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Homelessness within the US: Can “tiny houses” assist with the reasonably priced housing disaster?

Daily SF News — Wed, 29 Nov 2023 15:32:42 +0000

Sharon Sandelin is a resident at 33 Gough Street in San Francisco.

Gabriela Hasbun for Vox

Before she moved into the first shelter village of “tiny houses” in San Francisco, Sharon Sandelin — a 66-year-old who goes by “Mama T” — had been sleeping on the streets.

Now she lives in a 64-square-foot unit with heat, electricity, a twin bed, desk, and chair. There is a combination lock on the outside. The gated community where some 70 other people now live is clean and cheerful-looking, painted teal and sea-foam green. Residents are connected with supportive services like health care and served three meals daily.

Sandelin detests traditional homeless shelters, and appreciates the privacy of her locked room on Gough Street, knowing she can rest undisturbed. But she still considers herself homeless. Though she likes her tiny cabin more than she liked being unsheltered, residents must use porta-potties, they are not allowed to have outside visitors, they can’t shower after 2 pm, and they can’t cook anything that requires more than a microwave or toaster.

“I want to eat my own cooking,” she told me. “My daughter can’t visit me, and there shouldn’t be no set time for a person to take a shower.”

Sharon Sandelin is a resident at 33 Gough Street in San Francisco.

Gabriela Hasbun for Vox

Sandelin has a place to sleep in large part because of Elizabeth Funk, who spent three decades working at investment firms and tech giants like Yahoo and Microsoft, while serving on boards of various homeless nonprofits. Since 2020, Funk, now the CEO of Dignity Moves, which fundraised and developed the San Francisco village, has brought her experience and Rolodex to bear on a singular goal: to, as Silicon Valley puts it, disrupt the problem of homelessness in America.

Since 2016, unsheltered homelessness — meaning those sleeping somewhere not designed for human residence, like a car, a park, or a train station — has been going up. Particularly on the West Coast where housing costs are often prohibitive, local governments have struggled to curb sprawling and politically unpopular tent encampments, and many unhoused people prefer sleeping outside to crowded shelters with bunk beds. The challenge has been exacerbated by Martin v. Boise, a 2018 court ruling that said people can’t be punished for sleeping outside on public property if there are no adequate alternatives available.

Elizabeth Funk, founder and CEO of Dignity Moves.

Gabriela Hasbun for Vox

To Funk and other tiny house proponents, villages like the one where Sandelin now lives offer creative solutions to all these issues. The small, relocatable cabins provide leaders new ways to bypass restrictive zoning rules, by leveraging emergency building codes and “borrowing” rather than purchasing land. They also offer, at least for some, a more dignified shelter option, providing an affordable answer to the difficult reality that many people prefer to sleep outside rather than endure the rules and conditions of typical shelters.

Advocates of “tiny homes” as a solution to the homeless crisis say the units should be understood as a key tool to preventing chronic homelessness amid a brutal housing shortage. If people lose their homes but can get quickly off the streets into a temporary private dwelling, then they’re in a much better position to get back on their feet, and avoid the tumble into longer-term homelessness that can transpire from even just a few weeks without shelter.

For elected officials, the villages also mean that fewer people have to see — or think about — homeless people on a daily basis. Tiny homes provide leaders with a faster and cheaper alternative to building permanent housing or congregate shelters, and may provide cities with the legal authority to then clear out any remaining tent encampments: Funk told me she can determine “exactly how many units you need in order to make it illegal to sleep on the streets within the city limits in San Francisco.” All this has thrilled leaders eager to reclaim their cities from what they see as spiraling chaos and disorder.

Advocates for the homeless, meanwhile, worry that the tiny shelter boom will divert funds that could otherwise go to new permanent housing, preventing people from moving into a real home for even longer. The rush of private industry into the space also gives advocates pause, and they worry that cities will buy bare-bones, cheaper models, place them in remote parts of town, and criminalize those who refuse to go.

At the heart of the tiny houses debate is a question about the meaning of housing and shelter itself. As more companies rush to manufacture models with varying features — some out of plastic, some out of repurposed shipping containers, some built on factory assembly lines, others on-site or on wheels, some with in-suite bathrooms, kitchenettes, and storage space, others lacking plumbing and electricity and with virtually no amenities at all — there is little consensus on what a “tiny home” is, or what standards it must meet.

Tiny house shelter units are typically between 60 and 150 square feet, but the sharp variety of products within the industry creates confusion. How spartan is acceptable? Is anything better than sleeping outside?

