On November 12, 2018, California’s Democrats stared down a remarkable opportunity. They had not only snagged a legislative trifecta—both houses of government and the governorship all from the same party—but a supermajority. With the two-thirds of votes in place needed to approve fiscal policy, and an incoming governor who promised to make housing his top priority, anything seemed possible.
“Expect them to swing for the fences,” predicted Los Angeles Times columnist George Skelton shortly after the landmark election.
They swung—and they struck out.
Democratic lawmakers hold the fate of the state in their hands. But six months in, May might very well go down as the worst month in California’s housing policy history.
It seemed, at first, like May might have been a turning point. Over the last few weeks, up and down the state, cities posted double-digit increases in their annual homeless counts. Promising a major initiative to tackle the problem, Gov. Gavin Newsom created a task force to study potential homelessness solutions.
Meanwhile, a half dozen bills designed to alleviate the crisis began making their way through the legislature. State housing bills don't often make national headlines, but news out of California makes the Golden State a poster child for untenable inequality.
The data reads like a pitch for a dystopian blockbuster: One out of every 11,600 San Franciscans is a billionaire, while one out of five Californians lives below the poverty level. In Los Angeles, housing costs have increased so much that the typical renter cannot afford the average rent, exacerbating the gap between the rich and the poor.
Two-thirds of California voters supported Senate Bill 50, which would have increased building heights around transit and may have started to change that narrative by spurring more housing. But the bill was shelved by one of Southern California’s own.
“This isn’t the right fix at this time to do that,” said Sen. Anthony Portantino, who held up the bill as the chairman of the appropriations committee.
Portantino’s district is threaded by the Gold Line along its southern border, and includes wealthy cities like La Cañada Flintridge, which, while he served as its mayor, did not build a single apartment.
Whether it was the “right fix,” because the discourse was dominated by wealthy homeowners moaning about SB 50 (and the lawmakers who listened to them), it’s possible that many Californians failed to grasp the importance of legislation with basic rental protections to keep more people out of homelessness. A number of bills, if passed intact and made law, might have started changing lives immediately.
One by one, the other housing bills—like Assemblymember Richard Bloom’s Assembly Bill 36, which would have loosened the state’s existing rent control restrictions, and bills that might have protected tenants’ right to organize and made it tougher to evict tenants for no legitimate reason—all toppled like dominoes.
Only Assembly Bill 1482 survived, but it was gutted. A cap on rent hikes now offers three years of protection instead of the original 10, making it too watered-down to be as effective as intended.
And where was the governor, who wants to create 3.5 million homes for Californians? His staff falsely claimed he had expressed legislative support for the suite of bills that would help renters stay in their homes.
“He’s asked them to move every single one of these bills,” Newsom’s chief of staff said. He hadn’t, the same way he hadn’t expressed support for Proposition 10, the rent control-strengthening ballot measure to repeal Costa Hawkins, which, had it passed, would have prevented much of the May massacre.
Amid the carnage, a few housing bills did advance—including a tax credit for people who own historic or architecturally significant buildings. Sen. Toni Atkins, the president pro tem of the senate, the only person who had the power to reverse Portantino’s decision, brokered a deal not only to preserve the state’s most expensive real estate, but to give the state’s wealthiest homeowners additional money to do so.
The irony was too painful to bear. But these state bills don’t represent the only failure in government. At the city level, May was even worse.
The first HHH-funded building opened on Thursday, 933 days after Los Angeles voters approved the ballot measure that was promised $1.2 billion bond to tackle its home-grown homelessness crisis. The slower the city moves, the fewer units will be produced: Once intended to fund 10,000 units of supportive housing, the HHH figure might now be closer to 6,000, due to increased construction costs and neighborhood opposition.
Even 6,000 units won’t be enough. Local homelessness numbers will be released next week, and we already know, according to a statement from the mayor, to also expect “some double-digit increases.” That’s with the city housing 16,500 people.
Even with last year’s count showing a slight decrease, with 31,516 homeless residents in the city of Los Angeles, the most conservative double-digit increase would mean that over the last year, at least 10 more people became homeless in LA every single day.
If it takes the city almost 1,000 days to build 49 permanent supportive units, that math isn’t going to work. The estimated 600,000 LA County residents who are spending 90 percent of their income on rent will become next year’s homeless. And still, some members of City Council—who unanimously opposed SB 50—still can’t bring themselves to build 222 units of supportive housing by next July. Additionally, 15 emergency shelters were supposed to be open or under construction by now. Only four have opened.
