By J.K. Dineen
The Bay Area would need to more than double its housing production over the next decade to meet preliminary state goals aimed at easing the housing shortage that has driven out thousands of families over the past decade and made the region the nation’s most expensive.
The state Department of Housing and Community Development is calling for 441,176 new housing units to be built in the Bay Area between 2022 and 2030, nearly 2½ times the region’s target from the last eight-year cycle, which runs through 2021. The current target of 187,990 homes was set in 2012 and extends through 2022.
While the exact amount of housing each of the region’s cities would be responsible for producing has yet to be determined — the Association of Bay Area Governments will release that plan by the end of the year — the preliminary proposal is already sparking debate about whether the state goals are ambitious enough and how the influx of new housing can best reverse the displacement of poor and working class families.
The state estimates the region needs 114,442 new units for very-low-income residents; 65,892 for low-income residents; 72,712 for moderate-income residents; and 188,130 market rate homes.
State Sen. Scott Wiener called the proposed numbers “way too low,” especially compared with the 1.3 million units that Southern California is being asked to produce. He said the Bay Area’s Required Housing Needs Allocation should be well over 600,000 units.
“For reasons I don’t understand, they proposed numbers that are low and inconsistent with the law,” the San Francisco Democrat said. “These numbers have to change. It needs to be corrected.”
Over the past few years, Wiener has authored a series of bills to transform the RHNA from an unenforceable planning exercise into a process with real teeth and consequences for cities that don’t meet their goals.
In 2017 Wiener passed Senate Bill 35, which takes planning control away from jurisdictions that don’t approve enough housing. In cities that don’t produce enough of any kind of housing — market rate or affordable — a developer may avoid the local approval process by making 10% of the units below market rate. In cities that meet their market rate goals but not their affordable benchmark, developers can avoid the local planning approval process by making at least 50% of units affordable. In San Francisco that has cut down the approval process for affordable housing from three or four years to less than six months.
For developers, the stakes are big: The higher the goal, the less likely cities are to meet their RHNA objectives. And as long as the RHNA goals are not met, the approval process goes from an often highly political, multiyear local battle into a “right to build” process that bypasses city councils and planning commissions.
Wiener called the RHNA numbers the “bedrock foundation of California housing law” and argues that “if the numbers are too low, all we are doing is perpetuating a profound housing shortage.”
But while SB35 has helped streamline the approval process for more than 1,600 affordable units in San Francisco, some community activists worry that the law, coupled with the more ambitious RHNA numbers, would simply fuel the construction of thousands of new luxury units that serve well-paid professionals but are unaffordable to the average Bay Area worker.
Under the current allocation, the Bay Area has completed 126% of the market-rate development goals, but only 21% of the below-market housing goals, as high-end builders have flocked to the region to capitalize on the influx of a growing high-octane workforce.
Debra Ballinger, director of Monument Impact, a nonprofit organization in Concord that advocates for low-income workers, said ABAG’s goal should be to “allocate significant shares of affordable homes in all Bay Area suburban and urban cities, and minimize market rate housing in cities where residents are at risk of displacement.”
Apartments are now leasing at a new building at 50 Jones St., in the Tenderloin.Photo: Constanza Hevia H. / Special to The Chronicle
Peter Cohen, co-director of the Council for Community Housing Organizations, said the RHNA goal should be to promote more housing of all kinds in suburban and smaller cities while focusing on affordable development in cities like San Francisco, Berkeley and Oakland, where many low-income families have been replaced by wealthier professionals.
At best RHNA could take pressure off San Francisco and spread the burden of producing housing throughout the region, Cohen said. At worst it could “further gentrify San Francisco.”
“If you are standing in San Francisco or central Oakland or parts of San Jose, the market rate is already exceeding the RHNA goal — and now it’s going to double,” said Cohen. “That adds pressure, which takes the form of people being pushed out of their homes.”
Todd David, director of the San Francisco Housing Action Coalition, called the numbers “woefully low.”
A worker on the construction site at 1621 Market St. is seen from Brady Street.Photo: Constanza Hevia H. / Special to The Chronicle
“If we got a RHNA number in line with the Southern California number, we would increase another 50%, which would mean more counties would not be hitting their number, which would mean that housing would be streamlined in those communities,” said David. “This is a significant missed opportunity to address the Bay Area’s housing shortage. It’s really disappointing.”
Matt Regan, who heads up policy at the Bay Area Council, a pro-business trade group, said he supports the highest possible number so that developers will be able to get quick approvals by doing 10% affordable. He called the allocation “a mixed basket.”
“We were hoping to get north of 600,000 and we got 441,000,” he said. “It’s still a significant increase over previous allocations but nowhere near what SoCal got.”
Even if the Bay Area’s numbers don’t change, the new San Francisco allocation will be challenging to meet, according to Planning Director Rich Hillis. He said the city’s allocation would likely be upward of 9,000 units a year, a big increase over the 4,850 units the city produced in 2019, which was the second-highest production total in the past 20 years.
“It is going to be a heavy lift to get there. Based on our past numbers, it would be extremely aggressive.”
The debate comes at a time when much development is on hold as builders wait to see how the coronavirus pandemic will impact rents and home prices. Cohen said the pandemic could provide a “cooling off period that gives us a little more time to figure out how to plan for and build for the next wave rather than reacting to it,” he said.
Wiener said the current pandemic-driven pause in development is “irrelevant” to the RHNA debate.
“Our state housing laws are about the long term,” he said. “COVID-19 will pass and the economy will rebound. In terms of RHNA, the pandemic and the recession are not relevant.”