San Luis Obispo County may have a new tool to help assist with its ever-present housing development struggles, according to Sarah Sanders.
“It’s effectively a means of convenience for planning housing,” the San Luis Obispo Council of Governments’ (SLOCOG) transportation manager said. “My hope is that this tool will help make housing planning a little bit easier.”
SLOCOG’s Housing and Infrastructure Plan (HIP) aims to consolidate and adapt housing, transportation, and infrastructure data while figuring out how the county can best use grants and existing funding to meet state housing requirements.
Atascadero is one of the seven cities—including SLO city, Paso Robles, Pismo Beach, Grover Beach, Arroyo Grande, and Morro Bay—that SLOCOG wants to gather support from before the HIP is presented to the county Board of Supervisors in August.
It was the second city on the HIP’s tour around the county, and questions surrounding the “living document,” its data, and its intent have proven to be as much of a roadblock as the issue the plan hopes to address.
“While the city supports the regional effort to address the need for expanded housing and infrastructure throughout the county, we have a number of concerns regarding the methodology and data used to create the recommendations in the report presented to the City Council at the July 11 meeting,” Atascadero Mayor Heather Moreno told New Times.
At that July 11 meeting, Councilmember Charles Bourbeau questioned the number of Atascadero-related housing and infrastructure projects included in the HIP versus other cities like San Luis Obispo.
“My concern is that this list looks like it was taken page for page from a SLO city capital projects improvement list,” Bourbeau said at the July 11 meeting. “I see one Atascadero-related transportation project, then I see 20-some SLO high-priority transportation projects, so how exactly is this data going to be used if this is what we are being given to support?”
Both the SLOCOG representative at the meeting and Sanders said that, while SLOCOG would be taking input into account from each of the cities involved in order to ensure the HIP made sense for every party involved, the short time frame SLOCOG had to develop the document may be the source of some of the concern.
Initially set into motion in 2019, the HIP draft is centered on goals formed when SLO County, SLOCOG, and the seven cities agreed to a compact that would facilitate and optimize the housing development process for the upcoming Regional Housing Needs Allocation cycle. The state-mandated cycle requires a certain number of affordable housing units to be built per year per region based on local needs with the next cycle coming in 2028.
The HIP was developed with the help of a 2020 state grant that focused on accelerating housing development to meet the housing needs allocation cycle requirements.
“It’s a combination of an inventory of infrastructure barriers, funding to implement housing allocations, development of foundational information to meet that housing allocation, and what affordable housing actually means for our region,” Sanders said.
But then COVID-19 shifted county focus away from housing. Sanders said the pandemic effectively stalled out development of the HIP until January of this year, giving SLOCOG less than six months to assemble a plan and prepare presentations.
“Because of the pandemic, housing momentum got pushed to the side,” she said. “We essentially had a year left to spend this money we were granted in 2020 once [momentum] started up again, and while we are open to concerns and potential adjustments, we have fulfilled what we set out to do.”
But now that the initial HIP draft is complete, SLOCOG still needs the cities’ support and the county to formally adopt the plan and secure future funding before the 2020 grant money runs out.
Sanders noted it was never SLOCOG’s intention to decide which projects seemed more important in the HIP, noting that all of the data contained within the HIP was provided directly by the individual cities.
“The HIP does not have land use authority—in fact, it just takes all information cities have already provided to us by planning and public works departments,” she said. “We have decided to move away from the prioritization projections as it was causing unnecessary concern, and my hope is that this will alleviate some of the tension that was created from ranking projects from high, medium, and low.”
According to Sanders, the HIP doesn’t currently have the data to support what projects—whether housing or infrastructure related—should be prioritized over others.
“Further prioritization of projects needs to have future conversations, and that is something we will address once we have that data,” Sanders said. “The money that funded this plan is tied to accelerating housing development, so we need to focus on that. We would like to add economic development data in the future, but right now that data is not here.”
Mayor Moreno told New Times that Atascadero still plans on working with SLOCOG to reach their common goal of meeting housing requirements.
“We hope to work with SLOCOG in refining the inputs to the Housing and Infrastructure Plan to help tackle the barriers to responsible, sustainably developed affordable housing that meets Atascadero’s unique needs,” Moreno said.
Sanders stressed that city and SLOCOG camaraderie will help cities realize which projects share common ground to streamline grant application and planning processes.
“We just wanted to look at it at a regional level and see where we can meet, that way if there was a grant or program we could apply to together we could,” she said. “We have done this with housing planners in recent months, and it has allowed us to work ahead and begin applying for grants early because we are working together.”
She expects questions and comments to continue with each presentation, but with some adjustments, Sanders said she hopes that everyone involved can move forward as they continue to address SLO County’s housing crisis.
“This is the first plan of its kind, so we are taking on something that no one else has tried and that does make it a little more challenging than previous efforts,” she said. “It’s an ever-evolving document that is designed to be adapted and adjusted based on how much data and information we can gather with the funding it has.”
Ultimately it—as with most countywide processes, according to Sanders—is an ongoing process.
“We will continue to do more outreach, whether that’s to advocacy groups or city governments or residents … we want to get more feedback from the local community,” Sanders said. “I don’t think people realize how much cities in our county have in common with each other compared to Monterey and Santa Barbara counties. I think once they do realize—especially with plans like the one we have been presenting—we can begin to work together to get far more done than we would otherwise.” Δ
Reach Staff Writer Adrian Vincent Rosas at arosas@newtimesslo.com.
This article appears in Jul 20-30, 2023.
“We essentially had a year left to spend this money we were granted in 2020 once [momentum] started up again” The problem here is than rather do it right, they spent the $. It’s taxpayer $, not play $. This is the problem with government.
This entire concept is fundamentally flawed. We need to rethink the notion that our tax dollars should be used to subsidize already-wealthy builders and developers who then fail to deliver housing of the types and costs we really need. This is a classic example of socializing the costs and privatizing the profits. Let them pay for the infrastructure they need rather than looking for a public handout.