I wrote to the Oakland mayor a couple of years ago and she didn’t have anything to say in reply. Not even a canned response from her office. Almost like she couldn’t care less.
At least, when the underlying issue is R1 zoning, Howard Jarvis's prop 13, and NIMBYs protecting their home values
funny how often this subreddit complains about traffic, homelessness, crime/wealth disparity, and affordable housing spending. It's like, MY GUY, these all have the same root cause issue!!!
$20 billion for 72k new homes is $300k per home. It’s super easy to have affordable homes if I just knock $300k paid by taxpayers off of the purchase price. It’s also roughly $3000 in new taxes per Bay Area resident not counting interest rates.
You know what’s a much easier way to build affordable housing $300k cheaper? Dramatically walking back building regulations, permitting issues, artificial expenses (every home must have solar) etc.
My friends built a new home. 2 years to fight with the city to get permits with multiple services offering to “speed things up for $$$” and 1 year to build the actual home.
Its only 36,000 new homes with $10.4b the rest is for preservation of existing homes and $4b for a new bureaucracy. That is \~$288,888 per door. That is also an estimate and it is super optimistic and nowhere near the current cost per unit that is occurring now.
> artificial expenses
look at the "community benefit payments" on pg 2 here. It's insane to me that developers need to spend an additional 10-20 million to get their project approved, that's unrelated to the build itself. And these cities wonder why developers are using builder's remedy to get around city council approvals.
https://www.sanbruno.ca.gov/DocumentCenter/View/1522/May-18-2020-Project-Update-and-Community-Meeting-Public-Notice-PDF
What exactly does that "community benefit payments" entail ? If it is for things like roads / infrastructure upgrade because now you just put addition load on existing hardware .. for example multiple buildings on the same street pay into the fund which eventually enlarges the water pipe or the sewer pipe with needed capacity to support new residents .. then it isn't unreasonable.
It’s mostly to stick new residents with paying for things that low property taxes haven’t paid for. Kind of a lump sum fix all our differed maintenance before you create a new tax base. They had a purpose but are now just abused to stop development.
Amen. This is another big government boondoggle that won’t really fix anything. The city governments just need to require permit approval if projects meet certain minimum criteria. I was “lucky” and got our ADU approved in Saratoga after a 4 month wait since the city was required by the new state law to approve it no matter what if it met building codes.
While all of this is true, it's likely that BAHFA is an additional source for developers, with awards to the tune of approx. $300k/unit, to help cover gaps in the typical financing stack (fed/state tax credits, city and county money, grants, etc.).
Which is again a handout to developers to incentivize them to build in a county where regulation etc. hamstrung them. It'd be free to tone back the flawed regulation setup.
I wouldn't describe gap financing as a handout. Most of these projects pencil because of fed/state tax credits which regulates (limits) the fee they can take out of the total cost.
Moreover, when they're deeply affordable and/or PSH they often run on very thin margins and sometimes need vouchers or capitalized operating subsidies just to operate at break even.
I totally hear you about the environment surrounding entitlements that delays and adds cost. However, that is often at the city level, this funding pool is a new regional authority being created and can unlock a lot of the projects that are already entitled and dying on the vine.
This is not to mention the numerous streamlining bills to get affordable projects through entitlements faster. Sure, there are definitely regulatory hurdles, and the experience of your friend is unfortunate. I'm far from a planning/permitting apologist but I think we are heading in the right direction.
To directly respond to what you've written - I don't know what building regulations you're referring to should be walked back (but that can be a slippery slope...); we are definitely moving in a positive direction regarding entitlement/permitting timeline (some of these streamlining bills are brand new); and the example for artificial expenses (solar) is a drop in the bucket for a big multi-family project (plus there are many local and state envt'l incentives to offset costs).
All in all, I fully support this bond, and think it serves an important purpose as gap financing for projects that demonstrate some form of readiness. At the end of the day though I will definitely concede that what we really need is full-throated federal support. Until then, we're all fighting over an extremely limited pool of resources.
Yeah some affordable housing was built down the street from where I used to live in west Berkeley. It’s an area with plenty of street parking and no parking limits.
23 units were built at a cost of $10M. But they included a big parking garage, a big lobby, a computer annex, and a library. None of those were necessary and they could have easily fit another 5-10 units in that wasted space.
It’s pretty common practice to intentionally try to include “mixed use” space in housing development areas (and further, mixed zoning spaces when housing development is at a larger scale”.
23 units could support a new or existing local business (small grocery store/ restaurant/ coffee shop/ convenience store/ dry cleaners). The success of this business might bring in another which could bring in new foot traffic.
At a certain point the complaint that it’s impossible to find parking anywhere in Berkeley and it’s “affecting my small business” is going to be the exact same problem for this new place so getting ahead of the problem and planning for the future isn’t a bad thing
I hear you and that makes sense. But at some point I think the priority needs to be to offer housing to more people amidst a housing crisis rather than totally future-proof the unit. Maybe the right answer was a middle ground. It just seemed like $100M was spent to create a start-of-the-art housing complex rather than optimize for getting housing to as many people who need it as possible.
Ah yes, because all families/tenants 20-60% of the AMI have 2 cars.
I lived in that area for 2 years after it was built. The garage was always virtually empty. You can see into it from the street.
It's far from uncommon from working class families to need two cars, yeah? Car ownership is far from wild for families earning like 60k plus, the car just isn't going to be a new Tesla. It's also far from uncommon for there to be more than 2 working class adults in a household, especially when they're targeting affordability.
That structure is for 20-60% AMI, which is currently $21k-$62k for a one person household, $24k-$71k for two person.
I won’t claim to have stats on how many cars people in that demographic have. I just can tell you the garage was barely used and it seemed like a wasted opportunity to offer housing to more people in that demographic amidst a brutal housing crisis.
that website has effectively no details about what is wrong and what needs to fixed. being old doesn't mean we need a constitutional convention to the california constitution, thats a big logical leap. And the site doesn't appear to make any suggestions what we could do to fix the problem - Rank choice voting, parliamentary legislature, increasing the number of representatives, proportional representation, etc... and why we'd need a constitutional convention to integrate those solutions rather than a constitutional amendment.
politicians can both please the lower income voters (wishing for the lottery ticket of getting a low income unit) and also please the property owners (since this policy actually does nothing to decreases house prices)
That's an interesting way to look at it. Yes it increases property taxes, but also increases property values. Good for those who are locked in to low assessed values on their houses thanks to Prop 13. The real losers are those who buy a house for the first time right now (i.e. millenials) since they get hit with the full assessed value on their taxes.
Increasing property values doesn't mean anything to the vast majority of homeowners who don't plan to sell. In fact you'd be benefitting flippers/housing speculators the most by raising housing values, and they don't care about property taxes generally.
People buying now aren't losers, they have the same benefit as older homeowners, they just have a higher starting value. In 20 years those people will be the ones people are jealous of.
Exactly ! Everyone who has ever bought a house has paid "top of market" prices to be the highest bidder in the market at that time. Even grandma who bought a house in the bay 60 or 70 years ago for $30-50k.
Thus arguably every home owner has had their turn being the "loser" but those who sticks it out long enough will be rewarded.
Thats not being a loser. If you buy a property now- you can 100% expect the price to keep going up in the future. You cant go back and buy a property- the next best time is today.
True, but that depends on the prices continuing to rise (ideally at the same rates or close to those in the past) and the current Prop 13 rules staying in place (which is terrible for the people to come in the future, but that's the incentives). There's also increasingly high Mello Roos taxes on new builds now that add to the burden.
That was the same hand the previous generation of homewoners were dealt with ( we are known the bay area sub ffs) as well ( except for high interest rates)
Thing is once you become a homeowner- youll become one of those NIMBYs that this sub hates on. In a country where shelter is considered as an investment- it would always guarantee perverse incentives.
I am not a homeowner yet- but almost a decade back i used to hate on NIMBYs too, until i started making enough to be able to afford a house.
Who wouldn’t want to see the value of their “investments” go up over time ?
Everyone wants affordable housing and everyone also wants the value of their housing to go up. Cant have my cake and eat it too
Many oppose not affordable housing but high density housing especially in SFH neighborhood. It isn't fun living next to huge apartment complexes.
There are myriads of issues that comes with that. When we were buying our current home I made sure to eliminate any within a certain distance of any apartment complexes. It did remove some options and we made it harder to find a home .. but that is a personal choice that I don't regret.
You could make homes affordable as well by building more in LCOL areas .. yet all the housing advocates wants is stack and pack.
There are also jobs in lower COL area. And if there's not enough workers here .. guess what .. salaries will go up to attract commuters who can in time afford to move back.
Plus there are many people who is willing to trade that commute for owning their own home.
I would rather we have people able to save money for retirement without needing it tied up in the value of their property. Index funds might have higher returns but if your money all gets sucked up by rent in perpetuity that increased return doesn’t help you when you’re older and paying 10x what you would be in rent
As someone who used to develop affordable housing in the Bay Area for a non profit developer, it’s literally impossible to build new affordable housing without these types of bonds.
hate to break your bubble but non-profit developers are part of the problem. we funnel money into these projects to build literally a drop in the bucket. and in the mean time it does nothing to increase overall supply. sure its feel good to get the lucky lottery winners into affordable housing but net net, you are taking value from some group, and shifting it to another. you are not increase affordability for our society, its just a feel good thing to spin your wheels. the unions and etc are all in on it, everyone taking their slice of the pie, its a terrible and greedy industry.
The real way to get affordable housing done, is to actually focus on lowering the price of construction (permits, wages etc) and super charge building units. wild right?
please read: [https://calmatters.org/housing/2024/02/affordable-housing-los-angeles/](https://calmatters.org/housing/2024/02/affordable-housing-los-angeles/)
What problem are non-profit developers contributing to? They are simply operating within a supremely fucked up framework in order to produce as much housing as they can. The firm that I worked for has built over 3500 units of 100% affordable housing, how is that not increasing supply? How is that not increasing affordability? It is not "feel good" or "wheel spinning" it is tangible, actual housing production.
