Back in 2017, many breathless legal observers (including me) thought that the California Supreme Court had just opened up a major loophole in Prop 13/Prop 218 restrictions on raising local taxes. The two voter-enacted amendments to the state constitution otherwise require that any new taxes receive a two-thirds vote to go into effect.
But the Court ruled that year in California Cannabis Coalition vs. City of Upland that the supermajority hurdle did not apply to taxes put on the ballot through citizen petitions. Some legal experts and advocates pushed back on how much of a loophole the decision opened, suggesting that the case was overblown.
Now today we have confirmation that in fact the Supreme Court did dramatically scale back the two-thirds hurdle that has stymied local revenue measures.
The case at issue arose in San Francisco, where Proposition C passed by a majority, but not two-thirds, to fund homeless services through a new corporate tax. The measure was placed on the ballot by a citizen petition, so the city attorney had determined that only a simple majority was needed, based on the 2017 decision.
The Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association sued, lost and appealed, but yesterday the California Supreme Court declined to review. So barring any new cases or contrary appellate court rulings on this same issue, the case is closed, so to speak. That is, unless the voters approve a new restriction to close this loophole, as Prop 218 was originally placed on the ballot to close previous loopholes in Prop 13 based on an earlier California Supreme Court decision.
The ramifications? Any local government that wants to raise revenue for purposes like new transit or wildfire prevention could theoretically ask a nonprofit or business group to conduct signature gathering to place the measure on the ballot. Then they would only need a simple majority approval at the ballot box. In short, as I wrote back in 2017, this decision could be transformational for local “self-help” efforts to fund badly needed infrastructure projects and services.
Housing policy is at the center of all of our major societal problems in the United States:
- Care about racial justice? Restrictive housing and land use policies are responsible for our deeply segregated towns and cities.
- Climate change? Bad housing policies are the reason why so many people are forced into long, emission-spewing commutes, because they can’t afford to live close to their jobs.
- Economic inequality? Inflated home prices and rents increasingly force middle- and low-income residents into low-opportunity areas, while shutting them out of the wealth-generating possibilities of home ownership. Just to name a few issues affected by housing.
So why can’t we address the high cost of housing, particularly near transit and jobs? There are two culprits: high-income homeowners who support exclusionary local land use policies that restrict housing supply, which prevents others from moving into their communities and deprives them of the educational and economic opportunities that come with living in these areas. Second, the state and federal government is unwilling to provide sufficient public subsidies for affordable housing (though the scale of the need at this point is simply massive, especially given the country’s inability to build housing at a reasonable price).
Perhaps with these dynamics in mind, then-Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom campaigned for governor in 2018, promising 3.5 million new housing units to address the state’s severe housing shortfall. But after two legislative sessions, the Governor so far has no meaningful legislative accomplishments on increasing housing production. Like 2019, this just-concluded 2020 legislative session proved to be a bust (yes, Covid-19 interfered, but housing was one of the few remaining priorities that the legislature was committed to addressing this year).
Here are the gory details of the housing bills from the original legislative “housing package” in January that did not survive:
Assembly defeats:
- AB 1279 (Bloom): would have identified high-resource areas with strong indicators of exclusionary patterns and require zoning overrides to encourage production of small-scale market-rate housing projects and larger-scale mixed-income affordable projects.
- AB 2323 (Friedman): would have expanded CEQA infill exemptions to projects in low-vehicle miles traveled (VMT) areas.
- AB 3040 (Chiu): would have incentivized cities to upzone to allow for fourplexes in neighborhoods currently zoned solely for single-family housing.
- AB 3107 (Bloom): would have allowed streamlined rezoning of commercial land for housing.
- AB 3279 (Friedman): would have amended administrative and judicial review for various projects under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA).
Senate defeats:
- SB 899 (Wiener): would have streamlined review for religious institutions seeking to build housing on their property.
- SB 902 (Wiener): would have streamlined approval for up to 10 housing units per parcel near transit.
- SB 995 (Atkins): would have fast-tracked CEQA review for environmentally beneficial infill projects.