Lots of arrangements can be tolerated if they’re understood as emergency solutions — but some communities have also started to explore the idea of treating the units less as temporary shelters and more as something approaching new housing options.

“Harnessing NIMBY” to expand tiny houses

America has a housing shortage in part because it’s become so expensive and difficult to build new housing. The cost to purchase new land has skyrocketed, byzantine zoning rules make residential construction hard, and people living in communities often protest new development — wary of decreased property values, new neighbors, noise, traffic, or general change. This barrier is so common it goes by NIMBY, short for “not in my backyard.”

Yet over the last few years, “tiny home” shelters have been built in communities through what you could call creative hacks of the zoning code. In some places, structures smaller than 120 square feet are not classified as permanent dwellings, and therefore not subject to the same regulations applicable to residential buildings. Other groups have capitalized on cities that declared local states of emergency, which give governments more flexibility to build units with faster permitting.

Dignity Moves is a transitional housing program in San Francisco. These 70 modular units are set at 33 Gough Street, right in the middle of San Francisco. They offer the unhoused a non-congregate shelter option.

Gabriela Hasbun for Vox

Dignity Moves formed in 2020 as a task force within the Young Presidents Organization, a global networking group of chief executives. The group wanted to “apply private sector approaches and Silicon Valley-style ‘disruptive thinking’” to America’s homelessness crisis, as they describe it.

Funk could hardly hold back her grin as she outlined Dignity Moves’ theory of change. Instead of buying expensive land for tiny houses, she told me, they “borrow” it from developers who aren’t yet ready to use it.

Leveraging emergency building codes and word-of-mouth networking, “we take advantage of under-utilized assets,” she said. Maybe the shelters will go on a plot of land for two or three years, and then get transferred via forklift to another location when the developer needs their property back. (There are certain tax breaks available for landowners interested in making this deal.) The San Francisco village I visited on Gough Street rests on such borrowed land.

Sometimes Dignity Moves encourages faith-based groups or local governments to pony up their vacant property — like parking lots or land reserved for future infrastructure projects. In Santa Barbara, leaders countywide have jointly committed to finding locations for tiny houses in their neighborhoods and giving shelter priority to those sleeping outside in the surrounding areas. Funk’s group is spearheading this, and envisions the future playing out similarly in cities all over the country. By erecting many villages at the same time, Funk thinks it’ll be possible to get people off the street at once, a strong incentive for housed residents who are tired of seeing individuals living on sidewalks. “Then we can harness NIMBYism, which is a very powerful force,” she said.

There are at least some encouraging signs that local opposition to tiny house shelters wanes. When researchers at Portland State University surveyed housed neighbors who lived around various Portland “tiny homes” villages, they found the neighbors’ concerns about crime and decreased property values significantly diminished over time. “Some of the biggest initial opponents became some of the biggest champions,” Todd Ferry, a lead researcher of the study, told me. “I genuinely think it became beloved to many people in the neighborhood.”

Perhaps no politician has been more enthusiastic about the potential of tiny house shelters than San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan, who proposed this past summer to divert more than a third of his city’s housing funds to increase village production. Up for reelection in March, Mahan has made moving unhoused people quickly off the street a major part of his pitch.

San Jose started opening “tiny home” shelters about four years ago, originally to reduce the risk of contagion during the pandemic. About 500 units currently exist now in the city across six locations, and hundreds more are in the pipeline. Mahan credits their growth with reducing San Jose’s unsheltered homeless population by 11 percent in the last year, though he laments that new units seem to be taking longer to build than they did during Covid-19 and coming with new requirements.

“We were standing these up in six months at a cost of $80,000 or less all-in, including the utility hookup and common space, and now it’s taking progressively longer and costing more,” he told me, pointing to a new village project that cost the city $250,000 a door. Another San Jose village that took a year and a half to build saw costs go from originally $100,000 per unit to more than $175,000.

In September, Mahan urged his colleagues to quit making excuses for why they couldn’t build more units faster, and led a successful push to adopt a shelter crisis emergency declaration so San Jose could bypass certain building rules. Mahan says he’s motivated not only by a desire to help the homeless but to improve local neighborhoods generally. Calls for crime, fire, and blight in the immediate areas of the villages went down a year after they were built, according to a city analysis.

Each tiny house village in San Jose costs about $15 million to launch, and $3-4 million annually thereafter to operate. In June, the city’s budget director said funding roughly 1,400 of these shelter units will cost upward of $60 million by 2030, a “difficult” figure for San Jose to manage. The mayor, for his part, remains optimistic that external funding sources will come through.

