Mayors discuss affordable housing.
The need for affordable housing in the Bay Area has become quite dire, themayors of the three largest cities in the region agreed during a panel discussion in San Francisco.
“The affordability crisis,” Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf said this week during a mayors’ summit at social networking platform Nextdoor’s headquarters, “is literally about to kill the Bay Area.”
San Francisco Mayor London Breed agreed, noting that many of the friends she grew up with have fled the area. Breed herself, she pointed out, until recently lived with a roommate.
“I got a raise since then,” the new mayor quipped. “I may even buy something, who knows.”
But she, Schaaf and San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo acknowledged fewer people in their cities and the surrounding suburbs have that option as housing prices soar. Wealthy workers continue to floodthe area as the techeconomy booms, but few of the cities and towns have added enough homes to house them, and lower-income residents are fleeing for cheaper rents in theCentral Valley and beyond.
While all threemayors say they are pushing for new affordable housing in their cities and looking for innovative ways to serve homeless people, Liccardo issued a blunt call for suburbs to step up.
“The reality is that we can’t house everybody in three cities,” Liccardo said.
The San Jose mayor is under no illusion, he said, that towns will suddenly add housing, adding that he thinks the region and state need to find the right combination of “carrots and sticks” to prod them that direction.
That could mean financial in-
centives like money to use on improving transportation “to encourage them to get to yes,” Liccardo said, or fees for places that expand their job base without adding space forworkers to live.
“None of us has a hermetically sealed city,” Schaaf said, urging the cities and towns in the region towork collaboratively to increase affordable housing options for people. “We have to see the bigger picture.”
And, Schaaf added to nods from the other two mayors, that might mean making decisions that make current residents of the area “a little uncomfortable” to plan for the future so the current crisis doesn’t repeat itself.
“We have to get creative,” Breed said, noting that she has pushed for housing along transit corridors where the need for parking may be more limited.
She and the other two mayors agreed, the need to serve the area’s most vulnerable populations is pressing. The public housing complex Breed grew up in as a child was torn down and rebuilt with fewer units, she said, and many of San Francisco’s minorities, particularly African Americans, have been forced to leave the city altogether.
“There have been a lot of mistakes around housing production,” she said, adding that opponents of new housing have successfully used environmental regulations and other tactics to block new development. “We have to open up the doors and be open to housing in our neighborhoods.”
All three mayors also spoke about the challenge of ending homelessness, something mayors of cities across the state are struggling to accomplish. On a recent trip to Sacramento, the leaders of California’s 11 largest cities— Republicans and Democrats alike — all signed a statement agreeing that homelessness is the most pressing issue they face.
While there’s been a positive push across the Bay Area to provide homeless people with permanent supportive housing rather than temporary shelter space, Schaaf said, “our street encampments have exploded.”
“We’ve got a lot more work to do,” Liccardo acknowledged. “There’s no one solution that’s going to fix it all.”
Hou s - ing was the summ i t topic that generated the most impassioned responses f rom the mayors, but it was not the only issue. All three addressed the scooter craze that has gripped cities across the country in recent months, with Schaaf saying at one point, “I’m not sure if scooters are transportation or entertainment.”
On a more serious note, Schaaf said, “we need to reengineer our regulatory process” to be more responsive to innovative businesses.
There was one topic where Schaaf and Liccardo demurred: whether they might like to be president one day.
But Breed responded directly.
“I just feel like if Trump can be president,” she said, “I can be president.”