Yes, the transit-oriented communities program shows promise in experimenting with inclusionary zoning, but not a single one of those projects has been completed yet. Yes, the number of ADU permits skyrocketed, but we don’t know if, ultimately, those structures will become housing—or backyard yoga studios. And with rising costs of construction, it’s not clear how many of those units will be delivered to the rental market.
If we continue to rely on a handful of the wealthiest California property owners to keep the lives of tens of thousands of Angelenos intact, there will be no immediate solution to this problem.
The crisis calls for dramatic measures, words that have not been uttered in Los Angeles City Council chambers: vacancy tax, land tax, billionaire tax, rent freeze, universal basic income (like the program being tested in Stockton). Modular shelter structures that can go up within a week. Mandatory safe parking provided on every city-owned parking lot.
We don’t need 15 bridge housing facilities—we need 1,500. You don’t get to divvy up the impact of the crisis by 15 councilmembers and dole out gold stars to the handful that build emergency shelters.
These are not new ideas, and they are not particularly controversial in other cities and states. New Orleans reduced its homeless population by 90 percent with a combination of housing-first outreach and a rental-assistance fund. Minneapolis passed a law legalizing fourplexes citywide. California’s housing bills were inspired in part by Oregon’s similar policy package that passed sweeping tenant protections in March.
In the middle of California’s very bad month, New York Times columnist Farhad Manjoo surveyed the situation in appropriately dire terms: “The problems of affordable housing and homelessness have surpassed all superlatives—what was a crisis is now an emergency that feels like a dystopian showcase of American inequality.”
Manjoo blamed wealthy liberals. Slate’s Henry Grabar blamed Boomers. The tech industry is always easy to blame. But as San Francisco-based housing advocate Randy Shaw told the Bay City Beacon, the blame lies squarely on the supermajority: “It wasn’t the Republican party that destroyed this,” he said. “It was all Democrats.”
The blame must be levied at those in power, who hold the power to protect their constituents. Children, immigrants, students, veterans, older adults, people living with disabilities—these are the people who are facing eviction, harassment, chronic illness, hunger, and death. Today, in their districts. Serving the poorest and most vulnerable Californians should be the sole priority of our lawmakers right now. It’s clearly not.
Comments
Notwithstanding the statistical stupidity of comparing the ratio of billionaires in SF to the ration of homeless in the entire state (hey! over 90% of pro basketball players are African American, while the population at large is only 30% [or whatever] it is interesting to see how flat the liberal left falls on its collective face with all that control. For that matter, what percentage of San Franciscans leave their feces in the streets as compared to populations in other cities and towns, I wonder.
Interesting, but not surprising – it’s all about the money…NIMBYs who don’t want to see their property values fall (and who can blame them?) making it unlikely that high rises will be built along mass transit corridors.
Sadly, the aphorism "results don’t matter, intentions do" applies mightily to the bureaucrats who pontificate on their plans and fall flat on delivery.
By f8lee50 on 05.31.19 4:14pm
"Interesting, but not surprising – it’s all about the money…NIMBYs who don’t want to see their property values fall (and who can blame them?) making it unlikely that high rises will be built along mass transit corridors."
Newsflash: Property values actually RISE when land zoned for single-family housing is re-zoned for high density or multi-family. The potential profits from developing that land go way up, because they can build more units on it.
By Whitman Lam on 05.31.19 4:50pm
I agree. And homeowners know it too. I feel their resistance to SB50 was actually a sincere desire to protect the character of their single-family neighborhoods, even knowing their homes would have been worth more if it passed. Most of them fully embrace the idea of high-rises on commercial corridors. There are plenty of high-density development opportunities all along the Purple Line path on Wilshire Blvd that can be built without destroying the surrounding communities. Many of those communities have rent control apartments that would have been pummeled under SB50 for expensive luxury apartments that would have exacerbated the affordability problems.
By GhettoRalphs on 05.31.19 5:01pm
Are you a renter?
By Transplant Trash on 05.31.19 6:31pm
"There are plenty of high-density development opportunities all along the Purple Line path on Wilshire Blvd that can be built without destroying the surrounding communities."
Except that many of them equate difficulty in finding free on-street parking with "destroying their communities" regardless of whether the tall/dense residential buildings are not located on their particular block.
By disqusted on 06.03.19 2:32pm
Newsflash: no it doesn’t. Having ugly apartment buildings towering over your single family residence decreases its value and eliminates any semblance of privacy you once had. Stop lying.
By Transplant Trash on 05.31.19 6:25pm
Decreases in value to who? Just your personal feelings/Sentimental value? The vast majority of properties affected by SB50 would only be converted to 3 Plexes and 4 Plexis at the most.
