☆ Experts wonder if right-to-housing CA'n amendment “mere rhetoric,” Woke performativity
Opp Now exclusively spoke with seven urban policy profs, analysts, and housing providers to get to the bottom of proposed constitutional amendment ACA 10: which guarantees residents an equitably distributed “right to housing.” While some think ACA 10 is a step forward in combating neighborhood NIMBYism, others question if the amendment—vague, impractical, and tipped in local courts' hands—would truly benefit the Bay Area's housing market. Their perspectives (and alternative plans of action) below.
Michael (Mike) Angles, West Valley College Business and Real Estate Professor:
In my opinion, the ACA-10 does nothing to solve or advance solutions for California’s homelessness crisis. It is merely a political foundation from which future actions may be justified. That is, people will use it as a springboard to advance their own agenda.
California’s current homelessness issues have been 30-plus years in the making. Unfortunately, there are many reasons. I will acknowledge the billions being spent are helping in the short-term. But I don’t see economic long-term solutions without unpopular structural changes to our tax system and city hall politics. And even with said changes, it will be a slow recovery process.
Our housing shortage, a.k.a. our lack of affordable housing, is of our own making because of our economic prosperity, wealth, and unwillingness for change. Our wealth enabled many (myself included) to purchase second homes and RE-investment properties. And our tax code incentivizes such investment. First-time home buyers are unable to compete with RE-investors, as investors use the potential rental income plus their own wealth to service their mortgage payment. Assuming they leverage the purchase, that provides a cash flow cascade to leverage into additional investment, creating greater wealth.
Investors can afford to overpay, because in the long term, their returns exceed other investment opportunities. And many RE-investors will never pay capital gains nor recaptured depreciation tax allowances, as all is forgiven when assets transfer to heirs. Hence, real estate is the greatest multi-generation wealth creation investment ever.
Dean Hotop, San Jose Housing Provider:
I am all for ACA-10.
Why? When voters amend the constitution and declare a specific right, it puts government, at all levels, on notice that it may not infringe on that specific right.
For example, we enjoy a right to free speech. This right allows me to type and publish, or speak, the following sentence: “Democrats have absolutely ruined the once great state of California.”
If the government were to declare or pass a law prohibiting anyone from speaking ill of the sole party in control of all levels of government up and down the state, that would clearly infringe on my right to free speech.
Now, if everyone has a constitutional right to housing, then the government can take no action, or pass any laws, regulations/rules, etc., that infringes on that right.
For example, government actions which make it increasingly difficult and expensive to build adequate quantities of new housing stock in California, to meet the ever-growing demand for new housing units, would certainly seem to infringe on that constitutional right to housing. We have been living this for decades in California. It is government action that limits the feasible development and availability of housing units.
Now, to dig a little deeper into ACA-10, let’s look at what it actually says (and doesn’t say):
Article XXV Right to Housing
SECTION 1.
The state hereby recognizes the fundamental human right to adequate housing for everyone in California. It is the shared obligation of state and local jurisdictions to respect, protect, and fulfill this right, on a non-discriminatory and equitable basis, with a view to progressively achieve the full realization of the right, by all appropriate means, including the adoption and amendment of legislative measures, to the maximum of available resources.
So, we’ll have a right to “adequate” housing. Adequate by what, or whose, standard? Here’s how Merriam-Webster defines “adequate”:
sufficient for a specific need or requirement
also : good enough : of a quality that is good or acceptable
of a quality that is acceptable but not better than acceptable
Hmm, that’s a wide open standard. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Good enough for thee, but not for me.
Now, what ACA-10 doesn’t say is “regardless of means.” So, I have to ask: Is that implied, assumed, or purposefully omitted? If its implied or assumed, does this mean for anyone with a heartbeat, that someone else (taxpayers?) will provide you with housing — OR — is it purposefully omitted to mean that if you have the means, government will not stand in the way of you acquiring the housing that is simply good enough to meet your needs?
If it’s the latter, then it's time to start rolling back all the regulations that drive up housing supply costs, create shortages, and ultimately stand in the way of individuals acquiring housing that meets their needs.
Lastly, if we’re going to start declaring constitutional rights to individual needs, I’ve got a long list…
John D. Landis, University of Pennsylvania City & Regional Planning Professor Emeritus, California Housing Policy Researcher:
Although I think housing is a matter of legitimate government concern and favor the government doing more to fund affordable housing, I generally do not favor putting private consumption choices (e.g., housing nutrition, health care) in state (or national) constitutions unless there is strong and unified support for spending the huge sums necessary to deliver on such commitments.
Most of the rights in the Bill of Rights and other state constitutions are relatively inexpensive to guarantee. Housing is not; so before such amendments are enacted into law, however well intended, they need the support of a sizable majority of citizens across all economic and political spectrums.
Scott Beyer, Market Urbanism Report Owner, Urban Policy Analyst:
Calling something a “human right” is meaningless without a plan to provide it. And when it comes to housing in California, no such plan exists.
