Condo conversions were a big controversy a few years ago, but since then, have pretty much faded off the radar of everyone but professional affordable housing activists and developers. Now the issue is back, sort of.

Councilmembers Pat Kernighan and Rebecca Kaplan have introduced a proposal to make some changes to Oakland’s condo conversion rules (PDF), which will be considered at today’s Community and Economic Development Committee meeting (PDF).

Basically, sometimes apartment building owners decide they don’t want to own an apartment anymore and would like to turn their building into condominiums and sell the units off individually. In Oakland, however, this is not the easiest thing to do for most buildings. A 1981 law, designed to ensure a robust supply of rental housing, prohibits the conversion of an apartment building greater than four units into condominiums unless you have something called “conversion rights.”

In practice, conversion rights are a little silly. Basically, when someone builds a new apartment building, each unit gives them one conversion right. Then if someone else wants to convert their apartment building into condos, they go and buy the conversion rights needed to do so. So if I have a 20 unit apartment building I want to turn into condos, I have to go find someone who built at least 20 rental units and buy the conversion rights from him. In certain parts of the City, you can only buy conversion rights from buildings that are in the same area. The idea is, again, to guarantee that we preserve an adequate supply of rental housing, and to protect tenants from displacement if their apartments are converted.

The proposal (PDF) introduced by Councilmembers Kernighan and Kaplan would create a “Pilot Program” that allows up to 300 units in “higher rent” apartment buildings (buildings where the average rent for new tenants in the past two years has been over $2100 a month) to be converted over a period of two years without purchasing conversion rights. Instead, the building owner would pay the City a $15,000 per-unit fee for the conversions. Then after two years, it would be over.

Existing tenants in the buildings that want to convert would all have to be offered a rent controlled lifetime lease and units where tenants choose to take the lifetime lease could not be sold. If tenants choose to move instead of taking the lifetime lease, they wouldn’t get any money to help pay re-location costs. If tenants want to buy their apartment as a condo, they would get a 10% discount.

The fees paid to the City for the conversion rights would go to rehab of existing affordable housing. Additionally, the proposal would create more money for the City by creating a bunch of new condos, which will each be paying property taxes, transfer tax when they are sold, and parcel taxes.

There are two other features of the proposal, which I won’t get into that much right now. One would make it easier to convert some Tenant-in-Common properties to condos, and the other would clarify existing law to make it clear that if you build a new rental apartment building and then decide you want to convert it to condos, you’re allowed to use your own conversion rights to do so.

Anyway, Councilmembers Jane Brunner, Nancy Nadel, and Jean Quan do not like the proposal, and have introduced one of their own. Unlike Councilmembers Kernighan and Kaplan, they do not offer any explanation their rationale or analysis of the impacts of their proposed legislation. Instead, they submitted a simple chart outlining the highlights of some plan they want staff to turn into legislation. You can read the whole thing here (PDF). The key points are:

• Expand existing condo conversion ordinance so that it applies to buildings of 4 units or less, which it currently does not
• Cap conversions at 150 units per year and 150 units per Council district over 5 years
• 6 months notification, 15% discount, lifetime leases and first right of refusal for purchase for existing tenants in buildings to be converted
• The same inclusionary zoning proposal that keeps coming up before the Council and failing

The plan proposed by Councilmembers Brunner, Nadel, and Quan is not really worth commenting on now. I have written extensively in the past about inclusionary zoning, which is a tired, counterproductive, and failed concept (and appears to now be illegal for rental housing, although rental IZ is not part of their current proposal), and also totally irrelevant to the condo conversion issue currently on the table.

As for the limited conversion proposal from Councilmembers Kernighan and Kaplan, I find little to complain about. A supplemental report from CEDA staff (PDF) raises some legitimate questions about the proposed definition of “higher rent buildings” and potential obstacles to assessing the proposed impact fee, and those issues certainly deserve further discussion at Committee.