- SB 1085 (Skinner): would have expanded density bonus law by allowing rental housing developers to increase the size of their projects 35% if at least 20% of the units were moderately priced (rent at 30% below market rate for the area).
- SB 1120 (Atkins): would have allowed two homes on every property zoned for single-family homes in California; would have also allowed single-family properties to be split into two lots.
- SB 1385 (Caballero): would have made it easier to rezone commercial land for housing and streamline approval for projects on that land.
- SB 1410 (Caballero): would have provided rental relief through tax credits to landlords to fill unpaid rent.
It’s also worth reiterating that the senate voted down in January an amended version of Senate Bill 50 (Wiener), which would have reduced local restrictions on apartments near major transit and jobs.
And strangely, SB 995, SB 1085, and SB 1120 all passed the Assembly at the last minute, but Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon scheduled the vote too late for a concurrence vote in the Senate. As a result, the bills died.
But the news was not all bad. Some housing bills did pass, including:
- AB 725 (Wicks): requires that no more than 75 percent of a city’s regionally assigned above-moderate income housing quota can be accommodated by zoning exclusively for single-family homes, with the remainder on sites with at least 4 units.
- AB 1851 (Wicks): requires local governments to approve a faith-based organization’s request to build affordable housing on their lots and allows faith-based organizations to reduce or eliminate parking requirements.
- AB 2345 (Gonzalez): increases the density bonus and the number of incentives available for a qualifying housing project.
- SB 288 (Wiener): temporarily exempts from CEQA review infill projects like bike lanes, transit, bus-only lanes, EV charging, and local actions to reduce parking minimums, among others, until 2023 (disclosure: I helped Assemblymember Laura Friedman and Assembly Natural Resources Committee chief consultant Lawrence Lingbloom draft the parking provision, along with Mott Smith of the Council of Infill Builders).
So there we have it in 2020. A few successes, but mostly a wipeout. Perhaps recognizing the urgency after two failed sessions, Governor Newsom appeared this week to offer something of a belated endorsement of SB 50 and SB 1120, two of the more consequential bills that failed in the legislature this year:
But absent strong leadership from the Governor’s office and legislative leaders, this pattern of failure on housing production will likely continue, exacerbating all the challenges I discussed above that are affected by dysfunctional housing policy. That means we can expect worsening racial injustice and segregation, greenhouse gas emissions, and economic inequality, to name just a few, until the state can finally, meaningfully address this problem.
“Is it safe to take the bus?” That’s the question on people’s minds as we enter into the seventh month of the pandemic in the Bay Area. With ridership down, revenue across all Bay Area transit agencies has taken a huge hit that they may never recover from.
Join us on City Visions tonight at 6pm, as I host Jeffrey Tumlin, Director of the San Francisco Municipal Transit Agency (MUNI/SFMTA), to find out how MUNI is coping with all of these changes and planning for the future.
We’ll also hear from Paula Farmer, book buyer at Book Passage in Corte Madera, with her recommendations for books on racial justice, and we’ll get a Covid update from our experts Erin Allday, health reporter from the San Francisco Chronicle and Dr. Peter Chin-Hong, infectious disease specialist at the UCSF School of Medicine.
Call us during the show at 6pm with your questions at 866-798-TALK or send an email to cityvisions@kalw.org. We’re airing on 91.7 FM KALW in San Francisco and streaming live. Hope you can join us!
Imagine: a severe pandemic races through the United States, hitting cities like New York hard. Public transit is partially blamed for the spread, given that transit works best by squeezing in a lot of people in tight places to move them efficiently.
What happens next, as the virus dissipates? After a few years dealing with panic and fear of being too close to others, how will urban residents react?
In response, residents could start to abandon cities and the public transit they depend on. Americans might choose to move out of high-cost, dense transit-dependent urban areas to emerging lower-cost, western cities, built around the automobile and single-family homes. They might abandon transit forever.
The result could be catastrophic, an environmental wasteland dominated by suburban sprawl, crushing traffic, and choking pollution, with little open space or agricultural land preserved. Those left behind in cities to ride transit will predominantly be lower-income individuals who can’t afford a car or single family home – too often people of color. This dynamic will only worsen racial disparities, and transit service, already underfunded, will worsen.
