Not Another SF Housing Blog, God Why

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A bunch of kids from the Bay Area, inland California, and beyond with a blog and a dream. We’re a quorum of different income levels, races, genders, sexualities, political affiliations and liquor preferences.

Guest Post: We Need Real Rent Control

Rent control in San Francisco is broken. In fact, it’s not really even rent control. A state law called the Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing Act makes sure that cities are only able to have stabilized rents for tenants as long as they stay in their apartment. As soon as they move out, the landlord can raise the rent for that unit to whatever they want. Costa-Hawkins also prevents cities like San Francisco from passing any kind of rent stabilization for buildings built after 1995 or for single family homes.

Because market rate rents are skyrocketing in San Francisco, and Costa-Hawkins disallows price control when a unit changes from one tenant to the next, landlords deploy all kinds of tactics to evict tenants who are paying low rents. Because San Francisco doesn’t (but should) have a rental registry or any real process for enforcement against fraudulent evictions, the risks to a landlord of being found guilty in wrongful eviction proceedings are low.

Real rent control would control the amount that rents can be raised when a unit changes from one tenant to the next. When one tenant moves out, the rent of the unit shouldn’t jump to market rate. Real rent control would apply to all rental units and provide just cause protections for all rental units, regardless of the year that building was built. Real rent control would control rents, which would slow the speculation crisis that has caused the housing crisis we’re experiencing.

San Francisco has some of the strongest tenant protections in the state but we still don’t have real rent control, and we can’t have it. Because of Costa-Hawkins, San Francisco is not able to pass some of the most important solutions we need to solve our housing crisis and protect tenants. And because current market rate rents differ so much from rents of marginalized or long-term tenants, landlords are incentivized to evict people who are paying low rents.

Anything short of real, comprehensive controls on rent creates a two-tier system where it is more profitable to rent to tenants at market rate, regardless of what the landlord’s costs actually are for operating the building. This is especially true if market rate rents significantly exceed the rent of some tenants (like elderly, low-income, or long-term tenants). And most landlords, knowing what they have to gain, will do anything to get new tenants to move in at market rates, even if it means evicting marginalized or long-term tenants. This two-tier system has landed us in this eviction and speculation crisis we’re in right now which is tearing apart our neighborhoods and our city. Enough is enough. It’s time to repeal Costa-Hawkins so we can finally protect tenants with real rent control.

Cynthia Fong is a community organizer with the Housing Rights Committee of San Francisco in the Richmond District. Tenant counseling is available in the Richmond at 4301 Geary Boulevard from 9am – 12pm on Mondays, Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays. Tenant counseling is available in the Mission at 1663 Mission Street #504 from 1pm – 4pm from Monday to Thursday.

A Final(ish) Note on Inclusionary Zoning

Just when we finally thought the inclusionary housing compromise pushed forth by the Board of Supervisors was signed, sealed, and (eventually) delivered, a raft of last-minute state legislative maneuvers and dubious editorializing emerges to undermine the very concept of inclusionary zoning (IZ) and stymie its effective implementation in San Francisco.

A local pro-real estate blog recently took a swing at this issue by alleging that their bête-noire, SF Supervisor Aaron Peskin, negotiated an increase in the required percentage of subsidized affordable housing not to help families in danger of displacement, but rather to pad his own bottom line as a landlord**. This sort of conspiracy theorizing from groups pushing the editorial line of construction über alles is pretty derivative at this point, but let’s dig into some of the more substantive charges behind opposition to IZ policies.

Claim: With inclusionary requirements, fewer market-rate units are produced than would have been otherwise. Yes. The Berkeley Urban Displacement project estimated that each additional constructed below-market rate (BMR) unit is twice as effective at combating displacement than a market-rate unit. With inclusionary zoning, the level of subsidized affordable housing constructed via requirements on private development is ultimately going to be dictated by developers, who may choose to offset the losses from subsidized rental units by building fewer units than they would have theoretically built otherwise, in return for delivering the affordable units to San Franciscans immediately in danger of displacement. Professional linguists at the Oxford English Dictionary define this esoteric phenomenon as a “tradeoff.”

