“Redistricting determines who appears on our ballot and what parts of the city they’re going to represent,” Goh said. “It can really affect our community’s ability to elect a supervisor who represents your interests and responds to your needs. So when we participate in this process of local redistricting, we really have a voice in our democracy here in San Francisco.”

A nine-member task force will redraw the lines after receiving public input. Three members will be appointed by the mayor, three by the Board of Supervisors, and three by the Elections Commission. The process is not yet underway, and the League of Women Voters of San Francisco sent a letter to the mayor and other city officials in March urging them to move quickly to make sure members of the public are informed about the redistricting process so they can voice their preferences.

“These are public meetings that the task force and the city and the Board of Supervisors can have with community members, cultural districts, people inside the district who can really inform this,” Goh said. “The map is not the first step. The first step is listening and hearing where people identify and where they think the lines should be.”

The letter also urged the city to adopt a set of standard qualifications for candidates for the task force, including that they have experience and the analytical skills relevant to redistricting and voting rights, and that they have not been a candidate for political office or paid by a political campaign in the last five years.

The 2020 Census was delayed by the coronavirus pandemic and apparent attempts to undermine a complete count by the Trump administration. That means the redistricting process has also been delayed. But Goh argued that the city can set things in motion before those data arrive, in order to give residents ample time to get involved. 

“Oakland is actually an example of a place, of a city, that is doing a lot even without the census data. Their redistricting commission has been convened,” she said. “Oakland met on redistricting October of last year. So again, there’s a lot that can be done while we’re waiting on the census data to ensure that the public can weigh in.”

A segment from our radio show and podcast, “Civic.” Listen at 8 a.m. and 6 p.m. Tuesdays and Thursdays at 102.5 FM in San Francisco, or online at ksfp.fm, and subscribe on Apple, Google, Spotify or Stitcher. 

The post San Francisco’s Supervisorial Districts Will Be Redrawn appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

Local nonprofit organizations have been working to get correct and timely information to people often labeled “hard to count” to avoid that outcome. California has invested heavily in efforts to raise awareness of the census and disseminate current and correct information about it, often through partnerships with community-based organizations. 

The stakes are high: The census determines the allocation of $170 billion in federal funds for the state over the next decade, which funds services like MediCal as well as nutrition and housing assistance. Incorrect counts of the populations that benefit from those programs could paint an inaccurate picture of the need. And even with a complete count, California is expected to lose a congressional seat after this census.

“There’s a tremendous danger that the people who will not be counted are the people who are most in need of being counted in terms of needed services,” said Laurie Sanchez, who works at the digital access nonprofit Community Tech Network. “So, then we create a false picture of what our residents of the country are. And then we reinforce stereotypes of not needing to feed people, not needing to provide housing, all of these things.” 

“You exclude all the problems from the count, and then you can say there are no problems,” she added.

The less knowledgeable people are, Sanchez said, the more susceptible they are to being misinformed. “So, this, again, becomes the education campaign.”

News about the census changes by the day or even by the hour, and someone who isn’t online much may fall out of the loop. Simply keeping up with the flood of information requires a number of skills: English proficiency, access to technology, and an education that includes critical analysis of the news, Sanchez said.

This is why community-based groups have been working to disseminate accurate information, acting as what the Census Bureau calls “trusted messengers.” Among them is Self-Help for the Elderly, a nonprofit that works primarily in Asian communities in San Francisco. While much of their efforts earlier this year concentrated on in-person assistance, Self-Help for the Elderly’s Emma Yicheng Wu said outreach efforts also included social media and messenger applications.

Community groups take their messaging to chat apps

Self-Help for the Elderly has an officially verified WeChat account it uses to push out information about the census to an audience of all ages.

“I will say that all Chinese, even including some that are born here, they will start using the WeChat app since it’s so functional and accessible,” Wu said. Users ages range, in her estimation, from “maybe like in their elementary school or middle school up to like a very, you know, 80-, 90-, 100-year-old seniors, reach out every single day. They use it to chat with their families. They publish their story of the day with their friends.”

WeChat, with 1 billion Chinese speaking users worldwide, is owned by a Chinese company and monitored by the Chinese government. For groups hoping to disseminate accurate information and battle misinformation, that institutional control is a big hurdle, said Hong Mei Pang, director of advocacy at Chinese for Affirmative Action, a nonprofit group in San Francisco. 

“The most credible accounts are the ones that are official, but also that there are very strong regulations from the Chinese government that aim to censor issues that revolved around human rights,” Pang said. “The software catches phrases. They’re bots that the government sends out to capture phrases and deactivate accounts that might be misaligned with state propaganda.”

