Abstract
The lack of affordable housing in the San Francisco Bay Area and its attendant consequences for social and economic inequality have received considerable attention, but we lack empirical understanding of the causes for this housing problem and serious policy prescriptions aimed at treating it. Paul Lewis and Nicholas Marantz make an effort at both with Regional Governance and the Politics of Housing in the San Francisco Bay Area, contributing a valuable model of urban policy scholarship along the way. Straightforward and relatively concise, the book's basic project is “linking the Bay Area's structure of governance to its housing crisis.” In particular, the authors aim to demonstrate how and why the region's fragmented local geopolitics—101 different municipalities across nine counties—helps explain why so little affordable multifamily housing gets built there.
Of course, there are myriad factors contributing to the Bay Area's famously expensive housing market, not least a grab bag of skewed financial (dis)incentives confronting cities and developers alike. The region's fragmentation and political dysfunction have been the topic of previous study as well (see, notably, Schafran’s 2018 book The Road to Resegregation). Still, it is important to understand that the shortage of affordable housing is a direct result of the fact that planning power in the Bay Area resides with 110 individual cities and counties operating with little regional coordination or state oversight. Lewis and Marantz tell us why this matters and what we might be able to do about it.
The book begins with a focus on an aspect of this problem that has actually received little scholarly attention: the prevalence in the Bay Area of dozens of small municipalities with populations under 50,000. Californians know anecdotally—perhaps instinctively—that such places are famously anti-development (NIMBY, not-in-my-backyard, being the technical term), whether proudly “slow growth” and concerned with preserving small town character or plain elitist and exclusionary; they are routine targets of the ire of pro-housing YIMBYs. An earlier survey-based study by Lewis found that planners a generation ago thought so too. What Lewis and Marantz bring here then is testing empirically whether small jurisdictional population size is itself predictive of low housing production, and is thus, when multiplied at scale, a key part of understanding the Bay Area's overall housing development deficit.
The authors do this by analyzing changes in the number of multifamily housing units produced across California census tracts between the 2012 and 2018 five-year American Community Surveys. The Bay Area as a whole gained housing units, including multifamily units, during this period, but more than one-third of the sampled tracts actually lost multifamily units. Another 12 percent saw no change, meaning growth really occurred in just half of the tracts. Controlling for other factors, including physical area, existing housing stock, and even local political structure, Lewis and Marantz find that the change in number of multifamily units during the study period was indeed positively correlated with the population size of the municipality where the tract is located. (The relationship is strongest in municipalities with populations between 100,000 and 500,000 and only fades again in cities of a million or more, of which the Bay Area no longer has any.) So smaller cities are less likely to build housing, and the Bay Area has a lot of smaller cities: the median population size among the region's 101 municipalities in 2020 was just 31,439.
Adding geography drives home how much this matters, too. Due to the polycentric and mostly suburban morphology of the Bay Area, many of the region's employers and many of the locations with the best job access are in areas filled with small-population municipalities. Calculating a “jobs accessibility index,” Lewis and Marantz show that fully half of the 30 most jobs-proximate cities in the Bay Area had 2010 populations below 30,000—in fact, five of the top seven did. In other words, the sorts of small towns that are statistically (and politically and culturally) least likely to build multifamily housing dominate the areas where it most belongs. These are not just far-flung bedroom communities.
Even if all of this largely reaffirms a relationship that Bay Area housers already saw and believed, it is useful to have it demonstrated through a sophisticated empirical analysis, and it helps us to better understand the nature of the beast. What comes next may be even more valuable, however. Indeed, the book's biggest strength might be its second act, in which the authors turn to regional policy and the prospect of governmental reforms. This is because Lewis and Marantz give unflinchingly serious consideration to all the myriad (mostly frustratingly unrealistic) changes it might take to turn the situation around.
For instance, having shown that increasing the size of most Bay Area cities would likely result in an increase in multifamily housing getting built, they give real attention to the prospect of municipal mergers. Because even on top of the cities and counties the Bay Area is home to hundreds of independently constituted regional agencies, they articulate the need for a stronger and more democratically accountable regional government. If the book loses just a bit of its earlier focus on jurisdictional size here, one hopes that the wider scope and thoughtfulness of the discussion increases the chance of the ideas being taken seriously by decision-makers.
Lest there be any question here, Regional Governance and the Politics of Housing is not a sociology text. It is urban planning and policy scholarship, cut and dried. It is tempting, from the perspective of urban sociology, to connect the book with Logan and Molotch's classic Urban Fortunes (1987), and one could argue that Lewis and Marantz do illustrate here something approaching an “anti-growth machine,” or parts of one. But the explanatory power of the “city as a growth machine” lies in the explicit sociological linking of real human actors and their interests with the underlying structural conditions of capitalism. While human actors (mainly small-town politicians and the elite homeowners they are beholden to) unquestionably play a role in what Lewis and Marantz describe, and the conditions are undoubtedly socially contingent, they confine their argument to spatial statistics, policy analysis, and realpolitik. But sociologists will find this study useful in further complicating urban growth models, and they will likely be able to apply these findings to other regions despite the specificity of the case.
As for what to actually do about the Bay Area's housing situation, clearly leaving development approvals up to individual cities is not going to result in much getting built. Recent saber-rattling from officials in Sacramento suggests the issue is being taken more seriously than in the past, though Lewis and Marantz express limited faith in state oversight. What they settle on as most feasible is the institution of an appeals process by which developers might get sensible housing approved even when individual cities oppose it. What the authors imply should be the ultimate goal is a more empowered regional government. For this to succeed, in addition to policy changes, there is a need for a stronger sense of regional identity and regional obligation in the Bay Area. This is a different sort of puzzle, for which the book does not provide a solution. A challenge for sociology then, perhaps.