When the discussion turns to affordable housing in Northern California —and in the San Francisco Bay Area, in particular— big numbers tend to dominate. The nine-county region has not built enough housing for three decades; the region is short more than 180,000 affordable homes; just under $10 billion in gap financing is needed to build the existing pipeline of 433 shovel-ready affordable housing developments —or 41,000 homes.
In a region that regularly makes headlines for its housing shortage and high rates of homelessness, Heather Hood understands the terrain of the Bay Area’s uphill battle. “We’re far behind and it’s getting harder —it’s like a game of Chutes and Ladders,” said Hood, Enterprise’s vice president and market leader for Northern California.
Yet Hood, whose career has encompassed architecture, urban planning, and affordable housing, sees room for progress. “We’re committed to doing this hard work of detangling complex systems and helping people and agencies work together more effectively to solve complex problems,” she said.
Enterprise recently spoke with Hood about ways she is working to build coalitions and foster collaboration to advance affordable housing in the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond.
How would you describe housing affordability in the San Francisco Bay Area?
The housing affordability crisis is affecting everybody who's looking for a home now. Increasingly over the past decade, when we say affordable housing to somebody who doesn't work in the industry, they inevitably will ask, “affordable to whom?” And what it's telling us is that other than for the folks who already own their homes and plan to stay there, and folks who make or inherited a lot of money, it's not really meeting anybody's expectations. At a visceral level, it’s obvious because of the significant rise in homelessness that the system isn't working. Really, it barely working for anyone. We don't have enough homes, and we don't have enough homes that are affordable across income levels. Roughly a third of people are ‘housing burdened,’ meaning they are paying too much of their household income on housing.
The housing crisis has spread to all parts of the country, yet it seems to be so well publicized in your area. What’s special about the San Francisco Bay Area?
There's a lot of sizzle about the Bay Area because of Silicon Valley and its big tech companies. What most people don’t know is that we created four times the number of jobs than we did homes. So over three decades of creating a tech industry in a state that is now the 5th largest economy in the world, we've created over half a million jobs, which is an entire city —the population of the city of Oakland. We've created an entire city full of jobs, yet we didn't create the housing for the employees. We only created a couple of neighborhoods. We have expected all these new workers to fit into this place. And those newer residents took up existing housing and pushed a lot of folks out. You can think of it like musical chairs -someone is always losing.
I don’t mean to blame the tech companies; the cities that host them wanted to attract that economic development. The reality is that we are trying to dig ourselves out —like Seattle, Austin or wherever they have experienced job booms. The trouble is that it simply takes a long time and now it is very expensive.
Geographically, we are jammed into one place, except there's a giant hole, the San Francisco Bay, in the middle where people can't live. This creates incredibly long commutes for people, including stretching workers all the way to our Central Valley office, ballooning into one mega-region the size of Massachusetts. If you work in Silicon Valley as a cafeteria worker or entry level assistant, you’ve likely got a three or four-hour commute to and from work.
What are you most proud of in your career?
One of the things of which I'm most proud is starting a regional housing agency called the Bay Area Housing Finance Authority. In 2017, my colleague Geeta Rao and I had both worked at the San Francisco Foundation concurrently running a program called the Great Communities Collaborative. We started to tour places that had regional governance for affordable housing —like New York City, Minneapolis, and Puget Sound in Seattle. We saw how they had committed, in either bonds or just public budgets, funds that compounded over time to create reliable resources for affordable housing on a regional scale. We came back to the Bay Area and realized we didn’t have that —we had a few agencies, but very little cooperation.
One hundred and one cities are never going to tackle affordable housing on their own. And if we keep doing county bonds, only a few counties will do so, and we will continue to perpetuate segregation in the region.
Geeta and I pushed hard for not just getting money for affordable housing but having a regional housing agency. That was a foreign idea to many people, so we wrote about it in a report called The Elephant in the Region. And then slowly this concept about creating a regional body gained momentum.
This was very timely. Recently, you —and the board of the Bay Area Housing Finance Authority — voted to scrap a $20 billion affordable housing bond— which would have been the largest ever of its kind and the subject of a campaign a long time in the making. What happened?
