By Zelda Bronstein : 48hills – excerpt
The Yimby champion is now attacking planners who supposedly don’t know economics—but it appears that this law professor doesn’t either.
Chris Elmendorf—UC Davis law professor, prominent Yimby enabler, and de facto Chronicle staff columnist—is a scourge of economic illiteracy. Usually he trains his contempt on “folk economics” —what he and his colleagues call the economics of “a mass public befuddled by the relationship between housing supply and prices.”
In an October 30 op-ed for the Chronicle, Elmendorf cast a withering eye on a new target: city planners—specifically the staff of the San Francisco Planning Department. For evidence of their cluelessness, he cited the “Family Zoning Plan: Economic Impact Report” released on October 29 and authored by SF City Economist Ted Egan.
The report shows that San Francisco will not meet the state’s demand that the city zone to “produce”—both Egan and Elmendorf use that term—82,000 homes by 2031. Instead, Egan found that under the best-scenario/high-growth forecast, the upzoning mandated by Lurie’s proposed plan is likely to generate only 14,646 additional homes by 2045.
Elmendorf warned that by next February, the shortfall could trigger the dreaded Builder’s Remedy, which gives developers wide leeway to build whatever they want.
The basic problem, he argued, is that the models behind the Family Zoning Plan and the state’s own housing framework were devised by planners, which is to say, “crafted without economic expertise…. [T]here is not a single staff economist at the state’s housing agency. Nor does the state Legislature have economists vet housing bills.” The upshot: “the state tells cities to make realistic plans but doesn’t furnish reasonable modeling tools that they may use to evaluate their plans’ sufficiency.”…
The basic framework of the Regional Housing Needs Allocations was established by AB 2853. Contrary to Elmendorf’s claim, the state did not intend that framework “to fix” the housing affordability crisis. Nor did it penalize cities if the amount of housing built within their boundaries fell short of their Regional Housing Needs Allocation (RHNA—sounds like ree-nuh).
Indeed, AB 2853 stated: “It is recognized that the total housing needs…may exceed available resources and the community’s ability to satisfy this need…. Under these circumstances, the quantified objectives need not be identical to the identified existing housing needs, but should establish the maximum number of housing units that can be constructed, rehabilitated, and conserved over a five-year time frame. [California Government Code, Section 65583(b)(2)]”
This was a major concession to both home rule and reality. It acknowledged that planning for housing and producing it are different things. Accordingly, the state qualified its expectation that housing production would equal each jurisdiction’s RHNA.
That qualification was eliminated in 2018 by Wiener’s SB 828. Besides absurdly inflating the RHNAs (for a rundown of Wiener’s legislative antics, see Michael Barnes’ primer), SB 828 erased the distinction between planning for housing and producing it, by amending the passage cited above so that it reads: “It is the intent of the Legislature that cities, counties, and cities and counties should undertake all necessary actions to encourage, promote, and facilitate the development of housing to accommodate the entire regional housing need, and reasonable actions should be taken by local and regional governments to ensure that future housing production meet, at a minimum, the regional housing need established for planning purposes. [California Government Code, Section 65584(a)(2)]”… (more)