Out of sight, out of mind?

Another reason some have grown excited about “tiny home” shelters is often left unsaid: to no longer have to witness homeless people outside on a daily basis.

Tiny houses provide elected officials with faster and cheaper alternatives to building permanent housing or congregate shelters, and may provide cities with the legal authority to then clear out any remaining tent encampments. This has roused city elites anxious about their increasingly visible homeless crisis.

A federal lawsuit led by Los Angeles business leaders frustrated with their city’s lack of action around tent encampments resulted in LA pledging to construct up to 16,000 new shelter beds by 2027, to house 60 percent of the homeless population in each of the fifteen council districts. These can include “tiny home” shelters, and in exchange, LA officials can sweep remaining tents and resume enforcing anti-camping bans.

“We are now getting much more excited about this 60 percent thing,” Funk, of Dignity Moves, told me. “I’m going to be working privately, quietly, but [to] give you a little preview, [we’re] thinking about doing this for San Francisco specifically as well in San Jose.” If San Francisco has about 4,500 people sleeping outside, according to the last Point In Time count, then Funk believes leaders can confidently estimate how many shelter beds will be necessary to build to start enforcing anti-camping laws again. “Let’s be clear,” she said, “one of the big motives here is Martin v. Boise, and people being concerned about getting sued.”

Funk’s legislative partner in the California state Senate, Josh Becker, plans to reintroduce a bill that would make it easier for cities to build tiny house shelters, and potentially even allow cities to count them toward their state-mandated housing production goals. Given that the tiny structures are much cheaper to build than both traditional housing and permanent supportive housing, a state green-light to include them in production targets could prove to be a major incentive. But that’s worrying news for those concerned the units may be less of a temporary, emergency solution after all.

Bryant Akers works on repairs at 33 Gough Street.

Gabriela Hasbun for Vox

“We’re definitely seeing some cities focusing on this model as more than what I would call an interim solution and a gap solution,” said Amy King, the CEO of Pallet Shelter, a Washington-based company that produces tiny houses between $7,500 to $12,000 apiece.

When Becker’s bill was first introduced earlier this year and included the possibility that shelter units, including those produced by Pallet Shelter, could one day be considered permanent housing and even accept rent or housing vouchers, King’s company came out against it. “There’s just so much opportunity for people to take advantage,” King said of the idea.

Homeless advocates worry about a scenario where cities start to invest in lower-quality shelters that aren’t suitable for everyone, reduce investments in permanent housing, and grow more aggressive about fining or arresting those resistant to shelter offers. “We see sweeps and tiny homes going hand-in-hand,” said Alex Visotzky, with the National Alliance to End Homelessness.

A senior official with the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, who was not authorized to speak publicly, told me the agency has no hard-and-fast policy yet on tiny houses, but is currently “evaluating whether there’s a place for them” in their efforts to end homelessness. As part of that the federal housing agency is investigating whether communities have been abiding by fair housing and civil rights laws as they expand the units.

“Not just segregation, but are people put there by choice?” the official asked. “Are there potential consequences if you don’t go there — like subject to arrest or other penalties? We’re considering all of that.”

The line between housing and shelter

In 2020 a fire broke out within a Pallet Shelter community in Banning, California — destroying 19 prefabricated homes, and displacing 38 people. Two years later another fire broke out within a Pallet Shelter community in Oakland, California, burning down three of the structures. One resident told Curbed she barely made it out as “the walls were melting” around her.

Pallet has denied responsibility for these fires, though the company did make changes to the building materials it uses. The two incidents loom large as leaders debate how cheaply they can build these structures and how tightly together they can pack them together on high-priced land.

A row of Pallet shelters at the Chandler Street Tiny Home Village in February 2021 in the North Hollywood neighborhood of Los Angeles.

Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images

Some housing advocates say the challenges cities are running into with building tiny shelters now mirror the same issues that often derail producing more housing at all. Proponents fear that as more pandemic-era emergency codes expire, and if more accidents like those in Banning and Oakland occur, such “quick-build bridge housing” will be built far less quickly.

“Our biggest challenge is the regulations, the code compliance to make sure everything meets all the parameters of the building code,” said Viken Ohanesian, CEO of Boss Cubez, which manufactured the prefabricated units used at the San Francisco shelter village. “It’s kind of like you can never have too much insurance, you can never be too safe in this world that we live in because it’s a litigious world.”

