RHNA
(Regional Housing Needs Allocation) and the General Plan
The General Plan is our City’s roadmap
for the future. While it should not be changed on a whim, and we should
minimize spot-rezoning for specific projects, we will be required to
make zoning changes to create a Housing Element for the next RHNA
(Regional Housing Needs Allocation) Cycle which covers the years
2023-2031.
Like every City in California, Cupertino creates a Housing Element that
must be approved by the State of California. We must entitle at least
the number of units assigned by our regional authority, ABAG
(Association of Bay Area Governments).
Our RHNA requirement for the current eight-year cycle (2015-2023) was
1064 units. Our Housing Element entitled 1400 units. We actually
entitled far more housing than was specified in our Housing Element.
Cupertino entitled 3,457 residential units. Cupertino has the second
best jobs to housing ratio in the County.
Our excellent Jobs/Housing ratio is largely because the City has not
entitled large amount of commercial office space. The cities with poor
Jobs to Housing ratios, like Palo Alto and Santa Clara, entitled large
quantities of new commercial office space. The Apple Park project is
often cited by the bad actors in Sacramento as an example of Cupertino
allowing large quantities s of commercial office space, but they omit
the fact that Apple Park is almost all “replacement office space,” since
the HP buildings were all torn down in order to build the (much nicer)
Apple Park facility.
The biggest issue California cities have with RHNA is that the Housing
Element Sites that they choose, and the entitlements that they approve,
don’t necessarily result in the housing actually being built. A city
cannot force a property owner to build an approved project. Of the 1400
units in the current housing element, only 11 have been built and
occupied (the Veranda project, which the City expanded from 11 to 19
units by eliminating ground-floor retail).
The failure of property owners to build their approved projects was
almost inconceivable at the time the Housing Element was approved. Rents
were very high and there was a shortage of market-rate housing. But that
all changed. California now has a glut of unaffordable market-rate
housing, and projects currently under construction are worsening the
glut. I talked to one property owner in Santa Clara that built a project
that required rezoning of the land from commercial to residential. They
said that at the time the rezoning made sense but that they would not do
the same thing today because now they are stuck with a huge amount of
luxury housing and a shortage of tenants. The 2023-2031 RHNA cycle will
exacerbate the problem. Cities will have to identify a very large number
sites for new housing knowing that there is no way that much housing
will ever be built. Covid-19, and remote-working, has enabled a large
number of employees of Silicon Valley companies to live in areas with
less expensive housing, where they can purchase a house instead of
living in a rental apartment.
Mistakes were made in the Housing
Element for the current RHNA cycle and these mistakes are a contributing
factor in CUSD's enrollment and funding issues. The lack of long-term
planning and the lack of demographic data, led to the Housing Element
sites not being chosen properly.
RHNA is going to be the biggest and
most controversial task that next City Council will have to deal with.
The decisions we make will affect school enrollment, school funding,
homelessness, property tax collection, water, and transportation. RHNA
is very complex and it's not something that most residents should have
to become experts on. We need a City Council that can be trusted to act
in the best interests of the City.
It’s somewhat depressing to see the
lack of understanding of the RHNA process by some City Council
candidates.
- They don’t understand that there
is no rollover of RHNA sites if an entitled and approved project was
not built. The site cannot be re-used.
- They don’t understand that you
don’t get to count units that were entitled in the current RHNA
cycle but that were not completed until the next cycle.
- They don’t understand that it’s a
terrible idea to greatly exceed your RHNA number because you don’t
want to use up all the potential sites for housing in one cycle and
then have no sites left for the next cycle.
- They don’t understand that ADUs
(accessory dwelling units) don’t count toward fulfilling your RHNA
requirement.
- They don’t understand how
previous City Councils failed to look at the big picture when they
chose RHNA sites, and as a result we have some schools at risk of
closing while other schools are over-crowded.
- They don’t understand the
difference in revenue generation, or the school impact, between
rental and for-sale housing.
- They don’t understand that what
California is facing is an affordable housing crisis and that
building unaffordable luxury housing won’t address that crisis, but
they are so controlled by development interests that they don’t want
to look at the statistical evidence.
- They don’t understand that
extracting money from developers, in exchange for approving General
Plan Amendments, will result in very poor projects that the
community solidly opposes.
Steven Scharf and Kitty Moore are the
only two candidates with an understanding of RHNA. In fact both of us
have already began researching which sites would be appropriate for
medium to high-density housing projects and that would take into
account the issue of school enrollment. There are a limited number of
parcels suitable for housing in areas with low school enrollment, and
it's not clear if the owners of those parcels are interesting in
having their land rezoned for medium to high-density housing.
It's vital to vote for City Council
candidates that understand the RHNA process.
Proudly
NOT Endorsed or Funded by the Developer-Controlled Cupertino Chamber
of Commerce and San Jose Mercury News, Special Interest Groups, or
WIMBYs!
Steven
Scharf for Cupertino City Council 2020 FPPC ID #1388099
