If nine Bay Area counties borrow $20 billion together, shouldn’t they each get their fair share back? Turns out the regional housing bond will make smaller counties pay out far more than they get in return. With a local tax, Napa could fulfill its housing need in 16 years. Instead, RM4 would make North Bay taxpayers spend the next half century paying other peoples’ debt. Will Sherman reports in this Opp Now exclusive.

This November, voters in nine Bay Area counties will decide if they want to borrow $20 billion to pay for affordable housing projects around the region. 

If RM4 passes, taxpayers in counties around the Bay will service the loan until 2078, but many can expect to see very little in return.

“There are huge disparities,” said Tom Rubin, President of $20 Billion Reasons, a group established to oppose RM4, the Bay Area Housing and Finance Authority (BAHFA)’s bond initiative on the ballot this Fall. 

Using data from BAHFA and Regional Housing Needs Allocation (RHNA) numbers, a draft paper by Rubin’s group explains just how unfair the allocations are for San Mateo, Contra Costa, and all of the North Bay counties—some of them described as “extreme over contributors.”

Napa taxpayers, for example, are calculated to pay 495.3% more property taxes than what the county is guaranteed to get back.

“For what Napa needs and they’ll get out of this,” he stated in a Zoom call, “if they just adopted the same tax that [BAHFA] will impose and ran it for 16 years, they could complete their entire RHNA And they’re done. Period. Rather than pay for 53 years three times as much.” 

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