The report further criticizes the proposal for acting in isolation, instead of being part of a “comprehensive housing strategy,” which I think is just ridiculous. No, this isn’t a comprehensive housing strategy, it’s limited legislation intended to address limited issues, which is just fine. Not every single thing the City does has to be part of some overarching, long-term plan to address some giant issue. When you insist on doing things that way, nothing ever gets done.

Sure, I think it might be a little silly to go to all this trouble basically so one luxury apartment building can be converted into condos, but that’s really the fault of the people trying to tack all these other issues onto something limited and very specific. Like six people forwarded me this “action alert” from EBHO yesterday that hysterically claims:

The Oakland People’s Housing Coalition (OPHC) opposes Councilmember Kernighan’s condo conversion proposal as a bad deal for the city and a bad deal for tenants and affordable housing. Their proposal, if adopted, would create no new housing and would threaten displacement for low-income seniors and people with disabilities.

It doesn’t explain how, of course. The purpose of the condo conversion ordinance is to protect the supply of rental housing that is within the means of most people, and whether you agree with that goal or not, it’s hard to see how the poor renter in Oakland are going to be harmed by having ultra-expensive apartment buildings on the Lake become ultra-expensive condo buildings on the Lake. The protections for building’s existing tenants seem sufficient to me, although some form of relocation assistance would be nice and I don’t think too burdensome for the building owner.

The deplorable condition of much of Oakland’s affordable rental housing is as serious an issue as the supply, and to the extent that this proposal can supply some funds for rehabilitation, I think it’s a good thing. Additionally, the City’s revenue problems are not going away anytime in the near future, and this also provides a way to bring in more money for the City (PDF) (I think the estimates in that document are probably a little inflated, but the point remains that it’s a significant amount of money).

The Community and Economic Development Committee meets at 2 PM this afternoon. If you can’t make it down to City Hall, you can always catch it on KTOP, Comcast cable Channel 10 and available streaming online. I will be tweeting the meeting, so for real-time updates, you can always check out twitter.com/vsmoothe or follow the #oakmtg hashtag to get updates from others as well. (If anyone else tweets it, that is. Sometimes I’m the only one.)

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.

At this point, it appears that nobody is even bothering to make arguments for why IZ is needed or works or makes things “fair” anymore, but instead is just assuming that it’s going happen, which, let’s face it, it probably will. After all, it’s election year and I’m sure Ignacio De La Fuente doesn’t want to have to spend his whole campaign listening to people gripe about how he’s completely in the pocket of developers and hates poor people (which, honestly, his opponents are going to say no matter what he has done or does, now or ever – I don’t know why politicians don’t seem to get this), and Jane Brunner doesn’t want to spend her whole campaign defending the fact that she is so incredibly ineffectual that she has been hardcore pushing the same stupid policy for the last eight years and still can’t get it passed. Hell, if I was on the Council, even I might be tempted to vote yes on the damn ordinance just so I didn’t have to hear about it anymore.

It’s sort of like this guy I used to know, who would constantly demand the most absurd and unreasonable things, and at first you’d be like “No way. Put down the crack pipe, dude.” But when he wanted something he would just not give up ever, or go away ever, and if you tried to leave or hang up the phone or whatever he would just follow you or keep calling you over and over and over and just pester you about it incessantly until finally you gave him whatever the hell he wanted, no matter how insane, just so he would shut the hell up and leave you alone. No, scratch that. It’s not sort of like that. It’s exactly like that.

Anyway, when it was Jane Brunner’s turn to speak, she reminded everyone how she’s wanted IZ forever, but followed that statement with “I also understand it’s just a little tool in the affordable housing toolbox, it’s not the end.” (complete with a little hand gesture indicating “little”.)

Just a little tool? I’ll say. In April of 2003, the Concord City Council had their own debate about inclusionary zoning, and one of the attachments to the agenda item was a survey (PDF!) that staff had compiled of how inclusionary zoning ordinances were working in other Bay Area cities. The results are depressing. Below is a list of the cities included on the survey, the year their policy was adopted, and the number of affordable units (both rental and for-sale) that were generated by the program between adopted and 2003, followed by the number of units created per year (and I rounded up to be generous).

