Bay Area rides affordable housing wave following midterm elections

Affordable housing advocates may not have gotten everything they wanted on their Election Day wish list, but they’re cheering a series of victories this week that may help ease the Bay Area’s housing crunch.

That includes $6 billion in state-wide housing bonds and hundreds of millions more in local bonds and taxes.

“I think overall, it’s probably an A-,” Matt Regan, senior vice president of public policy for the Bay Area Council, said of the pro-housing results. “That’s not bad. I’ll take that.”

Still, some measures are too close to call, and others went down in defeat. In San Jose, for example, the housing department was counting on a $450 million bond to bring the city one step closer to its goal of building 10,000 affordable homes by 2022. But the measure was falling short Friday. Similar measures in Santa Cruz and Santa Rosa were rejected.

Major bonds are always difficult to pass, because it’s tough to convince voters to approve spending such large sums of money, Regan said. And he suspects San Jose voters may have been particularly reluctant this election, because they approved a $950 million affordable housing bond in Santa Clara County just two years ago.

Arguably the biggest housing win was the passing of Propositions 1 and 2, which together authorize $6 billion in bonds to fund home loans and affordable housing construction for low-income families, veterans and people with mental illness.

Locally, several cities had strong pro-affordable housing and pro-renter results. Oaklanders voted to raise $10 million a year for homeless services and dumping cleanup by taxing vacant properties, and to make it harder for landlords to evict tenants from certain buildings. Berkeley residents passed a $135 million affordable housing bond. San Francisco voted in a big-business tax expected to raise $300 million a year for affordable housing and homeless services, Mountain View passed a similar measure to pad its general fund, which could help fund housing, and East Palo Alto approved an office tax that will partly go toward funding affordable housing.

A controversial move to allow cities to expand rent control was a resounding failure, drawing ambivalent reactions. Some housing experts were disappointed, saying Proposition 10 was needed to help renters survive the overheated market. But others breathed a sigh of relief, saying the measure would have depressed new rental construction.

In the South Bay, affordable housing advocates were smarting as San Jose’s $450 million affordable housing bond struggled — garnering 62 percent of the vote, but falling short of the 66 percent needed to pass. The city could have turned that money into about 3,600 new affordable homes, said Jacky Morales-Ferrand, San Jose’s housing director.

“Without that, we’re going to have a large gap,” she said, “and we’re going to be very challenged in meeting the 10,000-unit goal.”

But even the losses — the large housing bond in San Jose and others in Santa Cruz and Santa Rosa that needed two-thirds of the vote to pass — won support from a majority of voters.

“We’ve seen an increasing realization from folks that we need to build more housing,” said Ernest Brown, a volunteer co-executive of YIMBY group East Bay for Everyone.

In Brisbane, a measure that would allow the city just south of San Francisco to double its housing supply held onto a narrow lead, ahead by fewer than 80 votes.

At the state level, Prop. 1 and 2 alone could double the amount of affordable housing supported by state funds, which will help jump-start Bay Area development, said Kevin Zwick, CEO of Housing Trust Silicon Valley.

“We’re going to see that over the next few years,” he said. “We’re going to see new supportive homes for Californians living with mental illness. We’re going to see more affordable homes for people who need them most. $6 billion — I mean, that’s a major statement that housing’s important to California.”

Housing also drove many of the Bay Area’s local council races, with mixed results. About half of the 30 local candidates endorsed by the Bay Area’s pro-development YIMBY groups were victorious or held leads Friday.

In Cupertino, where a battle is raging over plans to turn the defunct Vallco Mall into a massive housing, shopping and office development, one of the leading voices opposing those plans was cruising toward a seat on the City Council. Liang Chao, founder of slow-growth group Better Cupertino, was ahead alongside incumbent Mayor Darcy Paul, who came under fire earlier this year for saying the city’s housing shortage isn’t “dire.” Councilwoman Savita Vaidhyanathan, who has supported building housing at Vallco, was poised to snag the third open seat.

The dying mall’s fate was the main issue driving the City Council race this year, Chao said. As developers pushed ahead with plans to build more than 2,000 homes on the site, “a crazy big chunk of the community didn’t feel like their opinions were being respected,” she said.

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California election results In Mountain View, voters ousted Mayor Lenny Siegel, an outspoken housing advocate. But as all three council members ahead at the polls Friday support Google-backed plans to build nearly 10,000 homes in North Bayshore, Siegel suspects his loss had more to do with another housing-related problem — the scores of homeless residents living in RVs parked up and down Mountain View streets.

“I think that I lost votes because I pushed back when people criticized the vehicle-dwellers,” Siegel said. “I called them intolerant. So they turned around and blamed me for the fact that we’ve got people living in RVs.”

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