Goleta Valley: South County’s stepchild

The California Department of Housing and Community Development, since 1969, has required a California Regional Housing Needs Allocation, which requires that all local governments (cities and counties) adequately plan to meet the housing needs of everyone in the community, including the requirement to build affordable housing.

California’s local governments then adopt housing plans as part of their general plan to show how the jurisdiction will meet local housing needs.

However, it wasn’t until 2019, when Assembly Bill 101 was enacted, that the state put teeth into all the above.

Before 2019, communities like the city and county of Santa Barbara, especially Montecito, considered the housing requirements “advisory,” as they had no intentions whatsoever of complying with RHNA.

However, via AB 101, the state threatened to take authority over local planning functions to ensure the housing gets permitted while simultaneously threatening to fine the bejesus out of jurisdictions for every month they stall (upward of $100,000 a month).

Previously, whatever affordable housing was built in no-growth communities like the South County came at the expense of developers and their clients. The way the system worked is that the developers either had to build x number of affordable units as part of their projects or pay an in-lieu fee that would be used to build affordable units elsewhere. Then the jurisdiction would have a lottery to give away the affordable unit to some lucky person, including someone who may have just arrived here, with the caveat that the winner couldn’t sell or rent out the unit for the next 30 years or so.

Many jurisdictions, including the city and county of Santa Barbara, also threw all sorts of roadblocks in front of developers, including exorbitant fees, conditions of approval, inordinate time delays in the permitting project and severe limitations on how many units could be built.