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Amy Kalish
Dissonance: Do we really care about our own safety?
Two days after a strong warning by Daniel Borenstein (editorial editor of the East Bay Times) that the Bay Area needs to pull back it’s infrastructure projects because our population trajectory is wildly over stated, the same publication put out a story questioning Orinda’s right to care about its future.
Residents of the small built-out town of Orinda — with rising fire-hazard ratings — are legitimately concerned about what a 15% increase in development will do to their safety. AG Bonta’s guidelines acknowledge the issues, but have no legal teeth because of Newsom’s 2020 veto of SB 182, which would have required evacuation access and clearing for new developments. Bonta can suggest all he wants that projects should avoid hazard areas, but with massive RHNA, for most small and constrained California towns, that is not possible.
Orinda’s 1,359 new housing units are to be built by a for-profit system that entices high-end developers to tossing in a few lower-income units into market-rate projects as sweeteners, in exchange for bonuses including streamlined permits, increased density and height, reduced setbacks and parking, and more. The lower-income category units are treated as an afterthought.
A straw man argument in the Orinda piece, from Kevin Burke of “East Bay for Everyone,” wonders whether people are really concerned about their safety, or whether they just are against low income housing.
Does Mr. Burke understand that 557 of the 1359 units are mandated MARKET RATE units? This is a YIMBY mantra that discredits itself, yet is heard every time there is resistance to increasing risk by overdevelopment.
Low-income and wealthy residents alike face the same increased dangers of density in hazard zones, especially when it’s done piecemeal (to avoid infrastructure planning), and dense additions to evacuation chokepoints are massed below the most at-risk areas, as former Planning Commissioner Michele Jacobsen points out.
The California Department of Housing and Development (HCD) that came up with these numbers has refused to adjust them for safety and reality (rejecting all appeals), even after they could not demonstrate their methodology and failed a state audit. The official state projections from the Department of Finance unmask the massive housing numbers. They are a creation of HCD, driven by for-profit industries, and do not focus on the workforce housing that should be the goal.
Borenstein says,
“It’s time for local and state government officials to recalibrate. Projects that were conceived based on the assumption of an expanding California population will no longer make sense. We shouldn’t keep planning and budgeting as if the state’s numbers will continue to grow significantly…even the department’s current projections fall way short of its boom forecast at the turn of the century “
It’s time that media housing stories start combining common sense, population projections, hazards, tech job losses (about 35,000 lost in the Bay Area over the last 7 months), agricultural and infrastructures devastation, effects of COVID, infrastructure, utilities, sustainable water supply, flood plains, sea level rise, and environmental concerns.
The real story is that California is facing a lot of conflicting needs, including affordable housing. But there is no coherent plan that takes all of these factors into account. The state has no vision of how these components work together, and localities are no longer allowed to make their own sensible plans.
But HCD’s RHNA numbers are not only unattainable, they are often hazardous, enforced with draconian measures, and should be reduced, for the good of all residents.