Stop, Drop and Roll

06 September 2007 | Alameda Community, Alameda Community Development Forum, Measure A | John Knox White

Nothing strikes fear in the heart of all right-thinking Alamedans than the words “housing element.” It almost seems as if there are teams of people (albeit very small teams) who sit around preparing for this once every seven year process.

Alameda’s current housing element is one of 6 out of 109 bay area cities that is out of compliance with the state (but more on that later).

The process is state mandated, and is intended to make sure that there is some planning around housing issues and that all jurisdictions do their “fair share” to accommodate affordable housing. During my quick search to see which cities provide useable PDFs, the PDF I found from Piedmont was a great, concise overview of this issue (and of Piedmont’s concerns about having to build….wait for it….26 affordable housing units as a part of this process).

I’m going to rely heavily on their memo, because it does such a great job of explaining the process. The full text can be found here.

The overview of the process is this:

“State law requires each city and county to use the RHNA numbers as the foundation for their Housing Elements, the chapter of the general plan addressing affordable housing and other housing issues. Failure to have a state-certified Housing Element has a number of financial and legal consequences, including the potential loss of state funds…”

“…The RHNA for each jurisdiction is calculated using a complex methodology that considers such factors as projected growth, the local jobs-housing balance, available land in each city, water and sewer capacity, and market demand. The methodology for the 2007-2014 assignments was developed with input from jurisdictions across the region…”

“,,,ABAG released the RHNA numbers to jurisdictions for review and comment on July 24, 2007. Comments are due by back to ABAG September 18, 2007.”

Interestingly, cities are not required to “Build” this housing, just show that the could,

“State certification of the Housing Element is not based on the actual construction of affordable housing, but rather proof that the opportunity to construct such housing has been provided in the community.”

Within this process, each city is assigned numbers for housing the must show they could build, if they wanted to of course. These assignments are “segmented into four income categories”:

Very low (under 50% of areawide median income)1
Low (50-80% of areawide median income)
Moderate (80 to 120% of areawide median income)
Above Moderate (over 120% of areawide median income)

This process is going to be made all the more interesting, because the city’s planning department has managed to co-mingle the planning board “measure a forum” with the housing element discussion. The two are certainly linked, and the housing element process is required to hold a public meeting to gather input. Unfortunately, by mixing the two meetings into one, it’s quite possible that neither will reach their fullest potential. The housing element discussion is going to bog down into a discussion only about Measure A, and the Measure A discussion is going to try and conform to the needs of the housing element.

In coming days, we’ll talk about Alameda’s numbers, and how ABAG generates them.