Governor signs 15 bills to ease housing crisis
you, and they’re all good stuff,” Brown said. “But I’ve always said too many goods can create a bad.”
But that didn’t dampen the excitement of people delighted to see the state recognizing the need for dramatic measures to deal with the state’s growing housing problems.
“There is no corner of the state that doesn’t need affordable housing,” said Tim Frank, director of the Center for Affordable Neighborhoods in Berkeley. “There’s no silver bullet to deal with the state’s housing crisis, but this is a big first step.”
The legislators who joined Brown around the small desk where he signed the bills stressed that the housing problem reaches far beyond the low-income homeless.
“As a former mayor, I can’t afford a home in the community where I live and that I represent,” said Assemblyman Evan Low, who served as mayor of Campbell. “We need to increase the supply of housing and streamline the approval process.”
For San Francisco legislators like Assemblyman David Chiu and state Sen. Scott Wiener, the bill-signing was the culmination of years of effort to improve the state’s housing situation.
“I’ve been working on this since my first day in office,” said Chiu, a former San Francisco supervisor who was elected to the Assembly in 2014. “We’ve had some setbacks, but we kept working.”
Wiener warned that there’s still plenty more to do to deal with the housing crisis.
“This is the beginning, not the end,” he said, promising that he will be introducing more housing bills. “We can’t just check this box and move on to something else.”
The Legislature passed the 15 bills in the housing package on the last day of the session two weeks ago.
One of those bills, SB2 by state Sen. Toni Atkins, D-San Diego, creates a permanent source of funding for affordable housing.
The permanent funding is estimated to generate $200 million to $300 million a year through a $75 to $225 recording fee on real estate documents and some property transactions, not including home sales. Most of the money goes to local governments to build housing, make existing housing more affordable and create permanent or temporary shelters.
The bill was a priority for advocates who said the state needed to create a permanent source of funding to begin to replace $1 billion a year in lost redevelopment agency money.
A Public Policy Institute of California survey released Wednesday found that less than half of adults support the fee, though 64 percent of those polled said they favor building more housing in their cities.
Voters will decide next year whether to approve a housing bond. SB3, by state Sen. Jim Beall, D-San Jose, will ask voters to approve $4 billion in general obligation bonds to build rental housing for lowincome families and to fund other existing housing programs. The bond will set aside $1 billion for the state’s veteran home-loan program, which would otherwise run out of money in 2018.
Among the other bills signed was SB35 by Wiener, which pushes reluctant cities into approving housing projects. Dozens of cities opposed the measure, arguing that it undermined local land use decisions.
SB167, by Sen. Nancy Skinner, D-Berkeley, will make it harder for local governments to deny housing projects.
AB1505, by Assemblyman Richard Bloom, D-Santa Monica, will allow local governments to require developers to set aside a certain percentage of affordable rental units in new construction.
San Francisco Chronicle staff writer Melody Gutierrez contributed to this report.