Housing plan heads to Laguna Beach City Council amid hand-wringing 

By Lou Ponsi, Special to the Independent

The Planning Commission unanimously voted Wednesday to recommend the City Council approve the Housing Element update, despite concerns from housing advocates arguing the document doesn’t go far enough to produce affordable housing units.

Racing against a Feb. 12 deadline from the state, commissioners moved staffers’ recommendation after receiving a letter last week with extensive feedback from officials with the State Dept. of Housing and Community Development (HCD), which certifies the Housing Element complies with state law.

Laguna Beach City Housing and Human Services Committee members unsuccessfully pleaded with the Planning Commission to delay a vote until after they could hold a special meeting to dig into the letter’s implications for how city leaders will confront a state mandate to plan for 394 residential units affordable to very low- to moderate-income families.

Instead, staff will amend the Housing Element to meet the state’s recommendations before the document goes before the City Council on Jan. 11. Missing the deadline could attract litigation from state officials, who have recently been more active in enforcing housing laws, Community Development Director Marc Wiener said. Laguna Beach could also miss out on state housing grants.

“The revised element did not address this requirement to include programs with proactive and specific efforts to assist in the development of housing for lower-income households, including extremely low-income and special needs households,” the letter states.

The recommendations outlined in the letter can easily be integrated into the Housing Element, said So Kim, assistant director of community development.

State housing officials are asking the city to include in the Housing Element more information on the city’s development patterns over past years.

“These comments are pretty typical but usually require that we write a little bit more about the city’s history of development patterns,” Kim said.

Laguna Beach must commit to certain milestones that are reasonably attaining in the next few years.

“The city is also being asked to provide specific dates and time frames on when initiatives will be implemented and completed,” city consultant Nancy Bragado said.

The letter also asks the city to create a new zone for special needs housing.

“We’ve been aware of that since the beginning,” Bragado said. “It’s just been a matter of getting a commitment in place that the city can get behind and that you can do fast enough to meet state law.”

Another recommendation calls on the city to reach out to developers specifically for the construction of housing to meet the needs of lower-income and special needs populations, Bragado said.

To help reach its Regional Housing Needs Allocation, the City Council voted unanimously in November to relax restrictions on the construction of accessory dwelling units. After some negotiation, state officials agreed to let up to 15 ADUs per year count toward Laguna Beach’s housing goal, said Patty Anders of Civic Solutions, a consultant on the Housing Element.

“With this, there has been a significant upward trend in accessory dwelling unit applications,” Andres said.

Planning Commissioner Steven Kellenberg pointed out the city has had a very difficult time getting homeowners to commit to keeping rents to low-income. He added that the City Council may want to consider offering incentives to maintain these units’ affordability.

The City has also identified several sites where housing can be constructed. Those sites include the parking lots of Neighborhood Congregational Church and United Methodist Church, Pyne Castle, a vacant swath of land behind Providence Mission Hospital Hospital, and commercial properties previously slated for a new hotel in the 300 block of North Coast Highway.

The South Laguna Civic Association strongly opposed the idea of building up to 35 dwelling units per acre on the hospital site, saying the property contains environmentally-sensitive habitat found nowhere else.

Commissioner Jorg Dubin expressed disappointment that no sites were chosen in Laguna Canyon which had been discussed in previous meetings.

“I think we are really missing a lot of opportunity out there,” Dubin said. “To me, it’s’ a much more viable zone in the city to do these kinds of things and I’m really discouraged, quite frankly, that this has been taken out of this updated version.”

Adding housing in the canyon would require re-zoning and these publicly-owned sites were removed from Housing Element amid community uproar earlier this year, Kim said.

“There is a great deal of work to do in terms of addressing our housing needs and complying with state mandates,” Alex Rounaghi, co-chair of Laguna Beach Housing and Human Services Committee, said in a statement Wednesday. “Our committee will continue to work with city staff and members of the community on good faith efforts to meet these critical goals.”

Daniel Langhorne contributed reporting to this story.