AUDIO:

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TOM WHEELER:

Welcome to the Econews Report. I'm your host this week, Tom Wheeler, Executive Director of EPIC, the Environmental Protection Information Center. Joining me is my friend and colleague Matt Simmons.

MATT SIMMONS:

Hey, Tom. How's it going?

WHEELER:

It's going. And we also are joined by the Director of Baykeeper, Jen Kalt. Hey, Jen.

JEN KALT:

Hey, how's it going?

WHEELER:

It's again, it's going. I think it could be going better, but we have unfortunately a new land use initiative being brought forward by Security National and Rob Arkley that would radically change land use in Eureka. And that's what we're going to be talking about today. I don't like it at all. And so I could be doing better if this didn't exist. So let's get into what they're calling the City of Eureka Housing for All and Downtown Vitality Initiative and what I will be calling the NIMBY Initiative. Okay, Jen, as I understand it, this isn't the first time that Rob Arkley has pulled this trick, which is he doesn't like the way that a democratic decision has been made by our elected officials. And so he goes and pays for a ballot initiative to be created and put before voters. This is before my time, but this is something that you've worked on and probably lost a lot of sleep over. But Measure N. Tell us about the balloon track and Measure N and some of the history behind this tactic.

KALT:

Okay, well, basically, the balloon track is a former rail yard, it's in the coastal zone in Eureka. Rob Barkley bought this property just when the city of Eureka was going to get a grant from Humboldt Area Foundation to do a public process to ask the community of Eureka, what do we want to do with this property? It's zoned for public facilities, so railroad, hospital, school, that kind of thing is what you could do there, the way it's zoned today, and the way it has been zoned since zoning was invented. Baykeeper sued over a really bad cleanup plan, so we sued to block basically stirring around a bunch of contamination without actually cleaning it up.

WHEELER:

This again was the site of a former rail yard where these sorts of chemicals were being transported. It was diesel spilling from the trains as well. It was a heavily contaminated site. It's the balloon track, not tracked with a CT, but with a CK, because there was a balloon track, which is where trains could turn around and reposition themselves coming different directions. So it was a heavily industrialized parcel, as I understand it.

KALT:

That's right. And until the 1940s, it was a tidal wetland that was part of Humboldt Bay and Clark Slough. So it was a very important nursery area and still is for Dungeness crabs. And it was filled in the 1940s and turned into a railyard. What that means is there's lots of connection between the surface water and the bay today because of all that wetland fill that's on the site. So back to the ballot measure, what Rob Barkley Jr. did was he paid for the city of Eureka to put Measure N on the ballot. Measure N was intended to change the zoning to allow basically a mall with a Home Depot as the anchor. So not an allowable use in the coastal zone where there's lots of wetlands. And so it was pretty much dead from day one. But it became this huge campaign and the city voters in Eureka voted to approve Measure N to change the zoning to allow for this Home Depot shopping mall.

WHEELER:

As a Eureka resident, I know that there is not a Home Depot there today.

KALT:

Or there is a shopping mall.

WHEELER:

I continue to shop at other hardware stores. So if he rezoned it, if this initiative passed, why isn't there the development that that was kind of scheduled or anticipated?

KALT:

Well, the property is in the coastal zone, which means it's in this case, because of the wetlands, it's appealable to the Coastal Commission. So the city, in fact, did rezone the property, they voted to rezone it, they had an environmental impact review for the Marina Center shopping mall, etc. But Humboldt Baykeeper and Epic appealed the plan to rezone it and it never went any further because basically, if you have a project that gets appealed to the Coastal Commission, you have to follow through and take the next steps to figure out how you're going to get that project approved. And it's just been sitting on the shelf ever since. So Measure N was a huge hullabaloo, many, many hearings and commercials and money spent on all kinds of campaign materials and sweatshirts and stuff. And it just amounted to absolutely nothing because it doesn't have any teeth. Just

SIMMONS:

Because you change the zoning of a property doesn't mean something will actually get built there because there could be other things stopping the project from happening.

WHEELER:

listeners, that's what's called foreshadowing.

KALT:

Before we continue, I just want to make the point that the balloon track never was cleaned up either. So it's just been sitting there all these years, leeching into Humboldt Bay, who only knows what metals and all kinds of stuff.

