Local governments unable to cope with low-cost housing mandate

California's requirement that municipal and county governments build low-cost housing gets a fair amount of attention here in the Golden State.  Our new Governor, Gavin Newsom, recently sued a posh city in Orange County for failing to meet this requirement, and that suit seems to have inspired a story in the Sacramento Bee a few days ago under the headline, "Newsom's housing lawsuit puts several of state's cities on notice."  But the story and it's accompanying map don't just discuss "cities"; they also feature counties, including Plumas and Lake counties, as well as some small towns.

This excerpt from the Bee explains what's going on:

The roster of [47] out-of-compliance cities includes fairly wealthy ones on the coast. It also has dozens of communities in the Central Valley, Sierra Nevada, Mojave Desert and eastern Los Angeles County that generally are known as affordable places to live in California. 

Dos Palos in Merced County, for instance, is on the list of cities with inadequate housing plans. It has a population 5,000 and 27 percent of its residents live below the poverty line. 

Its city manager said the city simply can’t afford to hire the kind of consultant who would draft a study showing that the city’s zoning complies with state law. He said the city’s budget totals about $3 million a year and hiring a consultant would be a tremendous burden because most of its spending goes toward essential services like public safety and utilities.

The story quotes city manager Darrell Fonseca:

I don’t know how we’re gonna come up with that, but we have to.  We are a very tiny city, and we have been building, we just don’t have a fancy binding on the housing element that shows that we’re in compliance.

The Bee also quotes Randy Wilson, planning director in Plumas County, who says it would cost the county about $60,000 to pay a contractor to update its affordable housing plan. 

With the recession and the tight budget, we just haven’t addressed it.

Plumas County, population 20,007, has just about eight residents per square mile. It covers about the same land area as the State of Delaware.  According to the Bee, the "state wants it to support construction of 20 affordable housing units."

One of the other places featured on the map showing "problem" local governments is Amador City, population 185, the smallest city in California by size. It's less than an hour from Sacramento in the region known as the Mother Lode because it was settled during the Gold Rush.  The map accompanying the story also features "dots" suggesting that the failure to build affordable housing is a problem in Alturas (Modoc County), Yreka (Siskiyou County), and a couple of places in Humboldt County, all relatively sparsely populated.