Category Archives: Housing

deregulated housing bills, Housing, Politics

Did one of California’s biggest new housing reforms go too far?

By Chris Elmendorf : sfchronicle – excerpt

The state desperately needs changes to its housing laws. But did a recent fix create more problems than it solved?

Last month, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law a package of more than 50 housing bills. Most seemed inconspicuous, but sometimes changing just a few words in a statute makes a world of difference.

AB1287 is a case in point. It makes a small tweak to a state law that gives developers “bonuses” for building low-income housing.

On the books since the 1970s, the Density Bonus Law has a simple idea at its core: If a developer agrees to dedicate some units in a project to affordable housing, it should be allowed to make its project a little larger than a city’s rules otherwise allow. For example, if a builder dedicates 10% of the units to low-income housing, it receives a size bonus of 20%. This allows a site zoned for 40 units to be developed with 48.

AB1287 makes a seemingly minor change allowing developers to base their number-of-units calculation on what is allowed by a city’s general plan for land use rather than a city’s zoning. 

This might sound like a hair-splitting distinction. It is not…

Continue reading Did one of California’s biggest new housing reforms go too far? →

deregulated housing bills, Housing

Big San Jose apartment complex may convert to all-affordable units

By George Avalos : mercurynews – excerpt (audio track)

City officials prep decision to clear path for conversion

SAN JOSE — A big apartment complex in downtown San Jose could be converted into an affordable homes property, a shift that would terminate its status as market-rate housing.

Modera The Alameda, a 168-unit apartment building on The Alameda near the SAP Center and Diridon train station, is currently slated to be transformed into an affordable housing complex.

The San Jose City Council is scheduled to meet Nov. 14 to consider a conversion proposal for Modera. This decision also includes a financing package to enable the transformation to affordable housing.

A $100 million package of tax-exempt bonds to finance the purchase of Modera The Alameda is the funding centerpiece of the affordable housing conversion, according to documents on file with San Jose officials…

The proposal though, would remove Modera from the property tax rolls — which means the complex would no longer generate property tax revenue once the new owner takes over…(more)

Here is a relatively new program that seems to rely on government funds to convert market rate to “affordable” housing. What does this do to the tax basis? And is this a reasonable approach to generate affordable housing?

Housing

State’s housing suit put on hold. Judge wants federal case over charter city question to be decided

Huntington Beach – Top state officials took a legal blow in their ongoing lawsuit that accuses Huntington Beach of violating state housing laws, when a Superior Court judge halted their suit until a related federal case is decided.

A state Superior Court judge ruled Friday that the lawsuit filed by the state Attorney General’s Office and California Department of Housing and Community Development must wait. The ruling is a win for city officials who hope to fight off state housing mandates to keep the “suburban character of the city.”

The state earlier this year sued Huntington Beach for refusing to adopt a housing element in compliance with state law. The city fired back by filing a lawsuit in federal court that argued because it is a charter city it’s not subject to state housing laws.

City Attorney Michael Gates called the judge’s decision “a huge loss” for the state and said the decision can’t be appealed.

“The state is stuck and can’t take any further action against the city for failure to adopt a housing element,” Gates said.

A spokesperson for the Attorney General’s Office said, “We are disappointed by the court’s ruling and considering all options to obtain the swift relief that state law requires.”

For decades, on a regular cycle, the state has required local communities plan for allocated amounts of housing at a variety of price points, including some amount of affordable homes, to meet needs of the future. More recently the legislature has given the process more teeth.

The state wants Huntington Beach to adopt zoning that would allow developers to build 13,368 new housing units over the next eight years. Huntington Beach officials have argued the city’s allocation is a disproportionate burden compared to other jurisdictions, such as Marin County.

The state filed a motion on June 22 to dismiss the city’s federal lawsuit, but a judge hasn’t ruled on it yet.

“I don’t see how the court is summarily going to be able to dismiss it,” Gates said. “We await the ruling, but I think the motion to dismiss is not going to be granted, at least not in whole.”

The state filed a motion on Oct. 30 asking the court to make a decision on whether the lawsuit would be dismissed or not. The state argued the court had 120 days to rule on the motion to dismiss.

Huntington Beach refused to join in on the request with the state for the judge to make a decision. State officials and attorneys for Huntington Beach differed in opinion on when the 120-day clock started for the judge to make a decision.

