As part of a landmark agreement between affordable housing groups and labor unions, Governor Gavin Newsom on Wednesday signed two major bills into law to convert underused and vacant commercial buildings into housing.
Senate Bill 6 and 2011 Assembly Bill encourage housing projects in otherwise zoned commercial corridors for large retail and office buildings to help California fill a shortage of several million units in its housing supply. Both bills guarantee union-wide wages and promise an accelerated construction process, while keeping development close to downtown areas to help the state meet its environmental goals and avoid sprawl.
Newsom said the two laws will help California address the state’s “original sin” of housing affordability.
“It has been a stubborn problem. Decade after decade after decade, just fighting and talking about it and fighting each other in the process,” Newsom said.
“I think what makes today a special day is that it’s a great moment as we start… to take responsibility, not to give the same speech and expect the same applause, but to start doing something about it,” Newsom said during a news conference in San Francisco to sign the two proposals and dozens of other measures. “It’s a big package. These bills matter.
The standoff between several opposing forces on Capitol Hill — where unions, developers and affordable housing groups routinely block disputed labor standards legislation — nearly capsized this year’s landmark deal. The powerful State Building and Construction Trades Council of California backed SB 6, along with builders and business groups, while the California Conference of Carpenters and the Service Employees International Union of California split from other trade groups. work to support AB 2011.
“Each organization took a position that was most beneficial to them and decided which bill they wanted to support. And part of the challenge is that each coalition of people was willing to kill the other bill for their bill to succeed,” said State Senator Anna Caballero (D-Salinas ). “The problem was that you couldn’t strike that middle ground with certain bands. They just wouldn’t go there.
Both bills give developers options on projects to convert underused and vacant commercial space such as big box stores, strip malls and office buildings into much-needed housing.
Despite the energy and effort it took to pass the bills, Caballero and Assemblywoman Buffy Wicks, an Oakland Democrat who wrote AB 2011, said they were ready to negotiate a future deal on similar legislation.
“Today we take a monumental step in our efforts to steer our housing crisis in a different direction,” Wicks said in a statement. “The Governor’s signing on AB 2011 marks a turning point for California’s housing production needs – lack of land will no longer be an issue. There will no longer be a lack of incentive for workers to join the construction workforce. And, red tape and bureaucracy will no longer prevent us from building housing in the right places to address our climate crisis.
Experts say the impact on California’s housing supply could be significant.
Caballero said SB 6 will help rural communities recover from an exodus of large chain stores that left behind a trail of vacant buildings and parking lots. She sees the new law as a way to produce housing for first-time buyers.
Housing advocates are particularly excited about AB 2011.
An August analysis by UrbanFootprint, a software platform that analyzes city data for city planners and local governments, found the new law could produce 1.6 to 2.4 million new homes, according to market conditions, including hundreds of thousands of affordable units.
“AB 2011 has enormous potential to unlock…a ton of ground for development that was previously off limits,” said David Garcia, director of policy at UC Berkeley’s Terner Center for Housing Innovation. “It’s a huge deal.”
Garcia said he viewed the two bills as a sign that Sacramento lawmakers were taking a stronger “pro-housing approach” and were ready to push for the kind of legislation notoriously difficult to pass amid infighting. interest groups.
Ray Pearl, executive director of the California Housing Consortium, one of AB 2011’s co-sponsors, called the move a “game changer.”
“It’s truly unprecedented that we’ve brought together all these different groups. Looking to the future, nothing is ever easy in Sacramento, and it shouldn’t be,” Pearl said. “But there are a lot of people who want similar results. I hope we can use this coalition for future efforts.
Erin Lehane, legislative director of the trades council, said SB 6 will provide valuable work for local residents.
“These are opportunities for young people who really, really need them,” she said.
To finalize a deal, Caballero and Wicks worked together to craft two bills that promised each coalition a slice of the pie.
“As the clock started to turn, we both agreed that we would make some changes that would give each of us what we wanted,” Caballero said, though it meant “everyone was a little unhappy.” of the final product.
The Assembly bill includes a union-wide wage requirement, as well as strict environmental standards and a mandate that a certain percentage of housing must be affordable for low- and extremely low-income residents.
Some projects would be exempt from local governments’ discretionary approval process as well as California’s restrictive Environmental Quality Act, which has been used as a legal weapon to slow or even halt housing construction.
The labor requirement ensures that contractors provide health care benefits and union-level compensation, so-called prevailing wages, to all workers, even if some are not unionized. Contractors have argued that prevailing wage demands drive up housing costs and prices.
The Senate version was presented as a housing proposal for the “middle class” and demands union-scale wages as a minimum working standard while ensuring that a skilled and trained workforce is employed in the most situations. The additional regulation ensures that most workers are unionized.
The cautious optimism about future housing legislative deals may be short-lived, however.
Lehane said unions remain concerned about most residential housing construction projects, especially those that don’t use unionized workers, because those builders “pay and treat workers unfairly.”
“I think it’s not something that changes overnight,” she said. “As a responsibility, we must always remain vigilant to this.”
The new laws will come into effect on July 1.