The date on today’s paper is Jan. 5. Over at Big Pink, as we call the Marin County Civic Center, it’s the day a beleaguered Planning Commission is expected to put a final stamp of approval on the 2023 update of the state-mandated Housing Element and send it to the Board of Supervisors for adoption.
This round of Housing Element updating is Cycle 6, and it includes new state requirements that have unleashed a torrent of objection and anguish from one end of California to the other. More specifically than in the past, Cycle 6 attempts to kickstart a gargantuan increase in the number of housing units to be built in California over the next eight years.
I’ve been monitoring the tortuous progress of Marin County’s effort to comply with the challenging mandates enshrined in Cycle 6. I’ve also been thanking my lucky stars I wasn’t directly involved, as I was for the two previous cycles of Housing Element updates. Those occurred during my 13-year tenure as West Marin’s representative on the Marin County Planning Commission.
To give you a feeling for what changed between Cycle 5, which opened in 2015, and now, the county’s responsibility during Cycle 5 was to foster the construction of 185 new units of housing in the unincorporated towns and neighborhoods. Astonishingly, the new cycle increases the county’s obligation by almost 2,000 percent, from 185 units to 3,569 units. And that’s just in the unincorporated area of Marin; the county’s 11 cities and towns are tasked for an additional 10,836 units, bringing the countywide total to 14,405 new residences. Population-wise, that’s roughly equivalent to adding four new towns the size of Fairfax.
This all stems from something called the RHNA, an acronym pronounced “Reena,” for Regional Housing Needs Assessment. It’s the state’s approach to planning for the development of the new housing needed across the state by fragmenting the process into 540 separate plans, one to be created by each of the state’s 58 counties and 482 cities and towns. The RHNA assigns to each county and municipality a specific number of new dwellings it’s expected to ensure can get built during a cycle.
Of course, no county or city is expected to build the housing itself; that approach was attempted on a grand scale during the middle of the last century, and it didn’t turn out very well. The RHNA is based on the theory that all it takes to get the mandated housing built is for each county and municipality to adjust its zoning and housing policies so that private developers will come running, competing to build the required dwelling units, including, especially, affordable housing.
Has that worked? Let’s look at the just-completed Cycle 5 to see how Marin satisfied its requirement for 185 new units between 2015 and 2021. The county’s unincorporated communities saw 254 new units built during the cycle, or 143 percent of the RHNA mandate. However, almost two-thirds of those new units were market-rate housing. Of the 124 units of affordable housing the county was supposed to usher into existence, only 93 were built (75 percent of the mandate), and 76 of those were accessory dwelling units. Depressingly, only one affordable single-family home was built, against 140 market-rate single-family dwellings.
The flaw in the RHNA approach (sez I) is the belief that new housing can be legislated into existence. That’s appealing to legislators because they don’t have to make tough decisions, like allocating money to actually build the new housing. Instead, they’ve wimped, forcing the counties and cities to do the heavy lifting. And they specify draconian penalties for failing to do the job to the satisfaction of the bean-counters at the state’s housing department.
How will West Marin be affected by the Cycle 6 documents the Planning Commission is scrutinizing today?
The county’s “final” list of sites for new housing during Cycle 6 assigns 453 new units in West Marin, down from 492 in an earlier draft. The list breaks down the allocation to 370 affordable units and 83 market-rate units. The areas most targeted for the new housing are Point Reyes Station at 156 units, including CLAM’s 50-unit Coast Guard project, Tomales at 118 units, the San Geronimo Valley at 81 units and Olema at 56 units.
Smaller numbers are proposed for Nicasio (16 units), Stinson Beach (13 units) and Bolinas (13 units). No sites are identified in Dillon Beach, Inverness, Inverness Park, Marshall or Muir Beach.
How do I feel about the state’s chosen method of resolving what it characterizes as “a housing supply and affordability crisis of historic proportions”? I think it reflects an abject failure of imagination on the part of the state’s leaders, legislators and bureaucrats. After decades of ramping up failed RHNA mandates, hasn’t it become obvious that they simply don’t know what to do? In their intellectual vacuum, they’ve fallen back on the device of kicking the can down the road to the state’s 540 counties and municipalities. These counties and municipalities are supposed to spur the construction of new housing by gutting zoning standards and promulgating new development-friendly policies at the local level.
Does it make sense to burden Marin County with the bureaucratic redundancy of 12 separate RHNA allocations in 12 separate Housing Elements, one for each of the county’s 11 municipalities and one for the unincorporated area? Is it realistic for tiny jurisdictions like Ross and Belvedere, which are essentially already built out, to accommodate additional dwelling units? And let’s not even get started on the glossed-over issues of environmental constraints, availability of water for new residents, traffic congestion and the exposure of even more people to such threats as wildfire.
Finally, there’s the perennially embarrassing fact that in past cycles, most jurisdictions that managed to satisfy their RHNA mandate did so with an oversubscription of market-rate housing and a significant deficit of affordable units.
Today’s Cycle 6 is a done deal that we’ll have to live with. My hope is that someone at the state level will come to their senses before Cycle 7 rolls around and realize that a statewide problem, which the state itself acknowledges is of crisis proportions, must be solved by the state itself—comprehensively for the entire state, not piecemeal by the counties and cities.
Wade Holland has been policy wonking from his home in Inverness since 1970.