An eviction moratorium is a temporary prohibition on evicting, or removing, a residential or commercial tenant from the space that they rent. While such laws are rare, they have become more common during the pandemic because, without them, millions of renters who lost work would be displaced from their apartments, thus making it harder to control the spread of COVID To be truly effective, an eviction moratorium should outlaw all five stages of the eviction process.
Some local governments, including Alameda County, have passed moratoria that are stronger than the statewide law, offering local residents more protections. You can learn more about the emergency eviction protections in your East Bay community here. July The unit can be either a rental or ownership unit, such as a condo or a single-family residence. For ownership units, housing costs can include mortgage payments, property taxes, insurance, utilities, and condo fees. A Community Land Trust CLT is a non-profit organization dedicated to buying properties in order to maintain them for communal uses, including farming, gardening, and affordable housing.
In a residential land trust, the CLT owns the land while residents rent or own the buildings on that land. This makes it so that residents continue to live in their homes, often at an affordable cost, while the land remains a long-term asset under community control.
Community control ensures that, once the current residents move, the housing will remain permanently affordable to other residents of the neighborhood. CLTs are thus a tool to fight gentrification and displacement. As the cost of housing has skyrocketed, even more people are unable to afford a home to live in without being cost-burdened. See Affordable Housing. We organize residents of affordable housing, non-profit and public housing providers, and local residents across class and race to take action together to expand affordable homes for all who need it.
Our advocacy is rooted in values prioritizing racial and economic justice. Different organizations committed to housing justice take different strategies to reach their aims, however, and hold different perspectives on the best way to do their part of the work for housing justice. In addition to use, zoning regulates the design and development standards for each property.
These standards include the height, density, materials, and other aspects of a potential development. Where should Berkeley allow 9, new homes to be built? That housing need, which is initially determined by the State, is divided into very-low, low, moderate, and above-moderate income groups.
Once the RHNA is complete, cities and counties must update the Housing Elements of their General Plans to show that they have zoned their land in a way that will allow them to meet their RHNA targets, including identifying specific sites where that housing can be built.
The RHNA process is repeated every 8 years. EBHO sees RHNA as a tool to promote affordable housing, racial equity, and economic opportunity by requiring exclusionary suburbs to build their fair share of multi-family and affordable homes. Every city or county is required to update their Housing Element every 8 years. For the low-income segments of the RHNA, this requires zoning land for multi-family development.
The Housing Element must also identify barriers to housing development, such as exclusionary zoning, and specific policies to remove them. Finally, it must include strategies to affirmatively further fair housing AFFH. Inclusionary zoning is a policy that requires or encourages market-rate housing developers to include a specific percentage of units that are affordable to low-income or moderate-income households in new developments.
It is a response to patterns of exclusionary zoning. Rather than build affordable homes at the development site, many inclusionary zoning policies allow developers to pay in-lieu fees that can be used by non-profit developers to build affordable homes at other sites.
Exclusionary zoning is when zoning laws prevent people from living in certain areas in a manner that discriminates by race, ethnicity, religion, income, disability, or another group characteristic. In the early s, real-estate practices such as racial redlining and restrictive covenants were used to explicitly exclude marginalized people from upper-income, White, Christian neighborhoods. Since then, such practices have been ruled illegal. But in their place, many communities have turned to practices such as single-family zoning and other restrictions on multi-family housing that make it harder for low-income people and people of color to live in areas that have the most economic and environmental resources.
Inclusionary zoning and AFFH policies are meant to reverse the harmful impacts of exclusionary zoning. Land value recapture is the idea that, as cities invest public money in infrastructure or change their zoning codes to encourage development, land becomes more valuable and profitable. This increase in value is created by the public sector, but it primarily benefits private developers and land owners.
A CBA can be a tool for land value recapture. In other words, housing costs for a high-income CEO are usually not cause for too much public concern. The bad news is that a large and growing share of the population cannot afford its housing costs. Even moderate-income renters are struggling to pay the rent in many high-cost cities, towns, and counties. Although more than a quarter of renters—11 million households—have severe housing cost burdens, so do about 1 in 10 home-owners, for another roughly 8 million households.
As a public official or community leader, you can make big impact—even if you have limited funding available. To learn more, visit Local Housing Solutions. The Basics What is Affordable Housing? The table below illustrates the levels of affordability by household in Contra Costa County, which includes Lafayette. Market-rate housing continues to rise and outpace what many community members can afford. Because for-sale housing is so expensive in our community, ownership is all but impossible for lower-income households.
While many of our citizens make comfortable incomes, the average salaries for many Lafayette community members fall below the median income, especially those in support industries and some employees in our downtown. For example, the following table illustrates common current wages for workers in a variety of fields in Contra Costa County. Source: US Census, Goal H-1 Conserve and improve the existing housing supply to provide adequate, safe, and decent housing for all residents, with emphasis on maintaining the semi-rural character of the City.
Goal H-2 Facilitate and encourage the development of diverse housing types and additional affordable housing units to accommodate a diversity of Lafayette citizens in terms of age and socio-economic background and to meet regional housing needs as quantified in this chapter. Goal H-3 Expand affordable housing opportunities for persons with special housing needs such as the elderly, developmentally disabled, households with very low to moderate incomes, and first time home buyers.
Goal H-4 Promote housing opportunities for all persons regardless of race, age, gender, sexual orientation, marital status or national origin.
