Bramson: What Hollywood can teach us about California’s housing crisis

Summer blockbusters are built around a pretty straightforward idea: spend a lot of money to make something people will pay to see.

Movies like “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” and Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” involve enormous investments because studios believe there is an audience large enough to generate an even larger return. When that calculation works, capital follows. More movies get made.

Housing operates under some of the same basic rules. Money flows most readily toward housing that can generate enough revenue to justify the cost of building it.

The problem comes when we expect that system to produce something that doesn’t generate enough revenue to pay for itself.

California actually has a pretty good way of measuring where that happens.

It’s called the Regional Housing Needs Allocation, or RHNA. Every eight years, the state determines how much housing California’s different regions need. Those regional numbers are then divided among cities and counties. Importantly, communities aren’t simply given a target of, say, 10,000 new homes. That target is broken down by income, from housing for people with very low incomes all the way up to market-rate housing.

Think of it as California’s housing scoreboard.

It tells us not only how many homes communities need, but what kinds of homes they need. And when we compare those targets with what actually gets built, the scoreboard tells an important story.

The deeper the affordability, the harder it becomes to produce the housing. That distinction matters because much of our housing policy debate continues to focus on making housing easier to build.

The recently enacted 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act is a good example. The bipartisan federal legislation includes important reforms intended to increase housing production, reduce regulatory barriers, improve financing and modernize federal housing programs.

Those changes are important. California has also spent years passing its own laws to allow more housing and make approvals faster. We should continue removing unnecessary barriers that make homes more expensive or difficult to build.

But we should be equally clear about what those policies cannot do.

Streamlining can reduce costs. Zoning reform can create places for more homes. Faster approvals can eliminate expensive delays.

None of those things, by themselves, create deeply affordable housing.

A family earning $35,000 a year doesn’t suddenly become able to afford a $2,500 apartment because the project was approved six months faster. A senior living on Social Security doesn’t have more money for rent because a city eliminated a parking requirement.

If we want housing affordable to people with the lowest incomes, somebody has to pay the difference between what that housing costs to build and operate and what its residents can afford.

That requires investment.

And this is where RHNA should become more than a planning exercise. It should help us decide where public investment is most urgently needed.

If a community is making progress toward its overall housing target, but repeatedly falling behind on homes for its lowest-income residents, the scoreboard is telling us something. The problem isn’t simply that we haven’t removed enough barriers. It is that we haven’t invested enough money.

That means affordable housing bonds. It means Low Income Housing Tax Credits, local housing funds, public land, rental assistance and federal programs that reduce the amount of debt affordable developments must carry. And it means treating deeply affordable housing as infrastructure worthy of sustained public investment rather than an occasional expenditure when budgets allow.

The ROAD Act can help clear the path. California’s housing reforms can clear it further. But clearing the path and paying for the destination are different things.

We understand this distinction elsewhere. We don’t expect public transit to exist simply because we changed the zoning around a train station. We don’t expect schools to appear because we streamlined their permits. When society decides something is important enough to provide regardless of whether it generates a financial return, we invest public resources in it.

Housing for people with the lowest incomes is no different.

Hollywood knows what happens when it wants another blockbuster: somebody writes a very large check.

California already has the scoreboard telling us where our housing system is falling short. Maybe it’s time we started investing accordingly.

San José Spotlight columnist Ray Bramson is the chief operating officer at Destination: Home, a nonprofit that works to end homelessness in Silicon Valley. His columns appear every second Monday of the month. Contact Ray at [email protected] or follow @rbramson on X.