Under the duress of legislative action or the Regional Housing Needs Allocation program, California cities have added millions of units to their zoned capacity in recent years. All of those potential units mean little, though, if developers can’t put shovels in the ground.
Now the state’s four largest cities – Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego, and San Jose – are pursuing some of the most aggressive policies.
In almost every case, streamlining measures have been drafted and promoted by mayors, often using executive powers that circumvent the need for city councils and planning commissions to deliberate and approve ordinances.
Los Angeles
When Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass came into office in late 2022, she took action often reserved for natural disasters like fires or earthquakes: an emergency action to promote types of homeless services and to build affordable housing.
Signed in December 2022 and updated this March, Executive Directive 1, the first in a series of directives aimed at housing and homelessness, required the city to waive and fast-track certain approvals processes for projects consisting of 100 percent deed-restricted affordable units. The “emergency” nature of the directive enabled Bass to bypass the city’s typical legislative process, which entails City Council approval.
ED 1 puts city planners on a short clock. The city must comment on applications within 30 days of submission, and then it must render approvals (or denials) within 60 days of receiving a complete application. ED 1 exempts projects from California Environmental Quality Act review and site plan review because they are ministerial approvals, and it requires planners to consider only objective criteria with regards to zoning and specific plans.
In other words, if planners are going to make life easy for developers, developers have to make life easy for planners.
“You have to be consistent with the zoning; you cannot request a zone change; you cannot be request a variance, though you can request the state density bonus program,” said Kevin Keller, senior advisor to Bass. “For projects that really check the boxes... ED 1 provides an objective and predictable process to reach an approval."
Keller also described an administrative innovation called Universal Project ID, which was implemented with ED 1 and may make its way into other approvals processes. The city assigns each project a tracking number that is used across all departments that deal with development, including planning, building and safety, and public works.
CalMatters estimates that ED 1 has hastened development of over 13,000 affordable units citywide, and it has even inspired some market-rate developers to change their business plans.
"We have seen a high level of interest and involvement in this program,” said Keller. “We have seen private capital attracted to the 100% affordable housing space and we have seen a number of projects proposed providing and at least applying for affordable housing without other city subsidy dollars, which is an interesting outcome and I think something that's really worth supporting.”
ED 1 is not without complications, though. Despite ED 1’s CEQA exemption, the city has accepted some CEQA-related challenges from neighbors opposed to ED 1 projects, according to LAist. Thus far, those challenges have not succeeded; land use attorney Dave Rand, quoted by LAist, called the CEQA suits “Hail Mary” attempts and “annoyances” rather than substantial challenges to the program.
An ordinance to enact a permanent version of ED 1, and to expand it to some types of market-rate developments, is currently under consideration by the city council. Many of these city-based efforts complement and are inspired by state-imposed streamlining policies, most notably Senate Bill 35.
"The permanent (draft) ordinance also builds on the experience that the city has learned in implementing Executive Directive. 1,” said Keller. “It includes a number of guiderails and performance standards.”
San Francisco
In San Francisco, Mayor London Breed also resorted to executive action in order to sidestep the Board of Supervisors, which has grown increasingly skeptical of her attempts to reform the city’s notoriously complex and, often, obstructionist policies. In April 2023 she enacted a package of ordinances under the name “Housing for All,” designed, in part, to help attract up to 30,000 residents to the city’s beleaguered downtown.
“The state did an audit of San Francisco’s permitting process and declared that we had the slowest permitting process in the state,” said Elizabeth Watty, director of Current Planning at the San Francisco Planning Department. “Things that in many other cities could be approved over the counter… San Francisco would necessitate a much more lengthy zoning review or hearings.” (See related CP&DR coverage.)
The ordinances include measures such as reducing permitting fees, hastening approvals, and promoting conversion of office space to residential. The companion One City Action Plan draws in multiple city departments to speed up permitting.
A year ago, Breed pledged to extend Housing for All through measure such as the adoption of a new citywide zoning code and loosening of density limits. Ordinances approved by the Board of Supervisors and adopted in December eliminate many instances that previously required a “conditional use authorization” from the city’s planning commission—often delaying projects by six to nine months. It does away with many restrictions on seemingly trivial renovations, such as upgrades to balconies and common areas in multiunit buildings, and it eliminates a longstanding law requiring property owners to notify and seek permission from neighbors to get a permit to build or renovate.
“In our well-resourced neighborhoods, it’s the idea that you don’t have to go through a lengthy notification process to your neighbors if you’re adding density on your property,” said Watty.
Though the city has long drawn scorn for its processes, the recent adoption of the city’s housing element, combined with state scrutiny, forced the supervisors’ hands.
“These are not things that were just a bright idea for the first time,” said Watty. “It’s hard to say, ‘I supported the housing element that said we had to do these things…’ but not the legislation to actually do these things.’”
“When the state has specific objectives….. and they send us letters that basically say, ‘and we mean it’, that’s a different level of pressure,” added Watty.
Some of Breed’s goals have subsequently been foiled by the Board of Supervisors, which adopted an ordinance to restrict density in an historic area of roughly 20 blocks near Jackson Square. Breed vetoed that bill, but the board overrode her veto on an 8-3 vote in March.
