The leaders of Fremont, in the Bay Area, have decided they no longer want to have the middle class living in their town. To get rid of the middle class they are forcing developers to include affordable housing in their projects. If they don’t, then the developer will have to pay a large fee to get permits. Of course the developer will pass that fee onto the home buyers—hence making the most expensive area of California even more expensive.
“In a bid to encourage developers to build more affordable housing, the Fremont City Council has launched a two-prong approach that will dig deeper into the pocketbooks of those who don’t and give some breaks to those who do.
By increasing the fees that go into a special account reserved for eligible affordable housing projects, the council is hoping developers will choose to skip the payments and instead build the units themselves.
Otherwise, the developers will see their affordable housing in-lieu fees rise from $26 per square foot for houses and $27 for townhouses to $44 per square foot for both, starting on Jan. 1, 2024.
And the fees would have been even higher if two council members got their way.
At last week’s council meeting, Vice Mayor Yang Shao and Councilmember Jenny Kassan suggested increasing the in-lieu fee for townhouses to $50.”
This is why folks are fleeing California—government is working hard to make this a State for the very rich, the very poor and the illegal aliens. Others can pound sand and reserve a U-Haul to go to a Free State.
Fremont to raise fees for developers who don’t build affordable homes
City hopes to encourage more affordable housing built into market-rate projects
By Joseph Geha, Bay Area News Group, 10/17/21
FREMONT — In a bid to encourage developers to build more affordable housing, the Fremont City Council has launched a two-prong approach that will dig deeper into the pocketbooks of those who don’t and give some breaks to those who do.
By increasing the fees that go into a special account reserved for eligible affordable housing projects, the council is hoping developers will choose to skip the payments and instead build the units themselves.
Otherwise, the developers will see their affordable housing in-lieu fees rise from $26 per square foot for houses and $27 for townhouses to $44 per square foot for both, starting on Jan. 1, 2024.
And the fees would have been even higher if two council members got their way.
At last week’s council meeting, Vice Mayor Yang Shao and Councilmember Jenny Kassan suggested increasing the in-lieu fee for townhouses to $50.
“This is an amazing opportunity we have,” Kassan said. “We don’t do this often at all, and we have a horrible housing crisis throughout the entire country.”
But the majority of council members said that’s too much.
“We always get criticized that we have the highest fees,” Councilman Raj Salwan said.
“If $44 is among the highest, I think we’re good. I don’t see any reason to go above that if we are already at the maximum fees. A lot of fees cause more expensive housing,” he added.
The city has been called out in academic studies and reports for charging some of the highest cumulative developer fees in the state.
Even so, the fees haven’t tempered housing development in Fremont, where between 2015 and 2019 almost 6,000 homes and apartments have been approved — more than 5,100 of them market-rate.
Although a little more than 800 below-market-rate housing units have been built in that period, the city is about 2,800 units short of the number targeted for construction or approval by 2023 to satisfy a regional housing goal set by the state and the Association of Bay Area Governments.
Between 2023 and 2031, the city will be expected to approve over 12,000 homes, more than half at below market-rate.
Finance Director David Persselin said the in-lieu affordable housing fund currently has about $72 million. He said the city alerted developers in May that it would provide up to $45 million from the fund for affordable rental housing proposals.
In the past, the city has tapped that fund to help support projects, including $6 million for a planned 111-unit affordable apartment complex on Osgood Road, $9 million for a 90-unit apartment project under construction for older homeless or low-income people, and almost $2 million for a 59-unit apartment complex for homeless veterans and low-income residents.
A controversial homeless navigation center also was supported in part by affordable housing funds.
City officials couldn’t immediately say Friday how many total affordable housing units have been financed from the fund.
As another inducement , the council also lowered the percentage of minimum affordable housing units required within major projects if developers build them instead of paying in-lieu fees.
As a result, instead of requiring developers to provide 18% to 21% of housing affordable to a range of buyers including those with very low to extremely low incomes, the city will now ask only for 15% affordable units overall from developers willing to build them.
Since 2015, not a single developer chose to build all the required units into their project, according to city staff.
Resident Chris Cavette asked the the council to simply require developers to build affordable homes and do away with the in-lieu fees.
“If we do not require the inclusion of affordable housing…we will never get it,” Cavette said, adding that “we are running out of land and we are running out of time.”
