Despite what you may have heard

The City Council is not doing anything about affordable housing today, and they are also not considering a plan to fight crime that Dellums has submitted. Instead, they are going to listen to an hour of public speakers saying we need IZ or we don’t need IZ, then sit around and have the same conversation they’ve been having for years, then not do anything about it. Later, Dellums will ask for Measure Y reserve funds that we actually do need to pay police salaries and buy equipment so he can spend it on buying TV advertisements instead: this is is plan to fulfill his completely unrealistic goal of getting to 803 by the end of the year. Any small shred of optimism I had that this was possible was wiped out after getting Chief Tucker’s head-in-the-sand one line answers to a series of questions I asked about the specifics of the recruitment package. Follow-up questions have not been answered at all.

Anyway, I’m tired of writing about this stuff, and busy with other work, so that’s all I’m going to say for now. Maybe if I get my errands done quickly I’ll have more about the recruitment package up before the Council meeting starts, but it’s also possible that I won’t.

Well, that was boring.

I have to admit, I’m a little bummed. Usually during meetings with anything even related to inclusionary zoning on the agenda, somebody at least says something absurd that I can make fun of. This time, I didn’t even get that. Instead, a bunch of people stood up and thanked Jane Brunner for raising the issue of affordable housing, and the discussion wasn’t so much of a discussion in the sense that anyone actually talked about anything, suggested anything concrete, or made an argument for or against anything, but more of a little rah-rah pep rally about how important it is that we do something about housing affordability, like, now. Which, duh, we already all knew and I thought the point of this extra hour of the CED meeting was that we would talk about what we were going to do. Apparently I was misinformed. Read more

IZ rears its ugly head again

My God. I am so incredibly bored with blogging about inclusionary zoning. I’d love to just ignore it forever, but I don’t feel like I can since it appears to be the primary focus (PDF!) of the Community and Economic Development Committee’s “comprehensive affordable housing discussion” today. Really, though - how much more is there to say?

There is no evidence anywhere that a policy like the one being considered in Oakland is successful at providing affordable housing in cities. IZ advocates’ own studies find that successful and productive IZ programs actually subsidize the cost of the inclusionary units (in addition to allowing density bonuses, etc.), and do not expect developers to shoulder the burden. Most cities in Alameda County that have IZ produce fewer units of affordable housing per capita than we do. The city’s own economic study shows that the introduction of an inclusionary zoning policy would halt development in most parts of the city, thereby reducing the amount of money available to fund affordable housing construction through the RDA set-aside. The City Council is exactly the same as it was last time we voted on IZ, and there’s no reason to think anyone has changed their minds in the meantime. This entire discussion is pointless, and writing about it is growing unbelievably tiresome.

I’ve said this all before. Over and over and over again ad nauseum. So instead of ranting about the extreme retardation of this proposal yet again, I’ll just fall back on what I do best - page through a report nobody else is going to bother taking the time to read and share some of the information it contains. Read more

Getting the affordable housing discussion back on track

At the September 18th meeting when the Council received the Blue Ribbon Commission report, Jane Brunner lamented our failure to adopt an inclusionary zoning ordinance, saying “We have been discussing this issue for 8 years, and we’ve never gotten the five votes….we’ve been waiting and waiting and waiting.” She acknowledged that the Council is split 4-4 on the issue, but then somewhat bizarrely concluded that since half of them want it, they should “just do it.” If only getting things done were so simple. IZ represents a serious ideological divide, and there is no compromise on the table that that negates concerns that IZ would actively hurt our ability to affordable housing production. Read more

Real problems deserve real policy solutions

Last night I got home a little before 9 o’clock. As I was walking into my building, I heard a terrible scream, so I stepped back on the street to investigate. A woman on the corner had just been knocked down and had her backpack pulled off. She pointed the direction the kid ran, but he was already out of my sight.

She was bruised, but otherwise physically uninjured. Mentally was another story. She was shaking and sobbing and hysterical, as people tend to be when this sort of thing happens to them. (At this point I see a purse snatching as little more than an inconvenience, but I remember the first time I got mugged I reacted exactly like she did. Probably worse, actually.)

It wasn’t the middle of the night. It wasn’t a bad neighborhood. And it wasn’t a deserted street.There were four people within a block of her when it happened. In the 15 minutes we were waiting for the police to arrive, over a dozen people walked passed us.

