HLC Housing Agenda Blog

Housing Endowment Receives Award

Yesterday, April 23, 2009, the Association of Bay Area Governments presented the Housing Endowment And Regional Trust—the HEART of San Mateo County—with the 2009 Growing Smarter Together Award in the category of Public/Private Partnerships.

The award was presented to San Mateo County Supervisor Carole Groom, former Board chair for HEART, and Executive Director Chris Mohr at an awards ceremony in San Francisco.

A short video was produced by ABAG in concert with the award. We will try to upload it to YouTube soon and link to it on our website.

Housing Leadership Council provides staffing to HEART.

Photos aren’t available yet, but the award announcement is online.

Cross-posted from the HEART blog.

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Discussion of Alternatives for Redwood City General Plan

Every now and then it makes sense to be a megaphone for City Hall! This is from the City of Redwood City, about the new General Plan.

For Immediate Release
March 11, 2009
Contact: Tom Passanisi, Senior Planner, (650) 780–7234

Community Invited to Join Planning Commission in Discussion of EIR Alternatives for New General Plan

Redwood City, CA – Interested members of the community are invited to join the Redwood City Planning Commission for an important discussion of alternatives for the General Plan’s Environmental Impact Report (EIR). The Planning Commission meeting is scheduled for Tuesday, March 17, 2009, at City Hall, 1017 Middlefield Road, starting at 7 pm.

“Project Alternatives” are required by California environmental law in order to provide decision makers with alternative project choices and their impacts, while still attaining most of the basic objectives of the project. An alternative is also intended to mitigate one or more significant impacts of the Project. Although a project alternative would not necessarily become the preferred alternative, it is still part of the EIR discussion and evaluation, and requires analysis.

The “Project” in this case consists of the draft New General Plan (Plan) elements affirmed by the Planning Commission and City Council in January. City staff is incorporating three alternatives in addition to the Project. The draft Plan incorporates a balance of land uses including mixed use and live/work use with residential/employment development potential focused around downtown and along major transportation corridors. The draft Plan also includes new transportation options such as a potential street car system and bicycle boulevards. The three Project Alternatives to the Plan are:

• The “No Project” alternative: provides decision makers with a comparison to approving the proposed Project (the draft New General Plan) versus not approving the draft Plan (retaining the 1990 General Plan).
• The “Reduced Buildout” alternative: includes most elements of the affirmed Plan, but with reduced densities and intensities for some residential and commercial uses.
• The “Sustainable Streetcar Neighborhoods” alternative: includes most elements of the affirmed Plan, but with increased residential density and employment uses downtown and along specific transportation corridors, to further support a potential streetcar system. The envisioned streetcar system would consist of two or three lines that would intersect and carry passengers between Downtown, the proposed ferry terminal, the proposed Stanford facilities near lower Broadway, and several residential neighborhoods near downtown.

This will be an important discussion as the Planning Commission reviews and affirms the alternatives that will be in the EIR. The community is invited and encouraged to attend, learn about the range of alternatives, participate in the discussion, and contribute to the development of the New General Plan.

The General Plan is the document that establishes policies, goals, and programs for the long-term physical development of our community, and for what we want our City to be for future generations. The community is a crucial part of shaping that future, and this Scoping Meeting is another opportunity to help create the plan that will guide our community’s progress for years to come. More information on the New General Plan is available online at www.redwoodcity.org/generalplan.

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Legislation introduced to create state funding stream for affordable homes

Yesterday Housing California announced that Senate President pro tem Darrell Steinberg has authored SB 500, a bill to create a dedicated state revenue source for affordable homes. This is a high-profile start to a campaign that has been a few years in the making — since voters approved Prop. 1C, the last housing bond, in November 2006.

This is a placeholder bill that will be developed over the next few months. You can read the text here. Or you can read it here:

THE PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA DO ENACT AS FOLLOWS:

SECTION 1. It is the intent of the Legislature to enact
legislation that provides a permanent source of revenue for
affordable housing in California.

That’s it. Told you it was a placeholder!

