☆ Fact check RM4: email from San Mateo supervisor wildly inflates how many units housing bond will fund
It was like Christmas in late July when San Mateo County Supervisor Noelia Corzo invited constituents to an imaginary RM4 unwrapping session over Zoom: how should San Mateo spend its portion of the regional housing bond? For a meeting billed as “informational,” its announcement was inauspicious. The Opp Now team discovers that the email magically doubled the number of units RM4 would build. It also left out a troubling disparity—San Mateo could pay the region more than it gets back. An Opp Now exclusive.
Email claim: “The bond would fund approximately 143,000 new affordable housing units across the region, as well as fund efforts to preserve existing affordable housing.”
Fact check: False. Way off.
For two reasons.
First, MTC’s own brochure states in large font: “with this bond, the Bay Area will build and preserve approximately 72,000 affordable homes.”
Where does the figure 143,000 come from? To market the bond attractively, the brochure includes a sidebar pointing out that when you add RM4’s promise of 72,000 units to the 71,000 units that are already planned, you get 143,000.
Wow.
Still though, RM4 would only fund 72,000 units.
Secondly, it’s not even 72,000 new units. Just read the brochure: the bond will be used to build 36,000 new units, preserve 14,000, and either build or preserve the remaining 22,000. Napkin math shows us that the most RM4 could ever fund is 58,000 new units.
So, no. Christmas is not coming early.
Except in the email’s alternate reality where 143,000 new units is just the beginning because on top of that there’s some unspecified number of preserved units.
Email claim: the bond “could bring $2.1 billion to San Mateo County.”
Fact check: True, but omits the cost.
According to a draft paper by Tom Rubin, President of 20 Billion Reasons, San Mateo County taxpayers are calculated to pay property taxes 117.1% of what the county is guaranteed to get back.
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