BY ELAINE GOODMAN
Daily Post Correspondent
After being hit with hefty increases to their housing quotas in the latest eight-year state planning cycle, Bay Area cities should prepare for potentially even larger quotas in the next planning period, regional officials said.
The size of the quotas, and other changes due to new state laws, were discussed last week during a meeting of the Association of Bay Area Governments, a regional planning agency.
“We are bracing ourselves for what is coming,” said ABAG President Belia Ramos, who is also a Napa County supervisor.
The state gives ABAG a housing quota for the nine-county Bay Area; ABAG then divides that up among the region’s cities and counties. The quota for cities and counties is known as the regional housing needs allocation, or RHNA. The quotas are also broken down by the homes’ affordability to residents of different income levels.
In the 2015-23 planning cycle, the Bay Area’s housing quota was 441,176 new homes, compared to 187,990 in the previous cycle.
In Palo Alto, the housing quota was 1,988 units in the 2015-23 planning cycle. That number tripled in the 2023-31 cycle, to 6,086 units.
The city has issued permits for 811 new housing units so far in the 2023-31 period, or 13% of the quota.
Reasons for the increase
ABAG said previously that the Bay Area’s housing quota jumped because the state started including existing housing shortages, rather than just additional housing needed in the future. The state also had to factor in overcrowded households, those paying more than 30% of their income for housing and a minimum vacancy rate of 5%.
For the next planning cycle, a few factors could boost the Bay Area housing quota even higher, said Darin Ranelletti with ABAG’s regional planning program.
For one, the state will now factor in the housing needs of homeless people when it calculates the region’s housing quota. And the state will compare the Bay Area’s rate of overcrowding and people spending a large share of their income on housing to national averages, rather than to figures in similar regions.
“Due to changes in state law … the regional number for the Bay Area may in fact be larger than last cycle,” Ranelletti said. “ABAG and local jurisdictions should be prepared for an even larger (regional quota) which could result in larger allocations to local jurisdictions.”
After receiving the regional housing quota from the state, ABAG forms a committee and works out a formula for dividing the regional quota among cities and counties.
New state laws have given ABAG climate-change-related factors to consider when assigning quotas. Those include evacuation route capacity, wildfire risk and sea-level rise.
If one city’s quota is reduced due to climate factors, those housing units will be assigned elsewhere in the region, noted Ramos, the ABAG president.
“That doesn’t mean the number’s less,” Ramos said. “That means it’s going somewhere else.”
The state Housing and Community Development department is expected to issue its new housing quota for the Bay Area in early 2028. ABAG will start working on its method for dividing the regional quota next year.
Even though not much is happening yet in regard to housing quotas for the next planning cycle, Ranelletti said ABAG is giving a preview now because the quotas are a hot topic.
The penalty for cities
Some city representatives who attended the ABAG meeting wondered what happens if a city doesn’t make enough progress toward meeting its housing quota during the planning cycle.
Ranelletti said if that’s the case, developers can use a streamlined process for multi-family housing projects that include affordable housing.
If a city has fallen behind on its quota for lower-income and above-moderate-income housing, a housing project must include 10% affordable units to qualify for the streamlining.
If the city is behind on its lower-income housing quota, but not its above-moderate-income quota, a housing project must include 50% affordable units to be eligible.
The streamlining provisions were included in Senate Bill 35 by Sen. Scott Wiener in 2017. In 2023, another Wiener bill, SB 423, extended the sunset date for SB 35 for 10 years, until Jan. 1, 2036.
Absolutely disgusting that ABAG and MTC — 2 bodies withOUT elected representatives can do so much to ruin this area with outdated quotas they bar us from reconsidering for 8 years even while the economy is changing so drastically.
Do we get quota reductions when Oracle lays off 21,000 workers, when Meta lays off 10,000, etc etc?
Of course not. This makes no sense when builders want to add monstrosities like what’s planned for the Sunset site with a hotel, more offices, lots more offices, a shopping center etc etc that will dump tens of thousands of new cars onto roads and provide pathetically few “affordable” housing units.
But it’s a great time to be a developer or a developer-paid politician spouting meaningless platitutes about how minorities want to live in studio apartments and no one wants/needs cars to get to work because everyone — kids, grandmas, emergency vehicles etc etc — should be biking.