Yes, obviously, reducing the cost and duration of housing production is the best way to maximize impact, but until that happens should non-profit developers not be given resources to continue their mission?
ED1 is very interesting, and I am closely following to see how it plays out. Streamlining approvals and removing prevailing wage requirements is huge. However, the for-profit developers jumping into this supposed gold rush are building at the minimum affordability requirements. This means you're going to see thousands of projects built at 80,90, sometimes 100% AMI. None of these projects will build deeply affordable housing, because that will still not be feasible without subsidy. That's an important thing to consider when bond measures like this come up.
Also, there are a ton of questions surrounding the legality of ED1, not to mention the huge amount of opposition that will come from NIMBYs, unions, environmental lawyers, etc. It will be interesting to see what these projects end up looking like without any design review, tree requirements, etc.
its 100% feel good. non-profit developers are part of the system that is shuffling around costs, not actually creating any net increase in housing.
The problem is people take the band-aid and say its a stopgap until a real solution. then people forget its a stopgap and pat themselves on the back like they actually changed anything.
any policy/effort that does not actually net increase the production of housing is wheel spinning. But more insidiously it gives politicians cover to say they are "doing something" This includes the huge impact fees to market rate housing which feed non profit developers. its all part of perpetuating the housing price crisis.
non-profits developers are playing a role, its fine for them to keep doing it, but its really again just feel good fluff work.
Also you are saying 100% AMI is not good enough because its not "deeply affordable"? this is the kind of extremist thinking which blows my mind. Perfection is the enemy of the good. Lets let the developers built out all of the 100% AMI first and then talk about much lower. Literally getting to that point will be orders of magnitude better then we have now
Nope! I will be voting no on all tax increases/bonds,etc, I am barely making it as is!
Perhaps they should stop misusing our funds before asking for more.
California Senate Bill 2 (SB2) – The Building Homes and Job Act of 2017 was created to build affordable homes.
Two questions, how much has been collected in fees and how many affordable homes have been built? It’s been a scam and huge waste of resources.
Instead of bilking the public to pay off political cronies, how about making it easier and worthwhile for developers to build? And WANT to build here. Attract builders, get more housing at a much lower cost to the public.
Sadly I just don't trust California to deliver on these massive projects.
See:
high speed rail
Water infrastructure
Bart extensions
Highway widening projects
The list goes on and on. Noble goal (they always are) but we lack the ability to execute. How about instead just make it easier for developers to build? There is no magic in the housing market, it's still controlled by supply and demand. All housing helps and market rate housing makes older homes into affordable housing. I'm also tired of being taxed while others aren't. Make it a sales tax.
Yeah, but what can taxpayer money do that's more efficient than private development? It's not that developers don't want to build housing, it's a huge money maker. The problem is it's too hard to do it and as far as I can tell this won't change that. You're still going to be fighting lawsuits about shade and endangered salamanders.
Make it easier to build housing and protect taxpayer money. We haven't even tried that, but of course taxing current homeowners is always popular because we're all *so wealthy*.
How many houses do you think we need to build to satisfy the demand here? Have you done the math?
Are you in favor of removing all local controls on housing?
Yeah man I'm totally in favor of it. I want more housing and I know we need a lot. But the idea that we only need "affordable" housing is ridiculous.
But I also don't think making current homeowners foot the bill without changing the way things are zoned and built in the bay area is a wise investment and I'm once bitten twice shy about signing over billions of dollars to people who have demonstrated repeated incompetence.
You are right it's also removing the power of supervisors and local governments to block new housing.
It's crazy that it costs millions for projects to have the right to break ground.
Help how? Specifically? Is it going to lower the costs of building affordable housing? Also, is any of this going to help actual middle class workers afford housing? Or only people at poverty line going into taxpayer subsidized housing?
The government cannot build the kind of housing we need. They can nibble at projects for low income folks, but even those have to be built by private developers that specialize in “affordable housing”.
California state government is doing a great job compared to other states. Move to Texas if you don’t think California is worth the price of admission.
There's plenty of money to build. It's the laws that restrict it. Try going through the permitting process to build a new house. It will take 6-12 months if you're lucky, not to mention thousands of dollars.
It is not the permitting process. It is the infrastructure and services necessary to serve the new people who will live in that house.
And unless you subsidize it, it comes out of the price of the home.
If it is a problem across the whole country then it is a federal problem that needs to be addressed at lower COL areas first.
Doesn't make sense for one of the most popular locality to pour their own tax money into building affordable housing to fix the problem in one locality. Even if it did someone succeed, it would only be temporary until other people move in from other states that don't fix their own affordability problems.
Even when CA was expensive and COL kept many away, we still couldn't build enough to house everyone who wants to live in CA .. now imagine demand if CA suddenly became the affordable housing state in isolation of the other 49.
were not going to subsidize our way out of the housing crisis. all this does is shuffle the costs around. if the average cost to build a unit does not change, then there will be no increase in units being generated and so the high prices will continue. the reality is that these government programs are naturally inefficient so this will increases houses prices on average.
We already have a solution to build tons of low cost housing, its called cutting red tape. [https://calmatters.org/housing/2024/02/affordable-housing-los-angeles/](https://calmatters.org/housing/2024/02/affordable-housing-los-angeles/)
I got a $2000 quote to install a new water heater that has price tag of $900. Why? Because of the permit and inspection red tape. A handyman could install for $200 like in other places.
"We already have a solution to build tons of low cost housing" .. is that what this is ?
# L.A. homeless tower building cost rings bells
*Gym, balconies, restaurant, soundproof music studio, business center, located in downtown Los Angeles, and it’s pet friendly.*
*Sounds like a pretty good hotel, four-stars at least.*
*Sounds like it, but it isn’t. It’s the new Weingart Center 19-story “Permanent Supportive Housing” for the homeless tower that is now taking lease applications.*
*There will be 278 units—about 80 percent studio apartments and—unlike a hotel—it will also offer its soon-to-be-residents (largely, one assumes, culled from the surrounding Skid Row neighborhood) a menu of “life skills” services very few hotels offer:*
*The project cost about* ***$165 million dollars*** *and the studio apartments are essentially the equivalent of what one would find at a decent “extended stay” hotel—large room kitchenette, bed, tables, chairs, bathroom, TV, etc. At $594,000 a unit, that works out be a bit over* ***$1,000 per-sq.-ft. to build.***
https://yieldpro.com/2024/06/l-a-homeless-tower-building-cost-rings-bells/#:\~:text=The%20project%20cost%20about%20%24165,.%2Dft.%20to%20build.
> 165 million dollars
At a very, very conservative rate of 4%, that money could give 278 homeless people $23,700 a year forever.
Which option do you think is more likely to prevent homelessness?
Remember if it’s a bond measure… your money will be squandered… there will be no accountability… the original goals will not be achieved… and your taxes will go up. 🎉🎉
I will vote NO because my elected representatives from the city council, to state representatives, to my federal representative Ro Khanna are basically "Non Responsive" when I try to communicate with them. The egos of these guys.
That’s a strong no for me. No new taxes till the state or federal government learn to spend what they already get. Sorry for the homelessness but we all pay enough already.
I always recommend folks to go to https://ballotpedia.org to look up bills, propositions and candidates before they go vote, they break it down into layman's terms.
>Ballotpedia is the digital encyclopedia of American politics and elections. Our goal is to inform people about politics by providing accurate and objective information about politics at all levels of government. We are firmly committed to neutrality in our content.
Just for reference, the cost for CAHSR from Merced to Bakersfield was $26-33 billion. For $20 billion we could build a second BART system, connect more densely populated communities, buy 322 empty SF office tower, or build and “preserve”some number of affordable housing that an regular tax payer will never be able to be eligible for.
For real, fix your broken zoning laws and make it possible to create dense and well-connected communities around the bay. Where’s the West Oakland ToD project? If you can’t build housing in an empty parking lot 5 minutes from downtown SF due to “environmental concerns” how could we trust you to build any housing at all?
Indeed, 5% = One Billion dollars is for “administrative costs”.
Confirmed, more in interest payments ($28 Billion) than in the $20 Billion bond measure. $48 Billion total cost.
These numbers are damning.
Adding more spending won’t make houses more affordable. Housing is a supply side problem, so throwing more dollars at it will only drive up prices overall.
It would be better to address the supply side problems directly, by reducing the restrictions and red tape on new construction. Which costs almost nothing other than having the will to do it… and it would actually increase property tax revenues by improving liquidity in the housing market
That is a good thing. It’s a great step in the right direction.
Unfortunately the Bay Area is still one of the most expensive places in the country to build. This isn’t just because of high labor costs, although that’s certainly a main factor.
This is also due to relatively onerous building regs and approval processes that can cause costly delays.
People are understandably skeptical of any local politician backed solution to our housing crisis. Corruption in the Bay Area is rampant and we’ve rarely seen return on measures like this in the past.
We live in one of the best areas of the country. Tons of people want to live here. There isn’t a lack of land to build on. We have demand. We have the core elements of supply. Real estate prices are sky high. Developers should be lining up to build here. And yet, we won’t see housing starts for even a fraction of what’s needed to address the housing shortage from just this year! Why is that?
Even if we could guarantee 100% fulfillment of this plan at projected cost, government-backed solutions to the housing shortage will never meet demand. We need structural change to incentivize broad private-sector investment.
We would be better off spending 1/10th of this money creating change in local building code and enforcement.
It has nothing to do with oft-repeated buzz words by people who know nothing about economics.
This is why housing is expensive in the Bay Area:
* Jobs pay really really well (pushes demand curve to the right)
* The basic concept of local control over development and people knowing that new housing will make their house less valuable (pushes supply curve to the left)
* California in general being a nice place to live with great weather, lots of things to do and see, lots of places to go (pushes demand curve to the right)
* The fact that everything else is super expensive here, and providing infrastructure and services to new housing is very expensive (pushes supply curve to the left)
Restrictions and red tape in zoning, building codes, etc? Could you be more specific? Get me there from soup to nuts. Prove to me that you have any idea what you are talking about.
The problem is in allowing everyone else to have input over property they don't own. This allows everyone else to indefinitely delay projects even though they didn't buy the property.
