This week in affordable housing news…:
State and Federal Update:

• The demand for affordable housing is far outstripping production across the country—with the U.S. now at least 3.8 million homes short of meeting housing needs, double the number from 2012, according to a report from Up for Growth released this week. The report, Housing Underproduction in the U.S., finds a shortage of nearly 1 million homes in California alone, the largest gap of any state in the country. Texas (322,000 units), Florida (289,000 units), and New York (234,000 units) are the next closest states. “Four years ago, the nation’s housing affordability problems appeared to be concentrated along the coasts and in the Southwest,” the report concludes: “The crisis has deepened and is more widespread, affecting urban, suburban, and rural areas and profoundly impacting residents in nearly every state.” Take a look at these helpful tools for interacting with Up For Growth’s new data created by the New York Times and NPR.

• Southern California cities facing a fall deadline for rezoning land across the region to meet new housing goals were given a three-year reprieve by the Legislature and Governor in a trailer bill signed with the rest of this year’s budget. Only six of the region’s 197 local governments met this year’s February deadline for adopting state-approved housing elements as part of the next RHNA cycle: Duarte, San Gabriel, Victorville, Westlake Village, Wildomar, and the county of Ventura. The remaining 191 jurisdictions were required to complete the needed rezoning by October or face a host of sanctions, including loss of state funding and local control. With that deadline unlikely to be met, the state stepped in and granted regional governments extra time to complete the rezoning process. Kome Ajise, SCAG’s executive director, called the extension “much-needed relief to the cities and counties of Southern California.”

• This one shouldn’t have been a surprise: The primary cause of homelessness is not drug addiction, mental illness, poverty, or a host of other issues regularly associated with people living on the street. According to a new book published by the University of California Press, the real source is much simpler: A lack of affordable housing. In Homelessness is a Housing Program, Clayton Page Aldern, a data scientist and policy analyst in Seattle, and Gregg Colburn, an assistant professor of real estate at the University of Washington’s College of Built Environments, studied the rate of homelessness per 1,000 people in communities all over the country. Mental health and other issues existed everywhere, they found, but it was communities with the highest housing costs that had the highest rates of homelessness. While drug addiction and mental illness undoubtedly contribute to homelessness—and complicate policy solutions—they are not the main driver of homelessness. “I firmly believe that we can’t treat our way out of this problem,” Colburn told the San Diego Union-Tribune. “You could fix all the addiction in San Diego right now and you’d still have a problem with homelessness because there just aren’t places for people to go who have lower levels of income.”

ICYMI – Top news stories: 
Dem says Manchin blocking energy, tax provisions in big bill
AP News
Sen. Joe Manchin has said he’ll oppose an economic measure he’s been negotiating with Democratic leaders if it includes climate or energy provisions or higher taxes on the rich and corporations, a Democrat briefed on the conversations said late Thursday. The official said Manchin told Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. that he will only support a new measure if it is limited to curbing pharmaceutical prices and extending federal subsidies for buying health care coverage. Manchin abruptly derailed his party’s bigger and wider-ranging social and environment package last December after months of negotiations and after the measure had already passed the House. Manchin’s demands leave the future of the latest measure unclear. 
In drought, does California have enough water for lots of new homes?Gimme Shelter Podcast – Los Angeles Times & CalMatters
Tear up your lawn. Do fewer loads of laundry. Don’t flush the toilet unless you have to. This is all advice Californians have received in a drought that is forcing water restrictions up and down the state. Yet, at the same time, California leaders are pushing for the construction of millions of new homes to ease the state’s affordability problems. On this episode of “Gimme Shelter,” LAT and CalMatters reporters discuss the seeming contradiction between the drive for water conservation and new homebuilding. In short, water experts say that there’s enough available for lots of new homes and people if residents’ 60-year-trend of using less continues and accelerates into the future. This episode’s guest is Ellen Hanak, director of the Public Policy Institute of California’s Water Policy Center.

‘Affordable housing emergency’: S.F. doesn’t have enough units for this fast-growing, vulnerable groupSan Francisco ChronicleSan Francisco’s senior population is growing faster than the total population, and the city must ramp up production of affordable housing and care homes—and find a way to pay for them—to avoid homelessness or displacement among its oldest residents, according to a report issued Thursday by the city’s budget and legislative analyst. The 65 and over population is expected to grow by nearly 50% over the next two decades, and seniors tend to have lower incomes than other San Franciscans and are the fastest growing homeless age group. The city currently creates and sets aside affordable housing for seniors, but in order to merely maintain the current ratio to the projected senior population, the city needs to produce 67% more units annually than it has over the past five years. To meet the need, analysts proposed the Board of Supervisors declare an “affordable housing emergency,” among other policy recommendations.