The Coming RHNA Error-Filled Tsunami
The Planning Commission discussion last night turned to the coming Regional Housing Needs Assessment (RHNA) numbers. The State Department of Housing and Community Development has allocated over 441,000 housing units to our region which is led by the Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG) and the City of Cupertino is expected to have between 4,000-6,500 residential units in the next RHNA cycle. Our current cycle number is only 1,064 residential units. Why the big jump? The short answer is errors introduced by SB 828:
Senate Bill 828, co-sponsored by the Bay Area Council and Silicon Valley Leadership Group, and authored by state Sen. Scott Wiener in 2018, has inadvertently doubled the “Regional Housing Needs Assessment” in California.*
Questions from the Planning Commission meeting included whether the COVID-19 pandemic was considered in the calculations. The answer was no. The reason this is important is because people have been leaving the Bay Area and we do not know how many people will continue to telework for some or all of their work week and ever return. This means that for this one issue alone, the pandemic, the numbers are off, but according to the Embarcadero Institute, there are other reasons which have over-inflated the allocations including SB 828, by Senator Scott Wiener which:
Unknown to the authors of SB-828, the Department of Finance (DOF) has for years factored overcrowding and cost-burdening into their household projections. These projections are developed by multiplying the estimated population by the headship rate (the proportion of the population who will be head of a household). The Department of Finance (DOF), in conjunction with the Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD), has documented its deliberate decision to use higher headship rates to reflect optimal conditions and intentionally “alleviate the burdens of high housing cost and overcrowding.” Unfortunately, SB-828 has caused the state to double count these important numbers.**
We will be facing RHNA numbers between 4-6 TIMES our previous allocation. The resulting density, even if 6,000 units ever did get built, will not justify high cost meaningful quality transit along Stevens Creek Blvd. What it will do however, is thoroughly congest the streets. This problem needs to be ironed out.
Read the full Embarcadero Institute report here. A graphical depiction of the error is below:
