Planning staff has released the first draft of Santa Monica’s Housing Element for 2021-2029, and tomorrow night the Planning Commission will have a hearing on the draft. The draft reflects input staff received from the Planning and Housing Commissions and the Rent Control Board, but primarily direction staff received from City Council at the council’s March 30 meeting. Even though the draft follows what the council said to do, people are speculating whether the council will ultimately approve the Housing Element in something like its current form.

That is because council’s direction to staff was approved on a 4-3 vote, and one of the 4 yes votes came from Kevin McKeown. Last week McKeown announced that he was quitting the council. He will be gone long before October 15, the date by which the council needs to approve a housing element and send it to the California Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD) for HCD’s review and, one hopes, its acceptance. If, as it looks now, we are headed to a special election to fill McKeown’s vacancy, the council will likely have only six members at that time. Even if the council appoints a replacement, it is, of course, unclear how the new council member would vote.  

Regarding the council’s direction to staff, the primary directive was to draft a “compliant” housing element. “Compliant” meaning a document that complies with, among other things, the City’s “Regional Housing Needs Allocation” (RHNA). The RHNA number is how many new housing units Santa Monica must find room for and allow to be built. For this housing element, the number is 8,895 residences of which 6,168 are to be affordable. As I discussed in a previous post, achieving this increase in housing units would entail an approximately 2% increase each year in the city’s housing stock. While the RHNA numbers have alarmed those in Santa Monica politics opposed to development, the draft Housing Element shows that this level of housing growth is something Santa Monica could handle easily. Financing the housing, particularly the affordable housing, is more problematic.

The RHNA numbers themselves, however, were not the reason that three council members voted against the motion directing staff to prepare a compliant housing element. Those three members, Phil Brock, Oscar de la Torre, and Christine Parra, seemed to be ready to vote for the motion (indeed de la Torre had already voted in favor of a slightly different prior motion that had failed), but they changed their minds at the last minute. That was when they realized that one part of the motion, an “affordable housing overlay,” would have allowed the construction of four-story deed-restricted affordable housing apartment buildings in single-family, “R1” zones.

The opposition of the three to the affordable housing overlay could ultimately be a problem for approval of a compliant housing element. The overlay is part of a strategy to comply with a new requirement for housing elements. As of this year, housing elements must specify actions a city will take for “affirmatively furthering fair housing” (AFFH). In the context of Santa Monica, this means allowing for housing development, particularly affordable housing development, in districts where there are few people of color, which include the R1 districts. Thirty-five percent of Santa Monica’s area is zoned R1. That’s a lot of the city, and HCD is not likely to approve the housing element if it directs housing growth, especially affordable housing, everywhere but the R1.

After Mayor Sue Himmelrich made a motion with direction to staff that failed, Council Member McKeown made the motion, seconded by Himmelrich, that was ultimately successful. The motion included the overlay. Although McKeown said that he expected, because of the high cost of land in single-family zones, that it would be unlikely that affordable housing developers would build in the R1, when it came to the final vote on the motion, Council Members Brock, de la Torre, and Parra voted no. In the end it seemed that the image of a four-story affordable apartment next to a single-family house was something they could not stomach.

I will not try to predict how the Housing Element will ultimately deal with the AFFH issue and R1 zoning. However, and maybe this is surprising, I am optimistic that even a shorthanded council will approve something like the current overall proposal. Brock, de la Torre and Parra were elected last November on the “Change” slate. Although the slate did not run primarily on the issue of development, the slate’s candidates had (and still have) support from the most stringent anti-development factions in Santa Monica politics. Many in this faction still want to scrap the whole thing, RHNA numbers and all, and fight HCD. Nonetheless, based on what the three council members said March 30, they do not appear to want to challenge HCD with a noncompliant housing element. I hope not. Santa Monica passed an inadequate Housing Element in the early ’90s that was challenged in court. The City lost and ended up having to pay about $700,000 in the plaintiffs’ legal fees. No one should want to repeat that experience.

* * *

If someone had told me ten years ago that I would be unhappy if Kevin McKeown quit the council, I would have laughed. Now, however, I am sorry to see him go. As most liberals and people of good will who are elected to the Santa Monica City Council as no-growthers sooner or later do, McKeown ultimately found that his progressive values were inconsistent with the demands of increasingly shrill supporters who fear every change that might befall Santa Monica (other than the increases in their home values that come with limiting the housing supply). While McKeown never supported pro-housing zoning as much as I would have liked, in the last five or ten years he has opposed the worst of what the no-growthers proposed. Somewhat valiantly, against their opposition, he has supported efforts to expand the housing supply for the needs of today and the future. For this they have vilified him.

Still, I cannot resist a bit of schadenfreude. For his first 15 or 20 years in Santa Monica politics McKeown was among the crowd that besmirched anyone who believed in building more housing—people like me—as being “in the pocket of developers.” What should have been serious discussions about housing policy devolved into dime-store leftist tirades against “greedy developers.” Yet today McKeown is under attack from those same Santa Monicans Fearful of Change for whom he has carried so much water. And sorry, but I have to smile now to see the leadership of Santa Monicans for Renters Rights (SMRR), whose darling he was, whose Steering Committee he dominated, turn against McKeown. Who knows, but the last straw leading to McKeown’s resignation from the council might have been his motion to apply the affordable housing overlay to R1 districts. Apparently, at a meeting of the SMRR Housing Committee last Monday, the night before McKeown announced he was quitting the council, SMRR leadership rejected upzoning R1 to build affordable apartments.

Still, the last adjective I ever thought would apply to Kevin McKeown was “quitter,” and I’m unhappy he’s quit. Kevin McKeown as a council member was nothing if not conscientious. He showed up. The City Council, in dealing not only with the Housing Element but also with everything else post-pandemic and post-May 31, 2020, needs all the seriousness it can get. So does the city.

Thanks for reading.