New assembly bill could make it easier to build affordable housing
SACRAMENTO — A new California assembly bill could make it easier for developers to build affordable housing.
"The matter is we have 163,000 homeless people every night on our streets here in California, and it's absolutely not acceptable," said Assemblymember Buffy Wicks (D-15).
"It converts commercially zoned areas to be used for residential," she explains. "Think about your kind of dilapidated strip malls. Those can be converted to low-income or mixed-income housing."
A developer can bid on an underdeveloped piece of land zoned for commercial use. If that bid is successful and the developer wants to build affordable housing on the parcel, AB-2011 would allow for a streamlined process that bypasses certain permit approvals and relies on ministerial control to fast-track the process.
"[It] allows for much quicker, quicker approval for housing, and when you talk to folks who build housing, for some of them, they're waiting, you know, 3,4,5,6,7 years just to break ground," says Wicks. "In up to a decade to start to build the housing is just it's not excusable."
"This is one of the only mechanisms that would allow for a low-income housing," she continues. "And we think it would happen on such a mass scale that it wouldn't cost taxpayers money."
But the bill does have some resistance.
Livable California, a group that advocates for local city planning control, has been characterized by housing advocates as a "NIMBY" group, saying, "Ministerial approval of construction across such a broad category of zones is inappropriate office, retail, and parking."
The group also raised concern that power was being taken out of elected officials' hands and into city employees' hands, bypassing CEQA and raising construction costs.
Wicks and other bill supporters, ranging from the Carpenter's Union to AARP, say this is more practical than discussing single home vs. multifamily zoning policy.
"That should not interrupt people's feelings around who's going to be my neighbor necessarily right next to me, right?" Wicks said. "This is commercially zoned areas. So I think we will hopefully avoid some of those pitfalls or those fights that you've seen in other housing bills here in California."
Ray Pearl of the California Housing Consortium, another bill supporter, agrees.
"We can no longer piecemeal housing," mentions Pearl. "What this bill says is the entire state needs to say yes to housing, and we want to do it in the least intrusive way as possible."
"We want to put affordable housing and mixed-income housing on those sites is opening up a ton of space for potential housing developments," he includes.
Pearl points out that while elected city officials may be bypassed in a streamlined process to grant housing permits and change the zoning, the assembly members and legislative members pushing the bill through the Capitol are also elected officials.
Both Pearl and Wicks also tell CBS13 that they don't believe this type of development won't affect well-performing shopping centers, consistently used parking lots, or successful commercial sites.