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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. And we are talking about our housing crisis in Humboldt County, specifically in the city of Eureka and Eureka's attempts to get affordable housing built on city downtown parking lots. And I have two friends here joining me to talk about Measure F.

So joining me are Dylan Casey, Executive Director of the California Housing Defense Fund. And James Lloyd, Director of Planning and Investigations at Cal HDF. Hello. All right, so you are the corollary to EPIC. You exist to enforce California's housing laws. EPIC exists to enforce California's environmental laws. You exist to enforce California's housing laws. Dylan, tell me more about your organization and what you do.

DYLAN CASEY:

Sure. Our organization was, before we changed our name to California Housing Defense Fund, we were California Renters Legal Advocacy and Education Fund. We've been around since 2016, and we, you're right, we're founded to enforce state housing laws, but specifically, we enforce state housing laws for the most part against cities and counties throughout the state, since those are the local agencies that are responsible for really implementing state housing law and ensuring it actually produces the housing we need as a state. So we got our start with legal advocacy lawsuits against cities that had denied housing developments. Since then, we have touched on many different areas of state housing law, including accessory dwelling units, and more relevant to where we are now is housing elements, which are local plans to produce housing at various income levels.

WHEELER:

So California has really gone through a pretty radical shift in the past 10 years. We've come to a reckoning with our housing affordability crisis. We simply do not have enough supply and kind of all levers of state government have been turned to work on this problem. The legislature has passed a number of high profile bills. The California Attorney General's office is also going after recalcitrant cities who are refusing to implement California's housing laws. The governor's office has indicated this is a high priority for him. So you're doing exciting work at an exciting time. And also the landscape has shifted considerably in the last 10 years. You've touched on broadly the laws that do exist, but if you're to kind of summarize what a jurisdiction needs to do to comply with California housing laws, what are the necessary actions here? What is, for example, the city of Eureka doing in its housing element?

CASEY:

So I think I'd just like to focus on the housing element requirements specifically, because those are really what we're talking about here. And there's tons of other state housing laws that we deal with. And as you've mentioned, the legislature has been very active in passing new laws. I think broadly speaking, cities are adjusting to a rapidly changing landscape, and we try to be somewhat sympathetic in our work there. But a lot of cities are somewhat intentionally resisting implementation of these laws, because the people in power there don't want to see growth in housing. They don't want to see housing get more affordable, which is quite unfortunate.

I would not put Eureka in that category. I think we came into this somewhat late. We had not reviewed and commented on Eureka's housing element when it was first developed. But when we heard there was some affordable housing at risk, we looked a little bit more closely and considered getting involved in the lawsuits and looked at the housing element compliance in relation to Measure F. The basics of housing element law is that cities need to plan for housing growth for a variety of income levels. And the law really focuses on low and very low income housing, because those are the areas that we need the most growth in. So the core requirement is that a city needs to identify sites where it can accommodate low and very low income housing. And it needs to provide the zoning, which is just the development rules that apply to those sites to accommodate that. When we're talking about low and very low income housing, it's higher density multifamily, because that is the type of housing that can accommodate those income levels.

So Eureka enacted a plan that identified sites, which some which are at issue in Measure F now. And actually the Eureka compared to the Bay Area is on a schedule where we're like halfway through the planning cycle now. So the idea is to get this low and very low income housing built before 2027. And some of these projects have funding awards already and already fairly far along. So in overall, I would say, ignoring Measure F and the lawsuits, the city has done a pretty good job and is getting some real housing growth on the ground in downtown, which is great. We're happy to see it.

WHEELER:

Yeah, James.

JAMES LLOYD:

Yeah, and I just thought I'd add a little color. A lot of times us folks in housing and land use, it's a lot of technical vocabulary. And I just thought I'd try to bring it home. You know what what it is when we say low income and very low income. So so in in Humboldt County and a lot of what we're going to talk about is very low income and extremely low income. Very low income is about forty thousand dollars a year for a household of three. An extremely low income is about twenty six thousand dollars for a household of three. So so the sites we're talking about that are affected by Measure F are largely slated for folks making that level of income. Right. So some of the sort of neediest folks in the communities.

So just so people know -- and I think also to Dylan's point around the good job that the city has done -- the city, to its credit, has specifically decided to dispose of city owned parking lots. So city owned land to develop this deeply affordable housing. So this is really to the city's credit. The most progressive places around the country, when they really decide to throw their weight behind affordable housing development, they use one of their biggest assets, which is land. So I think that is really to the city's credit here in developing its housing plan, that it decided not just to rezone privately owned sites and see what the market would produce, but to actually go out, issue requests for proposals, RFPs, dispose of the land to affordable developers and participate directly in meeting their housing obligations.

