Cities try to block state push for housing – Orange County Register

People of a certain age may remember Mad magazine, a comic book that has lit up almost everything for over six decades.

One of Mad’s more famous and enduring works is “Spy vs. Spy”, created by Cuban-Cuban artist Antonio Prohías. In a word, two characters, one in black and the other in white, will try continuously to outdo each other but both can never win.

The political and legal battle over housing, which splits the state of California against its 400 cities, is reminiscent of the eternal duel between those two comic book warriors.

State enacts laws and regulations to force cities to accept the construction of more affordable housing, especially to serve low- and middle-income families, and cities that oppose laws and regulations localities to evade their housing quota.

While the state appears to have the upper hand when it comes to bridging the yawning gap between supply and demand, it must be said that the cities have been remarkably successful in evading their civic responsibilities and the law. because the construction did not meet state requirements. goal.

In theory, California should produce 185,000 units a year to meet current demand and eliminate backlogs, but it rarely produces half that number.

City officials, responding to residents’ aversion to high-density housing, employ all kinds of tactics to discourage development, such as imposing specific requirements that make projects impossible economically viable or demarcate unwanted land for housing.

As new anti-housing tactics are introduced, the state will tweak laws and regulations to discourage them, but cities are just finding new ways to preserve the status quo.

One of the state’s newest pro-housing approaches, embodied in legislation enacted last year and effective last month, allows for up to four housing units to be built on land that is planned for single-family homes. City officials denounced Senate Bill 9 as it passed the Capitol, arguing that it usurped their traditional land rights and would change the character of their neighborhoods. .

However, now that SB 9 has become the law, cities are trying to figure out how to remove, or even cancel, its impact in true Spy versus Spy fashion.

For example, just before the law went into effect, Pasadena issued an “emergency ordinance” that imposed tight and potentially unenforceable rules about what could be built.

These include an 800 square foot limit on new apartments, a one-story height limit, a requirement for one parking space per new unit, landscaping standards, and a moratorium on short-term rentals. In general, they can make SB 9 authorized development economically prohibited.

Woodside, a very affluent area on the San Francisco Peninsula, wins the award for the most innovative way to thwart SB 9 – backing a petition asking for mountain lions to be declared threatened and declared species the entire town is inhabited by mountain lions and therefore unsuitable for housing.