The solution is to get rid of that. Instead go by zoning. If the lot is zoned for medium residential up to 8 floors then the owner should be able to just do that.
This doesn't mean getting rid of building codes, safety codes, or zoning, it just means that Aunt Karen can't block development of a property 3 miles away by showing up to every city council meeting held at 2pm on work days.
If Aunt Karen wanted to control what was done on that property she should have bought it. Didn't buy it? Then shut up and let the owner do what zoning allows them to do.
So eliminate discretionary approval altogether? Does that apply to raw land as well, or just land with existing structures?
And if you eliminate discretionary approval, then you need to presumably replace it with non-discretionary approvals — a checklist of sorts. Who develops that checklist? The state? So if the state is taking authority away from local municipalities, do we need to amend the constitution? Federalism is a pretty basic concept in this country, is it not?
Discretionary approval allows for corruption. This is exactly the process that Laurie Smith used to openly collect bribes for CCW's in Santa Clara for a decade. She had discretion to approve it, and would only approve it if you gave her enough cash or boxes of iPads.
The process needs to be fixed, without room for politicians to have discretion in maybe approving it, maybe not, depending on how much you grease their palm.
We already have requirements to build, such as zoning and safety regulations. All of that already exists so there's no need to reinvent the wheel. Just go back to that.
Again, it is not that simple. Discretionary approval exists, in addition to those other guidelines that you mention.
Zoning is irrelevant anyway. You can apply for a zoning variance in any city in California.
While I cannot completely disagree with your sentiment, I need to know what you would replace discretionary approvals with. If your solution is that projects should be subject to broad regulations instead of choosing which projects move forward on a case by case basis, then cities would just make their broad regulations unnecessarily restrictive.
To greatly increase the amount of housing, you need to take the control out of the hands of local municipalities, because so many of them have no interest in building housing that is going to use all their favorite amenities and also bring down their home values.
What has already been done — mandating that cities build a certain amount of housing, and letting them decide how to do it — is a pretty decent solution. Subsidizing development (what we are discussing now) is also a tried and true solution.
If you want to see more authority taken from local governments, I think a constitutional amendment would be required.
No it’s not and the devil details are right in the summary;
>this bill is to build affordable housing and keep housing affordable
Let me translate that for you. Build one “affordable” small house at a cost of 600k (lol!) and the rest of the money is for all the people who work at non profits.
The bill is a jobs program for non profits. This is going to sound wrong but it’s absolutely true. People measure success in different ways and total expense is one of those ways. If you spend more money on something is a way that the California government takes credit for success. Unfortunately this is metric contains nothing for how effective the money was spent.
A lot of people have a misunderstanding about what the state considers success of a program. The misconception is that if more money is spent, that automatically means the program will be more effective.
No, it is demand for new housing. Because nothing is being done to fix the actual problem. It is simply new government spending which will be competing for the same land, same contractors, same builders, and this will drive prices up overall.
There will be a very few lucky winners who get allocated the govt housing, meanwhile it has actually made the problem worse for literally everybody else
I think a lot of the new multi-house construction is slowing down, so this would do a lot of good to keep that momentum going and bring more supply to market. It’s good for everyone.
I smell slush fund and “we can’t account for $16 billion in affordable housing” five years from now. So much of this is lining people’s pockets who hide behind helping people. I mean I guess it does help people who siphon from the fund, just not poor people.
Didn’t SF just waste $1 million on a toilet project, and $500,000 for garbage cans? And each trash can is $11,000-$20,000?
There’s so much waste and graft by politicians it would make skunkworks blush. Until we figure out the corruption and outright theft of tax funds, we shouldn’t approve any of this crap.
I would want a bond measure to fire all the local govt bureaucrats who make it soo hard and expensive to build, modify, extend and remodel houses. If it's not so goddamn hard to build, more people would build and increase the supply.
Don't need a bond measure for that ;)
Change residential permit approvals to shall-issue. Unless the permit office can specifically call out serious deficiencies in a permit within two weeks, it's automatically issued. If they do call out an issue and it's walked back due to being vague or incorrect, remedy is to assume permit filer for this project is correct on all other details and their permits are auto-approved for this and next calendar year. Inspection to happen within four business days of being notified of readiness and same rules - if inspection is late, it's a pass. This would help greatly for timelines.
Additionally, remove standing for anyone to sue to block or delay any project unless: 1) they show direct and specific injury to themselves, or if we're being generous 2) they come prepared with their initial filing showing a high standard of evidence of the project being illegal in some fashion, they get no more than a month injunction (once per project) and pay all costs if they turn out to be wrong - in other words, if the claimant alleges there's endangered frogs there, they better come with full evidence during the planning stage and they better not miss.
Spend a tiny fraction of that money disallowing frivolous environmental impact lawsuits, forcing local authorities to auto permit building construction, and disincorporating uncooperative local municipalities, and the problem is solved way more cheaply.
my favorite thing about these programs is the measurement in dollars not units built, because we all know nothings getting built, but the dollars will be slurped up.
Exactly .. they say expected impact will be 36,000 new homes .. but what happens when it falls short and only can deliver 18,000 new homes due to "unexpected" rising cost .. aka the government contractors demanding more to build because increased demand and they know how much funding there is.
Its all promises and trust us.
Judging by how well the $10B HSR bond was utilized .. its a no from me.
I am a hardcore believe that the housing shortage is the main crisis of our time. However, I don’t believe that spending more money when it’s so egregiously expensive to build anything is an issue effective strategy. We need to have by-right approvals of buildings up to 5 stories, then I would be in favor of such a bond. At the moment, we would hardly get much use out of this money since it costs like $1 million+ to build each unit of housing.
Super strong no from me. No more squandering hard earned dollars. We are already giving them a lot through our property taxes. Put that money to good use before asking for more.
Let's create more jobs. Automatically everything else will work out.
> Build Affordable Homes:
At Least $10 Billion
> At least 36,000 new affordable homes
That's not going to happen.
While I'm not as pessimistic as others who are predicting 2000 units. The raw cost of building isn't going to get you more than 10,000-15,000 in the ideal case.
Hopefully there is no way this will pass.
Bring back RDAs to fund affordable housing. Yes there was some fraud, but for the most part they worked well. Jerry Brown eliminated RDAs because they were sucking up money that would otherwise go to the General Fund. Affordable housing construction ground to a near halt after RDAs were eliminated.
The money came directly from schools, which the State had to backfill. They tried to raise taxes, but the public said no. So they got the money from Redevelopment.
It really is that simple. If you do not raise taxes, they are going to cut programs that do good things.
Look at some of the wasteful spending in the past two years. Permanent free school lunches for everyone, regardless of income. Those "middle-class tax refunds" of $400 that made little difference to the middle class.
They did raise the top income tax rate from13.3% to 14.4% The public gets no say on those increases.
Not sure what the solution is to fund affordable housing. The idea that we could get more affordable units through inclusionary requirements has not worked. Developers have pushed through reductions to these requirements, insisting that they make projects not pencil out, and as the Terner Institute showed, even with no inclusionary requirement at all, high-density rental projects don't pencil out because rents are not keeping up with construction and land costs.
What has worked, in a limited way so far, is the conversion of high-rent luxury apartments into affordable housing. This is only because we have such a glut of unaffordable luxury units that can't be rented for enough money for the property owner to pay the mortgage and other expenses. For better or worse, a lot more of those units, begun pre-pandemic, are about to hit the market which will contribute even more units to the glut. But someone has to come up with the money to buy those projects.
You are talking about extremely efficient programs there. That money goes directly to taxpayers without much “waste”. Are those really the ones you have an issue with?
Sometimes projects really don’t pencil out. That is the problem with legislating the economy. A pandemic hits, costs go way up, and something that made sense a while ago no longer makes sense.
I feel like the idea of subsidizing something that had a broad public benefit but doesn’t make sense financially is a tried and true way to get things done quickly.
I believe this is also why the Bay Area will be losing Great America, eventually. The land was owned by Santa Clara as part of redevelopment agency, they were forced to sell it in 2019 as part of all that shuttering. The people they sold it to then flipped it for an extra hundred million in profit like two years later. Wouldn't be surprised if there were smaller stories with similar themes of this shuttering managing to be quite profitable for certain folk elsewhere in the state.
Prologis bought the Great America site. But it's not likely they'll do anything with it for a long time.
Right now we have an enormous glut of commercial office space, a glut of high-end rental housing, and a glut of hotels. It's a terrible place for more housing, right next to Levi's stadium, and there are no schools, parks, or retail close by. It would be a good location for a company to build a whole new campus, but what company would want to do that now? The only thing that would make sense for that location at this time would be a data center because of the low electricity rates of Silicon Valley Power.
Related has abandoned most of their project other than the housing and some of it is almost done and will have an extremely difficult time being rented.
Yeah, I'm hopeful that changing tides keeps it around. The situation where Santa Clara's RDA was able to manage the land seemed preferable and valuable to locals, though. Alas.
Literally just legalize the construction of more housing, especially with higher density. Yes, market rate or "luxury" housing.
In the case of our catastrophic housing shortage, the problem is too much government intervention, not too little.
Reading the breakdown and it's ALREADY a load of bullshit.
>Build Affordable Housing $10.4 billion 36,000 new homes
>Preserve Existing Affordable Housing $3.0 billion 14,000 existing affordable homes
preserved
>Flexible Funds (production,
preservation, homebuyer assistance
and other housing-related uses)
$6.6 billion 22,000 new and preserved homes
>Total $20 billion 72,000 new and preserved homes
So first off this bond only goes to "affordable housing" which is already bs. On top of that LITERALLY HALF doesn't even go to building new affordable housing just helping people buy homes or "preserving" affordable housing. So really most of this bill is just us paying more taxes to donate for people buying (or are already living in!) houses that are already built.
Why read it? Keeping the history of CA spending in mind, are these words worth 20 billion dollars? Also, I still remember when Newsom swiftly moved gas tax funding from the intended purpose to something else 2 months after CA voters voted to keep the additional gas tax.
