This week in affordable housing news…:

State update:

• The Appropriation deadline passed this week, tripping up several major housing proposals, which will not advance this year. They include AB 1135 (Grayson), an effort to create a one-shop to streamline the state’s affordable housing financing system and AB 1188 (Wicks), a bill seeking to create a new rental registry that would allow the state to better track trends in evictions, homelessness, and rental debt accrued during the pandemic.

• Governor Newsom signed another high-profile housing bill, SB 7, authored by Senate President Pro Tem Toni Atkins, which will extend CEQA streamlining for major “environmental leadership” projects to other large developments, as well. “Whether or not many smaller projects will take advantage of the new law is an open question,” noted the Chronicle, quoting the Bay Area Council’s Matt Regan on whether affordable housing projects in particular would benefit from the new rules: “This could have been a game-changer but you have to figure in the math and economics,” said Regan.

• The National Council of State Housing Agencies’ (NCSHA’s) Housing Credit Connect 2021 conference will feature an opening plenary titled “A Blueprint for Furthering Racial Equity with the Housing Credit,” next Tuesday, June 22, at noon ET. The session will feature Priscilla Almodovar, President and CEO of Enterprise; Buwa Binitie, Managing Principal at Dantes Partners; Desiree Francis, Managing VP and Head of Community Finance at Capital One; and Matt Reilein, President and CEO of the National Equity Fund. The session will discuss how policies on Housing Credit site selection, developer experience and resident screening are being reexamined under a racial equity lens, as well as strategies to promote the Housing Credit as a vehicle to create opportunity and a more equitable society.

Federal update:

• In a positive sign for the Community Reinvestment Act, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) announced this week that it will “reconsider” and pause implementation of a Trump Administration rulemaking effort for modernizing the CRA—an action long sought by affordable housing advocates. “The OCC’s actions will provide for an orderly reconsideration of the June 2020 rule and provide banks with more flexibility to deploy resources in response to the COVID-19 pandemic,” the OCC said in a statement. “These actions also provide the OCC with the opportunity to consider additional stakeholder input, to evaluate issues and questions that have been raised, to reassess the necessary data, and to take additional regulatory action, as appropriate.”

ICYMI – Top news stories:

California’s housing crisis is getting worse. So is anti-housing denialism

San Francisco Chronicle – Editorial

In the latest sign that the pandemic has done nothing to mitigate California’s housing crisis, the median price for a single-family home in the state broke $800,000 for the first time last month, according to data released this week, while the Bay Area hit a record $1.3 million. Even seasoned observers of our perpetually overheated housing prices are using terms like “feeding frenzy” and “chaos.” The figures are disturbing enough on their own and more so considering how little California policymakers have done to encourage alternatives to single-family homes, which are increasingly unreachable for most of the population and unsustainable as a means of closing one of the worst housing deficits in the country. Apartment and condominium construction plummeted 17% last year, nearly twice the drop in overall housing production, reaching an eight-year low.

Biden targets housing rules that hurt low-income earners. Will the suburbs buy in?

Los Angeles Times

The enduring image of the American Dream is owning a tidy single-family house behind a white picket fence in the suburbs. But for many people of color and low-income earners, that part of the American dream is fleeting, in part because of exclusionary zoning laws. Though the Supreme Court in 1917 struck down explicit racial zoning laws as unconstitutional, exclusionary zoning regulations sprang up in their place, many requiring minimum lot sizes and banning all but single-family homes on residential lands. Amid a pandemic-fueled economic downturn and a single-family housing market boom that has largely been accessible only to higher-income earners, President Biden wants to create a $5-billion program to give grants and tax credits to local governments that start to eliminate exclusionary zoning rules.