Coronado Is Flouting California's New Affordable Housing Requirements

Speaker 1: 00:00 Karnataka with its beautiful beaches and historic hotel is one of California's top tourist destinations, but for the many low wage workers who keep the island running, living there as next to impossible state officials last year ordered the city to plan for a lot more affordable housing. But as KPBS Metro reporter, Andrew Bowen explains the city is not on board with that change. Speaker 2: 00:26 Bye Speaker 3: 00:30 Ivanka, Lena [inaudible] kisses. Her ten-year-old son, Ricardo goodbye as she leaves for work. But I see how their lives with her husband and three kids in a small mobile home in Chula Vista, she works as a room attendant at the hotel Del Coronado. She says she'd love to live in the community where she works, that would let her ditch her commute across the bridge and bike or walk to her job. Speaker 4: 00:55 I love this place. This is beautiful. It's quiet, clean. We have the beach. So everything is awesome here. Add to those Speaker 3: 01:03 Perks. Coronado's low crime rate and good schools and parks, but on a hotel worker's salary, there's no way, but I see they could afford to live in Cornado where finding a two bedroom home for less than $3,000 a month is a steal. As soon as she's off, Speaker 4: 01:19 I just feel that I have to leave and come back to my home. But this is like my second home because I pass more hours in the island, then my home, but I can not live in here. I just come and work and I have to go back. Speaker 3: 01:37 CLO circumstance is hardly unique. Cora natto is one of many high-end tourist destinations in California where low wage workers, staff, pricey, hotels, shops, and restaurants, but can't afford to live where they work. State lawmakers have tried to fix this by requiring cities to zone for dramatically more housing than ever before. Last year, the state ordered core natto to plan for 912 new homes over the next eight years. More than half of those homes are meant to be affordable for low-income households. Speaker 5: 02:09 Um, essentially trying to comply with and absurd and, uh, not sensible. Uh, state law is requiring us to be here. Speaker 3: 02:17 Order from Sacramento to add more housing was not well received in Coronado mayor, Richard Bailey and the city council last month voted to draft a smaller housing plan on Tuesday. The council unanimously approved a plan with about a third of the homes that are required. Bailey said at last month, council meeting the number the city picked is real. Speaker 5: 02:38 Um, it's not based on a pie in the sky number from the state, uh, which had no basis in reality whatsoever did not take into account our existing land use, uh, size, not take into account available space, our existing infrastructure, our sewage, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. This number does that. Coronado Speaker 3: 02:53 Sued to get a smaller housing allocation, but lost it's currently appealing that decision. But in the meantime, Cornado thumbing its nose at state housing law carries risks. The state can Sue the city into compliance. What Speaker 6: 03:06 Happens in San Diego is going to be a little bit of a foreshadowing of what happens throughout the state. John Speaker 3: 03:13 Wizard is with the San Francisco based nonprofit YIMBY law, which sues cities to enforce state housing laws. He says small wealthy cities across California are preparing similar fights to get out of their housing obligations. But San Diego county is the first region to go through that planning process. That means core natto could be a test case for how aggressively the state cracks down on scofflaw cities for wizard. It's not just a question of following the law. It's a question of fairness and equity. And Speaker 6: 03:43 When Coronado says we don't have to do what the state told us, we don't have to do our fair share. We don't have to pull our weight, but everybody else does. What Cornell was saying is that we're special. And that we don't believe that you deserve to live Speaker 3: 03:57 Avon Halina [inaudible] the hotel worker who can't afford to live in Cora. Natto has a similar message for the city's leaders. Speaker 4: 04:04 I will say to them that everybody deserves a very nice home because we are working hard and, um, our families deserves a very good place to live too. Speaker 2: 04:23 Joining Speaker 1: 04:24 Me is KPBS Metro reporter, Andrew Bowen, Andrew. Welcome. Hi Maureen. So Coronado is basically an island. Would the city have to build more high rises to accommodate nearly a thousand homes? Speaker 3: 04:38 Absolutely not. Although you might think so if you've been following this story and hearing what some of the residents and city officials have been saying throughout the process, uh, most of the city's residential areas are zoned for single family homes. So a very low density, um, low building Heights, things like that. And in a very high opportunity, highly sought after city like Coronado. That's basically the equivalent of saying nothing can be built here except for mansions because even smaller homes, um, very often sell for more than a million dollars. So those areas could be rezoned for apartments. You raise the density, um, not, you know, to, uh, the scale of a high rise, but maybe a mid rise apartment. You