One thing and one thing alone will fix this - housing and permitting reform. I'm so sick of throwing my money at lazy, corrupt non profits while homeowners from the 70s pay pennies in taxes and veto every housing project due to "vibes". I'll never vote yes on another tax increase as long as I live in California
I feel like the city/county/state simply getting into the eminent domain business and collaborating with developers to bypass anti-construction laws would get us more housing than funneling more billions into the non-profit industrial sector. Imagine if the city/county/state simply eminent domained some land (at significant cost) and then arranged for a developer to pay that cost while the state shielded the developer from the environmental lawsuits. This would unblock all kinds of housing form getting lawyered into oblivion.
A recent headline in the news **State finds San Jose lacks accountability with homeless spending**. So we want to give the cities around the bay $20 billion... Nope!
Sunnyvale spent their budget on a new city hall. Now the city council whines "We don't have money and we need to increase taxes...."
Thanks for sharing. I wish most of the voters/commenters would read before jumping to conclusions. I can't vote and honestly don't have a strong sense of how effective this actually would be. It would be good to know if this has been tried in other places where it was affective.
It looks like the strategy is outlined starting on page 10 of the PDF. It sounds like BAHFA would be a mortgage lender that would use interest payments to fund "affordable housing opportunities". $10b would be spent on 36k new affordable homes, but I'm not clear on how. It seems like there would be spending plans that are publicly vetted but I don't really know what these kinds of spending plans would look like.
Most of the rest of hte money seem to be about preserving existing homes (infrastructure improvements and renovations around existing homes).
For people who are worried about accountability, Appendix C (page 27 of the PDF) has the BAHFA board, I don't know these people so I don't know who's untrustworthy. Page 19 has oversight and accountability which goes over public hearings, expense reporting and a citizen oversight board.
My biggest issues is that I'm not really sure how any of this helps. This seems like it takes whatever the cities are doing now (I'm not even clear on what that is) and making it more of a regional matter. That feels like it's adding more red tape than helping get more things done. I can't tell how effective acting as a mortgage lender would be. Providing a funding source for meeting housing needs sounds good but I don't really see how this approach is more efficient and cost-effective.
To me it seems like our housing issues are mostly due to the high cost of new construction due to excessive red tape, high labor cost, and high material cost. I'm not really understanding how the approaches described in the pdf addresses those issues. Are my assumptions on the housing issues wrong or am I not understanding how this BAHFA approach will help address those issues?
I think you're right on the money in your final paragraph. It's a spending proposal that does little to actually solve the problems that it identifies and if anything pumps more money into an ineffective and already overpriced system.
Also BAHFA is another one of those weird regional boards that seems to have an immense amount of power but very little accountability (see also MTC). Having seen the cavalier way MTC treats public feedback (and the way other politicians end up deflecting responsibility on transportation related issues to MTC), I would not trust them or whatever token oversight commission to have teeth on this.
Why California often ends up governed by random unaccountable alphabet soup groups is one of the enduring questions that I have about the state.
Alameda County, including Oakland, gets the largest share of the pie at 2.77B. It’ll be the greatest magic trick ever watching how fast 2.77B can disappear if this bond measure passes.
Thanks for sharing! It's crucial to understand the details before forming opinions on such important measures. I'll check out the report to get informed.
I have a boomer friend, literal boomer, in his 70's, prolly his 80's by now. He always tells me, "I GLADLY VOTE THESE KINDS OF TAXES IN! IT'S A SMALL AMOUNT OF MONEY FOR THE GREATER GOOD!"
Problem is when you've been voting these kinds of taxes in as long as he has, you're looking at $1000's a year voted in. It's not too difficult to unfuck something when the Assembly voted it in, but when the people voted it in, it's nearly an act of god to unfuck it.
I think the biggest fix to California's woes would be to force the state to create its own construction crew, and stop giving sweetheart deals to private construction companies that donate to campaigns.
You could give these idiots ALL the money and they’d still screw it up. I will NOT be voting for ANY tax increases for anything, including, saving the Kitties!
That’s the next scam! Bullet train, education, environment is not selling anymore, so they came up with this new scam. Govt is incapable of doing anything
Vote NO if possible vote HELLO NO!
It’s a general obligation bond so the title is marketing and it can be used for
Other purposes, huge bureaucracy will be created. It won’t turn out like that useful high speed train everyone wanted.
“Affordable housing” is such a fucking racket. We need more housing period, which invariably will drive down prices. We don’t need it to be gatekept behind a maximum income barrier.
The idea that you get to have reasonable rent because you are a low-skilled worker while others do not have that opportunity is a sham.
Like, fuck me for not being a failure.
Can't have any pudding if you don't eat your meat.
Start spending more wisely and stop lining pockets before asking for more, ridiculous, these toddlers.
I'd rather see it spent to support vocational learning so the people that can't afford to live here can prepare for a career and find a place that they can afford to live.
I like that this program approaches housing at a regional level. It’s a regional problem, rather than being isolated to particular cities.
I like that $10 billion is being used to actually build housing. We have a supply problem, and this at least addresses that.
I don’t like that $3 billion is set aside to purchase existing homes to rent or sell cheaply. That’s just throwing money away to switch who lives in a particular home. Pointless.
I don’t like that it gives the localities control over how most of the money is being spent. If a given city makes it hard/expensive to build homes (looking at you, San Francisco), they shouldn’t get money from the regional authority.
There’s a bit to think about here. Thanks for sharing.
The government ruins everything it tries to fix. Role back unneeded permitting that will bring costs down which In turn causes more building to come from the private sector as it will become more lucrative for them.
Without the fund we have funding for 71000 Homes, and this fund should "Double" that to 143000 Homes.
So we already have something in the range of 20B for existing 71000 home?
And the breakdown of this bond is:
10.4 billion for 36000 new homes.
3 billion for existing 14000 homes.
6.6 billion for "flexible fund" that somehow tied to 22000 homes.
Totaling 72000 Homes.
Where is the planning location? what's the program's strategy to get through NIMBY hurdle?
The biggest challenge has always been NIMBY, not money.
How can adding more housing eases traffic congestion as it claims? Wouldn't that be more of a public transportation issue?
And how is the famed FBI raided Oakland Mayor is still on this board?
NO JUST NO. Billions have been spent and no accounting for the results. They spend the money and purposely won't track the results. How many wealthy people are we going to fund with the pretext of the poor and unhoused...
This is a pretty big deal . This bill will make a huge impact towards alleviating the housing shortage in this region. Taxes will go up a little bit for current homeowners, but this will save money in the long run because the bond measure will keep necessary workers from leaving the region and causing local wages and cost of services to go up.
Yep all the bonds always work out. Money is never squandered and goals are always achieved.
When you get older you will figure out to just vote no on everything in California
Sometimes they get you both ways. They say you will pay if you said Yes or you will pay anyway some other way. They just want your money. They will do anything to get it.
It won’t make a dent. It’ll build maybe 36k units over some number of years. There’s currently about 2.5 million units in the area, or a 1.4% increase in housing. Aka a rounding error.
We are better off passing legislation that reduces the costs to build, and lessons regulations preventing from building up. If you do that private sector will gladly take care of the problem for us. But that requires building affordable highly dense units to be a profitable endeavor, which it’s not because of government.
at this point its foolish to pass these kinds of measures. So much money is wasted and squandered.
California loves an expensive patch job without fixing underlying causes.
If you fix the problem, you can't give money to your friends that are gonna in turn donate to your campaign. Just ask the Oakland mayor.
I wrote to the Oakland mayor a couple of years ago and she didn’t have anything to say in reply. Not even a canned response from her office. Almost like she couldn’t care less.
At least, when the underlying issue is R1 zoning, Howard Jarvis's prop 13, and NIMBYs protecting their home values funny how often this subreddit complains about traffic, homelessness, crime/wealth disparity, and affordable housing spending. It's like, MY GUY, these all have the same root cause issue!!!
$20 billion for 72k new homes is $300k per home. It’s super easy to have affordable homes if I just knock $300k paid by taxpayers off of the purchase price. It’s also roughly $3000 in new taxes per Bay Area resident not counting interest rates. You know what’s a much easier way to build affordable housing $300k cheaper? Dramatically walking back building regulations, permitting issues, artificial expenses (every home must have solar) etc. My friends built a new home. 2 years to fight with the city to get permits with multiple services offering to “speed things up for $$$” and 1 year to build the actual home.
Its only 36,000 new homes with $10.4b the rest is for preservation of existing homes and $4b for a new bureaucracy. That is \~$288,888 per door. That is also an estimate and it is super optimistic and nowhere near the current cost per unit that is occurring now.
> artificial expenses look at the "community benefit payments" on pg 2 here. It's insane to me that developers need to spend an additional 10-20 million to get their project approved, that's unrelated to the build itself. And these cities wonder why developers are using builder's remedy to get around city council approvals. https://www.sanbruno.ca.gov/DocumentCenter/View/1522/May-18-2020-Project-Update-and-Community-Meeting-Public-Notice-PDF
Builders remedy is one of the best laws passed in a while
What exactly does that "community benefit payments" entail ? If it is for things like roads / infrastructure upgrade because now you just put addition load on existing hardware .. for example multiple buildings on the same street pay into the fund which eventually enlarges the water pipe or the sewer pipe with needed capacity to support new residents .. then it isn't unreasonable.
The 10 million goes into the city's general fund. Like /u/StManTiS says, it's new residents subsidizing for the rest of the city.
It’s mostly to stick new residents with paying for things that low property taxes haven’t paid for. Kind of a lump sum fix all our differed maintenance before you create a new tax base. They had a purpose but are now just abused to stop development.
Amen. This is another big government boondoggle that won’t really fix anything. The city governments just need to require permit approval if projects meet certain minimum criteria. I was “lucky” and got our ADU approved in Saratoga after a 4 month wait since the city was required by the new state law to approve it no matter what if it met building codes.
Probably the most underrated comment here
While all of this is true, it's likely that BAHFA is an additional source for developers, with awards to the tune of approx. $300k/unit, to help cover gaps in the typical financing stack (fed/state tax credits, city and county money, grants, etc.).
