Bay Area needs to rethink its rules on land use, zoning

Joseph Perkins, Bay Area needs to rethink its rules on land use, zoning, Oct 21, 2007, S.F. Chron., at F-1.

In this SF Chronicle article from October 2007, Joseph Perkins[1] asks: “How and where is the Bay Area going to house its additional 1.5 million residents?” His question contemplates projections made by the Association of Bay Area Governments in 2007: 1.5 million new residents are expected in the nine-county Bay Area region by 2030.

Perkins is concerned that the Bay Area will not be able to meet its housing production needs if the region’s recent history is an accurate predictor of its future performance. Contra Costa, he notes, is the only county from 1999 to 2006 to have kept pace with its population and employment growth. And the affordable housing supply was particularly poor: only six of 101 cities met the needs of their qualifying residents.

So what is the cause of the Bay Area’s shortcomings? Perkins blames excessive land-use regulations that make it “arguably the nation’s least hospitable region in which to build housing.” But going a step beyond, Perkins faults the “no-growth, anti-housing environmental alliance” whose activism has led to large and permanent open space designations. He also accuses them of hiding from the “unsuspecting public” that “only 16 percent of the region’s land area has been developed.”

With respect to future housing needs, Perkins says that the Bay Area environmental groups inaccurately suggest these needs can be met by smaller-scale, infill development within that 16 percent. By Perkins’ estimations, only one quarter of the projected 1.5 million people could be so accommodated. Green field development, he says, would be required to meet the needs of the remaining three quarters.

Perkins adds that if the environmental groups achieve their next large open space campaign, housing production will be further dampened and home prices will increase beyond the affordability of many next generation Bay Area residents.

And as a final twist to his knife, Perkins cites to a paper published by the Harvard Institute of Economic Research to conclude that affordability problems cannot be adequately combated through the imposition of affordable housing requirements upon builders. Housing prices are “three times higher” in this region, snaps Perkins, not because “home builders are somehow three times more avaricious than their counterparts in the rest of the country. It’s because the region’s land use restrictions and other anti-housing regulations are three times more onerous.”

[1] Perkins is President and CEO of the Home Builders Association of Northern California.