I support policies that will help improve housing affordability for teachers, families, retail workers, and young people who can’t currently afford to move back to San Ramon. At the same time, we don’t need to choose between housing affordability and our small-town charm: through thoughtful policymaking, we can have both. This specifically includes policies that benefit renters as well as homeowners: rented units make up almost 30% of all housing in San Ramon, but despite this large population, San Ramon’s renter protections barely surpass the minimum standards required by state law. Some of the housing policies I support include the following:

1. Reform the municipal zoning code to incentivize more vibrant streetscapes, allow for more mixed-use spaces that integrate retail and residential uses, and allow for more housing at price points that teachers, retail workers, and young people will be more likely to afford. These policy changes include:

• Allow single-family homeowners to build duplexes and triplexes on their lots
• Get rid of the city’s minimum lot size mandate, which constricts the construction of smaller units that are more affordable to low- and middle-income residents
• Retire the city’s minimum parking mandate, which makes our commercial spaces less inviting and makes housing construction more expensive and complicated without actually mitigating traffic

2. Pass a renter protection ordinance that includes:

• The creation of a rental registry, which would allow the city to have a greater ability to enforce existing housing laws that protect renters
• Just-cause eviction and rent stabilization policies that go above and beyond the state minimum requirements, protecting our renters from excessive rent increases

3. Pass a Tenant Opportunity to Purchase/Community Opportunity to Purchase (TOPA/COPA) ordinance, which would provide tenants and non-profit housing developers the first right of offer when developers sell rental complexes. Over time, this would allow rental units purchased by tenants’ associations or non-profit developers to be maintained at affordable prices.

4. Incorporate residents’ concerns about the aesthetics of new housing development into city policy in ways that don’t prevent the construction of desperately needed housing for our community members. This could include policy approaches such as form-based zoning, which would also incentivize mixed-use spaces.