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Thanks to Chris for posting this informative thread on the new guidance memo from @California_HCD on how cities should craft their housing elements for the next RHNA cycle. Here are a couple additional observations: https://twitter.com/CSElmendorf/status/1276906004114898946
1) It's likely that cities will try to game the new ADU laws to meet their RHNA #s and I'm not sure this memo does quite enough to stop that. The memo says that cities can use trends in "regional production" of ADUs to predict future ADU zoning capacity.
Why regional trends rather than local trends? The fact that the city of Los Angeles is permitting 400% more ADUs since 2017 says nothing about the trendline for Beverly Hills, although they are in the same "region."
The memo does say that cities will have a "safe harbor" if they predict ADU production will be 5X the previous planning period. So maybe HCD will be more skeptical when cities try to use other methods like regional trends. But those other methods *are* permitted and invite abuse.
Bottom line here: it will likely fall on housing advocates to ensure cities aren't trying to game the RHNA system by using ADUs to eat up most of their obligation, and the work is really cut out for us bc HCD isn't giving us a simple formula to rely on.
2) Notably, the memo says that the city must consider things like parking, setbacks, height limits *in determining realistic site capacity.* That's important, bc in my experience these constraints play a bigger role than use and density in limiting a site's development potential.
AND, the LG is required to consider parking, setbacks etc under "constraints" analysis of the HA so this gives advocates a 2nd bite at the apple to make cities do this analysis - once for zoning capacity, and then again for constraints.
It's not clear though how meaningful HCD's oversight will be on constraints. If you look at this sample site analysis, for example, you'll notice there is no analysis of regulatory (as opposed to environmental) constraints.
I might urge HCD to consider a similar "safe harbor" formula on constraints. Eg, if parking mins use up less than a set % of FAR, it's not a constraint. A parking space generally takes up about 320 SF of space. so multiply x number of units to get FAR that's taken up by parking
Chris has a great paper where he argues that cities should be deemed "presumptively constrained" under the constraint analysis if they fail certain benchmarks, but those benchmarks might not work as well when the q is whether a particular site has zoning capacity.
EDIT: 3) The memo prescribes the use of "by right" zoning in certain circumstances but outside those circumstances it's unclear if cities can use discretionary mechanisms like CUPs.
Suppose a site is zoned for 30 du/acre but you need a CUP to build at that density. Can I designate that site for moderate income housing without a rezoning, or do I need to rezone to remove the CUP requirement? That's unclear to me.
This is important bc cities use discretionary mechanisms like CUPs to increase cost of projects and to deny projects that are consistent with the zoning (and applicability of HAA isn't always 100% clear). Discretion kills projects more often than use/density restrictions.
I reserve the right to correct any mistakes in this thread as this is just my reaction to an initial read of a complex memo. Thanks to @CSElmendorf and @California_HCD for their great efforts.
