ORANGE COUNTY PERSPECTIVE : Aid for Affordable Housing
The affordable-housing crisis has confounded the best efforts of government leaders in Orange County. Now, in Costa Mesa, ordinary citizens are trying their hand, looking for solutions in a commendable grass-roots effort to apply a community’s best thinking to a vexing problem.
For a couple of months, a group of homeowners, business people and housing advocates have been meeting to evaluate city codes, ordinances and the General Plan to try to untangle them and find fresh answers. It is a subcommittee of an Orange County task force on affordable-housing issues.
The concern focuses on what member Larry Haynes calls “the working poor”--secretaries and retail store workers, for example.
The subcommittee is asking some good questions about qualifications for affordable housing; under state guidelines, people with incomes of less than 80% of an area’s median income are usually considered eligible. For a family of four in Costa Mesa, that’s roughly $41,700. But because of Orange County’s high cost of living, there are many below, and many above that figure might be unable to get decent housing that they can afford.
Haynes knows a good deal about the housing crisis because he is also executive director of Mercy House, a Santa Ana homeless shelter. The plan is to supplement the work of city officials in trying to find incentives for developers and others to provide low-cost housing for ordinary folks who live in Costa Mesa.
This daunting task involves painstaking review of the city’s affordable-housing strategies and evaluating how new development is set aside for low-cost houses and apartments.
But the dogged work of unsnarling a paper trail isn’t putting anybody off; since Costa Mesa started its program, residents in San Juan Capistrano, Huntington Beach and Fullerton have begun to hold similar meetings.
To bring affordable housing on line takes diplomacy and commitment in neighborhoods where low-income housing is not always welcome. This grass-roots approach is a welcome start.
