One of the interesting side benefits of SB 827 (Wiener), to allow mid-rise apartments to be built near major transit stops, is that it’s revealing exactly which interest groups have a stake in preserving the status quo of housing dysfunction and shortage.
Given the depth and breadth of the housing shortage, it’s not surprising that there are a lot of entrenched interests who benefit from this status quo. The obvious are the wealthy homeowners in coastal cities and their elected official allies.
But also in that corner are advocates for low-income renters in specific, transit-rich neighborhoods, either out of genuine concern over displacement but sometimes out of ideological hostility to market-rate housing, at least without being able to extract as much money out of it as possible for affordable units. They want to make market-rate development hard and expensive to build, so they can use that byzantine process as leverage to get a few additional affordable units built. But this is ultimately a self-defeating bid to boost affordable housing only for those few lucky enough to win the affordable housing lottery. Meanwhile, overall housing production lags, hurting low-income residents the most.
On the “pro” side are developers (who stand to profit from loosened zoning), the YIMBY groups (largely led by millennials frustrated at high housing costs), and a mix of pro-housing and climate advocates.
But in an interview with Vox.com, California YIMBY executive director Brian Hanlon pointed to another member of the pro-coalition: inland California representatives:
A lot of folks who represent more exurban areas, Inland Empire and parts of the Central Valley, they’re going to love this bill, even though it’s not going to allow more homebuilding in their areas. I spoke with one member in the legislature who just said, “I am sick and tired of these hypocritical, rich coastal liberals talking this good game on the environment, passing tax breaks for their rich constituents to buy Teslas, while not building any housing in their district. They’re displacing their middle-income people to my district, where they’re now driving an hour-and-a-half or two hours each way to get to work.”
You’re going to have some interesting alliances on this bill — folks like Ting, Skinner, and Wiener, who genuinely care about the environment and the housing crisis, along with members who represent outer districts.
Meanwhile, I still hold out hope that some of the low-income renter advocates will come around, once anti-displacement language is included in the bill. As Hanlon alludes to in the interview, the concerns particularly in Los Angeles around inadvertently weakening existing affordable housing policies are likely to be addressed through future amendments.
But in the meantime, SB 827 is finally lifting up the rock that keeps all of the dysfunction in California’s housing policy in place, with its attendant economic, environmental, and quality-of-life harm. The fight won’t be easy, but at least it’s finally getting started.
For those interested in the latest legislative updates and debates on housing and land use in California, I’ll be speaking this weekend at the Planning and Conservation League’s annual “Environmental Assembly” conference in Sacramento. I’ll be on an afternoon panel with:
- Kip Lipper, Chief Policy Adviser on Energy and Environment, Office of Senate President Pro Tem Kevin de León
- Winter King, Shute Mihaly & Weinberger, LLP
- Doug Carstens, Chatten-Brown & Carstens, LLP
We’ll discuss recent updates to the California Environmental Quality Act under SB 743, recent legislation like SB 35, as well as pending legislation like SB 827.
More details here:
What: Planning and Conservation League’s 2018 California Environmental Assembly
When: Saturday, February 24, 2018, registration and breakfast starts at 7:30 am
Where: McGeorge School 3200 5th Ave, Sacramento, CA 95817
The Sacramento Bee is running an op-ed today on line (and in print tomorrow) from me and infill builder Mott Smith in support of SB 827 (Wiener), to relax local zoning restrictions on housing near transit. The basic gist is that local control over land use has too often meant no new housing near prime transit areas, and it’s now time for the state to intervene directly.
As we summarize in the piece:
Change won’t come easy on hot-button land-use issues. But the status quo that so many groups defend drives the very problems we most need to solve – sprawl, environmental damage, transit disinvestment and gentrification.
We can only address these problems through bold action to boost California’s housing supply in the places we need it most. SB 827 is a long-overdue reform that will help the state rebuild its middle class, boost transit ridership and preserve the environment and quality of life that Californians cherish.
The bill will face some key tests in the coming weeks, particularly in the face of objections from advocates for low-income tenants. But the basic approach of SB 827 is right on and badly needed.
The Alameda Democratic Club is hosting a meeting tonight at 7pm with a panel on housing — specifically the challenges facing Alameda and the region from the statewide housing shortage. I’ll be one of the speakers on the panel, which features a wide range of viewpoints (including a member of the Alameda City Council):
- Marilyn Ezzy Ashcraft, Alameda City Council
- Victoria Fierce, East Bay for Everyone
- Paul Foreman, Alameda Citizens Task Force
- Catherine Pauling, Alameda Renters Coalition
- Jose Cerda-Zein, Realtor
Members of the public are welcome, and it will be held at the Alameda Hospital, Second Floor Room A. I’ll be sure to discuss SB 827 (Wiener) and other policies needed to address the housing shortage. Hope you can attend!
