Assemblymember David Chiu pushed for tough and controversial bills to tackle California’s housing crisis. But few critics, or even supporters, know just how closely he’s experienced the crisis himself.
A phalanx of white faces flanked a microphone under the bright Dublin sun, in a press conference convened in opposition to a hotly contested BART land use bill, AB 2923. Though speakers largely directed their pleas to Governor Jerry Brown, who has yet to sign or veto it, there was a common enemy whose name remained unspoken: David Chiu.
The Assemblymember representing San Francisco’s eastern half weathered an aggressive opposition to his transit-focused housing bill with stoic aplomb. His face hardly budged as he responded to criticisms in the legislature, both houses of which eventually passed AB 2923 by wide margins. All along, his line of reasoning remained the same: California needs more housing. His bill would leverage a regional transit authority to commandeer affordable housing development across a fractured Bay Area, where individual cities may be less welcoming.
When we spoke to Asm. Chiu about his housing agenda, we discovered, beneath the aura of an ambitious politician, the memories of a young man who had survived San Francisco’s perilous housing market and remained deeply incensed by California’s structural intransigence.
Getting Around
“The debate over this bill has been emblematic of the challenges we have in addressing the state’s housing crisis,” Chiu said. “When I introduced this bill, it was what I thought of as a modest proposal to build housing on acres of BART-owned land surrounding stations. I couldn’t imagine a more compelling case for Transit-Oriented Development on current surface parking lots.”
Contrary to much of the rhetoric surrounding it, Assembly Bill 2923 largely preserves local land-use authority, which critics contend is protected by the California Constitution as a municipal “police power.” Rather, cities benefiting from the boon of a BART station would be required to update their zoning ordinances to comply with the transit agency’s development goals within two years, which include high requirements for Below Market-Rate housing and a minimum of 70 dwelling units per acre. Zoning authority would only be passed on to BART if those two years lapsed without local compliance.
But the bill’s opponents could not have imagined a more garish affront to their local sovereignty. Led by Assemblymember Catharine Baker (R – San Ramon) and State Sen. Steve Glazer (D – Orinda), who were frequent allies in last year’s Republican opposition to Governor Brown’s intrastructure and gas tax initiatives, leaders largely from suburban Contra Costa County signed on to an open letter denouncing the bill. Signatories included elected officials from cities miles from any BART station, including Danville and Clayton.
“I couldn’t have imagined the level of intensity brought by the opposition, and the language they used in arguments to oppose a very modest idea,” Chiu said. “I thought it was ironic that the same cities opposing the bill are complaining about the intensity of the housing crisis.”
A particular source of consternation for suburban leaders was the possibility for BART to make land use decisions at their downtown Oakland headquarters without local input: “The bill requires BART to hold a public hearing to adopt the new zoning standards, but there is no requirement for BART to hold hearings in our communities,” wrote the letter’s signatories. “Transparency is critical, and our voices must be heard.”
Another criticism was that the bill “does not require BART to replace customer parking,” per the letter. “Where will BART riders park?”
In response to this particular complaint, Chiu and co-author Asm. Tim Grayson (D – Concord) amended the bill to require a “parking replacement policy” that would “consider the parking replacement needs for auto-dependent end-of-the-line stations.” Under the bill’s final structure, BART authorities would still need to negotiate parking with city governments when developing at their stations.
But Chiu’s staff countered Glazer’s assertion that AB 2923 “did not identify a problem,” given that many BART stations in Contra Costa County had not seen any development proposals for cities to reject. In other words, many critics contended that cities were doing just fine, thanks, and did not need imposition from a regional agency to meet their housing goals.
However, some so-called “transit villages,” such as those at Fruitvale or Walnut Creek stations, took decades to obtain financing and move through the local approval process. A project in Millbrae with affordable housing for seniors and veterans faced stiff opposition from the City Council, which sought to levy fees against the provision of subsidized units.
While the San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted to endorse the bill, the Berkeley City Council voted to officially oppose it on the principle of local control. While North Berkeley BART station remains surrounded by four blocks of parking and detached single-family houses, Berkeley mayor Jesse Arreguin stated earlier in the year that he was “committed” to developing housing on the parking lot. Despite holding a community meeting to discuss the future of the station, that commitment has yet to lead to any legislative reforms within Berkeley.
