While elected officials from across San Luis Obispo County filed into Grace Central Coast in SLO to attend a regional housing summit on March 22, a group of local residents huddled outside in protest.
They held up signs that read, “Oppose SB 50, Safeguard Local Control,” and chanted, “With top-down mandates, Big Brother’s on the rise! Here comes big money, goodbye views, goodbye skies!”
At the heart of the city of SLO’s recent battles over housing development—on display with the contentious reviews of four-story mixed-use apartments along Foothill Boulevard, for instance—is friction between state laws that aim to speed up housing production and the community’s desire to preserve local planning control.
Sacramento’s already passed several laws that incentivize housing while chipping away at cities’ discretion, and Senate Bill 50 (SB 50)—the More Homes Act—is arguably its boldest proposal yet.
Authored by Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco), SB 50 would effectively override local zoning and development standards for housing projects that are proposed in transit areas (near train stations and major bus stops) as well as in “jobs rich” areas—defined loosely as places that have “positive educational and economic outcomes for households of all income levels.”
SB 50, which is still in legislative committees, has local control advocates up in arms—like the SLO County residents who stood protesting Sen. Wiener at his March 22 appearance at the summit hosted by the Housing Coalition of the Central Coast.
Wiener spoke about his bill to local officials and other summit attendees inside Grace Central Coast.
“Local control is a good thing when it delivers good results,” Wiener said. “When local control is not delivering good results, you have to make a change. Really [for] forever in California, we’ve had a system where local communities have almost pure local control over whether any housing gets built and, if so, how much. We’ve had this system and where are we? We have a 3.5 million-home housing deficit in California.”
Wiener described SB 50 as both a bill and a tool “to spark hard conversations.” Some of its details: Housing projects that are proposed within a quarter mile of transit lines couldn’t be restricted to under 55 feet in height, and within a half mile, 45 feet. It also limits the extent to which cities can regulate the densities of such projects and their parking requirements. “Jobs rich” areas would face these changes as well, and it would allow developers to build multi-family projects in single-family neighborhoods.
“It’s time for the state to set some standards, to actually have rules in place,” Wiener said. “Right now, until very recently, we essentially had few or no rules around housing, and what that means is every project is a war in every community.”
After his talk, Wiener joined a panel of housing experts to field questions from attendees and SLO County Administrative Officer Wade Horton about the issue. Answering a question about the need for new infrastructure (water, roads, etc.) to support housing, a noted obstacle to SLO County’s growth, Wiener said communities shouldn’t wait around for “perfect” infrastructure conditions.
“Unless you are building a planned community from scratch, you’re never going to build infrastructure and housing at exactly the same time,” he said. “When you build the housing, the infrastructure will follow.”
Local residents who oppose Wiener’s bill, and the prior legislation that’s spawned recent development battles, argue that the state’s top-down approach will result in poorly planned communities as well as an unsolved housing crisis.
Allan Cooper, a longtime member of the Save Our Downtown organization in SLO, who organized the March 22 protest, told New Times he believes that measures like rent control are more promising to improving affordability than the rush for more supply.
“What we’re basically saying is [SB 50] is kind of a wolf in sheep’s clothing,” Cooper said. “It’s pretending to address the issue of affordable housing but it’s a sweetheart deal for the development industry.”
Cooper said what concerns him most about SB 50 is whether SLO would qualify as a “jobs rich” area.
“To the extent that we are, the whole city is vulnerable to being built up,” he said. Δ
Assistant Editor Peter Johnson can be reached at pjohnson@newtimesslo.com.
This article appears in Apr 4-14, 2019.
Let’s look at where local control has gotten us. San Luis Obispo County is the #5 least affordable county nationwide. We’ve forced a generation of young people out, effectively building a Trump wall around the area. And yet we have protestors who want to preserve the dismal status quo.
It’s rare for me to agree with a Democrat but in this case I do. In any free market economy supply and demand rule. If supply is low and demand is high then prices are high. Likewise if there is little demand for something that there is a large supply of then the price will be low.
The way to lower housing costs in a free market is to either increase the supply or lower the demand. The only way to lower the demand is to lower the population and you don’t want to go there. The population in California is going to continue to increase. zero population growth is a utopian myth and can only be achieved through forced sterilization and policies of euthanasia, and of course shutting down immigration from other countries. So, given that we cannot reduce demand we must increase supply. One of the reasons housing costs are so high in califormia is because governments have worked hard to limit the supply while the population continued to grow.
Rent control doesn’t really solve the problem and in fact would probably make things worse for most people. First, allowing central government control over one of the core tenets of a free market, supply and demand, would in effect destroy the free market and the promise of economic freedom for all Americans. Without economic freedom you are not free and are nothing more than subjects of the state. Second, it’s just plain wrong to tell someone what they can charge for something. It’s like telling someone they can’t ask more than some arbitrary wage. All the liberals chant about the minimum wage but how many would support “wage control”, a maximum wage? Imagine the outcry if Sacramento tried to enact a law that capped wages at $100 an hour. I’m sure a lot of the communists in California would support it but I think the large majority of Californians would oppose a maximum wage. How about a tax control? Wouldn’t it be great if there were an absolute cap on how much taxes you could be forced to pay and the government was barred from enacting laws that would tax the people too much?