San Diego’s Planning Commission unanimously voted last Thursday against a key part of Mayor Todd Gloria’s housing plan that would have eliminated single-family zoning in much of the city. The commission voted to recommend the city’s sweeping Housing Action Package 2.0, but stripped it of its biggest element: Senate Bill 10, which will no longer go before City Council for a vote. The optional statewide law, a lightning rod in the plan, would have allowed a single-family home to be torn down and replaced with a new structure of up to three stories with up to 10 units in much of the city.
Next year the California electorate will vote on three of the largest housing bonds in the state’s history. The measures include a $10 billion bond proposal, currently slated for the March ballot, that would replenish the coffers of some of the state’s premier affordable housing programs. Next, there’s a $4.68 billion measure, also scheduled for the March ballot, to build housing and expand psychiatric and substance abuse treatment for homeless Californians. But both of those state measures could be dwarfed by a third proposed at the regional level. The recently created Bay Area Housing Finance Authority, tasked with funding affordable housing projects across the nine counties that surround the San Francisco Bay, is still figuring out exactly how much it wants to ask voters to sign off on in November 2024. But it could be as much as $20 billion.
Across the state, affordable housing providers report massive increases in insurance premiums — often regardless of where their buildings are located. And for nonprofits in rural areas with a more pronounced wildfire risk, it’s an “existential” crisis, according to Seana O’Shaughnessy, the president and CEO of Community Housing Improvement Program, which manages nearly 3,000 homes and apartments across seven counties in Northern California. Industry groups that track the number of carriers and spending on premiums don’t separate affordable housing from other forms of commercial property. That means apartment buildings are lumped into the same category as gas stations and grocery stores. But according to the analytics firm CoreLogic, commercial property insurance premiums increased 45% since 2018, though the increases were not uniform across sectors.
Palo Alto will have to revise its newly adopted housing plan after the state Department of Housing and Community Development concluded that its latest submission remains out of compliance with state law. The state agency’s decision means that the city will have to revise dozens of programs in the newly approved document and perform additional studies to demonstrate that housing production is actually feasible on the sites that are listed in the document. The determination also means that for at least the next few months the city will remain vulnerable to "builder’s remedy" development applications.
As discussed in our prior alert, the builder's remedy applies when a local jurisdiction has not adopted a revised Housing Element in compliance with state law, in which case the local jurisdiction cannot deny a qualifying housing development project even if it is inconsistent with the general plan and zoning ordinance (subject to limited exceptions).
On the city of Alameda’s north shore, an abandoned former shipping terminal sits behind a long chain link fence. Known as Encinal Terminals, the empty industrial site is an anomaly in an otherwise dense and bustling community. Now, as a result of a deal brokered between the state of California and Alameda, which was just last week signed into law by Governor Gavin Newsom, the property will finally be developed. The plan includes 589 housing units, about 15% of which will be affordable. The deal is evidence of a housing development strategy that Alameda is employing to counter local opposition to new housing: building on abandoned land.
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