About a year ago we put together a video to call out the City Council’s woeful record on housing policy. The point of the video was to draw attention to the need for a plan. Well, now we have one. The Mayor’s Housing Affordability and Livability Agenda (HALA) Committee has produced what we asked for, a plan with an actual quantitative proposal for more housing.  Now the proposal, upzones with mandatory inclusion of rent restricted units in exchange, isn’t the best way to solve the problem as I’ve pointed out. But it is better than a linkage tax.

It’s interesting to watch the video and reflect back on how much has happened since then. It seems like we won the argument about incentive zoning — it’s not an incentive — but ended up with a linkage tax proposal. Then there was HALA and it’s recommendations that we all welcomed as, finally, a rational approach to the stated problem of housing not being affordable. We still have a long way to go, but, in many ways, we’re better off than we were a year ago. It looks like, with the HALA report, we at least have something to work from that isn’t just about adding more rules, fees, and taxes to build expensive subsidized units.