A new era begins under the dome at City Hall as Cynthia Kurtz attends her first meeting as Interim City Manager.
The big item at Monday’s meeting should be the SB 9 ordinance and this one is running headlong into a collision between locals who want to preserve neighborhoods and the folks who think we should build affordable housing everywhere, some of it by-right.
SB 9 allows property owners to split lots zoned for a single home to build more housing, but it does not guarantee affordable housing.
The law goes into effect on Jan. 1. Historic districts are exempt.
The housing advocates of course say we need more affordable housing. I disagree.
We do need more affordable housing, but it has to be smart and reasonable affordable housing.
It can’t be scattershot or one size fits all. It has to be built in the right place.
Yes, the state does have a part to play in alleviating the affordable housing crisis, but abolishing single-family housing or pushing it out is a bad idea.
The pendulum did swing too far and that led to a housing crisis, but now it seems like the effort to fix the problem may be swinging the pendulum too far the other way.
Across the country, the highway system displaced Black and Brown people as those neighborhoods were destroyed.
These are the neighborhoods that will take the brunt of SB9, and SB10 which makes it easier for cities to zone for smaller, lower-cost housing developments of up to 10 units.
We need affordable housing. At the same time, that should not mean that the neighborhoods in the city be subjected to excessive laws that all but remove the city’s zoning codes.
Yes, housing should be affordable, but at what cost?
In nearby Altadena, longtime residents were forced to fight back against a by-right project designed to be way too tall and way too big.
The developer later agreed to reduce the height by one story at the urging of Kathryn Barger, but the people that opposed this project are not racist people trying to keep minorities out of their neighborhood. Many of them are Black residents that have lived in Altadena for years.
People have every right to support or oppose housing projects in their community via public hearings, through their elected officials and other processes.
Let’s build affordable housing, but let’s be smart.
The Monday Morning Bullpen is published every Monday the City Council is scheduled to meet.
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2 thoughts on “Monday Morning Bullpen: SB 9 Is Bad For Pasadena”
I am a general contractor in Pasadena and recently served on the Pasadena Redistricting Task Force. While I strongly believe that we must find solutions for the critical lack of affordable housing, Mr. Coleman is absolutely correct that the impending effects of SB9 may have irreparable and irreversible unintended consequences for communities of color in our city if left strictly to market forces.
Currently the only viable avenue for generational wealth accumulation for working class Americans is the transfer of real property from parents to children. This has been the great success of home ownership, fueled by programs such as the GI Bill of the last century. Today, however, with the average cost for a home far beyond the means of working people, the prospects for entering the housing market on the strength of wage earnings alone is increasingly remote if not impossible for most people.
One cannot sit in judgment of a parent today who may choose to sell the family home to a corporate developer or real estate investment conglomerate and spend their hard-earned retirement in comfort and security, but for the children and family members who rely on that home for an affordable place to live the prospect of spending the rest of their lives as renters is a stark reality. Nowhere will this reality be more profound than in the lower wage tier neighborhoods of our city. We can predict with near certainty that the 2030 census will show communities of color as a higher percentage of renters and rent-burdened by the time this tidal wave of disruptive change washes over the land and there are no easy solutions to prevent that from happening.
Dear Andre,
It is easy to criticize, a bit harder to proffer a better solution. So what is YOUR better solution?
1) Splitting 10,000 square foot (and often 25, 000 square foot and larger) lots into the smaller, more usual 5000 square foot lots of yesteryear removes a lot of the disgusting, ugly reasons that these mega-lots were created in the first place, putting us back to where we should have been all along. (BTW, go to Big Bear – a resort- and look at all the 2500 square foot lots.)
2) The first step to more affordable housing units is simply MORE housing.
Atkins and Newsom don’t have to worry about a Nobel prize in economics for SB 9, but I give them kudos for at least doing SOMETHING. Maybe y’all will give them a better idea they can make into law for 2023 so they can repeal SB 9??