Deputy Attorney General Matthew Struhar said both sides needed to make the joint request, and state officials ended up filing without getting signatures from Huntington Beach attorneys.

The state also took issue with the city’s request to depose Gov. Gavin Newsom and other top state officials at City Hall.

CEQA, Housing, Politics

Mission ‘group housing’ moves forward, likely to cut some affordable homes

By ANNIKA HOM : missionlocal – excerpt

It could be one of the first projects to utilize a
dial-back of inclusionary units

The long game may just be starting to pan out for the developer brothers Chris and Brian Elsey.

After four years, a 149-unit group housing project at 401 South Van Ness Ave. near 15th Street moved one step closer to development on Thursday, when the Planning Commission unanimously approved a special permit the project needed.

The four-year process, however, also means the project can incidentally abandon its previous 25 percent affordability requirement and slash it to just over 15 percent, thanks to city legislation that took effect approximately two weeks ago…(more)

People are looking for proof that the state developer bills are decreasing affordable housing in the state and this is one of the first projects to take advantage of those bills. This is also proof that there is no incentive to build on these lots since the longer they wait, the better the deal gets for the owners. They started with a 20% affordable, now they are down to ten. If they wait another year, the incentives to build any will diminish along with the fees to pay for the infrastructure. Those are shifting from developers to the taxpayers. Say goodbye to your city or wait to be screwed by the state.

Housing

How Long It Really Takes to Get a Building Permit in San Francisco — and Why

By Adam Brinklow : thefrisc – excerpt

Whether you’re swapping windows or putting up new homes, SF’s red tape is notorious. Those in charge say relief is finally coming.

It’s a simple project,” says John McDowell, a permit expediter who helps would-be builders untangle San Francisco’s legendary red tape. His current clients, who own an early 20th-century, mixed-use building on Market Street, want to replace wood windows with more durable materials that he swears will look “exactly the same.”

McDowell says SF’s planning commissioners, who must approve the swap, won’t be able to tell the difference, let alone someone walking by on the street. The windows “are on the second floor, even,” he adds. He wouldn’t disclose the specific address…

Plenty of people with experience developing in San Francisco — be they architects, engineers, developers, permitting experts, and property owners large and small — have a horror story to share, perhaps more than one…

Mayor London Breed, some supervisors, and the Planning Commission are pushing for reform — and surprise, so are the very city bodies whose practices are under the microscope. In interviews and recent public meetings, staffers at both the Planning Department and Department of Building Inspection say they’re eager to speed up the way things work…(more)

Housing, Politics

San Jose Says Its ‘Tiny Homes’ Are Reducing Homelessness. More Are on the Way

By Calmatters :sfstandard – excerpt

It was the bathrooms that convinced Darlene Pizarro to accept an offer of shelter at a lot of “tiny homes” in San Jose last month…

“Tiny home” describes a specific type of housing more permanent than a tent or disaster shelter, but less than a single-family home, townhouse, apartment or something else thought of as permanent housing. The structures—smaller than 400 square feet, often lacking either a kitchen or private bathroom—have become increasingly common in California’s response to homelessness over the past five years, though opinions are split on how much to rely on them in years to come.

Pizarro’s unit boasts all the fixings of what homeless advocates say are best practices for temporary housing: Individualized case management allowing residents to stay as long as they need to get permanent housing

  • Laundry and kitchen facilities
  • The privacy of individual rooms that lock, with personal bathrooms
  • Other elements that emphasize residents’ dignity, like dog runs and weekly community events

Tiny homes are sometimes called modular homes or, in the case of San Jose, “emergency interim housing.” The city is all in, operating more than 600 such beds across six sites and building more. Mayor Matt Mahan credits them with a recent 10% decline in the city’s unsheltered population and notes that of the 1,500 people the city has sheltered in its tiny home sites, 48% moved to permanent housing. That’s compared to an average rate of 34% across Santa Clara County’s shelters over the past three years…

RELATED: Building Tiny Homes a Gigantic Task in Broken San Francisco…

A sense of privacy

Also making the sites attractive are a host of modular housing companies springing up to offer tiny homes that are more livable.

Compared to flimsier and less fireproof prior models that evoked disaster zones, many tiny homes now include double-pane windows that can open, individual thermostats and doorbells. In San Jose, one site where the city broke ground this year will include some tiny homes that have private kitchenettes.

