Required by State law

A few notes about the Housing Element, since the “official” version was released yesterday and will be available for public comment for about 30 days or so. After that the City will send this draft (I don’t know if they’ll make edits before they do) to the Department of Housing and Community Development for a 90 day review. The general schedule of the Housing Element is here.

This is pulled directly from the City’s Housing Plan specific website about why we do this Housing Element thing:

The Housing Element 2022 Update is Alameda’s housing plan for the years 2023-2031. It is required by State law and it must provide for Alameda’s fair share of the regional housing need, referred to as the Regional Housing Needs Allocation (RHNA). The Housing Element provides policies and programs to shape and guide decision making about the types of housing needed, the locations for new housing in Alameda, and strategies and programs to preserve housing and help people with special housing needs. [emphasis added]

I feel like this bit is important because for people who haven’t been following along (or at all) there may be confusion about this process and why we have to do it. I actually saw a comment on the City’s Facebook page where someone insisted that we should be working on “infrastructure” before discussing housing related issues because, well, “This is an island.” And by “infrastructure” it always seems to mean “more capacity for cars” despite the work that has been done and continues to be done to create safe transportation options other than single occupant vehicles.

Anyway, this process must be done, despite people not understanding, vowing to punish politicians at the ballot box for daring to complete this process, etc and so forth because, people, the consequence for non compliance are much, much worse.

And setting aside the portion of non compliance being really bad, there’s the whole housing crisis thing that we are constantly hearing about. I mean I guess you could avoid that information if you elect to dismiss the suffering of others but that’s tough for me personally. I’ll probably be doing a series of posts on the Housing Element shortly. A quick read of it the night it dropped was slightly disappointing for me, but, honestly, no one is going to be fully happy with the Housing Element. Some people will think it oversteps, others will think it doesn’t go far enough and, honestly, the HCD’s opinion is the only one that matters in this entire discussion. Definitely take the time to read it and put in a letter either to HCD or to the City because in these discussions it feels like a very small number of people have an outsized influence on the end product.