This week in affordable housing news, the Sacramento Bee provides an update on how each of the remaining Democratic presidential candidates plan to take on the housing crisis. The good news: Affordable housing continues to be at the top of every candidate’s priority list. According to the Bee, Joe Biden has said he doesn’t think anyone should have to pay more than 30% of their income in rent, Pete Buttigieg has proposed spending $430 billion on housing to fund two million affordable units, Amy Klobuchar “promises $1 trillion in housing and poverty spending,” and Elizabeth Warren “wants to spend $500 billion over a decade” on affordable housing. Tom Steyer proposes more than $47 billion on affordable housing, Mike Bloomberg wants to expand tax breaks to build hundreds of thousands of units over the next 10 years, and Bernie Sanders has proposed $2.5 trillion in new spending on affordable housing.

Closer to home, the Legislative Analyst’s Office released a report this week raising questions about one of Governor Newsom’s new ideas for addressing the state’s housing challenges: the January budget’s $1.4 billion proposal on homelessness. While acknowledging the Governor’s plans to spend $750 million on a new fund for building affordable housing and rental assistance—and another $695 million toward reforming Medi-Cal to serve people with mental health needs—the LAO said the proposal in its current form still “falls short of articulating a clear strategy for curbing homelessness.” A group of big city mayors and state legislators also expressed concern with the proposal, especially its mention of “regional administrators” to oversee the $750 million pot of funding. A spokesperson for the Governor said the Administration would continue to refine its plan, while also noting that “if you keep doing what you’ve done, you’ll get the same result.”

In a positive sign, the Los Angeles Times reports that after several weeks of uncertainty, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti and HUD Secretary Ben Carson have announced the formation of a joint working group to combat the city’s homelessness crisis. “In the next, I would say, two to three weeks, we will have an idea of what federal land will work for us to put city funds, hopefully some state funds, and federal funds together with county programs, to essentially open more beds,” Garcetti said this week. “It comes back to working together,” said Secretary Carson. “We’re not enemies.” 

STATE HOUSING POLICIES

California has a housing crisis: 2020 Democrats want to spend more to fix it
Sacramento Bee
Californians rank housing and homelessness as top issues in their state, and the candidates vying for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination are promoting plans to spend billions of dollars to make housing more affordable. Although the issue often gets less airtime than other topics more relevant to voters in early primary and swing states, all the top candidates have laid out plans to make housing more affordable, from offering incentives to cities to speed up construction to pouring more money into subsidies for low-income Americans.

Housing dispute gears back up over key bill
Capitol Weekly
Moments after the state Senate failed to pass SB 50, a bill that would have relaxed zoning laws to combat the state’s housing crisis, Senate President Pro Tem Toni Atkins vowed to pass housing legislation this year.  “I want to personally commit to each and every one of you, to the people of California, that a housing production bill to help alleviate our housing crisis will happen this year,” she said.

Opinion: Sweeping solutions, not half measures, needed to fix California’s housing crisis
Sacramento Bee
California’s housing crisis is getting worse. The status quo is not working. But as much as we like to complain about high housing costs, traffic congestion, and dwindling open space, we remain attached to an old version of the California Dream: single-family homes with big green lawns and swimming pools out of a David Hockney painting. One legislative leader is aggressively challenging the status quo. Sen. Scott Wiener of San Francisco is emerging as the state’s most visible advocate for more density.

HOUSING CRISIS

Wakeup call: Housing construction drops
CalMatters
Gavin Newsom came into the governorship a year ago having made many promises to accomplish great things, or as he put it, “big hairy, audacious goals.” Perhaps the most audacious was to solve California’s ever-growing shortage of housing by building 3.5 million more units by 2025. Specifically, he pledged in an on-line article to “lead the effort to develop the 3.5 million new housing units we need by 2025 because our solutions must be as bold as the problem is big.”

