According to the San Francisco Chronicle, a panel of mayors, developers, and transit officials known as the Committee to House the Bay Area but called CASA, have come up with an aggressive plan to address the area's housing problems with a combination of regional rent caps, new property taxes, laws against arbitrary evictions and loose zoning near transit centers. CASA would also like to create a new agency with taxing authority to implement region-wide housing solutions.
Over the past two years, its members drafted a 10-point compact meant to bring housing production more in line with demand: Since the recession ended in 2010, the Bay Area has created 722,000 jobs but built only 106,000 housing units. That imbalance has pushed people far away from where they work, forcing them into wildfire zones or soul-numbing commutes. “There’s a huge cost to doing nothing on this problem,” said Grace Crunican, general manager of BART and a member of the panel.
Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf agreed and stressed the importance of responding to the crisis as a region, rather than a collection of cities with separate laws.
“Oakland’s problems are not ‘Oakland’s problems’ — we’re all interdependent,” she said. “Our status as residents of the Bay Area supersedes our status as residents of any particular municipality.”
Some cities have already applied many of the concepts in the compact. Its provisions line up closely with recent laws passed in San Francisco, where Mayor London Breed is rallying for more housing and city officials are easing restrictions on nontraditional dwellings, such as granny units. San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, San Jose and Richmond already have entrenched rent control, whereas CASA recommends a 15-year cap, limiting annual rent increases to 5 percent greater than the consumer price index.
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