Tag: #affordable housing

Posted on

Gentrification as a Threat to Cultural Diversity in San Francisco

Within its 47 square miles, San Francisco is home to numerous thriving ethnic groups and cultural districts. While these neighborhoods host global tourists who come to enjoy the foods, arts, and culture, they have also persisted through generations as living, breathing communities where residents can feel at home with groups they identify with. For example, my friend’s parents lived and raised their family in Chinatown for 50 years and still can’t speak English. Before I became an advocate for affordable housing, San Francisco’s cultural diversity and the topic of gentrification were separate topics in my mind – I didn’t believe one had anything to do with the other.

The lack of affordable housing and the city’s prioritization of profit over people is erasing these communities. The irony is that while the cities rake in huge profits from tourism in these neighborhoods, they don’t provide support for these groups to survive. For example, tourists from all over the world come to enjoy the architecture, art, and cuisine of Japantown and spend money at Japanese-centric businesses, all while the city allocates its shopping districts for new Chipotles, Gaps, and Sephoras. How can Japantown make it if the city’s planners and policy-makers choose businesses that maximize profit rather than preserve the spirit of the residents? Also, these neighborhoods need more affordable housing so that families can move in and sustain the community over the long term. Instead, city planners and policy-makers allocate new housing developments for market-rate luxury units that the average family cannot afford. According to a recent report from the National Low Income Housing Coalition, an individual needs to earn four times the minimum wage to be able to house their family in a two-bedroom market-rate apartment in San Francisco.

San Francisco’s city planners, officials, and policy-makers must understand that their decisions to prioritize profit over people are cannibalizing the city. They cannot keep boasting of San Francisco’s rich diversity, inviting the world to enjoy Chinatown’s New Year’s Parade or the annual Pride Festival while making decisions that essentially erase the communities behind them.

Posted on

Affordable Housing Sitting Empty?

Given the high rates of homelessness on the streets and the urgent calls for more affordable housing, I was surprised to see the recent news in the San Francisco Chronicle that San Francisco has 305 below-market-rate apartments sitting empty despite having ~20K applicants for those spaces. Affordable housing is available, so why isn’t it being occupied?!

However, we should start by mentioning that the overall San Francisco rental market HAS become more affordable. Rents have come down ~12% since pre-pandemic times, meaning that more individuals who were previously shut out of the rental market can now get housing. However, that doesn’t change the situation for the individuals who still cannot afford the rents. Such individuals need to rely on programs like San Francisco’s below-market-rate housing program to attain housing for their families.

San Francisco requires housing developers to reserve between 15-21% of units at below-market-rate (BMR) for individuals and families earning less than 55% of the area median income. This program is a lifeline for many low-income families and is a model for cities around the Bay Area, but getting occupants into these units is inefficient and getting worse in the current rental market. In the past, the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development (MOHCD) reviewed around five applications before they filled a unit. Now, they review ~31 applications per vacancy as more people drop out of the program to get a better deal elsewhere. It is good news that more applicants can now rent elsewhere but highlights the gross inefficiencies in the review process as the MOHCD wastes time looking at out-of-date applications. A possible solution may be to enforce a penalty for applicants who don’t notify the MOHCD that they have dropped out of the pool, such as prohibiting them from re-applying for the next one or two years.

Reviewing 31 applications instead of the typical five makes an already-long review process six times longer. The review procedure for a BMR unit is much more involved and time-consuming than a simple rental application. The MOHCD office needs to verify the income of every occupant in the new unit to ascertain that they meet the income criteria. The long wait time is not just a burden for the new renters having to wait for housing but also for the building owners who may need the rental income to pay off debts.

Our inability to promptly fill all available BMR units highlights another obstacle in our quest for affordable housing – a slow-moving bureaucracy. In fact, the MOHCD has been compared to PG&E as one of the most inefficient organizations to work with. It is unfortunate that so many units are sitting empty while thousands of families are in such need. Unless the MOHCD figures out how to streamline the process to get families into these affordable units, it just looks like they don’t care.

Posted on

Inflation: Another Roadblock to Affordable Housing

In recent months, we have seen significant job gains in the Bay Area and unemployment falling to a low 3.4%, comparable to pre-pandemic days. But just as we were looking forward to financial relief for those who lost their jobs and livelihoods during the pandemic, we face another roadblock to affordable housing – inflation.

Inflation has reached 8%, a 40-year high. Inflation cuts into earnings for all workers but has dire consequences for low and middle-income earners. A family that could barely pay for food and housing may no longer be able to meet its basic needs and is thrown back into poverty. Those who don’t have the luxury to work at home may find that the increasing gas prices have left less for food and housing. But inflation is not just about higher gas prices or going to the store and finding that your milk and bananas are a couple of dollars more than you expected – inflation also makes things a lot worse for those seeking affordable housing.

