Category Archives: deregulated housing bills

CEQA, deregulated housing bills, Housing, Politics

A 50-story housing proposal is shaking up planning officials in San Francisco

By Josh Niland : archinet – excerpt

A proposed new high-rise development in San Francisco’s Outer Sunset district is standing out over its disputed manipulation of statewide density laws.

The LA Times is reporting on CH Planning‘s unlikely new proposal, which could add a Solomon Cordwell Buenz-designed 50-story tower to the neighborhood via provisions in California’s Density Bonus Law — a regulation they say allows for permitted deviations from local building restrictions to provide options for affordable housing.

“It simply defies logic that a building in a 100-foot height district seeking a 50% bonus could somehow rise to 560 feet,” Daniel Sider, chief of staff for San Francisco’s Planning Department said in a rebuke published by the newspaper. “While we agree that this site is ripe for housing, and we hope to work with the developer to achieve that, there is no provision in state or local law to permit the downtown-style building that’s been proposed.”

“The proposed project is flat out inconsistent with local zoning rules and state density bonus laws,” Rich Hillis, the city’s planning director, added. “It sets back our efforts to appropriately add housing on the City’s west side and meet our Housing Element targets. Frankly, it’s a distraction.”

(He also told the San Francisco Chronicle that CH “misrepresents what’s allowed by the planning code and state density bonus.”)…(more)

On the other hand… Atherton residents are crying foul and threatening to sue. Could they join the growing number of outraged wealthy enclaves who may turn the tide? Parts of San Mateo County are in Wiener’s district and some of them have deep pockets of cash at their disposal.
This may not only hurt Wiener. D-6, Haney’s former density district are the least satisfied with city services. They live in the dense housing model planned for the rest of San Francisco neighborhoods and they are not happy with it. Many empty over-priced units are up for grabs there. Wait until the earth begins to shake under their feet.

RELATED: Two wealthy enclaves that might fight the state:

‘Ridiculous’: Atherton residents call for revolt over housing plan revisions

This exclusive island town might be California’s biggest violator of affordable housing law

deregulated housing bills, Housing, Planning, Politics

Housing for ‘families’ or corporate rentals?

By Tim Redmond : 48hihlls – excerpt

Planning Commission approves the conversion of units that were supposed to help the housing crisis into very expensive places for short-term use.

When the Planning Commission approved a condo project at 1863 Mission in 2018, the staff wrote: The Project will add 37 units to the City’s housing stock, including 15 two-bedroom, family-sized units and will replace long vacant site that has been a blight to the neighborhood with a high quality mixed-income development.

That’s typical. We hear this over and over when developers want to build market-rate housing: Families in San Francisco need places to live.

When the supes rejected the Environmental Impact Report for 469 Stevenson, Yimby Law noted: Hundreds of families were denied housing in San Francisco because of Supervisors Gordon Mar, Dean Preston, Myrna Melgar, Connie Chan, Rafael Mandelman, Aaron Peskin, Hillary Ronen, and Shamann Walton.

But as of today, the planners have agreed that at least seven of the units at 1863 Mission will not be available for families who need housing. They will be corporate rentals, in essence high-priced hotel rooms for people who are in the city for more than 30 days but less than a year…(more)

Some of us have a different approach to the “landlord’s dilemma,” that strikes at the heart of the Tenants Bill of Rights by proposing a compromise that not only protects landlords from risky tenants, but also protects tenants from risky sub-letters, friends, family, and scammers who take advantage of the Tenants Bill of Rights. Too many cases of bad outcomes from turning temporary arrangements into long term nightmares, as depicted here: “Housemate From Hell Forces Elderly SF Artist To Move Across the Country”

We have heard a lot of horror stories about housemates and tenants from hell. What will it take for someone to step in and solve this problem? How many more rental units would go on the market if the laws that protect landlords from nightmare tenants were not curtailed? There has to be a way for people to protect themselves from predators. Which our of supervisors will solve this problem? How can we level the playing field?

deregulated housing bills, Housing, Politics

Bay Area Cities Just Lost Zoning Control. See the Wildest Homes That Could Come to Your Neighborhood

By Sarah Wright : sfstandard – excerpt

The state’s Jan. 31 deadline has come and gone, and 69 out of 109 jurisdictions in the Bay Area have failed to submit their required eight-year housing plan to the state.

Advocacy groups like YIMBY Law are already suing cities and counties, claiming they’ve violated state law by missing the deadline. But in the meantime, developers are preparing to file projects under the “builder’s remedy,” which means cities and counties cannot deny housing projects just because they violate local zoning plans.

That enticing possibility brought a crowd to Downtown San Francisco on Wednesday night, where housing advocates and architects gathered to celebrate the chance to build more aggressively and to share their dream projects.

The proposals offer a glimpse into what new developments might be popping up in cities, from Berkeley to Hillsborough, that are out of compliance with state law…(more)

deregulated housing bills, Housing

Marin Voice: County housing element needlessly supersedes carefully created community plans

By Sharon Rushton : marinij – excerpt

Last month, the Marin County Board of Supervisors adopted the 2023-2031 Marin County housing element update, as well as various countywide plan amendments related to the county’s plan for housing.

