MO 2002-041 to 2002-045 - Laserfiche WebLink

Home

ADMINISTRATIVE REVIEW DRAFT the preservation and improvement of the City's residential neighborhoods. It recognizes the benefits of a diverse, well -maintained housing stock. While the focus of the General Plan is on the City of San Leandro, it is important to view the Plan in the larger context of the San Francisco Bay Area. The shortage of affordable housing is widely recognized as one of the greatest challenges facing the Bay Area today. The region's housing costs are the highest in the nation, potentially threatening its future economic vitality, environment and quality of life. The population is expected to grow by another million residents by 2015, with housing supply continuing to lag behind demand. The housing crisis has sparked a regionwide campaign to make more efficient use of land in established communities and create a land use pattern that supports higher density housing and transit use. San Leandro's new General Plan is at the forefront of this campaign. New infill housing, along with the services to sustain that housing, are important parts of the vision for the City's future. San Leandro needs new housing to survive as a healthy City. It needs housing for its workforce, which is expected to grow by the thousands during the next decade as older industrial and commercial sites are redeveloped. It needs housing for its seniors and others with limited mobility and fixed incomes. It needs housing for its teachers, its police and fire personnel, its nurses and child care workers, and the retail and service workers that are the lifeblood of the local economy. It needs housing for families in crisis and others who cannot find adequate shelter in the local marketplace. While the City has witnessed tremendous residential construction during the past five years, most of the new homes have been affordable to just a small fraction of the City's population. Fewer than one -quarter of San Leandro's households can afford the median priced home in the City today. The Housing Element provides a strategy for supplementing "market rate" housing with housing that is affordable to a larger segment of the population. This includes opportunities for first-time homebuyers, new rental housing, and housing that is especially designed for people with special needs, such as the elderly and disabled. The "Fair Share" Process State law has established a process for assigning the responsibility for housing production in California to individual cities and counties. This process is known as the Regional Housing Needs Determination, or the "fair share" allocation process. The fair share process began in the late 1990s, as the State Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD) determined that the nine -county Bay Area needed to produce 310,761 new housing units between 1999 and 2006 to satisfy regional demand. The Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG) negotiated with HCD to reduce this figure to 230,743 units, based on projected economic and population growth in the region. During 1999, ABAG developed a formula to allocate the 230,743 housing units to the cities and counties of the Bay Area. The formula took a number of factors into consideration, including projected job growth, population growth, land supply, and local policies. In addition to identifying the total number of units assigned to each community, the formula determined how many of these units needed to be HOUSING ELEMENT 1-2 SAN LEANDRO GENERAL PLAN :-,�!Rd