Affordable housing

The San Diego Housing Commission and area elected officials Wednesday kicked off a three-year, $80 million program to provide more housing for the area's burgeoning homeless population.

The new phase of the commission's Housing First-San Diego plan involves six initiatives, which include giving incentives to landlords to rent to people who are homeless, providing more than 700 housing vouchers, constructing more affordable housing and voucher-eligible housing units, and assisting 600 more families that become homeless because of a sudden change like loss of a job.

But all those new homes came from projects approved before 2012 that home builders are just now putting on the market. And the city has turned away other developers interested in building housing where the city’s plan said they could, Perez said.

Since early 2015, Foster City’s median home value has increased 13% to a record $1.5 million, more than seven times the national average.

A mural on the wall of an elementary school here proclaimed, “All the world is all of us,” but the hundreds of people packing the auditorium one night were determined to stop a low-income housing project from coming to their upscale neighborhood.

The proposed 233-unit building, which was to be funded with federal tax credits, would burden their already overcrowded elementary school with new children, many people argued during a lively meeting last year. Some urged the Houston Housing Authority to pursue cheaper sites elsewhere.

As Los Angeles County kicks off its largest campaign ever to tackle homelessness, officials are also looking to stem the tide of those losing housing and ending up on the streets.

On Monday, the county will start spending expected revenue from Measure H, a quarter-cent sales tax that kicks in Oct. 1. The tax is expected to raise up to $355 million annually for all kinds of services related to homelessness — including the somewhat nascent field of homelessness prevention, which is slated to receive $45 million of investments in the first three years of the tax.

Local politics is always, in one way or another, about housing. In San Francisco, a deep blue city whose fault lines long ago ceased to resemble America’s, that politics is a vitriolic civic scrimmage, where people who agree about almost every national issue make sworn enemies over zoning, demolition, and development. It’s like a circular firing squad at a co-op meeting.