Among other consequences, these amendments needlessly eviscerate community plans, leaving areas open to development with minimal controls.

Most importantly, there is no requirement by the state that community plans must be weakened in order to achieve a compliant housing element, according to legal counsel.

Community and environmental organizations, which are located within the jurisdictions of the 26 Marin County community plans, are coordinating an effort to maintain the integrity of community plans. There is still limited time for the supervisors to reverse their mistake…(more)

CEQA, deregulated housing bills, Housing

Tensions rise between Newsom, mayors over homelessness

By Emily Hoeven : calmatters – excerpt

As voters cast ballots in the last few days leading up to California’s Nov. 8 election, who will they blame for the state’s persistent housing and homelessness crises?

Gov. Gavin Newsom’s surprise Thursday announcement — that he’s withholding $1 billion in state homelessness funding until local governments and service providers come up with more ambitious plans to reduce the number of people living on the streets — seems to serve as an implicit reminder to Californians that he isn’t the only one responsible for the state’s ballooning homeless population, which grew by at least 22,500 during the pandemic.

Newsom said the local plans would reduce street homelessness by just 2% statewide by 2024 — a figure that is “simply unacceptable.” He also slammed some regions for estimating their homeless populations would grow by double digits in four years, and said he plans to meet with local leaders in mid-November to review the state’s approach to homelessness and identify more effective strategies…

Having heard the hint loud and clear, many of the mayors of California’s largest cities are pushing back:

  • San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo told CalMatters housing reporter Manuela Tobias: “We need to put down the megaphones and pick up the shovels. … Let’s bring all the solutions in, but it’s not going to happen at a photo op. It’s not going to happen with 90 people in a room. You’ve got to have a lot of conversations with technocratic experts at the table, to try and understand exactly how you can get it done. That’s much harder work.”
  • San Francisco Mayor London Breed told Politico: Newsom is “creating more hoops for local governments to jump through without any clear explanation of what’s required.”
  • Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf told the San Francisco Chronicle: I’m “perplexed how delaying (these) funds advances our shared goals.”

The mayors also argued that their ability to address homelessness is constrained by a lack of ongoing state funding. Some have been calling on the state for years to create a multibillion-dollar permanent funding stream for homelessness, and have thrown their support behind Proposition 27 — a ballot measure that would legalize online sports betting and direct a sizable portion of tax revenue to homelessness and mental health services — for that reason. Newsom announced last week that he opposes Prop. 27…

But the state may first have to deal with a recent Superior Court decision that found state housing laws don’t apply to projects until after local agencies complete their environmental reviews under CEQA. This could allow a city to keep postponing its CEQA reviews and thus “impose an unreviewable death by delay on almost any housing project it wants to kill,” UC Davis law professor Chris Elmendorf argued in a Wednesday column in the San Francisco Chronicle..…(more)

deregulated housing bills, Housing

The SoMa project that created a furor in the Assembly race is back again

By Tim Redmond : 48hills – excerpt

Planning is trying again on 469 Stevenson, but the EIR appeal didn’t delay a project that isn’t going to be built any time soon anyway. Oh, and Yimby Law just lost.

The 469 Stevenson Project, which has created huge controversy, played a big role in Matt Haney’s election to the State Assembly, and spurred a lawsuit by Yimby Law, is back before the San Francisco Planning Commission.

The commission is going to begin to review a new Environmental Impact Report on the project December 8. That means, despite all the whining from the Yimbys and the likes of Haney, that the Board of Supes never “killed” or “took a wrecking ball” to the project. The supes just said the EIR wasn’t adequate and sent it back for revisions…

At the same time, a judge October 21 essentially tossed out the entire Yimby Law case against the city, ruling that the suit had no merit. Judge Cynthia Ming-mei Lee approved a demurrer motion, saying that Yimby Law had no case because the supes have every right to decide whether a project has an adequate EIR.

That’s an important decision, limiting the impact of the new state laws that seek to override environmental review of housing development…(more)

deregulated housing bills, Housing

Marc Benioff Calls To ‘Restructure’ SF Downtown, Adding More Housing

By Kevin Truong : sfstandard – excerpt

The walk up to the Moscone Center on Day 1 of Dreamforce had a sentimental air, with winding registration lines of techies in Allbirds or t-shirts advertising their favorite enterprise software under Patagonia vests…

The 20th iteration of Dreamforce tried to create a feeling of a return, underscored by the keynote presentation theme of “The Great Reunion” delivered by Salesforce co-CEOs Marc Benioff and Bret Taylor. As usual, Benioff played a starring role in the day’s events and used the stage to tout his commitments to the city and its recovery.

