The following article first appeared on The Healthy City Local.
It is hard to break bad habits. One habit that is hard to break in Santa Monica is fearmongering about development.
The latest instance comes from supporters of the “Safer Santa Monica” slate. As reported in the Lookout, a “small army of volunteers from the Northeast and Sunset Park neighborhoods has been busy blanketing their single family areas with an urgent message,” namely that if the candidates backed by Santa Monicans for Renters Rights (SMRR) are elected, they “would implement SB10, a State law that allows as many as 14 units to be built on a single family lot.”
SB10 was passed by the legislature and signed by the governor in 2021. I’ll wager that few laws have been more misunderstood than SB10. SB10 is a rather limited housing law that people opposed to housing development use to frighten people like a storyteller uses a ghost story to frighten children at Halloween.
SB10 does not mandate anything. It gives local governments the authority to override voter approved limits on development, and permit up to 10 units (yes, theoretically this number could be increased if ADU’s are included) on a parcel, but only if certain restrictions are satisfied. Here is the operative language, but you can read the whole statute here:
“Notwithstanding any local restrictions on adopting zoning ordinances enacted by the jurisdiction that limit the legislative body’s ability to adopt zoning ordinances, including … restrictions enacted by local initiative, a local government may adopt an ordinance to zone a parcel for up to 10 units of residential density per parcel, at a height specified by the local government in the ordinance, if the parcel is located in [a transit-rich area or an urban infill site].”
Note that SB10 doesn’t require local governments to do anything. It does expand the power of local governments to upzone, but only in cities or counties subject to “restrictions on adopting zoning ordinances.” SB10 did not expand the power of the Santa Monica City Council because Santa Monica does not have any such restrictions. The only zoning restriction relevant to housing enacted in Santa Monica is Measure LC. LC limits development of airport land (when the airport closes) to park and recreational purposes, but SB10 explicitly excludes from its scope “[a]ny local restriction enacted or approved by a local initiative that designates publicly owned land as open-space land … or for park or recreational purposes.”
Note that if the RIFT measure in 2008 or Measure LV in2016 had passed, SB10 would expand the power of City Council to override those measures, but voters defeated both RIFT and LV handily. SB10 therefore did not give the council more power than it already had. (There is a provision in SB10 that an upzoning enacted pursuant to SB10 would not be not subject to CEQA review, but CEQA review would not ultimately prevent an upzoning for housing in Santa Monica.)
But even if SB10 had expanded the Santa Monica City Council’s power, SB10 only gives authority to upzone if the local legislative body can make a finding that doing so “is consistent with [its] obligation to affirmatively further fair housing.” Readers may remember how the issue of “affirmatively furthering fair housing” (AFFH) was a factor when the City was adopting the Housing Element in 2021. (I wrote a number of posts back then about the Housing Element and AFFH; here is a link to one of them.)
Back then, the state rejected the City’s submission of a draft Housing Element because the council’s “Change Slate” majority had ignored warnings from Councilmember Gleam Davis and voted to approve a plan that didn’t take the AFFH requirement seriously. This led to Santa Monica becoming Ground Zero for Builder’s Remedy projects. Now that Santa Monica has an approved Housing Element, no matter who is elected to council it is unlikely that any zoning changes will be made other than those required by it.
I suppose the people distributing the SB10 flyers could have ignored SB10 and without reference to specific legislation simply generically mongered fear about what the United Santa Monica slate candidates might do to single-family neighborhoods. But they wouldn’t have been able to cite an immediate threat. Ever since Sen. Scott Wiener proposed SB10, the law has been a lightning rod for anti-housing panic. People should read the law and realize how limited it is.
There is the adage attributed to Georges Clemenceau that generals are always fighting the last war. In this case, we have some people in Santa Monica who keep fighting a war that’s over, the development war that so consumed Santa Monica politics for 30 years. The war is over because the state, reacting to California’s housing crisis, has taken over land use planning when it comes to housing.
The expanded legality of ADUs under state law, as well as SB9, have already upzoned urban R1 districts to some extent. While SB10 does not apply to Santa Monica, SB1123, which the governor recently signed into law, does. The new law, among other things, allows development of up to 10 units (plus ADUs) on vacant lots in single-family zones. Because it’s a state law, there is nothing the Santa Monica City Council has to say about it.
Yet, changes under all these laws are slow and incremental. No R1 neighborhoods, nor anyone’s “quality of life”, nor, for that matter, property values, have been destroyed. (Speaking as someone who lives in the delightful, very much housing heterogenous neighborhood of Ocean Park, my prediction is that in 20 or 30 years when traditional R1 neighborhoods have more of a mixture of housing types, residents then will be quite happy with where they live. Let’s plan for them.)
You may wonder: why did the state taken over land use planning (when it comes to housing)? Because cities like Santa Monica up and down the coast, and inland too, for so long blocked reasonable growth in the housing supply.
You reap what you sow.
Thanks for reading.
