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Old Posted Jan 14, 2020, 4:10 PM
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The Bill That Could Make California Livable Again

The Bill That Could Make California Livable Again


January 13, 2020

By Annie Lowrey

Read More: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/ar...fornia/604786/

Quote:
.....

California has a hyperacute version of a problem affecting a number of states and, especially, metro regions within those states. Based on the housing-unit-to-population ratio in similarly wealthy and urban states, such as New York and New Jersey, California is short 2 million to 3.5 million housing units. (California has 358 homes per 1,000 people, whereas New York and New Jersey each have more than 400.) Right now, the state ranks 49th in units per capita, behind only Utah.

- This deficiency has driven a cost-of-living crisis, leading to long commutes, desolate retail corridors, plunging net worths, bankruptcies, and shortages of child care, elder care, and other services. Any number of trends have collided to foster the housing shortage: surging income and wealth inequality, in-migration, growing construction costs. But in policy terms, there is one central culprit: zoning regulations, including local oversight rules. Neighborhoods have the ability to kibosh too many projects, and zoning rules favor sprawl over infill housing. --- S.B. 50 would override local restrictions on building, letting developers create more housing and denser housing near train stations and high-frequency bus stops. Homeowners would be able to build accessory dwelling units or casitas; companies would be able to build small apartment complexes.

- The bill stalled in the California legislature last year. But earlier this month State Senator Scott Wiener announced changes that would give localities more flexibility in implementing the law, provided that they allow as much construction as S.B. 50 itself would allow, and would ensure that low-income residents get access to the new housing. --- The bill is a technical one, steeped in arcana on parking requirements, height limits, and bus frequencies. But it would be a transformative one, both its detractors and its supporters agree. It would effectively disallow single-family zoning in many neighborhoods. It would force wealthy suburbs to permit the construction of apartment buildings and duplexes. And it would reorient the state’s growth away from sprawl toward infill. Housing would get more plentiful, and thus cheaper.

- Its detractors sit in two camps. Tenants-rights groups and low-income-housing advocates argue that S.B. 50 would not do enough to create housing for the poor, and might supercharge displacement in neighborhoods where even high-income residents are seeing themselves priced out. “Incentivizing more luxury development and inflating property values in San Francisco will further exacerbate real estate speculation, which has already played a key role in displacing low and moderate-income tenants, immigrants, seniors and families across California,” argues the Housing Rights Committee of San Francisco, which advocates for tenants. --- Then there are the NIMBYs, who argue that S.B. 50 will destroy neighborhoods’ homegrown character, hurt home values, and harm the environment: Goodbye to green, single-family neighborhoods, and hello to traffic-gnarled, high-rise apartments.

.....



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  #2  
Old Posted Jan 14, 2020, 4:27 PM
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This bill is a start.
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  #3  
Old Posted Jan 14, 2020, 6:12 PM
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This bill is not new by any means. I am fairly sure it has been discussed previously on this site. Wiener introduced it to the CA legislature several sessions ago but it was killed in committee or otherwise never voted on due to opposition by local governments unwilling to see their local control overridden. Now it is back in the current legislative session, still with considerable opposition. And Wiener keeps watering it down in an attempt to get it passed although arguably if he does, it won't do much because it will have been so diluted.

Quote:
Editorial: SB50 is back, and so is the shouting
Chronicle Editorial Board Jan. 8, 2020 Updated: Jan. 8, 2020 4 a.m.
Comments

State Sen. Scott Wiener relaunched his twice-stalled legislation to spur apartment construction Tuesday with a news conference in Oakland that showcased the resistance facing the controversial but crucial measure.

The San Francisco Democrat came to the steps of Oakland City Hall armed with an amendment answering local officials’ loudest objections to the bill, an array of backers from housing advocates to trade unions, and a slate of supportive politicians that even included a Republican. But given the protesters whose shouted and intermittently bullhorn-assisted chants made much of the event inaudible, what Wiener really could have used was a better microphone.

. . . Carroll Fife of Moms 4 Housing, which is occupying a vacant West Oakland house and was among the protesters, called the bill “the 2020 version of urban renewal,” the policy that razed poor, urban neighborhoods from the 1950s through the 1970s . . . .

The senator pointed out that some of the fiercest opposition to the bill comes from local officials in wealthy enclaves such as Palo Alto, Cupertino and Beverly Hills . . . .

The latest in a series of amendments meant to respond to the legislation’s critics would give cities two years to devise their own plans to allow as much new housing as SB50 would before its provisions take effect. That should answer the frequent objection that the measure usurps cherished “local control” of how and where development takes place.

In many cases, however, it won’t. That’s because those calling for local control of residential construction are often more interested in preventing it altogether . . . .
https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/...g-14957343.php
This commentary is from The Chronicle’s editorial board. We invite you to express your views in a letter to the editor. Please submit your letter via our online form: SFChronicle.com/letters.
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  #4  
Old Posted Jan 14, 2020, 6:29 PM
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^^Oops. Sorry about that Ms. Fife (of "Moms4Housing"):

Quote:
Deputies evict squatting Oakland moms in pre-dawn raid
By Amy Graff, SFGATE Updated 9:35 am PST, Tuesday, January 14, 2020

In an early morning raid, sheriff's deputies evicted a group of mothers illegally occupying a vacant house in Oakland.

