The Irvine Company to Build Housing on Infill Sites

The City of Irvine is teaming up with a developer to build up to 4,500 apartments on five infill sights in the city, and it’s a firm with a name that resonates in the city: The Irvine Company, which is based in Newport Beach.

According to a report in the Orange County Register, Irvine (the city) and Irvine (the company) have reached an agreement to develop 4,536 units—a quarter of them affordable—on the infill sites as part of the city’s Housing Element plan to meet the state target of building 23,600 homes in the City of Irvine by 2029.

Under the terms of the company’s agreement with the city, Irvine Company will pay the city a public benefit fee of $14,500 per unit. The infill sites, which the city says are either vacant or underused, are adjacent to the Discover Park, Market Place, Spectrum, Los Olivos and Technology Drive developments.

The Discovery Park infill site encompasses 29 vacant acres once planned for commercial use, the newspaper reported. At the Market Place shopping center, Irvine Co. will replace 15 acres of vacant stores with 1,261 apartment units.

At Spectrum, an office campus, the company will convert 15 vacant acres; at Los Olivos, housing will be built on 10 vacant acres next to an apartment complex;

Under the target given to Irvine by California’s state housing agency, 15,000 of the new homes to be built by 2029 will be designated affordable, reserving them for households earning less than local median income.

California has put some teeth into its housing targets this year by applying builder’s remedy—a state override of local zoning authorities—for housing projects in city’s that fail to get approval from the state housing agency for their Housing Element plans.

This week, the state filed a lawsuit against Huntington Beach, which last month adopted a ban on approving applications for builder’s remedy projects, seeking to strike down the ban as a violation of the state’s housing law.

The Orange County city responded by immediately filing a federal lawsuit challenging the state’s requirement that Huntington Beach rezone neighborhoods to make way for more than 13,000 new housing units.

In its lawsuit, filed last Thursday, the state asked for a preliminary injunction to prohibit Huntington Beach’s ban from taking effect while the case is adjudicated, the Los Angeles Times reported.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta, at a news conference announcing the lawsuit, said Huntington Beach’s ban had “infringed on the rights of property owners.”

“California is facing an existential housing crisis, one we should all be acting in unison to solve,” Bonta said. “Instead, the Huntington Beach City Council has chosen to stifle affordable housing projects, infringe on the rights of property owners and knowingly violate state housing law.”

Huntington Beach Mayor Tony Strickland held his own press conference, at which he said the state is “not serious about producing more housing.”

“Their goal is to urbanize quiet private property-owning communities,” Strickland said, according to the Times report. “This lawsuit filed by our city attorney today is the first major step in taking the governor and the state to task over their faulty narratives about housing and their unconstitutional legislative and administrative means of stripping charter cities of their ability to make their own decisions.”

The lawsuit sets up the first major legal challenge to builder’s remedy, which is being imposed by the state on cities that fail to submit an approved housing growth plan.

Builder’s remedy is a legal remedy, created in the 1990s, that can be invoked to allow developers to bypass local zoning requirements—any kind of city zoning or planning approval process—essentially a state override of local authorities that now is being invoked in what the governor is calling a housing emergency.

The measure approved last month in Huntington Beach blocks building applications for housing construction filed under builder’s remedy on the grounds that the construction could “adversely impact public safety and the environment.”