State leaders discuss housing crisis

Acknowledging that California faces a crisis in creating housing for the state’s residents, a group of more than 300 business, nonprofit and political leaders from across California gathered in Petaluma, an epicenter in the affordable housing crisis, to discuss solutions.

“The region has a housing crisis,” said Petaluma City Councilman Mike Healy. He was joined by Bob Glover of the Bay Area Building Industry Association, who said the problem was statewide.

“California needs to build 100,000 new homes to meet the need that is already here,” said Glover. “We’ll need as many as 660,000 new homes in the next 25 years.”

Speakers noted that Sonoma County cities issued 251 building permits for single-family homes last year, which marked the lowest total in half a century. County apartment rents increased 30 percent in the last three years, and according to James Hackett, Sonoma County’s housing authority manager, the county has a vacancy rate of one-percent - effectively no vacancies.

A consistent theme permeated the Petaluma Sheraton during the North Bay Housing Summit; that the region’s changing workforce needed more housing closer to where people work. There was a general agreement that increasing densities and moving more transit into the already developed parts of the region were the answer. But the consensus was that development costs were too high, and government regulations - specifically the California Environmental Quality Act or CEQA - inhibit the development of new housing.

“CEQA, as crafted, is not working and has become outmoded in terms of how it is applied,” said keynote speaker Carol Galante, a professor of urban studies at UC Berkeley. “It focuses on individual projects and their impacts without a larger context of the needs of a community.”

Since its passage, CEQA has been the defining legal standard for development in California, requiring any project to satisfy environmental and legal conditions before approval by a local elected body. CEQA requires any proposed project to publicly disclose the environmental impacts a project will have on the community. It is intended to protect the public from bad environmental planning. But according to panelists at the summit, the law has stopped or slowed thousands of projects over the years due to law suits or the threat of law suits by groups opposed to a particular development.

“It has dragged out the process of development and that increases costs,” said Marina Wiant, policy director for the California Housing Consortium.

She was joined in her criticism of CEQA by several others in attendance, including Supervisor David Rabbitt.

“We have a housing crisis and we have an affordability crisis in this region,” he said. “CEQA encourages law suits and is one of the most abused acts in that regard. The idea of CEQA is a great one, in which people should be made aware of environmental impacts from any development project. But there is no such thing as a project that will have no footprint and CEQA should not be a tool to stop all projects from moving forward.”

No representatives of environmental organizations or groups were included in panel discussions during the summit. Supervisor Susan Gorin spoke during one segment and said environmentalists should not be blamed for slowed housing growth, since many of them were involved in the process of creating the current multi-use housing plans in downtown locations, such as Petaluma.

“We need to remember that we can’t just build our way out of this problem,” said Gorin. “It is not just a housing crisis. Water, infrastructure and low wages are also big problems which must be addressed. We need to elevate wages.”

California Save Our Forests and Ranchlands president Duncan McFetridge said attacking CEQA and other environmental laws was “a ruse” used by developers.

“CEQA has been under fire by development interests since it was enacted,” he said. “It is a false argument to blame CEQA for the housing shortages, since the real issue is creation of livable and sustainable communities. Good city planning should be the real goal.”

Healy and Rabbitt both noted that open space and greenbelts around the communities of Sonoma County were not the product of CEQA, but of political and voter decisions.

“CEQA doesn’t drive greenbelts,” said Healy. “Urban growth boundaries are decided by voters. There is no political interest in sprawl development.”

Healy said Petaluma had a “strong record” of creating affordable housing and that future housing would have to be built within existing developed areas. Rabbitt cited the current plans for housing projects near the Petaluma River and Caulfield Lane as an example of the type of housing projects that would work within the region’s desires for more transit-oriented housing without sprawl.

(Contact E. A. Barrera at argus@arguscourier.com.)