Like most of you I received an e-mail from the California Attorney General Rob Bonita the other day, and he is concerned about “skyrocketing housing costs” and “a housing crisis of epic proportions.” He says he is “committed to doing all we can to help Californians get ahead.”
In Lompoc we have a poster child project to demonstrate part of the problem.
A proposed project on the north end of Lompoc at what’s commonly referred to as the “Wye” would result in about 476 residential units, eight acres of open space, a 3.3-acre passive park, and a 12-acre school site, and would be built over a period of 5 to 6 years.
At least that was what the developer said in the final Environmental Impact Report project description in 2005. Except for annual weed abatement, nothing has happened on the site since then.
In a related issue on April 19, the Lompoc City Council received and discussed a staff report that said, “In 2000, the City and Mission Hills Community Services District (District) entered into an Annexation Agreement which provided that the District shall provide water and wastewater services to Burton Ranch; however, in 2019, a dispute arose between the City and District regarding whether the District has the ability to provide such water and wastewater services.”
Because this property was originally in the unincorporated area, the county had to approve the annexation; the MHCSD provided services to this area so they would continue to do so.
So, here we are 22 years after the annexation was approved and the only work the developer has been able to do is write checks to pay for lawyers, local government staff time and seemingly endless “what if” engineering and feasibility studies. And, even after this dispute is settled the developer still must go through the plan check approval process that can take many months to complete.
When the developer purchased this property, and the annexation was approved they had every expectation that they could build and sell homes in the project within a reasonable time. Since then, the construction cost per square foot has skyrocketed; thus, the cost for the homes in the project will increase as well.
Lompoc’s Inclusionary Housing Ordinance requires that 10 percent of every project containing 10 or more living units be set aside for new affordable housing. But the developer may never have to build these affordable homes because the city has a very rewarding in-lieu fee provision in the ordinance that allows a developer to pay to have the homes built elsewhere.
The original fee, agreed established by the council in 2007, was $113,998 per required affordable unit; now the city is considering reducing it to $72,500.
The original purpose of the in-lieu program was to have enough funds available to build the affordable homes elsewhere in the city. Consider that new home construction costs for a modest 1,300 square feet are now well above $250 a square foot including the cost of land they sit on. So that is $325,000 for this type of house; so, if it’s not built on the project site, the in-lieu fee should be about the same.
The project at the wye is projected to build 476 homes. Based on the 10 percent calculation, it would mean that 47 units would be affordable homes. Using the proposed new fee of $72,500 for a 1,300 square foot house it means that the builder could pay an in-lieu fee of $3,407,500 to avoid building them on-site; that sounds like a lot.
But if you used the actual cost of $325,000 per unit it would be $15,275,000. Using the proposed new fee, it means a generous bonus to the developer of $11,867,500. And it also means that 47 new low-income properties won’t be built.
Meanwhile, Noozhawk recently reported that in nearby Santa Maria another proposed 140-unit project was placed on hold; why, because the Southwest Regional Council of Carpenters, a union, alleged that “greenhouse gas emissions” hadn’t been properly studied and called for an agreement to hire local workers for the construction project.
Maybe Mr. Bonita’s office should look at how cities are handing the same sort of situation, or how unions “manipulate the process under this guise of environmental protection to only to bolster their employment numbers” as Noozhawk recently reported as part of his pilgrimage to solve the housing crisis.
Or he might also assess the impact of sanctuary status for the millions of so-called undocumented aliens streaming freely across our southern border on this “housing crisis of epic proportions”.
— Ron Fink, a Lompoc resident since 1975, is retired from the aerospace industry. He has been following Lompoc politics since 1992, and after serving for 23 years appointed to various Lompoc commissions, retired from public service. The opinions expressed are his own.
