[Pedestrian]

SB 50 continues to be a lightning rod, stirring intense opposition and even anger from people who fear the bill would ruin their neighborhoods by adding high-density housing, ending the single-family neighborhood and with it, the American Dream in California . . . .

Wiener is hopeful that changes he introduced this month — and growing public sentiment that California is facing a housing affordability crisis — will be enough to get SB 50 approved.

. . . the San Francisco Board of Supervisors . . . voted twice last year by wide margins to oppose the bill, saying it takes away too much local discretion over development. Wiener said his amendments introduced on Jan. 6 would address that concern by giving cities two years to draft tailor-made plans and also give low-income people living near new developments priority for affordable homes in those buildings.

Mayors of the Bay Area’s three largest cities — San Francisco, Oakland and San Jose — are vocal SB 50 supporters.

SB 50 has also attracted opposition from a wide range of organizations such as the Los Angeles-based AIDS Healthcare Foundation, anti-growth Livable California and San Francisco-based Mission Economic Development Agency.

Mill Valley resident Susan Kirsch, founder and former board member of Livable California, disagrees with the idea that the state has a housing crisis, believing many baby boomers will soon move out of their single-family homes opening up a “glut” of available homes. The real problem, she said, is that people can’t afford homes that are available.

“The way the crisis is often sold is the issue of affordability,” Kirsch said. “There is mixing up of supply and demand and too much of a production mentality. There’s this idea of build, build, build and rezoning to build higher density near transportation. But, there is no conclusive evidence that building higher and denser is going to meet the need for affordability.”

Kirsch also rejects Wiener’s premise that the state needs 3.5 million homes, citing a study from the Embarcadero Institute that says the housing shortage is closer to 1.5 million homes.

“Land and housing is being bought up by corporate interests and the corporate interests are building high-density housing,” she said. “Single-family homes are what support the community and pay taxes and keep the community and the middle class strong.”

The 3.5 million estimate comes from a 2016 report by the McKinsey Global Institute. The report also found that 50 percent of California households cannot afford housing in their communities.

“Californians pay $50 billion more for housing than they are able to afford,” the report states. “In total, California’s housing shortage costs the state more than $140 billion per year in lost economic output, including lost construction investment as well as foregone consumption of goods and services because Californians spend so much of their income on housing.”

In 2018, Up for Growth California, a nonprofit research and advocacy group, estimated that California has 3.4 million fewer homes than is needed to keep up with job and population growth.

The problem is most acute in the Bay Area, researchers found, where the market had the highest price appreciation of anywhere in the country from 1980 to 2010 while at the same time the amount of new housing added per resident was among the lowest in the country . . . .

Many lawmakers and city officials agree California has a housing affordability problem, an issue illustrated by the trend of more people moving out of the state than moving in last year.

“Longer term, we can’t solve the housing affordability problems without adding more housing,” said Carol Galante, director of the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at the University of California, Berkeley. “Increasing the number of places you could put more housing through zoning reforms is clearly one of the keys to more production. The other is putting more certainty in the approval process.”

Wiener says that despite the continued opposition to SB 50, he’s optimistic that he will see more support for the bill in the state legislature this year. Even in the past several months, he has seen the dialogue about housing change from people simply saying “no” to new housing to more young people asking “why not” and demanding change from their elected officials.

“The next generation is acutely aware of the inequality of who is able to access a home and who is not in terms of race and income and age,” Galante said. “That is helping to shift to build people’s perspective on the need to build more” . . . .

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