Category Archives: CEQA

CEQA, Housing, Politics

The year in housing policy: State forced SF into a no-win situation (and Breed went along)

By Tim Redmond : 48hills – excerpt

Photo shot from the year that the voters stopped SB50 from going through. Since then Wiener and company have gotten better at ignoring the will of the public. There might be enough pissed off voters to take him out this year. We finally have some opponents running with other ideas of how to do his job so voters have a chance to take him out and show the other Sacramento legislators that there are other ways to govern that do not involve forcing unwanted changes on the public.

The supes did what they had to do, although a lot of them didn’t like it—but it’s not going to matter anyway.

It was a crazy year for housing in San Francisco, with the state forcing to city to adopt new rules for “constraint reduction” to comply with a new construction mandate that nobody, even housing developers, thinks is remotely possible.

The Regional Housing Needs Assessment calls for 82,000 new housing units in San Francisco, 46,000 of them affordable. (I love that terminology; it means the state wants to see 36,000 new units in the city that nobody but the very rich can afford.)

The city has six more years to reach that goal…

So now Sen. Scott Wiener, Gov. Gavin Newsom and the folks at the state Department of Housing and Community Development are going to have to deal with a basic problem:

They are asking cities like San Francisco to approve housing that doesn’t meet community needs and that developers don’t want to build…

What’s the state going to do? Penalize San Francisco for something completely out of the city’s control?

Or admit that this whole RHNA gambit was a fraud?.…(more)

RELATED:

Letter to the editor: Yes, a taxpayer can sue over the state’s housing laws by Nick Waranoff, retired real estate lawyer

CEQA, Housing, Politics

Mission ‘group housing’ moves forward, likely to cut some affordable homes

By ANNIKA HOM : missionlocal – excerpt

It could be one of the first projects to utilize a
dial-back of inclusionary units

The long game may just be starting to pan out for the developer brothers Chris and Brian Elsey.

After four years, a 149-unit group housing project at 401 South Van Ness Ave. near 15th Street moved one step closer to development on Thursday, when the Planning Commission unanimously approved a special permit the project needed.

The four-year process, however, also means the project can incidentally abandon its previous 25 percent affordability requirement and slash it to just over 15 percent, thanks to city legislation that took effect approximately two weeks ago…(more)

People are looking for proof that the state developer bills are decreasing affordable housing in the state and this is one of the first projects to take advantage of those bills. This is also proof that there is no incentive to build on these lots since the longer they wait, the better the deal gets for the owners. They started with a 20% affordable, now they are down to ten. If they wait another year, the incentives to build any will diminish along with the fees to pay for the infrastructure. Those are shifting from developers to the taxpayers. Say goodbye to your city or wait to be screwed by the state.

CEQA, Politics

Once it was hailed as a drought fix — but now California’s moving to restrict synthetic turf over health concerns

By Shreya  Agrawal  : Calmatters – excerpt (includes audio track)

IN SUMMARY: California cities can ban synthetic turf under a law Gov. Gavin Newsom signed. He rejected a bill to ban PFAS in fake lawns.

Gov. Gavin Newsom last week passed on a chance to limit the use of the so-called “forever chemicals” in legions of plastic products when he vetoed a bill that would have banned them in synthetic lawns.

His veto of an environmental bill that overwhelmingly passed the Legislature underscores California’s convoluted guidance on the plastic turf that some homeowners, schools and businesses use in place of grass in a state accustomed to drought.

Less than a decade ago then-Gov. Jerry Brown signed a law prohibiting cities and counties from banning synthetic grass. At the time, the state was in the middle of a crippling drought and fake lawns were thought to be helpful in saving water…(more)

CEQA, deregulated housing bills, Housing, Politics

These 12 secret power players are shaping the Bay Area housing market

By Susie Neilson, Emma Stiefel, J.K. Dineen and Lauren Hepler : sfchronicle – excerpt (includes audio track)

Last year, The Chronicle obtained data on almost every property in the Bay Area — about 2.3 million unique records. We were hoping the data would be a treasure trove of information about real estate ownership in the region, allowing us to easily identify who owns what, and thus pinpoint the most powerful corporate owners of rental housing.