In Chiu’s estimation, these cities are engaged in nothing less than outright theft of infrastructure from the general public.
“BART started in the early 70s, and back then, if we had foresight, we would not have invested billions of dollars to build BART stations without a commitment from cities to allow housing on BART land adjacent to stations,” he explained. “Unfortunately, in many of these communities, they’ve had to live with surface parking lots rather than housing. There shouldn’t be large surface parking lots occupying huge swaths of land next to our region’s main transit hubs.”
Governor Brown is expected to take action on AB 2923 by the end of the month. However, Sen. Glazer’s sole Democratic vote last year against Senate Bill 1, Brown’s widely touted gas tax reform to fund statewide infrastructure improvements, greatly soured his relationship with the legislature’s Democrats. In this context, it appears exceedingly unlikely that the Governor would accede to Glazer’s demands.
There but for the grace of God
Two central themes are consistent throughout Chiu’s housing agenda: curtailing local control to ease a statewide housing shortage, and empowering poorer tenants at the expense of wealthier landowners.
His far less controversial bill, AB 2162, was no less of an intrusion on municipal authority: the bill would establish “by right” approval to develop permanent supportive housing for the homeless. Though California currently has 20% of the nation’s homeless population, Chiu continued to see local governments across the state stymie or outright thwart new shelter for the homeless.
“Throughout the state, we have seen communities cry out about the need to address homelessness, and then block housing in needed to address it,” Chiu said. He explained that his office has a file cabinet with stories coming in from across the state—“every week, practically every day”—of housing for the homeless that could have been.
“This is not just about San Francisco—there are stories every week throughout the state, from Orange County, to LA, to San Diego, the Central Valley, the North Bay, and all of our cities—these fights are happening every day,” he went on. “It is delaying critical projects by years, even though they are good projects that comply with local planning and land use requirements. At the same time that cities are trying to invest billions of dollars in affordable housing, we need to make sure this housing gets built as quickly as possible.”
The most recent example from San Francisco can be found in Forest Hill, where Christian Church Homes sought to redevelop an old church building into low-income housing for seniors and the formerly homeless. Neighbors from the tony suburban district turned out in force against it, decrying the looming threat of drug addicts and other undesirables. Their threat of litigation, coupled with the opposition from Supervisor Norman Yee, forced the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development (MOHCD) to withdraw their funding for the project—funding that was already stretched thin due to the need for seismic retrofits.
In 2011, when Chiu served as President of the Board of Supervisors, he led the charge to build supportive housing for Transitional-Age Youth in the Edward II project, which was roundly opposed by the neighborhood’s Cow Hollow Association. Then-Supervisor Mark Farrell, whose district covers Cow Hollow, agreed with the neighborhood association on the need for extended neighborhood input, and introduced legislation to require more advanced notice for city-funded projects.
In Los Angeles, it was recently revealed that over $2 billion in bond revenue had gone unspent after members of the City Council exercised their power of a “pocket veto” to prevent the construction of supportive housing. If the City Council member did not write a letter authorizing the use of funds in their district, no housing for the formerly homeless would break ground.
Under Chiu’s legislation, he hopes none of these situations will continue to occur. “My bill is very simple: if you’re trying to build supportive housing, and you meet all the rules of local cities, you shouldn’t have projects held up and delayed in the process,” he explained.
Separately, his bill AB 829 would ban the Los Angeles pocket veto practice.
He discusses these policies with an acute awareness of what could have been, and after some prying questions, he opens up about the housing insecurity of his past. As a newly-minted lawyer in the mid ‘90s, the first place Chiu lived in San Francisco was a floor of a unit rented by the Mayor of San Jose.
“It was 1996, and housing was incredibly scarce then,” he said. “I literally slept on the floor of an efficiency unit in Trinity Plaza that my law school buddy Sam Liccardo was renting. Afterwards, five of us lived in an apartment built for three. Until we had our child, I lived as tenant, concerned that we’d be able to stay in the city.”
In the early 2000s, Trinity Plaza was acquired and eventually demolished by the notorious slumlord Angelo Sangiacomo, whose predatory rent increases in the 1970s spurred City Hall into drafting its first rent control ordinance.
