User:19alice2000/California housing shortage - Wikipedia

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Bold - my additions

Plain - Wikipedia text


Since 2014, several YIMBY (Yes In My Back Yard) groups have been created in the San Francisco Bay Area. These groups lobby both locally and in Sacramento for increased housing production at all price levels, as well as using California's Housing Accountability Act ("the anti-NIMBY law")  to sue cities when they attempt to block or downsize housing development. One activist, in a comment to the San Francisco Planning Commission supporting the construction of a new 75-unit mostly market rate housing development stated that: "The 100 or so higher income people, who are not going to live in this project if it isn't built, are going to live somewhere...They will just displace someone somewhere else, because demand doesn't disappear."

The housing shortage has also sparked many examples of the “housing as a human right” movement in response to the worsening ratio of vacant homes to houseless people. This was exacerbated by the pandemic and its socioeconomic effects, which also led to movements for canceling rent as the "eviction epidemic" was being recognized.[1] Some grassroots movements are resorting to more guerrilla methods; Moms for Housing, for example, is an organization that was founded after two houseless Black mothers were violently kicked out of a vacant home that they were squatting in out if necessity.[1]

The movement also created more formal tenants' unions like Housing NOW!, Tenants Together, and Tenant and Neighborhood Councils, which organize protests and lobby for rent control and other related legislation.

As a way to rapidly create inexpensive housing, a Bay-Area startup company converts 8' x 20' shipping containers into homes for as little as $8,000, though due to expensive ($3,000 - $5,000 for a permit) and restrictive zoning in many cities, has found it hard to find locations that will allow the homes.