Opp Now Exclusive: Mayoral candidates examine roots of our housing fiasco, and how to fix it

In the first of a three-part series about the key issues in the mayor's race, County Supervisor Cindy Chavez and D10 Councilmember Matt Mahan dig into the history of land use and housing policy decisions that led to our unaffordability crisis, and their plans to fix it. To receive daily updates of new Opp Now stories, click here.

Opp Now: We think it's fair to say that nobody actually wanted our local housing crisis to develop. And decisions made long ago had unintended consequences that have contributed to the broad unaffordability of housing in the area.

So let's pretend we're history professors for a moment. If you were giving a lecture on how San Jose got into its housing mess, what government decisions (or indecisions) would you call out as major contributors to our current housing crisis? And how can the next mayor use awareness of those mistakes to fix the housing crisis going forward?

Cindy Chavez: San Jose’s housing crisis has become a tight Gordian knot as a result of almost two decades' worth of bad decisions and misguided strategies. As mayor, I will take decisive action, cut the knot wide open, and unlock housing development throughout the city. This will both generate thousands of construction jobs and make housing affordable for working families citywide. 

For decades, California’s tax system has disincentivized cities from producing housing. In addition, the CEQA process has become cumbersome, time consuming, and has been weaponized to delay projects for years - or stop them entirely. 

San Jose has made a bad situation even worse by treating new housing as a liability.

The city’s general plan update, with its urban village strategy created massive obstacles. It functionally brought new housing development to a standstill at the exact moment when San Jose most needed to be encouraging major new development opportunities coming out of the Great Recession. 

The review and permitting processes now take much longer than they did a generation ago. The planning department suffers from insufficient pay and poor morale, which has led to a significant loss of talent and chronic staffing shortages. 

The results are pretty clear. When I was on the City Council from 1999-2006, San Jose averaged building 3,300 new housing units per year.  From 2007-2019 it averaged 25% less, fewer than 2,700 units per year. 

This has resulted in approximately 10,000 fewer housing units that we would have had if we continued the policies of 1999-2006. Even worse, the city actually needed to be building at more than double this rate just to keep up with demand and maintain affordability.  

While the city has been struggling for the past several years, At the County of Santa Clara, we joined in to help.  

We facilitated construction of  hundreds of affordable housing units and thousands more are in the pipeline.   

San Jose’s General Plan needs a comprehensive update, not only to facilitate housing in the right places, but also to reflect the realities of the post pandemic era for urban development. Facilitating development, especially housing, is the best way we can reinvest in our neighborhoods, particularly those that have been disproportionately impacted by COVID, and create community benefits that residents are demanding from city hall.  

We are going to overhaul the development review and building permit process, making it fully transparent and streamlined.  There are many best practices already being used elsewhere in the Bay Area and California that San Jose can easily adopt. This will lead to entitlements and building permits being issued with more speed, certainty and predictability.  

As Mayor my housing effort will be run directly out of the city manager’s office rather than leaving departments to fight amongst themselves without accountability.  I am also going to operationalize a multi-department Housing Strike Team dedicated to processing large projects on a priority basis from first application to certificate of occupancy.

Matt Mahan: We are not building enough housing, we are not building enough affordable housing, the way we are building housing is brutally expensive, and we are not creating the infrastructure needed to support new housing.

How did we get into this mess? The list is long, but it stems from decades of government adding countless well-intended (and, in some cases, worthwhile) regulations and taxes that have made housing construction incrementally more difficult and expensive over time. It’s no wonder that the housing market has been sluggish. It’s a fundamental problem of incentives — markets don’t support investment when there’s no return to be had and cities don’t embrace housing when the cost of providing services exceeds property tax revenue over time. As a former CEO, I know at the end of the day most people respond to incentives, consciously or not.  

Today’s housing crisis was also exacerbated by the withdrawal of federal support for new affordable housing in the 1980s and continued when California ended the Redevelopment Agency system that created local funds for affordable housing. A shortage of qualified labor contributes to the crisis, as does government tunnel vision that focuses on expensive construction techniques using technology from the 19th century.

The good news is we can rise to the occasion and solve this crisis. Instead of spending $850,000 per door for housing as Santa Clara County is doing, we could build modular housing on existing public land like the County Fairgrounds for just ten percent of that price. We can promote better use of existing housing and housing spaces, like encouraging people to rent out unused rooms in their homes and creating secondary units in backyards – which are affordable by design. We can pre-approve housing in our designated urban villages to speed up construction. We can invest in training more highly-qualified workers, which lowers the cost of housing and lifts more families into the middle class. And we can focus the funds wasted on expensive housing and use them to invest in the transit and road infrastructure we need to create new housing without creating traffic gridlock.

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ExclusiveJax Oliver