Alameda: Adopted 2002 – Units: None (0/yr)
Berkeley: Adopted 1986 – Units: 68 (4/yr)
Carslbad: Adopted 1994 – Units: 320 (36/yr)
Clayton: Adopted 1993 – Units: 86 (9/yr)
Cupertino: Adopted 2002 – Units: 140 (140/yr)
Danville: Adopted 1994 – Units: 99 (11/yr)
Dublin: Adpoted 1996 – Units: 59 (9/yr)
East Palo Alto: Adopted 1994 – Units: 115 (13/yr)
Emeryville: Adopted 1990 – Units: 954 (74/yr)
Fremont: Adopted 2002 – Units: None (0/yr)
Livermore: Adopted 1986 – Units: 1,000 (59/yr)
Menlo Park: Adopted 2001 – Units: 28 (14/yr)
Mountain View: Adopted 1999 – Units: None (0/yr)
Napa: Adopted 1999 – Units: 100 (25/yr)
Novato: Adopted 2000 – Units: 1,073 (356/yr)
Palo Alto: Adopted 1973 – Units: 270 (9/yr)
Petaluma: Adopted 1984 – Units: 1,422 (79/yr)
Pinole: Adopted 1972 – Units: 389 (13/yr)
Pleasant Hill: Adopted 1996 – Units: 13 (2/yr)
Pleasanton: Adopted 1975 – Units: 810 (30/yr)
Richmond: Adopted 2001 – Units: None (voluntary program) (0/yr)
San Mateo: Adopted 1992 – Units: 161 (15/yr)
San Ramon: Adopted 2002 – Units: None (0/yr)
San Rafael: Adopted 1990 – Units: 148 (12/yr)
Santa Rosa: Adopted 1992 – Units: 4 (0/yr – sorry, this is too sad to round up)
Sunnyvale: Adopted 1980 – Units 812 (35/yr)
Union City: Adopted 2001 – Units: None (0/yr)

So…good for Novato. And Cupertino, I guess. Other than that, even the best of these programs are looking pretty sorry. It just blows my mind that anyone could consider these numbers rationally and come to the conclusion that they’re worth gambling our best current source of affordable housing funding on.

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.

In 2006, the City commissioned an Economic Feasibility Study of inclusionary zoning from the Hausrath Economics Group. The report concludes that the inclusionary zoning proposal considered by the Council in the fall of 2006 simply will not work here. If you want to read it yourself, here’s the executive summary (PDF!), main report (PDF!), and (my favorite!) technical appendices (PDF!). From the report:

Overall, the impact analysis identifies that the costs of inclusionary requirements in the City’s proposed ordinance are high relative to returns from housing development in Oakland. The proposed inclusionary requirements could cause returns from development to fall below feasibility thresholds in almost all cases. The pro forma analyses show that, for the five prototypes that are feasible in the base case, there is only one prototype under one compliance option where development might be marginally feasible. The two prototypes that are already not feasible in the base case, would have returns that fall further below feasibility thresholds with the additional costs of the proposed inclusionary requirements. The proposed requirements are anticipated to have the greatest impact on the feasibility of developing lower-priced housing in the neighborhoods and developing the more costly building prototypes downtown. (emphasis added)

Yawn. It’s all so vague. Marginally feasible this, pro forma analyses that. Let’s look at some numbers.

First we’ll look at what it costs to build in Oakland. Say you’re a developer and you want to build yourself some condos in downtown Oakland. You’ll probably want to do something along the lines of what the Hausrath report calls “Prototype E.” You see a lot of these around, probably because they’re among the most profitable to build. These will be 4-5 story condo buildings in downtown Oakland or Jack London Square, containing between 100 and 140 units.

