Bill for taller housing falls short
State incentives to build must also prevent displacement
We all agree: California is facing an unprecedented housing crisis, the result of insufficient residential construction for more than 30 years. But it’s specifically the lack of affordable housing that has made the situation so dire for hundreds of thousands of families, prompting many to leave the state or, worse, end up homeless on our streets.
It is true that we need to incentivize our cities to build more housing. But we must do so while locking in affordability and anti-displacement protections to ensure that the Bay Area doesn’t end up being further divided economically and the poor forced to commute greater and greater distances because they can no longer afford to live here.
The city of Berkeley has added an estimated 2,000 new units over the past decade. We require all new housing developments to have affordable units or pay an in-lieu fee that goes into an affordable housing fund, and we are exploring the development of vacant sites and acquiring buildings for affordable housing. We also have some of the strongest tenant protections in the country, including rent control that has allowed many of our elders to age in place.
Given the ongoing crisis, state Sen. Scott Wiener’s housing bill SB827 comes at an important, right time and is extremely well-intentioned. It would allow for much denser housing, especially around BART stations and within a quarter mile of a high-density transit corridor, such as a bus stop where buses stop every 15 minutes. SB827 would result in a flurry of construction.
Certainly building more housing over the long term will lower rents. But it may take a decade or more for the effect of new market-rate construction to trickle down in terms of lower rents. If the state wants to lock in landuse policy for cities, it must also lock in stronger affordability requirements because not all cities have rent control. In fact, most don’t. This can be done by demanding that a specific percentage of every development built near transit be below-market-rate units, even in cities that don’t require them.
It makes sense for people to live around transit hubs: It reduces traffic on our congested freeways and cuts down on greenhouse gas emissions, the leading source of climate change. And, after being amended, Wiener’s bill is certainly more palatable to housing activists like me who are working to prevent working-class families from being displaced by our region’s run away housing costs.
But without the affordability component, the bill will do nothing to protect longtime residents from being displaced.
Gentrification may be a controversial word, but there’s no denying that San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley and even Richmond’s demographics are changing. In 1990, African Americans made up 19 percent of Berkeley’s residents, yet today they make up less than 8 percent. As they leave, longtime businesses are lost and those former residents often must endure longer and longer commutes to jobs in communities where they now cannot afford to live.
As we build, we must ask ourselves whether we are building for just the privileged (and mostly white) residents or for all: artists, people of color and working-class families who can’t afford $3,500-a-month rent for a one-bedroom apartment.
Sen. Wiener’s proposed amendments to prevent demolition of rent-controlled housing are a good step forward, but they do not go far enough. Not all cities have strong demolition policies, which means it will be easier in those communities for tenants to be displaced.
One way to strengthen eviction protections would be to mirror Berkeley’s strong demolition policy, which requires relocation assistance to tenants until the new building is built and explicitly prohibits properties where there has been an Ellis Act eviction in the last five years. The policy also applies to properties where there are verified cases of harassment of residents or illegal evictions within the past three years.
We all love the Bay Area for its diversity, charm, great climate and countless opportunities. Let’s make sure the legislation we pass does not come at the expense of the most vulnerable among us.