Golis: Is Santa Rosa City Hall's housing effort finally on track?

Santa Rosa officials believe City Hall is poised to shed its reputation as the place where big and small building projects disappear into a fog of red tape and bureaucracy.

“This concept of affordability is huge,” David Guhin, the city’s interim director for planning and economic development, said on Thursday. “I think that’s what hit a chord. We don’t have enough affordable housing for the people who need it. The City Council made this a top priority.”

In recent months, the city has signaled its determination to respond to a housing shortage that has driven up rents by 40 percent in three years. The council last week voted to spend $1.3 million on technology and staffing that will shorten the time required to review development applications.

This is not the first time the Santa Rosa council has pledged to streamline its planning review process. For years, builders and homeowners complained that taking a building application to City Hall was like passing into a time warp in which everything slowed down.

But this time seems different. Shortly after arriving in Santa Rosa in September of 2014, new City Manager Sean McGlynn acknowledged, “I think we’ve closed ourselves off in a lot of ways. We’re in the process of re-opening our doors.”

In July, an outside consultant analyzed the planning department’s work flow and concluded that good intentions were not enough to overcome a “dysfunctional environment.”

The current housing crisis in combination with the consultant’s findings became the impetus for a series of changes, including last week’s decision to spend additional dollars on measures to streamline the review process.

“We understand the importance of time, cost and certainty to getting these projects through the development review process, and we are doing our best to address each of those,” Guhin told Staff Writer Kevin McCallum.

For a long time, the pace of planning review in Santa Rosa was held hostage by people’s reflexive opposition to new construction. Unless it was your family-room addition that was caught up in the city bureaucracy, few cared that the city took a very long time to decide most applications.

People weren’t always wrong to oppose new development. Sonoma County continues to pay the costs of sprawl development that occurred during the years that elected officials never met a subdivision map they didn’t like.

But Sonoma County is not that place anymore. Urban growth boundaries, growth limits and an open space tax became the responses of a citizenry that declared, enough is enough.

Now the challenge is to make sure people who don’t make a lot of money have a place to live. And we’re not doing very well. Over the past two years, stories of homeless families, skyrocketing rents and substandard housing testify to communities slow to care about the needs of people who have less.

For a long time, the Santa Rosa council fought over real and imagined differences about how the city should grow. Current council members are not without their political disagreements - which will emerge as this housing discussion goes forward - but at least they understand they have work to do together.

On April 19, Guhin reported, the council will begin to explore some of the options available to the city. Among the possibilities: Increased densities in some areas, reduced requirements for parking, reduced fees, subsidies for low-income housing.

As Guhin noted, however, providing new incentives for affordable housing and changing the culture at City Hall won’t be enough if other groups don’t also step up.

We can imagine our own list:

If builders expect this crisis to provide them carte blanche for new development, or if they think they can dance around their obligation to include affordable housing in their projects, they will be disappointed. Builders need to line-up at the planning counter with complete applications and the knowledge that an affordable housing component could move them to the front of the line.

Environmental leaders, meanwhile, need to speak-up for housing projects that serve the needs of moderate-income people, even if it means offending some of their supporters. Groups that pride themselves on their progressive politics ought to be embarrassed that children are living in cars or in apartments infested with rats and cockroaches.

Employer groups need to speak up, too, because, well, there’s a reason it’s called workforce housing.

And neighborhood groups need to get over the idea that their neighborhood deserves special treatment. As housing needs focus on infill, higher densities and smaller homes, even the fanciest of neighborhoods will have a role to play.

Finally, elected officials will need to stand up to opponents who think affordable housing only belongs in some other neighborhood. For city council members all over Sonoma County, this will become the moment in which their resolve is tested. It’s easy to spend more money on a planning staff, not so easy to tell voters (or friends) that this apartment building belongs on the street where they live.

Pete Golis is a columnist for The Press Democrat. Email him at golispd@gmail.com.