Time to End The Housing Pain

In Berkeley, rising rents and the price of buying a home has pushed people into overcrowded living conditions and increased homelessness. Many cannot afford the ever-rising rents: they include students, those on fixed or low incomes, people living with disabilities, seniors and working people on minimum wage. They are shut out of the housing market and are experiencing housing pain. How can we end, or even lessen housing pain?

Adding more market rate housing alone will not ease housing pain. Some argue that supply and demand and free market forces will eventually produce the housing that everyone needs.  But the so-called free market has produced dizzying levels of inequality. Why? Because it is much more profitable to build luxury than low-income housing, much more profitable to build cramped tiny units than units with sufficient space for families. For-profit speculators keep units and even entire apartment buildings empty. The 2020 U.S. Census reported over 4,000 vacant places in Berkeley. These long-term vacancies artificially restrict the supply of housing and create blight in neighborhoods.

Thirty years ago people in the middle income range could buy a home in Berkeley.  But now in 2022, home buyers are paying somewhere between $300,000 to half a million dollars over the asking price.  Although some Berkeley neighborhoods have long been wealthy, increasing numbers of people with very high incomes and accumulated wealth, in recent years are changing the very fabric of our community. 

Even people with incomes in the top 5% have become renters. This adds to the pain of those who cannot compete in this high-priced housing market.  No longer restricted to north Berkeley and the hills, high-income tenants are now moving into south and west Berkeley, areas that were once affordable to low-income and minority tenants.  Moreover, the 45,000 students at the University of California are competing for the same housing as well as paying steep prices for Cal tuition.  

The bottom line: if you are fortunate to find a place to rent in Berkeley, it can be overpriced, run-down, too small, crowded with roommates, or much too far from work or school.

How Bad is Housing Pain in Berkeley?

It is easy to spot tall market rate properties popping up everywhere:  costly apartment complexes, hotels, and business towers. Rents can be $3,000-$4,000 a month for just a small apartment.  These units are unaffordable for most in Berkeley.  Some claim that market rate housing like these units brings down rents in surrounding apartments, but in Berkeley, such cases are hard to find. Instead, housing insecurity, or what we call “housing pain,” is rampant.  

The Racial Dimension to Housing

While housing pain can afflict millions of people across the country, it has had a staggering effect on people of color, and entire communities of color. A pre-pandemic study conducted in 2019 by the California Housing Partnership found that rising Bay Area rents between 2000 and 2015 had the greatest impact on low income Black, Latino and Asian communities.  Huge rent increases lead directly to the loss of housing in these communities.  This study of the nine counties in the Bay Area found that the 30 percent increase in rents between 2000 and 2015 was tied to a 28 percent loss in the number of poor households of color. Other conclusions from the study show that the proportion of renters paying more than 30% of their income has risen, particularly so among women of color.

In its report on the 2019 study, the Mercury News quoted Tameeka Bennett, former director of East Palo Alto’s Youth United for Community Action,  “Gentrification is happening at an alarming rate. Our families have no place to go….” Bennett said that many have moved to Stockton and Tracy and now contend with a long commute to their Bay Area jobs, “It’s really affecting their quality of life.” A third of low-income residents of color who moved in 2015 left the region completely.

Berkeley is not immune to this pattern of displacement. Once African Americans were nearly 25% of our city’s population. Berkeley’s Black population is now only 8%.  This loss is a great shame to our city.  After the end of the explicit Jim Crow redlining policies that restricted where Black people could live in Berkeley, we did not have the foresight to create policies which keep people in the community.  Instead we prioritized market rate housing with little attention to affordability.  As a result, our city has lost a tremendous amount of human talent, community assets and representation. 

Today our emerging housing patterns resemble the apartheid pattern of the past where Black people were forced out of the city, only to travel back each morning to low-paying jobs.  Our present housing policies mean that only rich people are allowed to live here; only they will influence city politics and policies. 

Berkeley, and California in general, are beginning to take seriously the decades-long call for reparations for African Americans for centuries of slavery and discrimination. This is a subject we will return to in future editions. 

Homelessness in Berkeley

Homelessness is the other side of the lack of access to affordable and low-income housing.   Not only low income, but catastrophic health issues, loss of affordable housing, incremental or sudden disabilities, substance abuse, LGBTQ youth losing housing with doctrinaire parents: all of these and more contribute to homelessness.  A compassionate social response to these factors demands a range of solutions, including available low income housing, permanent housing first for the homeless, mental-health services, substance abuse services, youth and LGBTQ services and outreach, and transitional housing with supportive services.

Berkeley spends a lot of money each year on homeless issues, but too much of that money does not address the roots of homelessness or benefit enough people on the street.  Beyond economics, there is a deeper moral issue as well. 

Under Berkeley’s council/manager form of government, the City Manager has broad authority and has ordered police sweeps and property confiscations of homeless people at will.  Sweeps and confiscations have been found by courts to violate constitutional protections, and they undermine the ability of hundreds of people to feel secure in their belongings, their health, and their ability to create a better life.  Berkeley desperately needs a better way of working with the homeless community. 