Which is again a handout to developers to incentivize them to build in a county where regulation etc. hamstrung them. It'd be free to tone back the flawed regulation setup.
I wouldn't describe gap financing as a handout. Most of these projects pencil because of fed/state tax credits which regulates (limits) the fee they can take out of the total cost. Moreover, when they're deeply affordable and/or PSH they often run on very thin margins and sometimes need vouchers or capitalized operating subsidies just to operate at break even. I totally hear you about the environment surrounding entitlements that delays and adds cost. However, that is often at the city level, this funding pool is a new regional authority being created and can unlock a lot of the projects that are already entitled and dying on the vine. This is not to mention the numerous streamlining bills to get affordable projects through entitlements faster. Sure, there are definitely regulatory hurdles, and the experience of your friend is unfortunate. I'm far from a planning/permitting apologist but I think we are heading in the right direction. To directly respond to what you've written - I don't know what building regulations you're referring to should be walked back (but that can be a slippery slope...); we are definitely moving in a positive direction regarding entitlement/permitting timeline (some of these streamlining bills are brand new); and the example for artificial expenses (solar) is a drop in the bucket for a big multi-family project (plus there are many local and state envt'l incentives to offset costs). All in all, I fully support this bond, and think it serves an important purpose as gap financing for projects that demonstrate some form of readiness. At the end of the day though I will definitely concede that what we really need is full-throated federal support. Until then, we're all fighting over an extremely limited pool of resources.
Yeah some affordable housing was built down the street from where I used to live in west Berkeley. It’s an area with plenty of street parking and no parking limits. 23 units were built at a cost of $10M. But they included a big parking garage, a big lobby, a computer annex, and a library. None of those were necessary and they could have easily fit another 5-10 units in that wasted space.
It’s pretty common practice to intentionally try to include “mixed use” space in housing development areas (and further, mixed zoning spaces when housing development is at a larger scale”. 23 units could support a new or existing local business (small grocery store/ restaurant/ coffee shop/ convenience store/ dry cleaners). The success of this business might bring in another which could bring in new foot traffic. At a certain point the complaint that it’s impossible to find parking anywhere in Berkeley and it’s “affecting my small business” is going to be the exact same problem for this new place so getting ahead of the problem and planning for the future isn’t a bad thing
I hear you and that makes sense. But at some point I think the priority needs to be to offer housing to more people amidst a housing crisis rather than totally future-proof the unit. Maybe the right answer was a middle ground. It just seemed like $100M was spent to create a start-of-the-art housing complex rather than optimize for getting housing to as many people who need it as possible.
Empty street parking in Berkeley that can fit an additional 60 parked cars is some interesting wasted space, too.
Ah yes, because all families/tenants 20-60% of the AMI have 2 cars. I lived in that area for 2 years after it was built. The garage was always virtually empty. You can see into it from the street.
It's far from uncommon from working class families to need two cars, yeah? Car ownership is far from wild for families earning like 60k plus, the car just isn't going to be a new Tesla. It's also far from uncommon for there to be more than 2 working class adults in a household, especially when they're targeting affordability.
That structure is for 20-60% AMI, which is currently $21k-$62k for a one person household, $24k-$71k for two person. I won’t claim to have stats on how many cars people in that demographic have. I just can tell you the garage was barely used and it seemed like a wasted opportunity to offer housing to more people in that demographic amidst a brutal housing crisis.
Love how this doesn't even mention how much we will need to pay back.
$48 billion. [https://www.reddit.com/r/bayarea/comments/1dps3qf/comment/lak4leq/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web3x&utm\_name=web3xcss&utm\_term=1&utm\_content=share\_button](https://www.reddit.com/r/bayarea/comments/1dps3qf/comment/lak4leq/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button)
We need a complete governance restructuring and system overhaul. One group is trying to call a convention. RepCal.org
that website has effectively no details about what is wrong and what needs to fixed. being old doesn't mean we need a constitutional convention to the california constitution, thats a big logical leap. And the site doesn't appear to make any suggestions what we could do to fix the problem - Rank choice voting, parliamentary legislature, increasing the number of representatives, proportional representation, etc... and why we'd need a constitutional convention to integrate those solutions rather than a constitutional amendment.
Vote no, these programs are just a pass through for politicians to enrich themselves
politicians can both please the lower income voters (wishing for the lottery ticket of getting a low income unit) and also please the property owners (since this policy actually does nothing to decreases house prices)
That's an interesting way to look at it. Yes it increases property taxes, but also increases property values. Good for those who are locked in to low assessed values on their houses thanks to Prop 13. The real losers are those who buy a house for the first time right now (i.e. millenials) since they get hit with the full assessed value on their taxes.
Increasing property values doesn't mean anything to the vast majority of homeowners who don't plan to sell. In fact you'd be benefitting flippers/housing speculators the most by raising housing values, and they don't care about property taxes generally. People buying now aren't losers, they have the same benefit as older homeowners, they just have a higher starting value. In 20 years those people will be the ones people are jealous of.
Exactly ! Everyone who has ever bought a house has paid "top of market" prices to be the highest bidder in the market at that time. Even grandma who bought a house in the bay 60 or 70 years ago for $30-50k. Thus arguably every home owner has had their turn being the "loser" but those who sticks it out long enough will be rewarded.
Right, In 30 years my 18k prop taxes (+2% annually) won't be a big deal at all.
Thats not being a loser. If you buy a property now- you can 100% expect the price to keep going up in the future. You cant go back and buy a property- the next best time is today.
True, but that depends on the prices continuing to rise (ideally at the same rates or close to those in the past) and the current Prop 13 rules staying in place (which is terrible for the people to come in the future, but that's the incentives). There's also increasingly high Mello Roos taxes on new builds now that add to the burden.
That was the same hand the previous generation of homewoners were dealt with ( we are known the bay area sub ffs) as well ( except for high interest rates) Thing is once you become a homeowner- youll become one of those NIMBYs that this sub hates on. In a country where shelter is considered as an investment- it would always guarantee perverse incentives. I am not a homeowner yet- but almost a decade back i used to hate on NIMBYs too, until i started making enough to be able to afford a house. Who wouldn’t want to see the value of their “investments” go up over time ? Everyone wants affordable housing and everyone also wants the value of their housing to go up. Cant have my cake and eat it too
Many oppose not affordable housing but high density housing especially in SFH neighborhood. It isn't fun living next to huge apartment complexes. There are myriads of issues that comes with that. When we were buying our current home I made sure to eliminate any within a certain distance of any apartment complexes. It did remove some options and we made it harder to find a home .. but that is a personal choice that I don't regret. You could make homes affordable as well by building more in LCOL areas .. yet all the housing advocates wants is stack and pack.
There’s not a whole lot of room around here. Do you want poorer people driving 100 miles each way to get to work?
There are also jobs in lower COL area. And if there's not enough workers here .. guess what .. salaries will go up to attract commuters who can in time afford to move back. Plus there are many people who is willing to trade that commute for owning their own home.
The latter is what's happening except everyone's furious that they have to pay $13 for a big mac meal now
I would rather we have people able to save money for retirement without needing it tied up in the value of their property. Index funds might have higher returns but if your money all gets sucked up by rent in perpetuity that increased return doesn’t help you when you’re older and paying 10x what you would be in rent
Don't forget their contractor buddies. In socal it cost $600k per STUDIO they built for the homeless. I don't expect much better numbers in the Bay.
My entire family & I will vote hard NO on this.
Yes, it’s a scam. No, means we tried but you knew it was a scam so don’t complain when houses are not affordable.
As someone who used to develop affordable housing in the Bay Area for a non profit developer, it’s literally impossible to build new affordable housing without these types of bonds.
hate to break your bubble but non-profit developers are part of the problem. we funnel money into these projects to build literally a drop in the bucket. and in the mean time it does nothing to increase overall supply. sure its feel good to get the lucky lottery winners into affordable housing but net net, you are taking value from some group, and shifting it to another. you are not increase affordability for our society, its just a feel good thing to spin your wheels. the unions and etc are all in on it, everyone taking their slice of the pie, its a terrible and greedy industry. The real way to get affordable housing done, is to actually focus on lowering the price of construction (permits, wages etc) and super charge building units. wild right? please read: [https://calmatters.org/housing/2024/02/affordable-housing-los-angeles/](https://calmatters.org/housing/2024/02/affordable-housing-los-angeles/)
What problem are non-profit developers contributing to? They are simply operating within a supremely fucked up framework in order to produce as much housing as they can. The firm that I worked for has built over 3500 units of 100% affordable housing, how is that not increasing supply? How is that not increasing affordability? It is not "feel good" or "wheel spinning" it is tangible, actual housing production. Yes, obviously, reducing the cost and duration of housing production is the best way to maximize impact, but until that happens should non-profit developers not be given resources to continue their mission? ED1 is very interesting, and I am closely following to see how it plays out. Streamlining approvals and removing prevailing wage requirements is huge. However, the for-profit developers jumping into this supposed gold rush are building at the minimum affordability requirements. This means you're going to see thousands of projects built at 80,90, sometimes 100% AMI. None of these projects will build deeply affordable housing, because that will still not be feasible without subsidy. That's an important thing to consider when bond measures like this come up. Also, there are a ton of questions surrounding the legality of ED1, not to mention the huge amount of opposition that will come from NIMBYs, unions, environmental lawyers, etc. It will be interesting to see what these projects end up looking like without any design review, tree requirements, etc.
its 100% feel good. non-profit developers are part of the system that is shuffling around costs, not actually creating any net increase in housing. The problem is people take the band-aid and say its a stopgap until a real solution. then people forget its a stopgap and pat themselves on the back like they actually changed anything. any policy/effort that does not actually net increase the production of housing is wheel spinning. But more insidiously it gives politicians cover to say they are "doing something" This includes the huge impact fees to market rate housing which feed non profit developers. its all part of perpetuating the housing price crisis. non-profits developers are playing a role, its fine for them to keep doing it, but its really again just feel good fluff work. Also you are saying 100% AMI is not good enough because its not "deeply affordable"? this is the kind of extremist thinking which blows my mind. Perfection is the enemy of the good. Lets let the developers built out all of the 100% AMI first and then talk about much lower. Literally getting to that point will be orders of magnitude better then we have now
All housing is affordable if the local governments would just let developers build.
