A woman marching for housing rights stops on Mission Street to listen to speakers talk about the luxury condos being constructed where the Giant Value store once stood. Photo by Molly Oleson.

Beyond Chron suggests putting an affordable housing bond on the ballot:

The only reason for the city not to put a housing bond on the November 2014 ballot is the 66.7% necessary for passage. The Housing Trust Fund (Prop C) only got 65% support despite little opposition. A bond could be more difficult because unlike the Trust Fund it imposes a tiny increase in property taxes for homeowners and landlords (the latter can pass these costs on to tenants in certain circumstances).

So the obvious question is: if Prop C could only get 65% approval after Mayor Lee assembled the broadest coalition in the city’s housing funding history, how is 66.7% even possible?

One answer is that the bond could assist a broader income range than the Housing Trust Fund. READ MORE.

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Founder/Executive Editor. I’ve been a Mission resident since 1998 and a professor emeritus at Berkeley’s J-school since 2019. I got my start in newspapers at the Albuquerque Tribune in the city where I was born and raised. Like many local news outlets, The Tribune no longer exists. I left daily newspapers after working at The New York Times for the business, foreign and city desks. Lucky for all of us, it is still here.

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1 Comment

  1. Apart from the 2/3 requirement, there is the other problem that the November 2014 ballot will contain a number of other revenue requests at both the state and local level.

    Proponents of these voter initiatives have often noted that voter fatigue occurs when too many requests are made simultaneously. The risk is that they will all fail whereas a smaller number of them may have passed.

    But surely a bigger problem is that even a very large bond measure would only benefit a very small number of lucky SF residents. At half a million for each BMR, it’s clear that even raising a 100 million dollars would only house 200 families, and that creates a lottery with a very slim probability of winning.

    Some people may vote for it anyway for ideological reasons, but will know that it is highly unlikely that they will personally benefit from it. Meanwhile everyone will pay for it – even tenants via the bond passthru mechanism.

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