It’s hard to find examples of success in the State Housing Mandate program because there are not many. It’s a program that does not work, but rewards bureaucrats and developers. Those who favored or spoke in favor of high density rezoning in recent county meetings were mostly landowners and bureaucrats whose job depended on the programs’ continuation. Many bureaucrats are the staff employees the supervisors depend on for information.
After all these years of this state program, why is this program not providing low-income housing? If it was working, long ago, we would have met the needs of low-income folks. The answer to this question starts in Sacramento and continues into the bloated bureaucracies that have been created in each county to administer these state mandates.
State mandates on housing have been pushed by development lobbyists in Sacramento. Lobbyists have crafted legislation that few of us will speak out against, supposedly requiring us to first take our fair share of state growth and next wanting us to provide affordable housing for the needy among us. On the face of it, these are commendable goals that we should all support. A program that requires rezoning to high density, but does not in reality require low-income housing, has not made significant gains for the poor among us. Housing mandates have actually fueled excessive state growth, rather than being a response to growth.
For many years, more people have been leaving the state than moving into it. Without illegal immigration, California’s population growth is actually stagnant. State bureaucrats are using their own census data and disregarding U.S. census data that shows an accurate picture. With stagnant population growth, who said we should have 17,000 new houses every five years in each coastal county? Bureaucrats tell us the needs, but they ignore the fact that California now leads the nation with 144,061 people leaving the state each year.
Today, in the north end of Santa Barbara County, we see the end result of mandates: new housing, but hardly priced for low-income folks, sitting vacant in Orcutt and Santa Maria. For a time, Santa Barbara County seemed about to get a handle on subsidized housing when it found from two reports that it was not working. The lottery system was in disarray, so-called low-income purchasers were actually renting the units out to others, and the county failed to collect $350,000 in fees from builders who chose not to build subsidized housing in their developments. Perhaps it’s time to suggest some other kind of approach to Sacramento, such as low-interest state subsidized loans for low-income folks to purchase and fix up homes that now sit vacant.
The current approach can be called only a dismal failure as it has not provided significant housing for the needy. When developers are selected for rezoning to 20 units per acre, they must yell, “Eureka! I have won the lottery!” The counties and cities are required to only rezone, not to actually build low-income housing. After time, the low-income housing built reverts to market price. Low-income families would have to have units that sell for $175,000 or lower to qualify, and builders have a hard time providing homes as low as $300,000 to $400,000. It is useless to mandate 20 units or more per acre to satisfy low-income needs when this just results in the cost and value of the land to increase. Windfall profits are generated when developers can sell condos for $650,000 or more on the land selected to rezone to 20 units per acre. The high price of land and construction along the California coast makes this approach useless.
Elected officials tell us they favor affordable housing, but attending an allocation meeting is like watching lawyers argue about how many perpetuities will fit on the end of a pen. None of them wants it in their district. Our elected leaders need to stop the discussion of how to divide up the allocation from the state and start to discuss how to fix a broken system that encourages excessive growth. Now that this round of allocations is over, and each supervisor does not have to deal with his or her constituents, perhaps it would be a good time for the Board of Supervisors to deal with the next five-year cycle of allocation and confront the state on this issue. m
Ken McCalip is a Orcutt native who holds bachelor and doctorate degrees in history, cultural geography, and law from various California universities. Contact him at foxmt.one@verizon.net.
This article appears in Apr 2-9, 2009.