California housing policy is no longer city oriented. Want to build a project? Cry to Sacramento, they will send letters to your city council announcing a lawsuit. That was done to Huntington Beach, which is fighting it and to Simi Valley, which caved to the Fascists of Sacramento. Simi Valley was forced to allow a 278 unit project that will cause traffic problems and way too big for the land available. T is a slum in the making.
“AB 2011, authored by Buffy Wicks, an East Bay Assembly member, and passed by the Legislature last week, rezones commercial areas on major boulevards for three-to-six story residential development. And it permits those buildings “by right,” meaning they will not be subject to discretionary reviews from neighbors or lawsuits under the California Environmental Quality Act. All told, the bill could enable the construction of more than 2 million new homes.
In other words, the State of California, not your city will create zoning! That is called Fascist—local control of the second most important job of a city is going to bureaucrats in Sacramento rather than your locally elected council members. Why vote for city council if all they can do is cut ribbons and issues worthless proclamations?
New law represents ‘seismic shift’ in California housing policy
By Benjamin Schneider, SF| Examiner, 9/8/22
A new state law would allow developers to convert strip malls and office parks into apartment buildings — in a policy change that could produce far more housing than last year’s high-profile effort to end single-family zoning in California.
AB 2011, authored by Buffy Wicks, an East Bay Assembly member, and passed by the Legislature last week, rezones commercial areas on major boulevards for three-to-six story residential development. And it permits those buildings “by right,” meaning they will not be subject to discretionary reviews from neighbors or lawsuits under the California Environmental Quality Act. All told, the bill could enable the construction of more than 2 million new homes.
In essence, the bill legalizes mid-rise apartment buildings in the heart of urban and suburban communities across the state and speeds up the development process considerably by removing procedural obstacles. And it does so at a time when cities and property owners are rethinking the amount of land devoted to retail and office space.
The bill also includes “prevailing wage” labor standards and health care requirements in a bid to improve conditions for construction workers. The bill awaits the signature of Gov. Gavin Newsom, who is expected to sign it.
“It has the potential for a seismic shift,” Wicks said of her bill. “My hope is that in five to 10 years we have transformed a lot of our communities in California. Where we used to have empty strip malls, we have multifamily housing with commercial on the ground floor, walkable communities where people can pop down to the cafe to get some coffee or go to the grocery store right there in their neighborhood.”
Wicks’ bill will allow major arterial roads across the state, like El Camino Real on the Peninsula and San Pablo Avenue in the East Bay, to evolve into “ribbons of density,” said Peter Calthorpe, a world-famous urban planner who advised on the bill. “Transforming those into truly livable, sustainable communities is a huge paradigm shift. And I think it’s a really healthy one.”
AB 2011 represents the realization of the “grand boulevards” strategy Calthorpe has been advocating for years. The idea is to solve multiple urban-planning problems at once: redevelop obsolete strip malls and office parks, increase housing supply, bolster public transit and create vibrant new retail corridors supported by all the new residents who live within walking distance.
“It’s a huge resource that ribbons its way through our communities, and it’s everywhere,” Calthorpe said. “Every community, rich or poor, has space for medium density infill along its corridors.”
Calthorpe’s company, Urban Footprint, produced a report that found the bill could enable the construction of between 1.6 and 2.4 million homes. Thanks to the bill’s 15% affordability requirement, up to 400,000 of those homes would be deed-restricted affordable units — all created without public subsidy. (In cities with higher affordable housing requirements, like San Francisco, local standards would apply.)
By comparison, a study by UC Berkeley’s Terner Center for Housing Innovation found that SB 9, the law that ended single-family zoning in California last year, would produce about 700,000 total units, almost all market rate.
AB 2011 would also be an environmental boon, Calthorpe’s study found. Compared with residents of new subdivisions in the suburban hinterlands, households in the new buildings produced by the bill would use 40% less water, drive 33% fewer miles and produce up to 45% fewer greenhouse gas emissions.
Wicks’ bill barely squeaked across the finish line due to opposition from organized labor groups, who foiled similar bills in recent years. While the Conference of Carpenters supported Wicks’ bill, the larger Building and Construction Trades Council did not.
The trades had hoped to insert language requiring a “skilled and trained” workforce, a synonym for union membership. But bill supporters argued that the state does not have enough union construction workers to build all of the housing it needs, and that the bill’s “prevailing wage” and health care provisions amounted to a major improvement in labor conditions for the majority of construction workers.
When it became clear last month that AB 2011 would pass, the trades dropped their opposition and instead focused their attention on supporting a similar bill, SB 6, authored by state Sen. Anna Caballero. That bill also allows residential development in commercial zones, albeit at somewhat lower densities, and without exempting projects from CEQA.
SB 6 requires a “skilled and trained” workforce but does not require any affordable housing. In practice, developers hoping to redevelop strip malls will get to choose whether to go with a union workforce by using SB 6, or dedicate some of their project as affordable housing by using AB 2011.
With the labor conflict dominating media coverage of AB 2011, “the NIMBYism conflict didn’t get as much oxygen,” Wicks said. That marks a contrast with SB 9, which was met with heated opposition from local control advocacy groups and many suburban city governments. “The politics of this issue is changing dramatically,” Wicks said.
The fact that the bill didn’t touch residential neighborhoods also made it an easier pill to swallow. “We’re primarily talking about commercial corridors that are underutilized, blighted and not economically viable,” Wicks said. “The idea of transforming that into multifamily mixed-income housing is appealing for people.”
Wicks was also able to gain support from city governments through research that showed AB 2011 would actually increase local tax revenues.
While Calthorpe is gratified to see his grand boulevards concept coming to fruition, “the housing is just half of the vision,” he said. “We need to enhance those streets with bike lanes, transit, street trees and all the great stuff that really will make it into a grand boulevard.”