First, you’re going to have to buy some land. That’s going to run you about $56,000 per unit. Since your land is probably contaminated with God-knows-what, you’re going to have to do some work on the site before you can start building anything. Add $11,200 per unit. Then you need a building. That’ll be roughly $227,900 for each unit, plus another $24,000 per unit for the parking space. Landscaping will add another $3,300. Whew! You’ve taken care of all your hard costs, and you’ve only spent $322,400 per unit. But you aren’t done yet. You’ve still got your soft costs to cover, like paying your architect and engineers, hooking up sewer and water and so on, which are going to run you about $68,000, plus $14,000 in permit fees. And forget the interest you have to pay on your construction loan! That’ll be another $22,900 for a grand total of $427,300.

Now your building will probably have a mix of unit types – mostly one and two bedrooms, and a few larger and more expensive units. When you average out the sales prices for the three, you’re looking at an average sales price of $540,000 per unit. (If you’re looking to buy, know that you could also get a cute little house on 82nd Avenue for that.) Subtract $18,900 in sales costs, and you’re looking at a revenue of $521,100 per unit. And since that unit cost you only $427,300 to build, you’ve got yourself a healthy $93,800 in net revenue, 22% of your development costs.

God, wasn’t that fun? Let’s do it again, this time with the most profitable development type, “Prototype D,” 4-5 story condos in North Oakland or along the eastern Estuary waterfront with between 80 and 100 units. Here’s your per unit costs:

Land: $50,000
Site Work: $13,000
Building: $244,250
Parking: $20,000
Landscaping: $4,000
Permit Fees: $14,500
Other Soft Costs: $70,000
Construction Financing: $23,500
Total Development Costs: $439,250

Average Sale Price: $565,000
Less Sales Costs: $19,750

Gives you a profit of $106,000 per unit, or 24.1% of development costs.

Hot returns! Remember, though, that you’re earning that 22% or 24.1% over the entire period of the project – not annually. Your building took about 18 months to construct, and before you broke ground, you had to buy the land, secure your entitlements, plan your building, meet with the community and get the Planning Commission to give you the go-ahead – a process that easily takes over a year to complete. The figure begins to look rather unimpressive. (Before you give up, remember that these returns are on the entire cost of development – not on your initial investment. You probably borrowed about 75% of the project costs to finance construction.)

To make a project worth building, developers need a minimum of 18-20% returns on development costs for both these prototypes. They’re both running above that in current market conditions, which is why we’re seeing so many of them being built. Of course, if you’re forced to give away 15% of your units at a loss of between $130,000 and $260,000 each, returns drop significantly. For the Prototype E downtown mid-rise development, they go from 22% to 11%. For the Prototype D North Oakland mid-rise, they drop from 24% to 12%, both well below the feasibility threshold. Meaning nothing gets built.

So if you hate all new development and want it to stop, IZ starts looking like a pretty good plan. On the other hand, if you can about the benefits of density, smart growth, an increased revenue base, or maybe providing affordable housing you should probably take a step back and rethink this plan.

This is something that IZ advocates just don’t seem to get. Nancy Nadel and Jane Brunner can sit around talking about integration and the dire need for affordable housing until the cows come home, and Jean Quan can cry, and after a long while, they might be able to convince some people that they actually do care about helping the less fortunate residents of Oakland. All they’ll manage to convince me of is that they’re bad at math. Not yours truly, though. I’m a whiz. I got a perfect score on my GRE math test, so you can trust me when I let you in on a little secret: 15% of zero is still zero.

Inclusionary zoning advocates are quick to point out that IZ is not a panacea, but only part of a comprehensive affordable housing strategy. However, they fail to offer other suggestions. IZ opponents are equally culpable. They correctly point out that IZ will not help create more affordable housing, but they are so consumed with arguing against IZ that they fail to present alternatives. In November, Oakland’s City Council will once again discuss our affordable housing policies, in conjunction with a promised plan from the Mayor’s office. If this conversation is to be productive, they will have to move beyond the endless bickering about IZ that has dominated our discussion for the past several years. In the spirit of getting the ball rolling, dto510 and I are using our blogs this week to present some other options that the Council should consider as a way to move the discussion beyond IZ.

