Let's get serious about local building deregulation

In 2017, I wrote a column about California’s affordable housing crisis. California had begun to realize that the economic health of the state hinged on relaxing zoning and development laws.

I wrote, “California has slowly realized that government is the problem and not the solution. The anger and resentment about the issue have grown so strong that the state Legislature is contemplating many bills to address it, including legislation that would stop NIMBYism (not in my backyard), not just for affordable housing but for all housing. California also is considering limiting the use of zoning and environmental and procedural laws that have been used to stop housing developments.”

A year and a half later, California has not only passed those bills but is now beginning to enforce them.

Two weeks ago, at the direction of the new governor, Gavin Newsom, the state attorney general began to sue local governments over their roles in hindering affordable housing. This is especially significant when you consider that Gov. Newsom was the former mayor of San Francisco — he came from local government himself.

According to a Los Angeles Times article, California sued Huntington Beach because it was blocking construction of affordable housing. “The governor said in a statement that the suit was needed because rising housing costs threaten the economy and deepen inequality,” according to the article.

While Huntington Beach has a much larger population, like Sarasota it is a coastal community that cites tourism on its webpage as one of its two leading industries.

In a Feb. 3 column titled, "To fight the housing shortage, California is right to come down hard on Huntington Beach," Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Michael Hiltzak of the L.A. Times, wrote that Huntington Beach has a housing plan to accommodate new growth by allowing greater density and height, reducing parking requirements and allowing faster review processes. But  NIMBYism kicked in hard.

“Residents peppered council members with complaints about apartment buildings, traffic on Beach Boulevard (a major route from the freeway to the oceanfront) and the loss of community atmosphere from the construction of apartment dwellings," Hiltzak wrote.

Sound familiar?

The issue is so serious in California that Gov. Newsom has taken his position one step further than just suing, he has threatened to block transportation dollars for those cities and counties that reject growth instead of accommodating it. Just to make sure everyone really understood he meant business, he also allocated incentive money to governments for homeless services and based on whether a local government was moving in the right direction in allowing growth.

This is quite a bold statement coming out of California. The state has mandated the deregulation of zoning and procedures because they directly relate to solving affordable housing.

I can hear the cries from the no-growth advocates now: “Make the developers pay more!”

They will argue that more growth and less regulation just puts more money in the developers’ pockets.

As the Strong Towns movement tells us, however, that chant is a myth. According to its Five Immutable Laws of Affordable Housing, the resident, not the developer, pays for the cost increases caused by regulations. “A developer who doesn’t pass costs on will not be in business for very long. For this reason, anything that makes development more costly for developers makes housing more costly for people, according to the Strong Towns website. "And remember, time is money; a convoluted permitting process makes housing more expensive, too.”

The City of Sarasota has decided to re-examine its building code. One of the items on the chopping block, at the urging of a no-growth organization appropriately called STOP!, will be an administrative review process.

Administrative review gave property owners the confidence during an unstable time in city government to rebuild portions of vacant storefronts into the robust mix of commercial and residential we have downtown today.

Under administrative review, if you follow the rules, you can build without costly procedures that require the services of the multiple experts required to alter plans at the whim of whoever wishes to change the rules, including those who don’t want a property owner to build at all.

Sarasota needs to take a deep breath and understand that growth is coming — trying to stop it with more procedures and regulations will only exacerbate the affordable-housing problem. Sarasota needs to take a hard look at the direction California is taking and find ways to accommodate growth and redevelopment instead of driving up housing costs through more regulation and processes aimed at stopping our economy.

Christine Robinson is executive director of the Argus Foundation and was on the Sarasota County Commission from 2010 to 2016. Contact her at christine@argusfoundation.org.