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By Steve Levy
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About this blog: I grew up in Los Angeles and moved to the area in 1963 when I started graduate school at Stanford. Nancy and I were married in 1977 and we lived for nearly 30 years in the Duveneck school area. Our children went to Paly. We moved ...
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About this blog: I grew up in Los Angeles and moved to the area in 1963 when I started graduate school at Stanford. Nancy and I were married in 1977 and we lived for nearly 30 years in the Duveneck school area. Our children went to Paly. We moved downtown in 2006 and enjoy being able to walk to activities. I do not drive and being downtown where I work and close to the CalTrain station and downtown amenities makes my life more independent. I have worked all my life as an economist focusing on the California economy. My work centers around two main activities. The first is helping regional planning agencies such as ABAG understand their long-term growth outlook. I do this for several regional planning agencies in northern, southern and central coast California. My other main activity is studying workforce trends and policy implications both as a professional and as a volunteer member of the NOVA (Silicon Valley) and state workforce boards. The title of the blog is Invest and Innovate and that is what I believe is the imperative for our local area, region, state and nation. That includes investing in people, in infrastructure and in making our communities great places to live and work. I served on the recent Palo Alto Infrastructure Commission. I also believe that our local and state economy benefits from being a welcoming community, which mostly we are a leader in, for people of all religions, sexual preferences and places of birth.
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Bay Area and Palo Alto RHNA
Uploaded: Jun 30, 2020
The California Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD) has released the Regional Housing Needs Allocation for the Bay Area,.
The total for the 8.5 year period is 441,176 units, which I believe is approximately 135% (more than double) higher than the current target.
Almost 60% of the units are targeted at low and moderate income households while 40% are for HH making more than 120% of the area median income
About half of these units are for the projected growth in population and half are to "catch up" on existing shortages: to reduce the number of overcrowded and cost-burdened households and to target a normal supply of vacant units. These catch up requirements are the result of recent state legislation to relieve housing challenges for current low and moderate income residents and are new to this round of RHNA allocations.
Palo Alto should expect to get a higher % increase as goal. The ABAG RHNA allocation committee criteria (not final yet) target above average allocations for 1) cities that are high opportunity areas and 2) cities that have an abundance of jobs relative to housing. I expect Palo Alto would score high on both of these criteria.
Whatever allocation Palo Alto ultimately gets will need to be planned for in the Housing Element update due in 2022. This will be a major work element for staff and the council in 2021. The Housing Element needs to contain credible and feasible sites for housing as well as an array of policies to meet state goals.
This is where local control can come into play as Palo Alto can adopt its own plan to meet the targets though it has to be credible and feasible.
Current and future housing proposals should be considered with this knowledge about Palo Alto's upcoming RHNA goals.
A final note.
The HCD determination was not based on the ABAG job and population growth forecast. If it had been, the target likely would have been 100,000--150,000 housing units higher.
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