Our affordable housing funding comes from a combination of state and federal grants, plus what we generate on our own through the Redevelopment Area tax increment. For a detailed description of how we used our federal funding last year, you can take a glance at the 2006-2007 CAPER (pdf!). We get roughly $5 million annually in Community Development Block Grants and another $5 million in HOME grants, and assisted a grand total of 384 households with our federal funds. We got another $12 million in state housing bond money. State law mandates that 20% of the tax increment in a redevelopment area be set aside for affordable housing. Additionally, we reserve a voluntary 5% of the tax increment to supplement this figure. For 2006-2007, the total affordable housing set-aside from redevelopment funding was $20,483,520 (PDF!).

When Mayor Dellums talks about his vision for Oakland as a model city, his rhetoric is dependent on getting more state and federal funding. I find this attitude defeatist and depressing. Obviously we should do our best to get as much money from other sources as possible, but any attempts to do so should be coordinated with efforts to maximize our own resources. We cannot sit and wait forever for Air Force One to swoop in and deliver us from all our problems. The best way for us to increase our own funding for affordable housing is to build more market-rate housing in redevelopment areas. We need to look at ways to ease barriers to construction that will allow us to increase the tax increment, and by extension, affordable housing funding from the set-aside.

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.

But mostly I was frustrated with the Council for wasting time with feel-good, do-nothing policies while they ignore the real problems facing the people who live here. I look at these agendas and watch these meetings week after week after week, and I wonder if anyone on the Council even cares about the people who live in this city. Do they ever stop for a second to think about whether what they’re doing will actually make people safer, or provide more affordable housing, or whatever the goal of the week is?

It really doesn’t feel like it. Banning carryout plastic bags from grocery stores is not going to help the environment. Inclusionary zoning is not going to provide housing to poor people. Banning smoking near bus stops is not going to reduce asthma and lung cancer risks for people who live next to the Port and have diesel trucks whizzing past them all day and night. Paying teenagers to stand around BART stations with maps for a couple of hours in the afternoon is not going to reduce crime.

Everyone on the Council knows all of this. (And if they don’t, they’re stupid. But I don’t think they’re stupid.) They know and they don’t care. None of it is about change – it’s about “making a statement.”

Oaklanders don’t need statements. They need safer streets. They need places to live. They need jobs. They need mind-numbingly boring results-oriented legislation with well thought out implementation plans and clear metrics for determining success.

In my story for Novometro yesterday, I wrote about an ordinance that hasn’t been implemented in the six years since the Council passed it, another ordinance that was passed amid great controversy and is now being repealed after it achieved nothing and the State Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional, a State law that we asked to have passed that lapsed because we failed to provide the required statistics about how we were using it, and another law that the Council will consider tonight that they have repeatedly admitted they can’t enforce. It’s pathetic. It makes me angry. And embarrassed for this city.

I get that crafting legislation that will make a difference is not fun. It takes a long time to research. It’s slow to write. By the time you see results, people have forgotten you passed it. It doesn’t sound sexy in the newspaper. But Oakland’s City Council owes their constituents far more than what they are giving them.

I can’t stop thinking about that poor woman last night. She was just so visibily overwrought over this horrible thing that had happened to her, and the fact that far worse things happen to people in Oakalnd every day was no consolation. She was around my mom’s age, kind of hippiesh looking, and wasn’t a smoker. But I’m pretty damn sure that she doesn’t think banning smoking near bus stops should be her government’s priority. When the Council votes tonight over whether they want to devote police time to ticketing smokers at golf courses or not, I hope they think about her instead of the sound bite they might get on KTVU.

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

Geeta Rao, policy director for the Nonprofit Housing Association of Northern California, called the commission recommendations “a missed opportunity.”
“Of all the 170 inclusionary housing policies in California, this is the weakest one,” Rao said.