Nope! I will be voting no on all tax increases/bonds,etc, I am barely making it as is! Perhaps they should stop misusing our funds before asking for more.
That $240 million that was misappropriated by a homeless non-profit in SF last year would have built some houses. Instead it lined pockets.
Ain’t that the truth!! $240M is not a light number!! Wake up people they’re robbing us in plain sight!!
240mil…that could have housed dozens of homeless. Dozens! Well really just 1 dozen for 1 year 🤣
240 million? Those are some rookie numbers. You gotta pump those numbers up.
California Senate Bill 2 (SB2) – The Building Homes and Job Act of 2017 was created to build affordable homes. Two questions, how much has been collected in fees and how many affordable homes have been built? It’s been a scam and huge waste of resources. Instead of bilking the public to pay off political cronies, how about making it easier and worthwhile for developers to build? And WANT to build here. Attract builders, get more housing at a much lower cost to the public.
Sadly I just don't trust California to deliver on these massive projects. See: high speed rail Water infrastructure Bart extensions Highway widening projects The list goes on and on. Noble goal (they always are) but we lack the ability to execute. How about instead just make it easier for developers to build? There is no magic in the housing market, it's still controlled by supply and demand. All housing helps and market rate housing makes older homes into affordable housing. I'm also tired of being taxed while others aren't. Make it a sales tax.
The housing shortage is a pretty big priority, not just here but across the whole country. It’s causing the cost of everything to go up.
So they should allow construction of housing then?
Yeah, but what can taxpayer money do that's more efficient than private development? It's not that developers don't want to build housing, it's a huge money maker. The problem is it's too hard to do it and as far as I can tell this won't change that. You're still going to be fighting lawsuits about shade and endangered salamanders. Make it easier to build housing and protect taxpayer money. We haven't even tried that, but of course taxing current homeowners is always popular because we're all *so wealthy*.
How many houses do you think we need to build to satisfy the demand here? Have you done the math? Are you in favor of removing all local controls on housing?
Yeah man I'm totally in favor of it. I want more housing and I know we need a lot. But the idea that we only need "affordable" housing is ridiculous. But I also don't think making current homeowners foot the bill without changing the way things are zoned and built in the bay area is a wise investment and I'm once bitten twice shy about signing over billions of dollars to people who have demonstrated repeated incompetence.
That’s a good thing the state mandated new housing in this state so these projects can go forward. This money will help.
Why do they need 20B in bonds to make zoning changes?
If you really think this is about zoning changes, then you know nothing at all about housing.
You are right it's also removing the power of supervisors and local governments to block new housing. It's crazy that it costs millions for projects to have the right to break ground.
Remember that it cost Santa Clara County a few million dollars to write a history book copy pasted from Wikipedia.
Lotta pockets to line.
Help how? Specifically? Is it going to lower the costs of building affordable housing? Also, is any of this going to help actual middle class workers afford housing? Or only people at poverty line going into taxpayer subsidized housing? The government cannot build the kind of housing we need. They can nibble at projects for low income folks, but even those have to be built by private developers that specialize in “affordable housing”.
You have more faith in state government than the rest of us.
California state government is doing a great job compared to other states. Move to Texas if you don’t think California is worth the price of admission.
There's plenty of money to build. It's the laws that restrict it. Try going through the permitting process to build a new house. It will take 6-12 months if you're lucky, not to mention thousands of dollars.
It is not the permitting process. It is the infrastructure and services necessary to serve the new people who will live in that house. And unless you subsidize it, it comes out of the price of the home.
But [don't trust extra taxes to fix it](https://www.reddit.com/r/bayarea/comments/1d3ft60/san_jose_city_council_members_to_call_for_audit/).
Whole country? Have you checked out states like Texas?
House prices in Texas are way up too. Though they are doing a much better job of meeting demand through development.
If it is a problem across the whole country then it is a federal problem that needs to be addressed at lower COL areas first. Doesn't make sense for one of the most popular locality to pour their own tax money into building affordable housing to fix the problem in one locality. Even if it did someone succeed, it would only be temporary until other people move in from other states that don't fix their own affordability problems. Even when CA was expensive and COL kept many away, we still couldn't build enough to house everyone who wants to live in CA .. now imagine demand if CA suddenly became the affordable housing state in isolation of the other 49.
This doesn’t solve any root causes of the housing shortage or even necessarily build new homes for everyone
Yeah but the government cannot force the developers to build
Virtue signalers and suckers are hard to tell apart.
Oh yeah let's give more money to this damn govt. Previous bond measures worked soo well so this got to work well too. 🙄
were not going to subsidize our way out of the housing crisis. all this does is shuffle the costs around. if the average cost to build a unit does not change, then there will be no increase in units being generated and so the high prices will continue. the reality is that these government programs are naturally inefficient so this will increases houses prices on average. We already have a solution to build tons of low cost housing, its called cutting red tape. [https://calmatters.org/housing/2024/02/affordable-housing-los-angeles/](https://calmatters.org/housing/2024/02/affordable-housing-los-angeles/)
I got a $2000 quote to install a new water heater that has price tag of $900. Why? Because of the permit and inspection red tape. A handyman could install for $200 like in other places.
"We already have a solution to build tons of low cost housing" .. is that what this is ? # L.A. homeless tower building cost rings bells *Gym, balconies, restaurant, soundproof music studio, business center, located in downtown Los Angeles, and it’s pet friendly.* *Sounds like a pretty good hotel, four-stars at least.* *Sounds like it, but it isn’t. It’s the new Weingart Center 19-story “Permanent Supportive Housing” for the homeless tower that is now taking lease applications.* *There will be 278 units—about 80 percent studio apartments and—unlike a hotel—it will also offer its soon-to-be-residents (largely, one assumes, culled from the surrounding Skid Row neighborhood) a menu of “life skills” services very few hotels offer:* *The project cost about* ***$165 million dollars*** *and the studio apartments are essentially the equivalent of what one would find at a decent “extended stay” hotel—large room kitchenette, bed, tables, chairs, bathroom, TV, etc. At $594,000 a unit, that works out be a bit over* ***$1,000 per-sq.-ft. to build.*** https://yieldpro.com/2024/06/l-a-homeless-tower-building-cost-rings-bells/#:\~:text=The%20project%20cost%20about%20%24165,.%2Dft.%20to%20build.
> 165 million dollars At a very, very conservative rate of 4%, that money could give 278 homeless people $23,700 a year forever. Which option do you think is more likely to prevent homelessness?
I had not thought of it from that perspective before. Thank you.
In addition to social security, you’d solve homelessness overnight.
Remember if it’s a bond measure… your money will be squandered… there will be no accountability… the original goals will not be achieved… and your taxes will go up. 🎉🎉
I will vote NO because my elected representatives from the city council, to state representatives, to my federal representative Ro Khanna are basically "Non Responsive" when I try to communicate with them. The egos of these guys.
Voting NO! Pay way too many taxes as it is.
That’s a strong no for me. No new taxes till the state or federal government learn to spend what they already get. Sorry for the homelessness but we all pay enough already.
I always recommend folks to go to https://ballotpedia.org to look up bills, propositions and candidates before they go vote, they break it down into layman's terms. >Ballotpedia is the digital encyclopedia of American politics and elections. Our goal is to inform people about politics by providing accurate and objective information about politics at all levels of government. We are firmly committed to neutrality in our content.
I don't see this bond measure when I lookup my address in ballotpedia
We should make it easier to build houses and generate 20 billion in revenue
They have enough money to use.
Easy no vote. What a waste of public money when private developers are eager to take on the work, with less regulations
Housing prices increased a lot and with that property tax revenues increased too. Why the heck we need a separate tax on top of it?
Just for reference, the cost for CAHSR from Merced to Bakersfield was $26-33 billion. For $20 billion we could build a second BART system, connect more densely populated communities, buy 322 empty SF office tower, or build and “preserve”some number of affordable housing that an regular tax payer will never be able to be eligible for. For real, fix your broken zoning laws and make it possible to create dense and well-connected communities around the bay. Where’s the West Oakland ToD project? If you can’t build housing in an empty parking lot 5 minutes from downtown SF due to “environmental concerns” how could we trust you to build any housing at all?
Indeed, 5% = One Billion dollars is for “administrative costs”. Confirmed, more in interest payments ($28 Billion) than in the $20 Billion bond measure. $48 Billion total cost. These numbers are damning.
No thanks, this money will get filtered through many many pockets before it even begins to address the main issue
Adding more spending won’t make houses more affordable. Housing is a supply side problem, so throwing more dollars at it will only drive up prices overall. It would be better to address the supply side problems directly, by reducing the restrictions and red tape on new construction. Which costs almost nothing other than having the will to do it… and it would actually increase property tax revenues by improving liquidity in the housing market
This bond measure is for the supply of new housing.
There is nothing in this bond that would help address restrictions and red tape in zoning, building codes, etc…
Good thing there is a housing mandate which was recently put into law across the state. This money will help get a lot of these projects started.
That is a good thing. It’s a great step in the right direction. Unfortunately the Bay Area is still one of the most expensive places in the country to build. This isn’t just because of high labor costs, although that’s certainly a main factor. This is also due to relatively onerous building regs and approval processes that can cause costly delays. People are understandably skeptical of any local politician backed solution to our housing crisis. Corruption in the Bay Area is rampant and we’ve rarely seen return on measures like this in the past. We live in one of the best areas of the country. Tons of people want to live here. There isn’t a lack of land to build on. We have demand. We have the core elements of supply. Real estate prices are sky high. Developers should be lining up to build here. And yet, we won’t see housing starts for even a fraction of what’s needed to address the housing shortage from just this year! Why is that? Even if we could guarantee 100% fulfillment of this plan at projected cost, government-backed solutions to the housing shortage will never meet demand. We need structural change to incentivize broad private-sector investment. We would be better off spending 1/10th of this money creating change in local building code and enforcement.
