Contra Costa County is failing to build enough affordable housing. Is lack of leadership to blame?

Like nearly every other part of the Bay Area, Contra Costa County is failing to build enough affordable housing.

Under state law, California cities are expected to approve a specific number of affordable homes every eight years to meet the needs of low-income residents. But in recent decades, most local governments haven’t come anywhere close to hitting those targets.

Contra Costa County’s civil grand jury is offering a solution that appears untried anywhere else in the region: appoint an individual staff member in each of the county’s 20 local governments tasked specifically with ensuring cities and the county meet their state-mandated housing goals.

In a recent report, the grand jury — a group of county residents that investigate the workings of local officials and agencies — found public officials view the targets as “mostly an academic exercise that no one takes seriously.” The lack of leadership in making sure affordable housing gets built, the grand jury found, “could well be one of the key reasons for our County’s failure to realize (permit and build) affordable housing for very low- and low-income residents.”

Cities and counties aren’t on the hook for actually building affordable housing themselves. That’s done almost entirely by private developers. But it is local officials’ responsibility to plan for growth developing policies to help meet their housing goals.

For the most recently completed eight-year housing cycle, local governments in the county approved just 37% of the 8,350 low-income units they were supposed to permit by the start of 2023, according to state data. During that period, neighboring Alameda County approved only 41% of its 16,516 unit goal. Santa Clara County met 30% of its 25,700 unit goal. And San Mateo County hit 59% of its 7,102 unit target.

By 2031, local governments across the Bay Area, including in Contra Costa County, are expected to approve double or even triple the number of low-income homes approved during the last cycle in hopes of putting a bigger dent in the region’s deepening affordable housing shortage. Meanwhile, state regulators are threatening new penalties — including withholding funding and revoking local permitting authority over new homes — for communities that resist planning for growth.

Sophia DeWitt, interim co-director of affordable housing advocacy group East Bay Housing Organizations, said while she supports the intent behind the grand jury’s “novel” recommendation, the myriad complex challenges to building low-income housing in the Bay Area “make it really difficult for any person assigned to do this to be successful.”

The grand jury report highlighted many of those obstacles, including local zoning restrictions on where multifamily projects are allowed, limited available land to develop, entrenched neighborhood opposition to new housing and a severe lack of public funding. Meaningfully addressing those issues, however, will take significant political will across different levels of government, DeWitt said.

Richmond Mayor Eduardo Martinez said that rather than assigning someone to oversee the city’s affordable housing progress, what Richmond needs is more help from the state.

“Quite frankly, we don’t have the staffing levels needed to actually implement our housing targets,” Martinez said in an email. “As with many policies from the state, the new approach to our (housing goals) is well-intentioned and yet came without the state funding needed to actually help us support these measures.”

To boost affordable housing funding, officials and housing advocates are pushing for a Bay Area-wide bond measure worth up to $20 billion that could come before residents in 2024. Voters may also decide on a $10 billion statewide housing bond next spring.

The Bay Area bond alone could raise as much as $1.9 billion to build and preserve low-income housing in Contra Costa County, DeWitt said.

“Both of those bonds could be extraordinarily impactful for the production of new affordable housing in the county,” she said.