What would I like to see more of in California Housing Elements?
Notes from Housing Element season
California Housing 8 : Where We Go From Here 11
Housing Elements are the housing component of General Plans in California, which are required by law for all counties and municipalities. Housing Elements (HE) must be updated every 7 years as part of the Regional Housing Needs Assessment (RHNA) process in California. Most jurisdictions in California are somewhere in the process - from drafting plans to waiting for certification from the State’s Housing and Community Development Department (HCD) to actually enacting changes. While this is an old process, it comes with many new expectations - including Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) - and much stronger enforcement teeth this cycle.
I include links to resource guides and explainers at the end of the post.
It’s peak Housing Element season in the Bay Area.
Most jurisdictions across the region are scrambling to get housing plans drafted and through public review before submitting them to HCD. Some have posted draft plans for review, or in a few cases submitted their drafts to Sacramento. Advocates are busy pushing for policies they’d like to see, commenting on what is in plans and what is not. Community outreach continues in many places. Commission and Council agendas are now full of updates and draft language and staff reports. City staff, and the small network of consultants and subcontractors who do most of the writing and research and outreach and facilitation, probably feel like accountants in March.
I’ve written about RHNA as a researcher, but this cycle is different. As a citizen of Oakland, and a member of two housing organizations, I’m trying to participate in outreach efforts and to comment on draft plans. As one of those consultants, I’m being paid to help a jurisdiction make a better plan, and working to help some advocates advocate for better plans.
This means I’ve read a lot of draft plans, a lot of letters about plans, seen a lot of information on needs and constraints and sites and all the parts of the plan that are required by law.
Let’s be real here - this is a very frustrating process. But this isn’t the time or place to reflect, and especially not to criticize. I promise you that I will come back with serious ideas for reforming this process, when the time is right. But this is the process we have, and our goal as housers should be to focus exclusively on getting the most out of the Housing Element process as possible, and writing the best possible plans.
So what would I like to see more of in Housing Elements? What can enterprising jurisdictions do to be better? What should advocates push for that perhaps they may not currently? What kind of feedback should people give to jurisdictions? What do I hope HCD will do?
Please don’t read the below as an exclusive list. Housing Elements are meant to be incredibly comprehensive, stretching to hundreds of pages of analysis and ideas and plans. I don’t talk much about sites or zoning or LIHTC housing or fair housing- these are critical, but my sense is that if you are reading this you probably know this already. Check out NPH’s Housing Element Guide, the Home for All San Mateo toolkit or Campaign for Fair Housing Elements for more detailed asks on these vital housing issues.
Below are the ideas that I don’t see enough of, the ideas that I think can help plans be more accessible, the ideas that go above and beyond state law. And if you are already doing this in your plan? Fantastic - let me know!
Better analysis of progress from the last Housing Element - and of existing programs and policies. Housing Elements are required to analyze what has happened since the last plan 7 years ago. But so many plans I see treat this as a check-box exercise, doing very little real analysis of what has been done - whether implementation of the previous plan, or whether any current programs or policies are working. Plans just say ‘ongoing’ or offer up a short paragraph of thoughts written quickly, and jump to new ideas and plans. This is one of those little things that makes it so frustrating to do planning - every plan feels like starting over. While HE’s will surely lead to some new programs or policies, most will change existing ones. To me, this part of the plan is as important if not more important than all the analysis of needs, constraints, etc. that are also mandated.
Tell us more about what the jurisdiction has and hasn’t done, and what’s working and not working.
Be more explicit in policies and programs about how they connect to previous HE goals and programs.
Better communication of key ideas and plans, so that it is easier to understand and give feedback. All the plans have goals, programs, policies. But so few that I see connect them all clearly. Don’t make advocates and citizens and busy professionals dig. Don’t make us do the work to connect all the dots. Here are some ideas of what to do:
Why not use tables (like the AFFH section requires) for connecting goals to programs and policies? The AFFH requirements force plans to clearly show the link between problems and solutions in a table. This would be good for the whole plan.
Visualizations of big ideas and plans would be super helpful. Even if you don’t have Alfred Twu on retainer.
Put hyperlinks in all documents so that I can easily go from one section to a related section without having to search.
Put key ideas up front so that it is easy to read. If I am interested in tenant’s rights, I should be able to quickly see if a) it’s a goal, b) whether there are any concrete plans to address it.
Make more sections web-based. I know it’s too late for most of this, but some of you can do something. PDFs are so frustrating.
Use online GIS to allow folks to zoom in and see sites. Give us permanent access to the tools ABAG has built. Don’t make us zoom in on a PDF to look at a site!
More real commitments to real collaboration beyond municipal boundaries. No jurisdictions have the capacity to do all the things that need doing - not even the big cities. Yet so many plans I read give little attention to making real plans and commitments here.
Commit to working with and supporting the Bay Area Housing Finance Agency (BAHFA), a new regional effort that is being set up and can potentially be a game-changer, especially for smaller jurisdictions. Housing finance is the lowest hanging fruit for regional collaboration on housing. There is no excuse for jurisdictions to go it alone with housing trust funds, in-lieu fees or any other aspect of housing finance. If you are serious about financing more housing with local funds, do it through a new professional regional agency.