Um…It isn’t. It isn’t even close. If one wanted to verify her statement, it is as simple as looking at this report (PDF!) issued by Rao’s own organization surveying inclusionary zoning policies in California. What might one learn from that? Well, for starters, 6% of IZ programs are entirely voluntary! Strike 1.

4% of statewide IZ programs require less than 10% of newly built units to be marked affordable, just like BRC recommends for the first 2 years, and 45% of IZ programs require 10%, which is the same the BRC’s suggestion for the first 2 years of off-site affordable construction. The recommendation proposes phasing in the policy so that after 2 years, 15% of all newly built units must be designated as affordable, or 20% if they’re built off-site, a stricter requirement than 50% of the jurisdictions in the entire state with the policy on the books. (In the interest of saving space and not repeating myself too much, I’m going to to detail the BRC’s recommendations here. You can read about them in my Novometro story for this week. Also recommended is dto510’s blog on the subject.)

Nearly all existing IZ programs include developer incentives to make the program more feasible and palatable, and of the 15 most productive programs, 71% actually subsidize the cost of building the affordable units (compared to 38% of other programs). From the report:

The most productive programs were much more likely than the other programs to subsidize the construction of affordable units (71 percent vs. 38 percent). The substantial difference suggests that funding is an important facet of a successful inclusionary program.

Well…duh! Of course, the BRC proposal includes zero developer incentives. Strike three!

Apparently this lie is the party line over at the Non-Profit Housing Association of Northern California, since the Trib story has a similar quote from a different policy director there:

Dianne Spaulding, executive director of the Non-Profit Housing Association of Northern California, said a policy requiring developers to set aside only 5 percent of homes as affordable would be among the weakest inclusionary-zoning policies in the state.

People, especially people advocating for policies, lie all the time. They say whatever they think will make people most sympathetic to their position, whether or not it bears any relationship to the truth. So if you quote someone and they’re lying, does that absolve you from responsibility to be accurate in your reporting? Apparently our local political writers at both the Chronicle and the Trib think so. It shouldn’t.

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.

I’ve already discussed one of my big problems with for-sale affordable units (for those who missed it: The units can do more harm than good, since many who qualify for below market rate units may not have the financial capacity to deal with the many “hidden” costs of home ownership). Today, I want to talk about another: resale. BMR housing units (including those created through “inclusionary zoning” programs) are usually required to remain “affordable” for a period of anywhere from 40 to 70 years, depending on the specific requirements of the municipality in which they’re created.

From the inclusionary zoning ordinance (PDF!) considered by the City Council last October:

Ownership units:

Inclusionary units required by this chapter that are ownership units must:

(1) in accordance with the schedule below, be sold only to moderate income households, with further maximum household income restrictions that restrict ownership inclusionary units produced as a result of a covered development project to a mean average of 100 percent of AMI adjusted for family size appropriate to the unit, averaged across all of the ownership inclusionary units produced as a result of the covered evelopment project;

(2) in accordance with the schedule below, be sold at an affordable sales prices for a household at the maximum household income level for the housing unit; and

(3) be subject to these restrictions on affordable sales prices and buyer incomes for a period of at least 45 years from the date of initial sale.

So what does this mean? Well, if you win a lottery for a BMR ownership unit, you do own it, but if and when you decide to sell, you cannot sell it for market value. You have to sell it to someone meeting the same income requirements you did, and for a price determined by a formula based on that income. The ordinance, by the way, includes no mechanism for monitoring the sales of these units (just one more example of the way IZ pushers ignore all practicalities of implementation).

On the one hand, this makes sense. The point of IZ is (allegedly) to provide workforce housing. If people could buy subsidized condos and then just re-sell them at market rate, then it would sort of defeat the point. You might as well just write a check to the lottery winners instead.

On the other hand, equity and resale restrictions sort of eliminate all the benefits of home ownership. What’s the point of buying a home if you have no chance to profit on it when you’re ready to move on? You get all of the burdens and none of the benefits.

