| This week in affordable housing news…: State Update: AB 2011 (Wicks) received an enthusiastic endorsement this week from New York Times columnist Farhad Manjoo, who published a piece on the upcoming Senate fight over the CHC-sponsored bill: “California Needs More Housing. Unions Might Stand in the Way.” “AB 2011 is an elegant effort to address a complex crisis,” Manjoo writes: “California needs a lot more housing. Strip malls and office parks are ideal places to build it. And guaranteeing livable wages is a way to make construction a much more attractive job.” Manjoo ends the piece with a quote from the bill’s author, Asm. Buffy Wicks (D-Oakland), who is fighting to keep the bill moving in the next two weeks of the legislative session. “When you go to my district in Oakland, we have growing encampments at every freeway exit—that is absolutely unacceptable. What we are doing is not working. And so while the politics may be tough for some, it is our job to make tough decisions.” CHC’s Executive Director, Ray Pearl was featured this week in CBS Sacramento’s coverage of the bill, which focused on how the legislation sidesteps common NIMBY critiques of new housing. “When you talk to folks who build housing, some of them are waiting 3-4-5-6-7 years just to break ground,” Asm. Wicks told CBS, highlighting the bill’s accelerated approvals for affordable projects in underutilized commercial areas. “This should not interrupt people’s feel around who’s going to be my neighbor…these are commercially zoned areas, so hopefully we can avoid some of those…fights you’ve seen in other housing bills.” “The entire state, all of our jurisdictions, need to say ‘Yes’ to housing,” Pearl said, “and we want to do it in the least intrusive way possible.” As CHC and our partners push to make it easier for cities to approve affordable housing, the Los Angeles Times editorial board cheered the state’s expanding crackdown on cities that are making it harder and more expensive to build desperately needed new homes. HCD announced last week that it was opening the first-ever investigation led by its new Housing Accountability Unit into the City of San Francisco’s plans to add 82,000 homes over the next RHNA cycle. “San Francisco is an easy target because of its astronomical housing costs due to pricey real estate and city building restrictions and the bare-knuckle fights over housing,” writes the LAT, “But there are plenty of cities that make it far too hard to build homes…San Francisco may be the target now, but other cities should be next.” CHC’s 2022 Policy Forum & Housing Hall of Fame Awards will be held in-person on September 8th in Los Angeles. To register for the event, click here. |
| ICYMI – Top news stories: These are the least affordable housing markets in California and the Bay Area San Francisco Chronicle Homeownership in recent months grew even further out of reach financially for most people in the Bay Area and across California, a new report says. Housing affordability declined in all nine Bay Area counties in the second quarter of 2022, according to the report from the California Association of Realtors. Statewide, it dipped to its lowest level in nearly 15 years. The CAR’s housing affordability index calculates the percentage of households that can afford to purchase a median-priced, single-family home in California. By that measure, in the Bay Area, only 18% of home buyers could afford to purchase the $1.495 million median-priced home in the period from April to June. That price would require a minimum qualifying annual income of $337,200. New data shows 20,000 people will be homeless in San Francisco this year San Francisco Chronicle San Francisco officials estimate as many as 20,000 people will experience homelessness at some point in the year 2022—and for every one person housed by a city program, four more will become unhoused. Those figures, contained in a report set to be released Thursday, reflect the Sisyphean nature of battling one of the city’s worst crises in some of the starkest terms ever. The new data is contained in the city’s full Point-in-Time Count, which fleshes out details hinted at in a much briefer summation released in May, when officials announced San Francisco saw a 3.5% drop in homelessness over three years, going from 8,035 to 7,754. That number reflects a snapshot in time—one night—versus the 20,000 people over the course of a year. Programs big and small are targeting homelessness—but where’s the ‘moonshot’? San Diego Union-Tribune Homelessness has been called a crisis, yet substantial progress seems lacking and the problem is getting worse. It doesn’t feel like we’re seeing the massive “moonshot” policies some say are needed to reverse the relentless tide of homelessness locally and across the nation. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent throughout San Diego County in recent years to get people off the street. Gov. Newsom’s past two budgets included $14 billion toward providing homes, shelters and other assistance. Nearly a year ago, President Joe Biden’s administration launched an all-hands-on-deck initiative called “House America” to put pressure on cities, counties and states to reduce homelessness in exchange for federal resources. There’s no question it takes time for massive new spending to kick in, but it would seem by now there would be a more positive trend in combatting homelessness than is apparent. |