The subjectivity of ‘local control’
California Senate Bill 330 took effect on January 1 of this year, and established a statewide housing emergency for five years. The reason? California housing prices have become too exclusive; there aren’t enough units at affordable prices. SB 50, a stricter state housing measure, failed to pass, but will be back.
Local control?
A recent Sustainable Sonoma newsletter noted a dynamic I have called the Green Checkmate. “The strongest opposition [to SB-50] was from local-control advocates. This group has been strong since the 1970s, when it arose as an alliance between those reacting to the civil rights movement, wanting to prevent apartments in traditionally white, single-family neighborhoods, and environmentalists opposed to development. Both groups have stopped many projects by suing under the state’s environmental law called CEQA. Ironically, nationwide, it is often the most politically liberal communities who most reliably oppose denser or subsidized housing development proposals.”
Affordable Housing advocates also objected to SB 50, because no area median income (AMI) people can afford market-rate prices. A reliance on too much market-rate housing only exacerbates affordability issues.
Objective standard?
One of the key SB 330 provisions is to force local governments to strip out subjective language regarding zoning and housing development. Such subjective language has served in part as code for maintaining exclusivity, and also as a proxy to stall many projects. Sonoma’s Housing Element update is due by 2022, and city housing language will soon have to meet an objective standard.
According to the SF Planning Director Bulletin #7 (December 2019), an “objective standard involves no personal or subjective judgement on the part of the city, and is uniformly verifiable by reference to criteria that are available to the applicant at the time of application.”
Criteria for character?
In Sonoma, the subjective terms small town character and rural character are used liberally in local land use policy, and in the urban growth boundary ordinance. Never mind that the unified Sonoma Valley urban area is equivalent to the fourth largest city in the county, after Rohnert Park. In response to SB 330, Sonoma planners have talked of turning these subjective terms about character into verifiable, objective criteria. I’m looking forward to analyzing that conceptual alchemy and wordsmithing.
Character basically means keeping things as much the same as possible. How will local government be able to finesse a trajectory of preserving and protecting the status quo, with another that calls for change and high density, downtown infill?
Free market vs. socialism?
Outside the Sonoma Plaza area, market-rate, single-family housing development has proceeded on a business-as-usual basis. The problem in Sonoma is not necessarily local control prohibiting market-rate housing, but rather of zoning protectionism and under-production of housing targeted at the AMI cohort. This shortage of AMI housing can be attributed to both lack of will and lack of money. As time goes by, limited city land gets more and more overrun by AMI-unaffordable market-rate projects, with only the city inclusionary ordinance to mitigate displacement of the working class.
Market-rate interests, via SB 330 and SB 50, see the solution as increasing supply. Low density homeowners, and environmentalists, want to focus this supply by incentivizing high-density infill near transit, but away from the Plaza on West Napa Street/ Highway 12. Yet, land prices in this area preclude full deed-restricted projects, and such “smart growth” ends up relying on market-rate actors to build or remodel, tacitly backing more unaffordable units, and only providing high-end, 100% to 120% AMI inclusions.
Will the congestion and parking issues that go with high-density infill pass the character test? Can SB 330 really neutralize NIMBYs? Or will the timetable to the lawsuit stage just be speeded up?
Ineffective dog training
In spite of market-rate and local control actors all professing to want to solve affordability issues, tenants and renters just keep on ending up with the short end of the stick. There’s no money in serving poor people. Tough luck. That’s our system, unfair and unable to account for the equity needed to be sustainable as a society.
Market-rate housing developers are like an unruly Alpha dog. The hope is to gain control through behavioral incentives. It only works with a tight leash. SB 330 and SB 50 seem to want to take the leash off, and hope against hope that somehow, magically, a public good will be produced. Can new housing objective criteria dog whistles actually work?
It seems there is just no mitigation for market-rate, off leash dogs.
Price is the bottom line
Something has to give, to break down the walls of unaffordable exclusivity. SB 330 calls for the elimination of subjective language that has served as a smokescreen for local control to endlessly stall any project, and to keep single-family-home, low-density zoning as a wall of white privilege. For California’s working class to gain a few scraps on the local housing front, it is not market-rate developers or a refigured local control disguised as smart growth that will save them. All prices here remain too high, with no signs of abatement.
The trick for state housing bills, and for city planning housing criteria, will be to incentivize as much non profit-built Affordable Housing as possible without allowing market-rate and smart growth Trojan Horses to continue with the current paywall displacement regime. It’s the same for the city – create Development Code language that meaningfully incentivizes the Affordable Housing needed.
As for the financial resources needed to produce low-income housing, and the wages needed to pay median rents, I can only look out and think of the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, “water, water, everywhere, and not a drop to drink.”
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