Focus
A year after LA fires, thousands of homes remain unbuilt. State funds aim to curb displacement.
Smart Cities Dive – January 13
Governor Gavin Newsom announced last week that the state will allocate $107.3 million toward 673 new affordable rental homes that will prioritize Los Angeles County residents displaced by last year’s wildfires. The deadly wildfires destroyed or damaged approximately 17,000 homes last January. Since then, less than a dozen homes have been rebuilt, exacerbating the area’s already-prevalent rental housing shortages. The planned affordable housing projects are in the city of Los Angeles, Bellflower, Claremont, Covina, Santa Monica, and Pasadena.
News
Perris extends warehouse moratorium by 10 months
The Press-Enterprise – January 15
Perris’ moratorium on new warehouses will last another 10 months after the city council voted unanimously to extend it. The council’s 5-0 vote lengthens a 45-day moratorium approved by councilmembers in December. The ban, which doesn’t apply to warehouses that already have a building permit or development agreement, can be extended once more for another year. The moratorium’s goal is to give Perris officials more time to study how more warehouses would affect the city and to suggest new regulations.
San Francisco neighborhood groups sue to halt Family Zoning plan
Courthouse News Service – January 9
A coalition of San Francisco neighborhood, business, and civic organizations has sued the city over its adoption of the Family Zoning Plan last month that will allow for construction of taller and denser housing developments across the city’s north and west sides. The plaintiffs filed a petition in state court claiming the approval of the plan, also referred to as Upzone 2025, violates the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). The petitioners claim the city should not have relied on an addendum to the environmental impact report prepared in 2022 for the Housing Element of its General Plan.
Thousands of affordable homes could have been built — if not for $1.2 billion in impact fees
San Francisco Chronicle - January 22
A report recently published by the UC Berkeley Terner Center for Housing Innovation analyzed about 700 California affordable housing projects from 2020 to 2023. The vast majority of those projects paid “impact fees,” as most market-rate projects also do — fees that municipalities use to offset the expected effect of the project on their water or transportation systems, or to pay for parks and other public facilities. The report found that those impact fees, which totaled more than $1.2 billion during that timeframe, could have instead been used to pay for roughly 5,000 additional homes for low income families.
California Forever, regional coalition push for federal designation to revive shipbuilding
CBS News – January 16
There is a new push by a coalition of regional stakeholders to revitalize shipbuilding in Solano County and the surrounding area, asking the federal government to designate the California Delta as a “maritime prosperity zone.” California Forever is the group of tech billionaires looking to build a new city of more than 400,000 people, an advanced manufacturing park and a shipyard in Solano County. The group is now the county's largest landowner.
CEQA cleanup bill withdrawn, delaying fix to industrial exemptions
The Sacramento Bee – January 12
Environmental justice and conservation advocates’ push to advance a bill aimed at strengthening California’s Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) stalled, as the measure was pulled from the January 12 hearing agenda. Assembly Bill (AB) 1083 would have rolled back some of the exemptions that Governor Newsom and the Legislature passed in June with Senate Bill 131. The exemptions to CEQA, a law that requires public agencies to identify and mitigate significant environmental impacts from their proposed projects, allowed “advanced manufacturing” projects to forgo environmental review.
“We’ve introduced a new bill — AB 1553 — to allow for more time to craft effective clean up legislation,” Assemblymember Damon Connolly, D-San Rafael said, referring to a placeholder CEQA bill introduced earlier this month that is expected to eventually carry whatever the negotiated cleanup language in place of AB 1083. Raquel Mason, a senior legislative manager at California Environmental Justice Alliance, described AB 1083 is currently in “intent language,” without the detailed policy provisions that will ultimately spell out how lawmakers propose to fix SB 131’s CEQA rollbacks.
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