Developer Skittish About New City Council Majority, Bypasses City Hall
Telephone 'Push Poll' Suggests
Ballot Initiative In The Works
'Supply and Demand' is the New Boss
Ballot Initiative In The Works
'Supply and Demand' is the New Boss
You know it's a new day in Emeryville when a couple of developers can't stroll into town and easily pull a favorable vote out of a compliant City Council, greasing the skids for a huge flawed housing project with practically no community benefits but lots of negative impacts for the residents. A new day indeed...that kind of thing in the old days could be done with impunity, without the developer even breaking a sweat. But now after Emeryville citizens elected a new progressive Council majority...well, Joe Ernst and Bruce Dorfman, the developers of the Sherwin Williams project, the giant 100% rental residential proposal slated for the Park Avenue neighborhood, are charting a different course to get their project approved. Starting with a city-wide telephone poll, it would appear they'll be taking their case directly to the people of Emeryville, ending in a voter's ballot initiative on the project, bypassing the newly resident friendly City Council majority and City Hall's pesky planning documents.
Ernst & Dorfman are starting with this... |
But like Washington's endless phony free trade deals touted to help average working Americans, we're left wondering; if they're right, why hasn't all the housing we've already gotten in Emeryville (and all the free trade deals in Washington) helped yet? We keep building and the rents keep going up. In fact, the more we build, the faster the rents rise. What about the law of supply and demand the developers keep reminding us about?
And why are the developers of Sherwin Williams paying so much money to call Emeryville residents to poll us on this?
Emeryville Doubles RHNA
Supply and Demand Build enough and eventually the cost of housing will come down. |
The strange correlation between building more housing and rising rents has been documented in a recent city funded nexus study on San Francisco housing. That study shows how counter intuitively, when developers build luxury units, an exponentially rising number of affordable units are needed to keep the city's housing affordability numbers on target. It has to do with an exponentially rising number of service people needed to cater to the demands of the wealthier people moving in. The study shows how if the city demands say 15 percent affordable set-asides, then every market-rate building adds more demand for affordable housing than it supplies. That means every new building actually makes the housing crisis worse.
The counter intuitive notion of more housing causing higher rents creates a space for developers to assert the intuitive but false canard of supply and demand.
And yet the supply and demand adage keeps running up against reality; everyone now sees how we keep building more housing at a frenetic pace and the cost of housing goes up, also at a frenetic pace.
Perhaps the developers will tell us Emeryville's double RHNA is the problem....what we really need to drive down rents is quadruple or quintuple RHNA. A 50 story apartment tower on every parcel in town ought to do the trick. Emeryville is to become a battle ground...a sacrifice zone in deference to a thick-headed meme put in the service of profit maximizing developers.
Ballot Initiative on the Way?
...and they hope to get this... |
We don't imagine Mr Ernst and Mr Dorfman are paying for the telephone poll to try to convince the progressive Council majority they must sacrifice Emeryville to the supply and demand god. Clearly that's a non-starter. Their only option is to call a special election (paid for by the taxpayers) to try to convince the citizens it's in their interests to bypass the City Council and overturn Emeryville's General Plan and go all in with their proposed Sherwin Williams housing project.
...in order to overturn this... |
...ultimately getting them lots of this. |
I got the call! I wasn't sure who was paying but it did seem like an agenda was being pushed. Thanks to the Tattler! Keep on doing what you do. Keep them honest! More sparkling writing from the Tattler. I love it!
ReplyDeleteI got the call from these guys but I didn't do the survey...don't trust them.
ReplyDelete