By Irene Garcia : localtoday – excerpt

Torrance City Council voted unanimously this week to leave the League of California Cities, saying the organization is failing in its mission to expand and protect local control for cities.

The motion, proposed by Councilor Mike Griffiths, was prompted by the dismissal of a Cal Cities petition in support of a ballot measure to strengthen the local planning authority. Griffiths said his frustration had been building for several years and called the organization’s lobbying lackluster.

Cal Cities officials said they disagreed with the council’s assessment; The organization, they said, fights hard for local control over land use and zoning, and urged Torrance to remain a member.

“One of my top priorities as President of Cal Cities is maintaining local control, and I cannot do this alone. I need your help, I need your participation,” President Ali Taj said. “Torrance is an integral member of Cal Cities and serves as a key voice in the South Bay. Our fight is not over yet.”

Regarding the dismissal of the ballot measure, Cal Cities regional public affairs manager Jeff Kiernan said several Cal Cities committees were looking closely at them but had concerns about their language… (more)

by Manuela Tobias at CalMatters : sfstandard – excerpt

The first statewide snapshot of California’s homelessness crisis since the pandemic hit reveals that the number of people without a stable place to call home increased by at least 22,500 over the past three years, to 173,800.

That’s based on a CalMatters analysis of the federal government’s point-in-time count, a biennial headcount of people sleeping on the streets and in shelters tallied by California cities and counties earlier this year for the first time since 2019.

Homelessness experts mostly attribute the rise to precipitous drops in earnings during the pandemic among Californians already teetering on the edge. They also point to a worsening housing affordability crisis that is decades in the making.

“We have to solve this rotting core in the center of California, which is that we are a million units short of housing for extremely low-income workers,” said Margot Kushel, director of the UCSF Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative…(more)

By Kevin Truong : sfstandard – excerpt

High-rise condos near San Francisco’s downtown—which account for the bulk of San Francisco’s newer housing stock—are piling up amid rising interest rates and a shift in the city’s housing market.

The luxury condos are another casualty of San Francisco’s slow return to offices, with a once-thriving social and retail scene in SoMa and Mission Bay now gasping for air. Home buyers are looking to other neighborhoods for less cookie-cutter units, more outdoor space and—frankly—more life… (more)

By Sarah Wright : sfstandard – excerpt

San Francisco is back at it with housing denials, this time killing 57 units planned for a 15-spot parking lot in the city’s South of Market district.

A conditional use authorization for the 1010 Mission St. project was denied at the Planning Commission last week in response to concerns from local community groups, who argued that the units were too small and that too few of them, at 13, would be considered “affordable” with even fewer set aside for the lowest-income people in the city…

“I believe the opposition of this project is really representative to what seems to be a trend of market-rate micro-unit housing being proposed in dense neighborhoods like SOMA,” said Commissioner Gabriella Ruiz, who voted against the project’s zoning approval.

PJ Eugenio, an employment counselor from the South of Market Community Action Network, was one in a deluge of speakers who attended Thursday’s meeting to oppose the project. He and others argued that SOMA already has too many single-room occupancy units that aren’t affordable, saying it’s “out of touch with the community.”…(more)

No one can claim the opposition is fighting housing when there is proof that a lot of the tiny units are empty because no one wants to live in them. Even homeless people and lower income people have standards and the new closets do not meet their needs. It is time to tackle the affordability problem and handing out entitlements does not solve that problem or satisfy the RHNA quotas. We just learned the thousands of entitled unbuilt properties in the pipeline do not count. Neither do the thousands of empty unfilled units. Once people see the goals behind the RHNA numbers are unobtainable, there is widespread interest in joining the fight against them. Find out more about the RHNA wars September 21, 2022, 6:30PM on the Zoom Town Hall: https://catalystsca.org/ where some city leaders will explain why they are joining the lawsuit.

By Benjamin Schneider : sfexaminer – excerpt

A new state law would allow developers to convert strip malls and office parks into apartment buildings — in a policy change that could produce far more housing than last year’s high-profile effort to end single-family zoning in California.

AB 2011, authored by Buffy Wicks, an East Bay Assembly member, and passed by the Legislature last week, rezones commercial areas on major boulevards for three-to-six story residential development. And it permits those buildings “by right,” meaning they will not be subject to discretionary reviews from neighbors or lawsuits under the California Environmental Quality Act. All told, the bill could enable the construction of more than 2 million new homes… (more)

By Corey McDonald : shelterforce – excerpt (includes audio track)

What began in earnest during the 2008 financial crisis has been exacerbated by COVID-19: large companies, often backed by powerful private equity firms, swept into the single- and multi-family housing market hoping for a big return on their investment. More than a decade later, they’re not only reaping the rewards — they’re increasing their market share.

“They just bought in bulk,” says Oscar Valdés Viera, a research manager at Americans for Financial Reform. “As people were losing their homes, they were taking advantage of that, and they’re doing that again — they’ve expanded during the pandemic.”…

Two laws specifically address auction sales of distressed properties, or properties that are risk of or have gone through foreclosure. California Senate Bill 1079, which was signed into law in September 2020, modifies the foreclosure auction process to give owner-occupants, tenants, local governments, and housing nonprofits the first right to purchase after a foreclosure sale.

Another bill, the foreclosure intervention housing preservation program, or FIHPP, provides funding in the form of loans or grants for nonprofits, community land trusts, and other eligible buyers to purchase properties available through SB 1079, as well as properties that are delinquent on their mortgage and have gone through a short sale…

The FIHPP process is still being worked out by California’s Department of Housing and Community Development…(more)

I might be nice to have someone less developer-friendly representing us in Washington to take advantage of federal opportunities to protect homeowners and potential purchasers. Who might that be?

by Annie Gaus : sfstandard – excerpt

San Francisco’s inability to agree on housing policy is nothing new. But with a state mandate looming, the city’s parochial squabbles over new housing development may do more than just frustrate pro-housing activists. They could also land the city in legal trouble.

That’s according to State Sen. Scott Wiener, who called the Board of Supervisors’ recent actions on housing policy “frustrating.” In June, the board passed a fourplex bill so laden with caveats that Mayor London Breed vetoed it on grounds that it could actually hurt, not help housing development. Last week, the board voted to send a charter amendment to the ballot that Wiener described as a “Trojan horse”—designed to confuse voters and sabotage another, more viable plan to build housing…(more)

If SF is sued by the state, we might consider joining the lawsuit against SB9 that eliminated single family housing, making home ownership more difficult and the state less family friendly.

Senator Wiener admits there is nothing illegal about the four-plex law. He claims SF is not doing what it needs to do to get things built. What does he expect them to do when selling entitlements is more profitable than building? Given the high cost of construction and financing, and the flight from cities, now is not a good time to invest in an overpriced city.

If our state representatives really want to house people they should figure out how to balance salaries with the cost of housing. Suing cities is a good way to anger the SF voters who are in a recall mood right now.