The Serenity at Larkspur apartment complex in Larkspur, managed by Catalyst Housing.
You have (hopefully) heard by now that Marin is in the midst of a housing crisis, and that if we don’t address it head on, we may ultimately lose the local control we have over where new housing appears within our community.
Jennifer Silva, a longtime housing advocate and the Board Chair for the Marin Environmental Housing Collaborative (MEHC), has been among the diehard proponents of taking action, as she expressed in an informative event last year at Westminster Events in Tiburon. Silva continues to spread the word, this time focusing on the incredibly high cost of housing.
But there’s another issue at hand: Developers have reaped millions of dollars from an affordable housing program for middle-income renters — with sometimes little-to-no discount from market rents — have invested heavily in lobbying and campaign donations in recent years in a bid to keep lawmakers from imposing regulations. The expenditures represent a fraction of the $32 million the California real estate industry as a whole spent on lobbying the Legislature and the executive branch in the past three years. But they helped the industry stop a bill seen as a threat to their business model, in which state-established finance authorities issue bonds to buy property to turn into income-restricted housing, and private developers collect fees from brokering the deals. Because they’re owned by a public agency, the buildings are exempt from property taxes, the savings from which are, theoretically, used to set rents at lower levels.
Since 2021, two developers of these projects, Catalyst Housing of Larkspur and Waterford Property Co. of Newport Beach, have spent $610,000 on lobbying legislators and government officials about the value of their “essential housing” strategy in addressing California’s affordable housing shortage and how it could be harmed by regulation that would have capped how much rent they could charge. Those two developers, and a handful of other essential housing players, have also spent $282,000 in donations to state politicians in key positions to block regulation or help them clear hurdles established by local authorities.
“Those profiting from these transactions were unwilling to accept any meaningful accountability requirements, including that rents be discounted meaningfully from general market rents,” said Mark Stivers, director of advocacy for the California Housing Partnership, one of the program’s critics. “Greater accountability to the public is still very much needed.”