The $20 billion regional housing bond that was supposed to be on the November ballot would have been a game changer. The money would have paid for 70,000 units of non-market affordable housing, enough to make a dramatic difference in homelessness, housing costs, air quality, and so, so much more.
San Francisco alone would have been in line for $2 billion, enough to build housing for thousands of people who are unhoused or who work in the city but have to commute from places hours away.
It was the first indication that maybe California was ready to go in the direction of many European cities, where housing is funded by taxpayers and provided as a human right.
Now it’s gone.
And its demise says a lot about the mismanagement of the Bay Area Housing Finance Authority and the lack of political leadership from the so-called “moderates” who insist they are better at “getting things done.”
There were issues with the bond, of course: I could argue that too much of the new housing would be at the higher end of “affordability.” Much of the housing would be affordable only for 55 years, not permanently. The for-profit developers were itching to get a way to make money off the deal.
It’s sad, too, that the only way we can build affordable housing these days is to borrow money—with interest over 30 years, the bonds would cost more than $50 billion. This country used to tax the rich and use that money to build infrastructure.
I’ve never been a big fan of ABAG and the MTC, which have been controlled by private developers and together run BAHFA, which would issue and control the bonds.
But this is the reality we live with, and the need for all of this affordable housing is so great that pretty much all of the advocates, from the Yimbys to the Council of Community Housing Organizations, all of the major tenant groups, and a wide coalition of elected officials, were on board.
“We got so far,” CCHO Director John Avalos told me. “We united so many people, and then we couldn’t get it done.”
Yes: The BAHFA just pulled the bond from the ballot.
The agency board gave no public reason at all for its decision. None. There was a lawsuit by the Howard Jarvis anti-tax folks, but that alone would not have been enough to prevent such a huge project.
The other reason, insiders tell me: Politics.
The BAHFA didn’t put together enough of a serious campaign to win both the bond act and a state measure, Prop. 5, which would lower the threshold for housing bonds from two-thirds to 55 percent.
So the powers that be decided to toss the housing bond and focus instead on the statewide change in Prop. 13.
From the Bay Area Council, a pro-development group:
In what was an incredibly difficult decision for campaign supporters, RM4 organizers determined that available resources would be better directed at passing Proposition 5 first and then coming back at a later date, possibly 2026 or 2028, to try for a housing bond. Without the guarantee of a 55% vote threshold, it would just be too risky to dedicate significant financial resources to a housing bond at this time.
Naturally, the council took the opportunity to say that the need for non-market housing is less important than the need for developer profits:
While we step away for now from Regional Measure 4, we must step up our efforts to remove the many barriers that have been erected to block and delay new housing,” said Jim Wunderman, President and CEO of the Bay Area Council. “This setback is unquestionably disappointing, but it can serve as a powerful motivator for us to get even more aggressive in changing restrictive land use policies and updating outdated laws like the California Environmental Quality Act that for too long have been abused to discourage and deter investors and builders from creating the housing we desperately need
Insiders close to the campaign told me that the polling numbers were shaky, and the campaign couldn’t raise enough money and didn’t have the capacity to put together a serious operation.
Passing a nine-county bond act, even at 55 percent, is a huge effort—and while MTC and ABAG are happy to do the bidding of big developers, the elected officials who are on those boards were unwilling or unable to bring in the tens of millions it would take to pass the measure.
It seems to me that running a joint campaign—pass Prop. 5, and pass the regional bond to build massive amounts of affordable housing and bring prices down for everyone—could have worked. But that’s not what the political operatives said.
The lawsuit didn’t help. As Joe Eskenazi reported, BAHFA made a big unforced error:
A group of concerned taxpayers on Aug. 7 filed suit against the housing finance authority and the elections directors of all nine Bay Area counties. The lawsuit is lengthy and targets the housing bond on multiple fronts. But perhaps the most salient claim is that the government had misstated the annual cost of repaying the bond: It’s not $670 million but, rather, $911 million.
This, it turns out, is true. The Bay Area Housing Finance Authority last week called an emergency meeting to correct what it categorized as a “clerical error” ahead of any Bay Area counties printing out ballots and official election materials. But the taxpayers did not drop their lawsuit.
An agency that wants to spend $20 billion of taxpayer money couldn’t even get its numbers right.
Another lawsuit, to derail Prop. 5, has failed. This one might have failed, too.
But the campaign wasn’t going anywhere. The polling numbers were barely about 50 percent. It would seem to me that a serious effort could bring that up (“that’s what campaigns are for,” one person close to the decision told me )but the people pulling the strings decided that Prop. 5 was more important—although the primary reason Prop. 5 exists was to help this and other big housing bonds.
Where was Gov. Gavin Newsom? He had the clout and the political capital to raise the money needed, make sure this got the support it needed, and get it on the ballot and passed. He was, insiders tell me, absolutely nowhere, totally missing in action. He was, apparently, too busy going around the state and evicting unhoused people to work to pass a bond that might have housed them.
So was Mayor London Breed, whose city would have had a massive windfall from the passage of the measure.
This is the second time the moderates have failed on a major infrastructure project; they couldn’t get a transit bond on the ballot either. “In both cases, the ‘moderates’ who claim to be the only ones to ‘get things done’ failed,” Calvin Welch, a longtime housing activist, told me. “Depending on ‘moderates’ to fund critical infrastructure is beyond foolish, it’s a failure.”
So now, maybe, that measure will pass, and we’ll see this bond again in 2026—when Sen. Scott Wiener and others want to place a massive transit bond on the ballot.
Wiener:
“In addition to affordable housing funding, we also need to shore up Bay Area public transportation systems to modernize and integrate them and to avoid devastating service cuts. We’ve worked for several years toward a 2026 ballot measure to modernize, integrate, and fund public transportation, in addition to funding our roads. Without action, major Bay Area transit systems, including Muni, BART, and Caltrain, will begin cutting service in 2026. That would be devastating for the Bay Area and would lead to increased traffic congestion, increased carbon emissions, and a huge number of residents unable to get to work, school, or other important destinations. I’ll continue working with stakeholders across the region to bring forward a measure to provide sustainable transportation funding at the ballot in 2026.”
Will voters, with lower turnout in a non-presidential year, pass two major tax measures at the same time?
If they don’t, the Bay Area will be in serious trouble. And it won’t be the fault of the progressive left.