County Housing Elements should make clear commitments for how the county will be a leader in getting locals together. County Housing Elements can’t just look like municipal ones for the unincorporated space. There needs to be real leadership here. Look at San Mateo’s 21 Elements, and push beyond it.
Municipalities should commit to collaboration outside its boundaries, and name the organizations it plans to work with. They should also call on the County to be a leader - and make it clear that when the county does lead, it will support.
Is there a subregional collaboration that doesn’t exist but could be useful? Great, name it.
More attention to transforming the development industry. Housing Elements are not (just) land use plans. Zoning is not our only constraint. Plans are not limited to what public agencies can (currently) do. For actual homes to come of this work, plans must address the limited capacity of our development industry. Working together with regional and county-wide collaborations (see above) and with the vast development industry, we must transform how housing is built and who builds housing. This is essential if we are going to transform who housing is built for and at what price. Plans should include ideas for :
Growing capacity of local non-profit developers, and for transforming established social service agencies into housing organizations when appropriate
Addressing the struggle of small and BIPOC-owned construction businesses, and building programs to support them
Addressing the challenges with growing and sustaining a construction workforce, including plans to increase training and apprenticeships and collaborations with organized labor and the industry
Ways to counter the limitations of being dependent on large outside for-profit developers to see anything happen on the ground, including building new hybrid local developers, including ones based on social housing models.
Just straight committing to social housing - i.e. a model of housing where the government plays a more active role as a developer.
More attention to homeownership, resident-controlled and housing tenure. Who owns all this housing matters. We need a bolder vision for resident-controlled housing, and we need to put this vision in our plans.
Make real commitments to growing Below-Market Rate (BMR) homeownership and any safe form of homeownership for middle and lower income households.
Find ways to create more smaller unit opportunities that are affordable by design (i.e. condos, townhouses, etc.)
Build real capacity for community land trusts, co-housing and other new forms of resident-control like Permanent Real Estate Collaboratives or Mixed-Income Neighborhood Trusts
Examine possibilities for addressing who owns housing in land use plans - i.e. bonuses for developments that don’t end up in corporate or large investor hands
Build creative programs to make more small-scale multifamily homeownership possible (stay tuned for my next post on this!).
Develop programs to enable low-income homeowners to add units to their properties, or even tear them down and build something new and nice, without having to sell out and leave the neighborhood.
More attention to larger developments, corridors and specific plans. Over the past decade, we’ve made a lot of progress on small-scale, small lot housing. ADUs are on another plan compared to a decade ago. SB9 is a political football, but the plans I see are at least talking about it. This is great. Where we’ve gone backwards or stagnated is in larger development opportunities.
Build in specific calls for Specific Plans which can coordinate development and infrastructure in areas with numerous sites.
Find ways to replace redevelopment, through Enhanced Infrastructure Finance Districts or other tools that can bring new resources to districts and areas with a lot of potential for housing.
Find ways in which Transit-Oriented Development funds can be leveraged to create new housing/transit nodes
Develop a real plan for commercial conversion. Every jurisdiction in CA has some old strip mall, underutilized commercial corridor, or old light industrial district. AB2011 - which may or may not become state law this year - is designed to push cities to add housing to these spaces. Why wait for the state? Make this happen.
If you have a really large site, push for regional and state resources to make the development better - more affordability, more transit access, more public space.
Pursue HCD Pro Housing Designation. Sacramento recently became the first city in CA to get this (underpublicized) designation from the state, which enables cities and counties to get bonuses towards certain funding. It’s a great goal for jurisdictions to include in Housing Elements.
Build in clear steps toward Pro-Housing Designation, including identifying which of the criteria you intend to meet by which date.
Anti-displacement. This is the one thing that many others are saying, but it can’t be said loud enough. Housing Elements have to protect people + find ways to build more housing.
Commit to the strongest possible tenants rights, including Just Cause eviction laws. We need to eliminate pathways to evict people just to make more money.
Pay attention to the plight of low-income homeowners, who are at serious risk. Build real programs to help them, including ones that add units to their land and stabilize them.
Go above and beyond. I never thought that all my years of teaching at universities would help me so much in practice, but this process is giving me flashbacks. So many of the plans I see read like papers or exams written to the exact requirements - a solid B+, just like I got 90% of the time in college. But what any good professor should want is for students to really see the paper as an opportunity to push themselves forward. Be creative. Take some chances. Try to do something real, not just an exercise.
I am very sympathetic to the reality here - jurisdictions need to pass a test they don’t fully understand, consultants need to deliver a product that will pass the test, and the only thing that folks know is that the test is waay harder than before. I get that. But what HCD should want and what advocates should insist on is that the plans really push housing forward. I have yet to see a plan that really gets an A, that blows us away with its ambition, courage and creativity, and that ultimately is designed to actually meet the challenge we face.
I hope these ideas help. Let me know if I can help more.
Housing Element Resources
State Government
AFFH Data Viewer - good way to see segregation and other issues in your area
HCD Annual Progress Reports Data - ways to check on how your jurisdiction is doing in meeting its RHNA Goals
Regional Government
ABAG Analysis of Southern California Housing Elements and AFFH experiences (What ABAG staff think HCD is doing)
Advocate Guides
Non-Profit Housing Association of Northern CA Housing Element Guide
Other Data Resources:
California Housing Partnership: Housing Needs and Affordable Housing tools