Housing

One Thing the Pandemic Is Trying to Teach Us

“We’re all in this together.” How many times have you read or heard that over the last six weeks? It’s everywhere. At the grocery store. On signs in front yards. Chalked into sidewalks. And we all instinctively understand what it means: We are all humans. We all want to live. We are sad that people are getting sick and sometimes dying from this disease no one knew about six months ago. (Eight months ago? A year ago?) And the vast majority of us are more than willing to isolate ourselves from one another in hopes that fewer of us will get sick and even fewer will die.

And we have reacted in typical human fashion. We are all learning to be grateful for the technologies that allow us to have meetings without meeting, to be able to see our children and grandchildren on Skype or FaceTime when we call, to select groceries or meals from a menu of options and have them delivered. “Drive by” is taking on a new meaning—no longer about crime but about living with our needs taken care of at a distance. A silent army of hobbyists are building frames for facemasks to protect our healthcare workers caught in a shortage of PPE. An automaker is retooling a plant in record time to build ventilators. The ingenuity of thousands is responding to the need to develop tests and vaccines for this new threat. At the same time, another army of people are working in grocery stores, advising us from drugstores, driving delivery trucks, saving people’s lives in hospitals. Thanks to all of them, everywhere.

So what’s the point? Our need for community. For common compassion. For having people in every community who will do all these jobs, both small and large. And the need for affordable housing that can accommodate all the workers. The pandemic is teaching us that we need protections for renters who have lost their jobs, hopefully temporarily, and cannot pay the rent this month—or next. And we need those same protections for homeowners who scraped together the down payment for a house but are only one or two paychecks away from losing it. Governors and mayors across the country are struggling to find a way to keep us all in the homes that protect us from mass exposure to a deadly virus.

The Social Justice Housing Subcommittee has been working for the last year and a half to understand how California got to a place where we need three and half million new housing units—most of which must be affordable to people living on 80 percent of the California median income of $71,800—yes, less than $57,400. (Remember that the median represents the halfway point, not the average.) Three million households in California are “rent challenged”; the renters in these households pay more than 30 percent of their income for rent, and half of them pay more than 50 percent of their income for rent. Our research shows that this holds true for Pasadena and other cities represented in the Pasadena-area League. When people are rent challenged, they find it difficult to pay all their bills—utilities, groceries, fuel, insurance, car maintenance, clothing.

And because it costs essentially the same amount (for land, building permits, construction costs, mortgage interest, maintenance) to build an affordable unit as it does to build a luxury unit, developers find themselves unable to recover the cost of building affordable units through affordable rents. The result: Affordable units are almost always built with the financial support of governments. There are carrots and there are sticks:

• Inclusionary zoning—in effect in Pasadena and not a lot of other places—requires developers to include a certain number of affordable units in their projects or pay “in lieu” fees that cover the cost of building that number of units somewhere else in the city.
• Density bonuses (per California law) allow more units to be built on a site if a percentage of them are affordable.
• Per-unit fees are assessed on all projects to help cover the infrastructure costs of expanding sewer lines and utility lines, repairing streets impacted by heavy equipment, and constructing sidewalks and parks to accommodate new residents. These fees are reduced if the unit is guaranteed (covenanted) to be affordable for a significant period of time.

These methods work. Pasadena has been able to increase its affordable housing stock by over 1,100 units in the past fifteen years—a significant achievement, but still far short of the goal set for the city by the regional housing plan. The Housing Subcommittee is exploring other ways to make it easier and cheaper to get affordable units built, and we are assessing the need for changing some of the rules that may be creating barriers to achieving that goal. We will discuss those in a future article.

But here is one thing to keep in mind: Perhaps the biggest barrier to affordable housing is NIMBY, “not in my back yard.” As we appreciate those who are on the front lines in the COVID battle—from farmworkers to grocery clerks to healthcare workers to those making sure our food is delivered to our doorsteps—maybe we can also recognize that many of these heroes are facing the housing dilemmas discussed here. Perhaps the pandemic can teach us that we really are all in this together and will help us remember that we need both apartment buildings and little houses in backyards, rented at affordable rates, to make our community livable for those who form our society’s backbone. That would be great outcome from a very sad situation.

— Anita Mackey, Chair, Social Justice Housing Subcommittee