The speed of senate bill 423
Approval time for new housing in San Francisco could drop from more than two years to just six months as the rules in Senate Bill 423 take effect in San Francisco. Mayor London Breed and Senator Scott Wiener, who authored Senate Bill 423, welcomed the change, which is being applied to San Francisco before any other city in the state after it was found by the California Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD) to be the first city subject to its streamlining mandate.
In June, HCD issued a summary report showing that only 47 jurisdictions in the state have met the required amount of low and moderate income housing. The same report lists another 254 jurisdictions that made insufficient progress toward mandated goals and could fall subject to Senate Bill 423. San Francisco is the first on that list to be so designated, but it is unlikely to be the last.
Senate Bill 423, passed by the state legislature in fall 2023, follows and elaborates on Senate Bill 35, also authored by Wiener and passed in 2017. The earlier bill applied to lower-income housing; the newer bill expands its rules to apply to most new homes. Wiener’s office issued a statement saying the bill’s application here could transform San Francisco “from the slowest approver of new homes in California to one of the fastest, and making home construction in San Francisco far easier and more inexpensive.”
Declaring that “we need real and dramatic change in how we get housing built,” Mayor Breed said that due to SB 423, “we are getting rid of barriers that slow housing approvals down so we can build more homes faster in neighborhoods all across the city.”
On July 19, HCD will host a webinar on the results of the 2023 Housing Element Annual Progress Report and on the cities and counties subject to Senate Bill 423 streamlining. Registration for the webinar is free.
Grants Pass passes
Originally named to honor the 1863 Civil War victory of General U.S. Grant at Vicksburg, Grants Pass, Ore., is today known as the battleground over whether communities can punish people for camping on public property. Like Vicksburg, the battle is over, but the war continues.
As expected, reactions to the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in the Grants Pass v. Johnson case drew dramatically different reactions from partisans. The court ruled that it was not unconstitutional to make public camping illegal, but though that is likely seen as a green light by some communities to begin or continue enforcement of anticamping laws, opponents of such measures say that ruling didn’t address all aspects of their arguments, including the disposal or destruction of the property of the cleared encampment’s inhabitants.
The mandate could change San Francisco from the slowest approver of new homes in California to one of the fastest.
San Francisco Mayor London Breed welcomed the ruling, saying it will help the city manage its public spaces. “We will continue to offer shelter, but we will not allow those who reject offers of help to remain where they are,” she said in a statement.
The city has been locked in an ongoing lawsuit over its encampment policies.
“We will continue to fight to ensure that San Francisco follows the law and its own policies in safeguarding the rights and property of unhoused residents,” said Nisha Kashyap, program director of racial justice at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area. Jennifer Friedenbach, executive director of the Coalition on Homelessness, which is suing the city, said people should not be punished for being poor, and “instead of tackling root causes, elected leaders have chosen to penalize residents who have nowhere else to go.”
The conflict isn’t only in San Francisco and Grants Pass, of course; and various elected leaders had different reactions. Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass criticized the ruling, saying it “must not be used as an excuse for cities across the country to attempt to arrest their way out of this problem or hide the homelessness crisis in neighboring cities or in jail.” Meanwhile, California Gov. Gavin Newsom said the ruling “provides state and local officials the definitive authority to implement and enforce policies to clear unsafe encampments from our streets. This decision removes the legal ambiguities that have tied the hands of local officials for years and limited their ability to deliver on common-sense measures to protect the safety and well-being of our communities.”
Seller’s market?
Most people probably assume that when prices are up, it’s a seller’s market, because they’ll make more money. When prices are down, it’s a buyer’s market, because prices are lower and they’ll get more for their money.
Home prices in San Francisco dipped slightly in the past year, according to Zillow, dropping 0.3 percent over 12 months (for an average home value of $1,299,639 for the city). That’s an even bigger drop from May 2022, when the median home value was $1,542,111.
But the folks at Rocket Mortgage’s Rocket Homes website say San Francisco is a seller’s market. Their definition is that in a seller’s market, “prices tend to be higher and homes sell faster,” which more or less is true, in that prices are higher and homes are selling faster in San Francisco than in many other parts of the country. As noted here last month, things are neither great nor disastrous in San Francisco’s housing market, but still, prices are down from that 2022 high, and in my book, that makes it a buyer’s market. When prices rebound, and they will, a home purchased today will be a bargain.