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Summary of Housing Portion of Federal Recovery Package

This is straight from the House Appropriations Committee’s press release of 2/12/09 about the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009:

Infrastructure

• $2.25 billion through HOME and the Low Income Housing Tax Credit program to fill financing gaps caused by the credit freeze and get stalled housing development projects moving
• $1 billion for the Community Development Block Grant program for community and economic development projects including housing and services for those hit hard by tough economic times

Public Housing

• $4 billion to the public housing capital fund to enable local public housing agencies to address a $32 billion backlog in capital needs — especially those improving energy efficiency in aging
  buildings
• $2 billion for full-year payments to owners receiving Section 8 project-based rental assistance
• $2 billion for the redevelopment of abandoned and foreclosed homes
• $1.5 billion for homeless prevention activities, which will be sent out to states, cities and local governments through the emergency shelter grant formula
• $250 million is included for energy retrofitting and green investments in HUD-assisted housing projects

Kudos to the Federal Policy Project, staffed by Matt Schwartz and Marilyn Wacks at California Housing Partnership Corporation, who led a collaborative, statewide effort to get housing including in any federal economic stimulus legislation. Their knowledge of the field and contacts within both housing and Congress resulted in many of the Project’s proposals being included in some fashion in the final compromise. Good work, Matt and Marilyn!

Finally, among other housing-related items in addition to the Federal Policy Project’s agenda, the bill includes a first-time homebuyer tax credit of $8,000 was created, for a projected cost of about $2 billion; and $555 million to expand the Department of Defense Homeowners Assistance Program during the national mortgage crisis.

Posted in Federal, Foreclosures, Housing finance, News | 1 Comment »

Good News in Draft Regional Transportation Plan

The Metropolitan Transportation Commission has released the draft Regional Transportation Plan (RTP). It’s called Transportation 2035.

I have only skimmed Chapter 1, Overview – Change in Motion, and I’m happy to see a determined focus not just on transportation solutions alone, but also on reducing climate change through appropriate land use planning.

Translation: Put homes near jobs, provide lower-carbon transportation choices between the two, and make sure plenty of the homes are affordable to the workforce in the jobs!

See page 11 in particular:

The anchors of the Transportation 2035 vision are the Three E principles of sustainability — a prosperous and globally competitive economy, a healthy and safe environment, and equity wherein all Bay Area residents share in the benefits of a well-maintained, efficient, and connected regional transportation system. These Three E principles frame the following eight individual goals for this plan.

• Maintenance and Safety
• Reliability
• Efficient Freight Travel
• Security and Emergency Management
• Clean Air
• Climate Protection
• Equitable Access
• Livable Communities

If the rest of the plan is like that, that’s good news for housing advocates. You can download a 15-MB PDF of the plan or single chapters from the MTC’s web Transportation 2035 webpage at http://mtc.ca.gov/planning/2035_plan/.

Tip o’ the hat to TransForm for the email alert!

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Mid-Pen chooses Lindenthal as real estate VP

This just in from Mid-Peninsula Housing Coalition:

Jan Lindenthal to Provide Leadership as Vice President of Real Estate Development

February 4, 2009 – Foster City, CA — Mid-Peninsula Housing Coalition, one of California’s leading non-profit affordable housing developers, today announced the appointment of Jan M. Lindenthal as Vice President of Real Estate Development. Since its foundation in 1970, Mid-Pen has developed over 6,200 affordable homes for residents in 8 northern California counties.

“Jan has a proven track record of developing quality affordable housing, leading and motivating teams and building strong partnerships,” said Matthew O. Franklin, Mid-Pen’s President….

Ms. Lindenthal comes to Mid-Pen from South County Housing where she served as Vice President of Development and Construction since 1998. In this role, she managed multifamily development, single family development and a construction company. During her tenure, South County developed over 1,600 affordable housing units.

Media Contact:
Beth Fraker
650-356-2913
bfraker@midpen-housing.org

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Obama’s HUD choice labeled “best ever”

Writing on the Beyond Chron website, author and Tenderloin Housing Clinic director Randy Shaw labels President-Elect Barack Obama’s choice of Shaun Donovan to be Secretary of Housing and Urban Development this way: “Obama’s Housing Choice: Best HUD Selection Ever.”
Quoting Shaw:

In picking New York City housing commissioner Shaun Donovan as the new Secretary of Housing & Urban Development (HUD), Barack Obama has sharply departed from virtually every prior selection for this position. Never before has anyone with close to Donovan’s experience and qualifications headed HUD, and nobody has entered the job with such positive relations with the affordable housing community…. Obama’s appointment of Donovan shows that the new President is serious about getting the nation’s affordable housing program back on track, though Obama is unlikely to greatly increase HUD’s budget. For more details on Donovan, click here.

