In case you missed it: DECOMPRESSION / THOUGHTS / ACTION after the discussion with Paul Campos last night

[Jon Schwark]

I know a lot of people will probably wonder how it went, so I thought I'd start a topic for people to post their notes and big takeaways. 

The Facts: We were at 7 Heron Street in SOMA, a new space for us that has the benefit of being significantly cheaper than the LAB. I counted 34 people a few minutes after it started, but by 10pm it had dwindled into the 20s). Considering that it was 7 days from concept to event, and the dry subject matter, this was great. Still more people than the average SPUR panel. 

There were at least a couple of members of the press present - one reporter form the AP was asking questions before the event. 

By design, it was a lot more of a drill down into obscurely named laws and agencies than our last events. Personally, I'm very excited that our collective "Housing Intelligence Quotient" got such a big bump.

BIG SUPER ACTION TAKEAWAY: there is a joint meeting of ABAG and MTC 9AM this Friday April 8th at 101 8th street in Oakland. 

We need to be there demanding an accurate count. We will have a separate discussion topic and google event for that, so lets keep this topic focused on the discussion last night.

What did you learn, what did you think? let us know here.

[Jon Schwark]

In my own notes, I kept a list of long term policy campaigns that might be beneficial for SFBARF to look at. These are not endorsements, but you could think of them as requests for members of our community to study and write up a position paper we could discuss:

1. Prop 98 (education funding) Reform – Currently most (~90%) property tax revenue (income generated by cities from housing) goes to the state and (~50% of the remaining) is locked in for education. Sales tax (and other income generated from commercial property) collected by the state is mostly returned to the city. Theoretically this makes it more beneficial for cash strapped cities to build retail and office space (see the example of San Jose). A potential solution would be balancing the same amount of education funding between property and sales (and other) tax. 
2. Advocate for policies that refocus additional affordable housing fees from new market rate housing to to new office development. Especially for newly demanded ratios like 33% in SoMa, but also in cities that are currently looking at affordable ratios and development funding for affordable housing.
3. Prop 13 reform – (Kill it completely, which would be super hard, or...) end the "corporate welfare" effect of Prop13 protection for commercial real estate. Also known as "Split Role". Another reform could be a smaller across the board change that increased the Prop13 "rate" from 1% to 1.5% annual rate of appreciation before a sale triggers a new appraisal. 
4. Reform of "adequate sites analysis" – This could be legislative, but it could also just be a talking point at ABAG meetings. Often municipalities will submit sites they know can't or won't be developed to fulfill their (RHNA or housing element? we need to clarify this) requirements. This proposal would say "if you used a site in the last period to say you are allowing enough zoned, developable capacity for housing, but it hasn't been built, then you can't claim it in the next period. This could be effective in starting to manage the "shell game".

[Jon Schwark]

Also, while last night is fresh on your minds, it might be a good time to browse the housing element. Trust me, your mind will be blown at how many times the ABAG RHNA numbers are used to give the impression of "were doing enough, we have it under control"

San Francisco's is here http://www.sf-planning.org/ftp/General_Plan/2014HousingElement-AllParts_ADOPTED_web.pdf

But every city has one.

Jon

On Wednesday, April 8, 2015 at 7:09:27 AM UTC-7, Jon Schwark wrote: