By Calvin Welch, HANC Board Member
About forty neighbors joined our panel to discuss the dominance of "neoliberal" pro- market proposals coming from Sacramento (and room 400 at City Hall) to address the affordable housing scarcity plaguing the entire state and nation and what might be done about it.
Joseph Smooke, co-founder of People Powered Media showed a twenty minute film cleverly refuting the "pro market narrative" dominating the media . It pointed out that San Francisco "housing crisis" is one of affordability not a failure to build housing and how the market will never produce, unassisted by regulation, housing able to be afforded by low and middle income households.
Theresa Flandrich, Housing Organizer for Senior Disability Action shared her research which showed that the average senior in San Francisco earns less than that which is required to "qualify" for what the Lee administration calls "affordable housing". It was the policy of the Lee administration to rely on private developers to supply affordable housing in the form of "below market rate"(BMR) units in their market rate developments. Since the lowest affordability level of such BMR housing requires an income of $40,000 a year for a single person and since most seniors rely on a social security income that averages about $18,000 a year such "market based" affordability is simply unaffordable to most seniors.
Shanti Singh, Development Coordinator for the state level tenants advocate group Tenants Together and founder of DSA San Francisco Housing Committee laid out the near total control that real estate interests have on Democrats in Sacramento and the critical importance of organizing at the local level to get the kind of control we need to have if housing affordable to residents of San Francisco is to be developed and protected from future demolition.
For readers interested in learning more about the history of neoliberalism and its impact Robert Kuttner's “Neoiliberalism: Political Success, Economic Failure” is essential reading. It can be found at https://prospect.org/article/neoliberalism-political-success-economic-failure