One option is to try and convince state lawmakers to pre-empt cities from tacking on new regulatory requirements. California lawmakers already took this step last year in banning mandates for fire sprinklers in “temporary sleeping cabins.” Funk says she’s “really, quite frankly, tempted to take the 10 other things that cities are starting to ask for, take them up to Daddy and say, ‘Can you break this rule?’” The costly rules and regulations, she believes, are a big part of how we got the housing crisis in the first place.

“I think our definition of housing with a capital ‘H’ is causing homelessness,” she said. “So we can either solve it or we can be stuck to our like, you know, our principles.”

Beyond worrying about building requirements and the practical longevity of tiny shelters, a broader, more existential set of criticisms have emerged around the policy idea.

A worker cleans in front of a row of tiny homes for the homeless, in February 2021, in the North Hollywood section of Los Angeles.

AP/Marcio Jose Sanchez

One major concern is that investments in “tiny home” structures actually sustain homelessness, by diverting needed investments from permanent housing. Many people living in temporary shelters of all kinds end up returning to the streets after their allotted time to stay ends, not having anywhere else to go.

“Until there is more affordable housing, this ‘solution’ leads nowhere,” argued Josh Kruger, a formerly homeless journalist in Philadelphia. “Instead, these are just feel-good boondoggles so middle and upper class people can feel like they’re doing something … They’re storage sheds for human beings who otherwise remind us all of our society’s failure to care.”

In 2021 the Washington state’s Lived Experience Coalition — a group of current and formerly homeless individuals — issued a statement lambasting the “dehumanizing conditions and lack of services” some experience in tiny house villages, and warned of lawmakers who avert focus from more permanent solutions. In Seattle, for example, some residents lived in tiny wood huts that lacked heat and electricity, where school children had to do their homework with flashlights.

Barbara Poppe, the former executive director of the US Interagency Council on Homelessness during the Obama administration, said while some models are better than existing congregate homeless shelters, some are “far worse.” What really alarms her, she told me, is the “corporate investor model, for-profit industry” that’s cropped up, naming companies like Tuff Shed and Pallet Shelter as examples.

“Some of these are quite inhumane, and some of those cost studies — Pallet will say it costs $12,000 [per door], but that’s a sleight of hand, it’s very deceiving, because there’s all the site preparation cost on top,” she said. “It seems like what the public wants and by extension what the elected officials say they want is an easy answer and a cheaper answer to the fact that we have an extreme affordable housing crisis that sits on top of growing inequality.”

For advocates like Visotzky with the National Alliance to End Homelessness, conceptualizing housing and shelter as distinct categories remains important. “If we start calling [tiny homes] housing then folks are going to potentially lose eligibility for a lot of key services and resources,” he said. “We need to make commitments and not shortcuts.”

Supporters of building more tiny houses say their critics are stuck in the status quo, implicitly accepting that thousands of people will remain outside. They say it’s a false choice that cities can’t invest in both permanent and interim solutions at once, and that the crisis demands vision and urgency.

“One of the biggest hurdles that’s blocking us from ending unsheltered homelessness is lost optimism,” said Funk. “Dignity Moves’ value-add can be to come in and say, ‘Oh, no, it’s very possible, here’s exactly the paint-by-color map of how.”

What does a real dignified investment look like?

The Connect Homes factory in San Bernardino, California, located about an hour outside Los Angeles, had homeless shelters on the assembly line the day I visited in mid-October. The company was working to fulfill a contract for Long Beach, California, which plans to open its first village of tiny house shelters in early 2025.

A view of the Connect Homes manufacturing plant in San Bernardino, California, on October 23, 2023.

John Francis Peters for Vox

Originally founded in 2012 to produce factory-built houses, Connect Homes leaders realized during the pandemic they could use virtually their same industrial tools to develop shelters, too. The company now wants to build shelters nationwide.

John Francis Peters for Vox

Gordon Stott, co-founder of Connect Homes, explains new homes in various stages of production. These will be used as interim housing in Long Beach, California.

“Is it housing, or is it shelter? Well I think what we’re seeing is it can be both,” said co-founder Gordon Stott. While at a higher price point than some of his competitors — units can be sold to cities at $80,000 per door — Stott believes his products are more durable investments, and prove homeless shelters don’t have to be ugly or stigmatized.

The shelter units set for Long Beach will be between 110 and 185 square feet (the larger ones will be ADA-accessible) and the city specifically looked for vendors who could build units with en suite bathrooms. The city used part of a $25 million state grant to finance the construction and expects to spend about $930,000 per year annually in operating costs.

Workers build tiny homes at the Connect Homes manufacturing plant.

