Editorial: The underlying condition weakening coronavirus-stricken California - San Francisco Chronicle

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The trouble with letting a crisis linger is that a new one inevitably arrives. California’s leaders have finally waited long enough: The state’s housing shortage has been joined by another disaster, one that compounds and complicates the consequences of the first.

The coronavirus pandemic and the strict distancing measures imposed in response administered a financial shock to a state already weakened by housing scarcity. The pathogen arrived to find more than 150,000 of the most vulnerable among us in shelters, tents and doorways, rendering them that much more susceptible to infection and worse. The state’s economy and revenues, for all their strength, have been constrained by the crisis, leaving our government and society less able to sustain the blow. And the opportunity to clean up the mess in good times has finally elapsed, forcing a scramble to manage both crises simultaneously.

Officials have made halting attempts to do so. Gov. Gavin Newsom secured agreements with leading banks to suspend foreclosures and mortgage payments in March, and he subsequently followed Mayor London Breed and other local officials in ordering a grace period for rent payments while suspending evictions of tenants with coronavirus-related hardships. Although the governor’s order was criticized as limited in scope and duration, the state’s judiciary rightly went further last month, halting most evictions until 90 days after the state of emergency is lifted.

None of this, however, addresses the question of what happens afterward. With more than 4 million Californians newly out of work in less than two months, the state could face a crushing backlog of eviction cases and a mountain of rental debt by the time the pandemic passes. Both will accumulate especially quickly in the Bay Area, where the housing shortage and price inflation are most acute. A recent paper by UC Berkeley’s Terner Center for Housing Innovation estimated that more than a quarter-million tenant households in the San Francisco-Oakland area depend on industries hurt by the pandemic, and their median rent amounts to more than 80% of the minimum unemployment benefits they can expect under Congress’ stimulus legislation.

Tenants facing such unforgiving arithmetic organized a small rent strike last week and have called for broad forgiveness of debts that accumulate during the pandemic. Landlords point out that such measures could ruin small-time landlords while exacerbating disinvestment in apartment maintenance and construction. The outlook is dire enough that renters and owners alike are asking for more government intervention.

Chronicle Editorial Board

Assemblyman Phil Ting, D-San Francisco, has introduced legislation enabling courts to cut rents by 25% for a year in some cases. State Sen. Lena Gonzalez, D-Long Beach, has proposed allowing the state to cover at least 80% of unpaid rent for seven months provided landlords accept it as payment in full. The latter seems unlikely to happen in a state now facing a $54 billion budget shortfall.

The problem is that the government-mandated shortage driving those costs hasn’t been solved. Despite an alarming recent surge in homelessness, the state Senate killed what would have been the Legislature’s landmark housing production legislation, state Sen. Scott Wiener’s bill to override local obstruction of multifamily housing, on Jan. 29. By then, the new crisis was already under way; the following week saw the first known coronavirus death in the Bay Area and the country.

True to form, the not-in-my-backyard lobby preventing such measures has begun to argue that the pandemic justifies its aversion to density — never mind that densely populated San Francisco has weathered the outbreak better than most of the state or that the virus is more likely to ravage a tent camp than an apartment complex.

The contagion could nevertheless be a gift to California’s constituency for a permanent housing crisis. The state’s already anemic home construction fell further in March, before shelter-in-place orders were in full swing, with residential permits down 8% from a year earlier. San Francisco, Marin and San Mateo counties permitted a grand total of four apartments that month, the least since 2012. At this rate, California’s housing shortage will be endemic long after the pandemic passes.

This commentary is from The Chronicle’s editorial board. We invite you to express your views in a letter to the editor. Please submit your letter via our online form: SFChronicle.com/letters.

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Editorial: The underlying condition weakening coronavirus-stricken California - San Francisco Chronicle
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