Affordable housing starting to vanish
Report: Five percent of Bay Area’s existing stock is at risk of becoming too expensive for low-income tenants
As Bay Area communities struggle to build enough housing for their poorest residents, one factor keeps threatening their progress: the affordable housing they already have is slowing disappearing.
The five-county Bay Area has lost 2,128 subsidized affordable homes since 1997, according to a report released Tuesday by the California Housing Partnership. Another 5,128 homes — or 5 percent of the region’s existing affordable housing stock — are at risk of becoming too expensive for their low-income tenants.
As the Bay Area grapples with an affordable housing shortage, the slow drain of its existing lowcost units is undermining efforts by local governments, developers and nonprofits to house the state’s poorest residents. Developers essentially are pouring water into a leaky bucket: as they build new units, older units fall out of the supply when their government contracts expire and landlords sell the buildings or convert them to market rate rents.
“In some communities, these homes are some of the last homes where low-income people, particularly low-income people of color, can remain as the pressures of gentrification have increased,” said Matt Schwartz, California Housing Partnership president and CEO.
Bay Area rental prices have climbed to staggering heights over the past few years, forcing low and moderate-income residents to move farther from job hubs in search of cheaper housing. An average apartment rents for $2,870 in Santa Clara County, and for $2,613 in Alameda County, according to RentCafe.
The state and federal government offer subsidies to landlords who agree to rent their properties at discounted rates to families making less than the area’s median income. But those deals typically come with an expiration date. Landlords who work with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, for example, generally sign 20-year contracts. During that time, low-income tenants pay up to 30 percent of their wages, and the federal government makes up the difference between that and a pre-determined market rate.
Another option is low-income
hope that what this will do is help prevent further fatalities and further severe injuries,” council member Dev Davis told Lavin and others in the audience who had lost loved ones to traffic crashes in recent years.
The council also asked city staff to explore creating a feature on the My San Jose app for residents to report unsafe streets, work with private sector partners like Waze to notify drivers when they are approaching a dangerous corridor and analyze the fiscal budget to identify funding opportunities to increase staffing on the police department’s traffic enforcement unit.
Mayor Sam Liccardo stressed that the city should focus on gathering more data and conducting further research to find the most effective way to use its funding to reach its goal of
Vision Zero.
“I don’t want to be flailing, I want to be focused,” Liccardo said. “That’s how we deal with a crisis, and that’s how we deal when there are lives on the line.”
Despite the efforts made by the city to reduce traffic fatalities up until this point, the number of people killed over the past 10 years has grown by 58%. During that same period, the number of traffic enforcement officers employed by the San Jose Police Department has shrunk nearly fivefold — from 48 to 10.
Council member Raul Peralez, who represents downtown San Jose, where many of last year’s fatalities occurred, said that correlation displayed “a clearly alarming trend.”
“If we want to make it a priority to get that number down to zero, then we need to change our strategy,” Peralez said in an interview before the meeting. “What we’re doing today is not working.”
Peralez will serve as chair of the newly formed Vision Zero Taskforce, which will meet quarterly starting in March to analyze collision trends and develop a strategy to improve traffic enforcement.
Along with Peralez, the task force will include members from the city’s transportation, police and fire departments, the county coroner’s office and public health department, Valley Transportation Authority and local advocacy groups such as California Walks and the Silicon Valley Bicycle Coalition.
The city plans to use the additional $7 million in funding, in part, to build safety improvement projects, such as new crosswalks, transit boarding islands and additional signage, in areas where the most collisions resulting in fatalities or severe injuries have occurred.
The city has identified 15 safety priority corridors totaling 56 miles of city
roadways to focus safety improvement projects, including sections along Santa Clara and 1st streets and McLaughlin and Senter roads.
Although almost everyone who spoke at Tuesday’s council meeting commended the council for its new plan, some community
members urged the city to move forward with more urgency.
Nikita Sinha, San Jose program manager for California Walks, asked that the city reallocate $20 million during fiscal 2021 to fund a larger number of Vision Zero safety improvement projects throughout the city.
“While this plan represents a step in the right direction, you need to take more urgent action,” Sinha said. “San Jose has a responsibility to do everything possible. Let 2019 be the last year we see an upward trend in traffic deaths.”