WHEELER:

And this is often necessary for something like affordable housing, which functions on a different market than regular market housing, right? You often will need some sort of intervention like this to to ensure that this housing will pencil out. And fortunately for the city of Eureka, their willingness to to give up land for housing is proving to be a smart choice. The city has been awarded, I think, over 100 million dollars cumulatively to go and build these housing projects, which is which is terribly exciting.

So we have hundreds of of new units that have already been approved on downtown parking lots that would go to Eureka's working class. These are folks who are your baristas, your bartenders. Forty thousand dollars for a family of three is is pretty standard up here. That captures a very significant amount of the population.

So now we have Measure F. Measure F is a citizen's initiative being brought forward by Eureka Housing for All, which is a pretty funny name for a group that's trying to thwart housing, which I think also speaks to the politics of housing at this point in the city of Eureka, where a lot of folks recognize that this is a problem, that this is impacting our economy. It's impacting families and that we need to have more housing. So even the folks who are against new housing still are trying to cloak themselves in the language of being pro housing advocates. Measure F does a number of things.

Do do either of you want to outline what Measure F does? Or I'm happy to also take that as my my local character.

LLOYD:

So Measure F, and it's a ballot initiative for this fall's general election, and it would amend the city's housing element. So the city is this, it would affect, Measure F would affect six city-owned parking lots that are scheduled to be disposed of for affordable housing development. Now, two of those six sites are scheduled for, to be disposed of to the Wiyot tribes, community land trust. Now, if that community land trust retains that RFP, then those two sites would be unaffected by the measure. However, it would still affect these four other sites.

Now, those four sites total, by removing those from the housing element, it would remove 50 very low-income units and 37 low-income units. What this would mean is that the city would no longer be meeting its obligations under state law. It would no longer be developing enough affordable housing to hit the quotas that have been assigned to it. The term of art in the regional housing needs allocation, which is what practitioners call it, but it's essentially to the quota that's been allocated to the city. In addition to that, it would also rezone the Jacobs school site for multifamily housing. So that's sort of the broad brush. And I think the thought behind it is building housing on the school site as opposed to building it on these downtown city-owned parking lots. Instead, they would preserve the parking lots for public use as parking.

WHEELER:

So to to to be the devil's advocate, to steel-man their argument, I think what they would say is, look, we're not we're not prohibiting these parking lots from becoming housing. What we're saying is that we need to preserve all of the parking that exists currently and then also ensure that any housing that is built has itself adequate parking. So it would require all the existing parking and then add some new parking for any housing or any sort of development that would go on top in the airspace above these parking lots. As folks who pay attention to how development works in the state, do you see problems with that argument? Yeah, James.

LLOYD:

Yeah, it essentially would mean that those developments would no longer work financially. So when you're building housing for very low income, extremely low income households, it's expensive to do, right? Because the rents that those families can pay do not cover the costs of developing the housing. So then requiring not just parking for those units, but requiring a whole extra set of parking, right? That means that you're building either underground parking or you're building a parking garage. That's really expensive. And the funds that go to build that affordable housing, it's just not enough money to also build structured parking or underground parking in addition to those units. So even if the measure wouldn't technically prohibit the use of those sites for housing, it would make it economically unfeasible to build any affordable housing on those sites.

WHEELER:

And as you said before, the Wiyot Tribe, they have two of these sites that they are going to develop. Dishgammu Land Trust is the developing arm of the Wiyot tribe. The Wiyot tribe has come out in opposition to Measure F. As a tribal government, they have come out in opposition to Measure F because of the impact that this would have on their projects. Because the Wiyot Tribe understands that this would be a killer for housing development in downtown.

But maybe everything's OK. Again, I'll try to steelman this. Because we could rezone the Jacobs Campus and have a whole lot of housing being built somewhere else in the city. Is there some problem with that? Again, James, it seems like you have some issues.

LLOYD:

Well, it's not that it's not really for us a question of what the city should do with its land. It's more that the Jacobs site isn't owned by the city, right? It's owned by the school district. They have a fiduciary responsibility to their district, right? And there's no guarantee that even with their zoning, that they would use that, that land for housing and let alone affordable housing. So we've been following what's been going on publicly, and it looks like the current highest sort of realistic bid for that land is from the California Highway Patrol that would like to build a facility there. And so it's very possible that the school district might elect to do that.

