Community Recommendations Regarding Opportunity Framework: Letter to CA DHCD from CCHO & REP SF
August 1, 2023
Tyrone Buckley,
Assistant Deputy Director of Fair Housing
Department of Housing and Community Development
Division of Housing Policy Development
2020 W. El Camino Avenue, Suite 500
Sacramento, CA 95833
Dear Mr. Buckley,
We appreciate HCD engaging in this important conversation regarding the Opportunity Framework, and the recognition that new approaches are needed to achieve fair housing opportunities in high resource communities while concurrently implementing community stabilization measures in historically disinvested neighborhoods.
In response to your solicitation for comments on the Opportunity Framework, the Council of Community Housing Organizations (CCHO) and the Race & Equity in All Planning Coalition (REP-SF) have compiled a set of overall recommendations based on the experience and expertise of our member organizations.
Together, our member organizations have played a leading role in innovating affordable housing strategies and advancing groundbreaking policies in San Francisco to expand affordability, prevent displacement, and stabilize local communities. Working across affordable housing and community development, direct services, and advocacy, our organizations have been responsible for over 30,000 new or preserved affordable homes, winning nearly $6.5 billion in dedicated funds for affordable housing, creating thousands of jobs, and helping to foster healthy and equitable communities. These efforts have been essential to implement San Francisco's efforts to affirmatively further fair housing.
We believe that as cities grapple with the complex layering of local and state factors that impact development, displacement, housing, and affordability across diverse neighborhoods and communities, it is critical to articulate an affirmatively advancing fair housing framework that centers the needs of BIPOC residents in all geographies. This can be achieved through a combination of program, policy, tools, and investment, and an overall balance among focused interventions in historically disinvested areas, reducing displacement pressures in gentrifying neighborhoods while supporting access to high opportunity areas, and initiatives to support fair housing integration.
We propose the following four overall recommendations to strengthen the State’s role in advancing the Opportunity Framework.
Focused Interventions in Historically Disinvested Areas
Program:
We urge HCD to develop a coordinated strategy focused on comprehensive community development that integrates strategies of production, preservation, and protection in historically disinvested areas.
Strengthen acquisitions strategies by community based organizations, tenants, and local municipalities to purchase and rehabilitate existing multifamily housing to convert to permanently affordable, including preserving rental units that serve very low and extremely low income households.
Policy:
We urge HCD to ensure a multi-pronged and long-term commitment to support local municipalities to achieve AFFH goals that includes specific additional state funding streams.
Create a State-level operating subsidy to enable deeper affordability and to serve ELI populations in historically disinvested areas in order to alleviate overcrowding and/or substandard housing conditions.
Investment:
We urge HCD to ensure a simultaneous increase in investment towards historically disinvested areas alongside the new concentration of investments to high resource areas, in order to sustain and stabilize low income neighborhoods that are predominantly communities of color, and have historically borne the brunt of displacement pressures, to enable them to become neighborhoods of opportunity for existing residents.
Support revitalization by creating a distinct financing tool or funding approach for more comprehensive community development and affordable housing. This could be modeled after HUD’s Choice Neighborhoods program as an example, and could receive encouragement and incentives through state funding programs.
Work across state agencies to ensure increased coordinated investment in transportation, schools, parks, libraries, small business support, etc. in historically disinvested areas and communities vulnerable to housing discrimination, to ensure that existing neighborhoods benefit from these investments.
Set aside funds to recapitalize and rehabilitate existing affordable units to ensure they are maintained as dignified homes and continue to serve as stabilizing assets in historically disinvested communities. This could be accomplished by expanding the Portfolio Reinvestment Program.
Reducing Displacement Pressures in Gentrifying Neighborhoods
Program:
We urge HCD to reinforce its commitment to reduce displacement pressures in gentrifying neighborhoods in order to prevent the erasure of culture, small businesses and residents that leads to exclusivity and segregated living patterns with worsened health impacts for those displaced away from their homes, jobs, culture, resources, language, and families.
Shifting state resources out of historically disinvested neighborhoods only exacerbates displacement pressures, rather than reduces them. HCD, therefore, must continue to invest in permanent supportive housing, housing for ELI and VLI households, and preservation, acquisition, and rehabilitation in neighborhoods at risk of gentrification and displacement.
Tie investments to robust anti-displacement policies. The Metropolitan Transportation Commission’s Transit Oriented Communities policy offers a useful blueprint in this regard.
Policy:
We urge HCD to incorporate an opportunity framework into existing state policy and funding initiatives so that resources and investments achieve a balance of fair housing goals that include gentrifying neighborhoods experiencing displacement pressures.
Establish Opportunity Framework guidelines that establish and embed a both/and approach within TCAC, MHP, Housing Accelerator Fund, State Infill Infrastructure Program, Golden State Acquisition Fund, CDLAC, Strategic Growth Council, and other affordable housing financing programs.
Tools:
We urge HCD to incorporate displacement risk mapping methodologies into existing state policy and funding initiatives.
Continually update the displacement risk mapping through UC Berkeley’s Urban Displacement Project that identifies areas at risk of gentrification, undergoing gentrification, and experiencing advanced gentrification. The state should evaluate the full picture of residential segregation/integration. It should look longitudinally at how neighborhood demographics are changing to determine how State funds can be effectively used to: a) preserve affordability in gentrifying places, b) accelerate community revitalization in historically disadvantaged locales; and 3) create opportunity in historically exclusionary communities.