That meant extra hurdles for organizations trying to use the platform to communicate with immigrant communities in the United States, like Chinese for Affirmative Action has for years.

“This has been a barrier to be able to institutionalize and get that credibility in our community through social media, because it has been gatekept transnationally,” Pang said. In January 2019, Chinese for Affirmative Action was able to get an official WeChat account, and is now able to facilitate information sharing through private WeChat groups.

Adding to the confusion, Trump this month threatened to ban WeChat in the United States. It’s unclear if and how such a ban will be implemented. For now, Chinese for Affirmative Action continues to answer questions on its WeChat account.

On social media, mixed messages amass

On other social media platforms, too, misinformation or incorrect information can circulate. In March, Facebook announced it would delete hundreds of ads from the official Trump re-election campaign that prodded viewers to click a link to a campaign survey by suggesting the ads led to an “official census.” On Twitter, a hashtag briefly circulated last year encouraging a boycott of the census. A national spokesperson for the Census Bureau confirmed receipt of questions about partnerships with social media companies but ultimately did not provide responses. 

What users end up with is a maelstrom of content, said Pang at Chinese for Affirmative Action.

“We are being oversaturated with different brands, differently branded information, different kinds of factsheets and all of this stuff that is floating out there in census universe,” Pang said. “It’s better to reach somebody three times than to not reach them at all, because we know that the census is important. But what ends up happening is that, you know, directly impacted hard-to-count communities have to sift through all of that.” 

By early March, fears still lingered that the census might include, at the behest of Trump, a question about citizenship. The Supreme Court decided in late June 2019 that the Census should have no such question. But the possibility had made people nervous, and community groups were still working to address immigrants’ fears. 

“It does feel like we are in this kind of narrative space where we’re being constantly bombarded with information,” said Pang. “So we have to kind of cut through the fear and really reiterate that this is about being, you know, a resident In a democratic society, and in a democracy, we have rights. And part of that right is to be able to be seen be heard, and be visible and to matter.”

“Part of what makes it even scarier is that all of this is shrouded in mystery, where people don’t really understand what census is,” she added.

That shroud persists. 

In late July, Trump sent a memo to the Census Bureau saying he wants undocumented immigrants not to be considered in the count that will determine how congressional representatives are divided among states. In testimony before Congress July 29, the Bureau’s director, Steven Dillingham, did not give a definitive answer as to whether or not his office would, or even could, carry out that directive. Lawsuits by several states challenging the directive could result in a ruling by the end of this month. 

In early March, Sonny Le, a partnership specialist for the Census Bureau working in the Bay Area, said the personal information collected by the census is not shared with other branches of government. As a Vietnamese immigrant himself, he said, he understands that the prospect of the government coming knocking is seen as threatening in some immigrant communities.

“In those countries, if the government comes to you, that’s not a good thing. You want the government to have very little on us,” Le said. “But we keep reminding people what we do with the census data in America. And, at the Census Bureau, it’s not our data. It’s your data. We produce that data for you.”

It would take legislative action to change the protections on census data, he said.

“You have to consider that it requires both houses of Congress for that law to pass, or to be changed,” he added. “And it cannot be changed through executive order.”

More than half a million enumerators are being deployed this week to reach the roughly 56 million households nationwide that have yet to complete the census. But the Census Bureau is scheduled to conclude its count at the end of September. Those who are most likely to be left out if counting ends before enumerators can reach everyone are renters, people of color, immigrants and people who live in rural areas. As of mid-August, just 61% of San Franciscans have been counted.

This is the last in a three-part series of multimedia reports on the impacts of the digital divide on the 2020 Census. Read or listen to the first part here and the second part here. This project was made possible by funding from Renaissance Journalism.

A segment from our radio show and podcast, “Civic.” Listen at 8 a.m. and 6 p.m. Tuesdays and Thursdays at 102.5 FM in San Francisco, or online at ksfp.fm, and subscribe on Apple, Google, Spotify or Stitcher. 

The post Census Education Falls to Community Groups as Trump Fans Confusion appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

An undercount can affect federal funding and representation. Before the pandemic, California was expected to lose one seat in the House of Representatives after the count, and was projected to receive some $170 billion in census-guided federal funding over the next 10 years.  That makes the likely outcome of missing residents costly. 

But the barriers to reaching some residents online are high. An estimated 10,000 people in San Francisco lack reliable internet access. Around 8,000 people at any given time don’t have reliable access to power or wi-fi because they are homeless. More than 12% of American residents have a disability — some of which can limit access to participation in the census. 

