COVID-19: Affordable housing construction exceptions rankles Bay Area trades groups, health officer

“The whole issue of affordable housing with a certain percentage as a criteria, that's got nothing to do with social distancing or risk to the workforce,” Dr. Bela Matyas, Solano County’s health officer said.

Under tightened coronavirus pandemic health orders, most of the Bay Area’s normally buzzing construction sites have gone silent. But you can still hear humming on a few plots — housing projects with affordable units.

Now, the Bay Area’s restrictions have raised questions of whether exceptions that allow projects with at least 10 percent affordable units to continue building is worth the risk of exposing workers to COVID-19, while market rate housing projects are at a standstill.

“Where’s the logic in that?,” Dr. Bela Matyas, Solano County’s health officer said. “The whole issue of affordable housing with a certain percentage as a criteria, that’s got nothing to do with social distancing or risk to the workforce. That’s basically a political statement.”

Labor unions also are questioning the exception — crafted by health officers representing six Bay area counties as well as Berkeley — calling it unfair, especially as Bay Area counties like Napa and Solano as well as the governor’s orders for the rest of the state, more broadly allow construction work to continue.

Solano County currently bans commercial construction during the pandemic, but allows most outdoor construction to continue if it’s serving an essential need, such as housing, whether market rate or affordable.

“The notion that you can have broader types of construction, yeah, the state rule allows for that, and we’ve allowed for that all along, we see no problem with it,” Maytas said.

He said there is no consistency in the principle guiding Bay Area health officers to allow only certain residential construction to continue.

The heads of some worker unions agree.

“I’m not sure what their thinking was behind that,” Rob Stoker, the president of the Building and Construction Trades council of Alameda County said about the updated health orders issued March 31, which tightened the restrictions around what kind of housing can be built.

“In reality, construction on an affordable housing project is hardly any different than, if at all, from market rate housing. The bricklayer that’s doing a project that’s all market rate, those working conditions are similar to the bricklayer that’s doing work on an affordable housing project,” Stoker said.

“I think that both affordable and market rate housing should be being built now.”

But officials in the counties making these orders say that construction work, which can require people working closely together, is a risky endeavor during the COVID-19 crisis, and health officers felt compelled to shut most of it down.

However, despite those concerns about health risks on construction sites, the simultaneous affordable housing crisis in the Bay Area required a health order “balancing act,” David Campos, a spokesman for Santa Clara County said.

“It was important for persons in public health to allow some exceptions for affordable housing, because the vulnerable communities that need affordable housing are disproportionately impacted by any health crisis,” Campos said.

Campos refuted the notion that workers building affordable housing are more expendable in the county’s view than others.

“We want to protect these construction workers, and that’s why we would only allow it in certain circumstances where the type of construction involved is for the most vulnerable in the community, and that’s a balancing act,” Campos said.

Campos noted the 10 percent threshold was a number “all seven health officers could live with” during talks about the health order rollouts, given that cities in each jurisdiction have differing requirements for affordable housing.

Neetu Balram, a spokeswoman for Alameda County, also said the creation of more affordable housing in cities around the county is “a priority,” even amid strict health orders needed to slow the spread of COVID-19.

“We know the need for affordable housing will remain long after we’ve ended this pandemic,” she said in an email.

Ann Skeet, a director of leadership ethics at Santa Clara University’s Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, said she views the exceptions for affordable housing that may expose some construction workers to COVID-19 as a “risk trade-off,” inherent to the difficult decisions public health officers must make.

“Everyone who’s going to work in a hospital environment right now, whether they are a doctor, or a nurse, or somebody cleaning in the hospital, is putting themselves at risk. But we’ve decided that’s a risk that we are willing to bear, because we want people who are sick to get treatment. People are working in grocery stores, even though that’s a risk,” Skeet said.

“To me, this (exception) was an acknowledgement (by the health officers) of the broader community crisis around affordable housing and an attempt to temper competing common goods,” Skeet said.

“I think it’s acknowledging that and saying…we’re not willing as a society to stop trying to solve this one problem of a lack of affordable housing completely, that we’re going to still allow that to move forward, because that was a crisis before this crisis came along.” .

But the building trades groups say health officials should have consulted them before making a call about which kind of construction can go forth, while others are stopped.

“Construction can be done safely, and the feeling of the building trades was that it was jumping the gun to close other kinds of construction” (besides affordable housing), said David Bini, the director of the Santa Clara and San Benito Counties Building and Construction Trades Council.

“We’re the experts on construction,” Bini said, “and we should have been in the room, or virtually in the room, to talk about it.”

Some developers, meanwhile, aren’t waiting to see if county health officers will loosen the restrictions on their market rate housing projects, and are instead finding loopholes to begin building again.

Holliday Development, of Emeryville, approached the city administration recently to ask for permission to change 11 of the planned 105 residential units in a mixed-use development from market rate to below-market rate.

According to the city, the 11 units will carry a deed restriction requiring they be reserved for households at or below 80 percent of the area median income. That affordable housing agreement is anticipated to be approved within the next two days, allowing construction to continue, the city said Tuesday.

Stoker, of the Alameda County trades council, said their counterparts around the state have adopted new guidelines for COVID-19 that allow housing construction of all kinds to be done safely, including banning lunch trucks from job sites, staggering worker start times, and having some companies check temperatures of workers before shifts.

Union representatives are also fanning out to job sites regularly, ensuring developers and contractors are keeping workers safe, all in an effort to keep construction moving, Stoker said.

“There is a consensus that obviously the affordable housing projects, if they can be constructed in a way without endangering the public and the workers, the same should go for the (market rate) projects,” Stoker said.

“As long as it is deemed an essential construction project that has all the protocols for safety in place,” Stoker said, “we have to keep the pulse of this economy for this state running.”