There was a lot of momentum, terrific core partners and we had a broad coalition, led by our staff and especially our state policy leader, Justine Marcus. With the nine counties coming together, NPH hired a campaign manager, the BAHFA Oversight Committee voted unanimously to place the bond on the ballot, and we were gearing up for November 2024. There was a companion ballot measure at the state level. Then, the state level initiatives started to hit some major headwinds with two lawsuits, one of them brought by an anti-tax group.
What was revealed in all of that was how much money opponents were prepared to spend to fight the Bay Area bond. Then, they unleashed that fury on places like San Jose and some other Bay Area cities for related lawsuits. We recognized then that polling was already fragile, and that with this level of opposition, we weren't likely to win. We hadn’t raised enough money and didn’t have enough time to win against such forces.
We also worked tirelessly on Proposition 5, which lost at the polls this November. Thanks to Shaun Donovan, my team and I were able to contribute not just our time, but some of Enterprise’s resources towards the campaign. Prop 5 offered voters a historic opportunity to empower local communities to truly address local housing affordability and infrastructure needs. It would have lowered the voter threshold from 67% to 55% for housing and infrastructure bonds. While Prop 5 fell short this year, we know efforts like these take time, and we are confident that we will find a path forward to unlock major housing resources.
How did you get into affordable housing?
I wanted so badly to be an architect when I was a kid. I really loved buildings. I was interested in homes, in schools and libraries and art museums, train stations. I studied architecture twice, but quickly realized that so much of the job was about staying at my desk, working on CAD software after the parameters had been set by zoning, the owner, a budget, etc. As a 26-year-old, I was impatient with how long it’d take before I could do the interesting part of architecture.
I went to city planning school and I got passionate about making places for people and wanted to better understand how to do that. Along the way I got to live in Denmark for a while and understand better how inextricably linked they are. I wanted to understand how cities morph and how places change over time. And it wasn't until I got to city planning school that I started really understanding the underlying policies and I got much more interested in local economic development and housing. I just got lit on fire when I was at Cal Berkeley.
Ultimately, I learned what it’s like to deal with powerful and sometimes competing interests. Working in the kind of zipper space between various sides led me to develop skills and an interest in fostering collaboration. All of this led me to work at the San Francisco Foundation and the Great Communities Collaborative, which was all about cross-sector collaboration.
Eventually, I wanted to know how the money worked to execute on plans and felt so lucky to join Enterprise, where I get to work with a great team on the enabling environment, shape how the resources flow and how to increase the affordable housing pie.
A recent report said that California needs one million homes. How can we get there?
There is this recognition we need to make building easier and it’s a bipartisan effort. How does this happen? We've had some good legislation to make it easier to build statewide. A lot of progress has been made through Bay Area lawmakers at the state level. The first thing is that land use needs to change to allow for more building, with less delay from NIMBYism with zoning changes that are super local.
Then, the money has to be there. But then there's the other part of that which is, can we do it for less? There’s a lot of energy going into figuring out how to control the costs of new construction. Simply put, we have to move more efficiently.
California — and the Bay Area in particular — is widely known for its high levels of homelessness. What are some ways forward? What gives you inspiration and hope that we can start making progress?
In Sacramento, Mayor Daryl Steinberg has put in place some important policies and partnerships between affordable housing developers and mental health and public health organizations. He’s made a big commitment and kept his eye on the ball. Because of that focus, they have lowered the homelessness rate significantly in Sacramento.
Tomiquia Moss, who founded the nonprofit All Home, has been another guiding light. She has now gone on to be the governor-appointed secretary of business consumer services and housing for the state. She was tapped because of her commitment and knowledge about homelessness. I have high expectations and high hopes for what she's going to be able to accomplish. It’s all about shaping shared perspective and agenda and getting agencies to work together.
The homelessness crisis, the crisis of compassion, and the crisis of public health and local economic development, with folks sleeping in restaurant doorways, is not hidden anymore. Now is the time to capitalize on that visibility and cultivate the will to make real progress. People need to care and be willing to drive their compassion towards action, maybe even sacrificing a little. I believe we can all do that.