Apartment developers will be knocking on your door, with ca$h in hand, to buy your single family home for $Multi-Millions$ so that they can build a similar Apartment building.
By Whitman Lam on 05.31.19 8:22pm
You can keep your SB50 wet dreams in your developer panties where they belong.
Sacramento will never dictate local zoning no matter how horny developers are to knock down SFRs in California. If you want to be surrounded by disgusting apartment buildings, you have the entire east coast to enjoy
By Transplant Trash on 05.31.19 8:44pm
Transplant brings up a good point. Why is California trying to be like New York. Be more creative Angeles. Super majority- Dems or Republicans, should not have that much say so.
By Wackyone1968 on 06.01.19 8:34am
Don’t ask me. I have always wondered why so many people from New York and the East Coast move here because it’s so different from where they came from and now want to fuck it up like a generic east coast place
By Transplant Trash on 06.01.19 8:43am
Most New Yorkers are actually moving to Miami because it’s walkable, vibrant night life, and more like home.
By Whitman Lam on 06.02.19 9:45pm
Good, most people are not amputees and can walk
By Transplant Trash on 06.03.19 5:51am
Yes, Manhattan is about 23 square miles in size; L.A. is 502. So walking to work or to the grocery store or to entertainment is much more doable in NYC.
By Another PJ on 06.02.19 4:51pm
By Kermit Kardashian on 06.01.19 1:07am
Be smart
By Transplant Trash on 06.01.19 4:30am
Your mother
By Kermit Kardashian on 06.02.19 11:20pm
"Newsflash: Property values actually RISE when land zoned for single-family housing is re-zoned for high density or multi-family."
Yes, but that is an unrealized gain. And if you had your way, and eliminated Prop 13, then it would still be an unrealized gain me, but a massive windfall for the tax collector.
By Westcork on 05.31.19 7:48pm
How is it an unrealized gain? Do you understand the concept of home equity? If you need lots of money with a relatively low interest rate, you can take out a Mortgage for the increased value. If you just need a steady income source without the debt burden …. you can get a Reverse Mortgage.
Want to try your hand at being a property developer/landlord ?…. find some investors to fund your project, use the SB50 guidelines to build an apartment, or divide your house into Fourplexes (The vast majority of properties affected by SB50 would only be allowed to convert to 4 Plexes) and rent them out to tenants.
There’s a lot more opportunity available than just keeping it as a single house on a 3/4 acre lot.
By Whitman Lam on 05.31.19 8:33pm
Only idiots recommend reverse mortgages
By Transplant Trash on 05.31.19 8:46pm
100% correct. Property values rise when there is housing around transit. New York is prime example. That’s what affordable housing advocates fear.
By Wackyone1968 on 06.01.19 8:17am
@ f8lee50
How exactly does your claim fit into this conversation?
FYI, Please refrain from using Far Right talking points like that in here, Otherwise you might come across as one of those "Diversity =White Genocide", "Racial and Cultural Homogeneity is the bedrock of Western Civilization" or "Immigration = White Replacement" talking heads like Stefan Molyneux, Jason Kessler, or Lauren Southern.
Please do not steer this conversation down that very toxic path.
By Whitman Lam on 06.01.19 2:52pm
I think he meant that the author is citing a spurious relationship between her variables, like the ratio of billionaires to homeless. He was using the basketball ratio as an example. So it does fit in to the discussion.
By Another PJ on 06.02.19 2:35pm
Based on daily articles in Curbed, Urbanize, LA Times, and others, Los Angeles is in the midst of a major building boom. New developments are sprouting up all over the Valley, DTLA, West Adams, Mid-City and elsewhere. So it looks like L.A. is already leading the state in development – far better than San Francisco where these real estate industry lobbyists bills were hatched. This Curbed editorial is completely biased (against homeowners, many who are not wealthy), and ill-informed. Perhaps the author should read the legitimate economist studies proving that all SB50 would have accomplished was to displace lower-income and middle-income apartments to create ultra-luxury dwellings.
By GhettoRalphs on 05.31.19 4:30pm
LA has built a lot of housing, but in the grand scheme is barely anything. If you actually read those articles, it would tell you this. It’s like saying if every city built 3 units, LA built 4. That’s nothing to celebrate. Further, SB50 would have not created ultra luxury housing. Again, if you actually read the bill instead of spreading disinformation, you’d know this.
By RPViews on 06.01.19 7:30am
We built enough housing and there will never be enough housing to make an expensive Pacific coastal city like Los Angeles affordable to a person who makes the minimum wage. It’s just never going to happen. Deal with it.
By Transplant Trash on 06.01.19 8:27am