Public Comment

The power to shape social truth is a field of war.

How so? Well: The power of the state and social truth are two sides of the same coin. To influence what is socially regarded as true is to influence the power of the state. For example, does the King's divinity grant him the power of life and death? or is the truth of guilt the realm of a jury of peers? Social truth and state power are co-determinate.

I mention this because in spite of what you might have heard there is no regional housing shortage.

The alleged existence of a Bay Area housing shortage is all rumor and innuendo, part of an enormous and coordinated effort to grab power and real estate. 

First, what are the stakes? What if there IS a regional housing shortage? Then a number of familiar conclusions follow: 

If there is a housing shortage then the state must move to give advantage to developers, to expend public resources to lower the cost of new housing production. 

If there is a housing shortage then the state must move to dedicate publicly controlled land to the use of private developers to swiftly build out. 

If there is a housing shortage sacrifices must be made to further help developers, whether it is lines of sight, blue sky, peaceful enjoyment, local businesses, or tenant protections. 

In summary, if there IS a regional housing shortage a handful of very rich people stand to become a good deal richer taking over public assets for private profit, and disrupting the authority of municipalities to govern themselves. 

As I said, though: there is no regional housing shortage. 

Nearly anyone who has shopped for an apartment or house in these parts, lately, is apt to disagree with me, rather strongly. Still, give me a chance to explain: 

It's true that, today, in this region, we're seeing a form of sprawl grounded in sharply increasing economic segregation. 

People who live at or below the area median incomes are being forced to the periphery of the region, and forced to adopt long commutes. People well above the median income, taking advantage of a growing income gap, are newly segregating traditionally desirable cities. Here and there, a few small pockets of designated affordable housing allow a fraction of the median-and-below households to remain in the urban core. 

The resulting community disruption and degrading of the built environment is not a shortage of supply, but a distortion in how housing is allocated in the region. 

It is also more or less exactly what the regional housing plan produced by ABAG calls for. The plan would call for slightly more, but not much more housing for the non-rich in places like Berkeley. 

Why is this segregation occurring? Largely because the tech and financial industries enjoy enormously high rates of profit compared to the number and wages of their employees. To retain certain employees, those industries pay extraordinarily high wages compared to the regional median. As a consequence, those employees bid up the housing in the traditionally most culturally rich parts of the region. Further, in the case of the tech companies that run private buses throughout the urban core, even their mid-range employees get a considerable subsidy (free transportation, free food, and so forth). Paradoxically, as we know now from not one but two bubbles, this wage disparity causes displacement and crushes the very cultural vibrancy those employees try to buy into. Regional segregation of the highest wage workers from the average wage and low wage households is the inevitable result. 

That is not a housing shortage, that's an income gap. 

Mistakenly treating the income gap as a housing shortage has profound consequences for public policy. 

Proposals such as mitigation fees, inclusionary units, and so on all have in common that they propose to worsen even further the ratio of affordable to exclusively priced units. Worse, these proposals are generally structured with the primary aim of using public money to ensure strong profits for private builders, landlords, etc. 

The economic crisis that is causing this wage gap is not going to go away (short of a complete collapse). It is going to get worse. 

For that reason, if we are serious about housing affordability and a sustainable city, we need to work aggressively on very different policy directions -- such as a huge expansion in the stock of social housing *at all price levels*. 

If the problem is not truly a shortage but rather lies in how housing is allocated along the spectrum of incomes, then social housing, housing owned by the public and allocated by public policy, is the solution. 

At Tuesday's special meeting the Berkeley City Council saw a number of presentations and proposals for housing policy directions. Developer interests presented, as well as a representative of ABAG. They heard from local affordable housing advocates, and even some academic theorists. In the official order of things, the views they offered are taken to be a wide range of opinion, a broad examination of all the issues and possibilities. 

Nothing could be farther from the truth. 

It is at present the official policy of the City of Berkeley to worsen housing affordability in Berkeley through development incentives, incentives to landlords, and backwards-bending tolerance of conditions such as over-crowding of low-income students. Even the most optimistic projections of what can be done with tools like mitigation fees, the HTF, and inclusionary units – even those projects forecast a steady worsening of affordability in Berkeley, for everyone but those above the area median income. 

Worse, every presentation addressed affordable housing needs as a need for subsidy – as a need for taxpayers to ensure high profits to developers, landlords, and lenders on behalf of an ever-smaller number of lucky middle-class subsidized-housing lottery winners. Because all of their reasoning takes profit on the back of residents as the sine qua non of housing policy, all nine council members put forward fundamentally regressive, extractive policy proposals. Instead of building social wealth, all nine members of council aim to hand off social wealth to Big Capital. 

The net effect is that even the voting minority on council is participating in accelerating a process of regional economic segregation, driven by the profit-making opportunities that arise from a widening income gap. Landlords and developers and banks want a taste of the surplus capital accumulating to tech and finance industries. Our Berkeley City Council is fixing to make sure they get it, even on the backs Berkeley's middle class and lower income households. Our council is even embracing the public health disaster that is over-crowding, enshrining it in law and using it as an opportunity to regulate resident behavior rather than to restrain rapacious capital. 

In the coming months I hope to join others in sharing with the council, and with all Berkeleyans, a more serious look at the nature of the housing crisis than that which they heard at Tuesday's meeting. We will see how there is not a supply problem but a discrimination problem. We will see how subsidies aren't needed and how housing windfalls can and should be socialized. We will put the lie to the assertions of ABAG and expose the faulty foundations your academic experts have chosen. 

For now, I ask council members to at least step back and start to admit to themselves, and to the public, that none of the policy options any of them are considering will turn around the affordability crisis in Berkeley.