Housing law removes local 'discretion' on building - Sonoma Index-Tribune
A new housing law from the state legislature will reduce the discretionary authority of local planning commissions, legal consultants told Sonoma city officials last week.
Though to what degree the law will impact the City of Sonoma remains to be seen.
The law, Senate Bill 9, or the California Housing Opportunity and More Efficiency (HOME) Act, was the subject of an Oct. 20 joint meeting among members of the Sonoma City Council, Planning Commission and Design Review and Historic Preservation Commission. The public meeting allowed the City’s legal counsel to detail the potential impacts of the new law and to field questions about its potential implementation.
Introduced by state Sen. Toni Atkins (D-San Diego), SB 9 allows property owners to split their residential parcels into two lots – to either add a second home or replace the existing residence with a pair of duplexes, resulting in four units – in the hopes of incentivizing the development of affordable housing units in residential neighborhoods.
The law comes with several caveats: The parcel must be a minimum of 2,400 square feet and zoned for single-family residential development, it can’t be in a historic district (or be historic itself), and it can’t be in a rural or high-fire zone.
Additionally, a split lot under SB 9 cannot require the demolition or alteration of current affordable housing, nor can it displace established renters.
Under the bill, cities and counties are required to approve such split-lot proposals as long as they meet size and design standards – effectively removing any oversight by city and county planning commissions. It is among dozens of housing-relief bills introduced by the state legislature in recent years in an attempt by lawmakers to mitigate the state’s housing crisis.
Sonoma City Attorney Jeff Walter at the meeting described the potential cumulative effects of the “monumental number” of pieces of housing legislation coming out of Sacramento as “game changing” for local municipalities.
“One of the principal purposes of (the legislation) has been to significantly reduce the discretionary authority that the council and its subsidiary commissions have in acting upon housing development projects,” said Walter. “They erode seriously on the ability of the council and commissions to exercise discretion untethered to what are considered objective development standards.”
Leading the SB 9 presentation at the meeting were land-use attorneys Gary Bell and Ryan Reed, both colleagues of Walter in the firm Colantuono Highsmith Whatley PC, which specializes in municipal law and contracts with Sonoma to provide city attorney services.
Bell said that about 60 housing bills have been introduced during the current legislative session and the “overarching theme” of the legislation has been to reduce local control, streamline so-called “ministerial approval” of projects, increase the number of units on existing lots and lower or eliminate environmental impact fees.
“The legislature is taking housing seriously,” said Bell. “This is a top priority for them.”
He highlighted the concept of ministerial approval, which he defined as the opposite of discretionary approval. “Ministerial approval requires no discretion, you apply a check-list of requirements to the facts of the application in front of you — yes and no answers and objective standards — and if the requirements are met the public official and city staff have a ministerial requirement to approve it,” Bell said.
Discretionary approval, on the other hand, requires discretion and judgment from elected officials. “They’re essentially asking, is this a good idea? These require your objective standards based on personal experience,” Bell said.
The seeds of almost all the new housing legislation stem from the Housing Accountability Act (HAA), passed in 1982, which pushed municipalities to apply objective standards to most housing proposals, said Bell.
According to the department of Housing and Community Development, the HAA means that local governments may not “deny, reduce the density of, or make infeasible housing development projects, emergency shelters or farmworker housing” that are consistent with objective local development standards.
“This is where they’re focusing most of their efforts on changes to local control,” Bell said about the legislature.
As for the impacts of SB 9 itself, attorney Reed parsed it down to the difference between three units previously allowed on a split lot to the four allowed under the new law.
According to a study by U.C. Berkeley’s Terner Center for Housing Innovation, the number of single-family residential parcels which are newly eligible for lot splitting under SB 9 in Sonoma County is about 2,688. And of all eligible parcels under SB 9, only about 5.4%, or 145 properties, of those would find it feasible to consider a lot split given the cost of development, among other factors.
source: https://www.sonomanews.com/article/news/housing-law-removes-local-discretion-on-building/
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