John Francis Peters for Vox

“We’re in a moment where cities are having to step up and do things they haven’t done before,” Rex Richardson, Long Beach’s mayor, told me. “We’ve had a big history of dealing with homelessness and providing housing but we weren’t prepared for the crisis — the way it manifested — with a 62 percent increase between 2020 and 2022.”

A Connect Homes employee works on a bathroom floor for a new shelter that will be used as interim housing.

John Francis Peters for Vox

Models with private bathrooms might deter some local governments, tempted to spend as little as possible. But if the structures are likely to stick around for years in a city, and if people are likely to live in them for extended periods of time, then investing in nicer units with higher standards makes more sense. Ferry, with Portland State University, said he tells municipalities considering tiny house villages “to think really carefully about” their request for proposals, or RFPs. If you put out a contract for a non-congregate shelter between 70 and 150 square feet with no other specifications, then you’re generally obligated to go with the cheapest bidder.

John Francis Peters for Vox

Connect Homes shelter products, from construction to finished and on display at the Connect Homes manufacturing plant in San Bernardino, on October 23.

For now though, most leaders have been drawn to companies that offer cheaper upfront products. While most players on the market say their relocatable shelters can last at least a decade if not more, none have been operating long enough to really put their claims to the test, to truly see if “tiny home” units can last, bouncing around from plot of land to plot of land.

Patrick Monahan, a 42-year-old resident of the shelter village in San Francisco, had been sleeping outside off and on for almost 10 years before he moved into his tiny cabin on Gough Street.

Volunteers plant gardens for the residents at 33 Gough Street.

Gabriela Hasbun for Vox

Patrick Monahan is a resident at 33 Gough Street.

Gabriela Hasbun for Vox

Monahan never wanted to stay in traditional homeless shelters, and he’s appreciative of what the village offers him: a “fairly safe” environment that’s “very pretty and clean” and where the “food’s not great, but it’s free.” He doesn’t love using a porta-potty but thinks it’s better than going on the street.

Still, Monahan holds out hope that one day he’ll have something more. “I can’t have visitors here,” he said. “I rather have my own place, that’s mine.”

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Homelessness within the San Francisco Bay Space: The disaster and a path ahead

Daily SF News — Thu, 23 Nov 2023 08:14:27 +0000

Homelessness in the San Francisco Bay Area has reached crisis proportions. The region has the third-largest population of people experiencing homelessness in the United States, behind only New York City and Los Angeles. Two-thirds of the Bay Area’s homeless residents are living on the street, in their cars, or in encampments, while the remainder live with daily uncertainty over whether their bed at night will be a relative’s couch or a temporary shelter cot. Tent encampments are becoming a visible feature of the region’s streetscape, and the crisis is placing an undue burden on auxiliary support systems, such as healthcare, criminal justice, and behavioral health. Despite concerted effort by public officials and substantial investment in housing and related supports and services, the number of homeless is growing, as inflows continue to outpace outflows.

Addressing this issue will likely require a regional, multi-stakeholder approach that holistically supports homeless families across the full journey, from housing insecure to homeless to housed, and integrates resources across the government, nonprofit, and private sectors.

The journey from housing insecure to homeless to housed

While most of the public thinks about homelessness as “unsheltered” homelessness, or street homelessness, the reality is a broader journey as individuals enter, experience, and transition out of homelessness, with myriad possible interventions along the spectrum (Exhibit 1). Complicating the crisis further are the facts that an individual or family’s path into and out of homelessness is often not straightforward and that the support system itself is fragmented, with limited communication and data sharing between service providers and across regions. Efforts to improve the crisis response system will benefit from an end-to-end strategy to stem the instances of entry into homelessness, increase exit opportunities, and better coordinate care across the support spectrum to ensure people don’t get “stuck.”

The state of the crisis in the Bay Area

Based on a 2017 point-in-time (PIT) count, 28,200 people were estimated to be homeless in the Bay Area, with 70 percent of these living in Santa Clara, San Francisco, and Alameda Counties (Exhibit 2). Preliminary PIT counts released in 2019 indicate an increase of 17 percent in San Francisco, 31 percent in Santa Clara, and 43 percent in Alameda Counties from 2017 to 2019. The total number experiencing homelessness in a given year is likely substantially higher: PIT counts may underestimate persons experiencing homelessness on an annual basis by at least two to three times.

Contrary to popular myth, the majority of homeless persons in the Bay Area are not coming from other regions: 89 percent of people experiencing homelessness in 2017 reported living in their county for one or more years. However, practitioners report high rates of interregional mobility, with persons experiencing homelessness crossing county lines regularly, many separated only by a short bus or metro trip.