But this harsh reality is actually not the future — it’s what already happened in our past. Specifically, after the 1918-1920 Spanish Flu, urban residents abandoned American cities, particularly in the East Coast, lured to the cheap housing and car culture of places like Los Angeles. Developers sold the West Coast “car suburb” to newcomers as offering an escape from disease-ridden cities. The result was the environmental degradation and ongoing racial residential segregation we see today.
To be sure, since Spanish Flu times, trends on transit have reversed to some extent. Urban rail transit launched a comeback starting in the 1960s, and cities have since been revitalized with strong demand for housing. Voters have increasingly taxed themselves to build more and better transit, particularly with local sales tax measures.
And in the Spanish Flu era, the automobile was new and exciting, but the limits of the technology were not yet widely understood. Consumers only saw the upsides of driving, not the downsides of increased traffic, pollution, transportation costs, suburban isolation and lost open space. Since that time, we’ve learned many of those lessons and implemented new environmental policies to counteract the pollution and sprawl.
But public transit is indeed in serious danger. Fear is powerful, and those with means will choose to drive or work from home instead of taking on the risk of getting the virus from transit. Those with no other option, such as people with low-incomes, service jobs requiring in-person work, or disabilities, will have no other choice, exacerbating social inequities.
The result will be a downward spiral: as ridership plummets, budgets take a hit, transit service is cut back, and the systems overall can become unappealing to lure “choice” riders back who could otherwise drive.
This future in many ways is already here, in the initial months of COVID sheltering. As Janette Sadik-Khan and Seth Solomonow noted recently in The Atlantic, ridership on bus and rail systems has already dropped from pre-pandemic levels by:
- 74 percent in New York
- 79 percent in Washington, D.C.
- 83 percent in Boston
- 87 percent in the Bay Area
We all have a stake in making sure this outcome isn’t permanent. Transit is essential for cities, as our economic and cultural engines, to function well. We also need transit to reduce driving miles and pollution and reduce pressure to sprawl. And transit can address equity concerns, by providing mobility for those who can’t afford a vehicle.
So how do we save public transit post-Coronavirus and not repeat the mistakes of the past?
First, transit officials and advocates need to address the public’s fear. The evidence on viral spread via transit is mixed at best. On its face, we’ve seen outbreaks in places with heavy public transit use, like in New York City, so the public and some scientists have superficially connected transit ridership with disease spread.
But recent studies in Paris and Austria showed no spread from transit. And looking at the geography, it’s hard to see a connection between COVID and transit:
- Hong Kong with heavy transit use has recorded one-tenth the number of cases as Kansas
- In New York, car-heavy Staten Island has had higher infection rates than transit-dependent Manhattan
- Cities in South Korea, Taiwan and Japan have had little infection compared to suburban parts of the US or Italy, where outskirts of Milan were hit harder than the city itself
In general, spread seems to be more acute in places like nursing homes and prisons and among families living together, not via transit.
Second, transit officials should point to and replicate success stories. Taipei in Taiwan provides perhaps the gold standard. Taiwan officials require mandatory mask wearing on trasit. They use noninvasive handheld or infrared thermometers to screen all riders. They test, trace and quarantine, and they clean the systems well. Transit officials also adjust service to limit crowding. All of these steps require resources in times of budget crunches, so we’ll need financial support for transit, for both environmental and equity reasons.
Third, officials can highlight the miserable alternative to supporting transit. Without transit, we would see significantly more traffic congestion, including traffic deaths (averaging about 37,000 in the US per year). We’d also see more pollution, imperiling our air quality, public health, equity, and climate goals.
Fourth, we need to boost non-automobile alternatives to transit. These options include “active” transportation, timely with e-bike sales skyrocketing and the proliferation of e-scooters. Cities can also explore employing more shuttles and vans instead of mass transit. And they can set aside street infrastructure for all of these uses, as well as offering rebates and other incentives to encourage e-bike and e-scooter purchases, to replicate success we’ve seen with zero-emission passenger vehicles.
