This week in affordable housing news:

State update:

• Several dozen bills impacting affordable housing have been introduced ahead of today’s bill introduction deadline. CHC is reviewing this legislation, which includes a variety of proposals to fund affordable housing (SB 5, Atkins), identify new sites for affordable development (AB 115, Bloom), reduce development costs (AB 571, Mayes), and strengthen the state’s ability to address homelessness (AB 816, Chiu)—among many other ideas. Bills will now move to policy committees, which must take action by early May.

• The Los Angeles City Council voted unanimously this week to expand its affordable housing acquisition program, pledging to purchase 10,000 units to maintain their affordability by 2030. A report published last year by the California Housing Partnership found more than 11,000 affordable rental units in Los Angeles County are at risk of converting to market-rate over the next five to 10 years. The motion noted that the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles has acquired more than 1,000 units through its acquisition program in 2020 with an average cost per unit of $231,690—half the price of building new units through programs like Proposition HHH.

• At a City Council meeting next week, the City of Berkeley will join a growing number of cities considering plans for eliminating single-family zoning—part of an effort to increase access to affordable housing, diversify city neighborhoods, and produce enough new housing to meet growing regional housing allocation numbers. A recent UC Berkeley study found that 83% of the Bay Area’s residential land is zoned for single-family homes, a major obstacle to the development of multifamily affordable housing and “missing middle” housing. San Jose is considering a similar zoning change in June. In January, Sacramento became the first California city to move ahead with a plan to eliminate single-family zoning.

Federal update:

• House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says House Democrats are aiming to set up a floor vote next week on President Biden’s $1.9 trillion federal stimulus package, giving the Senate time to act before the expiration of the December relief bill’s unemployment benefits on March 14.

• The House bill includes $1,400-per-person stimulus checks and an extension of $400-per-week unemployment benefits through August, along with $129 billion for K-12 schools, $30 billion in rental assistance, and an increase in the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour by 2025.

• “We think it’s very important to have a big package [that] addresses the pain this has caused—15 million Americans behind on their rent, 24 million adults and 12 million children who don’t have enough to eat, small businesses failing,” Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said this week. “I think the price of doing too little is much higher than the price of doing something big. We think that the benefits will far outweigh the costs in the longer run.”

ICYMI – Top news stories:

Biden’s $1.9-trillion big spend is a big bet on modern economic theory
Los Angeles Times
President Biden’s plan to flood Americans with nearly $2 trillion in coronavirus aid could come to a House vote early next week. Odds are decent it will also pass in the Senate. Nearly $2 trillion. Holy hannah. The macroeconomic term for this plan is a freaking windfall. “Now is the time we should be spending,” Biden said Tuesday at a CNN town hall in Milwaukee. “Now is the time to go big.” In the current pandemic and economic downturn, a going-big windfall comes as excellent news. But it’s also puzzling. We can just let Daddy Warbucks, the U.S. Mint, rev the printers and make it rain? Has the government been holding out on us?

California bill would lean on cities to build multiunit housing
San Francisco Chronicle
State Sen. Scott Wiener will seek to loosen restrictions on how much Californians can build on lots zoned for multifamily housing, hoping to clear the way for more small apartment buildings as the state tries to increase its housing supply. A bill introduced Thursday by the San Francisco Democrat takes aim at local regulations that limit the square footage of a project based on its lot size, which Wiener calls a “poison pill” to block anything but single-family housing. “We should not tolerate a situation where a city makes it impossible to build,” Wiener said.

Silicon Valley’s exodus: Stop blaming tech
San Francisco Chronicle: Oped – Sam Liccardo
Applause-seeking and responsibility-evading politicians blame tech for high housing costs, but finger-pointing obscures the fact that the Bay Area has become the nation’s most expensive place to build housing, at roughly $700,000 per apartment. Amid cost-reducing advances in the building industry—such as prefabricated construction, micro-housing, and co-living—we see little policy innovation to disrupt the 4L’s of construction cost: litigation, labor, land and the most holy of sacred cows, local control.