News

livablecalifornie. – excerpt

AB 2053 is Dead – sort of

It failed passage in the Senate Governance and Finance Committee, but could come back this session as a “gut and amend” or next session as an new bill.

We support social housing if it’s done in partnership with cities that want it and with the local jurisdictions having control.

State subsidies would be needed to ensure building for the lower income needs without over-building market-rate. The bureaucracy created to implement it should be limited, using local resources / existing resources whenever possible.

Unfortunately, AB 2053 did not meet our criteria for a good social housing bill. United Neighbors is working with Sen Hertzberg’s staff to amend the bill before it returns. We have provided our suggestions to them, including creating a pilot program, as outlined in our position letter.

AB 2011 passed with promises to reconcile with SB 6

We called AB 2011 the worst bill of the session in a news article. We opposed it in a position letter. We believe residential mixed use of empty or underutilized commercial buildings along commercial corridors are good places to add residential units and we strongly supported SB 15, but that bill does not seem to be moving. SB 6 is another commercial corridor bill.

Senate Governance and Finance Chair, Sen Anna Caballero points out the need to reconcile AB 2011 and SB 6 in hearing AB 2011 in committee June 29, 2022

Here is a comparison of AB 2011 and SB 6 from the latest committee analysis:

By-right vs. allowable use…
Development potential…
Affordability requirements…
Labor standards…
Commercial vacancy…
Sunset…
Going forward…

AB 2011 and SB 6 are likely to need to be reconciled. Such reconciliation could include limiting each bill to separate geographic areas throughout the state, targeting each bill at different types of development (for example, market-rate versus affordable developments), applying one bill more broadly, but with fewer benefits for developers, or others…(more)

By Benjamin Schneider : sfexaminer – excerpt

A new state law would allow developers to convert strip malls and office parks into apartment buildings — in a policy change that could produce far more housing than last year’s high-profile effort to end single-family zoning in California.

AB 2011, authored by Buffy Wicks, an East Bay Assembly member, and passed by the Legislature last week, rezones commercial areas on major boulevards for three-to-six story residential development. And it permits those buildings “by right,” meaning they will not be subject to discretionary reviews from neighbors or lawsuits under the California Environmental Quality Act. All told, the bill could enable the construction of more than 2 million new homes… (more)

By Tim Redmond : 48hills – excerpt

Why is everyone so set on meeting “RHNA” standards when the evidence is very clear that it will never happen?

In March, the Office of the State Auditor released a report on the implementation of the Regional Housing Needs Assessment, the massive planning process that seeks to add 2.5 million housing units to the state over the next eight years.

Most of the major news media in the state ignored the audit, which was pretty scathing: It said, in essence that the Department of Housing and Community Development, which oversees RHNA, bungled the numbers, used projections that aren’t reliable, and left cities and counties hanging without accurate goals and timetables.

People who are typically on opposite sides of the housing debate cheered: Yimby law said that audit should that HCD’s projections were too low. The California Association of Local Electeds said the audit proved projections were too high.

Missing from much of the debate and discussion is a problem that a few critics have raised from the start: The RHNA goals are so far-fetched that cities and counties can’t possible meet them—and that’s not entirely, or even primarily, the fault of local government… (more)

How many times do we have to say it? Cities don’t build housing. For a deep div into Bill Barns tapes go to the Catalyst site where you may download it copies of all their Town Halls and register for more. catalystsca.org/

Given the lack of honesty and truth about the reasons for the loss of affordable housing, our Sacramento politicians are trying to shift the blame for their failures to “fix” the homeless problem to local governments. How likely is this to work when we have rolling blackouts and water shortages, epic wildfire, and have become a global joke?

By Bob Silvestri marinpost – excerpt

We need to empower the bottom, not the top.

Incremental changes can lead to big things.

“There are many other common sense solutions that reasonable people concerned just with implementing good policy would be able to agree on. But we’re not doing any of that.” ~State Assembly Member, Kevin Kiley, speaking before the Assembly Housing Community Development Committee in June of 2021

The Consequences of Public Policy Mistakes

Perhaps, the greatest mistake the federal government ever made was raising interest rates after the 1929 stock market crash to teach ‘speculators’ a lesson. This played a significant role in worsening the Great Depression that followed.

The second greatest mistake the government ever made was to bail out the big banks and their wealthy collaborators (the “top”) after the crash of 2008, in the belief that wealth and economic health would “trickle down” to the masses, instead of sending aid directly to the millions of Americans who were losing their jobs and their homes (the “bottom”).[1] That precipitated the slowest economic recovery since the Great Depression. So slow that the average family has yet to catch up in real, inflation-adjusted terms.

The 2020 once-in-a-100-year pandemic left the government no choice but to send subsidies directly to the “bottom.” If we factor out the impacts of economic lock-downs, supply-chain disruptions, and the war in Ukraine that fueled global inflation helping the bottom instead of the top has worked pretty well to keep our economy running.

In the depths of 2020, traditional thinking was not an option. I would argue that our affordability crisis is another circumstance that requires challenging the status quo. But Sacramento is stuck in the 2008 belief system and remains stridently committed to “top-down” schemes to stimulate growth and housing affordability.

