In response to Supervisor Jane Kim's pledge to either pass a 30-percent affordability threshold for new development in the city, or to get such a measure put on the November ballot, Mayor Ed Lee introduced a counter-measure this week that he's dubbing Build Housing Now. Lee's measure, intended for the November ballot, would codify his promise to build 30,000 new units by 2020, and as Socketsite notes, the mayor's initiative "includes a soft target of 50 percent Below-Market-Rate housing."
Jane Kim's office spoke to SFist to clarify that they feel that Kim's measure will work as a good complement to the mayor's initiative, setting firmer goals when it comes to the city's overall affordable housing goals.
They also foresee that this battle will get louder as we approach November, and they don't in any way want the 30-percent goal to be seen as one that would halt development. It's simply a tool through which the city's own planning goals can better be met.
Lee's Build Housing Now initiative also has language to the effect that it will analyze "the impact of luxury development on the demand for middle-income housing in the City" and perhaps propose fees to mitigate those impacts.
But again, without the Redevelopment Agency to help anymore, funding affordable housing is becoming increasingly difficult an impact Governor Brown did not perhaps understand when he decided to dissolve all redevelopment statewide two years ago. As Kim's aides note, without the tax-increment financing tool that was the purview of redevelopment, finding the resources to fund anything that's not market-rate housing or finding incentives to get developers to build that housing has become a far greater challenge. For more background on that, see this piece from the Chron from when the Redevelopment Agency finally, fully dissolved, earlier this spring.
Previously: Jane Kim Proposing 30% Affordable Housing In New Developments