And there looms one major, yet controversial idea to consider for the long term: replacing all rail transit with far-cheaper and more efficient automated, electric bus-rapid transit lines (ART) on the dedicated lanes of former rail tracks. This transition would harness new technology in self-driving software and improvements in batteries to save transit agencies orders of magnitude in costs for operations and maintenance compared to rail. And with rows of connected buses, ART can replicate the capacity and electric propulsion of rail at a fraction of the time to build and money to operate — timely for squeezed transit agency budgets. Now might be the time for transit agencies to study these conversions.
In the future, public transit post-COVID doesn’t necessarily have to replicate the past. But unless we act now to bolster public transit and its sustainable alternatives, we may indeed find ourselves moving backwards, in more ways than one.
Sen. Scott Wiener is back trying to boost California housing production again, after his SB 50 legislation to upzone for apartments around transit died in the State Senate in January. This time, he’s proposing a “lighter touch” approach, salvaging an SB 50 provision that would end single-family zoning across the state.
Senate Bill 902 would authorize minimum residential zoning of duplexes in unincorporated county areas or cities under 10,000 residents. Triplexes would be the minimum density for cities between 10,000 and 50,000 residents, while fourplexes would be allowed for cities of 50,000 or more.
Furthermore, while local standards on height, setbacks, and fees, etc. would remain in place, any approval for these multiplexes would be “by right,” meaning environmental review would not apply under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) and permits would not be discretionary. In addition, the bill would not apply to parcels with renters any time in the last seven years, historic structures, or high-fire zones.
But wait, there’s more — and this time with a more explicit transit and environmental hook.
SB 902 would also allow local governments the option of rezoning any parcel (including for commercial uses) for up to 10 units in density, provided the parcel is located in a “transit-rich area, a jobs-rich area, or an urban infill site.” The definition of transit-rich means within one-half mile of any rail station or major bus stop, and urban infill site essentially means a previously developed spot surrounded by existing uses on at least 3 or 4 sides. “Jobs-rich” would need to be defined by the state’s planning and housing agencies. Like the multiplex provision, all permitting for these 10-unit parcels would be by-right and therefore not subject to CEQA.
This 10-unit opt-in provision holds the most promise to boost transit ridership and reduce vehicle miles traveled (aka “traffic”), the reason the state is now falling behind on transportation emissions. By allowing an opt-in for greater density, SB 902 provides off-the-shelf tools for local governments that actually want to see more housing near transit and jobs.
That said, the problem in California is that too many transit-rich, high-income local communities want nothing to do with more density. So many of the most critical transit-rich communities (San Francisco Bay Area suburbs and Westside Los Angeles cities like Beverly Hills) likely won’t budge on this tool. Their property-rich residents are just fine with their neighborhoods as they are.
The upside for the environment on the multiplex provision is that accommodating more residents in existing residential neighborhoods could also boost transit, if those new multiplexes are near rail stations and bus stops. And if those new residents drive, at least they would presumably have a shorter commute than if they lived in new exurban sprawl communities (the primary affordable housing alternative, short of leaving the state altogether).
The potential downside is that many of these multiplexes might be in far-flung subdivisions, meaning the new residents will have longer commutes than if SB 50 had passed and they could have lived in an apartment near transit. But the SB 50 opportunity, and all the mandatory affordable housing that would have come with it, is now passed.
As for the politics on SB 902, it seems likely it will be similar to SB 50. Wealthy suburbanites that sank SB 50 will be back en masse to oppose SB 902. Labor may not like the by-right provision (they use CEQA to force project labor agreements on developers) but may appreciate the construction jobs.
The political wildcard will be equity and affordable housing groups, which helped sink SB 50. Will they care about suburban upzoning? Some of these affected areas will have low-income tenants. While as mentioned the bill doesn’t allow redevelopment with renters present anytime in the last seven years, many tenant advocates may not care. Some are even hostile to market-rate development of any type, hoping instead for a government takeover of housing production. So it will be critical to see what positions they take on SB 902, as their opposition to SB 50 provided important political cover for wealthy opponents.
