Tenant Rights, Neighborhood & Community Groups Oppose Wiener’s SB50
Speculation Bonus Bill Will Displace Long Term Tenants
The Dangers of SB 50:
- It will deregulate local residential zoning control throughout California, creating value potentials that will exacerbate real estate speculation.
- It will inflate property values, which will, in turn inflate surrounding rents leading to more displacement
- It has no enforceable tenant protections in the bill since cities like San Francisco have no way to track rental histories.
- It’s temporary “sensitive communities” exclusion doesn’t adequately protect communities vulnerable to displacement
Tenant rights, labor, neighborhood, and community groups oppose Senator Weiner’s bill SB 50, which would deregulate residential zoning throughout cities in California with particularly significant impacts on working class communities of color in cities like SF. Incentivizing more luxury development and inflating property values in San Francisco will further exacerbate real estate speculation, which has already played a key role in displacing low and moderate-income tenants, immigrants, seniors and families across California. Assemblymember Bloom’s AB 1279 is a much better policy that actually addresses wealthy, exclusionary areas that aren’t building their fair share of housing.
SB 50 requires the residential upzoning of areas within a ¼ mile of a high quality bus line and ½ of a rail or ferry line, which effectively impacts all of San Francisco, yet it adds no additional affordable housing than what’s already required at the city level. Real estate speculators will be able to extract even more value from neighborhoods, and we will lose our ability to negotiate for the truly affordable housing our residents desperately need. According to the Regional Housing Needs Assessment, SF is meeting our luxury housing goals but are failing miserably on our housing production goals for moderate, low and extremely low-income households. Real estate speculators who created our affordable housing crisis should not be rewarded with even more legislation that puts profit over people.
The bill’s “tenant protections” are largely unenforceable in SF since we don’t have a renter registry to show whether or not a tenant has lived in the parcel to be upzoned. The bill’s “sensitive communities exemptions” are only valid for 5 years and exclude large portions of historic working class neighborhoods. For example portions of Chinatown, Excelsior, the Mission, and the Bayview aren’t considered “sensitive communities” under Senator Wiener’s classification. We urge our legislators to support efforts to create deeply affordable housing and stop real estate speculation.
Submit a letter of opposition using this portal.
and
Call these Senators in the Government and Finance Committee to express your opposition:
Senator Mike McGuire (Chair) – 916-651-4002
Senator John M. W. Moorlach (Vice Chair) – (916) 651-4037
Senator Jim Beall – (916) 651-4015
Senator Robert M. Hertzberg – (916) 651-4018
Senator Melissa Hurtado – (916) 651-4014
Senator Jim Nielsen – (916) 651-4004
Senator Scott D. Wiener – (916) 651-4011