news story / By Ryan Burns

Giant Circus Tent

Loose lips sail ships at county’s informal session on housing

(Feb. 12, 2009)  By the staid, bureaucratic standards of the Humboldt County Planning Commission, last week’s town hall-style meeting was a wild one. Granted, those standards may be lower on the drama-scale than those of, say, Arcata City Council meetings, but the idea, at least, was to hold a let-your-hair-down, loosen-your-tie brainstorming session (in the midst of more formal scheduled deliberations) on the contentious issues in the general plan’s housing element — issues like how to make homes more affordable and where to house the house-less.

The long-overdue general plan update has been inching forward since 2000, and this public review process is one of the last remaining hurdles before implementation. “This format is intended to be more interactive than our standard process,” Commission Chair Jeff Smith explained to the nearly full chamber. “We’re going to suspend [the usual] formalities, presuming we can do this without anarchy.”

Humboldt County Planning Commission, photo by Ryan Burns

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He needn’t have worried. Call it an excess of community-minded civility, or maybe simple shyness, but the open public-comment period began with more vague requests than specific suggestions, more polite observations than assertive demands. A few comers literally wore their opinions on their sleeves (OK, lapels) in the form of anti-inclusionary zoning buttons but shied away from such absolutes once they had the floor. If anything, the meeting could have used a little more anarchy.

Then again, maybe reserved deliberation is the best modusoperandi when crafting the “county’s Constitution,” a document that will guide the growth and development of our unincorporated areas for the next 20 years or so. While the housing element of the general plan gets revised on a state-mandated five-year cycle, the planning commission is taking an extra-close look this time around given the concurrent revision of related elements like land use and community infrastructure. Plus, Humboldt County hasn’t exactly been meeting its housing goals in recent years.

Taking matters one issue at a time, the commission opened the discussion with market-rate homeownership. “We used to have a very high [homeownership] rate,” Community Development Services Director Kirk Girard lamented from his witness-box-like spot beside the commission panel. We don’t anymore. The county’s housing affordability index — a measure of wage earners’ ability to afford a median-priced home — has been among the lowest in California in recent years, and California, in turn, has the second-lowest homeownership rate in the country.

This disquieting trend has shown signs of a rebound lately. Our affordability index rose to 18 percent in November (meaning 18 percent of working county residents could afford an average home), then rose again in December to 23 percent — its highest mark since May 2004, according to Tom Hiller, former president of the Humboldt Association of Realtors. “These are some pretty eyebrow-raising numbers,” Hiller said. Still, they’re a far cry from the 50-percent affordability Humboldt County enjoyed 10 years ago.

Girard explained how the general plan update could help matters further. Plan Alternative B, which is listed as the “identified proposed project” under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), offers several approaches, most notably the promotion of “infill” development. Since the county’s water and sewer infrastructure currently leaves much to be desired, the planning staff (along with anti-sprawl environmentalists) say it simply makes sense to build where those services already exist. Alternative B also calls for the creation of “housing opportunity zones” — specific geographic areas where low-income housing could be built, thanks in part to relaxed building standards.

Both matters were subjected to reserved, civil debate, but the real hot-(lapel)-button issue was inclusionary zoning. In a nutshell, IZ would require that a certain percentage of low-income housing be included in all major developments rather than confined to certain opportunity zones. Proponents say IZ is a necessary measure to keep low-income families from moving away. Taking the cordless microphone — which was being passed around the room by Smith’s daughter, Sarah, a student at Zane Middle School — local resident Bill Spencer said he considers long-term low-income housing an essential part of a complete community. “Just saying ‘no’ isn’t going to [help] those just starting on their careers or just ending their careers,” Spencer said.

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