Is This the Key to Fixing the Bay Area’s Housing Woes?
State money to convert a blighted hotel into affordable housing? Hell yes! (Aneta Pawlik, Max DeVesty)
There could be a spark of optimism on the horizon for those living in the Bay Area. Project Homekey is a relatively new program run by the California Department of Housing and Community Development that municipalities and organizations can tap for funds to purchase defunct or derelict buildings to transform into new housing. According to the Enterprise-Record, the small town of Orland just used the program to secure permanent housing for 33 residents who were or near to experiencing homelessness; that’s the proportional equivalence of housing 300 in the nearby town of Chico.
And this program couldn’t come at a better time. Northern California is home to three of the most expensive cities in the country: Oakland, San Jose, and, of course, San Francisco. Downtowns are hollowing out after years of backdoor deals to companies that never should have gotten the tax breaks and favorable treatment they received, an issue that should concern any citizen not already lost to corporate-funded solipsism and nihilism. Where average costs for a house hover around a gut-wrenching $1.5 million, NorCal needs a program like Project Homekey to ensure regular folks can live indoors and afford homes for their families.
Ora Prochovnick, Director of Litigation and Policy for San Francisco’s Eviction Defense Collaborative, couldn’t agree more. She told Street Spirit in 2021 the best way to address the issue of homelessness is to provide people with homes, though cautioned Homekey needs to go even further to solve these massive issues. For instance, towns like Orland and various agencies who purchase buildings to be adapted for affordable housing need to have the resources to maintain their new projects. “You have a much bigger need than you have resources, and this is just a drop in the pool,” Prochovnick told the outlet.
For certain, Prochovnick is right to keep an eyebrow raised. There are plenty of bad actors still preventing legitamite, sustainable change. A Burlingame landlord was charged by officials at the Department of Housing and Urban Development for coercing a family to move into a larger, pricier apartment. The Chronicle reports Mayor London Breed spent none of the city’s additional $5 million dedicated to repairing low-income housing on any of the 82 buildings within the first six months she won the money.
But on April 4 that same spark of hopeful property rehabilitation came to the region, this time from San Francisco City Supervisor Matt Dorsey, who introduced legislation to ease conversion fees on owners swapping from commercial to residential properties. While it would only alleviate about 10 percent of the average costs, Dorsey recognizes his area of District 6 was one of the most hard-hit by a population of moneyed workers who didn’t contribute much before they moved during the pandemic. Imagine instead a 20, 30, or 50 percent project cost reduction to tip the scales toward affordable housing. It takes a bit of what Harvard professor Cornel West calls the radical imagination, but these realities are always just a campaign, a vote, and a signature away.
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