News

“Cities have long leaned on policies that address affordability head on. Vouchers, rent control and requirements for builders to supply affordable units are all tools that continue to be used. But planners and academics warn that such approaches have their limits. Housing-assistance programs often help the neediest, while leaving a large swath of the population shut out. And requirements that builders set aside affordable units or pay into a fund to build such units come with their own challenges, notably that growth in affordable housing comes to rely on a much larger increase in market-rate housing.”

Perennial attempts to tweak the California Environmental Quality Act, which many developers blame for the slow pace of building, have collapsed. A bill to fund a dedicated housing fund introduced by former Assembly Speaker Toni Atkins, D-San Diego, a longtime housing advocate, went nowhere. A $100 million annual housing tax credit expansion was vetoed.

The School Facilities Program has little new money to hand out – especially for the more costly new construction and modernization projects – but the board has been reluctant to declare it depleted. To do so would trigger a provision in state law that places the burden of school construction costs fully on the backs of housing developers by allowing districts who meet the criteria to charge them 100 percent of building costs.

Not Houston. From 2010 to 2014, the Texas city added more than 140,000 people, a 6.7% increase and second only to New York in the U.S. But the difference between Houston and other high-growth cities is that it has expanded its housing stock to accommodate its new residents. In roughly the same period, the Houston metro area issued construction permits for 189,634 new units, the most in the nation. It is not surprising, then, that more than 60% of homes in the larger Houston metro area are considered affordable for median-income families, according to the National Home Builders Association, compared with about 15% in the Los Angeles area.

In a letter to Senate Republican Leader Jean Fuller, R-Bakersfield, the state’s legislative counsel said Brown does not have the authority, without legislative approval, to extend beyond 2020 the provisions of Assembly Bill 32, California’s landmark greenhouse gas reduction law.

This week, San Francisco became the first major US city to require solar panels on all new buildings that have 10 floors or less. (Larger buildings are exempt for now.) Analysts estimate that the resulting solar installations could help avoid 26,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide annually. If we use the EPA’s handy greenhouse gas calculator, that’s the equivalent of taking 5,500 cars off the road. . . So if San Francisco relaxed its restrictions and enabled, say, an additional 10,000 people to move from elsewhere in the Bay Area to the city, we could expect that to cut 79,000 metric tons of CO2 per year (to a first, crude approximation). This is three times as much CO2 as the solar panel law would save.

As a whole, U.S. cities are expanding as rapidly as they have throughout the last half-century. . . On the one side are cities such as San Francisco, Boston, New York and Miami that have slowed their pace of expansion dramatically since the 1970s, in part as they have added layer upon layer of building regulations. On the other side are cities concentrated in the southeast and Texas, which have grown outward and seen much slower price growth.

Today Ms. Trauss’s group is one of several pro-housing organizations (GrowSF and East Bay Forward are others) that represent a kind of “Yimby” party, built on the frustrations of young professionals who feel priced out of the Bay Area. BARF has won the backing of technology millionaires — Jeremy Stoppelman, co-founder and chief executive of Yelp, is the group’s largest individual donor — and the encouragement of local politicians.

Soaring rents also have undesirable demographic effects: They drive middle class families (generally a moderating force in city politics) out of urban areas, and make it difficult for young people not in fields like finance, tech, or consulting to get a footing in the housing market—a critical step toward achieving adulthood. Getting rents under control should be a major priority for any reform-minded politician—Left or Right—who wants to prioritize fairness, growth, and political stability. And that means beating back corrupt and outdated building restrictions.

The reason why California faces a housing affordability crisis is simple, many experts say: Lots of people want to live in the state and there aren’t enough houses for them. . . Legislators have shied away from tackling broad efforts to increase housing supply, such as overhauling the California Environmental Quality Act or reforming the tax code to incentivize residential development. Doing so would force lawmakers to take on some of the largest and thorniest policy issues in the Capitol.

Over the past five years, rents in cities with the most-restrictive land use regulations grew almost three times as quickly as in cities with the least-restrictive regulations. Controlling for changes in demand, more-regulated cities experienced a larger drop in inventory than less-regulated cities. Tightly regulated cities with higher rents and lower inventory have more adults living with roommates.

A report from online real estate company Trulia out Tuesday confirms what many prospective young Los Angeles homebuyers have figured out: housing here is out of reach. Only 27 percent of local households can afford a median-priced starter house, which Trulia said cost $329,000, Curbed L.A. reports. The report finds fewer homes available to buyers at all income levels in L.A. County and that home inventory has all but vanished in Orange County, San Francisco and San Diego.

“Not In My Back Yard” is a phrase that’s been used quite often in California over the last 30 years, usually as a precursor to challenge, block, delay or kill construction projects across the state. And NIMBY activists’ bludgeoning tool of choice is the California Environmental Quality Act. Like NIMBY, it’s better known by its acronym: CEQA. . . “It (CEQA) has been abused in this state for 30 years by people who use it when it has nothing to do with an environmental reason,” said Carol Galante, faculty director of the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at UC Berkeley, and a former assistant secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Major renovations on existing homes will have to be undertaken with energy efficiency in mind, using products and systems that meet an updated state building code. California’s code is already among the strictest in the nation. . . New homes will also be required to meet higher energy standards. By 2020, each home built in California should produce as much power as it consumes. At least one builder estimates that advanced energy systems will add $50,000 to the cost of a new, super-efficient home. What will that mean in a state where low-cost housing is in short supply?

California’s current housing market suffers from a shortage of supply and the lingering effects of the housing crash and the Great Recession. California currently ranks near the bottom in terms of its supply of housing relative to population growth. Add that to the increasing demand to live near the coast, to be close to tech hubs, and to be near downtowns, and it’s not too surprising that home prices throughout the state continue to rise. Additionally, the cost of development and stringent regulations imposed on developers has contributed to the lack of homebuilding in California.