Lea este artículo en español aquí.
After a two-hour debate, the San Benito County Board of Supervisors unanimously approved the county’s new Housing Element, one of California’s most important housing requirements.
At its May 20 meeting, the board’s slow-growth majority, while at first reluctant, ultimately backed the 300-page document that outlines the county’s housing policy for the next eight years.
The Housing Element will become part of the county’s General Plan once it’s certified by the California Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD). But for that to happen, the county must first rezone enough parcels to accommodate the more than 700 units that it’s required by the state to plan for in its unincorporated areas.
It was precisely this rezoning—where the parcels would be and how many units each would contain—that raised concerns for Supervisors Kollin Kosmicki, Ignacio Velazquez and Dom Zanger.
The board majority’s main issue concerned the methodology that county staff consultants Kimley-Horn used in planning for those units.
To comply with the state mandate, the county must plan for 754 units—307 for moderate and above moderate income households, and 444 for low income residents.
Consultant Bryant de la Torre said that in ongoing development projects, the county is already on track to meet its goals for higher income earners.
“Where we have difficulty is addressing our extremely low, very low and low income categories,” he said.
Altogether, with approved developments like Lands of Lee or Santana Ranch, as well as others still in the pipeline, the county has planned more than 2,300 units, far exceeding its goals for moderate and above-moderate income housing. But it falls short by 168 units for lower-income resident housing.
To close that gap, county staff proposed zoning for an additional 2,000 units, bringing the total number of planned homes to more than 4,400. That alarmed the three slow-growth supervisors.
“I will not sell this community’s soul to the development community,” said Kosmicki. “I’m not going to allow for the further ruining of San Benito County when we do not have the infrastructure to support 4,400 homes.”
De la Torre said that the high number stems from how affordable housing is typically built in California: developers rely on market-rate units to subsidize the cost of below-market ones. This means that to realistically meet low-income housing goals, jurisdictions must zone for larger projects that include housing for all income levels.
“Unless you can guarantee that you’re going to get 100% affordable projects, there’s no other way to prove that they’re all going to be affordable,” said De la Torre. “We can hope and wish that there are 100% affordable projects, but the market itself is not going to guarantee that.”
Supervisor Angela Curro supported the county’s logic.
“In my experience, working in affordable housing, you don’t get without giving. If we are willing to invest millions of dollars in affordable housing as a county, then we don’t have to do any inclusionary housing,” she said. “You’ve got to give to get. Whether that’s waiving permit fees, impact fees, or donating land, that’s the only way you’re going to ‘get’ this kind of affordable housing.”
Supervisors Kosmicki, Zanger and Velazquez pushed to revise the rezoning plan. Instead of spreading more than 4,000 units across 12 parcels, they proposed increasing density on fewer sites and focusing exclusively on affordable housing. They said the county needed only to meet its low income goals.
“What I want to see is how we’re going to make up those 168 affordable units,” Velazquez said. “That’s what I want to get to today. I don’t want to get to the 4,000.”
De la Torre warned the board that altering the proposed Housing Element, which was already reviewed and approved by the state, would require resubmitting it to HCD and delaying its certification by at least a year. That delay, he cautioned, could cost the county state funding and would keep the door open to unbridled development, spurred by not complying with its Housing Element.
Fear of ‘builder’s remedy’
San Benito County was supposed to submit its Housing Element by December 2023, but missed the deadline. Today it’s one of 100 jurisdictions in California—out of 539—without one. That delay has triggered a provision in state law, known as “builder’s remedy,” which limits the ability of jurisdictions to reject developments that provide affordable housing, even if they violate zoning rules.
As a result, six proposed projects totaling more than 1,400 units are being planned for lands designated as agricultural or rural, bypassing current zoning restrictions.
At a May 21 meeting, Planning Director Abraham Prado told the Planning Commission that all six projects are still in the preliminary application phase. The full review process—environmental studies, public hearings, and board approval—is still ahead.
Developers, he added, might still withdraw or revise their applications if the county presents what he called “quantifiable findings” to justify a rejection. “One of those, for example, could be lack of infrastructure and services, such as sewer and water,” Prado said.
But rejecting builder’s remedy projects is not easy. When the city of La Cañada Flintridge in Los Angeles County denied such a project in 2022 while lacking a compliant Housing Element, the state sued. A Los Angeles Superior Court ruled in the state’s favor, though the city is now appealing. Gov. Gavin Newsom has spoken openly about the case and has said that “the state will hold every community accountable in planning their fair share of housing.”
Curro cautioned against taking that road. Litigation, she said, would strain the county’s already fragile finances and stall any real progress on affordable housing. “If we are not approving our housing element and we’re not getting funding from the feds and HDC, we’re not going to be able to invest millions of dollars into affordable housing projects,” she said.
Supervisor Mindy Sotelo pointed out that approving the Housing Element would not mean approving the 4,000 units. Any development, she said, would still need to go through the full planning process.
“These are just options, they are opportunities,” she said. “At the end of the day, it would come to this body and if it didn’t meet the affordable housing ordinance, if we wanted to even put something more in place, so that people felt confident about it, we could do those things. But by limiting ourselves and entering into this builder’s remedy, that’s a scary place. It’s really scary for the community.”
In the end, the slow-growth majority on the board voted to approve the Housing Element as presented, including 12 parcels slated for rezoning and the more than 4,000 homes proposed.
But to avoid triggering more market-rate development, Kosmicki, Velazquez and Zanger said they would focus on meeting the low income housing requirement with a targeted project such as a farmworker housing development on county-owned land adjacent to Hollister.
Zanger said that once the county meets its lower income housing goal, he would ask HCD to reduce the number of higher income units included in the plan.
With the Housing Element approved, county staff will work on rezoning the 12 parcels, which later must be approved by the Board of Supervisors. Once completed, HCD can certify the Housing Element, thus ending San Benito County’s vulnerability to builder’s remedy projects.
We need your help. Support local, nonprofit news! BenitoLink is a nonprofit news website that reports on San Benito County. Our team is committed to this community and providing essential, accurate information to our fellow residents. Producing local news is expensive, and community support keeps the news flowing. Please consider supporting BenitoLink, San Benito County’s public service nonprofit news.
You must be logged in to post a comment.