Partnership seeks to ease Bay Area housing crisis

Vibrant, innovative and diverse, the Bay Area attracts talented people from all over the world. The future is invented here. But the region’s remarkable successes have created undeniable — and unavoidable — problems. Gentrification makes housing less affordable and less accessible. Infrastructure improvements have not kept pace with need. Public policies and plans to deal with these challenges have failed to deliver. People across the region pay almost three times as much of their income on housing compared to the national average. That’s unacceptable. It puts our future at risk.

Tomorrow’s success depends on policies that restore social mobility — a hallmark of this region for over 35 years. We must rethink how best to protect and preserve local communities even as this region strives to create innovative opportunities for new growth.

Thursday’s announcement of the new Partnership for the Bay’s Future is a hopeful sign that government, business and civil society are serious about change. Our work is built on years of earnest conversations with community and faith leaders, housing and transportation experts, elected officials, residents, bigand small-businesses leaders and philanthropists from across the region. We’re committed to strengthening livability across the region, beginning with the housing crisis. We recognize the interconnected challenges of housing, transportation and economic opportunity; however, a sharper focus will likely yield better outcomes.

The partnership’s mandate emphasizes three P’s: protecting current residents so they can remain in their homes, preserving affordable housing, and producing more housing across all income levels. Each of the founding organizations, including the San Francisco Foundation, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the Ford Foundation, the Local Initiatives Support Corporation, Facebook, Genentech, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation and the Silicon Valley Community Foundation are committed to this vision.

Founding partners have secured more than $250 million of a $500 million investment fund to accomplish this in San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Alameda and Contra Costa counties. This fund will be one of the largest of its kind in the nation.

Legislatively, Gov. Gavin Newsom and the state are developing proposals that both remove legacy roadblocks to housing production and assist people and families confronting homelessness by offering more emergency shelters and transitional housing. There are no policy panaceas here. But there is a difference between “stopgap” spending that buys time and public/private policy partnerships committed to accountable results.

Through the partnership’s direct housing investments and policy changes, our goal is to protect, preserve and produce housing for up to 175,000 households over the next five to 10 years. By leveraging local, regional and state legislation, our hope is to create even more homes across the economic spectrum. While lower income families suffer the most, no one is immune from these challenges.

Many critics will argue our proposals aren’t radical enough, that more money, more regulation and more aggressive planning are necessary to motivate change. Others will insist deregulation and market forces offer a better path. They may well be correct. But the partnership is committing to this path following extensive outreach and consultation. The scope of these challenges makes partnership essential to success.

In his book “Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City,” the sociologist Matthew Desmond wrote, “Decent, affordable housing should be a basic right for everybody in this country. The reason is simple: Without stable shelter, everything else falls apart.” These words should weigh heavily on all of us. They should remind us of our responsibility to act. And they should drive us to put smart solutions and lasting partnerships in place to tackle the great challenge of today.