Housing

As we work to address our historic housing shortage and affordability crisis, we support the production of diverse housing types to meet a wide range of affordability and demand. Plans and policies in Santa Rosa should reflect a commitment to pro-housing policies. In addition to policies that directly encourage development projects, opportunities for housing production can be maximized by actively seeking funding opportunities and competing for the millions of dollars available in the State’s various housing grant programs. We commend the City’s work to earn the State’s Prohousing Designation, which will in turn increase its competitiveness for such grants, although we recognize that the City’s designation was granted based on many actions and policies that are yet to be implemented. Additional opportunities with city, school district, and all public land should be explored and assessed for housing development. We support incentives for in-fill and affordable housing including reducing fees for affordable and workforce housing, and the encouragement of ADUs.

We began to see immediate benefits from the updating and passage of the Santa Rosa Downtown Station Area Specific Plan to support needed development and streamlining of the local permitting process to encourage housing development. It is critical that these streamlined polices are implemented with oversight for consistency at a department level to be sure they are being prioritized as intended and to maintain the trust and certainty they were meant to create. Additionally, similar improvements to the entitlement process are critical to gain process consistency and create needed certainty for developers throughout the city and in priority development areas. Lack of certainty is burdensome for all developers and particularly stifling to development below market rate.

Housing developers, other homebuilding industry professionals, and internal staff have recommended empowering a high-level staff person to align and coordinate departments with an eye toward increasing efficiency in the entitlement and permitting processes.

The misuse of CEQA is obstructing housing development, contributing to our insufficient housing stock, high development costs and high home prices. CEQA must be modernized to preserve the law’s original intent while preventing abuse for purposes unrelated to environmental protection. CEQA amendments must be addressed to streamline the process and to ensure it is not an obstacle for high density development, particularly for in-fill urban development.

The preponderance of evidence and research show rent control and just cause eviction laws do nothing to provide housing, reduce homelessness, or provide affordable housing for renters, and experts agree that these policies exacerbate housing shortages. Home development at all market levels—from deed restricted affordable to market rate—is the most effective way to ease the cost of housing. Support for tenants under financial strain needs to come with public funding so that rental housing providers aren’t forced to sell their homes resulting in substantial and lasting loss to our rental housing stock.

Just cause eviction and local habitability related laws are superfluous to the strong tenant protections existing under California law. Adding unnecessary local regulation grows the city’s budget, increases the workload of city departments, adds to the county courts’ congestion, and threatens the profitability of rental housing. Unnecessary local regulation hurts all rental housing providers instead of targeting the few bad actors. The city would be better served by a modestly priced public information campaign designed to inform tenants of how to avail themselves of the legal protections.