Housing Law

If anything defines the spirit of San Francisco, it’s the idea of doing things our own way. Immigrants, hippies, financiers, technologists, the LGBTQ community: Generation after generation, people with a vision for doing something differently and better, or simply for being different, have alighted here.

Doing things your own way can be great; our city has often been a haven for compassion and acceptance. But not always — and there’s nowhere we see that more profoundly than with land use.

In October, outrage erupted when San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors voted down a proposal to build nearly 500 new homes — many affordable — on a downtown site at 469 Stevenson St. now being used for valet parking.

Last month, California’s Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD) 

Housing advocates YIMBY Law and YIMBY Action sued the state of California last week, arguing the Department of Housing and Community Development misjudged the housing need of the San Francisco Bay Area. The suit raises important questions at the intersection of transportation, climate, and housing policy.

The activists’ complaint has merit. But, the Legislature, not the courts, should resolve it.

This blog post is coauthored by Chris Elmendorf, Eric Biber, Paavo Monkkonen, and Moira O’Neill.

Last week, as President Trump harrumphed about the faux emergency on our nation’s Southern border, California State Senator Nancy Skinner introduced a potentially transformative bill that addresses California’s real emergency: the ever-escalating cost of housing in the state’s economically productive metropolitan regions.

Homeownership promises more than it delivers. Americans purchase homes for perceived financial security and social benefits, while politicians push homeownership for imagined economic growth. Such claims are traded like stock tips around water coolers and repeated by "experts" paid by the real estate and home building industries. But they are merely myths, widely held but false.

Here are some of the biggest whoppers.

Homeownership is a good investment.