“It was terrible,” Chiu recalled. But he also noted that the precarious housing market he and Liccardo faced was still dire in 1996, predating the first “dot-com boom” and the tech sector growth typically associated with the Bay Area’s housing crisis. “But so many others have it far worse,” Chiu qualified, “and whether it’s the experience of tenants who are one paycheck away from being homeless, or who are already homeless, or struggling to make mortgage payments—we are all in a crisis. We need to build at all levels of affordability.”
One of his other signature bills, Assembly Bill 2343, is informed by his past as a vulnerable tenant, never knowing if the roof under his head was guaranteed. In its initial form, AB 2343 would have extended the period of time in which tenants can seek legal counsel and respond to eviction proceedings in court (known as unlawful detainers) up to half a month. After significant amendments, the bill yielded what Chiu still views as a win for tenants: shifting the existing time period from calendar days to court days, including court holidays.
“The bill does deal with a real issue that I have heard from tenants and attorneys around the state,” Chiu said. “When unscrupulous landlords serve eviction notices before weekends or a long holiday, it creates tremendous challenges for tenants to access a lawyer or make a rent payment, simply because the three-day notice requirement for rent payment—or the five-day requirement for serving someone with an eviction lawsuit—it was calendar days rather than court days. Just giving tenants a few extra days to put their rent money together or find an attorney, is the difference between someone staying in their home or being tossed out on the streets.”
But when asked if he considers this trifecta of bills an adequate step forward in addressing the housing crisis, he has a much simpler answer: “Absolutely not.”
More money, same problems
This year, the Democratic-controlled state legislature has primarily sought to address housing affordability through regulatory reform, amending decades of Kafka-esque red tape to cover an estimated deficit of several million homes more quickly. That’s because the necessary funding to shelter California’s neediest residents was addressed the previous year by Senate Bill 3, which placed a $4 billion bond measure on this year’s ballot.
Chiu currently serves on the campaign steering committee for Propositions 1 and 2, the resulting referendum to issue those bonds. Proposition 2 would authorize further spending to shelter homeless residents and veterans. But the Assemblymember insists that this won’t be enough. The state still gives far more aid, in the form of tax breaks, to the wealthiest homeowners, and it’s this inequity that Chiu ultimately seeks to upend.
“If Propositions 1 and 2 pass, they are only starting to reinvest in housing at the levels we were at before the Great Recession,” he said. He identified three key reasons for the funding shortfall: “After 2009 we stopped investing an average $1.7 billion a year in affordable housing. Redevelopment agencies were eliminated, prior bond revenue dried up, and the recession hit our general tax revenue very hard.”
And now? “Fast forward nearly a decade later, we’re billions of dollars behind, and Proposition 1 would be a $4 billion investment, which starts to bring us back, but it by no means solves the issue of affordable housing that private markets will never solve on their own.”
Chiu remained optimistic that some version of his unsuccessful bill from last year, AB 71, could be reintroduced to redirect funding to affordable housing from far less progressive functions. AB 71 would have ended the state’s Mortgage Interest Deduction for second homes, an annual expenditure of $300 million, to fund Low Income Housing Tax Credits (LIHTC) to fund nonprofit development.
“We are considering addressing that next year,” Chiu said. He also pointed to looming efforts at establishing some form of “Redevelopment 2.0” program, with stronger oversight than the previous decade’s beleaguered agencies. Notably, Lt. Governor Gavin Newsom has made new redevelopment agencies a central plank in the housing platform for his gubernatorial campaign.
“We have to look at wasteful ways in which the state government has been spending billions of dollars that could be put to a better use when it comes to housing,” Chiu said. He suddenly sounds very excited as he moves on to a white whale far larger, and far more sinister: “Did you see the article in the LA Times about Proposition 58?” Indeed, this investigation on California’s tax breaks for inherited real estate by journalists Liam Dillon and Ben Poston struck the state’s housing policy discourse like a thunderbolt.
“It was supposed to be a $28 million tax break so kids could stay in their parents’ homes. Instead it has become a $1.5 billion per year tax haven boondoggle for very wealthy few children who have significant real estate investments and living off the good fortune of their parents,” Chiu lamented. “That money is better used in many other contexts, including Housing and Community Development [HCD] programs that have a good track record of producing affordable housing.”
Chiu concludes this portion of our interview with a refrain that has become increasingly common when he discusses housing:
“Everything is on the table.”
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