters has a story with “everything you need to know” about the rise of young people living with their parents. “About one of every four Californians between 25 and 34 live with their parents — around 1.5 million people,” CalMatters finds. “Stay-at-homers are more likely to be male than female, are more likely to be a person of color than white, and are more likely to live in an immigrant household than their counterparts who have flown the coop.” One big reason for the trend? Yep, housing costs, combined with low wages. “The median income for a working stay-at-homer over the age of 25 is just north of $22,000,” says CalMatters. The higher a community’s housing prices—and poverty rates—the greater the percentage of young people living at home.

STATE HOUSING POLICIES

Proposition 13 is a political third rail in California. Changing it will be a hard sell
Los Angeles Times
There was a jarring reality check in the Legislature last week for interest groups plotting to change Proposition 13 and raise property taxes on major businesses. The reality is that raising any taxes will be very hard to sell voters. The plotters are led by some powerful public employee unions, including those representing teachers and service workers. They plan to place a citizens’ initiative on the November presidential election ballot next year.

Editorial: Expediting granny flats can ease San Jose housing crisis
Mercury News
Building backyard homes as rapidly as possible would help alleviate San Jose’s housing crisis that is plaguing teachers, nurses, seniors, restaurant workers and so many other residents. The city should move forward with measures Mayor Sam Liccardo announced Tuesday to streamline San Jose’s permit process for accessory dwelling units (ADUs). The primary goal is to help homeowners and developers obtain building permits for their projects as fast as a single day and, on what the city is calling ADU Tuesdays, within 90 minutes.

Editorial: Jerry Brown killed redevelopment in California. Gavin Newsom should bring it back to life
Los Angeles Times
To deal with California’s crushing budget crisis in 2011, then-Gov. Jerry Brown snuffed out “redevelopment” — an investment program designed to bring jobs, construction and growth to struggling neighborhoods. Local redevelopment agencies targeted “blighted” communities for investments in public buildings, business incubators, housing, parks and other magnets for employers and investors.

Opinion: California’s wildfires revealed a fix for our housing crisis — if we’re willing to act
Los Angeles Times
The destructive fires that roared through California over the last two years have displaced tens of thousands of people, creating a humanitarian crisis as well as a housing crisis. One of those fires provided valuable lessons on how to solve emergency housing shortages in the state — the Tubbs fire that ravaged the city of Santa Rosa and Sonoma County in 2017.

Opinion: California can’t solve homelessness without more housing. This legislation will be key
CalMatters
On any given day, as many as 150,000 Californians are homeless, struggling to exist without the most fundamental of necessities: shelter.  At the same time, millions of lower-income and middle-class families are struggling to afford a roof over their heads and are just one paycheck or one emergency away from being out of a home. That’s why I’ve authored Senate Bill 5, which would create the Affordable Housing and Community Development Program. 

Opinion: A resurrection for redevelopment in California?
CalMatters
Voters and elected officials adopt policies on assurances of beneficial impacts, but they often interact with other decrees to produce what are called “unintended consequences.” Redevelopment has been a classic example for nearly seven decades, and it may be on the verge of another twist. Redevelopment, authorized in the early 1950s, was aimed at encouraging local governments, cities mostly, to clean up neighborhoods deemed to have “blight.”

Opinion: California’s redevelopment bill is fiscally irresponsible
Orange County Register
One of former Gov. Jerry Brown’s most significant achievements gets too little attention. In the midst of a budget crisis in 2011, Brown and the Legislature eliminated California’s 400-plus redevelopment agencies. They were locally controlled agencies that diverted billions of dollars from traditional public services to corporate-welfare-laden economic-development projects. Now that the state’s general fund has a large surplus, lawmakers are trying to bring back the redevelopment process.

HOUSING CRISIS

Some High-Rent California Cities Aren’t Building Enough Apartments, And Zoning Is Part Of The Problem
Capital Public Radio
Cities near some of California’s biggest job centers are discouraging the construction of new apartments despite high rents and strong housing demand, according to a recent Brookings Institution report. It found several affluent, smaller cities near Silicon Valley and Los Angeles went years without building a single apartment, even though they were home to the highest rents in the state.

Nearly 40% of young adult Californians live with their parents. Here’s everything to know about them
CalMatters
It’s a Saturday night at Patsy’s Irish Pub in Mission Viejo, a wealthy suburb in south Orange County.  Patsy’s looks like a lot of other California bars in 2019 — a young woman belting off-key Katy Perry karaoke, a crowd of patrons vaping outside in a strip mall parking lot.  And loads of people in their twenties and thirties who still live with their parents. 

Opinion: Gavin Newsom tells Southern California NIMBYs to expect new housing in their backyards
San Diego Union Tribune
Gov. Newsom has talked a good game about housing in California. He said he wants to build 3.5 million units by 2025 to end the housing shortage. He said he wants to yank transportation funding from cities that refused to build enough housing to meet their communities’ needs. But the real question was whether the governor would stand firm when faced with the inevitable slow-growth, anti-development pushback from local governments.

Opinion: Three major hurdles to fixing California’s housing crisis
Southern California News Group
Earlier this summer, Governor Gavin Newsom signed a $214.8 billion state budget that included $2 billion in new spending to address California’s housing and homelessness crisis. While Governor Newsom and the state legislature should be applauded for their efforts, we must also acknowledge that California cannot spend its way out of the housing affordability crisis that has engulfed the state.

HOMELESSNESS

These six developers say they can build housing for homeless people faster and cheaper
Los Angeles Times
Building housing for homeless people is slow and costly, and is getting slower and costlier every year. But six developers responding to a challenge from Mayor Eric Garcetti are getting a chance to show how they would do it faster and cheaper. Pre-fab construction, simplified financing, shared housing and small-scale projects were the strategies spread through the proposals recommended Friday to share a $120-million grant funded through the city’s $1.2-billion homeless housing bond.

Gavin Newsom drops plan for California homelessness czar
San Francisco Chronicle
Gov. Gavin Newsom has abandoned a campaign promise to appoint the state’s first-ever homelessness czar and will instead rely on a task force and staff members to guide his response to the growing crisis in California. During his 2018 campaign for governor, Newsom said he would hire a “cabinet-level secretary committed to solving the issue, not just managing it.”

Editorial: You can’t see the results yet, but L.A.’s HHH homeless housing is being built
Los Angeles Times
One ray of hope on a bleak election night in November 2016 was the overwhelming support that Los Angeles city voters gave to a bond measure to build housing for the most vulnerable homeless people. By a 3-to-1 margin, Angelenos passed Proposition HHH to authorize $1.2 billion in bonds to help finance the construction of 10,000 units of housing, most of it designated for the chronically homeless.

Opinion: California should make clear there is a right to housing, not simply shelter
CalMatters
There are two ways to tackle California’s greatest public safety, public health and humanitarian crisis: homelessness. One way is to marshal resources, build programs, replicate successes, and say, with some justification, that we have helped a lot of people, even if the overall situation isn’t much better. The other way is to define a clear policy, a compelling objective, and the rights and obligations necessary to achieve that objective.

Opinion: Let’s get real about homelessness, California
San Francisco Chronicle
California’s system for helping the homeless is broken. Official reports show the homeless population spiking in cities of every size. But it doesn’t take a study to see the human suffering, public health problems and financial costs associated with this tragedy: tent cities, unconscious people on the sidewalk, open drug use, overwhelmed emergency rooms and more.