CASA Compact lays out plan to tackle housing

Compact aims to take on housing crisis with 10-point plan of ideas
The Sonoma County Alliance met Feb. 6 for its regular meeting where Sonoma County Board of Supervisors Chairman David Rabbit spoke about the recently approved CASA Compact – The Committee to House the Bay Area.

As keynote speaker, Rabbit discussed the compact’s ambitious, 15-year emergency policy package recommendations designed to help solve the Bay Area’s long-standing affordable housing crisis.
According to Rabbit, CASA was convened 18 months ago by the Metropolitan Transportation Agency (MTC) and the Association of Bay Area Governments in order “to fulfill the requirements of Bay Area 2040, a long-term land use and transportation plan – and to tackle the housing issue in the Bay Area.”
The CASA taskforce is made up of several committees.
There are 32 members on the technical committee and 18 members on a steering committee. Members of the committee included local community members, local officials and major employers such as Apple and Google, housing experts, social equity advocates and nonprofits.
“CASA brought these entrenched interests together for 18 months and told them to work through their differences and chart a new course because the status quo on housing issues just does not work,” Rabbit said.
Rabbit added that the CASA Compact initially became controversial as some thought it was a new action that “came out of nowhere,” however he said this was not true. He said the compact is an attempt to get in compliance with SB 375 – which tackles housing and greenhouse gases – and roll it together with a regional transportation and land use plan.
“All metropolitan regions in California must complete a sustainable community strategy, or SCS, as part of the regional transportation plan, or you don’t get any money.”
CASA was an item within the Bay Area Action Plan created over the course of two years.
Before diving into the elements of the 10-point plan, Rabbit discussed why the status quo on housing has to change.
He started by asking the crowd of attendees – which ranged from small business owners to a slew of city officials from various municipalities across the county – to give a show of hands when asked if they thought there was a housing crisis in Sonoma County and throughout the Bay Area.
Nearly all arms in the room shot up into the air.
Rabbit said of the crisis, “It does negatively affect our quality of life – certainly if it’s not you directly, it’s your children, your workers and many other people throughout our community … Keep your hands raised if your children can buy a home where they grew up or pay less than 40 percent of their income towards rent.” Only a few hands remained in the air.
“Here in Sonoma County, we had a tight housing market prior to the October wildfires and after the fires struck with a loss of 5,300 homes (5 percent of the housing stock in Santa Rosa), our housing market went from tight to absolutely unyielding,” Rabbit said.
According to Rabbit, Bay Area home prices are two and a half times the national average.
From 2007 to 2014, the Bay Area’s nine counties and 101 cities permitted 57 percent of the new homes needed to meet the demands of population growth and to maintain baseline levels of affordability. He also noted that since the recession ended in 2010, the Bay Area added 722,000 jobs, yet constructed 106,000 housing units.
What’s more, Californians spend more of their income on housing costs than any other location in the country.
Rabbit said of the current crisis, “I guarantee you that if there were a health or food crisis, then we would rally and we would take immediate action with the same tenacity that we tackled the rebuild and recovery from the October wildfires. A crisis by its very definition requires action. Somehow we have a housing crisis, people admit it and we keep doing the same thing and I think that’s where we really come together and say, ‘The status quo is not working, we really need to rethink.’”
That’s where the CASA Compact comes in, he said.
“The action plan recommends pursuing more ambitious funding, legislative and policy solutions that will stand in local, regional levels as well as strengthening and expanding regional housing initiatives,” Rabbit said.
CASA explored dozens of housing solution ideas from the various working groups and hours of meetings. The ideas were eventually whittled down to 10 elements:

1. Just cause eviction policy. A policy would make sure that residents are protected from arbitrary eviction notices and would require landlords to cite a valid and legitimate reason for eviction, such as failure to pay rent or violation of the lease agreement. It would also require landlords to provide relocation assistance.
2. Rent cap, an initiative that would establish an annual Bay Area-wide rent cap.
3. Rent assistance and access to legal counsel. An idea that stems from Oakland, where the leading cause of evictions in the Bay Area is inability to make rent. A rent assistance initiative would temporarily cover someone’s rent instead of moving someone out and having to deal with the after effects of displacement.
4. Remove regulatory barriers to accessory dwelling units.
5. Increasing density at transit stations. Housing near public transpiration would also help to get more cars off the road.
6. Government reforms to the housing approval process. This may include requiring no more than three public hearings for an item or having building permits expire in 24 months or standards for inclusionary housing.
7. Expedited approvals and financial incentives for housing. This would help ensure timely approval of zoning-compliant housing projects and create incentive for enabling on-site affordability.
8. Unlock public land for affordable housing. This could identify and rezone land for housing.
9. Getting dollars for projects, whether it is state dollars or funds from organizations for the housing coffers.
10. Regional housing enterprise. To distribute any funds regionally with 25 percent allotment for discretionary funds.

And while there’s still a lot of work to be done at the local municipality level in addressing these items in the compact, Rabbit said the hope would be to take these items as individual bills to legislators in Sacramento.
Rabbit said of the compact, “There’s something in this for everyone to hate and something for everyone to love. On a scale of one to five on how they liked it, about everyone was in the middle.”