Bay Area zoning policy to increase housing advances

A new policy that will dramatically increase the number of homes Marin County and its 11 municipalities must zone for has moved a step closer to approval.

The executive board of the Association of Bay Area Governments, or ABAG, voted this month to proceed with a new methodology for deciding how many homes counties and municipalities should be required to plan for from 2023 to 2031.

Every eight years, the state Department of Housing and Community Development projects how much new housing will be needed in the Bay Area to accommodate expected population and job growth. ABAG then decides how many of those homes to assign to each county and municipality in the Bay Area. Local jurisdictions are required to adjust their zoning laws to help make the creation of that amount of housing possible.

“There is a lot concern, because the estimated numbers are so high for many of the counties and cities, including Marin, which has over 14,000 housing units allocated to it during that time frame,” said Marin County Supervisor Dennis Rodoni, who sits on the ABAG board.

The board voted 23-10 on Oct. 15 in favor of moving forward. Marin, Contra Costa and Napa counties advocated delaying approval of the methodology so an alternative could be considered, but that proposal was rejected by a 24-9 vote. Rodoni said the alternative would have reduced Marin’s housing allocation by 38%.

In past years, enforcement of the ABAG zoning changes has been lax. Things could be different this time. Assembly Bill 101, which became effective at the end of July 2019, authorizes the state attorney general to sue jurisdictions and levy fines ranging from $10,000 to $600,000 per month.

All of Marin’s municipalities except for Fairfax sent letters to ABAG voicing their concerns about the new methodology.

Novato Councilwoman Pat Eklund, who also sits on the ABAG executive board, lodged her opposition at the meeting. Eklund said the approach would end up assigning much of the housing to areas that lack jobs and quality mass transit.

“It’s only going to exacerbate greenhouse gas production,” Eklund said.

Eklund noted that under the new methodology, Belvedere will be required to zone for 160 new residences compared with the 16 it was assigned in the current cycle.

“It’s an island in the bay,” Eklund said. “Where will they put that 160 units?”

There is one primary difference between the methodology that was approved at the meeting and the alternative that was rejected.

The approved methodology combines the number of existing households in each jurisdiction with the number of households expected to be added over the next several decades when projecting the need for new housing. The alternative would have used only projected growth.

While similar, the two approaches result in significantly different patterns of allocations.

San Pablo City Manager Matt Rodriguez, who presented the argument for the alternative methodology, said the approved plan “assigns a startling, drastic number of housing units to small and rural communities in the far reaches of the Bay Area subregion.”

Rodriguez said the plan would primarily benefit two counties, Santa Clara and San Mateo, at the expense of nearly all others in the region.

“These are the same counties that have had the largest housing deficits over the past decade,” Rodriguez said.

Dave Hudson, a San Ramon council member and member of the executive board, spoke in favor of the alternative methodology. Hudson said it is projected that two-thirds of the new jobs produced between 2015 and 2050 will be located in either San Francisco, San Mateo or Santa Clara counties.

“If you’re going to show that two-thirds of all the jobs are in three counties,” Hudson said, “you need to show that two-thirds of all the housing is going into these three counties.”

But Maya Esparza, a San Jose city councilwoman supporting the plan, said, “Alternate methodologies brought forth at this point really undermine the objectives of bringing in fair housing, addressing equity.”

The approved methodology is aligned with a “high resource area” strategy contained in the Plan Bay Area 2050 blueprint. In an effort to address concerns about racial equity, the latest iteration of Plan Bay Area identifies “high resource areas” near public transit where it recommends that increased housing development should be promoted.

The designated areas contain amenities associated with childhood development and economic mobility such as low poverty rates and high educational attainment, employment rates, home values and school test scores.

The incorporation of “high resource/opportunity areas” into Plan Bay Area’s equation is mandated by Assembly Bill 686, which requires that counties and cities implement the Obama-era policy of “affirmatively furthering fair housing.”

In an email, John Goodwin, a spokesman for the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, wrote that the approved methodology “performed better on equity criteria, including those related to the new legal requirement to ‘affirmatively further fair housing.’”

Speaking at the October meeting, Eklund said that it makes sense to assign housing to high opportunity areas that have high quality transit but not to areas where people have to wait a long time for a bus to arrive.

“No one is going to wait 30 minutes for a bus to go to the office; they’re going to drive,” Eklund said. “That is going to increase greenhouse gas emissions.”