The Metropolitan Transportation Commission unanimously voted this morning to pull a long-planned $20 billion regional affordable-housing bond measure that would have been voted on by residents of all nine Bay Area counties.
Yesterday, Mission Local reported on this eventuality.
“In June, when I put this on the ballot, it was definitely the best vote I’ve cast in my six years on this commission,” said Commissioner Victoria Flemming from Sonoma County. “And this is definitely the saddest vote I’ve taken.”
This morning’s vote comes on the heels of a lawsuit from concerned taxpayers targeting the housing bond on a number of grounds, most notably that the government had misstated the annual cost of repaying it. While the number publicized in voter materials was $670 million a year, the actual total would have been $911 million.
This was true: The Bay Area Housing Finance Authority described this misstatement as a “clerical error” and, last week, amended the language of the proposed ballot measure. But the plaintiffs did not drop their suit.
Bond backers were also concerned with a lawsuit from the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association. That suit was aimed at state Prop. 5, a separate measure that would lower the threshold for bond measures from 66.7 percent of voters to 55 percent. It claimed that the language presented to voters was misleading and could be interpreted as a raising of the threshold from a simple majority.
Last week, a Sacramento County Superior Court judge agreed. But, yesterday, California’s Third District Court of Appeal overruled the decision. Prop. 5 will go to the ballot without altering its language.
This is critical, because polling put the $20 billion housing bond at just below 55 percent. And yet, even after Prop. 5 survived its legal challenge, the Bay Area’s Metropolitan Transportation Commission opted to scuttle the bond today, the last day it could do so under state law.
Despite the unanimous 12-0 vote, each commissioner who spoke was sober, and expressed disappointment in this decision.
“We’re all enthusiastic about not saying, ‘goodbye, but see you later,’” said Nick Josefowitz, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission vice chair. “Let’s take this energy to ensure that Prop. 5 passes,” said Commissioner Sheng Thao, representing Oakland.
Members of the public both lamented this move, but said it was the right call in tight economic times. Affordable-housing developers implored the commission to reconsider or, at least, to keep the momentum going.
“I have seen time and time and time again every excuse thrown under the sun for why we can’t do this now, why we should not move forward in this moment,” said Bobak Esfandiari, a volunteer for San Francisco YIMBY. “I think it’s just heartbreaking that we’re asking people who desperately need these homes to wait two to four years for this.”
Was this “clerical error” a matter of misstating the annual cost in the ballot and nobody caught the typo before it went to the printer? Or did the MTC actually miscalculate how much the annual debt service on a $20 billion would be?
“Clerical error”. This is what we taxpayers get from local/regional government these days. BTW, the SFCTA and SFMTA, as always, following close behind. Just take a look at the illegal toll that the TA/TIMMA pursue on Treasure Island or the Oak Street Quick Build Project that pushes traffic on Page Street after they completely messed up the signal timing on Oak.
I’m grateful Howard Jarvis filed suit and looking out for Tax Payers.
I would not classify 210 MILLION DOLLARS as a clerical error!
“affordable housing” is a misnomer intentionally used to misinform the public.
the accurate description is “subsidized housing” or “deferred payment housing”. housing which all or part of the cost is subsidized or deferred to the taxpayers to pay instead of the actual home owner.
It doesn’t matter in San Francisco because Dean Preston would have found a way to block construction of new housing anyway.
It’s the opposite actually: Dean Preston supports building affordable housing that his challengers want to block and that the mayor has spent years stalling. https://missionlocal.org/2024/06/meet-district-5-candidates-week19-parcel-k/
You just gave away the trick that Preston and other sneaky socialists use to keep our city down.
I’ll explain it for the readers:
Preston, Ronen, Chan, Peskin, and Walton continually advocate for “affordable housing” to score compassion points with simpletons. But they secretly know that by insisting on “affordable housing”, very little housing will ever get built.
Or, the only housing that gets built are housing projects built by corrupt nonprofits (TODCO etc).
This is not the express purpose of their behavior, but if time and time again, every year, the effect of their behavior is to BLOCK housing, then you have to reason that is the true, hidden purpose of their behavior.
The crazy thing is if they just allowed more housing (non insisting on affordable) then the prices for existing houses would go down and become affordable. Only in SF is a 70-year old wood house with drafty windows and a weird layout expensive. Your current home is probably affordable housing, you just don’t realize it because new housing is continually blocked by Preston etc.
If this is allowed to continue, San Francisco will continue to be a B-tier city. To be clear I think we could be far and away the greatest city in the country and we have blown that chance.
I’m hoping that with a little more work, we can demote San Francisco to a C-tier city so as to ward off the YIMBY, urbanists, crypto swindlers and AI prospectors.
Parcel K is a city-owned site where affordable housing specifically was promised when the freeway came down over 20 years ago. There was never a market-rate housing plan for that site, nor is that what Dean Preston’s opponents and Mayor Breed want, they just want no housing.
The parcels freed up by the teardown of the freeway were devoted to a mix of affordable and market-rate housing. All of the market rate has been built. This site alone remains undeveloped, with a temporary use consisting of a yuppie gym and high-end coffee pop-up. Dean is the only candidate standing up to the NIMBYs who want to lock in that temporary use forever.
This is just one example. He also called for housing at 730 Stanyan to be built up to the full zoning of eight stories; the mayor’s office had proposed only six stories in a preemptive compromise with NIMBYs. Dean got them to reconsider and you can see the construction topping out at eight stories today.
Kudos for cherry picking one example.
If a measure is polling at less than the threshold for passage before the campaign has begun, then it is unlikely that the measure would pass after being contested in a campaign.
The question is why, if housing tops the issues list of regional voters, that polling on a remedy comes in under 55%?
This is a huge setback. Given that the next opportunity to run a bond isn’t until 2026, and that there are large lead times, this likely means our region will build hardly any affordable housing for a decade.
My heart breaks for my neighbors who will unnecessarily become, or remain, homeless because of this lack of affordable housing and will then be subject to performative cruelty from the likes of Breed and Newsom, cynical politicians who lift nary a finger for affordable housing funding but order useless and futile “sweeps” for the PR.
If we had a housing leader as governor, this bond could have been saved, and if we had a housing leader as mayor, we’d be spending the real estate transfer tax (2020 Prop I) on municipal social housing as it was intended to be for.