A list of anti-displacement housing bills
By: Gil Rodan
Tags: Housing, California

Upzoning single family and exclusionary communities

Single family zoning, from its inception in post-war America to the present day, has been used as a tool of race and class based segregation; creating high costs of entry into high-resource communities.

Last year, the Legislature came incredibly close to passing SB-1120, which would have allowed up to 4 units on existing single-family lots, and thereby allowing more people to access high-resource neighborhoods through the proliferation of affordable types of housing.

I would love to see a reboot of SB-1120, but I would also love to see it go even further, with a density bonus of up to 6 units per lot if 2 of those units are deeply affordable (meaning that they’re affordable to those making less than 50% of the AMI).

But these bills do come with their own concerns. Upzonings could lead to a surge in speculation, and thus even higher prices, in single-family neighborhoods (which are already increasingly being sold to wealthy speculators). Requiring that units be developed by property owners who own 5 or fewer properties could discourage property flippers from buying up swathes of neighborhoods and ensure that neighborhoods are, well, owned by neighbors.

Repealing Costa-Hawkins

Despite the prevalence of business-backed studies telling you that “rent control prevents new housing construction” or “rent control prevents housing construction”, rent control is actually a positive thing. Rent control provides a damper on the effects of market-inflating speculation, as evidenced by the explosion in rents in Cambridge, MA, after the repeal of rent control.

Further, rent control helps tenants stay in their housing in the face of rising rents.

This isn’t to say that rent control doesn’t have its flaws. Rent control loopholes can lead to condo conversions among landlords who feel they can make more money off of condos than rental units. And although rent control has no measurable impacts on new construction, it has been shown to lead to poor maintenance by landlords who no longer have incentives to make units attractive for tenants. (https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/99646/rent_control._what_does_the_research_tell_us_about_the_effectiveness_of_local_action_1.pdf)

Rent control by itself is not a solution to our housing crisis. But it can prevent displacement among low-income communities, while stricter standards regarding conversions and maintenance can protect rent controlled housing stock.

A repeal of Costa-Hawkins would go a long way towards decommodifying the housing market and broader expansions of rent control would reduce (or stabilize) rents in conjunction with other policies.

Community Opportunity to Purchase Act (COPA)

COPA (also known as TOPA) acts work by allowing tenants or local Community Land Trusts to have first rights to buy a rental property if the landlord chooses to put it on the market.

In areas targeted for redevelopment, landlords often sell their properties at significantly increased costs, as the rezonings which enable redevelopment boost land values. In these properties, rents are further increased and tenants are often evicted for new developments.

COPAs enable tenants to essentially buy out their landlords, thus decommodifying housing by putting the housing in the hands of the housed, and controlling the gains in property values and prices through limited equity cooperatives.

Taking housing off the speculatory market and putting it in the hands of residents ensures housing stability and gives the people that live in a building the right to decide how they want to manage their land.

Affordable Housing Overlays (AHO)

AHOs work by upzoning areas exclusively for affordable housing. By restricting the upzonings to affordable housing, these policies prevent land frenzies that drive up land costs; instead making them more accessible for affordable housing developers.

One way this could work is to upzone multi-family zoning designations by allowing a 50% unit capacity for moderately affordable units and a 75% development capacity increase for deeply affordable housing.

Transfer taxes, Community Land Trusts, and Social Housing

Aside from our stubborn opposition to housing construction, one of the most important factors in California’s housing crisis is speculation. An increase to the state’s real estate transfer tax is a direct way of disincentivizing speculation.

But where that money goes is just as important. If we disincentivize a practice we dislike, we need to make sure that the money incentivizes policies that work.

A portion of the new revenue could go to funding Community Land Trusts, as discussed earlier. These land trusts put housing directly in the hands of the people and stabilize costs by removing them from the private market (or developing new units).

A second, and just as crucial use of these funds would be the creation of social housing. Public housing certainly has a bad rap in the United States due to its association with poverty and decay. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

In cities such as Vienna, social housing is expansive, high-quality and stable (tenants can stay in social housing even if their incomes exceed the entry caps; making these developments diverse in income); preventing ghettoization. This model has also worked extremely well at keeping Viennese housing costs extremely low relative to other major European cities, as most citizens live in housing either built or managed by the government (and thus only pay rents to fund the up-keep of their housing).

In the absence of federal aid, funding programs to increase non-market based housing production can build much needed housing and reduce the inflationary effects of the market.