The Housing Readiness Report is a partnership between the San Francisco Foundation's Partnership for the Bay’s Future, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and affordable housing advocates throughout the Bay Area.
The tool provides affordable housing advocates with data, resources and tools to track, monitor and engage housing plans and policies throughout the Bay Area to ensure equitable racial, economic and social outcomes.
Every decade, the California Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD) plans for the future of housing across the state. The plans start with the development of RHNA goals – a set number of new homes – and how affordable those homes need to be – that regions must build in order to meet local housing needs of people at all income levels.
Once the regional RHNA goals are set, each region’s “council of governments” (in the Bay Area, this is the Association of Bay Area Governments) allocates the housing needs amongst all cities and counties within the region. If cities and counties don’t meet these housing goals, they will not receive certain types of state funding.
To meet their RHNA goals, local cities and counties develop policies and programs as well as find developable land that provide opportunities to develop low-income to market-rate housing. The local housing plans are called Housing Elements, and it’s during this planning process that community members are able to provide input and have their voices heard.
Because this only occurs once every decade, the time is now to plan for the future of our community.