IRVINE : Affordable Housing Measure on Agenda
The City Council tonight will consider a ballot measure that would allow voters to advise whether the city’s far-reaching affordable housing goals are appropriate.
In February, City Councilman Bill Vardoulis said he thought that if residents understood that the city’s goals encourage developers to build government-subsidized, low-income apartments rather than lower-priced houses, they would reject the goals.
Tonight, during the council’s 6:30 session, council members are scheduled to decide whether they want to put his belief to the test.
City Councilwoman Paula Werner said that placing the housing goals on the ballot wouldn’t accomplish anything because they are too complex to be phrased in simple ballot wording.
“This is like asking somebody to vote on something like the tax code or war and peace,” Werner said Monday. Using an advisory ballot measure would be “a very poor way to make public policy,” she said.
But Vardoulis said an advisory measure would allow the council to hear opinions from more residents. At past hearings on the housing goals, he said, the City Council hears only from a core group of subsidized-housing advocates.
One of the leading goals with which Vardoulis and a majority of council members disagree calls for developers to try to make 25% of all new homes affordable to families earning less than the county’s median income--about $49,700 a year for a family of four. Developers satisfy that goal mostly by using state and federal grants to subsidize apartment rents.
Under state law, cities are required to adopt policies and procedures that encourage housing for current and future residents of all income levels. In 1989, the previous City Council updated its housing goals and put the 25% goal in place. The goals also spell out ways the city should help developers build the low-income units, such as helping to find subsidies and allowing the developer to build more homes per acre than normally allowed.
Current, more conservative, council members have repeatedly opposed those goals as creating housing that is too dense for Irvine and that pushes up house prices for first-time buyers.
If developers are required to make 25% of their units affordable to low-income families, they will build fewer houses and condominiums and instead focus more on apartments, Vardoulis said. And unless the low-income apartments are subsidized completely by government grants, developers would have to increase the price of houses in order to defray the cost, he said.
“If this is what the people of Irvine want--a lot of apartments subsidized by somebody for low-income families, I’ll accept it,” Vardoulis said.
If the housing goals are placed on the ballot, Vardoulis said, he wants the wording of the goals to be understandable. City planners have recommended three general ways of phrasing the housing-goal ballot questions and neither option spells out the situation clearly enough, he said.
Vardoulis said he wants the ballot to ask more than just if voters support the concept of making 25% of all new homes affordable.
“When we throw around the term ‘affordable housing,’ the average person thinks that’s a nice condo or a small home down the street that somebody could buy at an affordable price,” he said. Instead, it should be clear to voters that affordable housing can mean government-subsidized apartments, he said.