Quickly, we learned it wasn’t so simple. California doesn’t have hard-and-fast rules on how property owners identify themselves; large corporations, hedge funds and even wealthy families often purchase multiple homes through shell companies or trusts, shielding their names from ownership records. It’s only by carefully tracing networks of ownership that one can start to grasp how much property an entity actually has.

So we redoubled our efforts. During the past year, The Chronicle analyzed these property records, which were collected from county assessors’ offices, plus nearly 7 million unique business records. We used machine learning methods to parse the data and called on dozens of experts and additional data sources. This work yielded a list of 12 of the Bay Area’s largest, most influential ownership networks. We believe this is an unprecedented effort to uncover rental ownership and management networks across all nine counties in the region: Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Napa, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Solano and Sonoma…

We still aren’t sure we’ve captured all of the Bay Area’s largest owners, but we’re confident this list of 12 includes some of the region’s major power players in residential real estate, housing tens of thousands of families in nearly 7,000 assessor-defined properties from San Jose to Santa Rosa…

Even if the owner of your property isn’t on our list, you can learn more about who owns it by using our map of nearly 2.3 million Bay Area properties here. You may read more about our methodology here.

Read why transparency matters…

Navigate to our content

One company operates thousands of San Francisco apartments. Just don’t call them a landlord

This map reveals who owns every property in the S.F. Bay Area…

Invitation Homes
Michael Marr
Greystar
Woodmont / Tad Taube
Equity Residential
John Vidovich
Neill Sullivan / REO Homes
Essex
UDR, Inc.
Tricon Residential
AvalonBay
Ardenbrook / Ardenwood…(more)

RELATED:

This map reveals who owns every property in the S.F. Bay Area

By Emma Stiefel and Susie Neilson: sfchronicle – excerpt

This tool will help you investigate your landlord or anyone else’s

To our knowledge, there has never been a centralized database where someone could see who owns any property in the nine-county Bay Area region, making it difficult to investigate connections between the powerful forces that shape the housing market for all. So The Chronicle built one.

Type in your full address, or any Bay Area address, to see who officially owns nearly any building. The map contains data on almost 2.3 million properties registered across the Bay Area’s nine counties, which The Chronicle obtained in summer 2021…(more)

CEQA, Housing, Politics

My house or my beach? How California’s housing crisis could weaken its coastal protections

By Ben Christopher : Calmatters – excerpt (includes audio track)

For more stories on inequality in California, sign up for Inequality Insights, a weekly must-read on one of California’s most pressing issues.

California lawmakers have been busy over the last decade trying to make it easier to build homes across a housing-strapped state. But there’s an 840-mile-long exception.

In an undulating band that generally runs 1,000 yards from the shoreline, the 12 members of the California Coastal Commission have the final say over what gets built, where and how.

Voters empowered the commission to protect the state’s iconic beaches in 1972, responding to a crisis of despoiled seas and the prospect of the Miami-fication of the California coast.

But five decades later, the state faces a different crisis as millions of Californians struggle to find an affordable place to call home. Now, a growing number of legislators and housing advocates are trying to wrest away some of the commission’s power…(more)

CEQA, deregulated housing bills, Housing

City Hall proposes a deal to regain control of Builders Remedy projects

by Matthew Hall : smdp – excerpt

Thirteen controversial oversized developments could be reined in if a proposed settlement goes through. The quid pro quo is the City will settle several lawsuits with the developer WS Communities. The City of Santa Monica wants to bring 13 Builders Remedy projects back into the regular development pipeline at their May 9 meeting through incentives created as part of a settlement with the developer.

City Hall has proposed settling several lawsuits with several companies related to WS Communities, the development company owned by Neil Shekhter that applied for 13 of the 16 Builder’s Remedy projects. While the cases being settled are entirely unrelated to the Builders Remedy projects, the terms include a clause that offers WS Communities incentives to drop the otherwise unstoppable projects.

WS Communities and its subsidiaries have been engaged in several lawsuits with the city over tenant harassment and the city’s leasing rules. At the May 9 meeting, Council will be presented with a settlement that covers those cases.

“The Settlement Agreement provides financial benefits for three recently displaced tenants of 1242 10th Street and guarantees them the right to return. The Settlement Agreement would also authorize the transfer of 20 deed-restricted affordable units from 1560 Lincoln Blvd to 1038-42 10th Street,” said the staff report.