When a household does not respond to initial invitations to fill out the census online, by phone, or on paper, workers called enumerators make in-person visits. More than half a million census takers are mobilizing this week in a quest to reach some 56 million households. Despite an April request for a deadline extension and funding boost to complete the count, all counting efforts will cease at the end of September, the U.S. Census Bureau’s director has confirmed, according to an NPR report.

The pandemic has also affected this timeline. In late February, enumerators were gathering and compiling data in preparation for counting homeless people, said Sonny Le, a Census Bureau partnership specialist for the San Francisco Bay Area.

“We had staff literally driving down each street, up and down,” Le said. “We go literally into the bushes and find people and identify and make a note of the locations.”

Because of the coronavirus pandemic and subsequent shelter-in-place orders, that count was repeatedly delayed, and is now slated for late September — just before counting officially ends. Le did not respond to a request for an update on how the operation would be conducted now that many shelters have closed and many street residents have been moved into hotels or city-approved encampments.

Challenges for unhoused residents

Even if the homeless count hadn’t been delayed, advocates have expressed some doubts about how effective it has been in the past. 

“They’ll catch the more obvious folks,” said Jennifer Friedenbach, director of the Coalition on Homelessness. “They need to find them, and then they need to complete the census forms. So, there’s a little bit of space between A and Z there.” 

For many without shelter, the first priority is finding a safe place to sleep, she said. That often means sleeping during the day — when enumerators are most likely to arrive at encampments — for fear of being targeted for crime at night without a locked door to rest behind.

“Folks who are outside, they’re in full crises,” she said. Those crises can include having no shelter or having a mental illness. Someone approached on the street by a census taker may simply not want to complete the form.

In theory, many who lack a permanent address are still able to access the internet through mobile devices. But Friedenbach said one of the biggest obstacles is keeping those devices charged or being able to access public computers. Since the city’s shelter-in-place order was issued in March, both outlets and public computers have been out of reach. Reached for an update by email recently, Friedenbach said she had not heard of enumerators trying to enter shelters.

“The pre-existing challenges with counting unhoused community members are now dramatically amplified during COVID-19,” Friedenbach wrote. “People feel very disconnected and even if getting counted was a priority for them during this pandemic, it is likely impossible for most to complete the forms electronically.”

Hurdles for seniors and the disabled

Homelessness all too frequently overlaps with age and disability, Senior and Disability Action director Jessica Lehman said.

“Seniors and people with disabilities face huge hurdles with digital access, and for a handful of reasons,” Lehman said. “One is that so many, particularly people with disabilities, are low income. Poor people are less likely to own a computer, to have a tablet or something, and to have had access to learning how to use the equipment.”

Using a computer may not be the preferred means of communication for someone who still uses a landline, for example. While the census can be done by phone or even on paper, less than two-thirds of the state’s residents have filled out the census. Prompts to complete the census were sent in postcard form.

“You get a letter in the mail. If it says ‘resident’ and from some government agency, are you even gonna open it? Or you’re just gonna throw it away?” Lehman said. 

Getting the initial mailed invitation to complete the census is not required in order to respond, even though the mailed invitation includes an identification number. Le said the online prompt for that number can be bypassed on the Census website. Asked if that option might lead to some households responding twice, Le said a “double count is a good problem to have.”

Once the data are gathered, he said, the Census Bureau uses information like name, birthdate, age, location, sex, race and ethnicity to identify and eliminate duplications.

For some people, the digital census itself might be more accessible than previous versions — if they have access to the technology they need.

“The census being online is exciting because it does present the possibility that someone who has requisite access technology, like screen magnification or a screen reader, to complete the survey independently,” said Scott Blanks, senior director of programs at Lighthouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired. 

Nonetheless, the cost of the necessary devices and of internet access, as well as the technical training needed to use those technologies, mean there is no guarantee a person with a visual impairment will be able to use those technologies. 

“You can’t just pull a computer out, turn on the program that’s going to speak the information to you, such as a screen reader, and know how to work that program. It does take some time,” Blanks said.

The Census Bureau has been collaborating with groups like Lighthouse to raise awareness of the census, and these community organizations have offered in-person support. Many libraries had equipment and staff available to help people complete the census. Community groups were hosting informational events and setting up assistance centers where neighbors could come to ask for help or get their questions about the process answered. 

The pandemic waylaid any in-person gatherings. Some groups have continued their public information initiatives online. But with enumerators mobilizing this week and just a month-and-a-half left to count nearly four in 10 households in the nation, the onus is now on the Census Bureau to reach those left behind by the digital divide.

“The undercounting is what’s our concern,” Le said. “We can’t afford to undercount any anyone or to leave out anyone.”