In addition, will environmental groups step up to support the measure? Most were MIA on SB 50, with the exception of NRDC, ClimateResolve and a few others. Some were even opposed, cowed by the tenant group opposition or beholden to NIMBY constituents. So SB 902 gives them a fresh opportunity to finally develop a coherent position on this most pressing environmental issue.
Ultimately, if Sen. Wiener can at least limit tenant group opposition, along with the wealthy NIMBYs who may be more scandalized by the prospect of an apartment building than a triplex, he may have a chance to get the bill passed. And ultimately, it will require the governor, who campaigned on 3.5 million new housing units but has instead seen backwards progress, to step up and get more involved in the political process.
Either way, if the bill has legs, we’ll likely see many changes as it winds its way through the process of political compromise. I’ll be following them closely.
Aaron Gordon at Vice News tackles one of the most pressing subjects on transportation & climate policy: why does the U.S. absolutely suck at building public transit? Whether it’s a bus-rapid transit lane or high-speed rail, the U.S. cannot build these projects anywhere near on time or at a reasonable cost, compared to other advanced economies.
Some examples:
New York City is responsible for the most expensive mile of subway track on Earth, at $3.5 billion per mile, the first segment of the Second Avenue Subway. The second phase is projected to crush that record.
And these statistics:
“Nearly all American urban rail projects cost much more than their European counterparts do,” [transportation scholar Alon] Levy wrote in Citylab. “The cheaper ones cost twice as much, and the more expensive ones about seven times as much.” This includes both heavy rail (subways) and light rail. “Only a handful of American [light rail] lines come in cheaper than $100 million per mile, the upper limit for French light rail.”
So how does Gordon explain the ineptitude? He cites multiple factors, but the big ones seem to be the following:
- Political compromises on routes and station locations, which drive up costs and turn transit projects into “political consensus” projects — a phenomenon I observed quite clearly and documented in my 2014 book Railtown on planning and building Los Angeles Metro Rail.
- Over-reliance on expensive consultants rather than cheaper in-house expertise. This dynamic is a function of the piecemeal, start-and-stop federal and state funding for transit, which means local agencies can’t build up the expertise they need. It’s also a function (in my view) of corruption, as special interests like contractors and labor unions cut deals for big contracts with minimal oversight.
- Overlapping and poor governance in a system of hyper-local control, in which multiple agencies have jurisdiction over projects, resulting in long permitting times and costly compromises.
Gordon is short on solutions in his piece but promises more to come. Meanwhile, other scholars such as Alon Levy and researchers at the Eno Center are also working on this issue. Hopefully we can see some promising reforms get traction soon, because the present situation in the United States is unsustainable and wasteful, in multiple ways.
The San Francisco Bay Area’s population and job centers are famously divided by the bay itself, with jobs and housing on the San Francisco side accessed by commuters to the east via the Bay Bridge or the transbay BART tube. The dream for unlocking access via more transit — and possibly high speed rail — depends on building a second tube
ABC 7 News covered the most recent plans for a potential project, featuring a short clip of me:
This is a subject we covered on my very first City Visions show as a host back in 2016. Regardless of what shape it takes, one thing we know for sure is a second transbay tube will take longer and probably cost more to build than the current plans will estimate. But such a project will be critical for long-term sustainable mobility in the region.
California (and the nation as a whole) is getting worse in our efforts to reduce emissions from transportation (i.e. driving). Last week, I gave a talk in the UC Berkeley Institute of Transportation Studies lecture series on what we can do about it. You can view the recording here:
In brief, we’re failing because driving miles are up while transit usage is down, in part due to poor land use policies that pushing housing farther from jobs. We need to encourage housing near transit and encourage electric vehicle usage for all other driving.
And on the subject of how we’re failing to build enough housing near transit, you can view a recording of a January 30th symposium at UC Hastings School of Law on this topic, featuring two panel discussions (I spoke on the second) and a closing keynote from State Senator Scott Wiener. You can also read a summary of the symposium from Hastings student Leigha Beckman, who helped organize the event.
