Planning officials balance housing needs with emissions
requirements
As an end comes to the sewer moratorium in Hollister, city and
county planning officials will need to heed mandates from the
state’s Housing and Community Development office as well as the
California Air Resources Board, whose mandates are sometimes
contradictory.
Planning officials balance housing needs with emissions requirements
As an end comes to the sewer moratorium in Hollister, city and county planning officials will need to heed mandates from the state’s Housing and Community Development office as well as the California Air Resources Board, whose mandates are sometimes contradictory as they plan future growth.
The Department of Housing and Community Development creates housing targets for cities and counties to ensure a steady supply of housing, both market rate and affordable – targets that are often tied to state funding and grants. The California Air Resources Board is charged with bringing California into compliance with a new law to drastically lower greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent of 1990 levels in the next 40 years.
To reduce residents’ carbon footprint, the challenge for local officials is to accommodate projected regional growth without inducing sprawl, local planners agree.
“We seem to sort of have mixed mandates,” said Mary Paxton, Hollister’s planning manager. “One mandate is to reduce our carbon emissions, and another mandate is to construct housing.”
Air Resources Board staff released a draft version of their plan June 26.
Reducing vehicles miles traveled is one of the major considerations in the draft plan, said Stanley Young, spokesperson for the California Air Resources Board.
“Greenhouse gas emissions can be equated with vehicle miles traveled,” Young said. “In the future, developments will have to be examined to determine the impact they have in terms of the number of vehicle miles that they could eventually generate.”
New development is not necessarily bad.
“It depends on where it is and how it links up with existing transportation facilities,” Young said.
Current state guidelines provide little direction for local officials, said Art Henriques, the county planning director.
“The advice from the attorney general’s office was, ‘Take your best shot at it. We recognize that the guidelines are open,'” Henriques said.
Every five or six years, HCD staff assigns each region a number of houses that it must accommodate over the next period, said Cathy Creswell, HCD’s deputy director for housing policy development. Good planning can address both issues, she said.
The local Council of Governments, an agency with representatives from the county and cities, distribute the housing allocation between those cities and counties.
It is not a choice between fighting global warming and building houses. Most carbon emissions come from transportation, Creswell said.
“We don’t think that folks are going to be successful in [reducing carbon emissions] unless we’re addressing the kind of housing in the places that folks are going to need it,” she said. “It is required that they plan to accommodate the growth.”
Without a certified housing element in their general plan, a city or county can lose out on state funding and grants.
Due to its restrictive growth ordinance, San Juan Bautista does not have a certified housing element.
New residential development in Hollister has been restricted over the last six years due to a moratorium on new sewer hook ups.