Build Build Build Build Build Build Build Build Build Build Build Build Build Build
New York Times
The City Council of Lafayette, Calif., met the public two Mondays a month, and Steve Falk liked to sit off by himself, near the fire exit of the auditorium, so that he could observe from the widest possible vantage. Trim, with a graying buzz cut, Mr. Falk was the city manager — basically the chief executive — of Lafayette, a wealthy suburb in the San Francisco Bay Area that is notoriously antagonistic to development.

LOCAL HOUSING INITIATIVES

Meet the planning chief Mayor Breed tapped to shape SF development and build 50,000 homes
San Francisco Chronicle
Mayor London Breed has appointed a longtime ally and former planning commissioner to head the planning department, an agency charged with shaping San Francisco development as the city’s housing crisis persists. The appointee, Rich Hillis, is executive director at Fort Mason Center for Arts and Culture and has held several senior positions at the city’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development.

HOMELESSNESS

Garcetti and Trump officials enter a new phase of finding a fix for homelessness in L.A.
Los Angeles Times
Taking the next step in months of negotiations over ways to combat L.A.’s homelessness crisis, Mayor Eric Garcetti and U.S. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson on Thursday announced the formation of a joint working group. Although much about the collaboration remains unknown, the mayor and secretary said their staffs would be working together to identify red tape and other impediments to getting people off the streets and housed quickly.

Newsom’s $1.4 Billion Homelessness Plan Lacks Clear Strategy, California Legislative Analyst’s Office Says
Capital Public Radio
Gov. Gavin Newsom’s proposed budget includes $1.4 billion in spending on homelessness, but the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office says it lacks a clear strategy. An estimate from the federal government puts California’s homeless population in 2019 at over 150,000 — up 16 percent increase from the previous year. Newsom’s proposed budget would commit substantial money toward addressing the problem. About $750 million would be used to create a new fund for building affordable housing and offering rental assistance to families in need.

Newsom offers vacant land across California for homeless shelters. But local officials are worried: Who will pay?
CalMatters
It was two hours after dusk in Santa Ana, and the temperature had dropped 10 degrees since sundown. A line of men and women bundled against the chill curled past the National Guard Armory’s entrance, around the side of the building and into the parking lot, about 150 in all.  Inside, the layout looked like something provided to evacuees after a disaster: row after row of black sleeping pads, lined up edge to edge.

Mayors blast proposal for regional overseers of new homeless funding
San Francisco Chronicle
Big-city mayors and several Assembly members got their first good look Thursday at Gov. Gavin Newsom’s proposal to create a system of regional administrators to oversee $750 million in new homeless funding, and they didn’t like it. Newsom’s plan is largely unformed and being introduced far in advance of the mid-June deadline for the state to pass its budget.

What Would ‘Housing as a Human Right’ Look Like in California?
KQED
Activists with a group of women that took over a vacant house in Oakland want to make the protest chant, ‘housing is a human right’ a reality by changing the California constitution. The group, Moms 4 Housing, is having preliminary conversations with East Bay Democratic Assemblyman Rob Bonta to introduce legislation that would “establish a fundamental human right to housing,” said Leah Simon-Weisberg, an attorney representing the group.

A Twist in California’s Homeless Crisis: Evictions by the Evicted
New York Times
After two months of missed rent, it was the knock on the door that the family had been dreading. Eviction brought the prospect of homelessness after months of living on the brink. But little did they know that the man handing over the eviction documents, John Hebbring, was homeless himself.

Opinion: A simple solution for sheltering Californians who are homeless
CalMatters
Many state and city leaders believe that the unprecedented homeless population in California is largely the result of a shortage of affordable housing. The supposition is that if there were more low-cost housing, a significant segment of the homeless would move in, go to rehab and straighten out their lives. Building enough housing required to accommodate the roughly 130,000 people living outside in California would be extremely expensive and would undoubtedly take far longer than many of the homeless can be expected to live. 

Editorial: A wise warning about Newsom’s approach to homelessness
San Francisco Chronicle
Spending large amounts of public money on homeless services and housing subsidies allows politicians to seem to be doing something about a problem that has rightly risen to the top of California voters’ concerns. And in a state governed by Democratic supermajorities and general acceptance of big state and local budgets, it has the additional advantage of being relatively easy.