Most poor advocacy groups keep pushing low income subsidized housing.
Which is a small band-aid that will never work. It creates lotteries where literally hundreds of people apply for a single home and one lucky person gets it. So one person is helped but the majority get nothing.
We need to actually fix the system, not create lotto winners.
There's definitely a role for bandaids while the longer term fix has its effect. I think it's really important to approach these with a "yes-and-" type of thinking rather than choosing a single direction and sticking to that alone.
Building more housing is a long term fix; even if we start building tomorrow with our maximum construction capacity, it's going to take a minimum of 15-20 years to make a really significant dent.
In the interim, protecting those who are most at risk is essential. And that means not only assistance at 60% of area median income (AMI), but also all the way up to 80% and even some amount of 120% AMI, in order to preserve some amount of economic breadth in communities like San Francisco.
The bandaids can't be the only policy, neither really can zoning be the only policy. It's going to take time to attract enough construction laborers to build everything we need to build!
Take it al with a grain of salt of course, it's just a newspaper columnist and not a full analysis but it's the best I've seen and he cites his sources.
The build rate required to hit that is about 65,000 units/year, which was about the rate that the Bay Area built at in 1971, which has severely tapered off since then:
However, everybody I hear talking about remodeling or building is saying that right now there's a construction labor shortage in the Bay Area, and we're nowhere near building 65k units per year, so it's going to take many years to build up the labor force and construction capacity too.
Building is a long term, but necessary fix to the housing crisis.
So why not just build social housing at a larger scale? It'd put actual downward force on the market by turning publicly-owned housing from a lottery into legitimate competition with privately-owned housing.
Cause that would require billions of dollars and a new state bureaucracy. I think building tons and tons of affordable housing would be great, but where's the money? I don't think the public support for an enormous housing bond is there yet.
And of course any time you tried to put down an affordable housing complex, you'd have to fight the neighborhood. SF had a proposed 100% affordable housing complex in the Mission that got shot down by the neighbors. Even if the money was there, you'd have to deal with the fact that people hate living next to poor people. So we'd probably need another state assembly bill that said something like, "if this complex has 80% affordable housing units no municipality can block it," and given the inability to pass SB827...there's no way that's going to pass.
These are the kinds of things people should talk about, to move the Overton window. But anyway, as of now, building tons of public housing just isn't politically feasible.
The legislators did pass a bill last year, SB 35, that says if a project has enough inclusionary housing, and it complies with all the zoning codes, and the city has been falling behind on affordable housing, then the municipality can’t block it. It has been proposed for use to convert a mall in “the circumstances are not dire” Cupertino to a mixed-use project with 50% affordable housing.
https://sf.curbed.com/2018/2/7/16986422/cupertino-darcy-paul...https://sf.curbed.com/2018/3/28/17173010/cupertino-mall-hous...
You should totally support California YIMBY, still. A weakness in the Housing Accountability Act is that the housing goals are very weak and unrealistically low. SB 828 would require the numbers to be more realistic.
https://cayimby.org/policy/
The money for market-rate development is so abundant that we feel a need to suppress it. Getting the public funding for significant social housing would be a revolution all by itself. San Francisco’s entire $10B budget could only build 20k affordable homes at a cost of $500k each (which is low, by a cursory Google for recent projects) if it suspended all other services.
Which is a small band-aid that will never work. It creates lotteries where literally hundreds of people apply for a single home and one lucky person gets it. So one person is helped but the majority get nothing.
We need to actually fix the system, not create lotto winners.