Now, even if they did decide maybe that a residential option might be better, there's also, like I said, no guarantee of use for affordable housing. So the Measure F wouldn't actually state that the that the housing on that site would be affordable, right? It wouldn't allocate any very low income or low income units to that site. So there would be no legal hook to get the school district to build affordable housing, even if they even if residential were an option.

WHEELER:

So your organization sent a letter to the City of Eureka recently that outlined your concerns with Measure F and also put forward what you thought were the legal consequences should this initiative pass. So let's get into those consequences, let's talk about what this might mean for the City of Eureka. First off, why Eureka? Why do you care about our little podunk city way up here on the North Coast? What is the kind of interest in the defense fund in what's going on here?

CASEY:

Well, why Eureka. I mean we focus on all of California, and housing issues throughout the state. I think we have a little bit of extra focus on very high rent areas, but that is why we were concerned. The other reason is just that the principle of the thing that the housing element is one that the city did a good job with. It took years to develop, and lots of community input was adopted I believe in 2020. And since then, the city's continued that work to find developers who are willing to develop this site. The sites downtown, and the developers have pursued funding the city has been part of that process, developing affordable housing like this is a years long process and it starts with the plan and then it needs the zoning and the funding and we're now, and to turn around and rethink this entire years long process is really well in our mind both against the, the text of state law but also really against the kind of the spirit of the whole process.

WHEELER:

It it's remarkable this past in 2019, as one of the local housing advocates, I remember going to the Humboldt County Association of Governments when they were divvying up our regional housing need allocation. I remember making testimony there. I remember the housing element being developed and these pretty uncontentious meetings, public meetings about the housing element.

And it was only when a parking lot that was routinely utilized for the employees of Security National was being released for development that this became an issue. And it became an issue because there was one person who was able to invest a significant amount of money into fighting this. I imagine that there's some precedential effect here that that we don't want Eureka to go down because this is a potential playbook for other jurisdictions that have similarly well-heeled folks who are opposed to housing development too. Is that right?

CASEY:

Yeah, there's a lot of cities with possibly even much more ability and will to self-sabotage their own housing plans. But I remember you did ask me about consequences. And I think it's probably important to get into that, which is, which there are a variety of consequences.

Basically, in our view, if this measure passes, the city's housing plan is no longer in what we call substantial compliance, which means that the city has not enacted policies by the time and zoning in order to comply with their plan. And there are a variety of results under state law that follow from the lack of substantial compliance. Probably the headline one is what we have come to call the builder's remedy, which is a provision of state law that says that if a housing development project is proposed with a minimum of 20% affordable housing, the city cannot deny it for non compliance with development standards. So this means basically on any private property in the city, a property owner could propose a 20% affordable housing project at whatever density they choose. And the city is prohibited from denying that project based on concerns about density, height, or really anything, or parking.

So by shutting the door on these affordable housing developments, the the city would be subject to unrestrained development everywhere. We have been involved in fighting for some of these projects and other cities that we think are good projects. But where a city actually has a good housing plan like Eureka, it really would seem like a shame to sort of up and that and open the door to unrestrained development. There are some other consequences, the city could get sued by the Attorney General's Office for non compliance and be subject to penalties, and potentially suspensions in non residential building permits, which we've seen in the city of Beverly Hills.

LLOYD:

And I was just going to add on a little bit there. So the reason it's called the builder's remedy is that the builder, right, a developer is remedying the city's failure in it to plan for housing. So that's why, where that term came from. And then to really drive home the point for laypeople, normally folks look at zoning as governing what can and can't be built. And they know that, all right, everything's going to be, look more or less sort of how it is today. And if something changes, well, there's going to be a bunch of public hearings and the planning commission is going to get involved and we'll be able to testify and so on and so forth.

Well, with the builder's remedy, a developer can ignore the zoning, right? So they can build whatever they want, as long as it's 20% affordable, as Dylan said. So just to really drive home. So in Santa Monica, when they were subject to the builder's remedy, you had thousands and thousands of apartments proposed, huge projects. So it's not to say that would happen in Eureka, but it's to say that it's the kind of thing the city could be exposed to.

WHEELER:

Dylan brought up the Attorney General earlier, and potential lawsuit from the Attorney General's office. I think that this is a very real potential consequence for Eureka. Already, the Attorney General's office has intervened in lawsuits brought by the Housing For All group, the proponents of Measure F, and has engaged in these county court battles over some issues already. The state of California is also paying attention to this. I know that this is on the radar of State Senator Mike McGuire, our local Assemblymember Wood and his likely replacement.

