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Authors: Tom Wheeler, EPIC; Colin Fiske, CRTP; Melodie Meyer, RCCER; Jennifer Kalt, Humboldt Waterkeeper
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There is a dire need for more housing in Humboldt County. Talk to a local renter or someone looking to buy their first home, and you’ll hear the stories. But where that housing goes is important to the environment and the economy. Do we want to cover our forests, fields and farms with more sprawl? Or do we want to see more housing in our existing communities? Right now, the Humboldt County Association of Governments (HCAOG) is considering a relatively obscure but important decision: how it should divvy up regional housing needs amongst various jurisdictions. This little-discussed decision will have big ramifications for the future of Humboldt.
Housing costs are fundamentally a question of supply and demand. Rents and home prices keep going up, and it’s often hard to find a home at all, especially in a neighborhood with jobs, schools, shops and recreational facilities. Just like in the rest of California — and much of the rest of the country — housing production has not kept pace with needs for decades. Renters end up squeezing into overcrowded homes with more roommates than they want, potential homebuyers keep renting because they can’t find a place to buy, and many people pay more than they can really afford for housing. In extreme cases, folks leave the community entirely or become homeless because there isn’t enough housing.
A lot of the decisions about where to build housing start with an obscure state-mandated process called the Regional Housing Needs Allocation (RHNA). Every eight years, the state assigns each region a specific number of new housing units in every income category, and requires local governments to make plans to ensure those homes are actually built. However, the region makes its own choices about how to divide the responsibility for those new homes among local jurisdictions. In Humboldt, a lot about the future of housing and transportation hinges on whether most of the homes will be built in existing job and service centers like Eureka and Arcata, or will be assigned instead to the mostly lower-density unincorporated areas of the county.
Thankfully, over the last few years, we’ve started to see significant progress in both Eureka and Arcata toward building some of this much-needed housing. From the Linc Housing and Wiyot Tribe projects in Eureka to Sorrel Place and the Yurok Tribe’s 30th Street Commons in Arcata, we are seeing more affordable housing planned and built than we have in recent memory. Crucially, these projects are all within walking and biking distance to many jobs and services, and served by multiple transit systems. This is what’s called “infill,” and it’s the kind of housing we need in order to make living in our region more affordable, improve health and safety and reduce climate pollution. (If you live in a place where a car is required to get anywhere, you almost double your effective rent when you add the costs of car ownership.)
But it’s not inevitable that future homes will be built in infill locations. The state issues Humboldt County as a whole, including incorporated cities, a set number of housing units it must plan for. HCAOG then allocates those targets to each jurisdiction in the county. HCAOG is currently asking for public feedback on its proposed formula for distributing housing responsibility among the cities and the county. Unfortunately, the proposed formula does not adequately address the economic or environmental needs of the region. In doing so, the formula would promote sprawl by over-allocating housing to be built in unincorporated areas rather than in incorporated cities.
The formula considers only two variables — existing population and existing jobs — and gives them equal weight. Locating housing near existing jobs is a good idea, and is correlated with several other important considerations, including greenhouse gas emissions, vehicle miles traveled, cost of living and equitable access to destinations. Locating housing near existing homes, on the other hand, doesn’t necessarily accomplish any particular goals. The existing population only tells you where people currently live; it provides no information about their living conditions, and certainly not about where they want to live.
We believe that the formula needs to be changed. Instead of population, the region should incorporate cost burden, vacancy rates and overcrowding directly into its formula. Other state-mandated considerations, including municipal sewer and water availability and the housing needs generated by Cal Poly Humboldt, should also be incorporated. And jobs should receive more weight, since that is such an important factor in meeting both environmental and equity goals.
Changing the formula as we suggest would likely result in more housing responsibility being assigned to Eureka and Arcata and less to the county. That’s a good thing. Eureka and Arcata are great places to build housing, unlike most county lands. The demand is already high, especially in Arcata, where prices make housing out of reach for many who work or go to school there. And building more housing in town will allow people to reduce their cost of living and their environmental impacts by increasing walkability, bikeability and access to high-quality bus service.
Over the last century, most local homes were built on former agricultural and wild lands, sprawling further and further from downtowns to places that are hard to access without driving. There is a lot of pressure to continue that kind of development. It took years of effort by tribes, public officials, planners and advocates to make projects like the ones we mentioned above possible, and they regularly face fierce backlash.
Don’t get us wrong: there are good places to build more housing in the unincorporated county, including places like McKinleyville and Myrtletown. But where most of the county’s land does not make for affordable, environmentally responsible development, almost anywhere in Eureka or Arcata does.
If you agree with us, now’s the time to speak up. You can learn more about this crucial issue, including how to submit a formal comment, on HCAOG’s website.
Don’t be deterred by all the numbers, models and acronyms. At its heart, this is a simple issue of where new homes should be built: on farmlands and forests, or in existing towns near jobs, schools and services. We think the choice is obvious, and we encourage you to join us in speaking up.