Would be one thing if Measure P was actually effective at providing affordable housing.
It’s not. It’s added 78 low income condos and 164 rental units. I checked the 2015 housing element, those numbers are from there. That’s 242 low income units since 1991 or less than ten per year.
Want to put ten units per year in context. There are 18,000 households in San Mateo that rent. 1700 extremely low income families in San Mateo paying market rate rents. Median rent is $2200. At the current pace you could put every extremely low income resident in a BMR housing unit in year 2188. That ignores the very low income families - there are 5700 low income families, and there are another 6700 low income households.
Put another way: the acceptance rate at Stanford is 4.8%. You have a 6 times better chance of being accepted to Stanford than you do of being a San Mateo renter who's qualified for a below market rate unit. YOU DON'T WANT YOUR AFFORDABLE HOUSING PROGRAM TO BE STANFORD.
So the program that you're fighting to defend has built ten units per year. Everyone else is in market rate units. San Mateo has the eighth highest median rents of any city in the entire country.
I think more important than voting to approve this or voting to reject this is making it easier to build housing in San Mateo.
- add an automatic expiration date to this legislation
- Speed up housing approvals. It took two years for the developer at 4 West Santa Inez Avenue to learn that you were going to reject their project. I don't think that that's helping build new housing. Speaking of BMR requirements they kick in at 11 units and you might notice the developer chose 10 units. I wonder how many units we are losing.
- Raising the required number of signatures to qualify a measure for the ballot
- By right approval for BMR projects. If 30% of your project is BMR housing you should get ministerial approval. If we actually care about affordable housing that's something we could do.
- Remove the owner occupancy requirement for ADU's.
- Reduced parking requirements. San Mateo has really high parking requirements. One reason we don't get many units is because Measure P forces parking underground. It costs about $60,000 per space.
- Also reduced parking requirements for BMR housing or housing near transit
- Easing height limits where you can
More important than whether we do a moratorium or not is making it easier to build housing of all stripes in San Mateo. Because 95% of your city’s renters are living in the eighth most expensive city in the country. Thanks.