We have heard of the stories of skyrocketing home prices during the pandemic, especially in places like Tampa, Florida, and Austin, Texas, which saw yearly appreciation of 43% and 40%, respectively. Though rising interest rates have reduced the numbers of those seeking homes, sellers still don’t have many incentives to lower prices because one house still receives many offers due to lack of supply. The scarcity of housing also drives up the rental costs, with rents increasing nationally by 15.2% on average. 48 out of 50 states saw overall rental increases, with increases as high as 35% in Austin, Texas, and 39% in Portland, Oregon. These increases would be acceptable if incomes grew at the same rate, but lower-income workers’ paychecks have not even remotely kept pace. As a result, affordable housing has become even more out-of-reach. A popular option for thrifty home buyers had been to purchase a fixer-upper, a cheaper home that needs work. But even this is becoming a less attractive choice as inflation increases costs for materials, and supply chain issues make materials challenging to attain.

The solution to the housing plight is and has always been to increase the supply of affordable housing. As we have explored in a previous post, the Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG) has assigned Bay Area cities the task of building 441,000 new homes and apartments between 2023-2031. Chances are slim they will be able to meet this goal, with a quarter of the cities protesting their quotas for various reasons. Such an enormous task will naturally receive opposition; there is limited space for the many who need affordable housing in the Bay Area. But the mandate is an essential step toward something we have waited a long time for – action.

Posted on

Cob, a Cheaper Alternative to Lumber

We at Care Association have been trying to stay on top of issues concerning affordable housing for lower and middle-class Bay Area residents. We worry about the psychological cost of high rents and the growing rates of homelessness. At the same time, we are also actively participating in the discussion around innovative ways to bring down the costs of new structures.

One of the developments we have been following is the growing interest in cob as a (much!) cheaper alternative to lumber in North America. Cob is a mix of clay-soil, straw, water, and sand, used to build walls that alone are strong enough to support a roof. Cob was used for thousands of years in ancient times throughout Asia, Africa, Europe, South America, and the Middle East. Here in Northern California, the stringent codes regulating seismic strength, fire resistance, and insulation have made cob a tough sell.

Cob’s growing visibility

The soaring housing costs led Bay Area architect John Fordice to revisit cob in the late ’90s to see if he could address those deficiencies. He set up The Cob Research Institute (CRI) in 2008 to ramp up visibility and research efforts into the viability of this cheap and clean alternative. The CRI began working with local university engineering labs to build cob wall prototypes and develop solutions to address its structural weaknesses. They compiled the results of their years of research into a guideline to help others overcome the common hurdles that past cob projects have faced when trying to get approval from their local planning departments.

We are delighted to share that this guideline has been formally approved for inclusion into the International Residential Code (IRC) just this year! It is now accessible to any interested builder as Appendix U, the Cob Construction Appendix, in the 2021 IRC. We were also excited to hear that the appendix was accepted by an overwhelming 93 to 6 majority. A lot of people are as excited about cob as we are!

Remaining obstacles to cob-based housing

Inclusion into the IRC is not a green light to start building cob housing for human habitation, but speeds up the permit process for other types of buildings, like storage units. Nevertheless, it is a very encouraging sign that we are getting closer to the possibility of cob-based homes. Other types of earthen building solutions, such as strawbale and light straw hay, also started as appendices in the IRC and were gradually adopted into local building codes. “Then why hasn’t Care Association started promoting strawbale or light straw hay?” you may ask. Strawbale will result in a sturdy home, but the walls will need to be 2 feet thick to meet the insulation requirements. If we are looking to build at volume, the area requirements will be prohibitive. Cob, we believe, can be as narrow as 12-16 inches with proper insulation. Straw is also difficult to find locally, and there is concern that straw is environmentally unclean.

Cob will result in thinner walls, but we don’t know how thick or thin the final product will be. Cob alone can not pass the requirement for an insulation R-value of 13 in Northern California. In layman’s terms, a cob wall is not “breathable” enough; vapor needs to be able to pass through the wall with some quantifiable measure of ease. The CRI and other organizations are working on this problem. They are researching possible solutions, such as replacing the heavy components of the cob mixture with lighter substitutes, adding more straw/hemp, or wrapping the outside of the cob wall with less dense mixes of clay or straw/hemp. Our CEO, Kiai Kim, has also been attending cob workshops to stay up to date on the latest research and help pose some solutions.

Our vision

Because cob is heavy, the labor costs to build cob structures will be high. If cob gets adopted into Bay Area building codes, our initial vision is to use a volunteer force of builders to provide labor. Luckily, building with cob is easy to learn. The savings from volunteer labor and the cheaper materials will offer an affordable housing solution for those in immediate need.

There are a lot of people rooting for cob. It is non-toxic, can be molded into beautiful shapes, environmentally friendly, and so fire-resistant that some make ovens out of cob. This is a great advantage in this new era of yearly wildfires. (Imagine fleeing a wildfire and returning to see your walls fully intact!) At Care Association, we are thrilled with cob’s newfound recognition and have great hopes for its future adoption, especially with lumber’s skyrocketing costs. With 21st-century engineering advances, perhaps the cob structures that housed our distant ancestors can also provide safe, warm, and affordable places for us to sleep as well.