Most SoCal Towns Ignored Deadline for Affordable Housing Plans

Nearly two-thirds of Southern California’s municipalities failed to meet an Oct. 15 state deadline—the second deadline the state has given them this year—to revise their housing plans to bring them in line for affordable housing goals that must be achieved by 2030.

The missing plans from Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino county governments as well as 121 SoCal municipalities, cover about 474K homes these towns have been ordered to plan to build by 2030.

On the brighter side, 73 SoCal jurisdictions—including Los Angeles, Long Beach, Santa Ana, Irvine, Ontario, Riverside, Fontana, Moreno Valley, Irvine as well as Ventura, Imperial and Los Angeles counties—have filed and received state approval for plans to build nearly 1M of the 1.3M in new affordable housing units the state has mandated by 2030, about 65% of the total.

The housing plans are required in accordance with the planning cycle mandated by California’s Regional Housing Need Allocation (RHNA) process, which establishes and enforces affordable housing goals in the state.

Under state law, municipalities must file plans to meet RHNA goals every eight years; the plans originally were due in February 2022, but a toughening of the rules for compliance appears to have backfired on California’s state lawmakers.

State lawmakers voted late last year to tighten the timeline for any rezoning that follows the housing element filings for cities that failed to meet the February deadline, trimming the rezoning timeline from three years to one. But when the February filing deadline hit, an estimated 97% of SoCal’s local governments ignored the deadline. The state legislature then gave them a second chance to comply: it restored the three-year rezoning window for towns that complied with an Oct. 15 filing deadline.

As of this week, the state Housing and Community Development Department has declared 121 SoCal cities and the counties of Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino “doubly non-compliant” for missing the February and October deadlines.

The municipalities and counties that missed the deadline must now get state approval for housing elements and rezoning concurrently to be in compliance; they’ll face potential sanctions, including a loss of state funding, if they fail to do so, according to a report in the Orange County Register.

Municipal governments without an approved housing plan and completed rezoning can lose access to state housing and transportation grants, have less control over future development and face the risk of lawsuits and fines, the newspaper reported.

A realtor-backed non-profit known as California for Homeownership has sued nine SoCal cities that failed to win state approval for their housing elements.

“This is moving into a new phase of the process,” Matthew Gelfand, an attorney for the group, told the Register.

“If you want to achieve housing element compliance, you now have to do both your housing element and rezoning at the same time,” Gelfand said.

The housing plans, which can run into hundreds of pages, outline where and how new low- and moderate-income housing can be built, creating an inventory of sites where developers can build new homes. Once the housing element is adopted, governments must rezone land to ensure there’s enough land for the new affordable and market-rate housing.