State legislators should take a breath on housing ‘crisis’
Sen. Scott Wiener’s controversial Senate Bill 50 is huffing and puffing its way back to the 2020 California legislative session. It aims to blow down formerly protected constitutional authority for cities to tackle their own planning and zoning.
Wiener’s march to Sacramento is with a choir of politicians who sing an off-key song of crisis. The tune goes like this:
“We have an affordable housing crisis. Cities are to blame. We have to do something. We’ll replace local control with topdown rezoning in the form of unfunded mandates dictated by developers and real estate investors.”
Let’s unpack these lyrics to discover why it should be stopped.
In the first verse, Wiener and some colleagues have accepted unproven assumptions about the crisis.
One is that California needs 3.5 million new housing units, but the Embarcadero Institute has shown that number is inflated. A more accurate figure is 1.5 million.
The senator overlooks two trends captured in headlines, including this one from last May in the L.A. Times: “California’s population growth is the slowest in recorded history,” and one from December in the San Diego Union Tribune: “Boomers will be putting millions of homes on the market in the coming decades.”
Growing evidence, and longheld common sense, shows that developers reach their aspirational profit-margins when they build moderate and luxury units. Truly affordable housing, without subsidies, takes 2530 years.
In the second verse of this irritating song, Wiener and friends claim cities are to blame for housing woes. They ignore corporate complicity.
Instead, they peddle the idea that housing and affordability will improve if they abolish long-held practices of community engagement with guidelines from elected officials, general plans, housing elements, and hard-fought provisions to protect the environment.
How did we get to this place so lacking in harmony?
San Francisco journalist and author Aaron Glantz describes the historical trends that led to the housing crisis of 2008 in his book, “Homewreckers: How A Gang of Wall Street Kingpins, Hedge Fund Magnates, Crooked Banks, and Vulture Capitalists Suckered Millions Out of their Homes and Demolished the American Dream.”
It could be that Wiener and his profit-driven chorus are laying the groundwork for a future book. It could be called “City Wreckers: How A Gang of Politicians, Global Real Estate Investors, Large Property Developers (like Blackrock), and Corporate Giants (like Amazon which paid zero federal taxes in 2018), Bankrupted Thousands of Cities, Left Millions Destitute and without Services, and Squandered Trillions of Dollars of Excessive Wealth.”
Legislators will lament, “We didn’t see it coming.”
Among Wiener’s YIMBY supporters, Minneapolis is celebrated for eliminating singlefamily zoning. However, Minneapolis Planning Commissioner Alissa Luepke-Pier offers a cautionary perspective in an interview published in The Planning Report.
Asked “what advice would you offer to the California legislators?” she said: “The people who should be at the table making these decisions are the people who lay their heads down on pillows in the ZIP codes that will be most affected.”
Growing evidence, and long-held common sense, shows that developers reach their aspirational profit-margins when they build moderate and luxury units. Truly affordable housing, without subsidies, takes 25-30 years.