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Thank you, Sister Bernie Galvin

I’ve been carrying around the October issue of Street Sheet, the monthly newspaper of the San Francisco Coalition on Homelessness. There’s a lovely tribute to Sister Bernie Galvin, who founded Religious Witness with Homeless People in 1993, and retired earlier this year, after 15 years.

I moved to San Francisco in January 1995. Religious Witness had just wrapped up a series of sleepouts in city parks to protest then-Mayor Frank Jordan’s “Matrix” policy of shuffling the homeless along. An elderly acquaintance of mine, Pauline, had joined the sleepouts — at the age of about 80 or so, as I recall. I was a co-signer of a statement that Religious Witness ran as an advertisement in local newspapers. I went to several vigils by City Hall.

One of Sister Bernie’s best results came in the Presidio National Park, on the site of the former military post. The Presidio Trust had planned to tear down an entire neighborhood of former military family housing out by the beach, and Bernie organized to prevent it from happening. The housing didn’t go to the homeless, but it did prevent much-needed rental housing from simply being torn down. Destruction of the housing is still part of the Presidio’s long-term management plan to restore parts of the park to more pristine natural areas, but at least in the meantime the housing is still in use, rather than getting torn down well ahead of restoration. The photo on the Religious Witness home page is from a march they held at that housing tract.

I’m afraid I wasn’t as involved after my initial participation. My explanation is that I got a job for a nonprofit housing developer in the Tenderloin neighborhood, which was all about creating homes that marginally housed people could afford. For a while, Robin had her office in the same building Sister Bernie did, so they would see each other from time to time.

The Coalition now publishes its stories on a wordpress blog, so you can find it here.

I particularly liked the closing quote from Sr. Bernie:

“This I know from my life experience,” she offered: “Hearts that beat strong with genuine compassion for the poor find each other. Hearts that beat with a fierce demand for justice find each other. It is as if the human heart has a magnetic element that pulls us so tightly together around our passion for the poor that our hearts begin to beat as one.”

Blessings to you, Sister Bernie, as you take time for rest, reflection, and discernment of what’s next. Thank you for your good work!

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Free Workshop for Homeowners Facing Foreclosure

From EPA CAN DO and Community Legal Services of East Palo Alto, by way of the City of Redwood City e-newsletter (hat tip to Malcolm Smith):

Date: Saturday, November 15, 2008
Time: 1- 4 pm
Location: 145 Lake Merced Blvd., Merced Room, Daly City
Contact: EPA CAN DO, 650-473-9838;
Community Legal Services of East Palo Alto

Anyone in San Mateo County is welcome to attend this free Foreclosure Intervention/Prevention workshop. The community is welcome to attend without appointment or RSVP (although RSVPs are appreciated). Contact EPA CAN DO at 650-473-9838 for more details. The workshop will assist homeowners who are near to or currently in foreclosure. It will focus on issues related to foreclosure such as the realities of the current real estate market, working with lenders to modify your loan, legal issues involved in foreclosure, short sales, and rebuilding post-foreclosure credit.

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It’s not tough medicine to live in a vibrant community

Today the San Francisco Business Times had its annual Peninsula Structures breakfast. The speakers were Rosanne Foust, mayor of Redwood City and vice president for Samceda (San Mateo County Economic Development Association); John Bruno, Redwood City Industrial Saltworks; Greg Walker, Jones Lang LaSalle; Chris Meany, Wilson Meany Sullivan/Bay Meadows; and Steve Elliott, Stanford University.

Both Bruno and Meany described the environmental and other benefits of building homes close to jobs in the inner Bay Area. During the brief Q&A time, I mentioned that I’ve heard some traditional single-family homebuilders that the market doesn’t want a denser, more urban home, they want a fence and a yard; and I asked the two if they thought the market demand would be there if and when (respectively) their developments come online.

Bruno said that times are changing, look at all the black buses on the freeway taking Google employees to work from San Francisco, where so many of them prefer to live.  He said these developments are for our children.

Meany went a step further and said they weren’t just for our children, they were also for the people in the audience right now. On the margins, there is a change of taste, as people prefer less driving. Older workers are looking to retire to a condo where there’s stair-free living and you can easily lock the place and go on vacation for a month. He said this style of living may not be a panacea to people at the peak of their childraising years, but it’s growing. And he claimed that a lot of traditional builders are afraid of the entitlement process.

The best quote from Meany was this: “This new way of life is not tough medicine, but a way of living in a vibrant community.”

Posted in Bay Meadows, Events, Housing need, News, Redwood City Industrial Saltworks | No Comments »