Santa Clarita City Hall is hosting a discussion focused on affordable housing Tuesday, after years of lamenting how state laws have eroded the city’s local control on its reviews for such projects.
The agenda for the 5 p.m. City Council study session calls the talk, “An overview of affordable housing programs and policies at the state and local level, including available funding sources the city can use to support and expand affordable housing opportunities.”
City Manager Ken Striplin said the goal is for a discussion to “guide future efforts and to prioritize funding,” in affordable housing.
The city has a relatively small allocation for such homes in the area, a little over 5,100 homes, particularly compared to the greater Los Angeles County area, which has more than 340,000 assigned under the Regional Housing Needs Assessment.
As city officials have pointed out, those are homes in all categories that could be built, based on the city’s zoning, not specific categories that have to be built.
Lately, it’s come up during Planning Commission and City Council discussions that Santa Clarita has no official policy toward affordable housing.
When developer New Urban West wanted to see about paying the city money as an “in-lieu fee,” meaning it would pay money in lieu of building the affordable homes in a plan, the city cited two problems: The money offered, about $800,000, wasn’t nearly enough to significantly subsidize the dozens of affordable units to be built elsewhere; and even if the city accepted the money, the city has never studied such a fee, so it had no basis for setting one or a plan for spending once it did.
During that discussion, city officials also mentioned that two of its “benchmark cities,” i.e. cities Santa Clarita uses for comparison in economic studies, including Glendale and Thousand Oaks, have policies that include an in-lieu fee for developers.
These could all be avenues for discussion Tuesday, although there are no specifics of the meeting agenda mentioned in the public notice for residents.
The agenda for the meeting does note that there’s an allowance for public comment, but the study session notice — which invites the city’s commissioners, the City Council and the public — is budgeted for one hour prior to the city’s 6 p.m. Planning Commission meeting down the hall in Council Chambers.
There are several analyses from the Legislative Analyst’s Office, a 75-year-old nonpartisan fiscal and policy adviser, that note lawmakers’ targeting of local governments’ approval procedures for housing projects, particularly affordable ones. The analyses for laws like Senate Bill 35 and SB 330 mention local officials’ ability to kill such housing projects through procedural delays is contributing to the state’s housing shortage.
A recent CalMatters analysis also reported that despite a handful of laws intended to streamline the approvals process, including Senate Bill 9 and Assembly 2011, there haven’t been a lot more affordable projects being approved or built.
But the new rules and regulations are expected to change the conversation in Santa Clarita on Tuesday.
Tracy Sullivan, city of Santa Clarita community preservation officer, indicated during a recent interview that staff also are awaiting council direction on how to spend the roughly $3.5 million the city is expected to receive from Measure A. The voter-approved replacement for Measure H is a half-cent sales tax that sends approximately $21 million in revenue to L.A. County each year to fight homelessness and create affordable housing.
