After the city’s appeal was rejected, Pasadena officials are regrouping and reassessing, trying to figure out what options they have left to fight back against state-mandated housing goals — if they have to fight back at all.
They say the state’s goals are unrealistic and unachievable, fearing future state laws that may reduce the city’s ability to control what local developers build, if the city and developers don’t build enough housing to meet the state’s benchmarks.
The benchmarks are part of the state’s Regional Housing Needs Assessment program, better known as RHNA (pronounced “reena”), and Pasadena’s allocation for the next eight-year cycle would require the city to build 9,409 units of new housing. That’s more than a 600% increase from the previous eight-year cycle mark of 1,332 units.
Pasadena fell far short of the last cycle’s goal, even though it made significantly more progress than any of its neighbors. The newest goals are even less likely to get met, officials say.
“At this moment, I wouldn’t rule out anything,” Mayor Victor Gordo said in an interview on Monday, Jan. 18. “The state has continued its overreach, imposing unrealistic and unfunded mandates. … It has to be looked at carefully and all options must be considered.”
It’s possible the city will sue the state over these benchmarks, Gordo said, but that’s putting the cart before the horse.
Right now, officials are trying to get their bearings to figure out what comes next. In a month or two, Gordo said he’s expecting a report from city staff to explicitly lay out all of the legal machinations the city will have to contend with if it wants to keep fighting.
Still, failing to build enough housing to meet the RHNA allocations isn’t a new phenomenon in Pasadena. The city has never met its RHNA goals in nearly five decades, Planning Director David Reyes said in an interview on Tuesday, Jan. 19.
That’s because RHNA only requires to the city to plan where those units would go, should they get built one day in the future. The city merely has to plan for the units, not guarantee their construction.
Outside of two pieces of state legislation — which allow developers to build 50% or 100% affordable housing projects without much review from the city — there aren’t many mechanisms to punish cities for failing to build up to their RHNA allocation.
At least right now.
Pasadena officials are concerned future legislation may give developers more leeway if they want to build in a city that hasn’t met its RHNA goals. With the existing legislation, the math doesn’t typically work for developers: It’s tough to make money off a 100% affordable development.
Even so, there were a significant number of bills proposed last year, each using a city’s success or failure with RHNA to give developers the ability to dodge local planning controls. All were rejected by state lawmakers last year, and Reyes isn’t aware of any new ones coming down the pike, but the prospect of these laws is a boogeyman for city planners and council members.
If the city’s development fate gets tied to its success or failure in meeting these seemingly unattainable goals, that’s the worst case scenario for local lawmakers.
“Local control is at the core of these discussions. We have to defend local control, ” Gordo said, explaining that he will lobby state lawmakers to “protect Pasadena and its residents’ ability to determine how our city evolves.
“Pasadena became a charter city for that reason. We can’t allow the state to reverse the will of Pasadena residents. We have to defend the autonomy of residents to determine how Pasadena should evolve as a city going forward.”
Appeal denied
Alongside 50 other cities in Southern California, Pasadena appealed its latest RHNA allocation, but the appeal was denied on Monday, Jan. 11.
“We’re disappointed but not surprised,” City Manager Steve Mermell said in an email. “The city will need to consider what, if any, additional steps we might take.”
Denials are par for the course: Every appeal from Los Angeles County cities has thus far been rejected, including those from El Monte, Alhambra, South Pasadena, Downey, Pico Rivera, Torrance and many others.
During the last cycle, years ago, every single appeal was denied.
This time around isn’t looking much different. Pasadena made two arguments and both were rejected.
- When Pasadena argued other cities weren’t building their fair share of housing — saying Pasadena was carrying too much of the burden — the Southern California Association of Governments (known as “SCAG”) appeal board said it wasn’t a valid basis for appeal and rejected it outright.
- When Pasadena argued that Fuller Theological Seminary decided not to build 250 units of expected housing, SCAG said it wasn’t enough to justify reducing the city’s allocation, and said there wasn’t anything that said Fuller wouldn’t come back and build those units later.
While there are a few technical hoops to jump through and the RHNA allocation won’t be officially finalized for some time, Pasadena will almost certainly have to plan for 9,409 units of new housing.
City officials hope there won’t be any new legislation over the next eight years that will force the city to build that much housing or else face the consequences.
If the city is forced to build these units, then Gordo, Reyes and housing activists all believe the state should fund affordable housing projects, which are otherwise fiscally untenable for any profit-minded developers.
What comes next?
“At the moment, we need to better understand what the state is demanding,” Gordo said. “We also need to understand the interplay between our zoning plans, our general plan and our housing element.”
He expects Reyes and city staff to spell out these relationships during a presentation where residents and the City Council will weigh in to figure out what the city does next.
For Reyes’ part, he said the city will have to make “very minor tweaks” to its housing element — a city-generated planning document that requires state approval — to meet the latest RHNA allocations.
If the housing element is approved, as Reyes expects it will be, Pasadena will have dodged the most serious RHNA-related consequences: If any city’s housing element is out of compliance with its RHNA allocation, then developers can build projects with hardly any input from city officials, as long as they’re 20% affordable — something Pasadena already requires from developers for any housing project.
“Our math shows that even with the existing development caps in place, we can plan for the 9,400 units,” Reyes said. While Pasadena does cap the number of housing units that get built each year, affordable housing doesn’t count against these caps, he explained.
That leaves Pasadena in decent shape compared to other cities, which may have to spend months in and out of public hearings, drafting new zoning codes to accommodate for such large increases in planned housing developments, Reyes said.
“We’re not going to have to do massive up-zones and land use changes because Pasadena’s existing planning scheme provides for — from a planning perspective — the level of growth required by the state,” Reyes said.
Still, the city’s housing element needs to be updated over the course of the next year before it will be submitted to the state for approval.
Housing activists are already preparing for the discussion, as local nonprofit Pasadenans Organizing for Progress are hosting a community forum via Zoom on Saturday, Jan. 23, asking residents to weigh in on how the city should update its housing element.
The event is co-hosted by regional housing activist groups, Making Housing and Community Happen as well as Abundant Housing LA.
“The housing element is a powerful tool to solicit community input in planning for sufficient housing for all income levels for the next eight years,” Jill Shook, local resident and executive director of Making Housing and Community Happen, said in a news release this week. “We have a golden opportunity to participate in shaping this policy.”
Rick Cole — who is a former Pasadena city councilman and the former city manager of Azusa and Santa Monica, also a member of Pasadenans Organizing for Progress — disagrees with Reyes. Cole doesn’t think it’ll be easy to update the city’s housing element.
“This (appeal) was a stall,” he said in an interview. “And what really needs to happen now is that we have less than 10 months as a community to come up with a viable plan that will meet state law, and that’s not going to be easy.”
He continued: “There’s no magic answer, there’s no easy answer. But hoping the problem will go away is the worst possible answer.”
