This election season, every vote is about housing – Orange County Register

This even-year time is always a busy time. In addition to the annual back-to-school activities, candidates are making their rounds, raising money and competing for voter visibility on a variety of issues of concern.

As co-founder and executive director of Orange County’s YIMBY organization, my self-proclaimed mission is to ensure that housing—specifically, the lack of affordable housing for low- and moderate-income residents, working families, young professionals, and seniors on fixed incomes—is among the top issues voters raise with their candidates. Recent polling from UC Irvine’s School of Social Ecology suggests that is the case.

The 2023 UCI Poll in OC found that affordable housing and homelessness were the top concerns for OC residents. This year’s poll found that 51% of respondents have considered leaving Orange County, and 78% said the reason was the cost of housing. High housing costs are a pressing issue not only for those at the bottom of our socioeconomic ladder, but also for adult children of long-time Orange County homeowners who have to tell their parents, “We’re moving; we just can’t afford to live in Orange County anymore.”

What these parents may not know, or may know and refuse to admit, is that this is largely a problem of our own making. Long-term NIMBYism and resistance to denser housing has created a shortage in every city in Orange County and driven up prices so high that our young adults see no future for themselves in the communities where they grew up. The recent combination of carrot and stick legislation in Sacramento has led to more approvals for rights-based housing, but Sacramento will not solve the housing shortage.

We need elected leaders in local government who are willing to make room for the next generation by approving new homes, apartments, and condos in their communities. Cities in Orange County have already identified locations for new housing through their housing plans, known as Housing Elements, and most have been approved by the state’s Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD).

This fall, city council members will have the opportunity to fulfill the commitments they’ve made in their city housing elements and voters to make room for the next generation by supporting pro-housing council members and candidates. There are housing developments working their way through the entitlement process right now, and they’ll be at a city council hearing near you soon!

There are large, innovative projects such as Related Bristol (Santa Ana) and the Magnolia Tank Farm (Huntington Beach), which at the time of writing are being considered by the City Council on the same evening, September 17.^andWhile these high-profile projects are the absolute headliners, smaller projects in cities that have been steadily delivering on housing, like Anaheim, Brea, Buena Park, and Irvine, are also moving forward. If you vote in those cities AND you care about where your children and grandchildren live (and you don’t want it to be yours), tell your city council members that you support new housing and that you want them to approve the projects that are before them.

If you live in a smaller city where new housing opportunities are less common (in some cases, decades away), THIS might be your year! Aliso Viejo is considering a 300+ unit apartment building on an existing commercial parking lot in the city’s aging retail district. Fountain Valley is considering new townhomes and single-family attached homes, along with 400 apartments on a 45-acre site, and Los Alamitos is considering redeveloping an old office building and parking lot into both owner-occupied and affordable rental housing.

Each of these project sites was identified in the city’s respective Housing Element as a way to meet the state’s Housing Requirement Goal (RHNA). Why is that important? Because it was the promise of new housing on those properties that prompted the state to approve the city’s Housing Element. Without a “compliant” Housing Element, scary things can happen, like Builders Remedy or lawsuits against the city by housing law advocacy groups. Long-term non-compliance with the state’s Housing Act can result in a city decertifying its Housing Element, losing state funding, and losing the city’s ability to issue building permits for existing residents and businesses. All of these outcomes are undesirable, no matter what side of the political spectrum you fall on.