As cities and counties work to comply with new housing requirements in the Bay Area Regional Housing Needs Allocation (RHNA) plan, almost every appeal to zone for fewer units is expected to be rejected.
Twenty-eight Bay Area jurisdictions have filed appeals against the amount they are obligated to zone for in the newest RHNA, for 2023-2030. Those figures have increased exponentially in the Bay Area – and across California – as many places have failed to meet their previous RHNA numbers, Matt Regan, senior vice president of public policy with the Bay Area Council, told the Northern California Record.
“One of the principal causes of the problem is we don’t have enough land in California, particularly zoned at the right density,” Regan said. “SBA 828 and the new RHNA calculation will require cities to zone a lot more land for housing and zone it at higher densities, so right off the bat, you're going to be solving for one of the principal problems of the shortage, and that's a shortage of available land.”
Bay Area cities face a tough battle against state-mandated housing goals, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.
Under the collective statutes known as Housing Element Law, every city is required to adequately plan for its housing needs. The Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG) website states that Housing Element Law requires ABAG to allocate all of the 441,176 units assigned to the Bay Area by the California Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD) for the 2023-2030 RHNA cycle.
If a municipality is successful in its RHNA appeal, those units don’t go away; ABAG must redistribute them to other local governments in the region.
For the current RHNA cycle, 2015-2022, the Bay Area got 169,000 units.
“That was the total number for all 101 cities in the Bay area,” Regan said. “That’s what the RHNA projected, not what was built.”
SB 828 retooled how the base numbers are calculated.
Roughly halfway through the process for appealing the 2023-2030 numbers, all but one appeal has been rejected, Regan said.
Opponents argue that decisions about future housing developments should be made by local jurisdictions.
But that also has led to extensive legal action that prevents development and fails to solve the state’s housing needs. “There's something fundamentally broken when a family making $120,000 has to rely on subsidized housing,” Regan said.
RHNA is structured to be a projection of future housing need, based upon a calculation of job and population growth, Regan said, but has become driven by politics rather than actual data, resulting in severe under-planning that has priced people out of the market and exacerbated homelessness.
Especially when the market is expensive, it can be a hurdle to go from zoning to building, but that’s why there are now California laws like SB35, which is triggered by RHNA non-compliance.
Regan noted that while many projects don’t make it through the permitting process, that’s expected to change in coming years with SB 828 and more cities not meeting their RHNA numbers.
“The easier and more rapid and more certain you can make the permitting process, the better,” Regan said. “We still have a lot of work to do in the housing reform realm to solve this problem. We really need more tools in the box to meet those RHNA numbers; we need more money for affordable housing and we need more streamlining for market rate housing, but at least now we have honest projections of what our need is. And that's always a good place to start – when you're shooting at artificially low numbers you're going to always fail, so now we're starting to shoot at more honest numbers, and that’s going to give us a chance to succeed.”