Hi All!
It has been a great year for many of us last 2019 and many opportunities lies ahead of us this 2020. There are so many of us seeking for better housing, relocation, medical assistance from the government, job opportunities and equal treatment. It is a real challenge for so many of us to get back on our feet if we have been struck with health problems, or who just came from a very disheartening divorce or who was once serving for our beloved country in a foreign land and experience those traumatizing experience of war and disputes. There are those who lost their jobs and was kicked out of their apartments and can no longer stay because they cannot afford to do so. There are some of us whose parents leaving us without knowing where they are now, so we decide that it is better to be on the streets to survive and hoping that someone will be merciful and helpful enough to extend a hand of help. Some of us received help, while many are still struggling and fighting for their lives on a day to day basis.
In this novel, Chapter 11, you will learn about the struggle of the people involved trying to protect the shelter from land grabbers and settling the disputes with the neighboring NIMBYS.
Rumors percolated through the Social Media about land grabs. Virtual space was abuzz about Big Brother .
Dr. Reese rallied the opposition, although her wasn’t well. Obliged to stay off his feet, he rode a golf cart to lobby neighbors for several blocks around. The appeal was simple: YOU’RE NEXT
Your property turns into parking at less than market value. Sports brings in thousand of fans. That’s progress. We, downtown residents, pay the overhead.
The hearing room overflowed. Closed circuit television played in the halls. Near the front entrance, street mimes turned themselves into furniture. The silent bidding played to the audience. A riot squad was on alert. Police already had set up traffic barriers.
After the meeting was called to order, several commissioners asked to be heard. Only the chair’s microphone worked.
“Let us speak; let us speak!” Yelled a man in a scuffed leather jacket, clutching a backpack.
Another petitioner in a buttoned suit approached the podium and held out his card.
The head of the commission shattered his gavel. He ruled that the committee proceed straight to a vote to declare eminent domain.
Several audience members, wearing cigar shop T-shirts with emblems, eld up spittoons. “Not on us, not on us,” they chanted. “ No Evictions! No Taking Land!”
Here’s an article from the San Francisco Chronicle…
Here’s my New Year’s prediction: The affordability crisis in California will continue unabated into 2020. The good news is that our elected officials are internalizing this fact. The bad news is that too many of them are grabbing onto whatever solution seems most politically convenient. Look no further than the 200-odd disconnected housing bills that were introduced last year by the California Legislature or President Trump’s recent calls for sweeping the homeless into detention centers.
It’s important to understand that where we are today is a direct consequence of decades of underproduction of housing. We currently build only about half of what we were building as recently as the 1980s, when California’s population was half as large. And the housing that we have been building is disproportionately higher priced or located in areas far from jobs, transit and higher-performing schools.
Much of the decline in housing production is directly attributable to local governments systematically limiting where and how much new housing can be built, and by the denial or downsizing of the few projects that are proposed for the sites that remain. As has been well-documented, the history of these practices is very much rooted in the historic use of zoning at the local level to exclude communities of color and to keep out renters or lower-income households that are perceived to threaten property values.
Local control over land-use decisions is a tenet of the California experience. However, these days most serious policymakers have come around to the premise that the state needs to take some degree of action to ensure that local governments approve more projects and increase zoning capacity, thereby allowing more housing to be built on any given site.
Luckily, we have recent legislative accomplishments that we can, and should be, building upon. First, significant expansions of the state’s Accessory Dwelling Unit (ADU) law, much of which became effective Jan 1, will give virtually all homeowners a right to add a second or, in some cases, a third unit. Particularly if the state can provide financial incentives or assist in outreach, this promises to open up potentially hundreds of thousands of new housing opportunities within the existing fabric of our communities. A new niche of professional builders is already moving into this space to help homeowners navigate the process and realize this economic opportunity.
Second — and even more significantly — a new set of state-mandated rules will impact how cities do obligatory periodic updates to their local land-use codes by requiring that cities arrive at outcomes likelier to facilitate increased housing production. With this cycle of updates now imminent, cities will shortly be kicking off months of community planning meetings, public hearings, neighborhood assessments and weighing trade-offs associated with various options for new zoning requirements.
Historically, California cities often use this planning process to arrive at outcomes that foreclose new growth; this time around, cities will have to prove to the state that they are hitting far higher state targets for population growth and removing more barriers to housing project approvals. In 2020 and 2021, most California cities will undertake this process, and the result will be zoning frameworks that allow for 50% to 100% (and in our most exclusive coastal cities and neighborhoods, 10 to 100 times) more housing production than before.
But more should be done to make these changes to state law a success. For example, Gov. Gavin Newsom has committed to creating a scorecard to more effectively reward cities that remove regulatory barriers to the construction of housing. But this scorecard could also provide the state with objective criteria to designate cities out of compliance with state housing laws when they otherwise have zoned sufficient sites. Noncompliant cities would then be subject to legal action and see their state transportation and infrastructure funding withheld.
And a recent paper published by legal and planning scholars at UC Davis, UC Berkeley and UCLA compellingly argues that California’s housing department has unrealized authority to require that cities zone, not just the theoretical minimum number of sites to hit their state housing production targets but enough sites to actually yield the state targets (thus finally giving the governor the means to deliver his promised 3.5 million new homes). The paper also points the way forward for the state to wholesale prohibit cities from denying proposed residential projects that otherwise conform to their local zoning if those cities are deemed to be off-track in terms of issuing residential permits to meet their production targets.
Regulatory actions like these aren’t great fodder for press conferences and they won’t bear immediate fruit for those struggling to make rent or cover their mortgage in the New Year. But if we use 2020 to strategically tackle our long-term challenges and to double-down on the reforms we’ve put in motion, an end to the housing crisis can be realized in the new decade.
Ben Metcalf is founder and principal of Stronger Foundations, a housing consulting firm. He served as head of the state of California’s Department of Housing and Community Development for Govs. Gavin Newsom and Jerry Brown and ran the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Office of Multifamily Housing under the Obama administration.
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