New Projects Will Mitigate City’s Affordable Housing Drought

The sheer number of renters and the relatively unaffordable cost of renting reached an all-time high across the country last year at a time renter’s income levels are slowly eroding according to a study released last week.

The study released by Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies found that 36 percent of Americans rent rather than own a home, with Los Angeles leading the nation at 52 percent of residents renting.

About 28 percent of renters nationwide pay more than half their incomes for housing with the highest concentration in Hawaii and California. Fifty percent of renters are classified as cost-burdened, paying more than thirty percent of their income.

Demand for low rent housing continues to far outstrip supply, as the shortfall in the number of units affordable to extremely low- income renters more than doubled from 1.9 million in 2001 to 4.9 million in 2011 the study said.

Pasadena is not an exception to this nationwide affordable housing shortage. With state funding cuts and now Federal funding budget cuts, the city of Pasadena is hard pressed for funds to provide new affordable units according to Housing Director Bill Huang.

“When people spend a disproportionate amount of their income on rent, it means they have less money for other things including proper food, proper transportation, schooling, healthcare, etc. So that’s bad for the household and also bad for the economy because then people don’t have the money to purchase things that help keep our economy going,” Huang said.

Councilmember John Kennedy has asked the Council and City staff on multiple occasions for a specified group appointed by the Mayor to study the issue of affordable housing in Pasadena for seniors and all low-income or very low-income households.

“We should look at this not just at the disproportional impact; we should look at it as a community issue. So I’m hoping that it gets serious consideration to the formation of experts in our community that would advise us on this issue,” Kennedy said.

City Manager Michael Beck said he had been in discussion with several groups of people since Kennedy last made the request.

“We think there’s some validity in bringing in together a group of experts and we’re still contemplating that. Hopefully we’ll have something before the first of the year for the council,” Beck said.

According to Pasadena’s Regional Housing Needs Assessment (RHNA) that designates a specified number of new units needed over an eight year planning period, Pasadena has far exceeded the amount of units produced at market rate housing, but has fallen short in producing enough low-income and very low-income housing (See chart).

The RHNA for the years 2006-2014 shows that Pasadena needs 711 new very low-income units but has only produced 217 thus far.

“It has fallen way short on the low and very low income goal. Those statistics would lead you to believe that there is a big unmet need of low and very low income housing,” Huang said, also noting that not everyone agrees those numbers are accurate.

Currently two projects are underway to produce affordable housing. Heritage Square project on the corner of Orange Grove and Fair Oaks, will meet the need for affordable housing for seniors with 70 units of very low-income senior housing. At Mar Vista and Union a 20-unit for very low-income families is also being developed.

“The other thing is to really make sure that our inclusionary housing ordinance is strong and effective because there are quite a number of multi-family developments in the pipeline right now, more than a dozen and they will generate either units or inclusionary fees that we could use for affordable housing,” Huang said.

The inclusionary housing ordinance requires that any market rate project in the City of Pasadena must provide 15 percent of the units to be affordable or be subject to pay a high fee to the city that goes to producing more affordable units.

The over a dozen projects in the development pipeline will produce around 100 units of affordable housing according to Huang.

One of those projects includes the proposed development on Walnut and Allen that will designate 10 of its 128 units for affordable housing.

However, the Regional Housing Needs Assessment will not be met even if all the proposed projects see the end of construction.

“Any place where the rents are very high, it forces people to overcrowd so they move into smaller units or double with other households to split the rent or they live in substandard housing, dilapidated housing, or even illegal garage conversions,” Huang said.