WHEELER:

Well, that's super duper. So I think that we can see some kind of recurring themes from, from this past experience, right? With what we're dealing with now, which is you have somebody who has a significant degree of wealth that enables them to go and pay for and do things that are otherwise not possible to us, ordinary mortals like pay for a ballot initiative to be created and written by lawyers and pay for somebody to potentially collect signatures and pay for a campaign to get the thing that you want done. And that, that line of thinking is behind this NIMBY initiative here. So I want to talk about what is included within the new NIMBY initiative that was served to the city of Eureka just a couple of days ago. And presumably in a short period of time, the petitioners will start collecting signatures to try to get it passed in the 2024 election. I'll do a brief overview of what it does. If you live in the city of Eureka, you know that the city is attempting to build housing, affordable housing on city-owned parking lots. And why are we trying to build it on these city-owned parking lots? Because the city actually owns that land and can ensure that it is released for development. These are like relatively poorly utilized public lands because they're just being used for temporary car storage. They are also not very well utilized for that car storage. We've had numerous parking studies done before and after the pandemic that show that they aren't meeting their utilization rate as we would want to have them be used. They will be released for housing development. We have three that have been released to Link, which is a nonprofit housing developer, and two that were recently awarded to Dishkama Humboldt, which is a tribal land trust organized by the Wiyot tribe for the purpose of affordable housing creation. They're doing the thing that we want them to do, which is to become affordable housing because we have a severe and acute housing shortage in Humboldt County, which is driving up housing prices. Eye of Sauron has turned on us because one of the parking lots that was proposed for development is Fifth and D, which is near the security national headquarters and security national employees would routinely park in this parking lot. So Rob Arkley became mad about this. That is the genesis of this ballot initiative. So here's what the ballot initiative would do. It would prohibit the development of these parking lots for anything but parking. It would create a new what's called overlay zone that would say it must be used for parking unless the voters through another initiative were to overturn it to make it seem like they're not just going after affordable housing. They would also have this other thing, which would rezone. It would create a new overlay zone on what's called the Jacobs parcel, home of the former Jacobs middle school in South Eureka, a 14 acre parcel, a new overlay zone that would allow for dense residential development there. It would allow for the same kind of residential development that is already allowable in our downtown core. So this is pretty big, pretty dense development up to a hundred feet tall in what is otherwise a single family residential neighborhood.

KALT:

So this is city parking that's free?

WHEELER:

This is free city parking. So currently the city of Eureka does not have any paid parking. We have some leftover parking meters. The city doesn't actually enforce those parking meters at the moment. There is a new plan. The city of Eureka just last night, Tuesday evening, approved a new parking management plan where it would potentially experiment with paid parking in the future. Yeah, these are all free parking lots that the city expends money to maintain and does not collect any revenue to keep. So these are lost assets.

SIMMONS:

And Security National employees have been parking there for free, and so we've been directly subsidizing Rob Arkley's businesses by giving all of his employees free parking at the city.

KALT:

That's true. Why doesn't he just buy the parking lot?

WHEELER:

Well, that, that's a complicated one because the parking lot is slated for development. There are other parcels that he could buy and create parking on, but why buy something when you can have it for free? Right. I think that that is fundamentally the motivation. We have this, this thing. So we're going to down zone in one area. We're going to say you can't build residential housing on these parking lots. And on the other hand, we're going to upzone. Matt, what's the problem perhaps in, in upzoning the Jacobs site? Why, why is this not kind of a one for one trade?

SIMMONS:

So I want to be clear, I have no problem with upzoning the Jacobs site. Yeah, same here. I think it's a good idea. I don't think it's a one-for-one trade, because as we talked about earlier, just because you rezone something doesn't mean that the thing you zone for there will get built. There's no guarantee at all. Whereas the sites that we're talking about actually already have developers lining up to build affordable housing on them. So you're taking a certain thing, new affordable housing getting built in the downtown core, and trading it for a purely hypothetical, maybe someday someone will want to build some housing over in this new rezoned area.

WHEELER:

I think it goes deeper than that still, one additional layer. So the city of Eureka controls the parking lots. It can release those for housing development. This site is owned by Eureka City Schools, which is a distinct separate political entity. The city of Eureka has attempted to purchase the Jacobs site from Eureka City Schools and Eureka City Schools turned down the city of Eureka in the past. The city of Eureka has no control over this site. Even if we rezone it, it's still up to the whims of Eureka City Schools on what to do with the site. There is not a reasonable likelihood that these rezones would actually result in new housing. And that is going to matter legally for the city because it would likely invalidate our housing element. Matt, do you want to talk about what a housing element is and why it's important to this conversation because it fundamentally shapes why the city of Eureka was releasing these parking lots in the first place.

SIMMONS:

As everyone listening to this is aware, the state of California has a terrible housing crisis. And one of the responses to that housing crisis has been a series of requirements from the state of California to all the local jurisdictions throughout the state to build more housing. One of those requirements is that every jurisdiction or every city have a housing element that explains how they are going to build more housing in order to meet their housing demand. Eureka has a housing element that was approved in 2019, I want to say. That housing element specifically says, we will take the city-owned parking lots and release them for affordable housing. And that will build the necessary affordable housing for us to meet our state mandates. We said we would do it back in 2019, we're finally getting to it now in 2023.

WHEELER:

And let's let's talk about why parking lots, why is this our strategy? Because the city has control over these sites, what some other jurisdictions might try to do is they might try to say, oh, we're going to rezone all these different properties. And we're going to expect that natural market pressures are going to result in development. That's what's

SIMMONS:

Happening with the Arcadia Gateway Area Plan.

WHEELER:

Exactly. We don't have that kind of development. We already have pretty loose development rules in Eureka because we want to see housing get built, but it's just not getting built. What ended up happening was the city of Eureka worked with Housing and Community Development, a state agency that regulates housing elements. And they came up with this plan where if they were to offer land for free, that then would be able to allow for this housing to be built. Because low-income housing, affordable housing, it's not getting built because there's going to be market pressure, right? We're not going to be able to put these units online for $1,600 for a one-bedroom, which is kind of the going rate for an apartment in Eureka these days. This is using different mechanisms to get housing built. It's a lot more difficult. And so having land for free is one of those necessary requirements for this to get built in the city of Eureka. And this is a political compromise that was shaped over many years between HCD, the state agency, and the city of Eureka.

SIMMONS:

I'll also just say there's like environmental reasons why we want to replace parking lots with housing. Yeah, let's go into those. Driving around a car produces greenhouse gas emissions and also other emissions that are bad for our health. And so everything we can do to reduce vehicle driving and vehicle ownership is a really important environmental goal. Building housing downtown where people can walk or bike or take transit to all the things they need to do severely reduces our emissions and it also allows more people to live that kind of lifestyle. When you are preserving parking lots, you're also preserving people driving and people producing all those emissions. And so this ballot initiative is actually, will have a really negative environmental impact by encouraging driving and keeping car dependency.

WHEELER:

Yeah. The Econews report, we're talking about Rob Arkley's new NIMBY initiative that would spike affordable housing development in Eureka. And a comparison between the parking lots in this Jacob site, right? The downtown parking lots, which we anticipate or hope will be developed into housing are actually on existing bus lines. They are located in the area that has the highest percentage of people living without cars in Humboldt County. So people are already kind of self-sorted. And this is the area, as proved by people living there, that it's possible to live without a car. It is a closer walking distance to grocery stores, including grocery stores that are, we sometimes kind of think about for poorer folk, like Grocery Outlet. It is a much shorter walk to a grocery store from parking lots in downtown Eureka to Grocery Outlet than it would be from the Jacob site to Winco. So there's all these reasons why these sites are kind of better suited for affordable housing.

KALT:

Well, the other really huge issue from an environmental perspective is that they're already parking lots. They're already heavily impacted. These are not natural areas. It's not agricultural or timberland. And the alternative is to build more housing in the outskirts of Eureka, like the North McKay track subdivision or whatever it was called, where they just clear cut this incredibly productive redwood forest to build a bunch of tract housing on big lots. No, maybe it's not all on big lots, but these are parking lots. It's not a wetland. It's not a forest.

WHEELER:

Yeah, so again, the parking lots were part of a long term political compromise between Housing Community Development, a state agency and the city of Eureka, they were released because they are good for development, they are on bus lines, this is kind of the environmentally good thing to do. That's why the environmentalists are coming out in full support of this program, the trade would be worse for folks who are living there, it's more inconvenient, it's more out of the way, it's further from jobs, it's further from resources. There's also a legal cost to do all of this. So housing elements are required. As Matt said, every jurisdiction has to have a housing element. If you don't have a certified housing element, there are a lot of consequences. So first off, there are economic consequences, the state can start restricting grants and must restrict some grants if you do not have a certified housing element. So the city of Eureka is currently pursuing lots of different grants that would be no longer available to the city if this were to pass.

KALT:

Yeah, some of those great grants the city's gotten to upgrade parks, right?

