San Francisco Bay Areas: A Case Study

The documentary San Francisco 2.0 examines how San Francisco city officials have given tax breaks to the Silicon Valley tech industry to move to San Francisco. These new techs companies have brought in a lot of wealth to the city, but at a cost. The majority of the low-income natives are being evicted or having their rents raised so high that they can't afford them. The gentrification of the city has impacted low-income districts (for example, the mission district known for its Latin immigrants) that the residents and the culture are being displaced. I believe the documentary is important for the study of the issue of gentrification because San Fransisco was known for being-counter culture, caring for the arts and for civil progress. The housing

The governing core of South San Francisco is the city council, which creates municipal laws and the overall policy, decides how to expend treasury, assigns members to all consultative local businesses and represents the city officially. The city council`s members are Richard A. Garbarino as a mayor, Mark N. Addiego as a vice mayor, Pradeep Gupta, Karyl Matsumoto and Liza Normandy.

The Lack of Affordable Housing in California Lowers the Quality of Life for its Residents

Affordable housing has become the paramount issue of cities and dense urban areas. San Francisco is the posterchild of an unaffordable city that regardless of immense investment from blue chip firms like Google, Facebook, and their ilk of startups evaluated at $1 billion or more, policymakers and elected officials must wrestle with the housing affordability crisis that is considered endogenous to swaths of homelessness and record statistics on crime. In New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio has made affordable housing the centerpiece of his legislation and championed the cause as a social justice issue—neighborhoods must remain affordable to maintain diversity for all races, ethnicities, and low-income families. A small sample of 827 New Yorkers by the NY1-Baruch College City Poll found the main concern of respondents was affordable housing while crime, jobs, and homelessness were peripheral problems (Cuza, 2016). The public discourse on how to address housing across the United States has pointed to negative externalities that surround rent-regulation and homeownership. Conversely, for this essay I will present various cases in order to illustrate the housing crunch is influenced less by housing and land regulations, or antagonistic homeowners but is induced by global market forces.

Adding to the inequalities and misfortunes within communities of color, gentrification has taken the Bay Area by a storm. Gentrification is the purchasing of deteriorated urban homes and areas, then the renovation by higher-end and middle class communities. An abundance of high-end people rush into the Bay Area and purchase up the real estate. Incoming middle and higher class take the Bay Area real estate and revitalise it into up-and-coming neighborhoods, then increase rent prices. Therefore, reducing affordable housing for communities of color. Therefore, this revitalization is changing the character of communities because the Bay Area may appear nicer, the communities of color are unable to afford the standard of living. Communities of

Over the past twenty years, San Francisco’s Mission District has experienced a tremendous amount of change. Similar to many neighborhoods across the United States, it has been undergoing a gentrification process in which increases in housing prices, redevelopment in buildings, and a shortage of rental units have left many of its low-income population homeless or on the verge of becoming homeless. In order to understand the controversial issue revolving around the gentrification process taking place the Mission District, it is essential to know the history of the Mission District, San Francisco’s geography and housing laws, and the socioeconomic impacts of gentrification.

Unfortunately, many of these types of housing options are incredibly subpar to begin with. The memoir The Glass Castle provides many instances of the pitfalls of low income housing options. For example, while living in Welch the Walls family lives in squalor, perpetuating the idea of inadequacy in the housing options that are available for the poor. Despite this, SROs and other forms of low income housing are still invaluable to many urban populations; however, due to gentrification, many of these options are diminishing. “Between 1975 and 1979 San Francisco lost 17.7% of its 32,214 SRO units… Ironically, other units were lost due to government-subsidized legislation which sought to provide housing for low income tenants, but its minimum property standards mandate a separate bathroom and kitchen for each unit, thereby encouraging the conversion of SROs and rooming houses into standard, and unattainable apartments.” (Erikson), this provides us with an excellent example of how urban “improvements”, even if well meaning, can actually be harmful to established populations. Furthermore, “An October 1980 study by the North Market Planning Commission found that 2374 more SRO units had been lost during the moratorium period, many of them converted to tourist hotels and high income housing