Lost riders on L.A. Metro alone, which serves L.A. County, accounted for fully 72 percent of lost transit patronage across the entire state. Those losses are even further concentrated: Remarkably, just a dozen bus and rail routes in L.A. County account for nearly 40 percent of all the vanished ridership in California.
Right now, the best explanation seems to be a staggering increase in cars on the road, owned and driven by the very people who used to ride buses, the report states. From 2000 to 2015, the population of the Southern California region grew by 2.3 million people, and the region added 2.1 million household vehicles—close to one new car for every person and a huge jump from the previous decade. In the same period, the proportion of immigrant households that own zero vehicles dropped 42 percent, and a whopping 66 percent among Mexican immigrant households specifically.
The ridership gap and vehicle usage seems to be particularly high among immigrant communities that previously were a backbone demographic for transit.
What are the solutions? One option is simply to make it more expensive to drive a car, through mileage-based fees, congestion pricing, and other taxes and fees. There’s merit to that approach, particularly if the funds generated help support transit in those corridors as an alternative.
But the other alternative is to stop forcing people to use cars as the most convenient travel option, and similarly stop subsidizing automobile infrastructure, particularly “free” mandated parking. And that all boils down to land use. People use cars to travel because their home is nowhere near convenient transit, they may have readily available free parking on-site and at their jobs (while paying for it via higher home prices and rents), and their jobs and other destinations are similarly not near transit.
So the most effective solution, as we’ve seen all over the world throughout the history of transit, is to encourage more homes and jobs near transit. It’s not really complicated: we need to build transit-oriented, walkable and bikeable neighborhoods within a convenient transit-ride of clustered job centers. Needless to say, this is exactly the goal of SB 827 (Wiener), which would lift local restrictions on growth near major transit stops.
Possibly the biggest beneficiaries in government from an SB 827 to approach to housing would be transit agencies. These agencies across the country have suffered this declining ridership over the past decade, hurting their revenues and undermining political support.
So far I haven’t heard California transit agencies clamoring to support SB 827, probably due to the complicated politics involved. But if they were honest, they would tell the public that SB 827 and similar approaches are what is truly needed to bring ridership back.
The “Gimme Shelter” podcast, a regular show dedicated to all things housing in California, interviewed me for a new episode releasing today on the tension between infill housing advocates and some environmental groups.
Specifically, the hosts, Los Angeles Times state policy report Liam Dillon and CalMatters Matt Levin, asked me about the 2017 UC Berkeley/Next 10 report Right Type, Right Place on infill housing, SB 827 (Wiener), CEQA, and other climate & housing topics. They cover other housing issues in the first half of the podcast (my interview starts about 29 minutes in).
Tune in here (and don’t forget to subscribe to their podcast if you haven’t already):
One of the common knocks on allowing new home-building near transit (as SB 827 would allow) is that it will displace low-income renters and gentrify low-income neighborhoods. The nightmare scenario for these tenants is that a developer buys and demolishes their low-income, single-family or small multi-unit building and then builds a luxury mid-rise in a fast-gentrifying neighborhood. The tenants are kicked out and can’t find comparably priced housing in their neighborhood.
But let’s explore why this dynamic might happen. A neighborhood is more likely to “gentrify” if higher-income people can’t find new housing elsewhere. They’ll buy up existing buildings in places like San Francisco’s Mission or Venice in Los Angeles, which otherwise house predominantly low-income residents.
And why can’t any of these tenants who are kicked out find comparably priced housing nearby? Primarily because local governments haven’t allowed enough new home-building, particularly subsidized affordable units, to stabilize prices and give low-income residents a chance to stay in their communities. So the current housing shortage puts displacement and gentrification on steroids.
Yet many advocates for low-income renters continually shoot down options to build new market-rate housing, even if that market-rate housing would include fees and requirements to build a certain amount of affordable units. Their argument is that the “luxury housing” that would result will only contribute to gentrification and displacement.
So what does the academic literature have to say on this subject? The Urban Displacement Project at UC Berkeley (in collaboration with researchers at UCLA and Portland State) tackled this question in a research brief last year. Here are their key findings, based on a study of the relationship among housing production, affordability and displacement in the San Francisco Bay Area:
- At the regional level, both market-rate and subsidized housing reduce displacement pressures, but subsidized housing has over double the impact of market-rate units.
- Market-rate production is associated with higher housing cost burden for low-income households, but lower median rents in subsequent decades.
