Waking Up to Bad State Policy
Before I joined the school board, my main focus was land use law. I also served as the Chair of the RPV Planning Commission, and dealt extensively with housing law, development, and state policy. So I have a lot of thoughts after receiving the same copy and pasted text from at least ten concerned parents over the last week. Families throughout Palos Verdes Estates are up in arms because the state is forcing the city to zone for dense housing. The City is holding a town hall at Palos Verdes Golf Club at 6:00 pm Wednesday, September 13 to discuss. I’d join in, but that conflicts with our school board meeting.
In a nutshell, here is the deal: every city has to submit a “Housing Element” to the State. California’s Housing Element Law requires local governments to zone for increased housing development. Sounds reasonable in theory, but in practice, the state has gone completely off the rails. It has demanded that every city zone for a massive increase in housing, and assigned completely unreasonable and unattainable RHNA numbers (the number of new units that a city must zone for in order to comply with state law). If cities don’t comply, or if a housing element is adopted without satisfying HCD, the city is regarded as noncompliant. That limits a city’s eligibility for certain state and federal funds for affordable housing and renders cities vulnerable to lawsuits.
Two nonsensical aspects of this mandate for new dense housing are: (1) after imposing new excessively high RHNA numbers, the state changed zoning laws to eliminate single family zoning throughout the state. So we’ve at least doubled, and in some cases quadrupled density, but the state will not lower the RHNA numbers to reflect that change. (2) California has seen an exodus of residents over the last few years. That exodus has not been incorporated into the RHNA calculus. Why would we need to build new dense housing all over the state when year over year we’re seeing a net loss in residents?
There is an army of YIMBYs watching, threatening, and suing cities over these issues. Californians for Homeownership (name sounds nice but completely misrepresents their actions- also, they are an arm of the California Association of Realtors) and CARLA (now known as CalHDF) are two examples of groups that sue cities to force increased density. However, due to my experience representing developers in land use contexts, I am wise to their games. I received an invitation to a joint fundraiser with YIMBY and State Senator Scott Weiner in Los Angeles (I declined). Guess who hosts and funds these things? Developers. Guess who does not want to build affordable housing? Developers. Guess who is actually behind the advocacy and litigation campaigns? Developers.
I’m not saying all developers are bad, but I am saying it’s important to be honest about what is actually going on. This is not a serious movement to build affordable housing. It is a movement to eliminate common sense restrictions in order to benefit developers. It also does not protect communities like ours, which is located in a very high fire severity zone, from increased risk, nor does it consider the need for upgraded infrastructure (water, sewer, schools, etc) to serve all of these new units. It is a great way to decrease the quality of life of people in existing built-out communities.
I’ve written a lot about housing law and policy on my law firm’s website. I hope that people will reach out to our State Assemblyman Al Muratsuchi and State Senator Ben Allen and tell them why California’s one-size-fits-all density push does not work for our community, and that local control is critically important. Please also check out Our Neighborhood Voices, which is working on an initiative to restore local control over land use decisions.
Finally, this is just one small example in a string of mind-blowingly terrible policies coming from Sacramento. Please pay attention to what’s happening up there, because once the consequences reach us, it’s too late. This is relevant to my work on the school board because it continues the same theme we’re seeing in public education - a relentless push for nonsensical policies that take away local control (see AB 1078) and claim to do something virtuous while actually inflicting harm on California families. That’s what happens when a supermajority goes unchecked for so long. The Overton window has shifted to a place most of us no longer recognize.
