Church lot spurs housing worries in Half Moon Bay

The housing element serves as a road map for the city to meet state-mandated goals of producing 480 housing units, 285 of which are affordable to low- and lower-income residents, by 2031. 

Our Lady of the Pillar parishioners, as well as the San Francisco archdiocese’s real estate company, expressed opposition to the proposal on grounds that the church has plans to expand its educational facilities on the currently-vacant lot. 

“I’m very disturbed to learn that the city is including the church’s parcel,” congregant Anne Martin said. “There are numerous parcels within the city limits that can be designated for affordable housing, but there’s only one parcel that can hold the academy, where this school can be built.” 

A motion to approve and send the housing element draft by Vice Mayor Harvey Rarback acknowledged Planning Commission and staff recommendations, which suggested keeping the lot in the housing element. 

“There’s been an incredible amount of misinformation here tonight,” he said during the meeting. “Everybody is saying the city’s going to take over the land and force the elimination of a parochial school. That is farthest from the truth. The opportunity sites are exactly what it sounds like — possible places over the next eight years.” 

Despite the designation, the city cannot legally move forward with development of any private property without the owners’ consent — which in this case, it definitively does not have.

For Mayor Joaquin Jimenez, action taken by the council meant the draft will remain as is and the church property will not be removed from the document, he said after the meeting. 

Councilmember Debbie Ruddock suggested during the meeting that staff reevaluate the document and reconfigure housing designations without the church lot that would still meet the 15% to 30% housing development buffer requirement required for state approval. To meet those metrics, staff would likely have to replace the lot with new opportunity sites. 

“If you don’t want your property in, it should just come out,” she said. “I don’t see the point of exacerbating what are already tensions in the community, and certainly property has a way of really blowing things up.” 

If removal wasn’t possible, she posited using a scale mechanism to designate the opportunity sites from high to low to indicate which lots weren’t likely to develop housing, although she said several times during the meeting she would be in favor of removing the church lot entirely. 

The approved motion — which included language instructing staff to include the recommendations of councilmembers, although Rarback said he didn’t think there were any “significant ones tonight” as he made it — meant staff would take those suggestions seriously, she said. 

Ruddock also shied away from the language of the draft housing element, instructing staff to remove the general fund as a funding source for housing projects to avoid the element becoming a proxy for the city’s budget. 

Disagreement around the housing element’s content overshadowed another piece of the conversation — the city is supposed to have the document certified by now and is currently out of compliance with state law. It could face penalties, ranging from monthly fines to disqualification from grant funding, if that continues. 

“Getting this housing element certified is really important. Details about whether or not we have sufficient buffer, all that is secondary, in my opinion, to the urgency of getting this certified,” Rarback said. 

He also rejected the idea that the city had a bevy of parcels upon which to develop affordable housing, a common refrain from many in the crowd expressing anger and disappointment about the church parcel’s inclusion. 

“We are not all opposed to low-income housing. What we do oppose is the attempt to take private church property, where there are many other land options available in Half Moon Bay to build low-income housing,” resident Mary Botham said. 

One of the few in the crowd to voice support for affordable housing was Carolina Carbajal, a housing activist and Half Moon Bay resident. 

“They say, ‘We do want housing, but not here, go build it somewhere else, maybe in El Granada,’ and people in El Granada are saying ‘Go build it in Half Moon Bay,’ people in Moss Beach say ‘go build in El Granada,’ and like that,” she said through a translator. “So we’re never going to build any housing.” 

Mayor Jimenez reserved his comments for the very end of the meeting, sitting through pointed barbs and mitigating an angry crowd. When he did speak, fielding hecklers, he emphasized a dire need for community housing and said the decision to retain the church lot in the plan was an easy one. 

“We are not taking your church away. We are not taking your freedom or religion. We’re not taking your education away from you, not at all,” he said. “We need close to 1,000 new homes for the community we have in Half Moon Bay right now. Some of you have no idea. So what we’re proposing is sites around Half Moon Bay with possibility we could build.”