In a sudden turn of events, two months after the board of the Bay Area Housing Finance Authority voted to place a $20 billion affordable housing bond on this year’s ballot, the board this week unanimously decided to pull the measure from the November ballot. The decision was driven by mounting concerns over public support, legal battles, and worries about Proposition 5.
CalMatters detailed:
The change of heart was born out of concerns about the public’s appetite for costly new measures, a pending lawsuit against the regional bond, and worry about another ballot measure, Proposition 5. That statewide constitutional amendment would make it easier to pass local and regional affordable housing and infrastructure bonds by lowering the electoral threshold for victory from the current high bar of two-thirds down to 55%.
The campaign behind the Bay Area bond was always meant to be part of an one-two punch. Even in a region almost synonymous with big spending liberalism, getting two-thirds of voters to agree to take out a $20 billion IOU was considered unlikely. Crossing the 55% threshold was deemed doable, if still a heavy lift. Recent polling commissioned by the authority found support for the potential bond hovering around that 55% threshold.
But members of the “Yes” coalition, a group of affordable housing developers and other housing-focused nonprofits, said they had growing concerns about Prop. 5. Rather than risk running an expensive bond campaign this year, the Yes on Regional Measure 4 campaign opted to first wait and see if the statewide measure would pass.
The Bay Area bond appeared to have issues of its own. Opponents of the measure, including former San Jose city councilmember Johnny Khamis, transit consultant Thomas Rubin and anti-density advocate Susan Kirsch, filed a lawsuit against the Bay Area authority last week, arguing the proposed language to describe the measure in Bay Area voter guides was “false and/or misleading.” The authority’s executive board already acted on one of those claims, fixing what it described as a “mathematical error.” The annual cost of the measure was stated as $670 million. The corrected value was nearly $911 million.
Calling into the hearing this morning, Khamis applauded the decision to pull the measure: “I don’t think that the voters are ready to pass another very large tax measure that’s going to make it very hard to keep their homes,” he said. “We have enough people living on the streets now and I don’t think a very large new tax is going to help.”
With the Bay Area bond delayed, “there will be more pressure in the state Legislature to do more next year, but we will already have lost a year,” she said. In the meantime,” everyone is going to have to plug along and hit those goals without the help.”