WHEELER:

Yeah, exactly. So we have impacts to things like grants. We also would no longer have a certified housing element, which would mean that we would lose certain abilities to actually regulate land use in the city of Eureka. In the most extreme circumstance, because a housing element is part of a general plan, the entire general plan could fall. So that would mean that the city would lack discretionary power over all projects, because we would no longer have a general plan, we would no longer have maps that say what is and isn't allowable, everything would presumably be allowable at that point. Even if that doesn't happen, there's something called the builder's remedy. Matt, do you want to talk about what the builder's remedy is and how it applies to a jurisdiction that does not have a certified housing element? Yeah.

SIMMONS:

Essentially, the builder's remedy is a provision that allows a developer, as long as they're building a building that is at least 20% very low income or low income, low income, at least 20% of the units are low income, they can avoid all the local or most of the local zoning on limitations on height and building mass and stuff like that. And so what we've seen in the last year is a lot of I'll say NIMBY jurisdictions like wealthier coastal areas like Santa Monica, Huntington Beach, throughout California, which refuse to have a compliant housing element because they didn't want to build more housing. They are now have no active housing element and builder's remedy projects are starting to be proposed there, where in an area that normally would only have one or two story buildings, you're seeing 10 story buildings proposed. And so the builder's remedy is this this real hammer to cities that's saying, if you don't allow new housing to be built here, we will allow developers to just totally ignore all of your local rules.

WHEELER:

Right. So like a single family residential zone, right? Like, so if we're thinking those areas of Eureka, where it's just single family houses under the builder's remedy, somebody could buy a lot, there are some large size lots in Eureka still remaining and build an apartment building that is multiple stories tall next to just a Pearson house, a ranch style house from the 1950s, that is a potential consequence of this, because if this passes, we will no longer have a certified housing element. This is the consequence.

KALT:

We should talk about what is affordable housing, because a lot of people don't realize that half the people in Humboldt County probably would qualify for affordable housing. You know, I mean, you think of these giant tenement buildings in big cities or something, but that's not what affordable housing is. So let's talk about that.

SIMMONS:

Yeah, so HCD has helpfully broken out every county in California by area median income, and then it explains what income is necessary to receive subsidized housing, right? And they break it out into acutely low, extremely low, very low, low, and median income. So for Humboldt County, low income, what your salary has to be if you're a family of four to live in low income housing is $65,950 a year. If your salary is less than that, and you're a family of four with one earner, you would be eligible for low income housing. Obviously, that gets more extreme when it's extremely low is $30,000 per year for a family of four, right? I think that makes sense. But it's very important to be clear, because this was actually in the findings for Rob Arkley's initiative, that this is not housing only for the completely destitute, right? Rob Arkley had some language in his initiative that says things like, we need to be building working housing and housing for real people, that kind of stuff. I just want to be very clear that unfortunately, because of our economic situation, low income applies to a lot more people than you might think just from the term.

KALT:

Yeah, the idea is that you shouldn't be paying more than a third of your income on on housing, whereas a lot of people in California are paying half or even two-thirds of their income on housing. So really the the ultimate consequence of this ballot measure succeeding is more and more people not being able to afford housing in Eureka and the greater Humboldt Bay Area.

WHEELER:

And we're talking about the probable loss of hundreds of housing units here. That is the consequence. So it would invalidate existing contracts between the city of Eureka and Linc Housing Development on two sites, both of whom would have 40 and 50-ish housing units developable. It would also invalidate the recent RFP awards to Dishgammu Humboldt for the 5th and D and 6th and L lots. It would massively set us back. It would fundamentally undermine our ability to build affordable housing in Eureka.

KALT:

I recall that Arkley's Citizens for a Better Eureka group, air quotes around Citizens for a Better Eureka, are also suing the city over the parking lot. So why run a ballot measure while you're also doing a lawsuit?

WHEELER:

I think that this is belt and suspenders, right? So Arkley's group, Citizens for a Better Eureka has filed two lawsuits against the city of Eureka trying to invalidate the housing element because they claim that that the city didn't do adequate environmental analysis. And we've talked about why that is bunk on, on a previous show, but I'll just briefly reiterate the city did do environmental analysis and this is the environmentally preferred thing to do, which is build infill development and the arguments that are being brought forward by Rob Arkley are legally things that the city cannot consider an environmental analysis, like changes to what's called level of service. That's a prohibited category of environmental analysis for housing projects under state law. So they're asking us to consider things that we are legally prohibited from doing in Eureka. So my guess is that he figured that this was likely to fail and he's succeeded before with previous ballot initiatives.

KALT:

Well, it depends what you define as...

