CA housing affordability crisis has been decades in the making - what got us here?

SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) -- Housing experts say the homelessness crisis has been decades in the making.

Prop 13, which limits property taxes, is one challenge in California. Then, there are competing local, state and federal laws.

And it all comes at a time when wider economic forces are putting pressure on people struggling to get by.

We took a deeper look into what got us here.

"You can think about homelessness as being a math problem, where people have an income, and there is rent. And it doesn't quite add up," said Jennifer Friedenbach, executive director of the Coalition on Homelessness in San Francisco.

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She's been a homeless advocate for the past 30 years.

Currently, inflation, the pandemic and layoffs all have an impact.

"We have large swaths of people in our community who are barely getting by. And so, any kind of hit, and that knocks them into homelessness," she said.

But then come the more complicated math problems like gentrification and corporate landlords. Friedenbach said 30 years ago, there were just more housing options. She uses community housing in San Francisco as an example.

"There was the classic CD flat in the Mission where you rent a room. You had pretty low rent. It was pretty easy for low income people to get by," Friedenbach said.

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Over time, those became private homes -- through real estate speculation -- where people buy low and sell high.

"And because of the state prohibition from being able to have rent controls on vacant units, there is a huge incentive for corporate landlord and corporate landowners to push longterm tenants out in order to really jack up the rents," Friedenbach said.

She adds that there are actually far fewer protections for renters and eviction laws than most people think. For example, Concord has been a city for almost 120 years but just passed its rent control laws this year.

Friedenbach isn't against the free market. But says that's part of the problem.

"You can't have it both ways. You can't complain about the number of homeless people, and then also say that housing should always be a commodity without any kind of control," Friedenbach said.

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Then comes the math around the politics of getting housing built.

"The cause of the affordability crisis is Proposition 13," said Kelly Snider, professor of Urban Planning at San Jose State University. "There is no incentives for people to dispose of their property or sell their homes or build new homes, because they have such a great deal locked in."

Passed in 1978, Prop 13 limits property tax increases. Snider said it remains hugely popular, so there is little incentive for lawmakers to change it.

She said new housing, especially high-density housing, isn't getting built -- adding to the housing shortage and rising prices -- and that the more recent push for affordable housing since the 2000s has come from initiatives and pressure from the state.

"What we are doing is digging out of a 50-year hole. We are about eight years into it. Another eight or 10 years, and it's going to help us a lot," Snider said. "More and more laws from the state level, overriding local officials, and if we can get to federal laws, to override state and local officials, that's when we are going to start to see it loosen up."