Editor's note: The article which follows first appeared on San Francisco's 48hills.org news site. It's relevant for Berkeley, because on Tuesday night Mayor Bates and the City Council majority managed to drag out the proceedings for such a long time that they were "unable" to vote on Councilmember Jesse Arreguin's drafted letter to Governor Jerry Brown expressing Berkeley's doubts about the proposed state legislation described in this article. One might wonder if a meeting something like the one described below also too place in Berkeley before that happened...if so, the Planet wasn't invited.
Why is SF mayor backing plan that would undermine local ability to demand more affordable housing?
I went to the strangest press conference today. Ed Lee was there; so was Ben Metcalf, who is Gov. Jerry Brown’s director of housing and community development. We met at SPUR’s downtown headquarters, at a little after 11am.
There were only a handful of reporters – me, J.K. Dineen from the Chron, Liam Dillon from the LA Times. Kim Mai Cutler showed up late.
And it wasn’t clear why we were really there – except that for the past couple of hours, Lee, Metcalf, and a group of “stakeholders” (mostly big nonprofit housing developers like Bridge, the Bay Area Council, and the pro-any-kind-of-development Housing Action Coalition, and the law firm of Holland and Knight,
which represented a tech startup illegally using space in Chinatown) had been meeting privately to figure out how to promote the governor’s plan to
allow developers to build housing without the normal community oversight.
The measure has been pending in the state Legislature, but community housing groups all over the state have tried to slow it down. It would override local laws and allow anyone who wants to build any type of housing to do that “by right” if it complies with existing zoning and has a tiny minimum of affordable housing – wiping out the ability of community groups to try to cut better deals with developers.
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