State Senator Scott Wiener’s recent amendment to Assemblymember Phil Ting’s AB 915 is unintentionally illustrative of how the “private” side of “public-private partnerships” (and their political boosters) can ultimately sabotage permanently affordable construction. The original San Francisco-only bill requires projects that are granted market-rate density bonuses to build additional affordable units so as to pencil out to the locally required percentage. What that means is that a project could build to the 18% requirement and receive a density bonus for additional construction that brings the overall percentage down to an estimated 13%. The original bill would require that this be brought back up to 18%, but Wiener’s amendment allows California to override this back down to 13% should they conclude that any market-rate housing would be lost as a result, despite knowing full well that inclusionary requirements are fundamentally a tradeoff-based policy.

Claim: Inclusionary zoning does not deliver affordable housing at the scale required, even with increased percentages. Also yes! San Francisco’s inclusionary program has produced several thousand units since 2002; when these units come online, the applications can number up to 30, 40, or even 50 applicants per unit.

Unfortunately, many inclusionary opponents look to the overriding power of state legislation to force construction in rich, exclusionary neighborhoods, which sounds great until you realize that their efforts will also undermine input from tenants in working-class neighborhoods who use community approval mechanisms to push developers for more subsidized affordable units. Some inclusionary opponents are also funded or supported by interests that stand to lose big money in a scenario where the public, fed up with compromises that result in fewer affordable units, could acquire land and oversee the construction of larger-scale publicly controlled below market-rate housing.

Without concurrently pursuing effective tenant power and land use democratization as political goal, many IZ opponents are ultimately aligned with those already poised to capitalize off the revaluation of existing land; suffice it to say these interests are not going to prioritize equity over profitability. Much of the recent political dialogue around upzoning proposals in San Francisco’s west side falls into this trap, with the ultimate result of taking land from (sometimes) well-off homeowners to give to even-more-well-off developers, with no concurrent planning to ensure that the new community will be in any way affordable or inclusive beyond a reduced percentage of affordable units.

Claim: There are other solutions that would work better to construct affordable units. Yes! Unfortunately those solutions require funding, and while seeking additional funding is an immediate necessity, we are still operating in a climate where HUD is facing $7 billion in cuts from the Trump administration. California state law, meanwhile, prohibits the levy of local income taxes that could fund local affordable housing. On top of these obstacles, enough money must be raised via taxation for municipalities to compete with the entire private market, local and international, to acquire both land and pre-existing housing.

Inclusionary zoning policy is but one ameliorative tweak to a housing-for-profit system that needs deep structural change. It is, unfortunately, considered the most viable option in a post-Reaganite ideological climate that prefers public-private partnerships such as IZ and density bonuses over truly democratized land use policy via collective forms of ownership and development. Inclusionary zoning units pegged to area median income (AMI) can also exclude low-income tenants since the area used for the calculation is usually metro area-sized and includes richer locales. In a gentrifying neighborhood where AMI sharply rises, AMI-pegged housing policy can run the risk of shutting out the very people it aims to protect.

Claim: We don’t need IZ. Upzoning for density in and of itself would create more integrated and affordable neighborhoods. NOPE. Zoning changes are not in and of themselves guarantors of affordability, let alone justice, in housing. Upzoning without planning for racial and economic justice won’t deliver us into a mixed-income urbanist utopia either, as much as many market urbanist types would like to think they do. Tenants who still have access to limited Section 8 funding often find they are excluded from residence in up-and-coming neighborhoods due to rampant discrimination, as the exclusionary redlining of the past (strategic disinvestment from urban neighborhoods, especially communities of color) gives way to the exclusionary bluelining of the present (strategic investment in those same communities to push those same residents out of now-desirable cities, in favor of attracting wealthier, and usually whiter, ones). Veteran urban planner Peter Marcuse outlines this in discussing the social and personal ethics of gentrification:

Rezoning a particular area to allow more housing to be built in such fashion that the net proportion of higher income households is significantly increased in the community, displaces families, both on the parcels on which it is built, and those priced out of the community by the impact of increased land values resulting from the new construction for the richer will further, not reduce, segregation as the net result.

