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Cities will no longer be able to tack on impact fees to housing units that developers produce through California’s density-bonus program under legislation proposed by state Assembly member Marc Berman, D-Menlo Park.
The bill, known as Assembly Bill 2063, would apply to a range of fees — including inclusionary zoning fees and in-lieu fees — that cities currently tack on to housing developments. Cities use these fees to bolster their affordable housing funds and support community services such as libraries and parks.
Cities are already prohibited from tacking on these fees to below-market-rate units in new housing developments. Berman’s bill would extend this prohibition to housing units created through the state’s density-bonus program, which allows residential developers who build affordable housing to get a density bonus of up to 50% density for their projects and which also allows them to receive waivers and concessions such as reductions in parking and setback requirements.
The topic of affordable housing fees has been divisive in Palo Alto, where the City Council moved in to raise the fees in 2016 from $20.37 to $60 per square foot, only to see newly elected members reverse that decision in early 2017 and set the fees at $35 per square foot. Last October, the council voted to raise fees to $68.50 per square foot, consistent with what Santa Clara County was seeking to impose on Stanford University as part of the university’s expansion plan (Stanford withdrew the plan in November 2019).
In a statement, Berman’s office said the bill will address a barrier to affordable housing production and strengthen California’s density bonus law.
“The intention of the California State Density Bonus was to incentivize building more onsite affordable housing,” Berman said. “However, tacking on additional fees undermines the intent of this law and can prevent desperately needed affordable housing from actually getting built.”
AB 2063 is one of two affordable housing bills that Berman has proposed in the days leading up to the Friday, Feb. 18, deadline for new legislation. Another bill, known as AB 2006, aims to streamline the application process by removing the need for affordable housing developers to report the same information about their projects to three different state agencies: the Department of Housing and Community Development, the California Housing Finance Agency and the California Tax Credit Allocation Committee.
Sponsored by the California Housing Consortium and the California Housing Partnership, AB 2006 would require the three state agencies to enter into a memorandum of understanding to ensure that only one entity will conduct physical inspections for a particular project, which eliminates the need for a developer to submit duplicate information to different entities and establishes a single process for projects to obtain the needed state approvals.
“By streamlining the oversight currently handled by multiple state housing agencies, this smart bill will make it less expensive and time-consuming for the state’s private sector partners to provide affordable homes for those in need,” Matt Schwartz, president and CEO of the California Housing Partnership, said in a statement.
Berman said the two bills aim to address California’s “dire shortage of affordable housing.”
“These two common-sense bills will remove barriers that delay critically needed affordable housing production,” Berman said in a statement. “The limited resources of our local affordable housing providers should be spent housing our most vulnerable neighbors, not filing unnecessarily duplicative paperwork with multiple state agencies or being spent on fees that prevent affordable housing from being built.”
Berman is such a shill for the Pelosi backed development machine. If he wasn’t a vague environmentalist, I’d say he’s a completely worthless candidate.
It’s funny how they just won’t be cool with us having a say over anything because we actually exercise judgement
I’m over this “affordable housing” misnomer it’s called subsidized housing because that’s way more accurate y’all are being manipulated
Stanford had the TOP endowment of all the universities in the US, topping $1,000,000,.000 (billion) this year. Thank heavens Berman protected their sagging bottom line from fees that would help the communities where they’re based.
As Berman said in another article, he can’t do much about the cost of building materials or the cost of land, so this should go far in making housing more affordable when land costs what, $1,000,000?? an acre.
Always good to have priorities.
Another strike against the NIMBYs. Hurray!
Another strike against ALL PA residents, another win for developers. Hurray!
So often developers wrap themselves in the flag of high-density housing for Palo Alto, but then live in Atherton, Los Altos Hills, etc., where they are far removed from such developments. I’m not against development (tho each one should be evaluated on its own merits), but I’d feel much better if developers weren’t protecting their own backyards while getting rich off of others’. Who’s the NIMBY is this scenario?
Berman’s Bill is hugely destructive of funding for below market rate housing, and so typical of him.
It leaves cities with no funds to deal with impacts of thousands of more housing units in town needing land and construction costs for more schools, more parkland, libraries, transportation, public safety staff, etc.
Loss of in lieu fees into our affordable housing fund means no money from the city for BMR housing projects.
All Berman is doing benefits market rate housing developers and likely himself in political support from Big Housing to the detriment of cities, residents and people needing affordable housing.
With Stanfords General Use Plan, if cities can’t mitigate impacts of the enormous amount of wished for development over 10 years by the University, it would be terribly destructive to Menlo Park, East Palo Alto and Palo Alto – towns Berman is supposed to be representing.
To think he inhabits the Assembly seat of the Great Byron Sher and Joe Simitian is enough to make one shudder.
Berman once again proves that he is not pro-housing, just pro-developer. He represents his deep-pocket contributors, not the people of Palo Alto.
A few hundred people and I sat in on one of his Zoom meetings about the housing bills. He couldn’t/wouldn’t answer ANY specific questions and wouldn’t respond to specific points and objections.
He evaded the question about how he’d vote, claiming he hadn’t made up his mind and that he was dealing with 800 bills and thus couldn’t “wrap his mind around” the details and the issues to contact his legislative assistant.
She was as evasive as he was right up until the minute he voted.
I have been led to understand that Berman’s family may have extensive real estate investments and financial interests in property development , though I do not know if that is in the bay area or elsewhere in California. Which may or may not predispose him to be more motivated by promoting incentives for the profit housing development sector at the expense of affordable housing for a broader spectrum of the population.
Berman always votes for developers at the expense of residents. His first billl in this article reduces funding for below market housing.
He proposed a bill – it has to go through a process and eventually be signed by the Governor. If Newsome signs this bill as he has signed all other bills that victimize the taxpayers of this state then remember that when he runs again – for whatever. They keep using the excuse of the low cost housing requirement but to date we have seen very little results of that “excuse”. They are trying to block any discussion with that excuse – do not let them do that.