Easing zoning near transit key to adding homes
California’s chronic and welldocumented housing crisis has been generations in the making andwill not be fixed overnight. But the days of legislative inaction or half measures may be nearing their deserved end.
Last year, state lawmakers finally prioritized housing, sending a package of 15 bills to Gov. Jerry Brown to increase the affordability and supply of new housing.
While those bills will ultimately be insufficient to produce the approximately 100,000 additional housing units annually that would align supply with demand, they represent a sharp change in the Legislature’s commitment to fixing this unsustainable problem.
And a bill to take the dramatic next step is now on the table. Last month, state Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, introduced Senate Bill 827, which would promote the creation of new mid-rise housing near transit stops and transit corridors.
The bill would eliminate minimum parking requirements, prohibit maximum residential densities or floor-area ratios, and require height maximums of 45, 55 or 85 feet, depending on the street, for new transit-proximate housing.
The goal is to facilitate denser and taller residential development where such development belongs. Most obviously, the bill would facilitate substantially greater housing production near subway and commuter rail stops in urbanized areas such as San Jose, Oakland, San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego.
The predictable hand-wringing response by hyperbolic NIMBYs wielding specious arguments began almost immediately. One elected official in the Bay Area called SB 827 “a declaration of war against our neighborhoods.”
A community group in Southern California resorted to breathless, ad hominem attacks, writing, among other things, “Scott Wiener is to gentrifiers what Donald Trump is to racists.” The group went on to suggest that the bill’s supporters are akin to colonizers and have a white-supremacist mindset.
Embedded between the lines of such bombast is the notion that the existing zoning schemes that have led to the current housing shortage and related exorbitant housing costs are somehow equitable. But that notion is not credible: Zoning policies that require low-density residential development near transit are exclusionary and already result in widespread segregation and displacement of residents.
SB 827 is not a perfect bill. It does not streamline the approval of housing that would qualify for the bill’s “transit-rich density bonus,” for example, nor does it shield such development from California Environmental Qual- ity Act abuse. But SB 827 is perhaps the first real effort to find a way to produce a meaningful addition of new housing, and in a way that will help meet California’s long-standing climate and air quality goals.
Although the state has long had a range of laws that recognize the importance of housing and declare the issue a matter of statewide importance, those laws have proven to be insufficient.
If we are to successfully address what has thus far been an intractable problem, we can no longer simply nibble around the edges of housing policy or rely on relatively toothless laws that are poorly enforced.
Instead, we must find bold, unburdened solutions that go to the heart of the problem. SB 827 is a strong step in the right direction and marks a noteworthy shift in the conversation in Sacramento. Bryan W. Wenter is a lawyer in Miller Starr Regalia’s Walnut Creek office and a member of the firm’s land use practice group.