Breed responded in a statement, “Our current housing shortage is a result of decades of bad policy decisions and inaction and it will take years of consistent and relentless work to make the necessary change to get more housing built.”
San Diego
Arguably the polar opposite of San Francisco, the City of San Diego has long been relatively friendly to developers. It has promoted housing development through both up-zoning and administrative reforms. The city adopted its “Housing Action Package 1.0” in February 2022 under Mayor Todd Gloria, and it adopted Version 2.0 in December 2023.
The first Housing Action Package included provisions related to implementation of SB 9, development of accessory dwelling units, development of housing in high-resourced areas while the second package adds provisions to support development of single-room occupancy homes, student housing. Separately, Gloria issued an executive order called Permit Now that speeds up the approvals process for 100% affordable projects and another requiring reviews of no more than 30 days for projects that contribute to “complete communities.”
“The commonality between everything is that they are intended to increase opportunities for new homes,” said San Diego PlanningDirector Heidi Vonblum. “But, that doesn’t happen in one single way or another, and the housing needs aren’t uniform.”
One notably absent provision is that of an ordinance to enact Senate Bill 10, an upzoning opportunity that the legislature passed in 2022 but has yet to be implemented in any California city. In San Diego, the City Council removed SB 10 from the Housing Action 2.0 package in order to study it further.
Developers say that San Diego offers better customer service than most other California cities, regardless of its new policies.
“San Diego is the best large city on the West Coast to build housing in, from the standpoint of a streamlined, predictable approval process,” said San Diego-based infill development Andrew Malick. “I think the city’s Development Services Department actively listens to the development community and tries to take the feedback to heart.”
Being friendly to developers, and speeding up the approvals process, does not necessarily mean that the city gives them free rein.
“Streamlining doesn’t mean no regulations,” said Vonblum. “Streamlining means the provision of certainty to developers so that they know up-front what they’re expected to comply with.”
Even so, San Diego has not always been kind to infill development, which is what makes the Housing Action Packages so crucial.
“They are further refining and untangling 50 years of really bad, restrictive land use policy that effectively made building multifamily housing in urban areas illegal,” said Malick.
San Jose
The city that is, arguably, most enthusiastically competing with San Diego for that title is San Jose. The city relies heavily on ministerial approvals.
“Even before this housing element process, we’d been trying to facilitate more housing in our city” said Jerad Ferguson, principal planner for San Jose. “It’s both to continue that effort and try to meet our goals under our RHNA.” The city’s target is roughly 62,000 units.
“We make it pretty easy already. It is a discretionary process. Generally, most are approved….. goes through a hearing with our planning director, for the most part” said Ferguson.
As part of its recent housing element update, the city is drafting an ordinance that would expand ministerial approvals to many areas the city has designated for multifamily development. Those approvals would include environmental review which, said Ferguson, is “generally the biggest component of the time.”
Ferguson said that the expansion of ministerial approvals relies heavily on clear guidelines.
“We want to be very clear about what are the requirements needed in order to achieve approval” said Ferguson. “The applicant and the city understands what the expectations are for a project. Providing that clarity helps increase the speed at which we can approve a project.”
As in Los Angeles, San Jose hopes to extend streamlining measures currently reserved for affordable developments to nearly everyone.
“Most of our affordable projects utilize state streamlining. We feel like this city process is an opportunity for other, market-rate projects to utilize a similar pathway,” said Ferguson.
One aspect of the approvals process that municipal legislation cannot solve in and of itself is that of staffing. In Los Angeles, one consequence of ED 1 expediting for affordable projects is that approvals for market-rate projects have, reportedly, tended to move more slowly.
The opposite is happening in other cities. In San Francisco, elimination of arcane permitting requirements has made the process easier for developers and planners alike, creating a virtuous cycle that can further speed up approvals.
“These are processes that bog down our staff hours, so we don’t get a lot of bang for our buck with staff hours….. a lot of staff time without much return to the greater good,” said Watty.
In other cities, though, the bottleneck does not center on staffing but rather on economic conditions.
“Right now, on the entitlement side, we have staff capacity to approve those projects,” said Ferguson. “It’s really the economic challenges have been the biggest burden on new housing creation.”
Contacts & Resources
Los Angeles Executive Directive 1
San Diego Housing Action Packages
Jerad Ferguson, Principal Planner, City of San Jose, Jerad.Ferguson@sanjoseca.gov
Kevin Keller, Senior Advisor, Office of Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, kevin.keller@lacity.org
Andrew Malick, Founder and CEO, Malick Infill Development, andrew@malickinfill.com
Heidi Vonblum, City Planning Director, VonblumH@sandiego.gov
Elizabeth Watty, Director, Current Planning Division, San Francisco Planning, elizabeth.watty@sfgov.org
The original post of the Calmatters article listed over 16K. It looks like the edited artil revised it down to 13K.
Here’s a version of the original article wit the 16K figure: https://ncrc.org/calmatters-los-angeles-one-weird-trick-to-build-affordable-housing-at-no-public-cost/
