Coalition Would Fight Barriers to Low-Cost Homes : Development: Supervisor Stanton is forming a group to work for streamlined regulations as a means of reducing building costs.

The urbanization of Orange County is so far advanced, some building industry and government officials privately agree, that the opportunity to create a significant new supply of affordable housing most likely has passed.

But in a bid to seize what opportunities do remain, Orange County Supervisor Roger R. Stanton has begun forming a coalition that would work to streamline government land-use processing and establish regional ground rules that could help reduce some housing costs.

Government fees alone can add up to $30,000 to the cost of a home in Orange County, according to a recent BIA study.

In July, the average selling price of a new home in Orange County was $264,048 while the average resale price was $242,766, according to TRW Marketing Services.

Stanton’s plan was unveiled Tuesday by Christine Diemer, executive director of the Orange County Building Industry Assn., during a panel discussion of the controversial “Kemp report,” a federal Housing and Urban Development Department study of obstacles to affordable housing in the United States.

Stanton, who did not attend the BIA-sponsored session, said in a later telephone interview that he wants to use recommendations of the Kemp report, named after HUD Secretary Jack Kemp, to spur government to “do something tangible instead of just jawboning the issue for a year or so.”

The group he has instructed his staff to assemble would include representatives of county and city government, housing groups and the building industry. “This is all just in the formative stages,” Stanton said. “But the goal is to actually put together a county-city cooperative effort.”

The difficulty in doing that, however, is that there are several opposing camps involved.

The development industry and political conservatives who believe that government should not interfere in the real estate marketplace tend to support the Kemp commission report, especially those parts of it that pinpoint government regulation and government-imposed development fees as major blockades to affordable housing.

“Overregulation of the industry adds greatly to the cost of housing,” said Larry Arnn, a member of the Kemp committee and president of the Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy, a conservative think-tank in Montclair.

The HUD report, officially entitled “Not in My Back Yard: Removing Barriers to Affordable Housing,” urges sweeping changes in the way federal, state and local governments regulate the development industry.

But some see the report as an effort to relax government standards and frustrate interests as diverse as the environmental movement and grass-roots homeowner groups that oppose high-density, low-cost housing for social or economic reasons.

The latter group, generally called the NIMBY movement--the initials stand for “not in my back yard”--was singled out in the Kemp report as “perhaps the most potent and, to date, intractable cause of regulatory barriers to affordable housing.”

While no one admitting to be representing the NIMBY position spoke at Tuesday’s BIA panel, attended by about 40 government, building industry and housing advocacy representatives, the state’s largest environmental group sent a representative.

“I agree with probably a majority of the recommendations, but overall I believe this (report) is an outrageous government document” that chiefly represents the interests of the development industry, said Gordon Hart, a legislative representative for the Sierra Club.

He said he agrees with the report’s call for elimination of unnecessary government review and regulation and for re-evaluation of “expensive infrastructure fees,” such as charges for construction of roads and public parks and installation of sewer lines.

But those changes should not come at the expense of environmental protections, Hart said. The Kemp report calls for changes to federal- and state-designated endangered species and for wetlands-protection regulations in order to speed decision making and reduce costs to the development industry.