A large portion of the Bay Area homeless population is unsheltered: 67 percent in 2017, second only to Los Angeles. Relative to other metropolitan areas, the Bay Area also has high rates of chronic and youth homelessness (Exhibit 3).

How we got here

The combination of a long-standing housing-affordability crisis, insufficient inventory, and a lack of system-level and regional coordination means the Bay Area has failed to sufficiently stem inflows, increase exits, and effectively navigate those experiencing homelessness to lasting solutions.

Housing affordability

Long-standing housing-affordability challenges affect every stage of the Bay Area’s homelessness cycle. From 1999 to 2014, the Bay Area permitted construction of 61,000 fewer very-low-income affordable-housing units than recommended by the state and lost a substantial portion of existing housing inventory to market pressures—in San Francisco, for every two affordable housing units created, the city lost more than one from its existing inventory because of units being permanently withdrawn from the protection of rent control.

The result is a severe housing shortage: according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, as of 2017, in the San Francisco–Oakland–Hayward and San Jose–Sunnyvale–Santa Clara metropolitan areas alone, there was a supply gap of more than 157,500 affordable and available units for extremely low-income households. Two-thirds of extremely low-income households lived in rental accommodations they struggled to afford, leaving them one unexpected expense away from entering homelessness (Exhibit 4).

Insufficient inventory

Insufficient inventory across the homelessness spectrum further limits exit opportunities and leaves many waiting on permanent solutions without a temporary home. In keeping with the national push for Housing First, the Bay Area has doubled down on increasing permanent-supportive-housing and rapid-rehousing options. However, in light of the affordability challenges previously discussed, current inventory is not nearly enough to meet demand. Accounting for permanent-supportive-housing and rapid-rehousing supports, the current Bay Area crisis-response system currently shelters 30,000 homeless individuals. Assuming current bed-count utilization is at 100 percent, more than 28,000 additional individuals require permanent housing, with more than 18,000 of those in need of immediate shelter (Exhibit 5). Ultimately, an “all of the above” strategy is required: the right mix of affordable housing, permanent supportive housing, and temporary shelters to meet the full accommodation need.

Lack of coordination

The Bay Area’s crisis-response system is highly fragmented, with limited communication and data sharing between service providers and across regions. Each county operates its own Continuum of Care: submitting its own strategic plan, collecting its own data on its homelessness population and system performance, and receiving its own funding from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Given the substantial interregional mobility of the Bay Area’s homeless population, this approach impedes understanding of current service needs and gaps; it also hampers much-needed collaboration to determine the most effective strategies to meet growing need.

Pillars of the solution

Practitioners across the system agree: there is no silver bullet. Progress on the issue will likely require regionally coordinated efforts by governments, philanthropists, and the private sector across three key spheres.

1. Meet the accommodation need

At its core, the solution to homelessness is a home. The Bay Area must expand the housing supply available to extremely low-income households to keep people in their homes and increase exit opportunities into permanent housing solutions. Efforts will need to target both families and individuals able to benefit from rapid rehousing services, as well as the Bay Area’s large chronically homeless population, who, in most cases, require housing with wraparound services in order to successfully transition out of homelessness and remain housed long term. These solutions aren’t free, but neither is the status quo: a 2015 study in Santa Clara County estimated that indirect costs of homelessness on the healthcare, criminal justice, and social services systems amounted to more than $520 million annually.

Meeting the affordable-housing gap will likely not be possible under the status quo: convoluted permitting, high construction costs, and long timelines fraught with administrative bottlenecks impede meaningful progress. Renewed efforts by stakeholders in the public and private spheres could reduce the time and cost needed to build new units, incentivize housing production for lower-income brackets, and test and scale innovative models to meet accommodation needs and provide the necessary support services.

2. Drive greater state and regional collaboration

The fragmented solution landscape and intraregional mobility of the Bay Area’s homeless population point to the importance of a cohesive strategic approach to homelessness that integrates funding, data collection, and advocacy efforts between service providers and across regions. Creation of a regional Bay Area Homeless Management Information System could help to build a more accurate map of inflows, exits, available services, gaps, and cost to serve. Establishing a regional homelessness-management plan—like the regional emergency-management systems that have been set up in the wake of disasters—could enhance service delivery, reduce redundancies, increase accountability, and enhance the region’s power to advocate at the state and national levels.

