Mayor builds compromise for affordable housing mandate

Affordable housing? Low-cost housing? Subsidized housing? The words may be vague and undefined on one hand, or carry heavy emotional and political freight on the other, but all are capable of stoking polarizing philosophical arguments, as happened in the city council last week when the staff proposed updating the state mandated Housing Element at a cost of $100,000. After hearing energetic pronouncements ranging from “I’m amazed, amazed there’s not more objection to this!” to “I’ll go down in flames to defend this!” from councilmembers sitting at opposite ends of the ideological spectrum, Mayor Joanne Sanders brought the discussion back to the task at hand. She posed a compromise that four out of five could live with.
Those in favor, such as councilmember Steve Barbose, argued vehemently for the community’s obligation to “take care of its own,” and maintain a diversified, sustainable community where families can live and raise children. “Nobody with children can afford to buy a house here,” he said later. “The long term implication is you’ll have a city without children — except for children of very rich families. You’re going to have a city without young working people, where more and more people have to commute in, because they can’t afford to live here. This is inconsistent. I just feel like even without ABAG, I’d be wanting to create some housing opportunity for all segments of the population.”
The single hold-out in opposition, councilmember August Sebastiani, argued for independence from government control. “There’s a real problem there when a government’s job is to manage the finances of a community and you are building homes and selling them at an artificially low price, then they’re assessed on an artificially low price basis, but the roads and the other costs stay the same. So you, as a city, don’t get the proper revenue.”
But at issue, City Planner David Goodison explained, is the fact that the city is at the end of the seven-year planning period and is under state mandate to update the existing housing element. “Actually,” he said in a subsequent interview, “the numbers we received, in terms of our housing targets, are a little less than half what the objectives were last go round.” He explained that fair share figures start with the Department of Housing and Community Development, which comes up with an overall number for the Bay Area, and then that number is handed off to the Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG). They then come up with a fairly complex formula for breaking that number down, taking into consideration things like available infrastructure within the community, available land and whether the community’s part of a transit network. “It’s a pretty complex task,” he said.
So the problem was not that the targets themselves are onerous, or that the discussion should be about whether or not the city can or should choose to support low cost housing. Rather, the cost of the RFP seemed, to Sanders, regardless of her overall views about low-cost housing, out of line with city’s economic needs moving into an uncertain future.
“It’s not about going down in flames,” said Sanders, “it’s about working together.”
The compromise she requested would not constrain the staff, said Goodison. “We developed a RFP that was pretty expansive, that included a lot of different activities, and if the council had been interested in going in that direction, it would have cost about $100,000. But to the extent the council wants to cut back, that could certainly be reduced.”
In the end, three councilmembers, Barbose, Ken Brown and Stanley Cohen, were ready to move forward and authorize the RFP with a $100,000 cap, and two, Sanders and Sebastiani, didn’t want to spend the $100,000 – “for some similar and some different reasons,” Sanders said. She asked one of those in favor whether he would be willing to ask staff to redraft a plan that would cost a lot less and still satisfy requirements, and he agreed and staff agreed to redraft the plan and the vote went forward four to one, with councilmember Sebastiani holding firm to his objection.