San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
California concedes to a crisis
It’s another unnecessary gauge of the severity of California’s housing crisis that it’s largely undisturbed by a onceinacentury pandemic and an economic shock that rivaled the Great Depression in its early stages.
In September, the state’s median home price reached a record of $ 712,000, marking a fourth straight month of alltime highs after an astonishingly brief period of pandemicinduced easing. San Francisco and other Bay Area locations have seen precipitous declines in median rent this year, but the city remains the most expensive large market for tenants in the country even after the greatest drop nationwide, according to Zumper, while San Jose and Oakland rank fourth and fifth.
The glacial pace of housing construction, meanwhile, provides little hope for relief from such prices. The sixmonth period through September saw singlefamily home building decline 7% from the already inadequate output of a year earlier. Multifamily construction, which provides the bulk of sorely needed affordable housing, was even more anemic, down 20% from the year before. In fact, California hasn’t seen a substantial increase in apartment production since 2015.
Even as it has moderated but not corrected housing prices, the pandemic has underscored the ravages of the housing shortage. Shelterinplace orders collided with the cruel reality of more than 150,000 Californians with nowhere to shelter, forcing state and local officials to scramble to place them in hotels and motels. Joblessness left tenants that much more unable to afford the rent, necessitating a series of eviction moratoriums to prevent further swelling of the ranks of the homeless.
Yet the Legislature, which has struggled to produce legislation to boost the supply of homes since 2017, did not improve on its record in the session that ended this year. On the contrary, it reached a nadir, killing the most significant housing production measure of the past three years, Democratic San Francisco Sen. Scott Wiener’s SB50, before failing to pass a host of less ambitious housing bills. Legislators’ main achievement was a lastminute agreement to an attenuated version of an eviction moratorium championed by another San Francisco Democrat, Assemblyman David Chiu, which is set to expire at the end of next month. Gov.
Gavin Newsom, meanwhile, has little to show for his big housing production promises.
Under the circumstances, one might have expected lawmakers to reconvene last week with a renewed sense of urgency. But the session that began Monday already looks haunted by the diminished ambitions and underwhelming results of the past one.
Most of the housing measures announced so far attempt to repair or redo last year’s halting efforts. Chiu is proposing to extend emergency eviction protections, with assistance for tenants and landlords, through the end of next year, a needed step in light of the alarming trajectory of the pandemic. Wiener is reviving a measure to let cities voluntarily expedite rezoning of lots restricted to singlefamily housing for up to 10 units, revisiting a bill killed by the Assembly last year. State Senate leader Toni Atkins, DSan Diego, is bringing back a bill to allow up to two duplexes on singlefamily parcels, which the Assembly passed so late in the past session that the Senate had no time to concur.
All these measures deserve approval, but none approaches the magnitude of the longterm shortage. California needs to make building higherdensity housing in cities and suburbs dramatically easier and cheaper by reducing the power of local governments and other interests to obstruct development that should be routine. That won’t happen as long as the Legislature doesn’t try.