☆ Experts disagree on ACA 10's impact for local housing construction, rental, zoning snags

Continuing an Opp Now exclusive series, two housing and urban design experts parse ACA 10's consequences—or lack thereof—for our housing market. Under ACA 10, CA would enshrine the right to housing into its constitution, and require that local jurisdictions “fulfill this right, on a[n]... equitable basis.” Two opposed takes below.

Jennifer Liu, Business and Housing Network (BAHN) President:

In an ideal world, all human beings would be housed; it’s our common goal as a civil society. However, the key is how to achieve it and who pays for it. From the housing provider’s standpoint, private property rights must be respected since those are our constitutional rights. Shredding the private property rights is counterproductive to produce more housing to have everyone housed.

No one is clear about the exact implication of ACA-10. One thing is very clear, though. ACA-10 won't generate a single housing unit. The right way to solve the housing crisis is to provide landlord/investor/builder friendly policies to encourage more investment into housing, and set up funding to help increase home ownership, including:

1) Reduce government bureaucracy and fees to make housing permits faster and cheaper, so that builders are willing to construct more housing.
2) Make landlord-friendly rental policies to stimulate more investment into housing, so that more rental housing units are available, therefore making rents more affordable.
3) Help first-time home buyers with down payments to encourage home ownership.

We hope the government can come up with something more practical to solve the housing issues.

Bruce Appleyard, San Diego State University City Planning and Urban Design Professor:

Housing, as much as breathing, is fundamental to our ability to thrive in our world and live day to day. If we consider the freedoms Franklin Delano Roosevelt talked about, the right to housing should be at the top of all of them. A caring society should view housing as a right accessible to everyone.

I do a lot of research on homelessness. There are 45,000 unsheltered folks in LA and 1 million backlogged housing units. It's a similar situation in San Diego. To be a humane, respectable society, we must take care of the needs of our most vulnerable; this includes providing these people housing.

There's things already happening at the state level to free up and make more flexible existing zoning laws. And if we establish housing as a constitutional right, it'll continue state-led efforts and hopefully result in more effective legislation that provides housing while overcoming things like strict constraints provided by single-family zoning and the prevalence of NIMBY opposition (which we've seen for well over 40 years statewide). This would transform our urban environment for the better, especially if we consider similar good examples of cities like Paris, Barcelona, and even London. These places were highly codified under Roman rule and later allowed to grow organically, and we know them today as wonderful and beautiful cities. So I have little problem with us being more flexible with our development codes; it's a paradigm shift, but one California needs to take.

Out of all the regions in California, the Silicon Valley has probably changed the most economically in terms of prosperity. But it's changed the least in terms of the urban environment responding to that economic growth. A lot of that comes at the hand of zoning and NIMBY opposition by neighbors trying to keep affordable housing out. These longstanding effects have quelled the ability of our society to respond to housing demand. It's the reason we have such high housing prices. Again, enacting ACA 10 would encourage and further state efforts to relax zoning laws and combat NIMBYism.

Read more exclusive local perspectives on ACA 10 here and here.

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