Long Beach must make room for 26,502 units of housing over the next eight years, a 276% increase from its last eight-year housing cycle.
These numbers come from the Regional Housing Needs Assessment (RHNA), a State analysis of how much housing must be created in certain regions to meet current and future housing demands.
The assessment is done every eight years and aligns with the State’s eight-year requirement for cities to update their housing elements.
During the last RHNA cycle, Long Beach was required to create 7,048 units of housing. It only met 16% of its affordable housing requirements.
And this cycle, the State has increased Long Beach’s housing requirements by 276%. Of those, 58% need to be affordable.
“It’s aspirational, it’s doable. It’s going to be an aggressive approach. It’s going to require the cooperation of a lot of private property owners to help us realize that,” Councilmember Al Austin said of the housing requirements. “I think that’s the missing element.”
The Long Beach City Council discussed the City’s 2021-2029 Housing Element—a plan to make space for its State-imposed housing requirements—at its Tuesday, Nov. 16 meeting. Both Mayor Robert Garcia and Vice Mayor Rex Richardson were absent from the meeting.
The Housing Element is a document that will shape the City’s approach to housing for the next eight years.
It includes goals and policies to help meet its housing requirements, including ways to incentivize developers, prospective parcels for development and an assessment of the current condition of the city’s “housing landscape.”
In a presentation to the council, Planning Manager Patricia Diefenderfer summarized that landscape.
43% of Long Beach’s majority-renter population is overburdened by housing costs—meaning they pay too much for their rent or mortgage—and the effects are felt particularly by renters of color.
“Rents are unaffordable to many in the city,” Diefenderfer said. “They’re unaffordable to low-income and even some moderate-income households.”
People of color are disproportionately affected by overcrowding, concentrated primarily in West, Central and North Long Beach. They’re less likely to own a home than white residents.
“Families are being pushed to their financial limits because of enormous housing costs,” said Maggie Valenzuela with the Long Beach Coalition for Good Jobs and a Healthy Community. “Long Beach must do better for those who are barely hanging on during these tough economic times.”
Earlier this year, the council received a report outlining where new housing could be constructed—based on likelihood to be developed, existing lot coverage, lot size, zoning and other specific criteria set forth by the State.
The site inventory concentrated a majority of those parcels in North, East and West Long Beach, away from “high opportunity areas” in East Long Beach.
During public comment, Elsa Tung, land use program manager with Long Beach Forward, called upon the City to identify more housing sites in high-resource areas.
“We need to dismantle the legacies of redlining and segregation for more than 80 years,” Tung said. “67% of all the identified housing sites in the inventory are located in high segregation slash poverty, low resource or moderate resource areas.”
The Housing Element does include more sites in high-resource areas compared to a previous draft version of the plan. This time around, 15% of the parcels in the site inventory are in the high-resource areas, with a little more than 35% in moderate-resource areas.
Gabby Hernandez, executive director of Long Beach Residents Empowered, said that the plan “reinforces historical redlining, segregation and racial concentrations of poverty.”
Deputy Director of Development Services Christopher Koontz pointed out that the City is not responsible for building the housing, but rather creating an environment where the creation of housing is possible and incentivized.
“The City does not build individual projects,” Koontz said, noting that more substantial incentives for building, like tax credits, come down from the State. “We provide the underlying rules of the road, the zoning codes.”
He said the current Housing Element “furthers our fair housing goals more than any other prior endeavor by the City” and “satisfies the requirements of the law.”
The Housing Element also includes a plan to introduce an ordinance protecting renters against substantial remodel evictions by 2023. Many residents called on the council to move the deadline to 2022, but Koontz said that such a move would put the City at risk of litigation if they don’t meet the deadline.
Since the plan is part of the Housing Element, defaulting on the promise would make the City “subject to being almost immediately out of compliance,” Koontz said.
Residents also proposed a rent stabilization ordinance. Councilmember Mary Zendejas showed interest in the idea. The Housing Element includes an item to “explore” rent stabilization as well as tenant-landlord mediation programs.
The plan also includes 27 other objectives that include community land trusts, housing rehabilitation, homeownership assistance, accessory dwelling units, micro-units and adaptive reuse, among others.
Recently-approved policies like density bonuses and an inclusionary housing policy in the Downtown area also hope to contribute to the City’s housing goals.
“We have developed a multi-pronged strategic approach to creating better options and opportunities,” Austin said. “I think we need to continue to keep our foot on the gas and be aggressive in doing so.”
The City has limited time to make changes to the Housing Element, which has already undergone one round of revisions from the State. A final version must be submitted by Feb. 11, 2022.
Since the State has 60 days to give their second round of feedback, Diefenderfer said the City was in a “time crunch” and that there would be little if any room for substantial changes when it comes back to the council.
“We must build enough affordable housing to address our current and future situations,” Councilmember Mary Zendejas said. “Last time the Housing Element came to us, it was a missed opportunity. That’s what I keep hearing from all sorts, from housing developers, from housing advocates. This time around, we must get it right.”
