A $20 billion regional affordable housing bond poised for the November ballot will no longer be going before Bay Area voters this fall.
The Bay Area Housing Finance Authority voted Wednesday morning to scrap the initiative for now, citing a pending lawsuit against the measure and the unlikeliness of gaining enough votes for it to pass in the upcoming election.
The measure would have put billions of dollars towards developing thousands of affordable housing units across the Bay Area that observers say are stuck in the pipeline. The BAHFA, which voted unanimously two months ago to put the measure on the ballot, estimated it could generate 90,000 units of affordable housing across the nine Bay Area counties. It would have been funded by general obligation bonds generated by ad valorem property taxes.
“This is tough news. As we all know, this is a multiyear fight to bring about systemic change and to address the decades of disinvestment that have brought us here,” the Yes on RM4 coalition, which campaigned for the measure, said in a statement to the Business Times. “Together we will persist in our long-term campaign to address the housing needs of our communities. That is what communities deserve.”
The group said the campaign is still facing ongoing “legal and campaign challenges” and decided to drop the measure to focus on Proposition 5, a constitutional amendment that would make it easier to pass local and regional housing and infrastructure bonds by lowering the electoral threshold from two-thirds to 55%.
On Aug. 7, a group of concerned taxpayers filed a lawsuit against BAHFA and the elections directors of all nine Bay Area counties, calling out the regional housing measure on several fronts, including an error regarding the annual cost of repaying the bond. The suit alleges the government misstated the cost as $670 million, rather than $911 million.
The BAHFA called an emergency meeting last week to correct the error, but the lawsuit was not dropped.
Proposition 5, which is slated to be on the November ballot, had also faced a lawsuit from the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, who claimed the language of the measure was misleading to voters. A Sacramento County judge agreed, but the Court of Appeals on Tuesday reversed the judge’s ruling and stated the ballot language did not need to be rewritten, CalMatters reported.
The $20 billion bond would have had to gain approval from two-thirds of the Bay Area voters across San Francisco, Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Napa, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Solano and Sonoma counties this fall.
If approved, 80% of the $20 billion would have been split between the region’s nine counties and largest municipalities, and 20% would be set aside for BAHFA to develop housing for homeless or extremely low income individuals across the Bay Area.