This is the second in a three-part series of multimedia reports on the impacts of the digital divide on the 2020 Census. Read or listen to the first part here. This project was made possible by funding from Renaissance Journalism.

A segment from our radio show and podcast, “Civic.” Listen at 8 a.m. and 6 p.m. Tuesdays and Thursdays at 102.5 FM in San Francisco, or online at ksfp.fm, and subscribe on Apple, Google, Spotify or Stitcher. 

The post Online Census Yields Mixed Accessibility Results appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

The count from the census is used to determine how many seats each state gets in the U.S. House of Representatives. And according to the Project on Government Oversight, California can also expect to receive more than $170 billion in census-guided federal funding over the next ten years, and this funding is distributed based on the population tallied by the census. But past encounters with well-meaning government agents have made homeless, poor, undocumented and otherwise marginalized people skeptical that being counted will benefit them, said Lisa “Tiny” Gray-Garcia, an Oakland-based advocate, self-described “poverty scholar” and co-founder of POOR Magazine.

Gray-Garcia and her mother became homeless when she was 11.

“I had to drop out of school and enter the school of hard knocks, where I’m proud to say I graduated with a Ph.D. in poverty,” Gray-Garcia said. “But you know, not glamorizing that at all. We were constantly criminalized.”

When a social worker saw Gray-Garcia and her mother living on the street, she said, she was separated from her mother and placed in foster care. Her mother was deemed unfit and had to fight to get Gray-Garcia back. She said she knows other homeless parents who fear contact with any government agent could mean the same might happen to their families, or simply bring unwanted attention from other government agencies. 

“You’ve got indigenous refugees, migrante folks who cross these false borders and are now here working for, you know, barely a living wage, who can’t afford rent. It doesn’t help to count Indigenous, and, you know, refugees. It doesn’t help to count children,” Gray-Garcia said. “Because if families are seen on the street, we get incarcerated more. You know, families are immediately criminalized when we’re seen on the street. That’s what me and Mama’s situation was.”

Sonny Le, a partnership specialist for the San Francisco Bay Area with the Census Bureau, responded to that concern by emphasizing that the personal information collected by the census is not shared with other branches of government.

“Nobody has access to the Census Bureau,” he said in early March. “Not law enforcement agencies, not the planning department, not CPS,” a reference to Child Protective Services. 

Mobilizing to count everyone

The census is frequently referred to as the country’s largest peacetime mobilization, sending enumerators out in massive numbers to try to ensure everyone is reached and counted. About 63% of the population has filled out the census online and as a result of early outreach efforts. 

Households that did not respond to the census online have other options, including responding by phone or mailing a paper form. Failing that, enumerators will visit. But the schedule for in-person counting has been repeatedly delayed by the coronavirus pandemic. Census takers have just this week begun knocking on the doors of 56 million households nationwide. And concerns raised at the beginning of this year are starting to come into sharper focus now. 

In addition to uncertainty about the inclusion of undocumented residents, there is uncertainty about how and when people who don’t have a fixed address will be counted. The dates for enumerators to reach out to people living in congregate settings or in informal gathering places like under bridges and in encampments have been moved to September, and all counting operations are slated to conclude by the end of that month. For homeless people, Gray-Garcia said, the only thing that would make being counted feel safe would be anonymity.

“I haven’t seen the fact that my information will be protected. And if you’re talking about making people feel safe to engage in a count in a time like this, when we have this federal government administration — let me not go into that rabbit hole — you need to make that really front and center,” Gray-Garcia said. “Because there’s absolutely no way I know that me and fellow poor mamas on the street who I work with and live with every day would engage with any kind of counting like that right now.” 

Anonymity is not something the Census Bureau can promise. The census asks every person for their name, address and age. However, personally identifiable information, said Le with the Census Bureau, is not released to the public until 72 years after it’s collected.

At the time of Le’s remarks, the presidential memo ordering the exclusion of undocumented immigrants hadn’t been issued. But when pressed on what would happen if the executive branch decided to exert pressure on the Census Bureau, Le expressed confidence the agency’s data would remain secure and private.

“You have to consider that it requires both houses of Congress for that law to pass, or to be changed,” he said. “And it cannot be changed through executive order.”

He described the agency as a steward of information rather than a broker. “Census data is free, because the taxpayers pay for it. And because it belongs to the public, not us,” he said. “The Census Bureau is only responsible for collecting and safekeeping the data. It’s not our data.”