Multiple videos posted by news organizations online show the mothers being pulled out of the house and put in handcuffs by deputies just before 6 a.m. Protesters stood outside chanting "shame on you" at the deputies.

Alameda County sheriff's deputies arrested two women and a man during the eviction, a sheriff's spokesman confirmed . . . .

Alameda County Superior Court Judge Patrick McKinney ruled on Friday that the women do not have the right to stay and must leave within five days . . . .
https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/artic...n-14973686.php
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  #5  
Old Posted Jan 14, 2020, 7:48 PM
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Quote:
S.B. 50 would override local restrictions on building, letting developers create more housing and denser housing near train stations and high-frequency bus stops. Homeowners would be able to build accessory dwelling units or casitas; companies would be able to build small apartment complexes.
Ive never heard them called 'casitas'.

Here we call them in-law units or granny units or something like that, casita actually sounds better imo.

Yes that's nitpicking but whatever...
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Old Posted Jan 15, 2020, 3:53 AM
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Originally Posted by dimondpark View Post
Ive never heard them called 'casitas'.

Here we call them in-law units or granny units or something like that, casita actually sounds better imo.

Yes that's nitpicking but whatever...
I hear casitas in So Cal regularly, but the official name is ADU, additional dwelling unit. The restrictions on ADUs was loosened 2 or 3 years ago.
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  #7  
Old Posted Jan 15, 2020, 4:50 AM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by dimondpark View Post
Ive never heard them called 'casitas'.
It's a common term in Arizona but it means more than an "adu". It's basically used for any very small detached living unit--doesn't have to be "accessory" to anything. As you may know, it literally just means "small house".
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  #8  
Old Posted Jan 15, 2020, 11:49 AM
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Any bill that could reduce community input, and reduce asinine regulations will greatly make California livable again.

I see that the NIMBYS are rallying against S.B. 50 as it will "destroy neighborhoods", but the neighborhoods are already destroyed. The cities and the state have already lost their character. Hurt home values? Por favor, the home values need to drop.

Would be nice if California leaders and politicians would grow some stones and do whats right instead of cowering to the property appreciating, self-serving castle dwellers that have for the last 30 years ruined a state that had promise.

This housing needs to be forced with little to no stopping power from these castle dwellers. Either build and reduce costs... or see a decline in the future. Its their choice. Other states will reap the benefits of those refugees seeking greener pastures.

Edit: Actually, they won't see the benefits, if they continue to support backwards policies.
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  #9  
Old Posted Jan 15, 2020, 4:49 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by dimondpark View Post
Ive never heard them called 'casitas'.

Here we call them in-law units or granny units or something like that, casita actually sounds better imo.

Yes that's nitpicking but whatever...
Calling them Casita's is very common in California and the southwest in general. In Arizona, Nevada and New Mexico they are called Casitas as well

Unsurprisingly it is Spanish for "little house"
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  #10  
Old Posted Jan 16, 2020, 10:11 PM
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I hope this bill dies like the stupid ones that were proposed. When this bill makes cities even more unaffordable, more opposition to new transit lines, and California still bleeds population to states(notably ones building large freeway networks), the anti-car crowd will still blame suburbs and cars and conservative ideologies.
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Old Posted Jan 16, 2020, 10:37 PM
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I'm no economist but wont new units just end up being market rate? The bar has already been set pretty high. The median price for a house statewide 500k. But yeah, it's a start.
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  #12  
Old Posted Jan 17, 2020, 12:01 AM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Obadno View Post
Calling them Casita's is very common in California and the southwest in general. In Arizona, Nevada and New Mexico they are called Casitas as well

Unsurprisingly it is Spanish for "little house"
I've never heard them referred to as "casitas" either. In the Bay Area I usually hear people refer to them as "in-law units" or "granny flats," but then I'm not in the construction or real estate industries so those are just layman's terms.
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  #13  
Old Posted Jan 17, 2020, 6:22 PM
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Quote:
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” . . . .
https://www.bizjournals.com/sanfranc...821&j=90446321
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Old Posted Jan 17, 2020, 6:33 PM
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Originally Posted by plutonicpanda View Post
I hope this bill dies like the stupid ones that were proposed. When this bill makes cities even more unaffordable, more opposition to new transit lines, and California still bleeds population to states(notably ones building large freeway networks), the anti-car crowd will still blame suburbs and cars and conservative ideologies.
Lol. When will you people learn that America has been getting diminishing returns on the suburban experiment for 40+ years now? Do you just ignore the successes of walkable and urban Europe and Asia?
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Old Posted Jan 17, 2020, 7:19 PM
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Originally Posted by craigs View Post
I've never heard them referred to as "casitas" either. In the Bay Area I usually hear people refer to them as "in-law units" or "granny flats," but then I'm not in the construction or real estate industries so those are just layman's terms.
Yeah, I have not heard of them called casitas, and normally as Californians we interact with Hispanics on a daily basis. I'm not sure how many places in nor cal even have one of those granny flats. When I lived in downtown Sac they had apartment variations, but they were just called "backyard apartments".
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Old Posted Jan 17, 2020, 7:44 PM
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Originally Posted by TWAK View Post
Yeah, I have not heard of them called casitas, and normally as Californians we interact with Hispanics on a daily basis. I'm not sure how many places in nor cal even have one of those granny flats. When I lived in downtown Sac they had apartment variations, but they were just called "backyard apartments".
In San Francisco they are often called a "garage" . . . because that's what so many of them are. A huge number of San Francisco houses are built over first floor garages and a lot of those garages have been turned into rentable living space, often without benefit of a building permit (so it's hard to find a number of them and I just spent about 20 minutes trying).