“This needs to go well so we attract more business back to San Francisco. This will be a key way of reopening downtown, reopening these areas and giving everybody a big boost,” Benioff said in an interview. “We invested a lot in Moscone, and this is the first time Moscone’s really being used. Everything is open for the first time so let’s see if this can be a great convention city.”…

Benioff said that as he traveled the country and observed the economic recovery in major business centers, San Francisco’s downtown stood out for its overwhelming reliance on office space…

“If you go to a city like Philadelphia it looks like it’s a lot more open. Why is that? Because you have office, residential, university, arts, all these things mixed in the downtown,” Benioff said, calling for “a lot more housing” in San Francisco’s downtown. “You have to rebalance, restructure, refill your downtown if you want it to feel alive.”…

And return-to-office mandates are not on the horizon: Benioff said recently at an event in New York City that “office mandates are never going to work” …(more)

RELATED

Benioff Speaks  about a number of subjects during Dreamforce week.

Being as he is one of the only tech titans standing who holds much sway in San Francisco since the out of office exit turned the downtown into a deserted nightmare of streets and sidewalks with a threat on every corner, he is one of the few people who may be able to knock some sense into City Hall. We will share a few pearls of wisdom that he handed out from a number of media sources.

““There’s no finish line when it comes to security and social engineering,” He was commenting on Uber hack and the social engineering is puzzling but, perhaps it lack context.

“Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff on quiet quitting: Do what makes you happy”

Benioff Says San Francisco homelessness is improving as City’s performance scorecard shows 3.5% decline. He backed Prop C to fund homeless projects by taxing gross receipts on corporate revenue above $50 million.

The market ‘doesn’t fully appreciate how committed we are to growth and margins’, which means acquisitions of other tech companies are on the horizon.

Marc is inspired by Patagonia founder’s giving away his company. will he do something similar?

 

 

deregulated housing bills, Housing

Are yimbys the new progressives? Only in a bizarre Wonderland

By Calvin Welch : 48hills – excerpt

The supporters of the ‘build-at-all-costs’ position ignore a half-century of history and the realities of the modern housing market

“Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

–The Queen of Hearts, in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

San Francisco yimbys have now declared themselves “as progressive as it gets” in the welcoming pages of the San Francisco Chronicle.  Claiming Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as one of their own, they are now, the article claims, engaged in “fighting inequality to protect the most vulnerable.”

Well, not really, actually, fighting but certainly “advancing progressive …policy goals.” The piece, by Bilal Mahmood, who ran for state Assembly in 2022 and lost, explains that in the future will protect the most vulnerable that remain.

What are these yimby “policy goals” and just how progressive are they?..(more)

The more you look under the covers the more obvious it becomes that the entire YIMBY plot traces its linage to the deepest darkest least transparent source of deceptive promulgation of untruths, baked into an insidious plot to spin a web of confusion around the facts. We have the documentation to prove it, but, who wants to see?

deregulated housing bills, Housing

The State’s RHNA Housing Quota days are numbered

By Bob Silvestri : marinpost – excerpt

The State’s unrealistic, dysfunctional housing regulations demand that cities and counties “build” more housing, even though 98% of California’s cities and counties don’t build any housing: never have/never will. But, for all the anti-NIMBY, gavel pounding, and stomping of feet the state’s “trickle-down-the market will solve everything” approach has been an utter failure.

Let me repeat that. The state’s approach to increasing affordable housing has been an utter failure.

New ideas have been suggested but the state continues to double down on failure. A day of reckoning is approaching.

Over the past 15 years that the state has added regulations on top of regulations, penalties on top of penalties, and even resorted to having a special task force suing municipalities for Regional Housing Needs Allocation (RHNA) compliance, California housing production today (about 1 new house for every 656 people with a population of 39.4 million) is worse, on a per capita basis, than it was when all this started with the passage of SB 375 in 2008 (about 1 new home built for every 610 people in 2008 with a population of 36.3 million). And it’s a lot less than we were building 40 years ago (about 1 new home per 265 people with a population 23.8 million).

In other words, we’re building less housing today than 40 years ago…(more)

deregulated housing bills, Housing

Court upholds density bonus law

By Bob Egelko Court Reporter : sfchronicle – excerpt

Court upholds density bonus law that exempts certain housing projects from local restrictions

A state appeals court says developers who agree to include affordable housing in their projects can be exempted from zoning rules, height limits and other local restrictions on neighborhood construction. The ruling, in a case from San Diego, has potential statewide impact as tensions over local control and the state’s housing crisis continue to escalate.

California’s 1979 density bonus law “incentivizes the construction of affordable housing,” the Fourth District Court of Appeal said in a decision it certified Wednesday as a precedent for future cases.

Once the developer commits to making a specified portion of the project affordable to lower-income households, “local government must allow increased building density, grant permits, and waive any conflicting local development standards unless certain limited exceptions apply,” Justice Judith Haller said in the 3-0 ruling.

Those exceptions include threats to public health or safety, harm to a historic resource, or conflicts with state or federal laws. None applied to the proposed 20-story project overlooking Balboa Park in San Diego, so it can be built despite opposition from some community organizations, Haller said… (more)

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