Distrust in an imperfectly inclusive system

Even for people who don’t have immediate fears of being targeted, there is still a base level of trust that those who are supposed to get counted need to have in order to be convinced to participate in the census. Jessica Lehman, who directs the San Francisco advocacy group Senior and Disability Action, said that’s a hard sell for many seniors and people with disabilities — who are also overrepresented among the homeless. Past negative experiences with agencies that promise to help, she said, make it difficult for someone who is struggling with daily tasks like finding shelter or food to go to the effort of completing the census. 

“I always worry, too, just the tremendous ableism and ageism in our society makes people think that, or really is the idea that, disabled people and seniors just don’t matter,” she said. “So I don’t think it’s at the top of everyone’s mind that we have to make sure that seniors and disabled people get counted. Even though frankly, we rely on a lot of the programs that we’re talking about and we’re an incredibly important part of our society. But if people don’t have that in their heads that we need to be reached, we need to be counted, we need access, then it’s going to be easy to kind of ignore us.”

The onus to find and count those who have been left out is on the Census Bureau and its enumerators.

“It’s often hard to reach isolated seniors and isolated people with disabilities,” Lehman said. “It’s just a question of: Do the agencies and organizations that are doing census outreach know how to reach, particularly, disabled people? And so, will that happen to the extent it needs to?” 

Scott Blanks, senior program director at San Francisco’s Lighthouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired, saw the online count as an opportunity for improved independence.

“The census being online is exciting because it does present the possibility that someone who has requisite access technology like screen magnification or a screen reader to complete the survey independently,” Blanks said. “If it’s an accessible experience, a number of blind and visually impaired folks will have an autonomous independent experience for the first time with the census.”

The online census, Le said, meets federal standards for accessibility to people with disabilities. Software compatibility alone will not determine how well people with disabilities are included, however. The counting process began in mid-March with a printed invitation mailed to every household, inviting members to fill out the census online. As Blanks pointed out, people who are not able to read print independently must rely on someone else to interpret that invitation. If they don’t do that, at some point an enumerator is supposed to come knocking.

In the past, “Someone coming to your home to fill out the census was the norm,” said Blanks. “That experience was one in which a blind person could participate. Though again, sitting with somebody who might be completing a document on your behalf is not necessarily an independent experience,” he said. “And you don’t know if the information that you’re providing is being entered in an accurate fashion.”

It’s another example of why people with disabilities, people of color and immigrants ought to be engaged in designing public policies and practices, Lehman said. 

“We need people to be designing our programs and our systems and not just trying to make sense of them afterwards, because it’s hard to catch all of these things after they’re out,” she said.

This is the first story and episode in a series of reports on the impacts of the digital divide on getting a complete count in the 2020 Census. This series is made possible by funding from Renaissance Journalism.

A segment from our radio show and podcast, “Civic.” Listen at 8 a.m. and 6 p.m. Tuesdays and Thursdays at 102.5 FM in San Francisco, or online at ksfp.fm, and subscribe on Apple, Google, Spotify or Stitcher. 

The post Threats to Exclude Undocumented From Census Exemplify Fears of Other ‘Hard-to-Count’ Communities appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

This year, for the first time, the Census can be done online. Millions of households have received an invitation in the mail to complete the survey, and nationwide more than 20% of residents have done so. But there are many groups of people who won’t be counted this way. Some do not receive mail, some have no fixed address, or live in group settings. The Census staff who will be going into the field to count those communities are also practicing social distancing, so these counts have been delayed. Pamela Michael, a media specialist with the Census Bureau, lays out how the timelines have changed to protect the health of both enumerators and people who will be counted in person.

“The safety of the enumerators and of the people being counted are a primary concern. The enumerators will follow standard health department advisories on distances and if they’re to wear gloves, masks, they will follow those guidelines. As you can imagine, it’s a very delicate operation.” — Pamela Michael

The post Coronavirus Pandemic Delays Census Count of Homeless appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

Is an abundance of vacant units worsening the Bay Area’s housing crisis? That’s what some politicians have suggested. Their solution: a new tax on landlords who leave residential and commercial properties unrented.

Oakland voters will decide in November whether to levy a parcel tax on empty apartments, condominiums and townhouses, plus all vacant industrial and commercial buildings and lots. If two-thirds approve, Oakland would become the first U.S. city to tax so-called ghost homes.

In San Francisco, voters could face a similar measure next year.

A vacancy tax was floated in 2015 by then-Supervisor Eric Mar and again in 2017 by Supervisor Aaron Peskin, who, in a research request to the City Attorney’s Office, cited its potential to “help mitigate the impacts of the widespread practice of warehousing valuable residential and commercial units.”

The most often-cited figure for a variety of vacant residential properties is 30,000, which is based on U.S. Census data cited in a 2014 report by the San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association, or SPUR, a local public-policy think tank.

