Foster City starts preparing for next housing element

The city officially adopted its current 2023-31 housing element over a year into the cycle and must plan for about 1,900 units between then as part of its state-mandated housing assignment, or Regional Housing Needs Allocation figures.

“This was the most difficult housing element to date by far,” Phillips said. “[Regional Housing Needs Allocation] units went up by a lot. Simultaneously, the criteria for how you identify adequate sites got much more strict, so you had more units to accommodate and fewer sites that could have qualities in past cycles.”

While the Department of Housing and Community Development most likely won’t release the next cycle’s RHNA numbers for another two years, cities should plan for even more legislative changes aimed at spurring housing production, he added.

Currently, the state’s RHNA figures it provides to cities are divided by income group, with a certain number of housing unit approvals required for very-low-income, low-income, moderate- and above-moderate households. The next cycle will also include acutely low income, which are households that make below 15% of the area’s median income.

It also requires jurisdictions to evaluate the constraints on housing production caused by historic preservation practices. From Southern California to San Jose and even San Mateo, there have been vigorous debates over whether historic districting is appropriate or is a means to curb more development.

Other updates that jurisdictions will have to contend with is Senate Bill 1037, which imposes civil penalties of at least $10,000 per month for failure to adopt housing elements on time.

“These can also be triggered if the [Department of Housing and Community Development] or the attorney general takes action to revoke housing element certification, and you’d have mid-cycle noncompliance if you're not meeting the commitments and honoring the policies that you adopted in connection with your housing element,” Phillips said. “These can also apply if you improperly deny a project that was eligible for a state streamlining program, like SB 35 or AB 2011.”

Senate Bill 35 implements a more streamlined approval process for affordable housing developments, while Assembly Bill 2011 allows housing units to be built on land zoned for commercial and retail uses provided it meets certain below-market-rate criteria.The state has ramped up its efforts to eliminate local constraints that could impede housing development. That’s built up frustration in some small cities like Foster City, said Vice Mayor Art Kiesel.

“The length of time to certification has gotten monumentally large. We went through six iterations just in our small city,” he said, adding that some regulations, such as those that limit city-imposed parking minimums, are also particularly burdensome for Foster City.

“We are putting requirements out there for fewer and fewer parking spaces. When you're on the transportation corridor, I can see the methodology behind it, but … the transportation corridors on the Peninsula run north and south. The east-west corridor is just nonexistent.”

Other state-level changes for the next housing cycle could include more detailed parameters around builder’s remedy applications — which allows developers to skirt local zoning regulations in cities without a compliant housing element — and allowing elderly residential facilities to qualify for state density bonuses. Last March, a property owner submitted a builder’s remedy application to get a residential development built after attempting to do so for over a decade.

While the current and future RHNA figures may seem difficult to achieve, Councilmember Phoebe Venkat said the city’s zoning gives it an advantage.

“We’re actually only 35% single-family home-zoned, so I would think, even though we view our numbers as high, I would guess they might be even higher if we were zoned like other cities in the surrounding area,” she said.