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Housing has become an intractable problem in California with no seeming solution. After spending tens of billions of dollars to improve homelessness and housing affordability, the situation only has gotten worse in our state. From the one million people who have left the state over the last five years to the humanitarian crisis of so many living on our sidewalks, it is easy to feel hopeless.
A problem of this magnitude—with a million Californians now rent-burdened—requires a new paradigm. When a problem rises to this level of severity, bold action is needed.
It is hard to believe that throwing more money at housing will be magical. Sweeping homeless encampments doesn’t make homeless people go away; it just pushes them somewhere else. It may provide immediate gratification to try anything even if it doesn’t work, but if we are serious, we have to look at root causes and make changes from the bottom up.
First and foremost, the supply of affordable housing must increase. This entails preserving the current stock of affordable units instead of depleting it. We have to stop tearing down affordable housing and replacing it with luxury buildings. We can’t allow runaway rents to displace more and more people. We must rehabilitate older buildings and repurpose them for permanent housing. We must bring down the cost of new construction. Government must play a much larger role as the funder of last resort to keep poor people housed.
There is a vital role for the market to play in housing, but it cannot, has not, and will not provide for everyone in need. That is the job of government. How can we have faith in government if it cannot handle the basics like ensuring that everyone is housed?
A new paradigm must embrace the principle that housing is a human right. Further, it cannot be ruled solely by profit motive because there are those who require added assistance. Incentives must be aligned so that the private and community sectors have a compelling desire to contribute to a solution.
Among the many daunting challenges that American ingenuity has solved are some less difficult than our current housing crisis. Most people in the United States today have health coverage. Most forms of discrimination have been eliminated legally, if not always in practice.
Making housing available and affordable is within our capabilities. If California’s ultra-rich can find ways to build hidden mansions beneath Los Angeles (so-called “iceberg homes” with plush “McBasements”), the rest of us can find ways to build affordable housing units for Californians in need.
It’s not rocket science. There are basic ways to solve the problem. Rent control is the most important, since it protects existing tenants from being displaced. Next is requiring luxury developers to include at least 25 percent of their units as low-income. Then, we need to increase housing subsidies, make it easier and cheaper to build new low-income housing, and stop the destruction of existing rent-controlled units.
Billionaire corporate landlords will fight back against even the most common-sense solutions. Represented by the California Apartment Association, corporate landlords and their political allies in Sacramento will try to kill rent control and other renter protections, while continuing to favor luxury housing over housing for the rest of California.
But their obstructionism cannot compete with the will of millions of voters who support Proposition 33, which can expand rent control in California this November. The people will speak up in 2024, and that will make the ultimate difference for our state.
Michael Weinstein is the president of AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF), the largest global HIV/AIDS organization, and AHF’s Healthy Housing Foundation.
“First and foremost, the supply of affordable housing must increase. ” Well…maybe. Currently, there are more vacant homes in the US than homeless. I’ve read San Francisco has five times as many vacant homes as its homeless population.
There are very old drivers of this situation. First, Richard Nixon stopped the federal government from building affordable homes. JFK and [governor] Ronald Reagan evicted the mental asylum patients without providing transitional housing, although an LA study discloses the majority (58%) of homelessness stems from rents rising faster than incomes. [President] Reagan, as he was cutting taxes for the wealthy roughly in half, with his successor raised payroll taxes eightfold, and cut HUD’s affordable housing budget by 75%. Public policy matters, not just building new homes.
You might also take a look at https://ggwash.org/view/78164/how-public-housing-was-destined-to-fail for the long view.
My suspicion is that people believe poverty and homelessness is result of poor choices, not bad luck. Poor and homeless people are therefore subject to neglect. Hey! They’ve “earned” it.
A family member was in the philanthropy business and met lots of wealthy people. His comment: “Ninety percent of these guys were born on third base, but they all want to act like they hit a triple.”
The arrogance speaks for itself here.
From Google’s AI:
As of 2021, San Francisco had over 61,000 vacant homes, which is about 15% of all housing units in the city. This was a 52% increase from 2019, when there were about 40,000 vacant homes.
The number of vacant homes in San Francisco is higher than the median of 10% among other major cities. The vacant homes include:
Occasional use homes: These include vacation homes, pied-a-terres, or short-term rentals.
Other vacant units: These include foreclosed units, homes belonging to people out of town, and homes in probate or inheritance limbo.
In 2022, San Francisco voters approved a vacant home tax, which is considered one of the strongest in the world. The tax was created in response to high housing costs and homeowners who live elsewhere. The goal of the tax is to encourage owners to fill their empty homes.
BTW, current PIT count is a little over 8000 people. However the vacant houses doesn’t address affordability.
Rent control is not the answer. It’s a simplistic solution for those who fail to understand the complexities of the housing market. This recent meta study of research on rent control highlights the adverse effects of rent control:
https://www.multifamilydive.com/news/rent-control-development-construction-survey/727682/
Research points to the downsides of rent control
A new review of over 100 studies shows a variety of negative impacts around policies that regulate rent.
Better solutions probably include “use it or lose it” policies for buildings and land within city boundaries similar to the land use laws in Germany.
An underlying problem is the incentive to stay overlong in a house arising from Prop 13 limitations, but we probably can’t ever resolve that. (Unfortunately a case poorly argued before the Supreme Court in 1997 locked in those protections.) Those protections also increase the price of housing by at least 15% (when I last calculated it) and probably more. In San Diego, the average residency has risen from 7 years to 13 years over the last two decades.