I’d really like to see how IZ advocates answer that question.

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.

Tens of thousands of families in Oakland have serious difficulty finding a place to live. As of September 2006, the City of Oakland was supporting a grand total of 10,712 subsidized housing units. 3,308 units of public housing. 2,572 assisted units for families. 157 units of supportive housing. 90 units of transitional housing. 3,914 units for seniors. 679 SRO rooms. A little over half of these are federally funded by Section 8.

I have explained repeatedly why I think IZ is a bad idea for Oakland. But that is no longer the point. The very real needs of too many residents are being totally ignored while we draw out this fruitless debate forever. It’s time to change the discussion. The Council needs to start looking for ways to increase the affordable housing supply that we might be able to agree on.

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. There is no requirement in most IZ ordinances that the recipient of the lottery-awarded units work in the city with the home, or even that they live in the city before they get the unit. At the IZ meeting at the City Council last fall, one man speaking in favor of the ordinance told the Council that he moved to San Francisco after winning a lottery unit. I talked with a woman a few weeks ago who had moved to the Bay Area from the East Coast after winning a lottery unit in Emeryville. Furthermore, nowhere in the article does the writer explain that these units are marketed to people making as much as $90,000/year, not to those in most dire need of housing assistance.

In Oakland, a proposal that would have required developers to set aside at least 15 percent of new housing units for low- or moderate-income residents failed by the narrowest of margins last year. After the City Council split 4-4 on the question, then-Mayor Jerry Brown cast the tie-breaking vote against it, saying the proposal would have driven developers and private investment out of the city while doing little to help the 30,000 families living below the poverty line in Oakland.

NO, NO, NO!!! This didn’t happen! I was there! The Council never voted on inclusionary zoning. Desley Brooks introduced a substitute motion to create a Blue Ribbon Commission to further study the issue and make recommendations for the Council to vote on later. The only thing that was voted on was the creation of the BRC. That’s what Jerry Brown cast a tie-breaking vote on. And he voted for the motion, not against.

Lest anyone think this is a minor point, I’ll remind them that one of the Council’s IZ crusaders disagrees. Jean Quan, at that meeting, practically threw a temper tantrum when she learned that since she had cast a vote on the substitute motion she could no longer bring the original motion to the floor (Apparently Ms. Quan does not spend her free time studying parlimentary procedure. Seriously, she really should have known better.). She cried “Now we can’t say they voted against it!”.

Inclusionary zoning proposals frequently do come up against the argument that they may stymie development. Dianne Spaulding, executive director of the Non-Profit Housing Association of Northern California, said numerous cities’ experiences with inclusionary zoning indicates that such fears are unwarranted.”There’s really no factual data that for-profit developers cannot build under this kind of policy,” she said.

Yes, they do “come up against” that argument. Don’t you think that this would have been an opportune time to mention that the Council commissioned an economic feasibility study (PDF!) to see how IZ would impact development in Oakland? And that the study showed that it would, in fact, halt development in most of the city? That an IZ ordinance would reduced the profit on a mid-rise condo project from 14% of development costs to 3%? Does anyone think that we can expect developers to build with that rate of return? Why not look at the actual numbers of affordable units created in cities that have it, and see how the compare? How about looking for studies showing how IZ has affected the housing market in cities that adopt it (PDF)? Oh, I know. Because it’s a lot easier to simply quote a non-factual talking point from an IZ advocate.

And it is completely irresponsible to discuss affordable housing creation programs without explaining how Oakland is currently funding its BMR housing construction. State law mandates that 15% of units built in redevelopment areas are affordable to very-low, low, and moderate incomes. These are paid for with the tax increment created through market-rate projects.

The real question Oakland’s City Council needs to ask is this. Do we want a policy that makes us sound like we care and makes activists happy but that will hurt affordable housing production and property tax receipts? Or do we want to put some effort into crafting policies that will really help people in need?