Housing
Housing is a hot topic for our community. It’s not about building or not building housing in Saratoga. It’s about how our City and community can manage housing growth within the current State Laws that restrict our ability to use local zoning and safety laws.
What is Saratoga’s housing problem?
Saratoga is struggling with the loss of local zoning control, just like other Cities. With Builders Remedy projects and the Housing Accountability Act (HAA), Saratoga no longer can set its own standards for where and how much housing will go into a given location. This has created tension and angst among residents with developers, that appear to be more interested in their financial benefit than concern for existing neighborhoods and wildfire safety concerns.
Housing is being built is Saratoga, it’s just a matter of where.
Here is a link to a sanjoseinside article. About 15 paragraphs into the article, it states: ”Saratoga tops the list of 15 cities in the county, with the state projecting its housing construction rates at: Very Low, 49%; Low, 93%; Moderate, 78%; Above Moderate, 74%.“
So, we are not doing so badly relative to other Cities and the State mandates.
What is Affordable Housing?
There are only two types of housing; Market Rate and Subsidized housing. You make housing “affordable” by subsidizing it. This subsidized housing is targeted for people that can’t afford Market Rate housing.
Housing Planning Experts will tell you that Subsidized Housing (actually any housing) should be built near good transit, shopping, education and jobs. They should be in walkable and bikeable areas. Build housing in places to enable communities so they don’t rely on car transportation as much.
There is not very much land left in Saratoga to build, using those types of parameters.
I do think Saratoga should participate in creating additional housing. I think we should go back to the rules that allow local control and community-based decision making about where and how much should be built. At the very least, we should be able to include Health/Safety issues and Wildfire Hazards into account when making decisions about where to build housing.
What can the Council do?
All Cities in California have been severely restricted in the actions they can take, to influence Builder Remedy projects. The ability to actively manage our local zoning rules have been restricted.
Even when the City is required to approve a project because of the HAA, the Council can at least discuss the issues with the projects. Ensure the residents, their voices of concern are being heard. Make sure they officially voice the issues, on the chance Sacramento is listening.
We need to get ahead of the next Regional Housing Needs Allocation (RHNA) Cycle. The City needs to ensure the next update to the Housing Element is approved by the State on time, so that we don’t get new Builders Remedy projects. And this is going to be tough. We haven’t seen them yet, but I assume that Sacramento will continue to change the parameters of what will qualify as an approved Housing Element. We should also push to have the RHNA methodology updated. Saratoga is not creating new jobs in the region, so why are our RHNA allocations so high?
What have I done?
Independent of running for the Council, I have been reaching out to elected officials and working to get targeted changes to the HAA. The specific change would be; when a jurisdiction, that has a WUI and High Fire Hazards; and has to make Statements of Overriding Consideration to approve an EIR; they should be able to include legitimate wild fire concerns when making those determinations.
Additionally, I have been trying to get the Santa Clara County Cities Association to take a position on this and to lobby the League of California Cities to take a position. Work to create a coalition of Cities across the State that have similar concerns. It will be a heavy lift to get this type of change to the HAA, but it will never happen if we don’t try.
What can residents do?
It is the California Senate and Assembly that are passing the laws to restrict the local zoning control from Cities. During any election cycle, residents should ask the candidates what they are willing to change in the HAA to take Wildfire Hazards into account for Builder Remedy projects.
We need to be contacting our State and Assembly elected representatives and let them know, we want to see targeted changes to the HAA. We believe that when a jurisdiction, that has a WUI and High fire Hazards; has to make Statements of Overriding Consideration to approve an EIR; they should be able to include legitimate wild fire concerns when making those determinations.