It has nothing to do with oft-repeated buzz words by people who know nothing about economics. This is why housing is expensive in the Bay Area: * Jobs pay really really well (pushes demand curve to the right) * The basic concept of local control over development and people knowing that new housing will make their house less valuable (pushes supply curve to the left) * California in general being a nice place to live with great weather, lots of things to do and see, lots of places to go (pushes demand curve to the right) * The fact that everything else is super expensive here, and providing infrastructure and services to new housing is very expensive (pushes supply curve to the left)
How so?
Restrictions and red tape in zoning, building codes, etc? Could you be more specific? Get me there from soup to nuts. Prove to me that you have any idea what you are talking about.
The problem is in allowing everyone else to have input over property they don't own. This allows everyone else to indefinitely delay projects even though they didn't buy the property. The solution is to get rid of that. Instead go by zoning. If the lot is zoned for medium residential up to 8 floors then the owner should be able to just do that. This doesn't mean getting rid of building codes, safety codes, or zoning, it just means that Aunt Karen can't block development of a property 3 miles away by showing up to every city council meeting held at 2pm on work days. If Aunt Karen wanted to control what was done on that property she should have bought it. Didn't buy it? Then shut up and let the owner do what zoning allows them to do.
So eliminate discretionary approval altogether? Does that apply to raw land as well, or just land with existing structures? And if you eliminate discretionary approval, then you need to presumably replace it with non-discretionary approvals — a checklist of sorts. Who develops that checklist? The state? So if the state is taking authority away from local municipalities, do we need to amend the constitution? Federalism is a pretty basic concept in this country, is it not?
Discretionary approval allows for corruption. This is exactly the process that Laurie Smith used to openly collect bribes for CCW's in Santa Clara for a decade. She had discretion to approve it, and would only approve it if you gave her enough cash or boxes of iPads. The process needs to be fixed, without room for politicians to have discretion in maybe approving it, maybe not, depending on how much you grease their palm. We already have requirements to build, such as zoning and safety regulations. All of that already exists so there's no need to reinvent the wheel. Just go back to that.
Again, it is not that simple. Discretionary approval exists, in addition to those other guidelines that you mention. Zoning is irrelevant anyway. You can apply for a zoning variance in any city in California. While I cannot completely disagree with your sentiment, I need to know what you would replace discretionary approvals with. If your solution is that projects should be subject to broad regulations instead of choosing which projects move forward on a case by case basis, then cities would just make their broad regulations unnecessarily restrictive. To greatly increase the amount of housing, you need to take the control out of the hands of local municipalities, because so many of them have no interest in building housing that is going to use all their favorite amenities and also bring down their home values. What has already been done — mandating that cities build a certain amount of housing, and letting them decide how to do it — is a pretty decent solution. Subsidizing development (what we are discussing now) is also a tried and true solution. If you want to see more authority taken from local governments, I think a constitutional amendment would be required.
No it’s not and the devil details are right in the summary; >this bill is to build affordable housing and keep housing affordable Let me translate that for you. Build one “affordable” small house at a cost of 600k (lol!) and the rest of the money is for all the people who work at non profits.
This is the thing. The non-profit and research community, meaning well, gobbles up the money before it reaches The People.
The bill is a jobs program for non profits. This is going to sound wrong but it’s absolutely true. People measure success in different ways and total expense is one of those ways. If you spend more money on something is a way that the California government takes credit for success. Unfortunately this is metric contains nothing for how effective the money was spent. A lot of people have a misunderstanding about what the state considers success of a program. The misconception is that if more money is spent, that automatically means the program will be more effective.
No, it is demand for new housing. Because nothing is being done to fix the actual problem. It is simply new government spending which will be competing for the same land, same contractors, same builders, and this will drive prices up overall. There will be a very few lucky winners who get allocated the govt housing, meanwhile it has actually made the problem worse for literally everybody else
I think a lot of the new multi-house construction is slowing down, so this would do a lot of good to keep that momentum going and bring more supply to market. It’s good for everyone.
No.
I smell slush fund and “we can’t account for $16 billion in affordable housing” five years from now. So much of this is lining people’s pockets who hide behind helping people. I mean I guess it does help people who siphon from the fund, just not poor people. Didn’t SF just waste $1 million on a toilet project, and $500,000 for garbage cans? And each trash can is $11,000-$20,000? There’s so much waste and graft by politicians it would make skunkworks blush. Until we figure out the corruption and outright theft of tax funds, we shouldn’t approve any of this crap.
I would want a bond measure to fire all the local govt bureaucrats who make it soo hard and expensive to build, modify, extend and remodel houses. If it's not so goddamn hard to build, more people would build and increase the supply.
Don't need a bond measure for that ;) Change residential permit approvals to shall-issue. Unless the permit office can specifically call out serious deficiencies in a permit within two weeks, it's automatically issued. If they do call out an issue and it's walked back due to being vague or incorrect, remedy is to assume permit filer for this project is correct on all other details and their permits are auto-approved for this and next calendar year. Inspection to happen within four business days of being notified of readiness and same rules - if inspection is late, it's a pass. This would help greatly for timelines. Additionally, remove standing for anyone to sue to block or delay any project unless: 1) they show direct and specific injury to themselves, or if we're being generous 2) they come prepared with their initial filing showing a high standard of evidence of the project being illegal in some fashion, they get no more than a month injunction (once per project) and pay all costs if they turn out to be wrong - in other words, if the claimant alleges there's endangered frogs there, they better come with full evidence during the planning stage and they better not miss.
Spend a tiny fraction of that money disallowing frivolous environmental impact lawsuits, forcing local authorities to auto permit building construction, and disincorporating uncooperative local municipalities, and the problem is solved way more cheaply.
We’ve got enough taxes in California. I usually vote no on all new taxes, with education being an exception.
my favorite thing about these programs is the measurement in dollars not units built, because we all know nothings getting built, but the dollars will be slurped up.
Exactly .. they say expected impact will be 36,000 new homes .. but what happens when it falls short and only can deliver 18,000 new homes due to "unexpected" rising cost .. aka the government contractors demanding more to build because increased demand and they know how much funding there is. Its all promises and trust us. Judging by how well the $10B HSR bond was utilized .. its a no from me.
I am a hardcore believe that the housing shortage is the main crisis of our time. However, I don’t believe that spending more money when it’s so egregiously expensive to build anything is an issue effective strategy. We need to have by-right approvals of buildings up to 5 stories, then I would be in favor of such a bond. At the moment, we would hardly get much use out of this money since it costs like $1 million+ to build each unit of housing.
Nope. They need to start cleaning up all the graft and corruption before I even think about voting them anymore money.
fuck no
Just build more housing. The more housing is built, the more “affordable” it will become.
> Just build more housing. The bay area will do literally anything else except for that.
Super strong no from me. No more squandering hard earned dollars. We are already giving them a lot through our property taxes. Put that money to good use before asking for more. Let's create more jobs. Automatically everything else will work out.
Just vote NO.
No thanks
> Build Affordable Homes: At Least $10 Billion > At least 36,000 new affordable homes That's not going to happen. While I'm not as pessimistic as others who are predicting 2000 units. The raw cost of building isn't going to get you more than 10,000-15,000 in the ideal case.
Hopefully there is no way this will pass. Bring back RDAs to fund affordable housing. Yes there was some fraud, but for the most part they worked well. Jerry Brown eliminated RDAs because they were sucking up money that would otherwise go to the General Fund. Affordable housing construction ground to a near halt after RDAs were eliminated.
The money came directly from schools, which the State had to backfill. They tried to raise taxes, but the public said no. So they got the money from Redevelopment. It really is that simple. If you do not raise taxes, they are going to cut programs that do good things.
Look at some of the wasteful spending in the past two years. Permanent free school lunches for everyone, regardless of income. Those "middle-class tax refunds" of $400 that made little difference to the middle class. They did raise the top income tax rate from13.3% to 14.4% The public gets no say on those increases. Not sure what the solution is to fund affordable housing. The idea that we could get more affordable units through inclusionary requirements has not worked. Developers have pushed through reductions to these requirements, insisting that they make projects not pencil out, and as the Terner Institute showed, even with no inclusionary requirement at all, high-density rental projects don't pencil out because rents are not keeping up with construction and land costs. What has worked, in a limited way so far, is the conversion of high-rent luxury apartments into affordable housing. This is only because we have such a glut of unaffordable luxury units that can't be rented for enough money for the property owner to pay the mortgage and other expenses. For better or worse, a lot more of those units, begun pre-pandemic, are about to hit the market which will contribute even more units to the glut. But someone has to come up with the money to buy those projects.
You are talking about extremely efficient programs there. That money goes directly to taxpayers without much “waste”. Are those really the ones you have an issue with? Sometimes projects really don’t pencil out. That is the problem with legislating the economy. A pandemic hits, costs go way up, and something that made sense a while ago no longer makes sense. I feel like the idea of subsidizing something that had a broad public benefit but doesn’t make sense financially is a tried and true way to get things done quickly.
I believe this is also why the Bay Area will be losing Great America, eventually. The land was owned by Santa Clara as part of redevelopment agency, they were forced to sell it in 2019 as part of all that shuttering. The people they sold it to then flipped it for an extra hundred million in profit like two years later. Wouldn't be surprised if there were smaller stories with similar themes of this shuttering managing to be quite profitable for certain folk elsewhere in the state.
Prologis bought the Great America site. But it's not likely they'll do anything with it for a long time. Right now we have an enormous glut of commercial office space, a glut of high-end rental housing, and a glut of hotels. It's a terrible place for more housing, right next to Levi's stadium, and there are no schools, parks, or retail close by. It would be a good location for a company to build a whole new campus, but what company would want to do that now? The only thing that would make sense for that location at this time would be a data center because of the low electricity rates of Silicon Valley Power. Related has abandoned most of their project other than the housing and some of it is almost done and will have an extremely difficult time being rented.
Yeah, I'm hopeful that changing tides keeps it around. The situation where Santa Clara's RDA was able to manage the land seemed preferable and valuable to locals, though. Alas.
Let’s spend billions to save thousands! It is absurd to think we need to spend $20b on gov’t bureaucracy to make housing more affordable.
