Quick Take
Lookout politics columnist Mike Rotkin unpacks the deluge of state affordable housing laws passed in recent years and uses them to buttress an argument against Measure M. He says if M passes Tuesday in the city of Santa Cruz, the state will get even more control over local building projects.
Have something to say? Lookout welcomes letters to the editor, within our policies, from readers. Guidelines here.
Lately, I’ve heard a lot of references to changes in state housing laws that affect the planning process in the city of Santa Cruz. In addition to general concerns, the battle over Measure M on Tuesday’s ballot has raised questions about how new legislation on affordable housing might impact our community if Measure M passes.
Normally, when the legislature and governor are confronted by competing bills, they hold hearings and gather public input on which of the many proposed approaches makes the most sense, and pass a limited number of bills that address the issue.
In the case of affordable housing, the interest in doing something about California’s affordable housing crisis is so strong that the Legislature essentially decided to simply pass all kinds of new laws requiring or supporting more affordable housing construction – even if the laws overlapped or even took contradictory approaches. It’s as if they decided to throw everything they had at the problem and wait to see what worked best to achieve the goal of more affordable housing in the state.
Between 2017 and 2022, 129 housing-related bills (some major, some minor) passed out of the California Legislature and were signed into law by Gov. Gavin Newsom. Last year, the governor signed 62 new housing and land-use bills into law.
The deluge stems from need, certainly, but the Legislature is also more than two-thirds Democratic in both houses, and the governor is also a Democrat. So that makes passing laws much easier, although much of the legislation had bipartisan support. Also, the rapid rise of Latino representation in the California Legislature, and the concerns of those legislators for the housing needs of low- and moderate-income constituents has played a role.
Much of the new affordable housing legislation can be characterized as restricting or weakening the environmental and local planning policies and practices that have been used to thwart attempts to build affordable housing in cities and counties in California.
There are simply too many laws to describe even a large percentage of them in anything less than a book. I read through thousands of pages of legislation and a 71- page presentation made to the Santa Cruz City Council on Feb. 13 (agenda item 21) attempting to summarize this legislation and its impact on local planning issues.
So I will focus on a few of the most impactful new laws and discuss their possible effect on the creation of affordable housing and other local planning issues, particularly with respect to the impacts of Measure M, should it pass.
In 2017, Scott Wiener, a San Francisco state senator, introduced Senate Bill 35, which required cities and counties to have state-approved housing plans meeting minimal goals for the construction of affordable and moderate-priced housing. These goals required far more housing than local California communities had been constructing previously. Cities that failed to meet their Regional Housing Needs Allocation (RHNA) goals would turn control of local planning over to the state. This legislation was to sunset next year.
And turning local planning over to the state is not the worst possible outcome. Another option is the state imposing what are known as “builders’ remedies,” which can include removing any control over height, setbacks, density or other development standards.
SB 35 also streamlined approvals for projects meeting minimal affordability requirements and restricted the ability of local governments to reject such projects. It also prohibited adding new zoning restrictions after a project was submitted to a local planning agency. Perhaps more important, it restricted the denial of affordable housing projects based on anything but “objective criteria” – things like density, height, percent of open space, etc.
Subjective criteria that had been used to turn down or downsize massive numbers of housing projects, such as whether a project “fit into the character of a neighborhood,” were no longer allowed to be part of planning approvals or denials.
The City of Santa Cruz had its RHNA goals certified by the state and met them over the past five years, so the city maintained its control over local planning. This past year, Wiener authored successful SB 423, a bill that renewed and strengthened SB 35.
In addition, several other bills place major restrictions on the ability of local government to disapprove housing projects.
Here are a few:
Assembly Bill 3194 says that a project needs only to meet objective general plan requirements rather than the more detailed and restrictive zoning laws that used to be determinative of approvals for housing projects.
AB 1287 requires essentially automatic approvals of denser, taller buildings if there are set-asides – often as little as 10% – for middle-income housing.
AB 1449 shields many affordable housing projects from any environmental review under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA).
SB 439 makes it easier for courts to slap down “frivolous lawsuits” against affordable housing projects.
Several bills shorten the time for decisions about housing projects:
SB 330 prohibits cities from enacting policies or actions that delay approvals. This might easily come into play if Measure M in Santa Cruz passes and then triggers a public vote on a housing project.
So, even if it passes, Measure M might be invalidated by a court for delaying a construction project – making the actual vote of local citizens on the project a moot point.
Explicitly buttressing this disempowerment of local voters, SB 469 establishes criteria for housing projects that can bypass voter approval as long as affordable housing development includes certain kinds of departmental funding or tax credits aimed at creating affordable housing – which almost all affordable housing projects do.
Doubling down on SB 330 and SB 469, AB 1633 sets a short time limit for cities to approve or deny a project’s environmental review.
Other new housing laws make it clear that once a local community loses control over planning, it doesn’t impact just the areas where the housing growth had been planned. An example of this is the south of Laurel Street area in Santa Cruz.
SB 684 provides for ministerial (no public hearings) approval of up to 10-unit housing projects in multifamily zones, i.e. most of the Eastside of Santa Cruz. AB 976 removes the power of local government to require owner-occupancy of properties with accessory dwelling units (ADUs). This is a real blow to the self-regulation that makes ADUs acceptable to many who live in residential-zoned neighborhoods.
What this means, in the end, is that the passage of Measure M is less a question of how one feels about tall buildings or even the right of local citizens to have a say in how our community develops than whether we want to maintain any control over our local planning process. To keep control, we need to say no.
Admittedly, this is kind of a no-winner choice; however, I, for one, now understand the wave of state imposition crashing down on us and want to at least keep some local control over our future.