Austin producing 10 times as much housing as SF

rewrite this content and keep HTML tags San Francisco, California and Austin, Texas.Brandon Bell/Mit Desai/500px/Getty Images/Illustration by SFGATEIt’s no secret that the Bay Area is short on housing. But simply stating that the region suffers from a “housing crisis” tends to obscure the exact degree of the problem. The Bay Area Council Economic Institute, a local nonprofit think tank, used census data to rank major U.S. cities by the per-capita number of housing permits issued from January 2022 through August 2023. The organization released its analysis to SFGATE on Monday; it will be released publicly Thursday.According to the council’s analysis, the city of Austin, Texas, issued the most permits per capita during that period, at 2,946 per 100,000 people. In comparison, Oakland lagged by a factor of seven (462 permits per 100,000), San Jose by a factor of eight (352), and San Francisco by a factor of 10, at just 276 permits per 100,000 residents.The findings mirror those of a report released Wednesday by California’s housing department, which found that San Francisco has more hurdles for housing development than any other city in the state, as reported by the New York Times. The report noted that the city’s housing policies and practices run counter to state laws promoting housing construction.AdvertisementArticle continues below this adIt’s true that in San Francisco developers must navigate restrictive laws at both the city and state level. The California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), for example, was drafted to prevent environmental harm, but anti-housing activists frequently use the act to stall construction on housing projects they oppose. There’s also the city’s onerous, yearslong permitting process that developers must navigate before they can break ground, and the fact that San Francisco is the only city in California that allows neighbors to appeal permit applications at any point in the permitting process, which can grind the process to a halt at the 11th hour, as the San Francisco Chronicle reported. (The Chronicle and SFGATE are both owned by Hearst but have separate newsrooms.) The city’s antiquated zoning laws complicate the issue further, limiting the area available for multifamily housing units overall. California Gov. Gavin Newson recently signed a bill that would exempt low-income housing projects from environmental review. He signed a separate bill earlier this month to ban the post-entitlement appeals that can delay projects, which will take effect on Jan. 1, 2024. FILE – Victorian residential townhouses in San Francisco, CaliforniaAlexander Spatari/Getty ImagesAdvertisementArticle continues below this adSan Francisco Planning Chief of Staff Dan Sider noted to SFGATE that because the institute’s analysis relies on census data, it counts only new buildings, as opposed to any modifications or additions to existing buildings that may add housing units.“It doesn’t include additions or other changes to existing buildings, which are far more common in urbanized places like San Francisco than, for example, in Texas,” Sider wrote in an email to SFGATE.Sider said that when counting housing permits issued for modifications to existing buildings, San Francisco issued approximately 590 permits — not 276 — per 100,000 people between January 2022 and August 2023, which places the city in “the middle of the pack” for issuing housing permits.Abby Raisz, a senior research manager at the Bay Area Council Economic Institute, echoed the conclusion of Newsom’s housing agency, telling SFGATE that these figures are the symptoms of red tape and outdated policies. Compared to cities such as Austin, where “it’s very easy to build anything you want,” the Bay Area has “grossly underproduced” housing, she said. AdvertisementArticle continues below this ad“We paint ourselves as a sort of progressive region, but our outcomes have been pretty regressive when it comes to housing people,” Raisz said. “Especially on the lower-income side of the spectrum.”Raisz also cited California’s Proposition 13, a 1978 law that limits property taxes to 1% of a home’s value. Prop. 13 assesses a home’s value not by its market price, but by its most recent sale price, so taxes remain low even as property values rise. As a result, homeowners have incentive to keep their homes, creating a lock-in effect that limits home turnover.Overall, Raisz described San Francisco’s housing crisis as “death by a thousand cuts.” One particular policy might not sink a construction project, but the combination of a lengthy permitting process, fees and restrictive zoning laws could make building all but impossible in the City by the Bay.Editor’s note: This article was updated at 2 p.m., Oct. 26, to remove a photo whose caption incorrectly identified a building in Austin.AdvertisementArticle continues below this ad

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