Peskin aide Sunny Angulo confirmed that the supervisor’s office is working to put a vacancy tax initiative before voters in 2019. She said Peskin decided not to push for this November because “there are going to be a lot of taxes on that ballot.” She said it was too soon to provide details about the plan.

Neither city would be the first to address what some critics have called a glut of vacant second homes hurting housing markets in some of the world’s most desirable cities.

Paris began taxing second homes in 2015, and two years later tripled its surtax to 60 percent of the standard property tax. In 2016, Vancouver, Canada, enacted a tax of 1 percent of the assessed value on homes unoccupied for 180 days or more, the first in North America. This year Melbourne, Australia, adopted a tax on properties empty more than six months, and Hong Kong policymakers said they, too, were considering a vacancy tax.

Tom Murphy, a former mayor of Pittsburgh, compared the proposal to an approach his city took for half a century: taxing land at a higher rate — at one point close to six times more — than any improvements on the land. “The theory of it was that if you create a penalty for sitting on vacant land, in effect, by having a higher property tax on the land, then it will encourage people to develop their land,” said Murphy, a senior fellow at the Urban Land Institute. The policy was scrapped in 2001 after an uproar among some homeowners over their land assessments.

“So that’s essentially what San Francisco is talking about,” he added. “For it to work, it needs to be at some level that is painful rather than a nuisance.”

Would It Work — Or be Legal?

Skeptics question whether taxing vacant units would be legal or effective at making more housing available.

“The economic impact is going to depend on how many there are, and what level of tax will get people to change their behaviors, and whether the tax is legal or not,” said David Shulman, a senior economist at UCLA Anderson Forecast. Depending on how the law is drafted, he pointed out, this kind of tax could be viewed as an unconstitutional taking of property.

Charley Goss, government affairs director of the San Francisco Apartment Association, likewise questioned whether a vacancy tax would be legal. He added that small-property owners who leave units vacant often have legitimate reasons, from being burned by bad tenants and having to make large payouts to get them to leave, to keeping units available for family.

“The city passes punitive legislation against property owners all the time, many of whom are low income, many of whom come from other countries, many of whom are monolingual,” he said. The city’s regulations and fees and taxes on property ownership “create an inhospitable environment for them to operate in, which leads some people not to operate in it,” he said, “but then they want to tax you for that, too.”

S.F. Vacancies, With Caveats

So why are politicians pushing this idea? Are thousands of San Francisco residential properties being kept off the market? Without better data, the second question is hard to answer. The first is clearer.

The moves appear to have been prompted in part by the SPUR estimate of 30,000 vacant units,based on 2012 census data. That figure had risen to 34,120 out of almost 387,000 total housing units in 2016, the latest data show.

On its face, that would indicate that vacant units make up almost 9 percent of the housing stock. However, the data come with two big caveats. First, 9,750 units were in transition: either for sale or for rent, or recently rented or sold with a new renter or owner who had not yet moved in. An additional 7,600 homes were either for sale or sold but not yet occupied. That left about 16,700 units kept empty for seasonal or occasional use, a category that could include both second homes and units deliberately kept empty or unoccupied for other reasons. These units make up around 4.3 percent of all the city’s housing units.

Second, the data came from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, which samples a relatively small slice of the population and has a high margin of error — around 13 percent for the housing-unit totals and 24 percent for the vacant units. Those numbers indicate that vacant units that weren’t for rent or sale made up between 1.3 percent and 2.3 percent of the city’s homes in 2016.

For context, Reis Inc., a commercial real estate data analyzer, put San Francisco’s apartment vacancy rate at 3.2 percent in 2012 and 4.5 percent in 2017 based on its study of buildings with 40 units or more. Condominiums were not included. Those numbers don’t seem to indicate a glut of vacancies, but without data on condos, it’s hard to say definitively.

Vancouver’s Experience

Vancouver faced similar data problems in its effort to tally vacant housing. The city was especially concerned about foreign owners buying second homes and leaving them empty or occupied rarely. In August 2016, the British Columbia provincial government imposed a 15 percent tax on foreign buyers, and weeks later the federal government tightened mortgage-insurance requirements to further discourage ghost homes.

To get a better handle on vacancies, Vancouver commissioned a study of electricity usage that set abnormally low power consumption as a proxy for vacancy. It concluded that 10,800 units were unoccupied for a year or more, resulting in a non-occupancy rate hovering around 5 percent from 2002 to 2014, even as census data showed non-resident occupied units growing by about 50 percent.

