This week in affordable housing news…:

State update:

• Jason Elliott, Governor Newsom’s senior advisor on housing and homelessness, provided a detailed update on the Administration’s affordable housing views this week in a panel discussion hosted by Capitol Weekly—highlighting, once again, that the state continues to be millions of units short of the housing Californians need.  “We have the wrong reflex around housing in the state. We start with no. No, we shouldn’t build there,” Elliott said at the event. “Let’s start with yes, unless there’s a reason not to build.” Elliott noted the potential of the Governor’s proposed “Housing Accountability Unit” within HCD, which would more regularly track local housing progress and approvals. Elliott also noted that importance of enforcing and implementing existing laws, which he said would continue to be just as impactful as passing new legislation. “A governor’s signature does not build new units,” Elliott said.

• Almost 500,000 low-income renter households in LA County do not have access to an affordable home. The same is true of more than 132,000 of the most vulnerable renters in San Diego, and almost 60,000 Sacramentans. These are just a few of the numbers in a county-by-county series of reports released in May by the California Housing Partnership—which found earlier this year that the state continues to have a face a shortage of 1.2 million affordable homes. The lack of affordable housing prevents renters from buying basic necessities, save for a down payment, pay off debt or accumulate wealth—keeping workers and families trapped in poverty. “That really leaves very little for anything else,” CHP president and CEO Matt Schwartz said in a recent Sacramento Bee story. Cathy Creswell, board president of the Sacramento Housing Alliance, said the crisis has grown so severe that it will require every region to be dedicated to producing new affordable housing “in a way we haven’t seen before.”

Federal update:

• The Biden Administration announced this week that its American Jobs Plan infrastructure proposal would include $213 billion in direct funding for affordable housing—and $55 billion for a major expansion of the Low Income Housing Tax Credit. In total, the plan would produce or preserve more than two million affordable homes and create thousands of jobs.

• “The American Jobs Plan would provide hundreds of thousands of affordable homes through an expansion of the Housing Credit—a bipartisan and proven solution to meet the vast need for affordable rental housing,” said Emily Cadik, executive director of the Affordable Housing Tax Credit Coalition said in a statement. “The Affordable Housing Tax Credit Coalition applauds the Biden Administration’s proposal to make this historic investment in the Housing Credit.” 

• With Republicans seeking an infrastructure package that is much smaller in scope than the Biden proposal, negotiations over the bill may stretch into the summer. However, if bipartisan negotiations stall, Democrats could still have the option of pursuing an infrastructure and economic recovery bill through the budget reconciliation process, which would require only a majority vote in both houses of Congress.

ICYMI – Top news stories:

Why it’s not easy to build affordable housing in California
CalMatters – Oped by Dan Walters
When the Legislature reconvened in January, a group of legislators, led by Assemblyman Tim Grayson, introduced legislation that would bring some order to the state’s jumble of housing agencies. It would require them to “jointly establish and operate a single, centralized housing funding allocation committee,” giving developers of low- and moderate-income housing a one-stop shop and speeding up construction. Assembly Bill 1135, however, was held in the Assembly Appropriations Committee last week. There was no public explanation for the stall, but it was obvious to those involved that it was because Grayson had rebuffed demands from construction unions that all projects affected by its provisions be required to use union labor.

It took 20 years, but affordable downtown housing is finally coming to Livermore
San Francisco Chronicle
A 20-year crusade to build affordable housing in downtown Livermore won a unanimous victory Tuesday when the city council approved a development that had divided the city and fueled accusations of racism and elitism. The 5-0 vote will allow nonprofit Eden Housing to construct 130 affordable homes on a flat dirt 2.5-acre parcel fronting Stockmen Park, near the southeast corner of Railroad Avenue and L Street. The city-owned lot has been designated for affordable housing since 2007. The developer, Eden Housing, was selected in 2018 and has received $14.4 million in bond funding from Alameda County for the project. Council Member Brittni Kiick said that she was 13 years old when the project was first proposed. She said that an apartment like the ones Eden is planning to build would have helped her family. “My mom worked at the school district and access to affordable housing like this would have changed her life,” Kiick said.

S.F. is about to see a wave of affordable housing projects bring 900 homes to the city
San Francisco Chronicle
A decade-long push by city officials to pressure office and market-rate developers to carve out land for affordable housing is starting to pay off. The Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development is set to announce that it has picked affordable builders to construct nearly 900 units on nine sites scattered around the city, with the majority concentrated in the South of Market where the tech boom of the 2010s was most prominent. The group of future affordable housing sites include four on big development parcels in the city’s Central Soma neighborhood. Mayor London Breed said the nine projects represent a “central pillar” of the city’s post-Covid recovery. “Getting these projects moving forward quickly is so important for our economic recovery,” she said. “We have seen over and over what a lack of affordable housing means for our city and for our residents. If we want to have places for people to actually be able to afford to live and work here, we need much more housing.”