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.