- At the local, block group level in San Francisco, neither market-rate nor subsidized housing production has the protective power they do at the regional scale, likely due to the extreme mismatch between demand and supply.
The key takeaway here is that new affordable housing provides the most “bang for the buck” in terms of reducing displacement and gentrification pressure.
But the study also indicates that new market-rate housing may have three primary benefits for low-income tenants:
- It can reduce displacement pressure overall (although less so than new affordable units).
- This housing stock eventually “filters” over the coming decades into low-income housing, as it gets older and therefore less desirable to higher-income earners. As a result, it provides an investment in the unsubsidized housing of the future (most low-income residents live in market-rate housing, not subsidized units).
- New market-rate development can provide local governments with the revenue they need to fund new subsidized units, via impacts fees, inclusionary zoning, or higher tax revenue.
There’s no denying that displacement is a genuine concern, and policies to promote new housing need to take that concern into account. But opposing new market-rate housing, particularly near transit, is not a solution. In fact, it’s part of the problem.
Housing more Californians near transit and not in sprawl areas represents one of the most crucial ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Senate Bill 827 (Wiener) would help do just that, by preventing local governments from zoning people (and homes) out of these prime transit areas. So it was surprising to see an environmental organization like Sierra Club California come out against the bill (here is a PDF of their letter).
Just how high are the environmental stakes of SB 827? Berkeley Law, together with the Terner Center and Next 10, recently analyzed the impact of putting all new residential development in California through 2030 within three miles of transit or in low-vehicle miles traveled neighborhoods (areas without rail but where residents drive at low rates) and found the following impacts:
Annual reductions of 1.79 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions compared to the business-as-usual scenario, which is the equivalent of taking 378,000 cars off the road and almost 15 percent of the emissions reductions needed to reach the state’s Senate Bill 375 (Steinberg, 2008) targets from statewide land use changes.
Significantly, the geography we examined was farther from transit than what SB 827 encompasses, which only covers up to one-half mile near major transit. So the greenhouse gas savings and air quality improvements from building new homes near transit will be significantly greater under SB 827.
So why would Sierra Club oppose what is arguably the state’s most important climate bill this term (as the New York Times couches it)? Let’s go through their arguments:
First, they argue the SB 827 will fuel neighborhood opposition to new transit. Why would neighbors want to support a new rail line, Sierra Club argues, if it will force them to allow new people in their community who will want to live near it? Perhaps the Sierra Club doesn’t realize it, but they just made an important point in favor of SB 827. The better question is: why should we build expensive new rail lines through low-density communities, when they refuse to provide the ridership necessary to support these taxpayer investments? SB 827 is actually a great way to weed out bad rail projects with weak ridership in favor of more sensible transit investments, like bus-only lanes or rail in areas that can actually support it.
Second, they argue that bus routes and service changes all the time, so frequent transit service now might be reduced, leaving SB 827-style dense development underserved by buses. But if you look at the maps of bus routes served with 15 minute peak headways, they cover major arterials that would be among the last places a transit agency would peg for service reduction, like Van Ness Avenue in San Francisco and Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles. And if Sierra Club is really concerned about service reductions, why not recommend an amendment that the bus routes must have been in service at 15 minute commute headways for a minimum period of time for SB 827 to qualify? Otherwise, this seems like a weak reason to oppose the bill outright.
Third, they are worried about displacement of low-income renters near transit. As I’ve blogged before, this is a legitimate yet overblown concern. Gentrification and displacement is happening now like crazy, precisely because we’re not building enough housing overall. Furthermore, developers will build in upscale transit areas where they can get higher returns, not in low-income neighborhoods. For example, a UCLA study examining low-income neighborhoods around the Blue Line light rail from Downtown Los Angeles to Long Beach showed virtually no investment in these areas, despite some very relaxed local zoning.
But if Sierra Club is truly concerned about displacement, why not recommend policies to address it in the bill, such as requirements for inclusionary zoning or density bonuses? Instead, they offer no solutions, while failing to recognize the massive displacement already occurring due to the existing housing shortage. My question for Sierra Club: what do they propose to combat the gentrification and displacement currently happening now? And where do they want new homes to be built, if not in these prime transit areas?
Fourth, they argue for more incentives on growth instead of a state-based approach like SB 827. But incentives only go so far when you’re up against well-heeled homeowner groups who will vote out elected officials who don’t toe the exclusionary line. What incentives does Sierra Club believe might entice Westwood to upzone their single-family zoning around the Expo Line? Or Rockridge around its BART station? Let’s face it — local control in transit-rich, upscale areas mean the forces of exclusion win. Hence the critical need for approaches like SB 827.