We looked at a variety of ways to help alleviate this cost. Since one of the main issues causing high living costs in the Bay Area is shortage of housing one of the possible solutions could be building more housing. Possible problems here are that San Francisco itself is not too big of a city and in most cities of this type in the world the population density is increased by building tall buildings –

The utilization of the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit or LIHTC has had an overall positive effect on housing for low-income families in the United States. Four key outcomes of the LIHTC are: First, there is less likelihood of segregation within the tax-credit housing than in the government provided section 8 and government-subsidized voucher programs (Schwartz, p. 115). Second, the purpose of the program, which was to subsidize mixed income housing to low and working class families, is provisionally being met (Khadduri, Buron, & Lam, p. 10). Third, through decentralization of the implementation of the LIHTC program the federal government allowed the state governments more latitude in the dissemination of the tax credits to appropriate developers (Furman Center, p. 2). Finally, there is a correlation between the areas where LIHTC housing properties are developed in the impact on the sounding region. This correlation is both positive and negative in nature, but heavily is judged on the region that the LIHTC is built in and as to whether it is in an urban center, suburb, or in the metro areas (Deng, pp. 46-48). These four outcomes will guide the body of this paper about the overarching theme of LIHTC as a policy tool as opposed to section 8 housing or government provided housing.

Shortage of housing supply, especially in the coastal areas, is the critical issue that drives housing affordability crisis in California. California’s major coastal metros (such as Los Angeles, San Francisco and San Diego), where about two-thirds of Californian live, is lacking in sufficient housing to accommodate all the people who want to live there . For example, in 2015, there were 133,000 jobs created in the Bay Area while only 16,000 units of housing added there . In addition, the construction of new housings in California’s coastal metros, from 1980 to 2010, was low from both national and historical standpoints. During the past three decades, the number of housing units in the typical U.S. urban center grew by 54%, compared with 32%

Inclusionary zoning is a tool to help accomplish affordable housing. The main goal of it is to build a certain percentages of house but to where the houses can be afforded by middle/low income earners. Incentives are provided to act as cost offsets and include density bonuses, tax abatement, and reduced parking charges. Density bonuses motivate developers to have additional units which result in an increased profit margin. On subscription to the inclusionary zoning, benefits accrued eventually lower costs that would have otherwise been charged on the developers. This technique provides a sustainable method of dealing with housing shortage (Dietderich 13). The municipality, however, cannot force developers to set a particular minimum price and therefore the government can only provide incentives to developers to voluntarily provide the units for low-income earners.

As the bay area technology boom continues, so has one of residents’ basic needs: the cost of housing. According to U.S. Census data five of the top seven fastest growing counties in California are in the bay area, with the fastest growing county being Alameda (2010). Since the 2010 census, it was estimated Alameda would add a little over 100,000 residents by August of 2014. With the increased population the cost of living has also increased, especially housing costs. From January 2014 to January 2015, the average rent in Oakland increased by approximately 20 percent in a city struggling to deal with housing demands (Zillow, 2015).

Over the last three decades, the number of affordable housing units constructed under the Low Income Housing Tax Credit has declined due to poor oversight of the program, unregulated LIHTC development financial markets, and local government’s power to block the construction of LHITC developments in higher opportunity areas.

Multiple reasons exist for the the lack of affordable housing. On the demand side these include population growth and increased migration to urban areas, easily accessible housing finance, tax incentives and a “strong cultural preference for owner-occupied detached houses”. On the supply side, affordability problems are exacerbated by inflexible and slow responses to the need for new housing stock, lack of infrastructure and generally inefficient planning processes and development assessment by local governments.

However, housing in the United States is still becoming very limited with time; a growing population with nowhere to go is causing overcrowding and lack of housing. However, this is not a problem new to the U.S., housing has been disappear since the early ‘90s. The availability of rental housing decreased significantly between 1993 and 1995, according to Robert Hess (Hess).