Condos Summary by A.P.
[ Excerpt from The Angry Poodle column in the SANTA BARBARA INDEPENDENT, by Nick Welsh, 6/26/2008 ]
... [recently] the Santa Barbara City Council wrestled with some exceedingly modest measures designed to secure a toehold for the middle class — and the upper-middle class — in the South Coast’s ever forbidding housing market. It used to be that affordable housing programs were designed to help the poor and the very poor. In Santa Barbara, the focus has shifted to the middle and upper-middle class. Once upon a time, teachers, nurses, and cops could afford to buy a home here. Those days are gone. Now doctors and lawyers can barely make it. Just imagine when the lawyers we need to sue our doctors for malpractice can no longer afford to live here. Is that the kind of community we want to become?
On the table were changes to city rules requiring that developers include a token number of affordable units in whatever housing they build. Four years ago, the council imposed these requirements on developments of 10 units or more. Anything smaller was not affected. Nor were condo conversions. Guess what? In the intervening four years, we have discovered that the vast majority of new housing units going up — 95 percent of them in fact — are smaller than 10 units. And there’s been a whole lot of condo converting going on, too. In response, councilmembers Helene Schneider and Das Williams have led the charge to include condo conversions and projects with two or more units. Given the resistance they encountered, you’d have thought they were demanding rent control...
The new plan requires that 5 percent of all condo conversions and new units be affordable. And by “affordable,” we’re talking upper-middle-class income brackets. Developers can opt out by paying an in-lieu fee of $17,700 per affordable unit. Admittedly, that’s not much when you consider that the median price of a South Coast home is still just over $1 million. But if these rules had been in effect during the past two years, City Hall would have collected $3.5 million to underwrite housing subsidies for people who, until recently, would never have needed subsidizing.
Council deliberations can be windy affairs where councilmembers deploy such phrases as “folks,” “thinking outside the box,” and “providing another tool in the toolbox” with criminal abandon. This Tuesday’s phrase du jour was “silver bullet,” as in, the new rules would definitely not be “a silver bullet” for dealing with the high cost of housing, but they would provide “another tool in the toolbox.”
...Councilmember Iya Falcone agonized at such length over the pros, the cons, and the “unintended consequences” of the measure that she seemed to be waging a one-woman filibuster with herself. Council conservative Dale Francisco... objected that the proposed ordinance language constituted “extortion.”
... Schneider responded that people who converted rentals into condos — a ministerial transaction effectuated by City Hall — reaped such a huge financial windfall that taxing them a little bit was more than fair. This being City Hall, no action is ever truly final. Still, the council voted 6-1 to approve the changes in concept and send them back to committee for further refinement...
... [recently] the Santa Barbara City Council wrestled with some exceedingly modest measures designed to secure a toehold for the middle class — and the upper-middle class — in the South Coast’s ever forbidding housing market. It used to be that affordable housing programs were designed to help the poor and the very poor. In Santa Barbara, the focus has shifted to the middle and upper-middle class. Once upon a time, teachers, nurses, and cops could afford to buy a home here. Those days are gone. Now doctors and lawyers can barely make it. Just imagine when the lawyers we need to sue our doctors for malpractice can no longer afford to live here. Is that the kind of community we want to become?
On the table were changes to city rules requiring that developers include a token number of affordable units in whatever housing they build. Four years ago, the council imposed these requirements on developments of 10 units or more. Anything smaller was not affected. Nor were condo conversions. Guess what? In the intervening four years, we have discovered that the vast majority of new housing units going up — 95 percent of them in fact — are smaller than 10 units. And there’s been a whole lot of condo converting going on, too. In response, councilmembers Helene Schneider and Das Williams have led the charge to include condo conversions and projects with two or more units. Given the resistance they encountered, you’d have thought they were demanding rent control...
The new plan requires that 5 percent of all condo conversions and new units be affordable. And by “affordable,” we’re talking upper-middle-class income brackets. Developers can opt out by paying an in-lieu fee of $17,700 per affordable unit. Admittedly, that’s not much when you consider that the median price of a South Coast home is still just over $1 million. But if these rules had been in effect during the past two years, City Hall would have collected $3.5 million to underwrite housing subsidies for people who, until recently, would never have needed subsidizing.
Council deliberations can be windy affairs where councilmembers deploy such phrases as “folks,” “thinking outside the box,” and “providing another tool in the toolbox” with criminal abandon. This Tuesday’s phrase du jour was “silver bullet,” as in, the new rules would definitely not be “a silver bullet” for dealing with the high cost of housing, but they would provide “another tool in the toolbox.”
...Councilmember Iya Falcone agonized at such length over the pros, the cons, and the “unintended consequences” of the measure that she seemed to be waging a one-woman filibuster with herself. Council conservative Dale Francisco... objected that the proposed ordinance language constituted “extortion.”
... Schneider responded that people who converted rentals into condos — a ministerial transaction effectuated by City Hall — reaped such a huge financial windfall that taxing them a little bit was more than fair. This being City Hall, no action is ever truly final. Still, the council voted 6-1 to approve the changes in concept and send them back to committee for further refinement...
Labels: condo conversions, ordinance
Posted by Malcolm on
6/26/2008
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