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ATTACHMENT 3 DRAFT P14 -0440, 2015 -2023 Housing Element Update A request to review the 2015 - 2023 Draft Housing Element update to the General Plan and consider a recommendation to the City Council to approve submittal to the State of California Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD), including a review and discussion of housing programs and policies and available housing inventories. Jennifer Wallis presented the staff report and described the scope and key elements of the Draft Housing Element and its accompanying Background Report. Mr. Dolan then presented the portion of the staff report on the Regional Housing Needs Allocation (RHNA). He stated that what has really attracted the most attention in this Housing Element update has been the numbers, which is not really a big surprise because the numbers translate into zoning and housing sites. He pointed out that while most people understand that there are certain things the City needs to do to meet State law and the City's own housing needs, they tend to have pretty strong opinions about where our housing sites should be located with respect to their own neighborhoods. He then displayed the Estimated Current RHNA Capacity table below which summarizes where the City currently is with respect to its housing inventory and describes all the numbers related to the various income categories that the City is required to address within the Housing Element. He clarified that for the purposes of the Housing Element, those income categories really translate primarily in terms of the zoning into density requirements. He explained that the Very- Low- Income and the Low - Income categories with 30+ units per acre are where the City needs to provide sites to meet those numbers, and added that staff has determined that the City can meet the Moderate - Income category with zoning at 23 units per acre, and the zoning on the Above - Moderate - Income does not really matter. Mr. Dolan continued that staff has calculated on this table what the City already has in its inventory relative to its RHNA requirements. He noted that one of the things that everybody has been well aware of is that because of the large number of rezonings the City had done in the last cycle, combined with RHNA's reduced assignment to the City this cycle, the City ended up with what has been referred to as a surplus. He explained that when the numbers on the bottom line of the table are added up and what is available is taken into account, the total surplus number that has been quoted by several people is 1,292 units, which represents what the City has zoning for, above what RHNA indicates the City has to have. He pointed out, however, that that number really is kind of an imaginary number that does not have a lot of value in a real -world discussion of what the City is confronted with, because the bulk of the surplus comes in the Moderate - Income category, which only exist because the City has projects that has been zoned for in the last Housing Element cycle and for which projects have been proposed but have not yet been built, which then get to be counted in the inventory. He cautioned that there is not all this extra capacity, and as soon as those projects are built, that surplus goes to zero. He noted that, in effect, the only real number that should be talked about in terms of a surplus is the 375 in the column to the left, in the DRAFT EXCERPT: PLANNING COMMISSION MINUTES, 8/13/2014 Page 1 of 18