by Christopher S. Elmendorf, Richard Frank and Darien Shanske
[Cross-posted from the San Francisco Chronicle]
The recent defeat of Senate Bill 827, state Sen. Scott Wiener’s bill allowing 5-story buildings near transit hubs, was an enormous setback for California’s efforts to make housing more affordable while reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
Our state is now in a serious bind.
The only way to make California housing widely affordable is to build a lot more of it. We could do this with Texas-style suburban sprawl — Houston has boomed while remaining affordable — but that would sacrifice the environment. The alternative is to add residential density to existing neighborhoods, near job centers and mass transit.
California picked density over sprawl a decade ago, when it enacted SB375, a commendable law that requires local governments to plan for energy-efficient, transit-oriented development. Yet most city and county planners report that this planning mandate has had “little to no impact on actions by their city.”
The defeat of Wiener’s bill and the so far meager impact of SB375 speak to a deeper truth: California is not going to achieve large-scale, high-density development near transit unless it can change the local politics of housing.
In theory, the state might induce pro-housing political realignments with taxes and subsidies — for example, reallocating property tax revenue to cities that allow dense housing near transit and starving those that don’t. But the quick demise of SB827 suggests that serious penalties are not yet enactable, and subsidies would have to compete with many other General Fund priorities.
We think California can bolster pro-housing forces at the local level without bringing down the hammer or breaking the bank. Consider these alternatives:
1. Leverage “cap and trade” to make the climate consequences of density more transparent — and more tangible. The linchpin of California’s climate change regime is the state’s cap-and-trade program, which puts a statewide ceiling on greenhouse gas emissions from industrial sources and requires emitters to buy allowances for their releases. California could strengthen pro-housing forces in city politics by folding local governments into the cap-and-trade program.
The state would issue a formula estimating the per-dwelling climate impact of new developments, taking account of proximity to transit, size, materials and parking. When a local government permits new housing that’s more climate-efficient than the typical new unit statewide, it would be rewarded with credits to sell in the cap-and-trade market.
This would give pro-housing “YIMBY” activists a green cudgel to wield in local fights over development. Using the state’s formula, proponents could quantify the environmental benefits of each project near transit. Meanwhile, budget-minded city officials would have a fiscal incentive to upzone land near transit. The more transit-friendly development the city permits, the more allowances it would earn to sell in the greenhouse-gas market.
2. Reframe local debates with state reporting of “housing potential” along transit lines. Guardians of the status quo point out that San Francisco has increased its housing production in recent years. But the picture would look quite different if we compared current production to the city’s potential for transit-friendly housing, rather than to the city’s very modest output over the past few decades.
3. Let cities recapture the value they can create by upzoning and streamlined permitting. Opponents of Wiener’s bill called it a giveaway to developers. They had a point. Rezoning a lot from single-family use to five-story apartments increases its value tremendously. Why should the landowner keep all that profit? When local governments control rezoning, they can demand ancillary benefits such as affordable-housing units, infrastructure investments, and more. All this is standard fare — and not just for major rezonings, but for individual projects under the highly discretionary permitting rules that prevail at the local level today.
Yet project-by-project bargaining has major downsides. The uncertainties and delays, and the inefficient medium of exchange (in-kind benefits rather than money), contribute to the result we see all around us: an inadequate supply of new housing. Local officials surely understand this, but right now they have no way to profit from clear, nondiscretionary rules for development.
To encourage development on lands near transit, California should allow cities to share directly in the property value created by upzoning and permitting reforms. Cities could be authorized to impose “special assessments” for upzoning or permit-streamlining on lands within a half-mile of transit — recouping, say, 50 percent to 75 percent of the value added. The state law authorizing such value-recapture assessments would probably need to be approved by referendum vote. But once it is enacted, cities would have a fiscal incentive to supplant project-specific haggling with transparent, value-enhancing and development-enabling rules.
Our state’s housing-affordability crisis was decades in the making, and these solutions won’t work miracles overnight. But if state-mandated upzoning is off the table, and state-mandated planning is ineffectual, we had better start thinking about ways the state might intervene at the root, targeting the local politics of housing.
