The city of Hayward is accepting applications in a housing lottery for about 60 new below-market-rate homes.
The two- and three-bedroom homes are priced between $170,000 and $300,000. To qualify, applicants' household income can be up to $185,000 depending on the size of their household.
Although Hayward is pushing to develop more housing, it’s in the same boat as other communities in the Bay Area: There are more people who want to buy a home than there are homes available.
By law, all California cities and counties must plan for population growth in order to meet the state's plan for housing long-term. But one Hayward city official says construction costs are just one obstacle. Red tape is another.
Get a weekly recap of the latest San Francisco Bay Area housing news. Sign up for NBC Bay Area’s Housing Deconstructed newsletter.
"It’s hard to develop housing, so anything we can try to remove a lot of those barriers, anything the state can do to remove those barriers, anything we can do to bring construction costs down will make it easier for developers to build housing," Assistant City Manager Jennifer Ott said.
California needs to build 2.5 million homes by the year 2030 in order to address the housing shortage. About 1 million must be affordable to low-income households.
Local
To put the pace of construction in perspective, fewer than 600,000 homes were built over the last eight years.
For more details on the Hayward lottery, visit housekeys8.com. To check availability of a similar lottery in other Bay Area communities, visit housekeys.org.
