03/29/2024

Stat of the Week: $150,000 added to every new home

That’s the estimated cost of city fees tacked onto each new single-family home in Fremont. The Terner Center for Housing Innovation at the University of California, Berkeley, compared housing development fees in seven cities: Berkeley, Oakland, Fremont, Los Angeles, Irvine, Sacramento and Roseville. Fremont topped for both single-family homes and for multifamily units at about $75,000 per unit.

“What was initially thought to be a clear assignment turned into an odyssey of combing through difficult-to-obtain fee schedules, cobbling together piecemeal information across city departments, and repeatedly interviewing various city planning officials,” Terner Center researchers wrote in a blog post.

Among the reports takeaways: development fees are extremely difficult to estimate, city departments often fail to coordinate on fees, developers are often hit with fees not specified in codes or policies, and fees add up and substantially increase the cost of building housing.

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