[Cross-posted from the San Diego Union-Tribune]
By Christopher Elmendorf, Ricardo Flores and Jon Wizard
Last month, California’s Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD) notified San Diego that the city will be out of compliance with the state’s “housing element” law as of June 16 unless it commits to serious corrective actions before then. This is a make-or-break moment for San Diego and for the future of housing in the state.
Every eight years, California cities must adopt a state-approved plan, called a housing element, which shows how the city will accommodate its share of regionally needed housing. This law has been on the books for decades but was toothless until recently. Starting in 2017, the Legislature bulked up regional housing targets, added new sanctions, required cities to loosen zoning restrictions enough to achieve their share of the regional target, and insisted that housing plans undo historical patterns of segregation and exclusion.
What HCD decides in San Diego’s case will establish a landmark precedent for cities throughout the state — San Diego County is the first region to go through this process. It will also have immediate ramifications for San Diegans. Under state law, a city that lacks a compliant housing plan forfeits authority to deny or downsize affordable housing projects on the basis of the city’s zoning code and general plan. Thus, if San Diego falls out of compliance, it would have no choice but to approve large apartment and condo buildings even in neighborhoods zoned just for single-family homes.
Perhaps to shelter the city from this serious sanction, HCD has thus far treated San Diego with kid gloves. San Diego’s housing plan was due last September, but the plan the city adopted and sent to HCD had grave shortcomings. UCLA professor Paavo Monkkonen and his students found that 65 percent of the sites San Diego identified for low-income and multifamily housing are located in the poorest third of the city’s neighborhoods. San Diego has an unusually large percentage of its land area reserved exclusively for single-family homes, yet the city’s plan did not open any of these neighborhoods to multifamily housing. This flaunts the Legislature’s mandate to “affirmatively further fair housing.”
San Diego’s housing plan also presumed that every single parcel of land identified as having redevelopment potential will definitely be developed for new housing during the eight-year planning period. This parlor trick allowed the city to “show” that it can accommodate its share of regionally needed housing (108,000 new homes) without relaxing any land-use restrictions. Yet during any given eight-year period, many sites that have redevelopment potential will be tied up by long-term leases, held back by owners who don’t want to sell or stay unchanged for other reasons. San Diego’s “every parcel will be developed” assumption is like a university that needs a freshman class of 1,000 students deciding to admit only 1,000 applicants, even though the university knows (or could easily learn) from past experience that only about 1 in 3 admitted students will enroll. Just as the university would need to admit 3,000 applicants in order to enroll a class of 1,000, cities need to zone for several times their housing target in order to reach it. San Diego did not.
But instead of finding San Diego to be out of compliance last September, HCD deemed the city’s status quo plan “conditionally compliant” and gave the city six months to adopt amendments about fair housing and housing sites’ likelihood of development (the college admissions analogy). Disappointingly, the city has adopted no such amendments. Instead, in February, it quietly floated some inconsequential draft revisions that leave the status quo intact.
One of us leads a coalition of nonprofits that will soon launch a first-time home-buyer grant program for lower-income people of color. Our goal is to build modest for-sale homes — accessible to households earning no more than 80 percent of San Diego’s area median income — in high-wealth, low-crime neighborhoods. We’ve received several million dollars in charitable commitments, but the single greatest barrier we face is restrictive single-family zoning that makes it impossible to construct smaller, more affordable homes in most of the city.
It is a moral and economic imperative that San Diego open up exclusionary neighborhoods and revise its zoning code to allow a lot more multifamily housing. It’s also the law. HCD and Gov. Gavin Newsom must stand tall and enforce it. If they don’t, cities across the state will infer that compliance with the state’s “strengthened” housing law just requires embellishing the status quo with cheap talk about good intentions.
