Post Type
Alameda Housing Element Compliance
About the Campaign
Public Advocates supported Renewed Hope Housing Advocates, a dynamic community group that has been fighting to increase affordable housing opportunities in Alameda since the nineties, in a successful campaign to repeal a 39-year ban on multi-family housing construction and adopt a legally compliant housing element for the first time since 1990. This win opened the door to as many as 2,300 new homes for lower-income workers and retirees.
Affordable homes for lower-income families in the Bay Area almost always take the form of multi-family housing, like apartment buildings. However, in 1973, Alameda prohibited the construction of new multi-family homes, locking low-income families out of the city entirely. This ban conflicted with state affordable housing laws, meaning that Alameda had not had a legally compliant housing element since 1990.
After decades of advocacy by Renewed Hope Housing Advocates, the City of Alameda adopted a legally compliant housing element in 2012, reshaping the landscape of affordable housing in the city by:
- Creating capacity for more than 2,300 multi-family units.
- Making sufficient sites available to address not only the city’s current share of the region’s housing need, but also the portion of its past affordable housing needs that it failed to accommodate.
- Building in incentives for affordable housing through increased density and height limits to projects that include affordable units.
- Committing the city of developing stronger affordable housing funding programs and pursuing all available sources of affordable housing funds to support new affordable housing construction.