County Issue / Developer Contributions to...
Andres Herrera, City councilman, Oxnard
I am opposed to requiring such a condition because the tower development provides an opportunity for us to get jobs that we desperately need here. It was more important to make sure the developer could improve the quality of life in the community by creating temporary construction and permanent office jobs than to ask him to provide funds for the city’s undefined program for affordable housing. As to whether developers should provide funding for affordable housing, that should be a matter of the City Council establishing an objective and a program for creation of affordable housing. I’m not aware of such a program in this city. So I don’t see the correlation between the fee to provide affordable housing and holding up a $60-million project for which the city will receive in excess of $1.5 million in developer fees. We have thousands of people who commute out of our jurisdiction every day for employment located to the south. We hope to capture some of that in our third tower.
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Manuel Lopez, Mayor, Oxnard
The only reason I voted against approval of the tower was because the condition requiring the developer to pay $150,000 for affordable housing was deleted. It’s a good project and it’s needed, but it was inappropriate to delete that requirement because the planning staff felt our housing policy calls for such a condition. Some other council members feel Oxnard has a disproportionate amount of affordable housing, relative to the number of jobs here. But I think we can and should impose this fee on a development when it will create the need for more housing. We have people here living in garages and we have many homes that are occupied by as many as four families. Cities shouldn’t have to bear the burden of providing affordable housing alone. This condition, a contribution by the developer toward affordable housing, is used in other communities. The developer would just as soon not build the sound wall we mandated, either.
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Elois Zeanah, City councilwoman, Thousand Oaks
First, I don’t understand why such a developer would be charged for affordable housing. Unless it’s a standing, adopted policy, I would question a city’s decision to charge such a fee in these tough economic times. Cities should have long-term goals and policies on how they will provide affordable housing. Certainly, I don’t feel it’s fair to have developers pay for it unless such a fee is applied to all development. Developers are already paying a fee per square foot that helps pay for community improvements. Cities are racing to attract developers right now, and this is not the time to impose new requirements on them. Because the recession has hit Southern California particularly hard, cities are having to look at their permit processes and their costs to developers, who bring with them many new jobs. We are trying to find ways to cut out red tape that’s unneeded and yet maintain the economic and environmental balance.
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Eileen McCarthy, Attorney, California Rural Legal Assistance
I favored the condition, though I can understand cities’ concern that developers would be frightened off by what they might perceive as an extra financial burden. There is an equally important concern that cities should have, and in fact are mandated (by state law) to have . . . adequate housing for their very low- and low-income residents. There are a number of mechanisms that could be used in assessing the costs of affordable housing against developers. One example is to have the developer set aside money in a housing trust fund. When a developer is going to create a certain number of jobs in a community, it’s important to determine what kinds of jobs those are. If they’re low-paying jobs, then that will increase demand for affordable housing. However, if you’re trying to make the argument that there’s an increased strain on the affordable housing market by creation of new jobs, your argument is certainly lessened if most of those jobs are high-paying.
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Greg Stratton, Mayor, Simi Valley
I’d have to agree with the Oxnard City Council members who voted to strike that requirement. Tying the housing problems of a community to a commercial development, in this case an office building, can be counterproductive in the process of trying to bring jobs to your community. That kind of requirement seems to be a hang-over from the days when we thought California’s economy was impervious to any kind of faltering. Each city has to have a program to address affordable housing, and I don’t think developers should have to directly support it. In Simi Valley we’ve always been the other way around--the city has had a lot of affordable housing and we’ve been trying to get industrial development. We’ve met our affordable housing goals with incentives given to developers who build affordable housing, and with funds from our redevelopment agency that were used to subsidize several affordable housing developments.