I had planned on using my evening to write some blogs for today - one about the BRC’s stupid non-recommendations and another about this idiotic smoking ordinance. But I found myself too restless and frustrated to write. I was frustrated at myself for not being able to comfort this terribly upset woman or think of better things to say to her. I was frustrated over knowing that this kid would never be caught, and even if he was, nothing would happen to him, since this isn’t a “serious” crime. Read more

Worthless reporting on a worthless report

I’m not sure exactly how this came to be, but somehow we reached a point quite some time ago where the metric for objectivity in political journalism shifted from reporting the actual truth about a situtation to giving equal time to both sides of an issue. Generally, this is accomplished by finding advocates of both pro and con positions and quoting them. So if you’re, say, Christopher Heredia, and you’re writing about an inclusionary zoning report from the disastrous Blue Ribbon Commission, you call up Greg McConnell and then you call up some IZ advocacy group, write down whatever they both say, and then BOOM! you’re done and you can go grab a beer or to your yoga class or whatever it is you like to do with your free time. Great.

Of course, the downside of that approach is that you end up with nonsense like this in your stories: Read more

For-sale affordable housing: who does it benefit?

People are constantly advising me to buy a home. They tell me that as a renter, I am simply throwing my money away every month. When I point out that between condo fees and property taxes, even a modest condo in Oakland that I owned outright with no mortgage payment would cost me more per month than I currently pay in rent, they say I am missing the point. The main reason to buy a home, I am repeatedly told by well meaning relatives and wealthy friends, is to build equity.

Okay. If they say so. I’m personally not entirely convinced of all the wonderful benefits of home ownership that seem to be widely accepted conventional wisdom in this country, but that’s really an issue for another day. Read more

Time to move on from inclusionary zoning

Zennie Abraham thinks blogging about crime is depressing. He’s right. You know what else is depressing? Blogging about affordable housing.

The Blue Ribbon Commission met on Tuesday for the final time, and after more pointless discussion, decided…nothing. The Commissioners were unable to reach a consensus on anything and will be issuing no recommendations to the City Council.

This is a phenomenally depressing outcome from a commission that was charged with creating “a comprehensive housing strategy to ensure that housing, be it rental or ownership, is affordable to all income levels within the city.” Also, this is what happens when you become so focused on ideology that you forget what you’re supposed to be doing in the first place. All the BRC did, all the Council does, and all the housing activists do is sit around yelling about IZ endlessly. At this point, it should be abundantly clear that this Council is not going reach a consensus on IZ. They do not have the five votes needed for it to pass. Read more

More lies about inclusionary zoning from the Trib

A few days ago, I was complaining to a friend, as I often do, about how worthless I find most local news. Regular readers will already be familiar with my feelings on this. He defended the reporters, saying that the job is hard, and that to report on policy with any depth or nuance required more research than most reporters have time for. I wholeheartedly disagree. There is simply no excuse for reporting on important topics like housing policy and getting your facts completely wrong.

Take this article in today’s Trib, for example:

Inclusionary zoning ordinances, as they are called, are designed mainly to ensure people can have home ownership opportunities in the communities in which they work, rather than forcing people to live far distances from the workplace.

No, they aren’t. Read more

More on East Bay IZ

Yesterday, I posted some numbers comparing Oakland’s production of affordable housing to several other Easy Bay cities.

I don’t have much to add. I think the numbers speak for themselves. One of the most frequently repeated arguments from inclusionary zoning advocates is that most other cities in the Bay Area have adopted some form of IZ. I have never quite understood this argument - didn’t we all learn as children that someone else doing something is not a good enough reason to do it ourselves? The argument might be persuasive if cities with IZ actually generated a significant amount of affordable units through the program. But they don’t. Read more

A look at affordable housing production in the East Bay

Inclusionary Zoning advocates and lazy reporters love to accuse IZ opponents of not caring about providing affordable housing. This is far from true. IZ opponents are simply more concerned with facts and reason than with emotion, and repeat time and time again that while IZ might sound nice and helpful and all that, it has not been demonstrated to be an effective method of providing affordable housing in cities. In fact, if an IZ ordinance passed in Oakland, the city’s own economic analysis (PDF!) has shown that it will halt new housing construction, resulting in a net decrease in the number of below market rate units produced.

Below I have listed the number of affordable units produced in a number of East Bay cities between 2000 and 2005. Read more

Blue Ribbon Commissioners should be ashamed of themselves

If you haven’t been following dto510’s excellent coverage of the Blue Ribbon Commission, you can get up to speed by checking out my Novometro story on the subject.

In what will undoubtedly be yet another colossal waste of time, the Commission will meet tonight again at 6:30 at City Hall, where they will squabble pointlessly over IZ, just as they have at virtually every meeting for the past six months. These fights will bring us no closer to providing affordable housing for any number of Oaklanders, but the BRC has repeatedly demonstrated that they have zero interest in such a goal.

IZ advocates are so determined to extract their pound of flesh from developers that they have abandoned all pretense of caring about whether or not any affordable housing gets built in this city at all. Read more

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