I'd bet anything this house once had a ground floor garage:



like this one still does:


Images: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/276549...24308/?lp=true
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Old Posted Jan 17, 2020, 8:22 PM
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There are also people who live in actual basements in San Francisco. Though I imagine that that is super illegal and probably not that common.
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Old Posted Jan 17, 2020, 8:33 PM
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Originally Posted by uaarkson View Post
Lol. When will you people learn that America has been getting diminishing returns on the suburban experiment for 40+ years now? Do you just ignore the successes of walkable and urban Europe and Asia?
The most powerful and wealthy country on the planet seems to be doing something right and hasn't been hindered by suburban development. The suburbs are experiencing tons of growth and are homes to hundreds of millions of people. The "suburban experiment" hasn't failed and is no longer an experiment. It is a part of life. Get over it and try lowering your nose a bit.

You just ignore the successes of suburbs. Europe and Asia have tons of problems just like the states do. It is so funny to me so see posters here act like the pastures are so much greener in Europe and Asia.
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Old Posted Jan 17, 2020, 8:47 PM
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Quote:
Key California housing bill’s chances of passing just improved dramatically
Alexei Koseff Jan. 17, 2020 Updated: Jan. 17, 2020 11:23 a.m.

SACRAMENTO — State Sen. Scott Wiener’s bill to clear a path for denser housing around public transit and in wealthy suburbs got a big push forward Friday when the Senate’s leader steered it out of the committee where it stalled last year.

Senate President Pro Tem Toni Atkins, D-San Diego, said she was moving SB50 out of the Appropriations Committee, whose chairman, Democratic Sen. Anthony Portantino, blocked it in 2019 and gave a frosty reception to the amended version that Wiener is now proposing.

Atkins sent the bill to the Rules Committee, where it could advance directly to a Senate floor vote before a deadline for passage at the end of the month. . . . .
https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics...f-14984182.php
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Old Posted Jan 17, 2020, 8:55 PM
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There are also people who live in actual basements in San Francisco. Though I imagine that that is super illegal and probably not that common.
Reality is always more dramatic than theory in the Bay Area. Not only do people live in basements (aren't Millennials doing that all over the country?), developers are developing underground warrens--like termite dens--for them:

Quote:
Maybe underground ‘sleeping pods’ in the Mission aren’t a bad idea after all?

Of the 219 units micro-housing developer Chris Elsey of Elsey Partners LLC wants to build in the Mission District, 65 of them would be underground sleeping pods renting between $1,000 to $1,375 . . . .

Elsey, a Kansas-based developer, would like to build two apartment buildings in the Mission District, located across from each other on surface lots at 401 South Van Ness and 1500 15th Street, that would each include two basement-level floors.

“Above ground, the building would feature eights floors with 161 units—each 200-square-feet including a bathroom and kitchen,” reports SFGate. “In the basement-level floors, the sleeping pods are stacked on top of one another, like bunk beds, with one side opening to a common living space.”

Think of the cellar spaces somewhat akin to capsule hotels, popular in countries like Iceland and Japan, where people sleep comfortably on the cheap in pod-like rooms. But unlike the overseas hotels, Elsey’s underground pods would only come with curtains for privacy, as the city’s building code won’t allow them built with a wall and door. And while the basement units won’t come with windows, Elsey says that the common space, which would face an outdoor courtyard, would provide some natural diffused light.

Though abnormal and ostensibly outrageous, exceedingly tiny sleeping units have, due to the city’s “cruel and inhumane” housing crisis, proven successful in San Francisco as of late. For example, the $1,200-per-month bunk bed pods in the Tenderloin, which made headlines last year, sold out as soon as they hit the market . . . .

The buildings’ above ground studios would rent between $2,000 to $2,375, a bargain in a city there the average rent for a one-bedroom apartment is $3,683 . . . .

(The Building--above ground)


(Diagram of below-ground "podville")
https://sf.curbed.com/2020/1/10/2105...unk-beds-dorms
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