I want to make real the consequences for people. This could be a multi-year legal battle that costs the city hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars in legal fees. That is one potential result of this passing. Another result is that we lose our pro-housing designation. We are no longer eligible for certain state grants that we are currently enjoying, that we have used in the past. These are all things that could likely flow from this.

One funny thought, too. I wonder if in this effort to kill these affordable housing projects, could they be hoisted by their own petard here, with the Builders' Remedy? If we no longer have a compliant housing element, if we are now subject to the Builders' Remedy, where if you have 20% of units being affordable, a project could move forward, despite other local zoning regulations that would otherwise stop it. Here, we are still having 100% affordable housing projects. I wonder if, even if this were to pass, if we still have the resolve, could we even still move forward? There are all sorts of funny what-if consequences should measure have passed.

Tell me a little bit more about your work as an organization and your statewide legal battles that you engage in. Not promising that you will be in Humboldt County Superior Court, but you are paying attention enough now to send the city a letter warning of the consequences. Maybe you could talk about your other legal work and how maybe Eureka fits into this kind of broader picture of your organization.

CASEY:

Sure. I think one example I could bring up would be our lawsuit against La Cañada Flintridge to start. Just as sort of an example of what happens when a city, while in that case is sort of willfully enacting bad policy in relation to their housing element.

That case, the city took a long time, went way past the deadline in producing and adopting a compliant housing element. And as a result, there was a builder's remedy project proposed. In this case, it wasn't any like skyscraper. It was a pretty modest housing development right on the main street on a former church site. And the city denied that project. So we sued and the developer sued and the attorney general's office intervened in our lawsuit. And we won. We won in LA Superior Court after several months of litigation and really a lot of work. The city has since appealed because they appealed the city is subject to a bond to cover damages due to delay to the developer and that hearing is coming up shortly. They are potentially subject to attorney's fee awards for both our organization's legal work and for the developer's own attorneys, and potentially penalties if they continue to defy the court order.

All told, the city's subjecting itself to 10 over $10 million in terms of legal liabilities, all because of one single development that it decided to disapprove. I don't think we I wouldn't say that Eureka as far as the city leadership is in the same categories locking out of Flintridge, but if city policy starts going down a road where it's defying state law, as you said, there are pretty serious legal consequences and potentially financial consequences for the city.

LLOYD:

And one thing I'd like to sort of add on to that is, not only is this a potential consequence, but let's say Measure F passes and the city sort of scrambles to amend its plan to get something that's compliant with state law. Well, in the meantime, when the city is out of compliance, developers could still file applications to do builder's remedy projects. And as we say in the housing biz, those applications would vest, meaning that once they file that application, they would have the right to build that project even if two weeks later, the city comes back into compliance with state law, right? If the city amends its housing element to come back into compliance. So I just, folks should really realize that it's not something that can be washed away or fixed with a quick change of a plan by the city that if folks move rapidly, that might be dealing with the consequences for years to come.

WHEELER:

we know that we need to build more housing in the city of Eureka, we know we need to build more housing in the county of Humboldt. Where we build that housing has a massive environmental impact. We could either build it on our farms, on our fields, in our forests, and that's one way that we can meet our housing demand. Or we could build it within our already urbanized jurisdictions. If we build it within our already urbanized jurisdictions, if we build it in Arcata, if we build it in Eureka, that's great. They're closer to services, they're closer to jobs. We can ensure that folks can live their daily lives in a way that just produces fewer greenhouse gas emissions, that requires fewer vehicle trips.

This is why environmentalists like myself are excited about infill development. And efforts to fight projects like this are going to be bad for our community, because they're going to raise housing prices already. I think that if you're in our working class, you know that housing is unaffordable in Humboldt County.

So they're going to raise housing prices, it's going to impact organizations like myself. I have a staff of a lot of young people who are largely renters. And it's also going to force development pressure to be relieved somewhere else, like in our greenfields. And that's unacceptable to us. So we have this kind of weird alliance together now, the environmental community and pro-housing developers, because we both understand the consequences of this failure, this long-term systemic failure to build housing. It hurts our environment. We can do it in a better way, and this is the best way that we could do it. All right, well, off my soapbox.

Unfortunately, we are out of time. I'd really like to thank Dylan Casey and James Lloyd from the California Housing Defense Fund. Thank you, friends, for coming on the Econews Report. Thanks.

CASEY:

Thanks for having us.

LLOYD:

Yes, thanks very much.

WHEELER:

All right, join us again, listeners on this channel at this time for more environmental news from the North Coast of California.