HUNTINGTON BEACH : Affordable Housing Quota Plan Defeated

After a heated debate over a months-long controversy, the City Council this week narrowly rejected a proposal for an interim policy that would have set affordable-housing quotas for developers who receive city financial aid.

City staff members recommended that the council approve the measure until a permanent policy can be enacted.

But the council rejected the idea 4 to 3, siding with development-industry representatives who argued that the city should offer financial incentives for them to build affordable housing rather than make such units mandatory. Council members also established a nine-member committee to study the issue and recommend a permanent policy. That report is tentatively due within six weeks.

The interim policy would have required that developers of residential projects who receive any city assistance set aside 20% of their units for low- or moderate-income residents, either as part of the development or elsewhere in the city. That requirement would also have applied to any residential project 10 acres or larger.

The city by 1994 must submit to the state a policy for providing housing for low- and moderate-income residents. In Orange County, moderate-income households are defined as those with earnings of between $41,760 and $62,650 a year; low-income households are those in which the wage earner or earners make between $26,100 and $38,000.

City staff members have typically aimed for a 20% affordable-housing goal for residential projects, but council members have never stated clearly whether they support that objective. Council members during recent months, however, have been debating how to begin forming a definitive stance on the issue.

The interim policy was proposed as a guideline for several large residential projects that the council will be considering in the coming months. The policy, had it been adopted, would have remained in effect only until the newly formed committee had recommended a permanent plan.

The committee will be composed of Council Members Don MacAllister and Grace Winchell; Planning Commission members Ken Bourguignon and Shirley Detloff; Richard Harlow, a development consultant; James Righeimer, president of the Huntington Beach-Fountain Valley Board of Realtors; Doug Snider, a residential development representative for the Robert Mayer Corp., and two members from nonprofit organizations who have yet to be appointed.

Leaders of the Board of Realtors, the Chamber of Commerce and large developers charged that the interim measure would make their projects economically unfeasible.

MacAllister, among others, agreed, criticizing the 20% mandate as “an arbitrary figure.”

Winchell led the dissenting arguments.

“This is one way we can bring the development community to the negotiating table,” she said. “Without it, they leave the table.”