Housing Is A Human Right
What is happening?
In Oakland, we are experiencing a housing crisis. There are three times more vacant homes than unsheltered people; in the last census there were over 5000 people living on the streets. Home ownership is out of reach for even upper middle income families; 60% of Oakland residents are renters and over half of these households are rent burdened, meaning they pay more than a third of their income to rent. The racial disparity around housing accessibility and affordability has led to disproportionate levels of homelessness in Black communities, 70% of unhoused individuals in Oakland are Black.
Why is it important?
The pandemic has destabilized the fragile and precarious balance many families have attempted to strike under a free market structure. The free market operates on a belief that resources are scarce and only a select few can reap the profits, when in reality there are an abundance of possibilities through government interventions that could make housing, along with health care and other essential services, a human right for all.
A primary function of government should be to care for society, particularly in the face of unregulated market forces. When we address the experiences of the most marginalized, we can improve conditions for everyone. At the root of Carroll’s vision for addressing Oakland’s housing crisis is a shift from a financialized housing system to housing as a human right.
What’s been done so far?
For Affordable Housing
➔ Introduced Measure Q to authorize the development, construction and/or acquisition of up to 13,000 low-income housing units. Under Article 34 of the California Constitution, voters need to approve on a ballot any low-income housing development and Oaklanders resoundingly approved, collecting the most votes on any local ballot measure in 2022. See the deep dive on Article 34 to learn more about the racist housing history behind it.
➔ Co-introduced Measure U for infrastructure funding, providing $350 million specifically for affordable housing—a $250 million increase over the previous infrastructure bond, 2016’s Measure KK. Under Measure KK, some funding was earmarked for land trusts, such as the OakCLT, to acquire properties where tenants were at risk of displacement. As a result, low-income these Oaklanders had a pathway to become first-time homeowners or secure stable, low-rent housing. Measure U is expected to nearly double the amount available for these acquisitions.
➔ Introduced legislation in support of California State Senate Bill 555 (Wahab), which would set five- and ten-year goals for the creation of 1.2 million units of social housing to meet the needs of lower- and middle-income California residents.
For The Unhoused
➔ Co-introduced legislation to allocate funding for a year-long safe parking sites program for unhoused residents living in their vehicles. The program is facilitated by the Interfaith Council of Alameda County, a nonprofit organization, utilizing sites owned or controlled by local faith based organizations, and will also provide portable toilets, wash stations, access to showers, and wastewater dumping.
➔ Moved the City Administrator to develop a plan to use 34th Street on Mandela Parkway for an intervention, while expanding access to an existing intervention at Beach Street.
➔ Introduced legislation to study the feasibility of housing one thousand individuals at the publicly-owned North Gateway Parcel located at the former Oakland Army Base. After significant community support, 8-acres were approved and the City has filed for a waiver from the state to grant use. Read more about it in the news SF Chronicle, Mercury News and Fox 2.
➔ Supported the development of the Lake Merritt Lodge, a site for emergency COVID-19 response housing for unhoused community members. This project has had full occupancy of all 92 units and is now requiring an advocate for permanent purchase.
➔ Authorized the conversion of an empty Caltrans site on Third and Peralta into a co-governed community. We held weekly meetings with unhoused residents at a previously existing encampment and supported their move to Third and Peralta where they continue to meet weekly and govern the site with service providers. Several people have since moved to permanent housing.
➔ Held weekly meetings with leaders at the Wood Street encampment and discussed how the D3 office could support their move to sanctioned encampments. We learned that there was a significant need for waste management and our office pushed for and won services such as individual trash bins and a large-sized dumpster to the Wood Street encampment.
For Tenant Protections
➔ Capped yearly allowable rent increases to be 3% max, keeping housing affordable and families housed. Read about it in the news on the Oakland Post, Oaklandside and the SF Chronicle.
➔ Co-introduced Measure V for expanding tenant protections under the Just Cause For Eviction ordinance. It now covers tenants of all multi-unit buildings that are past their first ten years after construction. It also prevents families with students and educators from being evicted during the school year and more.
What’s coming up next?
Increase Homelessness Services and Sites
Whether it is the 8 acres at North Gateway or the myriad of other spaces that sit vacant, we have the opportunity to have City-operated sites with services for thousands of people to eventually transition into permanent housing.
This will require bringing as many services as possible in-house in order to have improved oversight and monitoring, developing a robust services pipeline, and investigating current service providers to ensure they are providing the required care and attention.
Public Lands For Public Use
Utilize existing City-owned lands and acquire additional properties for deeply affordable housing. There are many vacant properties throughout District 3 that could be utilized for housing with the right political will and structures that connect funding and development to need
Carroll’s 2023 Legislative Plan:
➔ Spearhead initiatives similar to Seattle’s Measure 135 that creates a Social Housing Department that develops, owns, and maintains social housing for all of Oakland.
➔ Create a formal process and funding source for the City of Oakland’s Housing Department to acquire blighted/tax defaulted properties for affordable housing.
➔ Release vacant County-held properties to Community Land Trusts (CLTs) and nonprofit housing developers.
Tenant Protections And Homeownership
➔ Strengthen tenant protections by expanding legal services and bolstering the Rent Adjustment Program, so it can better serve tenants and housing providers. It is also important that we help fund legal services for those facing illegal evictions, rent increases, and uninhabitable conditions.