“A healthy vacancy rate for a city is considered between 3 percent and 5 percent,” said Patrice Impey, a spokeswoman for the city of Vancouver. “What it means is that if somebody comes to your city to rent something, there’s enough choice for them.”

Between April and October 2015, Vancouver’s already tight vacancy rate grew even tighter, dropping from 1.1 percent to 0.6 percent. So even a slight bump — 0.9 percent last year from 0.8 percent in 2016, according to city data — was cheered as evidence that the market was loosening, thereby increasing available housing.

One factor that helped ease implementation of the tax was that the city didn’t use a time-based system that would have required audits of how often a home was in use, Impey said. Instead, homeowners simply must state whether the property is their principal residence. “That allows us to audit based on straightforward things like your driver’s license and government records,” she said.

Tax Generates $23 Million

Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson announced in April that the tax was expected to generate about $30 million (U.S. $23 million) in its first year from 3,300 properties out of about 184,000 total units. Of the 8,500 properties determined to be vacant or under-used, 5,200 were declared exempt from the tax for various reasons, including proof that a unit was being rented out long term, being remodeled or redeveloped, or that the owner works in the city at least six months a year. The highest single tax was $250,000, with a median of $9,900. Proceeds will be directed to housing initiatives.

“We brought in the Empty Homes Tax because we want to ensure that housing is for homes first, not just treated as a commodity,” Robertson said in a news release. “With a near-zero vacancy rate, we can’t have homes sitting empty while people who want to live and work in our city are struggling to find a place to rent.”

For San Francisco, the questions and answers are less clear-cut. Without better data, officials can’t quantify the scope of the problem or estimate how many units a vacancy tax might free up.

And to some observers, the shortage of affordable housing is more of a supply problem than anything else. Since 2010, San Francisco has added more than 78,000 residents, but just over 31,000 housing units.

“The solution is not a vacancy tax,” said Shulman of UCLA. “The solution is changing the zoning and building more housing. Everything else is rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.” 

The post Cities Sic the Taxman on Vacant ‘Ghost Homes’ appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

The U.S. Census Bureau estimates that the population of the Bay Area’s nine counties grew by almost 100,000 between July 2013 and July 2014, to 7,500,000-plus.

The Census sees the region growing about one-third faster than the 1 percent annual pace predicted by the Association of Bay Area Governments, a regional planning body. (A spreadsheet containing the data is downloadable at the bottom of this article.)

By the year 2040, an estimated 9.3 million people will call the Bay Area home, according to the group’s Plan Bay Area, published in 2013 and intended as a planning guide for local cities.

Plan Bay Area directs cities to use a “smart growth” approach to accommodate the region’s increasing population. That approach aims for dense urban areas where all the necessities of modern living are nearby and cars are obsolete.

Those are the features that attract people to live in places like San Francisco and Oakland, said Egon Terplan, regional planning director for the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association. Residents can “hop on a bus or hop on a train” to get to their jobs, medical appointments or school, Terplan told reporter Angela Hart for the San Francisco Public Press’ summer 2012 special report.

But our report showed that cities may lack the money to follow Plan Bay Area’s guidelines, and the Association of Bay Area Governments cannot force them to. So it will likely be up to individual cities to figure out ways — smartly or not — to adapt to population growth.

An interactive map that KQED’s News Fix team created shows how the Census estimates that the Bay Area’s population changed. Growth here outpaced most other regions of similar size nationwide, though parts of Texas and Florida also grew fast.

San Francisco’s estimated population rose 1.3 percent to 852,469 between 2013 and 2014 yet another new historic high. If it continued rising at that rate, it would break 920,000 by the year 2020.

Politicians have lamented that the pace of housing construction has not kept up, which has helped inflate prices.

A $500 million transportation bond, which voters approved in November, will fortify the city’s public transit system to help absorb the strain.

Mayor Ed Lee has said he will do everything he can to ensure that 30,000 homes are built by the year 2020 — eclipsing construction rates of recent decades. But, as we have previously reported, Lee’s total actually includes existing homes that would be rehabilitated, not just new ones. And projects that were planned when he set that bar already totaled 30,000.

San Francisco’s most recent Pipeline Report, which tracks construction in town, showed that pending projects would add more than 50,000 units of housing if they were all approved and built.

The post Census Estimates Show Bay Area Growing Faster than Expected appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

This map helps readers of the Public Press’s summer edition special project, Growing Smarter: Planning for a Bay Area of 9 Million, understand these trends.

Household density, shown here in shades of red, is a measure of the number of households (family units, not dwellings) in a given area. This map employs census block group data for a detailed representation of household density. (Most census block groups are not as large as a square mile.)