Though not all cities use them, many companies build modular units with en suite bathrooms, which residents say provide significantly more privacy and dignity…(more)

Housing, Politics

Newsom signed 60 housing bills in 2023

Newsom signed 60 housing bills in 2023

Download the pdf or read the article in the Chronicle: https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/newsom-california-housing-bills-18442548.php

Unfortunately, the real elephant in the room in SF is not the lack of housing projects being entitled. The problem is that they are not being built thanks to the the DBI holding back on processing buildings and then one must run the gauntlet of the inspections department, but, have been heavily mired in corruption and are years behind schedule, unless you are a big corporate developer.

 

Housing

California exodus: Charts show huge shift in which U.S. states most people are moving to

By Christian Leonard : sfchronicle – excerpt
Texas remained the most common destination for former Californians, followed by Arizona.

California lost a net of 340,000 people to other states from 2021 to 2022, with a growing number of residents leaving for Florida and Arizona.

The outflow from California to other states was lower than it was from 2020 to 2021, when about 410,000 more people left California than arrived, according to new migration data from the U.S. Census Bureau. But it was still far higher than in the years before the pandemic, when the annual net loss was fewer than 200,000.

The Census Bureau’s estimates for the calendar years, which don’t include international migration, are based on responses to its American Community Survey. The 2022 survey asked respondents whether they lived at a different place than they did a year ago, and if so, where they lived previously.

The emigration from California contributed to a slight dip in the state’s population from 2021 to 2022, from about 39,143,000 to 39,029,000…(more)

Looks like the state finance department has more accurate calculations that HCD.

CEQA, deregulated housing bills, Housing, Politics

These 12 secret power players are shaping the Bay Area housing market

By Susie Neilson, Emma Stiefel, J.K. Dineen and Lauren Hepler : sfchronicle – excerpt (includes audio track)

Last year, The Chronicle obtained data on almost every property in the Bay Area — about 2.3 million unique records. We were hoping the data would be a treasure trove of information about real estate ownership in the region, allowing us to easily identify who owns what, and thus pinpoint the most powerful corporate owners of rental housing.

Quickly, we learned it wasn’t so simple. California doesn’t have hard-and-fast rules on how property owners identify themselves; large corporations, hedge funds and even wealthy families often purchase multiple homes through shell companies or trusts, shielding their names from ownership records. It’s only by carefully tracing networks of ownership that one can start to grasp how much property an entity actually has.

So we redoubled our efforts. During the past year, The Chronicle analyzed these property records, which were collected from county assessors’ offices, plus nearly 7 million unique business records. We used machine learning methods to parse the data and called on dozens of experts and additional data sources. This work yielded a list of 12 of the Bay Area’s largest, most influential ownership networks. We believe this is an unprecedented effort to uncover rental ownership and management networks across all nine counties in the region: Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Napa, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Solano and Sonoma…

We still aren’t sure we’ve captured all of the Bay Area’s largest owners, but we’re confident this list of 12 includes some of the region’s major power players in residential real estate, housing tens of thousands of families in nearly 7,000 assessor-defined properties from San Jose to Santa Rosa…

Even if the owner of your property isn’t on our list, you can learn more about who owns it by using our map of nearly 2.3 million Bay Area properties here. You may read more about our methodology here.

Read why transparency matters…

Navigate to our content

One company operates thousands of San Francisco apartments. Just don’t call them a landlord

This map reveals who owns every property in the S.F. Bay Area…

Invitation Homes
Michael Marr
Greystar
Woodmont / Tad Taube
Equity Residential
John Vidovich
Neill Sullivan / REO Homes
Essex
UDR, Inc.
Tricon Residential
AvalonBay
Ardenbrook / Ardenwood…(more)

RELATED:

This map reveals who owns every property in the S.F. Bay Area

By Emma Stiefel and Susie Neilson: sfchronicle – excerpt

This tool will help you investigate your landlord or anyone else’s

To our knowledge, there has never been a centralized database where someone could see who owns any property in the nine-county Bay Area region, making it difficult to investigate connections between the powerful forces that shape the housing market for all. So The Chronicle built one.

Type in your full address, or any Bay Area address, to see who officially owns nearly any building. The map contains data on almost 2.3 million properties registered across the Bay Area’s nine counties, which The Chronicle obtained in summer 2021…(more)