➔ Move forward a feasibility study for the Tenants/Community Opportunity to Purchase Act (TOPA). TOPA is a mechanism to support tenants in making an offer to purchase their home if the owner is selling. While a policy that has been in DC for decades, a feasibility study will look at how it can be implemented specifically in Oakland and is also captured in Oakland’s latest Housing Element.
➔ The Right of Return will give priority access to housing support to families and their descendants who have been displaced and forced to move out of Oakland by development projects such as highways.
Deep Dive: What Is Social Housing?
The real estate market has failed the majority of working class people, evidenced by past industrial-era exclusionary practices and the 2008 foreclosure crisis with all its ongoing effects. Social housing, housing that is built and managed with the support of government funding, is one strategy for creating affordable housing opportunities outside of the private real estate market.
Many major cities with similar or even smaller geographies, such as Vienna, Singapore and Hong Kong, have been able to mitigate housing shortages by turning a quarter or more of their housing stock into municipally owned and managed housing - creating a floor for not only the most vulnerable, but also middle-income individuals and families.
A Brief History Of Public Housing
The Great Depression of the 1930s saw mass unemployment and foreclosures. In order to support Americans during those desperate times, the federal government became involved for the first time in creating low-rent housing. In 1937, they started the United States Housing Authority and a year later, the Oakland Housing Authority was also formed. At least in the United States, the term “public housing,” versus social housing, is generally used to refer to federally initiated housing.
Throughout the 1930-60s, due to federal policies that ensured billions of dollars worth of federally insured mortgages and construction for white-only suburbs, more and more white families were able to eventually move out of public housing. The federally insured mortgages meant that even lower-income white residents could get a mortgage and if they defaulted on their mortgage, the federal government would pick up the bill.
Cities such as Oakland became the only spaces Black Americans, BIPOC and low income-individuals could live in, with Black communities in particular beginning to fill public housing developments. Black families paid higher rents in the private market than their white counterparts as landlords took advantage of the limited housing available to them due to racial restrictions. Black families were also either excluded from opportunities to take out mortgages or had to pay steep interest rates and large down payments in order to do so.
It is unsurprising then that over the decades, public housing became increasingly synonymous with Black housing. In the early 1950s, 43% of the 15,000 residents in Oakland’s permanent and temporary public housing projects were Black; one out of every eight Black residents in the city. Ten years later, hardly any white people lived in the increasingly underfunded projects.
As public housing increasingly began to exclusively serve communities of color, it became consistently underfunded and under-maintained. Yet, it was through public housing where many were able to find stable housing for their families, giving them a chance to access education, resources and be active in their communities.
Why Don’t We Have More Low-Rent Housing in Oakland?
California’s lack of affordable housing reflects a racist history where in 1950 California voters approved a measure that added Article 34 to the California Constitution. Under Article 34 of the California constitution, low-rent units cannot be built without voter approval.
Article 34 is a prime example of decades-old segregation policy contributing to poor housing conditions today. It was a reactive measure to the Federal Housing Act of 1949 which banned explicit racial segregation in public housing. By making public housing projects harder to build, predominantly white voters chose to effectively ban public housing instead.
By 1969, nearly half of the public housing projects proposed in Article 34 elections — 15,000 units — were turned down and many housing agencies didn’t even hold elections, fearing that their plans would be rejected (LA Times). A federal Department of Housing and Urban Development report at the time found that California had the nation’s largest population of poor people, but ranked 22nd in the amount of housing available for them. The report blamed Article 34.
Today in Oakland
The City’s Housing Element Annual Progress Report for 2020 found that the City has not met the demand for low-income housing. Only 43% of the Regional Housing Needs Allocation (RHNA) goals were met for very low- income housing, and 25% of the RHNA goals for low-income housing. We’re not only at a deficit, but according to the 2023-2031 RHNA goals, we need an additional 6,511 units of very low-income housing and 3,750 units of low- income housing in order to meet demand. We need approximately 13,000 low-rent units in order to meet the increasing demand for affordable housing.
And who is considered to be a low-income resident in Oakland?
Many are surprised to learn that according to the Area Median Income (AMI) index, a single person earning $76,750 or less is considered low-income! Very low-income is $50K or less, extremely low-income is $30K or less, and acutely low-income is $15K or less. Since the city has not kept pace with the increasing demand for affordable housing, many Oaklanders are rent burdened. 51% of renter households make less than 50% of the Area Median Income and being rent burdened means they are dedicating over 30% of their income towards staying housed.
The increasing lack of low-rent housing has also led to more and more people plunging into homelessness. There is no doubt that if Oakland had more low-rent housing, we would have less people sleeping on the streets.
Social Housing Can Be Beautiful
New social housing does not have to mean the poorly maintained and built public housing of the past. There are now examples of beautiful and inspiring social housing globally that we can draw from. Social housing reflects a different understanding of state funded housing, and while the definition varies depending who you are talking to, it can mean beautiful homes where residents of various incomes live together and have control over how the spaces are maintained.
From Vienna, Brussels to Singapore, we now know that state bodies can execute beautiful and dignified state-funded social housing, if there is the public and political will to see it through.
