Controversial regional housing bill would create agency to tax the Bay Area — and raise $1.5 billion a year

By Jody Meacham
– Reporter, Silicon Valley Business Journal

Mar 11, 2019, 7:21am PDT 
Updated a day ago

A group of politicians, policy wonks, developers and tenant activists called CASA that is trying to address the housing crisis with a regional approach is now turning its sights on how to fund more homes.

Last week, San Francisco Assemblymember David Chiu, a supporter of CASA, proposed a bill that would create a regional housing entity called HABA that could tax all nine Bay Area counties to help pay for housing.

HABA, which stands for Housing Alliance for the Bay Area, would have the authority to put tax proposals on county ballots to raise money for housing.

“Everybody wants transportation. Not everybody wants housing," said Leslye Corsiglia, executive director of affordable housing advocacy nonprofit Silicon Valley at Home and a co-chair of the regional group that drew up the CASA Compact, a package of proposals to address the Bay Area’s housing crisis as a regional concern.

She said HABA should provide funding and some technical assistance to local governments but “not to in any way provide any kind of regulatory oversight of local government.” She wants it to be a “helpful entity to what locals need to be doing and are required to do by state law.”

It would resemble the Bay Area Toll Authority, an arm of the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, rather than the MTC itself, she said.

Officials of some Bay Area cities have objected to what they see as a loss of local control from the bill. Chiu has said could produce $1.5 billion a year to be used for land acquisition, construction and rental assistance.

Sen. Jim Beall of Campbell, who chairs the Senate’s housing and transportation committee, said he has not read Chiu’s bill, AB 1487, in detail. In general, however, he said, smaller cities can’t afford to finance housing programs that might be needed so the idea behind Chiu's bill makes sense.

“That’s a rational view,” he said.

He said that some cities say they can't afford to build affordable housing, but that's a smokescreen because they actually don't want it. An advantage of HABA would be that “If we have the funding in a pooled fund, then that kind of gets the point where there's no real excuses," he said.