Finally, Sierra Club complains that some of these new buildings near transit won’t need to undertake environmental review under the California Environmental Quality Act, based on last year’s SB 35. This is a bit of a convoluted argument. SB 35 only applies to jurisdictions behind on affordable housing production. The projects that are then eligible for SB 35 CEQA streamlining must otherwise meet strict requirements and be compliant with local zoning, including providing a significant amount of affordable housing on-site (addressing the displacement concerns Sierra Club raised earlier). So the universe of projects that escapes CEQA review under SB 35 is already pretty minimal.
But more importantly, if you follow this line of argument, now that SB 35 is in effect, Sierra Club is basically saying they won’t favor any zoning changes to allow new housing in communities that are behind on producing affordable units because it might mean CEQA doesn’t apply to projects consistent with that zoning. I don’t think that’s a position Sierra Club really wants to take.
Overall, Sierra Club California appears to be at a reputational crossroads here on smart growth. Their image on this issue took a big hit when wealthy property owners used the San Francisco chapter to oppose new housing in the city, precisely the low-carbon area where new housing should go. So is Sierra Club an organization of wealthy homeowners who want to keep newcomers out of their upscale, transit-rich areas? Or are they actually committed to fighting climate change by providing enough housing for Californians in low-carbon, infill areas? Because their opposition to SB 827 unfortunately indicates more of the former than the latter.
If passed as is, SB 827 (Wiener) could have a big impact on neighborhoods adjacent to rail and major bus transit in California by requiring local governments to relax development restrictions there. But simply stating “one-quarter mile” or “one-fourth mile” radius from these stops is not that helpful for most people to visualize where the affected neighborhoods are located, particularly when the bill currently includes some areas with “transit corridors” — and not just transit stops.
Fortunately, a tech-savvy (former Redfin CTO) SB 827 fan with time on his hands developed a very useful interactive map. If you live in California (or interested in what happens here), you can now click on Sasha Aickin‘s map and see how any particular city or county might be affected by the bill.
But perhaps more importantly, regardless of what happens with SB 827 during this legislative process, the map shows the battleground in California where we desperately need more housing to be built. All of the highlighted areas are prime transit-oriented spots, where residents can easily bike or walk to access transit. Study after study shows that development in these areas is what makes or breaks transit ridership.
And for a place like California, with its longstanding housing shortage, it also shows where badly needed new residential development would be most appropriate from an environmental perspective.
Happy viewing!
Scott Wiener’s revolutionary SB 827 proposal to ease local restrictions on transit-oriented development is part of a growing legislative trend to tie development incentives to proximity to major transit stops. These stops are defined to include those with frequent bus service. As a result, some pro-growth advocates worry that NIMBYs will respond by lobbying their transit agencies to decrease bus service in their neighborhoods so developers can’t access these benefits and build more in their area.
But what about the opposite problem, where developers lobby transit agencies to increase bus service, merely to get some of the permit streamlining and density boosts that would follow? The danger is that transit agencies would comply, perhaps as a favor to a politically connected developer, but the project at issue wouldn’t actually be transit-oriented or otherwise justify the increased transit service.
And a worse situation might involve the transit agency increasing bus service only temporarily to qualify the project for the land use and permitting benefits, and then later reduce the service. The consequence could be a type of “density sprawl” with projects that wouldn’t serve transit (or have transit serve them) and instead increase overall driving miles and pollution.
To be clear, we want to encourage development near major bus stops. And this policy trend of tying incentives to transit proximity started before SB 827. For example, SB 375 (Steinberg, 2008) provides permitting relief through streamlining provisions under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) for projects within 1/2 mile of a major transit stop, including frequent bus stops. Similarly, SB 743 (Steinberg, 2013), also relaxes CEQA’s transportation impact analysis for projects in these areas.
But both possibilities of manipulating bus service either to 1) avoid new development in the right transit-oriented areas or 2) facilitate car-oriented projects in less transit-friendly areas would be bad.
What’s the solution? Transit agencies will need to develop strong and transparent standards governing their decisions about when to expand or retract major bus service (defined as 15 minute peak headways during commute times). Follow-up state legislation could potentially accomplish this outcome by mandating such standards on local transit agencies (something these transit agencies would probably hate). Or transit agencies that don’t already have such policies on the books could adopt such standards on their own, perhaps using some best practice examples from around the state and country.
Right now, I don’t think this kind of transit service manipulation is a serious problem, although I’ve started to hear some anecdotes from local transit agencies. But if SB 827 passes in anything like its current form, it may become an issue that policy makers at either the local or state levels will need to address.