Every jurisdiction in the State of California is required to update its Housing Element every eight years. This chapter of the General Plan is the only element that is required to be certified by the state.
It contains detailed demographic information, data on the cost of housing, and documents the need for housing that is affordable to lower-income households.
It includes goals, policies and programs to address housing needs in the community, and sets time lines for the completion of implementing actions. The individual-level ownership and the small scale of these unsubsidized properties make financing their upkeep difficult, says Shekar Narasimhan, managing director at Beekman Advisors, because of the high cost of doing business with an individual property owner.
But banks charge for these services on a percentage basis. If I charge 1. It's the law of numbers. Such fixed costs apply to foreclosures of any size, and they "eat into the value of the property significantly, which means the recovery rates after foreclosure on smaller properties are much lower.
Therefore, the lender loses more money when a default takes place," says Narasimhan. As a result, small-scale owners often must put up significant collateral — perhaps even their own home — to access credit, which may inhibit them from seeking a loan to rehabilitate or renovate their property.
Poor physical condition of properties is another challenge to addressing this housing through economies of scale. Research shows that privately owned multifamily rentals typically are older and therefore have higher upkeep. Such properties often have insignificant reserves, in part because of their low rents, and require substantial rehabilitation. Together, these qualities make small-scale, privately owned affordable housing unattractive to large-scale investors, which in turn makes adequate property maintenance difficult.
In stronger markets, privately owned, low-cost rentals have been lost through conversion to condominiums. This type of loss spiked in the mids; in , only a few thousand homes in multifamily properties were converted to condominiums, and by , that figure reached a peak of , More than 40 percent of these conversions were located in the southeastern United States.
The market for condominium conversion has since cooled in most areas. Gentrification poses a special threat to the continued affordability of privately owned stock. A study from the Dukakis Center for Urban and Regional Policy suggests that transit investments can drive up rent.
The researchers conclude that in most communities with new transit options, rising rents "likely caused many [renters] to pay a higher proportion of their income for shelter and could eventually force them to seek housing elsewhere. Unlike most privately owned unsubsidized stock, government subsidized rentals were built specifically to provide affordable rental housing.
Under past and present programs including Section , Section 8, and the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit program LIHTC , owners agree to maintain affordable rents for a set period, usually 15 to 30 years, in exchange for federal subsidies. When those agreements expire, owners can either reenroll in the affordability programs or convert their properties to market-rate units.
In some cases, private owners can leave subsidized programs before rent restrictions expire by prepaying their mortgages after a set number of years. Air conditioning installation at Whispering Pines Senior Village in the logging town of Estacada, Oregon, is part of the renovation and green retrofitting of 62 affordable units. In return for maintaining rent at affordable levels, owners received subsidies to lower the interest rate paid on mortgages insured by the Federal Housing Administration FHA.
Similarly, between and the mids, HUD's Section 8 program created about , units with affordability restrictions lasting 20 to 30 years. Tenants pay 30 percent of their income toward their rent, and the government pays owners the balance. Research suggests that a small percentage of these properties do leave the affordable stock.
A study of 22, Section 8 properties consisting of 1. Government Accountability Office found similar rates of renewal; of the 13, project-based Section 8 contracts that expired between and , 92 percent were renewed. Unmet physical needs are another threat to the continued affordability and viability of subsidized housing. Department of the Treasury, which provides incentives for the private market to build affordable housing.
In exchange for tax credits which are sold to investors to raise funds for development , owners agree to maintain affordable rents for a set period of time. LIHTC properties placed in service before require affordable rents for 15 years; that term increased to 30 years in At "Year 15," the tax-credit investor can exit the deal, requiring the owner to either buy out the investor's portion or sell the building.
The main threat to LIHTC properties' long-term affordability and viability stems from the cost of physical improvements. Current per-unit rehabilitation costs may be relatively low, but if they go unmet, these costs may constitute an increasing threat to affordability as these units age. In addition to meeting demand for affordable rentals and upgrading housing stock that has already been built, preservation can offer economic benefits. Although costs such as maintenance expenses may be higher over the life of a rehabilitated property, rehabilitation is still more cost effective than new construction.
A number of factors contribute to the high costs of new construction. According to the Federal Reserve Board, residential land costs have grown about percent more quickly than inflation since , although land costs do vary regionally and did fall during the recent recession. In addition to high building costs, rising land prices, and land-use restrictions that make replacing low-cost units with new affordable construction difficult, another reason to preserve affordable rental housing is the positive effects of rehabilitated development on the community.
For example, in gentrifying neighborhoods, preserving affordable rental housing promotes economic diversity, creating or sustaining a mixed-income neighborhood. This is why in gentrifying neighborhoods, says Enterprise's Lydia Tom, "it's very important to…support the acquisition and preservation of affordable housing…while it's still affordable.
Preservation restores vacant buildings to a city's housing stock, and research shows that restoration also benefits neighborhoods. For example, studies of New York City show that affordable rental housing has attracted private investment and improved community safety. Although the increased median income is in part a sign of gentrification, the study's authors explain that "the development of affordable units created housing where there was none" — by restoring vacant buildings — "so the influx of moderate-income households did not result in displacement of existing families and households.
Federal Solutions to Preserving Affordability. The Moses Dewitt Redevelopment project in Syracuse, New York will rehabilitate and preserve 37 apartments for very low-income seniors.
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