I talked about how the Regional Housing Needs Allocation numbers (RHNA) will mess up cities in the County two and a half months ago. Little did I know at the time that the whole process of coming up with these numbers is shoddy at best and perhaps fraudulent at worst. A state auditor, Michael S. Tilden, has said as much as reported here
The Auditor found problems in the HCD methodology that may have inflated RHNA requirements by hundreds of thousands of housing units. The Auditor concludes that “The Department of Housing and Community Development must improve its processes to ensure that communities can adequately plan for housing.”
In his letter to the Governor and legislative leaders, the Auditor also states, “Overall, our audit determined that HCD does not ensure that its needs assessments are accurate and adequately supported. …This insufficient oversight and lack of support for its considerations risks eroding public confidence that HCD is informing local governments of the appropriate amount of housing they will need.”
Unfortunately, the audit reviewed the RHNA plans from only eight counties, which together contain less than eight percent of California’s population. Due to pending lawsuits the audit did not consider the RHNA plans of the two largest planning organizations, the Southern California Association of Governments (SCAG) and the Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG). These two regions contain almost two-thirds (65.5 percent) of the state’s population. This omission makes it difficult to grasp the scale of the problems created by HCD’s errors.
ABAG is the one we care about here. They are the ones jamming big numbers down cities' throats and now we learn that the whole process may overestimate housing needs by 200,000 units. Who knows, maybe it's even more. But that hasn't stopped our Attorney General from getting into the act as reported by Tom Elias at the Daily Post on April 28th
Cities, especially B'game, should immediately question their allocations from ABAG. They should also get a read out on the full Tilden report from city staff before anymore giant projects get the green light. Getting a read out on the "pending lawsuits" noted above and the wisdom of joining one is action item #3. And as I said here, it's time for a new attorney general with better priorities and an ability to stay in his or her lane.
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