What About the Housing Element, What’s Next?
Great question!
As many of you know, we have been engaged in the Housing Element process at every stage. Our board and membership have written numerous letters, attended nearly all meetings of the Housing Element Working Group, and provided public comments throughout the process. Our perspective on the City’s Housing Element was most comprehensively in an extensive letter shared with the City and the California Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD) in December 2022.
HCD provided a comment letter on the Housing Element to the City last March, which detailed important changes for the City to make to ensure compliance with state law. The City responded with changes to the Housing Element. We are grateful to staff for their hard work on the updates. We recognize that this is not easy work, and we understand that staff are operating under many political and operational constraints/demands.
As of May 8th, the City has elected to move forward with adoption of the updated Housing Element, which it hopes has satisfied HCD’s requests and is compliant with state law. While we believe that many of the changes are helpful and applaud staff for their work, we believe that more meaningful changes would give us a compliant and effective Housing Element that will actually result in the construction of housing. In particular, we urge the City to:
Align zoning standards with those that are financially feasible for development. There is a significant gap between the City’s zoning and the financial reality of housing development, as demonstrated by past housing approvals which required significant deviation from zoning standards. Further, the City has hired consultants to study the economic feasibility of base zoning but has not released the study.
Address key concerns about the City’s new analysis of physical feasibility. For example, the City’s site inventory includes 4,195 units (69% of Regional Housing Needs Allocation [RHNA]) on sites that lose at least 50% of their square footage allowance once an 11th unit is added to the site. This is something we are calling the “floor area ratio cliff” and it affects the majority of City zoning designations, which means the site inventory has vastly underestimated unit capacity of sites.
Mitigate other governmental constraints on housing, such as timelines and CEQA. The City’s Streamlined Review Process has not expedited housing projects, but could be effective with robust changes to our outdated zoning rules. This could also expedite the environmental review process by allowing the City to take advantage of streamlining provisions.
Update site inventory to solve data errors and other issues with sites. We have flagged these issues for the City and they generally involve simple math errors, lack of evidence/analysis of the potential for the housing conversion assumed in the inventory (for example - the Safeway on Middlefield Road in Midtown is identified as a housing site), and unit capacity assumptions that conflict with the base zoning.
What’s Next?
HCD is reviewing the adopted Housing Element and will provide additional comments to the City to address. We look forward to reviewing the comments and seeing how the City responds.
We believe that it is still possible to have a legally compliant and effective Housing Element, and we look forward to working with the City and HCD to make any necessary changes to ensure a stronger, more vibrant Palo Alto.