can fit quite a bit of homes into something like three or four stories, but a single family home zoning is, uh, kind of like a third rail and local politics, certainly in Coronado. So when single family neighborhoods are untouchable, then that really limits where home builders can add more housing. And so pushing all of the new housing to just a couple of lots as Cornado is trying to do here, ironically makes, uh, high rises, uh, kind of more likely Speaker 1: 05:47 And what a Coronado city leaders saying about why they don't want to increase density. Speaker 3: 05:53 Well, city leaders and residents alike have been railing against new housing obligations from the start, uh, years ago in the public meetings that the city has held in written comments that the city has received from residents. People will say things like this will increase traffic. It will block our views. It will lower our property values. It will make parking more scarce. And one of the most common phrases you hear is that this will destroy our community character. It's not always clear what people mean by that community character. Uh, sometimes they seem to be just talking about the architectural style. You know, they like their historic homes. There are a lot of those in Cornado other times it seems like community character is more referring to the people and who can afford to live in Coronado now versus who would be able to afford to live in Cornado. If there were more of a range of options, things like duplexes and smaller apartments and things like that, isn't there Speaker 1: 06:48 An additional element advocating racial equity and fairness in the state mandate to build more houses in communities like Coronado and our city leaders are addressing that issue in any way. Speaker 3: 07:02 Yeah. One of the biggest new requirements from the state is that cities have, as they update their housing elements, which are, is what this is officially called. They have to affirmatively further fair housing. What the government never did was attempt to make up for all of the centuries of, of legal, uh, discrimination and segregation. Things like barring people of color from living in certain neighborhoods. You know, it's no accident that Coronado is more than 80% white. So, uh, this requirement of affirmatively furthering fair housing, it requires every city, uh, Coronado included to take actions that proactively undo the damage and the inequity and the segregation that was caused by those past policies. And this is an area where the state, uh, state housing officials, as they were reviewing, reviewing Cornell's draft housing element, they saw big shortcomings in what the city had proposed. But again, as with the number of the city, just decided it wasn't going to do what the state had asked. Now Speaker 1: 08:00 You say Carnados first attempt at suing to get the housing mandate reduced lost in court. Coronado is appealing it's loss in court is a drawn out legal battle part of the city strategy of non-compliance. Speaker 3: 08:17 Uh, so basically, um, the city is banking on the assumption that state housing officials are going to be really busy dealing with a number of cities like core natto that are, um, either pushing the bounds of what's allowed or just, um, completely ignoring them altogether. Uh, the, the existing lawsuit, um, does have, you know, a ways to go before it's heard before a judge and the court of appeal. There are other ways that the city can kind of draw out this process. And there was a council member who last month as the city council was, um, deciding it wanted to scale back its housing plan council member, Michael Donovan said that with our existing lawsuit, with all of the other things that the state has going on, it'll probably be a couple of years before we really see the consequences of not having a certified housing element. And those consequences could be the city loses authority over land use. Uh, a developer could come in and Sue the city, get a building permit from a judge and build whatever they want. Pretty much wherever they want, if they own that property. Speaker 1: 09:22 San Diego is apparently the first region to try to update its housing plans to accommodate the new state housing mandates what's happening in the rest of the state. Speaker 3: 09:32 Well, as I said, there's a, you know, a number of cities that are pushing back against these new requirements. San Diego is the first county in the state to go through this new process under these new rules. And so it's, um, definitely, uh, testing the state's patients and the state's, uh, aggressiveness in terms of how, how much they want to crack down on these cities. But yeah, there are cities in LA county, in the bay area that are all fighting these higher, uh, mandates for housing. And many of them are, uh, just saying they want to fight this as long as possible. Some of these things, you know, I think that the, the end of the road is coming, uh, and the state may eventually just be able to get what they want because there's, um, very clearly, uh, you know, the state government has authority over local governments, uh, but things can, can be drawn out for a few years and that's likely to happen in Coronado. I've been speaking Speaker 1: 10:25 With KPBS, Metro reporter, Andrew Bowen, Andrew. Thank you. Thank you, Maureen.