The priority development areas are shown in blue outline and transparency. These zones in the current draft of Plan Bay Area are strung along the region’s traditional core, and follow long-established corridors of communication in the West Bay, South Bay and near-East Bay, and sprinkled amid and adjacent to the fast-growing suburbs of the far-East Bay. They also appear in the last underdeveloped bits of the Santa Clara Valley, as well as concentrated pockets in Solano County, where density is still low.

View the full-size map, which ran in the newspaper as a broadsheet page, 13.5 inches wide by 21 inches tall.

The post Map: Where we live now — 2010 household density and priority development areas appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

Oakland remains the largest African American city in California after Los Angeles. In the last decade, however, the city has had a net loss of 33,000, nearly a quarter of its African American residents. This decline is part of a larger trend seen across cities nationwide.

Michael Krasny: Who is leaving, why and where are they going?
Malo Hutson: What’s happening in Oakland is what is happening across the United States. Blacks are leaving for the suburbs. If you look at the data, it is working professional and working class blacks that are leaving major metropolitan areas. Thirty-three thousand have left Oakland in the last decade, and many of them are going to outlying areas such as Antioch, Brentwood, Oakley and other suburban areas.
Krasny: In Oakland specifically, you have a lot of whites moving into West Oakland and in East Oakland, you have a lot more Latinos moving in.
Hutson: Correct. As you’ve had roughly a quarter of blacks leave Oakland, you’ve had roughly an 8 percent rise in whites and Asians who have moved in the last decade and Latinos up 13 percent.
Krasny: Let’s get the reasons why. A lot of it has to do with affordable housing.
Allen Fernandez Smith: What we’ve been seeing is that affordable housing has been a big pull factor for people to leave Oakland. Affordable housing is one of those indicators that is important for our low-income communities and communities of color.
Krasny: And crime?
Smith: Crime is up there, too. One of the things we’re seeing with Oakland is that public safety is a huge indicator as to why people would leave. Everyone wants their families to be in a safe place, and unfortunately, sometimes it doesn’t happen in many of our Oakland neighborhoods.
Krasny: There’s kind of a reverse migration isn’t there? We’re seeing blacks from the North heading South again.
Angela Glover Blackwell: Black people have had a tough time in this country and they have had a particularly tough time in the downturn of this economy, and many African American families, particularly those with a few resources, a house they could get something out of, skills that allow them to have some mobility have just said “enough.” They have relatives and friends who have made that move and say “Come on down.”
Krasny: Why are a lot of people leaving now?
Margaret Gordon: There’s a lack of jobs, affordable housing, the crime, lack of education and resources. It’s been a combination of complex issues of disparity that nobody really addresses. This migration of African Americans out of the inner city has been happening for 30, 40 years now.
Krasny: There was supposed to be a renaissance in Oakland, are we seeing the decline of that now?
Hutson: On one level, we’ve seen people moving back to cities. You have two things happening: you have outgoing of blacks in the Bay Area, but you have an increase of other ethnic groups into major cities.
Krasny: Wealthy in the cities and poor on the outskirts, is that how things are divided now?
Blackwell: It is not a sustainable model. Oakland, even though it is losing a substantial portion of its African American population, 26 percent of the population is white, 27 is black, 25 is Latino, 17 percent is Asian. This is probably still the most integrated city in the nation. Let Oakland be the model where all can participate and prosper.
Krasny: Is there a lot more tension in the suburbs now?
Blackwell: We have been a nation where people who were poor and people who were middle class lived together. The interaction of people who were middle class with those who weren’t gave those who weren’t a chance to see what it was like to have a better life. This notion that somehow poor black children don’t want to do well in school and better their lives is a false notion. But if they don’t see that, if they don’t see the path and they are isolated in every way, it’s not likely to happen.
Krasny: Malo, is this not as racial as we are making it out to be?
Hutson: I think there is still the racial component, but if cities are going to continue to be successful, they need to figure out how to support the middle class. If you look at our current economy, the middle class is really suffering. If we are looking at raising taxes and having revenue to support our schools, support our police, then we have to create an environment where the middle class can live and support themselves.

The post Black flight from Oakland to suburbs is reshaping makeup of the city appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

The city’s homeless figures have ranged between about 6,500 and 8,600 people in the last decade, but the real number is anybody’s guess. The sketchy knowledge of who is living on the street has been a big impediment to perennial attempts to solve the crisis.

Temporary census workers will spend three days at the end of March interviewing homeless people at their usual gathering places, including shelters, soup kitchens, parks and highway underpasses. The census workers will ask questions similar to those asked of people who do not reply to questionnaires delivered to households.

The post Census methods could provide lift to hidden homeless appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.