☆ Keeping home construction affordable in Silicon Valley: a multi-pronged approach
Pre-approving modular design libraries. Waiving impact fees for workforce housing. And–yes—keeping CEQA under control. SF Briones Society’s Jay Donde and former Hollister mayor Victor Gomez lay out how local gov’t might streamline the building process—and save residents thousands along the way. An Opp Now exclusive.
Jay Donde, San Francisco Briones Society president: It's no secret: the Bay Area is unaffordable due to the high cost of housing.
One way to tackle this problem is to make it cheaper to build. To that end, Bay Area cities should offer pre-approved modular design libraries. These libraries consist of factory-built modular housing designs that local governments must approve by right. Modular housing significantly reduces construction costs by leveraging standardized components, reducing construction timelines by up to half, and requiring far less labor in assembly.
And by-right approval would allow modular housing developments to bypass a permitting and "community input" process that has become—in San Francisco and elsewhere—little more than a pork barrel fest for unions to extract goodies from developers.
Victor Gomez, government relations consultant, past Hollister mayor: One of the most impactful steps local governments can take to improve affordability is to waive or drastically reduce impact fees for workforce housing. These fees, often totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars per project, are passed directly onto renters and buyers—pushing working families further out of reach of the communities they serve.
We also need to streamline permitting. Time is money in housing development, and delays caused by excessive red tape or drawn-out discretionary reviews can kill good projects. Fast-tracking workforce and affordable housing should be the default, not the exception.
Additionally, recent CEQA streamlining signed into law is a long-overdue step forward—but it shouldn’t stop with a few major infrastructure or public projects. These reforms must be expanded to apply to all housing, especially infill and mixed-income developments, which face some of the worst delays despite broad community benefits.
Finally, cities should unlock underutilized public land for housing through ground leases or partnerships. If we’re serious about affordability, we need to align policy with action—and that starts at the local level.
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