San Francisco Chronicle: Building more homes essential for California

California’s housing shortage is strangling our state — displacing longtime residents, undermining job growth, and harming our environment and public health, as people are pushed into longer commutes. For decades, we have failed to build enough housing, and now we are paying the price.

I recently introduced a housing reform bill, Senate Bill 35, to strengthen incentives for local communities to build enough housing at all income levels. SB35 deserves your support.

This human-made housing shortage is doing real and lasting damage to our communities. Housing costs are through the roof in many parts of our state — and most significantly, in the Bay Area. It’s time we take responsibility — as a state, as local communities, and as residents — to build more housing.

California’s lack of enough housing affects everyone: Those who struggle to find housing they can afford, and those with stable housing. We can’t just continue to ignore this basic need.

If you’re a parent, you want your children to be able to rent or buy a home near you.

If you’re a business owner, you want workers who don’t have to spend hours commuting, arriving at work exhausted or having to leave early.

If you want healthy communities, you know we need teachers, police officers, baristas, health care workers, retail workers, janitors, and artists to live and work locally.

We must break the inertia that has paralyzed California for decades and led us into this housing crisis.

SB35, the Housing Accountability and Affordability Act, is based on the premise that all cities need to do their fair share to build housing. Under California law, every eight years, each city is given a set number of both market-rate and affordable housing units (both low-income and moderate-income) that it needs to build to meet regional needs. Yet, this state-mandated process, called the Regional Housing Needs Assessment, has no enforcement mechanism and creates no real incentive for communities to meet their housing goals. Some communities fall far short or blow off those goals entirely, frequently by blocking new housing approvals or creating cumbersome approval processes that delay and defeat new housing.

As a former elected official in San Francisco, I support local control on many levels. However, local control isn’t about whether a community meets its housing goal, but rather how it meets its goal.

SB35 would put in place an evaluation system: If a city is meeting its regional housing goals to build both market-rate and affordable housing, the law will have no effect. If it isn’t meeting its goals, then SB35 triggers a process so that the housing we all need gets built —specifically, the city’s approval process will become streamlined so that project that meet zoning requirements are automatically approved, subject to design review and paying construction workers prevailing wage. If a city begins meeting its goals, the streamlined process ends.

SB35 allows local communities to control their destinies. It also recognizes that allowing local communities to refuse to build housing is no longer tenable.

SB35 may have its greatest effect in accelerating the creation of affordable housing. Few, if any jurisdictions meet their housing goals for low- and moderate-income housing. Streamlining the approval of these projects will help those in greatest need of housing opportunities.

Last year, Gov. Jerry Brown challenged the Legislature to approve a plan to streamline housing construction. While I didn’t agree with everything in the governor’s approach, I do respect him for calling the question on this issue of statewide concern. SB35 helps answer that call.

SB35 will hold us all accountable to address California’s worsening housing shortage. Ideally, all cities will work to build their share of housing in a timely manner, and the state law won’t kick in. That, however, requires residents to support new housing in their own communities and adopt smart, progressive, local land use policies that allow for the creation of housing for our neighbors. Until that happens, we need the right incentives to create more housing in all of our cities. SB35 does just that.

Scott Wiener represents San Francisco and northern San Mateo County in the state Senate. He serves on the Transportation and Housing Committee.

Read the op-ed on the San Francisco Chronicle website