Vote NO on Peskin’s resolution (update)

UPDATE: Resounding Victory! YOU came out in force (public comment starts at 2:28:00). Both resolutions (Wiener’s and Peskin’s) were sent to committee yesterday. That means both resolutions are going to be heard on some Monday afternoon at the BoS Land Use Subcommittee. Sign up here or here for updates.

Dear Board of Supervisors,

Please vote NO tomorrow on Peskin’s resolution regarding Governor Brown’s By Right bill, and YES on Wiener’s resolution.

Peskin’s resolution contains bad ideas.

FURTHER RESOLVED, That the Board of Supervisors of the City and County of San Francisco does hereby urge the San Francisco Legislative Delegation to offer amendments to the By-Right Housing Approvals Trailer Bill and an amendment that states the By-Right Approvals pre-emption shall not apply to jurisdictions whose “performance” of housing production for very low, low and moderate income residents constitutes at least 25% of its total housing production,

Here, Peskin proposes that localities that produce 25% subsidized housing be exempt from by right multi-family development. The idea here is that some localities are doing their fair share, housing wise, and so they should be exempt from the governors’ law, which is meant to spur housing development.

It might be the case that there are some CA localities that are prudently and responsibly using their local powers, and building fast enough to accommodate the need for housing in their communities. Fresno, for example. The median rent in Fresno is $891, that’s lower than the US Median rent, $934/ mo and Fresno’s vacancy rate is 5%.

Peskin’s criterion (percent subsidized housing produced), however, doesn’t have anything to do with whether a locality is building responsibly. Peskin’s amendment would exempt Palo Alto. 27% of Palo Alto’s 150 new housing units per year are affordable to median income people or below. Peskin’s amendment would also exempt such well known leaders in affordability and access as Los Altos Hills (46% affordable), Sunnyvale (53% affordable) and Monte Sereno (67% affordable). Clearly, localities that are opposed to growth easily meet the 25% Below Market Rate standard by hardly building anything, and thereby prove how useless it is as a standard.

If the Board of Supervisors wants to pass a resolution asking for a criterion that would exempt a city from By Right development, the data point should be the city’s vacancy rate. If a city has a 8% vacancy rate, the city arguably has “enough” housing, by the ordinary understanding of enough. SF’s vacancy rate is less than 3%.

require approved development projects to begin construction within 180 days,

Anyone who is older than 8 years old remembers the last economic crash. Projects entitled before (and during) the crash had to wait for financing to come back before they could start being built. If entitlements expired in 6 months, as Peskin proposes here, instead of projects being able to start building as soon as financing came back, they would have to restart the (expensive) entitlement process as the economy improved. This suggestion is a guaranteed way to suppress the creation of housing at the time when the economy needs it most — at the end of a bad economic cycle.

the City and County of San Francisco does hereby urge the San Francisco Legislative Delegation to oppose the Trailer Bill, as it would restrict critical local jurisdiction discretion regarding multi-family housing development,

The whole point of the Governor’s Bill is to restrict local jurisdiction discretion regarding muti-family housing development. The reason it is necessary to restrict local discretion is that our 4 decade experiment in allowing local discretion has yielded the following result: devastating housing crisis.

Does the City and County of San Francisco want Cupertino, Palo Alto or Sunnyvale to continue to have local discretion regarding multi-family housing development? How has that been going for SF, or the Bay as a whole? Peskin’s proposed amendment, because of its ridiculous and easily gamed performance criteria, would guarantee that those Peninsula cities would continue to aggressively export their housing needs to San Francisco and San Jose.

Local discretion is a failed experiment. It benefits home owners and landlords like Peskin (who naturally is trying to preserve it). It damages renters, aspiring home owners, and anyone who has employees and is trying to build a business. It increases housing costs and thereby inflates the general price level. If local discretion was a valuable tool for increasing affordability, then SF would be affordable, but it’s not.

Vote NO on Peskin’s resolution. End the local discretion experiment.