Palo Alto City Council is reviewing our housing work plan tonight at 7:45. The plan was tabled all last year and staff has a backlog of 25+ housing assignments. The NIMBY interpretation of this data: we're doing fine on market-rate housing, so no more! cityofpaloalto.org/civicax/f…

Fun fact: for 2015-2017, city counted some non-deed-restricted moderate-income homes. 2018-present, city counted all market-rate as above-moderate. This change kept Palo Alto from being subject to 10%-affordable SB35 streamlining. (screenshot from link in tweet I'm replying to)

This is an extremely unfun fact David. I wonder what @California_HCD thinks about these kinds of shenanigans.

I've tried to parse the text in SB35, etc., to figure out how a city should determine whether a non-deed-restricted home is affordable to those with moderate incomes. It's... not especially clear?

My guess is that the rule is whether the rent is less than 35% of 110% of the county's AMI for a family the size of the max legal occupancy of the unit. See HSC 50052.5(a)(4).

But how does the city decide what the rent is? And is the occupancy clearly defined? (The occupancy bit is the part where I'm making the most inference, I think.)

On the other hand, SB35's rule that only above-moderate housing (and not other market-rate housing) counts is somewhat bonkers, so maybe the right answer here is 🤷.