The crux of the crisis
If Mountain View’s recent approval of a plan for nearly 10,000 new residential units provided an extraordinary example of progress on California’s housing crisis, a standstill at the other end of the Peninsula exemplifies the forces that keep homes from being built even at the core of the Bay Area employment boom.
In the year that the Legislature finally passed a raft of bills to boost housing, the lingering impasse over more than 4,000 proposed homes in Brisbane shows that Sacramento, as the would-be developer put it, “has a tremendous amount of work to do.”
The Brisbane City Council was expected to make a decision this year about the Baylands, more than 600 acres of former landfill and rail yards near public transit on the edge of San Francisco. But 2018 will be the 13th year that local officials consider the proposal — or effectively decline to do so. City officials even cited then-pending legislation to expedite housing as their latest reason to delay development of housing or anything else.
Although one key new state housing law is designed to diminish the local obstructionism at the heart of the shortage by easing projects that answer unmet housing needs, it’s not expected to affect the Baylands project. State guidelines require Brisbane to accommodate only a small fraction of the new housing proposed for the site, and the city’s general plan prohibits housing on the Baylands site.
Universal Paragon Corp. first proposed developing the area more than a decade ago and added housing to its plan five years later. A final environmental impact report was completed in 2015, and last year, after much deliberation, the Brisbane Planning Commission recommended keeping the site housing-free. The City Council went on to hold more than 15 special meetings on the subject, the last one in August, without reaching a conclusion.
“This is a textbook example of a case in which the state needs to step in and do something about what’s broken ... that allows communities to spend 12 years considering a proposal and put it off again and again,” said Jonathan Scharfman, Universal Paragon’s general manager.
The project raises several questions the state has yet to address, including how to assess and enforce housing needs more effectively, prevent environmental laws from being used to stop smart urban development and change incentives that favor commercial uses.
“It’s a magnification of an issue that we have statewide,” Scharfman said. “For 40, 50 years, we’ve done very well at adding jobs, but we’re lagging in producing housing. The result is a disaster.”