However, the deal includes an additional clause independent of the leasing/harassment cases. The settlement offers WS several incentives to reenter the normal development process. It allows the developer to combine affordable housing requirements from individual projects into a single location while preserving State density bonuses that would otherwise be invalid if affordable housing were combined. It also offers increased allowable parking in their developments…

The Santa Monica Coalition for a Liveable City (SMCLC) opposes the deal saying the information presented so far lacks important details.

“This proposed settlement is essentially a mega development agreement – the biggest one in the city’s history,” said Diana Gorden on behalf or SMCLC in an email sent to Council. “Given this, there needs to be a high degree of disclosure as to what is being built and what the real-life benefits and burdens to the community will be if implemented. And there needs to be a more open and transparent process and sufficient notice than simply adding, almost as an afterthought, an administrative item to an already packed Council agenda.”…(more)

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

CEQA, Housing

Home Breaking News Groups Believe that SB 423 Will Threaten Local Democracy

Special to the Vanguard : davisvanguard – excerpt

Recently Senator Scott Wiener introduced legislation that would make SB 35 permanent…

Sacramento, CA – A coalition of communities are pushing back on recent housing proposals, and warn that SB 423, a permanent extension of SB 35, “gives developers unlimited ability to develop nearly anything, anywhere in California.”…

But for some, that means it would “permanently strip local communities of nearly all important land use decisions.”

The group calls itself Our Neighborhood Voices and describes itself as a “non-partisan coalition of residents and elected officials from every corner of California who believe that land use decisions should be determined by local communities and their elected leaders – not one-size-fits-all laws from Sacramento and for-profit developers.”

Our Neighborhood Voices is organizing to qualify a citizen-led ballot initiative that they say would “protect the ability of local communities to adopt laws that shape local growth, preserve the character of neighborhoods, and require developers to produce more affordable housing and contribute to the costs associated with it.”

Opponents note that while “the legislation – SB 423 – is touted as a tool to solve our affordable housing crisis, local elected leaders say that the legislation undermines local democracy by removing the ability of communities to plan and prepare for what is built in their neighborhoods.”

They explain, “It also can accelerate damaging ‘Builders Remedy’ projects across the state that see massive projects built in residential neighborhoods without adequate planning for water, schools, transit, safety fire danger and other priorities.”…(more)

Is there such a think as too much? Some developers clearly think the sky’s the limit when “Builders Remedy” is concerned. They have decided to test that theory with a 50 tower next to Ocean Beach in a single family neighborhood that objects to anything over 4 stories.

RELATED:

Skyscraper Plans Revealed for San Francisco’s Ocean Beach: 712 Homes, 50 Stories

CEQA, Housing, Politics

Wiener bill would kick elected officials out of critical land-use and housing decisions

By Zelda Bronstein : 48hills – excerpt

Mitts-Off

If cities don’t meet the state’s impossible housing goals, unelected bureaucrats could be approving development projects with no oversight.

State Sen. Scott Wiener just introduced a new bill, SB 423, that extends the absurd provisions of his 2017 bill SB 35. That law forces cities to approve—that is, “streamline”—certain housing projects if the number of building permits they’ve issued halfway in the eight-year Regional Housing Needs Allocation (RHNA) cycle falls short of their respective allocations.

The mandate is absurd, because cities can approve projects, but they can’t compel developers to pull building permits on projects that have been approved. Builders are not going to build if they can’t make a profit; that’s why in San Francisco right now, tens of thousands of approved housing units are not getting built.

In a further absurdity, the allocations themselves, especially the low-income numbers, are so enormous as to be unrealizable. SB 35 sets up cities to fail.

Now comes SB 423. The mainstream press has focused on two controversial aspects of Wiener’s new bill: it adds Builder’s Remedy to SB 35’s penalties, and it loosens SB 35’s requirements for employing union labor.

My focus here is on another problematic aspect of SB 423…

Here’s the relevant passage in SB 423: Section 65913.4 of the Government Code is amended to read:

…. (c) (1) If a local government government’s planning director or any equivalent local government staff, including all relevant planning and permitting departments, determines that a development submitted pursuant to this section is consistent with the objective planning standards specified in subdivision (a) and pursuant to paragraph (3) of this subdivision, it shall approve the development. …(more)

Homeowners and would-be homeowners take exception to Wiener’s claims that single family homes are immoral. The more you know about the plans to limit your lifestyle the less you like it.