Ultimately, IZ is not in and of itself a solution for the equitable distribution of housing. Still, beware of snake oil salesmen prioritizing ostensibly “progressive”, colorblind, class-blind, and deregulatory policy over the immediate construction of affordable units. Any attempt to coax equitable outcomes from the for-profit housing market necessitates tradeoffs; the idea that San Francisco’s working class should be denied viable opportunities for subsidized housing today to build the maximum theoretical amount of unsubsidized housing tomorrow isn’t just logically unsound but morally irresponsible.

 

**(Editorial disclaimer: This author was involved with Supervisor Peskin’s 2015 campaign, but was sadly ineligible to attend the Secret Landlord Conspiracy Committee as s/he is a tenant).

The Juice Is Loose: A Brief(ish) Intro to Loose Cash and Housing Speculation

A friend of mine, reading Bloomberg News’ recent exposé of $120M-funded startup Juicero – makers of a $400 Wi-Fi enabled juicer that simply squeezed out prepackaged bags of juice also sold by Juicero – recently pointed out that, “at least [fraudulent blood-testing startup] Theranos was pretending to solve an actual problem.” The Juicero machine was clearly geared toward buyers with enough cash to purchase a shiny object that had nowhere near the use value to justify its insane price tag.

Unfortunately, much of our housing supply appears to serve the same purpose.

Want More Affordable Housing? Reform Prop 13

In order to address our housing crisis, we must generate more local revenue. Chris Hoene, Executive Director of the California Budget and Policy Center, recently told a conference of  California Realtors that Proposition 13 needs to be reformed so that local governments are able to finance affordable housing projects. To understand why local governments have such a limited ability to fund affordable housing development, let’s take a closer look at Prop 13. And what better time to do that than on the 39th anniversary of its passage.

Has the Castro Lost Touch With Its Radical Roots?

“Let’s make no mistake about this: The American Dream starts with the neighborhoods. If we wish to rebuild our cities, we must first rebuild our neighborhoods. And to do that, we must understand that the quality of life is more important than the standard of living.”

-Harvey Milk

HOME-SF: The Good, The Bad, The Downsized

To increase housing production in transit corridors across the city, District 4 Supervisor Katy Tang has proposed legislation known as HOME-SF (formerly the Affordable Housing Bonus Program), which aims to increase affordable housing production, especially for middle-income families, along transit corridors. Previously, Supervisor Tang attempted to pass this legislation last year, but only the exemptions for building heights on 100 percent affordable housing ordinance was passed.

Our Dingo Babysitter: Market Boosterism and Planning for Affordability

It seems post-Trump despondency has hit the San Francisco affordable housing debate, leading some housing advocates in the world’s sixth-largest economy to turn to the private market to resolve affordable housing supply… just as they did during the Obama administration.

Building Affordable Housing Without the Perks

We’ve discussed local measures addressing affordable housing and zoning, but what’s being done at the state level? Let’s see what our local assembly members have on the docket for housing.

The Geary BRT Lawsuit is Out of Its Lane

If you live anywhere along or near the Geary corridor you are probably aware of the controversial Geary Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) plan that has been underway for years.

Money From Trees Don’t Fall: Zoning, Race, Class, and Community Self-Determination

“Corporations aren’t interested in the messy ebb and flow of humanity. They want stability and predictable rates of return. And although racial discrimination is no longer a stated policy for real estate brokers and developers, racial and social homogeneity are still firmly embedded in America’s collective idea of stability; that’s what our new landlords are thinking even if they are not saying it.”