3. Engage private and philanthropic capital to enhance services and pilot innovative solutions

Private and philanthropic dollars can be deployed in innovative ways to expand and improve services for current homelessness populations. Public–private partnerships and innovative models, such as pay for success, could mobilize much-needed capital to rapidly test and scale highly effective interventions. Fast-growth employers expanding in the Bay Area can add housing as they expand or invest in efforts to preserve affordability, such as the recent Partnership for the Bay’s Future, supported by Facebook, Genentech, Kaiser Permanente, and several local foundations. Innovative technologies can enhance outreach efforts, reduce costs, and simplify complexities in the current service system.

Unprecedented growth in the Bay Area has brought unprecedented challenges. The region has long been an engine of growth and prosperity, but it has also increasingly become marked by unaffordability and inexcusable conditions for our most vulnerable. The problem is not intractable: the Bay Area has the intellect and resources to turn the tide, but doing so will likely require additional resources and a more cohesive, coordinated, and substantial approach than the status quo.

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Professor Exposes Drivers of San Francisco’s Housing Disaster

Daily SF News — Wed, 01 Nov 2023 21:21:07 +0000

With its majestic hills, mystic fog and magical afternoon light, San Francisco is one of the most photogenic and expensive cities in the world, with the median home price hitting $1.4 million in 2023.

It’s a city that Moira O’Neill, an urban planning and local government law scholar at the University of Virginia, knows well, even though she was born and raised on the other side of the bay, in Oakland. These two California cities have been in the media for years because of their rising housing costs and the debate around the relationship between housing supply, gentrification and displacement. But the cities are at the center of O’Neill’s research about what drives regional and neighborhood-level inequality.

These topics aren’t abstract for O’Neill. She grew up poor, in a city much less affluent than its neighbors in the region, and went to public schools that were de facto segregated. For that reason, understanding how law can remedy or perpetuate inequality has long been a personal mission for O’Neill — an effort that culminated last week in the heralded release of a California-funded investigative research report that prompted the state to require the city to overhaul a zoning and permitting process that has stymied housing construction.

As O’Neill told The New York Times after her report was released, San Francisco has progressive zoning laws on paper, but its actual practices — which her report uncovered — have resulted in a city that excludes middle- and lower-income workers.

“It’s a progressive city, but there’s this contradiction,” she said in the Times article. “It’s really, really important to highlight not just for California, but for the country, how it’s possible to use procedural rules to be exclusive and block the ability to house people.”

Over the years, pundits and politicians have thrown out various explanations for the astronomical home prices in San Francisco, from generally blaming liberal policies to more specific issues such as the booming tech economy, the cost of labor and building materials, and the expense of addressing environmental regulations.

That last claim was a tipping point for O’Neill, whose scholarship harnesses empirical and data-driven evidence to support state and local government efforts to address both climate change and inequality. Now holding a joint faculty appointment in UVA’s School of Architecture and School of Law, O’Neill still serves as an associate research scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, where she also previously taught at the College of Environmental Design and at the law school.

When she began working as a researcher at Berkeley in 2012, O’Neill took a close look at how other fields — like urban planning and public health — understood and evaluated law. That’s when she began designing a project to use more detailed data and interdisciplinary methods to tease out the details of how state and local law shape housing development patterns in very different cities.

In 2016, she started talking about her work to a colleague at Berkeley Law, Eric Biber, who taught environmental law. “I told him about my concerns and said, ‘Here’s why this matters to me,’” O’Neill said. “‘Because urban economists are saying that it’s environmental law in California that’s blocking housing, and from working in this space, I don’t think it’s that simple and I don’t think we have the right data to fix anything.’”

Biber agreed, but he didn’t need convincing to join her efforts. “He had his own reasons for wanting to launch this work,” O’Neill said.

Working with a law student, they launched an initial study in San Francisco. “So I had partners — we still had no money, but we had a team,” O’Neill laughed.

By 2017, a program officer at the Silicon Valley Community Foundation took notice of their work and provided O’Neill and Biber their first grant to fund expansion of the work into four neighboring cities in the region. O’Neill and her colleagues released their first working paper in February 2018, sharing initial findings from the dataset that would become known as CALES, short for Comprehensive Assessment of Land Use Entitlements Study.

Within months, the paper’s findings would show up in the analysis supporting legislative reform to close loopholes in existing state housing law. “Now we had a proof of concept on what precise, detailed data could do for legislative reform.”

Other funding then showed up, including money from the California Air Resources Board.

Over the next several years, O’Neill and her colleagues at Berkeley continued to collaborate on papers looking at the CALES data from different angles — but always with consistent methodology. In one instance, the CALES data showed that local governments were choosing to write their local law to trigger the state environmental law that other scholars said blocked housing construction. In another, the CALES data showed that state climate policy — often blamed for displacement — could not overcome the challenge of local exclusionary land use regulation.

