The Santa Monica City Council wants to make building affordable housing in the city much easier.
At their meeting last week, council members voted unanimously to have staff pour over the city’s voluminous zoning codes looking for inconsistencies that might discourage developers to build affordable housing in Santa Monica.
The state mandates that municipalities give certain incentives to developers of affordable housing by allowing them to build an extra units, cutting them some slack on height requirements and letting them build closer to the curb.
But Santa Monica officials believe as the zoning code gets more complicated, those incentives may be harder to reach.
“This would be more of a technical change to clean up some of the inadvertent glitches in the policy,” Councilman Ken Genser said. “We would try to remove the inadvertent obstacles to the development of affordable housing.”
Affordable housing, which is typically provided in apartment complexes, can be built in every section of the city except for the industrial area off of Olympic Boulevard and 26th Street, as well as areas set aside for single family homes.
Bob Sullivan, president of the Santa Monica Housing Council, said the city council is responsible for creating most of the obstacles to affordable housing. He said the council has passed several changes to zoning laws which decreased the number of apartments that can be built by half.
“One reason we don’t have affordable housing is the council’s constant reduction of densities,” he said. “If they really wanted to encourage affordable housing they would increase those density benefits.”
Sullivan said the high rents that plague the city are a case of supply and demand. The city, he said, won’t allow the supply to increase, so demand causes the rents to go up.
“Affordable housing comes from supply, and if you cut the supply off where there’s demand you don’t get affordable housing,” Sullivan said. “There has been very little new rental housing built in this city over the past 20 years.”
“Affordable housing comes from supply, and if you cut the supply off where there’s demand you don’t get affordable housing.” — — BOB SULLIVAN Santa Monica Housing Council president
And Sullivan said the city’s slow permit process makes building new rental and affordable housing units in Santa Monica very expensive and frustrating.
“We have advocated that for a long time to streamline the decision process,” he said. “If they like your project it seems to go through, but if they don’t like it there’s all these hurdles thrown up and it can get pretty subjective.”
But Mayor Mike Feinstein said the city is working to make its permit process much easier, and to make sure that it is not preventing new affordable housing from getting built.
At the same time, the city also wants to make the process of building apartment complexes and condos of any size a much more public process, he said.
“It can be conflicting goals when you want to make sure there is a public process and strong review — balanced with providing affordable housing,” Feinstein said. “The same process that would not slow down market-rate housing could slow down and endanger affordable housing.”
And in the end, city officials said the entire process is meant to make sure more affordable housing comes on line as more rent controlled apartments disappear.
“We have a very significant housing shortage,” Genser said. “And by cleaning up the zoning codes, this is a place where we could help increase the number of our affordable housing units.”
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on April 29, 2002. Read the original PDF.