Quick Take
The Housing for People initiative on downtown building will appear on the March ballot in the city of Santa Cruz. Between now and then, voters will need to decide where they stand. Here, retired city planner and Housing for People member Frank Barron pushes back on a Nov. 30 Lookout opinion piece critical of the initiative. The criticism, Barron says, is “full of inaccuracies.”
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I’d like to respond to the falsehood-laden opinion piece that ran Nov. 30 about Housing for People’s ballot initiative.
The piece, by Don Lane, Diana Alfaro and Elizabeth Madrigal, is full of inaccuracies and scare tactics.
The people of the city of Santa Cruz should not be fooled.
I am a retired city planner and a member of Housing for People and I’d like to highlight the major issues the authors got wrong in their hit piece. Let me explain.
First, the authors claim that if the Housing for People initiative passed, homeowners wanting to build a 7-foot fence would need approval from the voters. This is absolutely false.
The only time a vote would occur under the Housing for People ballot initiative is when a general plan/zoning ordinance amendment is needed to increase building height limits over what is allowed under zoning rules. This would occur only if a developer wanted to build high-rises or other over-height buildings, generally in a large, multiblock, multiacre area.
Over-height (7-foot) fences need only a minor height exception, not a full general plan amendment or zoning change, and thus would not require a citywide vote under our initiative.
Voter approval would be required only when developers want to build high-rise buildings taller than what is currently allowed. In most of the downtown, five-to-eight-story buildings are already allowed (when the state-mandated density bonus is added).
The authors also claim voters would need to vote on accessory dwelling units (ADUs) more than 18 inches over normal heights.
This is false.
Over-height fences and ADUs need only a minor height exception, or sometimes a variance, neither of which would trigger a popular vote under the Housing for People initiative. The only buildings that would have to go before voters are those that require a general plan amendment to increase building height limits. Slightly over-height ADUs do not do this.
The authors also claim that if the initiative passes, voters would need to approve a proposed five-story homeless housing project near Costco. Again, false. That project does not require a general plan amendment to allow for an increase in height limits, so no vote would be needed.
Also, projects such as this, which include low-income housing, are entitled under state law to a “density bonus” and, depending on the percentage of affordable units, can be up to five stories in a district that normally would allow for only two stories, without the need for a general plan amendment. Under the Housing for People initiative, this would not trigger a vote because a general plan amendment would not be needed.
The authors also claim that the initiative’s proposed 25% affordability rate (for projects of 30 or more units) is too high.
The city’s current affordability rate is 20%, but that gets watered down by the state density bonus law, so the net rate ends up being only 11% to 13% of new units being affordable to moderate- and lower-income folks.
Our initiative would increase that by 5% – to a much more reasonable 16-18% of the new units. It’s still not enough, but at least it’s an improvement.
A similar proposal to this was fully vetted by the planning commission in 2021-22 and it recommended approval by the city council. Unfortunately, city staff never let it come up for a city council vote.
That’s why we are including it in our initiative, so the people can decide.
The authors claim it will be too expensive to put height-limit-increasing general plan amendments on the ballot, saying it would cost $170,000 a pop. That’s ridiculous.
The city council can place items on the ballot during regularly held elections for very little cost. We got our Housing for People initiative on the March 5 ballot for practically nothing. It just took some hard work to collect enough signatures.
The city council wouldn’t even have to collect any signatures. It would have just a simple vote to place it on the next ballot. It should be noted that general plan amendments are major, area-wide changes to the city rules and are not something that should be happening frequently, anyway.
The people of the city of Santa Cruz should have some say in the matter when developers want to go above and beyond the already generous height limits in the current general plan/zoning code. Five to eight stories are already allowed downtown, but a vote should be required when the developers want to go above that and build 12 or 17 or 22 stories (yes, a 22-story skyscraper was actually proposed for south of Laurel Street). That is what the ballot initiative sets out to put in place.
All these extremely tall buildings seem to be just fine with our city’s planning department. It looks like we — the city voters – are going to have to be the backstop to this kind of thinking.
Don’t believe the obfuscation and falsehoods promulgated by profit-driven developers and other opponents of the Housing for People initiative. Bring direct democracy to the planning process that is shaping the future of our city and increase the amount of affordable housing that gets built.
Frank Barron has lived in the county since 1969, and in the city of Santa Cruz most of the time since 1980. He is a retired urban planner, with 30 years’ experience working in the Monterey Bay region. He holds a master’s degree in urban planning from San Jose State University (1992) and a bachelor’s degree in environmental studies from UC Santa Cruz (1985).