Regional Housing Needs Assessment Cover Letter
This review and cover letter was written to provide background and suggestions for Auditors Tilden and Lozano to consider in relation to the audit commissioned by the Joint Legislative Audit Committee at the request of Members Glazer, Newman, Bauer-Kahan, Portantino, Muratsuchi, Stern, and Bates. The authors are professors who study land-use law and housing markets (see bios below). The primary goal is to provide big-picture context, in the hopes that this will help to organize and focus the audit on matters of consequence. The main points are as follows.
1. California’s framework for accommodating needed housing has long suffered from three fundamental problems, which the Legislature and HCD have addressed only partially and equivocally. The audit should highlight these problems and propose solutions.
2. HCD’s determinations of regional housing needs for the 6th cycle were based on reasonable applications of the statutory criteria. In the aggregate, the department’s adjustments for “present needs” are at the low end of the range of independent estimates of those needs.
3. The societal costs of overestimating housing need in the RHNA process are minimal, whereas the costs of underestimating need are severe, given California’s housing crisis. Because the costs of overshooting are minimal, there would be no need for the Legislature to adjust cities’ 6th-cycle targets even if they had been set “too high.”
4. In 6th-cycle housing elements to date, cities are using wildly disparate approaches to assess the capacity of their site inventory to accommodate the city’s RHNA. Only a small minority of cities have realistically accounted for economic conditions and site development rates.