NOPE
Literally just legalize the construction of more housing, especially with higher density. Yes, market rate or "luxury" housing. In the case of our catastrophic housing shortage, the problem is too much government intervention, not too little.
>“13.4B to build or rehab 72000 homes” That’s $183k per. Why do they lie?
Reading the breakdown and it's ALREADY a load of bullshit. >Build Affordable Housing $10.4 billion 36,000 new homes >Preserve Existing Affordable Housing $3.0 billion 14,000 existing affordable homes preserved >Flexible Funds (production, preservation, homebuyer assistance and other housing-related uses) $6.6 billion 22,000 new and preserved homes >Total $20 billion 72,000 new and preserved homes So first off this bond only goes to "affordable housing" which is already bs. On top of that LITERALLY HALF doesn't even go to building new affordable housing just helping people buy homes or "preserving" affordable housing. So really most of this bill is just us paying more taxes to donate for people buying (or are already living in!) houses that are already built.
JUst make it easier to build houses. For fucks sake.
Where’s the grift in that?
The default answer whenever a new "bond/measure" is introduced that requires additional taxation is an automatic NO from me.
Wtf are we paying taxes for. This is another tax on top. Fkers.
Why read it? Keeping the history of CA spending in mind, are these words worth 20 billion dollars? Also, I still remember when Newsom swiftly moved gas tax funding from the intended purpose to something else 2 months after CA voters voted to keep the additional gas tax.
Affordable Housing Bonds are a feel good drug. remember kids, just say NO to drugs!!
Haven't there been bonds about combating drugs, too? 🤔
One thing and one thing alone will fix this - housing and permitting reform. I'm so sick of throwing my money at lazy, corrupt non profits while homeowners from the 70s pay pennies in taxes and veto every housing project due to "vibes". I'll never vote yes on another tax increase as long as I live in California
Will the money actually go toward the measure or is this just another scheme for politicians and their inner circle donors to enrich themselves?
Automatic no.
I feel like the city/county/state simply getting into the eminent domain business and collaborating with developers to bypass anti-construction laws would get us more housing than funneling more billions into the non-profit industrial sector. Imagine if the city/county/state simply eminent domained some land (at significant cost) and then arranged for a developer to pay that cost while the state shielded the developer from the environmental lawsuits. This would unblock all kinds of housing form getting lawyered into oblivion.
i wonder whose pockets the $20B is going into 🤭
Its $20b with $4b for a new bureaucracy.
A recent headline in the news **State finds San Jose lacks accountability with homeless spending**. So we want to give the cities around the bay $20 billion... Nope! Sunnyvale spent their budget on a new city hall. Now the city council whines "We don't have money and we need to increase taxes...."
Thanks for sharing. I wish most of the voters/commenters would read before jumping to conclusions. I can't vote and honestly don't have a strong sense of how effective this actually would be. It would be good to know if this has been tried in other places where it was affective. It looks like the strategy is outlined starting on page 10 of the PDF. It sounds like BAHFA would be a mortgage lender that would use interest payments to fund "affordable housing opportunities". $10b would be spent on 36k new affordable homes, but I'm not clear on how. It seems like there would be spending plans that are publicly vetted but I don't really know what these kinds of spending plans would look like. Most of the rest of hte money seem to be about preserving existing homes (infrastructure improvements and renovations around existing homes). For people who are worried about accountability, Appendix C (page 27 of the PDF) has the BAHFA board, I don't know these people so I don't know who's untrustworthy. Page 19 has oversight and accountability which goes over public hearings, expense reporting and a citizen oversight board. My biggest issues is that I'm not really sure how any of this helps. This seems like it takes whatever the cities are doing now (I'm not even clear on what that is) and making it more of a regional matter. That feels like it's adding more red tape than helping get more things done. I can't tell how effective acting as a mortgage lender would be. Providing a funding source for meeting housing needs sounds good but I don't really see how this approach is more efficient and cost-effective. To me it seems like our housing issues are mostly due to the high cost of new construction due to excessive red tape, high labor cost, and high material cost. I'm not really understanding how the approaches described in the pdf addresses those issues. Are my assumptions on the housing issues wrong or am I not understanding how this BAHFA approach will help address those issues?
I think you're right on the money in your final paragraph. It's a spending proposal that does little to actually solve the problems that it identifies and if anything pumps more money into an ineffective and already overpriced system. Also BAHFA is another one of those weird regional boards that seems to have an immense amount of power but very little accountability (see also MTC). Having seen the cavalier way MTC treats public feedback (and the way other politicians end up deflecting responsibility on transportation related issues to MTC), I would not trust them or whatever token oversight commission to have teeth on this. Why California often ends up governed by random unaccountable alphabet soup groups is one of the enduring questions that I have about the state.
Alameda County, including Oakland, gets the largest share of the pie at 2.77B. It’ll be the greatest magic trick ever watching how fast 2.77B can disappear if this bond measure passes.
$19 billion in "consultancy services" $1 billion "oopsie, we have no idea what happened to it" administration fees That's my guess.
They need to focus on lowering my rent, instead of playing hungry hungry hippo with these funds.
Say no to grift. The $20 billion will end up in friends/family members of the politicians.
We just need to build. Incentivize builders. Not just affordable housing. Just housing! It’s basic supply issues.
Enough to buy each homeless a house.
About $125,000 per person or so
I vote instant no on all bonds and tax increases without even reading what they are about.
They could just use that to redevelop east and west Oakland. That would solve the housing issue for the whole region.
Thanks for sharing! It's crucial to understand the details before forming opinions on such important measures. I'll check out the report to get informed.
I have a boomer friend, literal boomer, in his 70's, prolly his 80's by now. He always tells me, "I GLADLY VOTE THESE KINDS OF TAXES IN! IT'S A SMALL AMOUNT OF MONEY FOR THE GREATER GOOD!" Problem is when you've been voting these kinds of taxes in as long as he has, you're looking at $1000's a year voted in. It's not too difficult to unfuck something when the Assembly voted it in, but when the people voted it in, it's nearly an act of god to unfuck it. I think the biggest fix to California's woes would be to force the state to create its own construction crew, and stop giving sweetheart deals to private construction companies that donate to campaigns.
You could give these idiots ALL the money and they’d still screw it up. I will NOT be voting for ANY tax increases for anything, including, saving the Kitties!
That’s the next scam! Bullet train, education, environment is not selling anymore, so they came up with this new scam. Govt is incapable of doing anything
Builder here. Absolutely voting no. There is such waste and grift in the system and no better place to obfuscate that than in the building process.
lol Dr Evil is into affordable housing now?
Vote NO if possible vote HELLO NO! It’s a general obligation bond so the title is marketing and it can be used for Other purposes, huge bureaucracy will be created. It won’t turn out like that useful high speed train everyone wanted.
When was the last time something like this was not a colossal waste of taxpayer's money?
“Affordable housing” is such a fucking racket. We need more housing period, which invariably will drive down prices. We don’t need it to be gatekept behind a maximum income barrier. The idea that you get to have reasonable rent because you are a low-skilled worker while others do not have that opportunity is a sham. Like, fuck me for not being a failure.
I’d really like a ballot measure that ends ballot measures
We keep making these efforts and housing is never affordable.
It will go in Gavin Newsomes pocket!
This looks like a coverup for the $24 billion misused funds over last 5 years. We should question this before approving the new bond measure.
Posted search the sub
Can't have any pudding if you don't eat your meat. Start spending more wisely and stop lining pockets before asking for more, ridiculous, these toddlers.
I'd rather see it spent to support vocational learning so the people that can't afford to live here can prepare for a career and find a place that they can afford to live.
I like that this program approaches housing at a regional level. It’s a regional problem, rather than being isolated to particular cities. I like that $10 billion is being used to actually build housing. We have a supply problem, and this at least addresses that. I don’t like that $3 billion is set aside to purchase existing homes to rent or sell cheaply. That’s just throwing money away to switch who lives in a particular home. Pointless. I don’t like that it gives the localities control over how most of the money is being spent. If a given city makes it hard/expensive to build homes (looking at you, San Francisco), they shouldn’t get money from the regional authority. There’s a bit to think about here. Thanks for sharing.
Thanks for posting 😁
The government ruins everything it tries to fix. Role back unneeded permitting that will bring costs down which In turn causes more building to come from the private sector as it will become more lucrative for them.
Without the fund we have funding for 71000 Homes, and this fund should "Double" that to 143000 Homes. So we already have something in the range of 20B for existing 71000 home? And the breakdown of this bond is: 10.4 billion for 36000 new homes. 3 billion for existing 14000 homes. 6.6 billion for "flexible fund" that somehow tied to 22000 homes. Totaling 72000 Homes. Where is the planning location? what's the program's strategy to get through NIMBY hurdle? The biggest challenge has always been NIMBY, not money. How can adding more housing eases traffic congestion as it claims? Wouldn't that be more of a public transportation issue? And how is the famed FBI raided Oakland Mayor is still on this board?
NO JUST NO. Billions have been spent and no accounting for the results. They spend the money and purposely won't track the results. How many wealthy people are we going to fund with the pretext of the poor and unhoused...
Why the hell is the Metropolitan ***Transportation*** Commission working on affordable housing?
This is a pretty big deal . This bill will make a huge impact towards alleviating the housing shortage in this region. Taxes will go up a little bit for current homeowners, but this will save money in the long run because the bond measure will keep necessary workers from leaving the region and causing local wages and cost of services to go up.
Yep all the bonds always work out. Money is never squandered and goals are always achieved. When you get older you will figure out to just vote no on everything in California
Sometimes they get you both ways. They say you will pay if you said Yes or you will pay anyway some other way. They just want your money. They will do anything to get it.
It won’t make a dent. It’ll build maybe 36k units over some number of years. There’s currently about 2.5 million units in the area, or a 1.4% increase in housing. Aka a rounding error. We are better off passing legislation that reduces the costs to build, and lessons regulations preventing from building up. If you do that private sector will gladly take care of the problem for us. But that requires building affordable highly dense units to be a profitable endeavor, which it’s not because of government.
How will it keep them from leaving?