Happy viewing!
The UN climate conference in Madrid last month may have ended poorly, but conference attendees had a big success story right in front of them. Spain’s success achieving efficient – and enjoyable – land use and transportation outcomes is a model other countries and states should emulate to address climate change.
Spanish cities and towns feature many remarkable urban spaces, not unlike those found in other European countries. These areas tend to prioritize compact apartments located within walking distance of abundant transit, shops, bike lanes and jobs, with many containing pre-automobile-era narrow cobblestone streets built for people and not vehicles. Cities are often built around plazas, typically along with town halls and churches. They also protect against sprawl by prioritizing open space and agricultural land, particularly in the central and southern part of the country. Meanwhile, a high speed rail network connects most of the country’s major urban areas.
The result? While many factors probably come into play, US News in 2019 ranked Spain tops among all countries in terms of the overall happiness of its citizens. The country also ranked 18th in overall quality of life and among the top in food and culture.
You can see this effect on the ground. Spanish cities and towns are among the most walkable and enjoyable cities I’ve experienced. Particularly in the capital city of Madrid, where the UN conference was held, residents can access most destinations by transit or on foot, and the central city is closed to vehicles not registered to central city residents, while any other entering vehicle must meet low- or zero-emission standards. As a result, the Madrid city center is a quiet and clean pedestrian playground. And this same dynamic is present in cities and towns throughout the country, based on my travels there. It’s likely a major reason for the country’s success in terms of emotional well being.
This urban walkability has positive environmental effects, too, particularly on greenhouse gases. According to World Bank figures, Spain’s per capita carbon emissions is 5 metric tons, ranking it approximately 60th on the list of 192 countries, despite having a GDP per capita that ranks roughly 30th. These emission figures stand in stark contrast to the 16.5 metric tons of emissions for the average United States resident, more than 3 times as much as the average Spaniard. And even similarly developed and urban countries like Japan and Germany have almost twice the emissions per capita of the Spanish, with 9.5 per Japanese resident and 8.9 per the average German.
To be sure, some of this climate progress is due to their increasingly clean electricity grid, which has seen a significant deployment of renewables over the past decade. But smaller homes and walkability that decreases driving miles helps, too. For example, overall driving miles (or kilometers, in this case) in the country is relatively low for a developed nation, at approximately 400 billion per year. With 47 million residents in Spain, that equals roughly 8,500 km per person, or 5,287 miles per year (14.5 miles per day per person). By contrast, according to the Eno Center, the average Californian drives 50% more miles than the average Spaniard, at 8,728 miles per year, or 24 miles per day (rural states do even worse, with Wyoming at a whopping 16,900 miles per year, or 46 miles per day per person).
The lessons learned? Policy makers should design towns to maximize walkability and transit access, limit private vehicles, prioritize public spaces like plazas, and preserve surrounding farmland and open space from sprawl. Hopefully attendees at the UN Climate Conference experienced some of these Spanish practices on land use and transportation firsthand. Because the climate-friendly results mean cleaner and happier living overall, something worth achieving everywhere.
Some media appearances from me this week on a range of energy, housing and rail topics:
- “Greater LA” on KCRW radio in Los Angeles covered the conspiracy theory that auto companies dismantled the vast Los Angeles streetcar network in favor of freeways, interviewing me for the segment based on my Railtown book.
- CalMatters reported on a new state legislative analysis of California’s renewable energy program, finding significant emission reductions and many research gaps, which helps deflate a Republican proposal to pause the program (with some quotes from me).
- KPCC’s AirTalk radio program featured a live discussion on Wednesday on the proposed “California Green New Deal” legislation, which in part seeks to boost affordable housing and a just transition for workers out of fossil fuels. I was joined on the program by Sylvia Chi from the Asian Pacific Environmental Network and Christopher Thornberg, founding partner of Beacon Economics.
With the legislative session just beginning, I expect the media to continue to focus on the numerous proposals to address our ongoing energy and climate needs. Happy Friday!