ACA 10 declares a fundamental right to housing for all Californians, making it “the shared obligation of state and local jurisdictions to respect, protect, and fulfill this right.” It's the latest acknowledgement that local-level rules contribute to the housing crisis.
But the bill misses by promoting a “right” to housing rather than tangible steps to produce housing, such as upzoning or CEQA reform. If anything, ACA 10 goes the wrong way; a WCLP fact sheet writes that “state and local governments can use a wide variety of measures to implement the right, including tenant protections, market regulations, public housing, housing subsidies, and progressive tax policy.” As I’ve written for Opportunity Now, these are the very pro-tax and -regulatory policies that discourage construction to begin with.
Establishing this constitutional right could also have unintended consequences. The stipulation that housing be provided on an “equitable basis” is opaque, possibly leading to market-distorting measures like rent control and inclusionary zoning that “feel” good but increase costs.
California's done a decent job of passing statewide reforms, like SB 9, that counter local Nimbyism, and should continue this liberalization trend. ACA 10, by contrast, is mere rhetoric.
David Reiss, Brooklyn Law School Real Estate Finance Professor:
Dynamic metropolitan areas like the Bay Area, LA, and New York City suffer from longstanding mismatches between the supply of housing and demand for it. Local communities control the zoning, and local voters (typically existing homeowners) have little incentive to increase the supply of housing. After all, more supply will likely increase the tax burden as new residents increase the demand for services (more schools, more infrastructure, more public safety). Homeowners are already in the market and generally like the way things are, notwithstanding their political views about the high cost of living for others and the epidemic of desperate homelessness that plagues all of these areas. The result of all of these local land use decisions is that very few units of housing are built in these communities, given the size and growth of the population.
Many coastal cities are high-opportunity areas, offering jobs to immigrants, young adults, and strivers of all stripes. They drive up the demand for housing even hours from urban centers, living in overcrowded units in many cases.
When demand outpaces supply, prices rise. Government can try to limit the effect of this pressure through a variety of means: rent controls, housing subsidies, right to shelter legislation. All of these interventions can assist certain segments of the housing burdened — current renters, new renters, homeless people — but to a large extent, they just reallocate scarce housing from one burdened group to another. That is not necessarily bad public policy given the current political realities, but it does not address the fundamental problem these communities face: There is not enough housing for all of the people who live in them. A broad coalition of decision-makers need to face this reality and develop long-term strategies to build a lot more housing where all of these people want to live — for access to economic opportunity, for proximity to family, for all of the reasons that people want to relocate and build a life for themselves and their loved ones.
Jennifer Liu, Housing Policy and Urban Design Expert, Business and Housing Network (BAHN) President:
In an ideal world, all human beings would be housed; it’s our common goal as a civil society. However, the key is how to achieve it and who pays for it. From the housing provider’s standpoint, private property rights must be respected since those are our constitutional rights. Shredding the private property rights is counterproductive to produce more housing to have everyone housed.
No one is clear about the exact implication of ACA-10. One thing is very clear, though. ACA-10 won't generate a single housing unit. The right way to solve the housing crisis is to provide landlord/investor/builder friendly policies to encourage more investment into housing, and set up funding to help increase home ownership, including:
1) Reduce government bureaucracy and fees to make housing permits faster and cheaper, so that builders are willing to construct more housing.
2) Make landlord-friendly rental policies to stimulate more investment into housing, so that more rental housing units are available, therefore making rents more affordable.
3) Help first-time home buyers with down payments to encourage home ownership.
We hope the government can come up with something more practical to solve the housing issues.
Bruce Appleyard, San Diego State University City Planning and Urban Design Professor:
Housing, as much as breathing, is fundamental to our ability to thrive in our world and live day to day. If we consider the freedoms Franklin Delano Roosevelt talked about, the right to housing should be at the top of all of them. A caring society should view housing as a right accessible to everyone.
I do a lot of research on homelessness. There are 45,000 unsheltered folks in LA and 1 million backlogged housing units. It's a similar situation in San Diego. To be a humane, respectable society, we must take care of the needs of our most vulnerable; this includes providing these people housing.
There's things already happening at the state level to free up and make more flexible existing zoning laws. And if we establish housing as a constitutional right, it'll continue state-led efforts and hopefully result in more effective legislation that provides housing while overcoming things like strict constraints provided by single-family zoning and the prevalence of NIMBY opposition (which we've seen for well over 40 years statewide). This would transform our urban environment for the better, especially if we consider similar good examples of cities like Paris, Barcelona, and even London. These places were highly codified under Roman rule and later allowed to grow organically, and we know them today as wonderful and beautiful cities. So I have little problem with us being more flexible with our development codes; it's a paradigm shift, but one California needs to take.
Out of all the regions in California, the Silicon Valley has probably changed the most economically in terms of prosperity. But it's changed the least in terms of the urban environment responding to that economic growth. A lot of that comes at the hand of zoning and NIMBY opposition by neighbors trying to keep affordable housing out. These longstanding effects have quelled the ability of our society to respond to housing demand. It's the reason we have such high housing prices. Again, enacting ACA 10 would encourage and further state efforts to relax zoning laws and combat NIMBYism.
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