Expert: RM4 defeat occurred because local pols couldn't see the grass-roots power of overtaxed citizens
What was the BAHFA board thinking when they tried to muscle through RM4--a clearly misguided and mis-timed mammoth new tax? Marc Joffe of the California Policy Institute suggests arrogance and hive-mind may have blinded the board from what citizens were really thinking.
In an unlikely victory against government excess in the ultra-liberal Bay Area, a regional housing authority has decided to remove a $20 billion housing bond from the November ballot.
It’s dead, the victim of an all-volunteer effort.
The California state legislature created BAHFA to solve the region’s housing affordability problem in 2019. Instead of focusing on the problem of government regulation, BAHFA, operating in connection with two other regional agencies, settled immediately on a single solution: government housing subsidized by a massive bond program.
But although BAHFA had more than four years to develop RM4, the measure had serious flaws. Most egregiously, the ballot language contained a huge mathematical error, quoting annual bond debt service at $670 million rather than the correct amount of just under $911 million. BAHFA also misleadingly called RM4 the “Bay Area Affordability Plan,” when, in fact, it would have made the Bay Area less affordable for the millions who pay property taxes directly or indirectly through their rent.
These and other misleading statements in the RM4 ballot language attracted a lawsuit from several Bay Area taxpayers (including this author). Although BAHFA conceded the mathematical error, it was still fighting other wording changes demanded by the lawsuit when it finally pulled the plug on August 14.
It’s hard to know precisely why proponents abandoned their initiative — hard but not impossible. In the Spring, BAHFA’s own pollster (hired at a cost of at least $133,500) showed RM4 was polling just below the necessary 55 percent threshold required for passage. Then came the lawsuit and attendant negative press coverage as well as audits showing government mismanagement of homeless programs, and reports of affordable housing costing more than $1 million per unit all of which likely soured Bay Area voters.
More recent but unpublished BAHFA polling apparently showed support had slipped a few points since then.
BAHFA and its supporters were also surprised by the appearance of an opposition group. Falsely assuming that all Bay Area fiscal conservatives had moved, retired, or died, they incorrectly concluded that they could act with impunity. The homelessness industrial complex’s arrogance and sloppiness created a target-rich environment for opponents.
A more fiscally responsible program would have focused on manufactured housing in outlying areas with lower land-acquisition costs. Better yet, BAHFA could have proposed policies that would lower the cost of building market-rate housing, making homes affordable to a broader range of Bay Area residents without saddling everyone with years of bond repayments.
One can hope that BAHFA will come back with a less bad program in 2026, but somehow I doubt it. Rather than reach out to the opposition, I expect that they will fall back on their supporters to give us another misbegotten program.
Marc Joffe is a federalism and state policy analyst at the Cato Institute and a visiting fellow at California Policy Center.
Read the whole thing here.
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