Berkeley must take on affordable housing in ways that will reduce housing pain for the people who live and work in Berkeley. Encouraging more towering market rate housing is not the answer.  In the sections that follow, we will discuss several approaches that can take us in a more positive direction.

Measure M to Free Up Vacant Housing

The current Berkeley City Council took a bold step towards increasing the housing supply in the community by placing Measure M, the vacancy tax, on the ballot this November. 

The Bay Area Community Land Trust supports Measure M because it will push some vacant properties onto the market, some of which can be acquired by non-profit groups for affordable housing. And the money raised through the tax on vacant properties that are not brought onto the market, can be used by the City to help non-profits purchase properties and keep them affordable.

Measure M, if passed, is expected to unlock many of the estimated 1,200 units that are currently vacant and not available to rent. Measure M, known as the “Empty Homes Tax”, discourages large corporate property owners from keeping units vacant. It institutes an annual tax of $6,000 on empty units in large buildings and $3,000 on empty condos, duplexes, and single-family homes not used as someone’s primary residence. The tax increases based on the length of vacancy. Measure M will encourage large property owners to rent their units and will generate up to $5.9 million annually for building and preserving affordable housing. 

A City of Vancouver B.C. analysis of positive outcomes of their vacancy tax shows that from 2017 to 2020, the number of vacant properties decreased by 26%, and that more than $86.6 million of net revenues from the tax was allocated to support affordable housing initiatives in Vancouver. Is there hope that with Measure M we can bring all factions of the housing debate in Berkeley together? Could this step be the beginning of a “Housing is a Human Right” movement? 

Housing pain is a systemic, long-standing problem that has its roots in the idea of housing as a means to make profit. There is no single “fix” to solve such a problem and this society will not overcome the housing affordability crisis until we come to see housing as a human right, as something that our society guarantees to all, like public education, social security, and emergency healthcare. 

But such changes in thinking can take decades.  For the moment, here are a few ideas that are worth considering: 

• The Vacancy Tax (Measure M) is on the ballot this November.  It needs no public expense to work and will produce revenue for creation of affordable housing. Find more information about Measure M here,  and the full text of Measure M here.
• Housing must be focused on creating units for those with the greatest need. We must produce housing that is truly affordable for all including low-income, very low-income, and those with no income at all, and also provide the ongoing subsidies necessary to house extremely low-income people. 
• Affordable housing can be a form of anti-racist Reparations to African Americans.
• Tenant and low-income protection such as extension of rent control and the Tenants Opportunity to Purchase Act (TOPA).
  • Rent control: Berkeley passed strong rent control decades ago, but the city’s ability to extend it to single-family homes and apartments built since 1995 has been curtailed by California’s Costa-Hawkins Act in that year.  To fully protect tenants’ rights, changes must be made both in Berkeley and California law. 
  • Tenant or Community Opportunity to Purchase ordinances (TOPA or COPA) require that when real estate investors sell rental properties, they must give the tenants and non-profit community housing organizations advance notice and a first opportunity to purchase the building. Unless the tenants have enough money to purchase the property at full market value, the usefulness of the TOPA/COPA ordinance depends on the City having money to subsidize purchases.

We will come back in future issues of Berkeley Now to examine these ideas in more depth. 

It is interesting to look at how this simple proposal speaks to the talking points of the three main housing factions.:

First is the “NIMBY” (Not In My Back Yard) constituency.  People who want to maintain the character of their neighborhood and oppose building of additional housing should like Measure M because it does not make the city more dense or the buildings taller. It simply frees up vacant housing so people can get off the street, and it may even begin to reverse the absurdly high cost of housing for everyone.

Second, the “YIMBY’” (Yes, In My Backyard) constituency should appreciate that the vacancy tax puts more housing on the market, even if not necessarily at the affordable housing level. These “pro-housing” folks believe it is necessary to open up housing for people of all income levels, they argue that “we just need more housing.” 

Third, affordable housing advocates demand release of vacant housing to the market because it could lower the cost of housing for everyone. This group is clear that the vacancy tax will not solve the affordability crisis by itself. It will have to be part of a range of social programs including constructing more affordable and low-income housing, strengthening rent control, better regulating evictions, and many others.  These advocates support the vacancy tax as a great start that will benefit everyone except the for-profit speculators. Retaining older housing by its nature preserves affordability because new buildings are exempt from rent control for 20 years.

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Is there a solution to Housing Pain?

Housing pain is a systemic, long-standing problem that has its roots in the idea of housing as a means to make profit. There is no single “fix” to solve such a problem and this society will not overcome the housing affordability crisis until we come to see housing as a human right, as something that our society guarantees to all, like public education, social security, and emergency healthcare. 

We will come back in future issues of Berkeley Now to examine these ideas in more depth.