Housing crisis demands action

Petaluma’s housing crisis is bad and getting worse, yet public officials are showing remarkably little initiative to do much about it.

A couple weeks ago, a group of more than 300 business, nonprofit and political leaders gathered in Petaluma, an epicenter in the affordable housing crisis, to discuss the problem and potential solutions. The problem was easy to identify. Apartment rents have increased 30 percent in the last three years and the county has a vacancy rate of one-percent - effectively no vacancies.

Here in Petaluma, the average rent for a one-bedroom apartment is now $1,700 per month, a price that is out of reach for many middle class workers. But the high price doesn’t really matter much if there are no homes or apartments to rent.

Local businesses are feeling the pinch by not being able to find employees for available jobs. It just does not make sense to commute two hours to work in Petaluma.

Speakers at the housing conference noted that Sonoma County cities issued just 251 building permits for single-family homes last year, which marked the lowest total in 50 years. When demand increases but supply remains stagnant, prices rise. That’s exactly what’s happened with housing costs in Petaluma.

Increasing the supply of local housing is the singularly most effective means to help solve the problem, and Petaluma does have a limited amount of developable land zoned exactly for that purpose. Yet despite adoption of an urban growth boundary many years ago with promises to focus on city-centered growth, not sprawl, Petaluma has done little in recent years to encourage affordable housing development. Traditionally, Petaluma officials had always made construction of low- and moderate- income housing a high priority.

Not anymore. Today there exists a huge gap between the very limited supply for low- and moderate-income housing and the burgeoning demand for it.

Solutions discussed during and after the conference included amending zoning laws to increase housing densities; easing restrictions on certain types of housing, particularly senior housing and so-called “granny units;” reducing development impact fees for smaller units; and providing public funding, loan guarantees and tax breaks for development of low-income housing. There was also a general consensus that the California Environmental Quality Act, or CEQA, was being abused by anti-development activists and should be reformed by the state legislature.

CEQA was groundbreaking state legislation when it passed in 1970. Its mandate was simple: any proposed project that could alter its surrounding environment would require an independent report on the project’s plan for mitigating that environmental footprint. But according to panelists at the conference, the law has been misused to stop thousands of legitimate projects over the years due to lawsuits or the threat of lawsuits by groups opposed to a particular development.

The law’s strict environmental review process, made more complicated in the four decades since its enactment, means it is relatively simple to challenge developments via claims of flawed EIRs. Today, CEQA-required environmental impact reports are frequently used to tie up housing proposals in the courts. It’s a move less about genuine environmental concerns than simply a tactic aimed at draining developers of time and money - and ultimately the desire - to see such projects through.

Many longtime champions of CEQA are now coming around to the idea that all too often its environmental protection ethos is being used as a property values protection ethos by those “conservationists” most interested in preserving their own quality of life in and around their property limits.

At the housing conference, in fact, Supervisor David Rabbitt called CEQA “one of the most abused acts” to come out of Sacramento.

“The idea of CEQA is a great one - in which people should be made aware of environmental impacts from any development project,” Rabbitt said. “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.”

Clearly, CEQA needs an update by the state Legislature.

But until that happens, anti-growth activists will continue to abuse the law for their own purposes. It doesn’t matter if existing zoning laws allow for a housing development. Opponents will say the project is too big, will obscure their views or will generate too much traffic. Those with housing (whose homes, incidentally, were also built by developers), are often more interested in keeping others out.

City officials have an opportunity, and an obligation, to ensure that more affordable housing units are constructed so that low- and middle-income people, including seniors and young families, can continue living in Petaluma.

We need them to act now.