Editorials
Round up the usual suspects--a mini-symposium on market-based land use planning
First, let’s take a quick look at this cheery emailed message from the Institute for Policy Studies:
“Donald Trump pulled the U.S. out of the Paris Accord this week. This is a colossal foreign policy mistake and reveals how little this administration cares about the gravest existential threat humanity has faced. But, our climate policy expert Basav Sen points out, there might be a silver lining in all of this: If the U.S. doesn’t stay in the agreement, this administration can’t use that arena to fulfill its desire to undermine global climate talks and advance the fossil fuel industry’s agenda.”
If you click on the link, you can read the supporting article, which makes a good case for why it’s better that the Trumpers are leaving the table for now.
And while we’re talking about the reading list for this weekend, take a look at Between Victoria and Vauxhall, byJohn Lanchester, in the June 1 issue of the London Review of Books.
He writes about London’s problems with overbuilding of luxury housing combined with serious underbuilding of affordable housing:
“Who should you vote for … at this general election, if you want to stop what’s obviously going to happen: the creation of a huge number of the very last things the city needs, new luxury flats under absentee foreign ownership? In the case of housing, the solution to this problem is obvious and has been known for years. It is to build more housing. … We have persuaded ourselves into a corner where governments believe they have no tools to address the shortfall in housing construction, especially social and low-cost housing. The best that successive governments have been able to do is to ‘leave it to the market’, even though the market has manifestly failed, and carries on failing, to build enough new homes.Sound familiar? This excellent article analyses the problem as if it’s the product of the British way of making local planning decisions, but in fact the same thing is happening all over the world, caused in large part by the migration of international flight capital to buying urban real estate in the glam cities: London, New York, Paris, San Francisco and the rest--and even Berkeley.
“The housing crisis is partly a question of misaligned incentives: big property companies’ main asset is land, and if an inadequate supply of houses is being built, the value of the land goes up, creating a perverse, but highly effective, incentive not to build more housing. As a demonstration of the law of supply and demand, it could not be more perfect: supply is artificially restricted, so demand surges. In plain English, there aren’t enough houses being built, so houses are too expensive for most people. This fact is well understood, but the liberal ideology of market solutions makes it impossible to adopt an alternative.
“A system which allows total primacy to economics finds it impossible to address this basic economic fact. The charity Shelter defines truly affordable housing as absorbing no more than 35 per cent of income, but the average rental cost is 47 per cent. So the average is already unaffordable. The best that can be done in the current framework is for the public sector in effect to borrow or beg for crumbs off the market’s table in the form of social and affordable housing. The legal definition of the latter is defined not in relation to pay, but as 80 per cent of the current market rate. So even the alternative to the market defers to the market. The market is very good at building luxury flats, and completely useless when it comes to solving this problem.”
Even in smaller and less glamorous Berkeley, international capital is busily engaged in devouring the prime opportunity sites near mass transit, which instead should be made available to house working people who need to be able to rely on affordable car-free access to jobs. And just as in London, the public sector is forced “to borrow or beg for crumbs off the market’s table in the form of social and affordable housing.” As Lanchester says about his English choice, who can you vote for to correct this situation?
Around here, the November elections yielded a new crop of legislators at the city and state level, and now it’s “Who Can You Trust?” time: will they put their votes where their progressive mouths went?
Don’t bet on it.
Tim Redmond, on the 48Hills blog, reports that:
“A bill that would make it harder for local residents to pass ballot measures limiting development has passed the state Assembly with almost no opposition – and so far, with almost no discussion in San Francisco, where citizen initiatives have been a powerful tool against an industry that often controls City Hall.
"AB 943, by Assemblymember Miguel Santiago, was directly aimed at the growth-limiting Measure S in Los Angeles. But it could have sweeping impacts on cities and counties all over the state. … The measure would raise the threshold to 55 percent for any community-based ballot measure that would “reduce density or stop development or construction of any parcels located less than one mile from a transit stop.”For the rest of Redmond’s story as it applies to San Francisco, see Assembly passes bill to limit land-use ballot initiatives.“That’s all of San Francisco.
“Had AB 943 been in effect in the past, it would have stopped Prop. M, the groundbreaking local growth-control measure in 1986, which won with 51 percent of the vote. It would – intentionally – limit the ability of activists to force a vote on the direction of local development.
“The limit would not apply to measures placed on the ballot by local legislators; it’s aimed entirely at community-based initiatives.
“The biggest backer of the measure is the California Apartment Association, a powerful landlord organization."
Also, don’t miss two articles that came to the Planet in the middle of last week.
From Zelda Bronstein, former Planet columnist who now usually writes for 48Hills about San Francisco: Nancy Skinner, real estate Democrat, backs three bad bills in next week's votes . She tells me that all three bad bills have now been passed in the assembly. We’ll have an update soon.
And focusing on the Berkeley picture, we have an op-ed from Charlene M. Woodcock documenting Berkeley’s dismal record preventing gentrification and suggesting what can be done about it by the newly elected city council. She says in part:
“The 12/16 figures that show Berkeley has met 278% of our ABAG quota for above-median-income housing but only 3% for low-income and 4% for moderate-income residents provide more than ample justification for a strong new policy from our city council to address this intolerable imbalance.All of these pieces are well worth reading. It is very tempting when confronted with the real threat of climate change to be suckered into more and more schemes embodying the neoliberal “YIMBY’’ child-like faith in the efficacy of markets for solving the affordable housing crisis, but it would be a mistake.
“A new policy to require 40% inclusionary low-income and family units in all new residential developments and to require all new buildings both residential and commercial to meet LEED platinum environmental efficiency standards can be made effective immediately and can apply to any project that has not yet broken ground.”
Lanchester laments the situation in his district, Vauxhall, which despite being solidly Labour since the 1950s has done nothing to solve the housing crisis. –and his M.P. was wrong on everything else too—she even was prominently pro-Brexit. He says:
"Isn’t representative democracy great?... Perhaps the most emblematic, and the most dispiriting, thing about this local contest is that our votes won’t have much effect on the things that affect us. The outcome of the Vauxhall contest in the general election will have no bearing on any of the outstanding problems facing the area: it will have no effect on the housing crisis, no effect on the hollowing out of Central London by absentee capitale", et cetera et cetera et cetera…"This is starting to read, I know, like a syllabus instead of an editorial, but problems of gentrification and the attendant housing shortage gentrification are part of a global crisis, with no simple rhetorical solution.
As long as we're doing this, two more you should read:
From Lyman Stone, Global cotton economist. Migration blogger. Proud Kentuckian:
A Not-So-Brief Thought on Zoning--I’m skeptical liberalization will boost density.
And finally, a wonky blog contribution to the Marin Post by Berkeley Housing Commissioner Thomas Lord, with interesting follow-up comment exchanges, contesting the Regional Housing Needs Assessment (RHNA), a product of the Association of Bay Area Governments.
Those of us in Berkeley and San Francisco, as eternally dominated by the Democratic Party as Vauxhall is by Labour, are representedin the State Senate by Nancy Skinner and Scott Weiner, both heavily funded by construction industry campaign contributions. No surprise, we have similar gripes like those Lancester has about London.
All together now, in the American vernacular, ain’t democracy grand? But it’s the best we’ve got, and better than any alternatives I know of. It keeps you on your toes, doesn't it?