The truth is that neither our economy nor housing affordability depends on the health of the big banks or big housing developers. Throughout history, beginning with the rise of the merchant class that sparked the Renaissance, socioeconomic success has depended on the health of the working middle class. Trickle-down economics is a con.

California has failed to produce a significant amount of affordable housing because the state continues to pursue a “tax and spend, “demand and punish” approach and refuses to accept that its ideologically-driven policies are misaligned if not completely divorced from the realities of our markets.

Picking up, then, from where Part I of this series left off and putting aside the fact that “housing affordability” is really just a symptom of our society’s “overall unaffordability,” before we discuss new ideas we need to examine some of the facts, challenges, and misconceptions surrounding affordable housing development…(more)

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By Mallory Moench : sfchronicle – excerpt

A San Francisco ballot measure meant to tax Amazon won’t go before voters in November, after its backers realized the measure might not apply to the e-commerce giant and a judge ruled they can pull it from the ballot.

The backers of the ballot measure went to court over the issue after city officials and community members told them not only might it not apply to Amazon, but it could ensnare hundreds of small businesses and reduce general city revenue…(more)

By Alastair Bland : estuarynews – excerpt

In the mountains and foothills of California, an enduring drought has depleted the state’s major reserves of water. There is virtually no snowpack, and most of the state’s large reservoirs are less than 40 percent full. But in the central Sierra Nevada, a trio of artificial lakes remain flush with cold mountain water. The largest of them, Hetch Hetchy Reservoir, from which millions of Bay Area residents receive water, is more than 80 percent full.

This remarkable plentitude is the outcome of careful planning by the agency that manages the Yosemite National Park reservoir plus conservation by Bay Area residents, who use less water per capita than most other people in the state—between 35 and 65 gallons per person per day. The statewide average is 82 gallons.

But some environmental advocates are hardly cheering San Francisco’s water conservation success. Instead, they’re accusing the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission of hoarding its water through an excessively conservative management plan they say harms the environment and benefits almost no one—not even the city dwellers who use the water…(more)

by David Sjostedt : sfstandard – excerpt

A new program slated to open in September will provide housing for criminal defendants awaiting trial in San Francisco with the goal of steering them towards sobriety and a path to a job.

The 564 6th Street SoMa facility will offer temporary lodging, along with mental health and job support, to people released from San Francisco jails. Run by Adult Probation, Episcopal Community Services and the Pretrial Diversion Project, the state-funded program will provide up to 30 beds for an initial trial period of one year.

The $483,701 pilot aims to fill a gap for the roughly one-third of people released from jails who are homeless, according to Adult Probation. It’s an evolution of a Covid-era effort that used hotel rooms as temporary shelter for people released from jail during the peak of the pandemic.

“We’ll knock on a tent with a cup of coffee and a doughnut and get them ready for court,” said David Mauroff, CEO of the Pretrial Diversion Project. “Detention is not a solution to our housing problem, our mental health problem and our substance abuse problem. The answer lies in partnerships like this.”…(more)

Does this give more homeless people a reason to misbehave so they will go t the head of the housing list? Is this a solution or an excuse to try a new tactic and who does it prioritize the right people for housing? It is hard to know what is going on as City lunges from one “new idea” to the next. It feels like they are throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks. Do they reward anyone who comes up with an tried program?

By Tim Redmond : 48hills – excerpt

Fast-track bill would override state regulation and give criminal utility taxpayer money for a plant that isn’t safe—and guv wants a vote this week.

Gov. Gavin Newsom just released an immensely complicated bill that includes stunning taxpayer giveaways to PG&E, changes the way energy prices are set in California, and would keep alive a nuclear power plant that is not only aging but no longer meets federal safety standards.

And he’s asking the state Legislature to vote on it Wednesday/31.

“This is terrible,” Loretta Lynch, former president of the California Public Utilities Commission and an energy-policy expert, told me…(more)

What exactly does Newsom owe PG&E officials that makes him so intent on pushing their profits to the top of his list of state concerns? This kind of allegiance is not excusable in a public servant and should make if ineligible to run for national office. Once again, California is called upon to warn the nation that they don’t want our public servants in their White House. Will they listen this time or just gaze at the well-coiffed attractive man that is somehow indebted to big energy.

By Josh Koehn : sfstandard – excerpt

Pour one out for a bill to keep the party going. By all appearances, SB 930 is dead.

The bill—authored by state Sen. Scott Wiener and Assemblymember Matt Haney, both of whom represent San Francisco—would have created a pilot program to allow bars in the city, Palm Springs and West Hollywood to stay open past 2 a.m.

As of Wednesday evening, SB 930 was sitting in the state Assembly’s dreaded “on call” pile, with just 28 votes in support and 29 against. It needs 41 votes to pass out of the Assembly.

The bill is now in limbo with just a week left in the legislative session. Wiener and Haney released a joint statement expressing dismay with opposition arguments they say were made in bad faith…(more)