By Bill Fulton, FAICP, Co-Director, Center for Housing Policy and Design, Professor of Practice in Urban Studies and Planning at UC San Diego, Terner Center Fellow.
The Center for Housing Policy and Design’s Bill Fulton recently published a piece for the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at UC Berkely exploring what other cities can learn from San Diego’s pro-housing policies. Read the excerpt below:
“Over the past few years, as the State of California has moved to push local governments to allow more housing and make it easier and quicker for developers to get that housing approved, the City of San Diego has moved even more aggressively in pursuit of the same goals.
During this time, San Diego has reformed both its planning policies and its permitting processes so that housing moves through the system much more quickly and with greater certainty as to the ultimate outcome. The reforms to San Diego’s planning policies are especially notable because the City has streamlined the process of updating Community Plans, which in the past had dragged on for many years, and has converted many project approvals from discretionary to ministerial. This transition is particularly important because ministerial approvals are not subject to the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), which has been frequently identified as a major contributor to the time and cost of approvals.
Not all cities in California have the same staff capacity to execute the level of reform that San Diego has undertaken, for example, few cities can add 200 permitting specialists in order to move things along. Nevertheless, San Diego’s recent efforts do provide a roadmap for cities, including those that are much smaller, seeking to increase housing production and expedite housing projects:
- Move most CEQA analysis up to the plan level.
Critical to San Diego’s approach is to deemphasize project-level CEQA analysis. By preparing full Environmental Impact Reports for a Community or General Plan, further environmental analysis for individual projects can be limited or even eliminated, even if projects are not covered by the State’s new infill exemption. - Permit ministerial approval of projects that conform to plans.
If plans are updated with comprehensive CEQA analysis and objective design standards, there is little reason for discretionary review. Conforming projects should be approved ministerially. - Create local density bonus programs.
Local density bonuses can be crafted in a way to provide significantly more density than state law while also aligning with a local jurisdiction’s planning priorities. By creating attractive local density bonus programs, as San Diego did, a local government can encourage additional housing (and affordable housing) while maintaining some control over the location and type of housing being built. - Use dedicated project managers and all-department meetings to speed permitting along.
By creating dedicated relationship managers and empowering staff from all departments to make decisions on an accelerated timeframe via a mandatory interdepartmental review meeting, San Diego solves for a major process component of getting housing built.”
Read the full report on the Tener Center’s website here.