Earlier this year O’Neill was able to use the data to explore the effects of recent state legislation that requires cities that aren’t meeting their housing production targets to approve “qualifying” affordable developments. Qualifying developments are those where a specified amount of the units are priced below market rate, where the proposed project will be built on parcels that are not environmentally sensitive and where they meet other special labor criteria.

“If they conform to all the city and state rules, you must say yes,” O’Neill said. “For those developments, you can no longer apply a discretionary local review process.”

The point of removing a locale’s discretion for otherwise compliant projects is to prevent well-organized — and well-heeled — neighbors from blocking affordable or mixed-income development by raising a ruckus at zoning and planning hearings, she said.

The work that led to last week’s eventful release began last fall, when California’s Department of Housing and Community Development launched an investigation into San Francisco’s land use policy and practices. The agency provided O’Neill a grant to expand CALES in San Francisco and analyze the data to identify barriers to housing approval and affordable housing construction. O’Neill was also tasked with checking to see whether San Francisco’s processes were consistent with California’s housing law, which requires cities to zone and plan to provide their fair share of affordable housing to the region. That law keeps home rule intact, but it asks cities to equitably spread both the burdens and the benefits of housing construction.

“The state’s newest changes to this area of housing law do more to task cities with revising local laws that have essentially walled off neighborhoods from multifamily housing, in order to relieve the burden on the neighborhoods that have carried the load for so long,” O’Neill said. “This is one of the ways cities create opportunities for social and economic mobility — by making sure that poor people aren’t concentrated in one part of the city.”

The report released last week showed how San Francisco has maneuvered around California’s housing law — which applies to its local zoning and planning law — through its local law, including a provision in its business and tax code. That provision requires discretionary review of all permits of any type.

“There is no proposal to do anything that is not subject to discretionary review,” O’Neill said. “If you want to do anything, even build a deck — there’s always the element of notification, and neighbors and ‘interested parties’ can just request a hearing on it.”

O’Neill calls it “process to an extreme.”

O’Neill and a team of researchers — which included Tim Dodson, a third-year UVA Law student — also looked at every detail of how San Francisco’s process unfolds in practice. Some of what she found came through the CALES data set. Other insights came in through interviews because informal conditions for approval were rarely referenced in hearing transcripts and documents.

“What developers, planners and housing advocates in the city shared is that the process allowed the city to impose conditions for approval that are not codified, that are not enumerated in writing, that are not predictable and that come up in between hearings,” O’Neill said. “That’s what people are reporting and it’s very hard to track whether the city is imposing conditions that are not allowed under state laws, because it’s happening outside of the formal public notice-and-hearing context.”

The research resulted in a 94-page academic report with statistical analyses, mapping and comparative charts. The biggest takeaway, O’Neill said, is that the housing approval process in San Francisco makes it hard to create any kind of new multifamily housing, affordable or otherwise.

“In other words, San Francisco is exclusionary — despite having inclusionary laws on paper, such as an inclusionary housing program, tenant protections, and a lot of land zoned for dense residential use compared to other cities,” she said.

This arduous process has meant it takes developers two years, on average, to get the initial green light for developments that already comply with all of San Francisco’s local law, or “code compliant” development. San Francisco then self-reports to the state that it takes another 605 days, on average, to get building permits for specific items like plumbing and electrical hookups. The unpredictable timeframes have driven some developers out of the market and deterred others from entering, she said.

The state is now mandating 18 specific actions the city must take, including eliminating the right of any individual to object to projects that comply with city rules and speeding up building permits once a project is approved. The state’s report also provides another 10 recommended actions.

According to the state report, if the city doesn’t make the required changes within the specified timeframes, California could withhold state funding and revoke local control over development in San Francisco.

While the San Francisco project had personal relevance for O’Neill, she said she hopes to be part of building a more equitable and sustainable future for Charlottesville, Albemarle and the South generally — a place where her husband, Malo Hutson, the dean of UVA’s School of Architecture, has family ties.

“I believe in research that helps local and state governments implement policy to tackle climate change and inequality — that’s everything I do in my research,” she said. “I love teaching land use law and state and local government law, because of how relevant it is to our daily lives. It may not be the area of law you think about first when you come to law school, but the fact is, your day-to-day experience is deeply impacted by state and local laws that affect your choice of schools, how you get to work and your ability to pay for your housing.”

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