PD Editorial: Making housing affordable

The affordable housing squeeze in Sonoma County and across much of California is in many ways matched by a skimpy set of policy tools for addressing the situation.

One of the tools is inclusionary zoning, a rather bureaucratic label for local ordinances requiring developers to sell some housing at below-market prices.

On Monday, the state Supreme Court unanimously upheld San Jose’s inclusionary zoning law, flatly rejecting arguments from builders and real estate groups that such requirements are unconstitutional.

“It will come as no surprise to anyone familiar with California’s current housing market that the significant problems arising from a scarcity of affordable housing have not been solved over the past three decades,” Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye wrote for the court. “Rather, these problems have become more severe and have reached what might be described as epic proportions in many of the state’s localities.”

The court’s decision won’t change that. It won’t help tenants either, as the justices didn’t revisit a 2009 appellate court decision that prohibited similar set-asides for rental housing.

But the ruling does protect about 170 counties and cities, including Santa Rosa and other local cities, that require developers to set aside some new homes at below-market prices or pay into a fund that subsidizes construction of affordable housing as a condition for obtaining building permits.

Cantil-Sakauye wrote that these laws mitigate the impacts of new development while serving two “distinct, but nonetheless constitutionally legitimate purposes.”

First, they increase the availability of affordable housing and, second, they assure that affordable units “are distributed throughout the city as part of mixed-income developments in order to obtain the benefits that flow from economically diverse communities and avoid the problems that have historically been associated with isolated low-income housing.”

Some of the factors contributing to California’s housing crisis are beyond the reach of the courts and the other branches of government, too.

For one, demand for housing in California exceeds the supply and, in some regions, including the Bay Area, available land. Indeed, as the state legislative analyst reported recently, almost two-thirds of the land surrounding urban centers on California’s coast is unsuitable for development because of mountains, hills, water and other environmental factors.

Opposition to new development frequently exacerbates those physical limits, contributing further to rising housing prices - about 2½ greater than the national average.

Many young people are getting priced out of the market. So are many people working low- and middle-income jobs including winery, clerical and retail employees, even schoolteachers. They’re often forced into long commutes, contributing to traffic and smog, doubling or even quadrupling up in rentals or opting to move elsewhere. Businesses are reluctant to relocate or expand because costly housing complicates recruiting.

For healthy communities and a steady economy, it’s crucial that cities and counties insist new housing projects accommodate a full range of incomes. That’s a proper exercise of what the court called their “broad discretion to regulate the use of real property to serve the legitimate interests of the general public.”