Investment:
We urge HCD to begin ramping up investments in the near term and as part of a long term resource plan to grow state investments to support local community stabilization and anti-displacement efforts.
State funding for affordable housing developers and local municipalities to purchase and rehabilitate existing apartment buildings so they can be held as permanently affordable housing.
State funding for rehabilitation of existing apartment buildings and single family housing for long-term residents that cannot afford repairs and or local building code upgrades.
State funding for local long-term residents to close the gap in down payments and or purchase price of single family homes in gentrifying neighborhoods.
State funding for tenant counseling and advocacy and eviction defense
State funding for statewide right to counsel program for all tenants
State funding to preserve and create housing for very low and extremely low income individuals and families (10-35% AMI), especially in gentrifying areas.
Explore State funding programs distributed at the organizational level instead of the project level (i.e a city or CDC would apply for a funding grant that could be used to access multiple acquisitions instead of applying for individual projects), thus enabling rapid response and nimbleness than traditional NOFAs in order to compete with the private sector purchasing buildings.
Supporting Access to High Opportunity Areas
Program:
We urge HCD to scale up production, preservation, and protection interventions in high opportunity areas to expand opportunities for low income residents. We also urge HCD to recognize that some residents will not pursue these opportunities because of longstanding cultural and economic ties in their cultural and ethnic enclaves, and desire not to move away from key social, cultural, and service networks.
Support acquisition and rehabilitation of existing apartment buildings for permanently affordable housing.
Expand rental assistance programs and hold landlords accountable for not discriminating against voucher holders.
Build state-funded low and very low income family housing in high income areas
Establish a pathway for first right of refusal for a public entity, community organization, and/or tenants to purchase a property when a landlord evokes the Ellis Act with the intent of going out of the rental business.
Policy:
Establish a more flexible mix of housing components for projects in high resource areas to include ELI or other categories that are more likely to provide opportunities for families with children.
Investment:
In addition to sustaining and expanding existing funding programs, we urge HCD to develop new funding opportunities that are tailored to emerging needs of production and preservation in high resource communities.
Create funding resources that are more flexible and cost efficient than LIHTC so 100% affordable housing projects smaller than 100 units can be built.
Initiatives to Support Fair Housing Integration
Program:
We urge HCD to foster the creation of a robust social housing system that couples public investment with community, cooperative, and public ownership in order to advance fair housing goals.
Create permanent state-funded housing to serve populations experiencing housing insecurity and rent burden.
Support distinct types of community development initiatives that expand the reach of social housing strategies, such as public housing revitalization and place-based CBO-led efforts, by engaging on-the-ground community practitioners to understand needs and priorities.
Ensure preferences for locally rooted and community based affordable housing development organizations, including land trusts, and increase capacity funding for community based non-profit organizations, including community land trusts (CLTs) and permanent real estate cooperatives (PRECs).
Strengthen collaboration with the Department of Financial Protection and Innovation to coordinate and support efforts for local jurisdictions to establish municipal banks which can provide an added layer of financing for local affordable housing projects.
Policy:
HCD can advance model policies and work to support legislation that expands the role of social housing within the housing market to advance fair housing and affordability goals.
Establish a policy goal to achieve a certain proportion of local housing stock to be price controlled (say ⅓), either through public, non-profit, or community ownership so as to establish an affordable housing sector with market power to buffer against speculation, gentrification, and displacement.
Regulate large investment and private equity firms that purchase single family housing and residential apartment buildings and drive skyrocketing rents and increased housing costs throughout the state.
Expand the scope of tools to achieve rent stabilization, including reforming Costa Hawkins legislation.
Uphold community-based planning processes even in the quest to minimize constraints and advance streamlining. Specifically, strengthen opportunities for historically disinvested communities to help shape local decision making instead of just voicing their concerns, and defer to community-based planning processes to establish priorities in these areas.
Tools:
HCD can use its enforcement authorities to achieve greater impact in affordable housing goals.
Increase HCD enforcement of local jurisdictions’ implementation of the affordable housing goals under RHNA.
Establish and monitor metrics to measure progress towards achieving Opportunity Framework goals like how overcrowding is reduced, how displacement is prevented, or how rent burden is reduced.
Institute reforms to the opportunity mapping process based on research that demonstrates that “the neighborhood characteristics that [matter] to residents [are] not necessarily reflected in the opportunity maps” but rather in “neighborhoods’ cultural amenities and proximity to work and services.”
Investment:
Develop affordable housing budgeting and transparency policies that identify annual resource commitments and an annual progress report for affordable housing production, preservation, and protections.
Require the State to establish an annual affordable housing investment plan for the state’s contribution scaled to enable local municipalities to achieve their RHNA affordable housing production and preservation mandates.
Thank you for the opportunity to comment on HCD’s Opportunity Framework and your commitment to incorporating lessons learned from on-the-ground community expertise. We hope that these efforts will result in greater overall balance of community reinvestment, community stabilization, affordable housing, and anti-displacement investments towards areas facing chronic inequities and continual displacement pressures as well as fair housing goals within high resource areas.
Sincerely,
John Avalos
Council of Community Housing Organizations
and
Jeantelle Laberinto
Race & Equity in all Planning Coalition, San Francisco