WHEELER:

Yeah, right. So it's, it's fundamentally frustrating to me that when somebody who has the means, when they don't like a decision made by a popularly elected local governmental body, that they will just turn to these other avenues so quickly. And let me say that, that this has been an election issue for multiple elections, right? The city's housing element was under development during the 2018 elections. It was in place during the 2020 elections. It was a major issue in the 2022 elections where we had two candidates for the downtown ward of Eureka and arguably the more pro-housing candidate in that election won. So it's not as if we haven't had opportunities to, to have some sort of an influence as we, the people or whatever we have. And multiple times we have said, we appreciate the direction that the city of Eureka is going in. We are going to continue to elect folks that believe in this vision. And notably many of the individuals who have been behind the citizens for a better Eureka have been on the losing side of these elections, right? Marion Brady, Anthony Mantova, Michelle Costantine. These are all folks who have signed on to the lawsuit. Michelle Costantine is one of the two signers of this petition for this ballot initiative, attempting to, to undo election results in this manner.

KALT:

Yeah, it's also really important to note that ballot measures once adopted can only be overturned by another ballot measure. And so that's why in California, we keep seeing overturning the death penalty on the statewide ballot because the death penalty was enacted in California by a ballot measure. And that's the only way it can be undone.

WHEELER:

That is, that is the case here. And it's explicitly so within the ballot initiative that the overlay zones that would be created would exist in perpetuity and could only be overturned by the voters. So even into our next general plan, sometime into the future, they would have to somehow preserve the existing status quo and there'd be no ability to make changes except by another ballot initiative.

SIMMONS:

More protection for parking lots than most things get.

WHEELER:

Yeah, right. So again, I'm feeling optimistic that this isn't going to succeed, right? I believe that we've settled these issues on multiple past elections in the city of Eureka, where folks have said, Yeah, we're, we're in favor of more housing. I think that this is a pretty reasonable proposal. There are certainly critics of what is happening. And those critics are the ones who are behind this, but I believe that they are a loud and vocal minority here. So I hope that this doesn't actually ever make it to the ballot, they're going to have to collect 1600 signatures to to ever have this on the ballot. And I would hope that folks in our listening audience would decline to sign. So if you see somebody with a clipboard, and it has some sort of pro housing name, be aware that that is actually the NIMBY initiative that is designed to spike affordable housing developed, right, that is being paid for by a local billionaire. That's the truth.

SIMMONS:

How should people spot it. Anything we can tell them to make sure that they stay away from it beyond just that?

KALT:

Just don't sign ballot measure initiative signature drives unless you actually read them. They usually mean the opposite of what the title and summary say.

WHEELER:

So I'm sure there'll be more about this in the future. If it continues to progress, hopefully this will just die in the vine.

SIMMONS:

I'll also just put out a pitch to everyone listening to think about ways to get downtown that don't involve personal vehicle ownership, right? Some of the people responding to this initiative act like it's literally impossible to move around Eureka without a car, and we know that there are a lot of our neighbors who don't own cars. And so think about taking transit, think about carpooling with a friend, think about parking a block down and walking a block. I worry sometimes when I hear about these people who think that they can't park anywhere in downtown Eureka.

KALT:

Eureka is such a walkable city too. A friend of mine used to always walk from his house near Henderson Center down to Has Beans in Old Town, and it was his morning stroll to go for a walk, get a cup of coffee, see a bunch of his friends, and walk back home.

WHEELER:

And there's, there's more to parking management than just supply, right? And that's what the city of Eureka is doing right now. It has a parking management plan. Again, that was just approved by the city of Eureka. That's going to improve signage. That's going to experiment with having lots available for employees who work in old town, which has been kind of a constant concern and criticism that these folks who are going to their jobs, they don't want to have to move their car every two hours. Sure. Fine. We'll have a lot specifically set aside for, for.

KALT:

The other criticism I often hear is for people with disabilities, and there's another fairly straightforward solution to that.

WHEELER:

It's having disabled placard parking spaces available on street and in parking lots. And it's not as if this is going to remove all of the parking lots in Old Town. We are, we are done after this round of RFPs from the city, there aren't going to be any more released under the existing housing element. So there's still going to be plenty of parking left over. We'll discuss more on a future episodes. I'm sure how we can accomplish housing development in Humboldt, because it has just been a big frustration for folks in this room, I'd like to thank everyone in the listening audience. And remember declined to sign any sort of a ballot petition that says that it will influence housing construction in Eureka. There's only one, it is the NIMBY initiative. All right. Join us again on this time and channel next week for more environmental news from the North Coast of California.