This week, The Los Angeles Times Editorial Board writes about lessons to learn from Minneapolis’ recent vote to eliminate single-family zoning in favor of allowing more duplexes and triplexes to combat the housing crisis and climate change. The San Francisco Chronicle reports there’s a dip in the number of people experiencing homelessness – with attribution to local and state investment in affordable housing and homeless programs. And the New York Times California Today looks at SB 50 and how much author Sen. Weiner has incorporated critiques of last year’s version – SB 827.

HOUSING CRISIS

Housing shortage will bite California’s economy
CALmatters
The most obvious and most important victims of California’s chronic and still-growing housing shortage are the countless thousands of families that struggle to put affordable roofs over their heads. The shortage has driven prices skyward in a classic example of a supply-demand mismatch and housing costs are the largest single factor in California’s shameful status of having the nation’s highest level of poverty. There is, however, another economic dimension to the housing crisis. It’s hurting the state’s overall economy as employers face increasing shortages of skilled workers, especially in coastal areas where the housing squeeze is the tightest and local resistance to housing construction is the most implacable.

Op-Ed: The next housing crisis
Orange County Register
Little over a decade ago, the housing sector almost brought down not only the American but the world economy. Today the reprise of the housing decline will be playing a very different tune. In the past bust, it was the fast-growing exurbs, aspirational home of the middle and working classes, that imploded, driving millions of people into foreclosure. Aided by dicey lending practices from the private sector, devastation was most precipitous in states such as California where public policy helped drive to unsustainable levels.

HOMELESSNESS

California’s homeless number drops a little as programs appear to pay off
San Francisco Chronicle
Investing billions of dollars in affordable housing and homeless programs in recent years has apparently put the brakes on what had been a surge in California’s homeless population, causing it to dip by 1 percent this year, a federal report released Monday showed. The decline was in sharp contrast to the 2017 statewide count, when California’s homeless population rose 14 percent as part of an increase along the West Coast, the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development reported in its annual national homeless assessment. The report put California’s homeless population this year at 129,972, a drop of 1,560 in the number of people on the streets in 2017.

5 Things People Get Wrong About Homelessness
Huffington Post
Homelessness affects hundreds of thousands of Americans on any given day, and yet many people still perpetuate wrong and at times harmful stereotypes about those struggling to access housing. Last year, more than 500,000 people were homeless across the country on a given night in January, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. While there’s been a decline in the number of homeless Americans over the last decade, last year saw the first increase in recent years, per the HUD report. The issue is getting notably worse in certain areas, as the country’s affordable housing crisis makes it harder for people to afford rent in big cities, and even small cities and some rural areas.

Hope, Humanity & Housing: Life on Sacramento streets
KCRA Sacramento
Her story is different. Her story is the same. Chana Smith was one of more than 3,000 people living on the streets of Sacramento. She worked in customer service for more than 20 years, including Verizon Wireless for eight years before losing her job. “When I worked at Verizon, two of my co-workers said they had the best seat in the house listening to me work,” Smith said. “But, it’s just, it’s a feeling. The customer knows that you really truly care about them.” In 2013, Smith got a new roommate. He was a friend who was going through a divorce and needed a place to stay. Smith said he was struggling and drank a lot, a habit, she admits, she enabled.

STATE HOUSING POLICIES

California Today: Scott Wiener ‘Took to Heart’ Housing Bill Criticism
New York Times
I recently wrote about how California can feel like home to almost anyone. But even if it feels like home, it’s increasingly tough to afford living in the state. Scott Wiener, a state senator from San Francisco, says he’s trying to fix that. He’s the legislator behind a divisive housing bill, S.B. 827, which died last year. The idea? Require cities to allow the construction of eight-story apartment buildings near transit stops, even if local governments object. This year, he resurrected the proposal, now called S.B. 50, and with some changes.

Wiener: State will never reach Newsom’s housing goals without taking power from cities
CALmatters
Gov.-elect Gavin Newsom may have set an astronomical goal for allowing construction of 3.5 million new housing units in California by 2025, but a key Democratic state senator says it will never happen unless the state pries away some local control over housing decisions. In this week’s episode of “Gimme Shelter: The California Housing Crisis Podcast,” San Francisco Democratic state Sen. Scott Wiener says: “To build three and a half million homes, which is our housing deficit, you’re never going to do that without zoning reform.”

Editorial: California Needs a Housing Revolution
Bloomberg
Along Santa Barbara’s cherished Pacific beachfront, old campers, modified pick-up trucks and shabby cars are parallel parked on the adjacent road. It’s growing dark, and the denizens of these cramped, four-wheeled apartments are settling in for the night. California remains a land of great beauty and soaring promise, with dynamic industries and spectacular vistas. But if the state does not aggressively address its housing crisis, its future is at risk. The state is home to many of the nation’s least affordable metropolitan areas.

Opinion: Tackling state’s housing crisis is the top concern
San Diego Union-Tribune by Assemblymember Todd Gloria
Put simply, we do not produce enough housing. According to a report this year by the state Department of Housing and Community Development, in the last decade, California has built an average of 80,000 homes per year. That’s far below the approximately 180,000 homes needed each year to keep up with growth. To that end, it is without question the Legislature must continue to address the housing crisis this year. But more specifically, and as I’ve worked to do, we must center our attention on the creation of more affordable middle-income housing. To be clear, low-income, subsidized housing is not any less important.

LOCAL HOUSING INITIATIVES

Ambitious plan to ease Bay Area housing crunch draws heat, but passes
San Francisco Chronicle
It was supposed to be a fairly smooth sign-off on an ambitious plan to stanch the Bay Area’s housing crisis. Instead, Wednesday’s meeting of the Metropolitan Transportation Commission became a taut showdown. While a panel of mayors, transit officials and business leaders vigorously defended their proposal to build 35,000 homes a year, residents and leaders of smaller cities who had been balking solidified into stiff opposition, saying they’d been left out of the discussions.

Editorial: What L.A. can learn from Minneapolis’ ban on single-family zoning
Los Angeles Times
Minneapolis may have just become the most radically pro-housing, anti-climate-change city in the nation. The Midwest metropolis recently voted to eliminate single-family zoning and instead allow duplexes and triplexes to be built on lots now reserved for one house. Such an ambitious, large-scale overhaul of zoning rules is practically unheard of in U.S. cities, where single-family neighborhoods with their rows of houses set behind landscaped front yards have typically been off the table during discussions of citywide “Smart Growth” and affordable housing.

Op-Ed: Los Angeles is a city of parking lots. It doesn’t have to be
Los Angeles Times
In recent years, Los Angeles residents have gained all kinds of new transportation options that are reshaping the way people navigate the city. Bike lanes, bike shares and e-scooters have fueled a distinct uptick in two-wheeled travel; more rail and rapid bus lines are under construction to lure commuting suburbanites out of their cars; and rides from Lyft and Uber are never more than a few minutes away.

These transportation choices have something in common: They don’t require parking a car. It is difficult to overstate how the need for parking has shaped Los Angeles.

MISC HOUSING

Putting a Price on NIMBYism
City Lab
In 1985, New Jersey launched an innovative experiment in social science and housing segregation. It failed—spectacularly, if slowly. But now Garden State Republicans and lefty California academics are giving the idea behind that experiment another look. Two state supreme court decisions forced New Jersey’s hand. Known as the Mount Laurel Doctrine, the 1975 and 1983 decisions represent an important plank of civil rights law today. The court ruled that local governments cannot use class as a proxy to establish racially exclusionary zoning.