Land for the homeless in Humboldt county

Humboldt County settles lawsuit with Housing for All; multifamily rezoning to be completed by Aug. 15

Donna Tam/The Times-Standard
Posted: 06/23/2011 09:51:12 AM PDT

After years of litigation over the county's low-income housing supply, the county has agreed to meet a rezoning deadline set by a local advocacy group.
The Humboldt County Board of Supervisors announced Tuesday that it has settled with advocacy group Housing for All, which intervened on the lawsuit originally filed by the Arkley-backed group Humboldt Sunshine, Inc.
In February 2007, Humboldt Sunshine sued the county saying its housing element was out of compliance with state law because it did not facilitate the development of adequate and affordable housing for all economic segments of the community.
The county must file a housing element with the state every five years to be eligible for millions of dollars in government housing grants and loans. Humboldt Sunshine challenged figures used by the county to identify land available for development.
Housing for All spokeswoman Elizabeth Conner said the group intervened in 2009.
"Housing for All intervened in the (Humboldt) Sunshine lawsuit because we felt we could better represent the rights of low-income residents," she said.
The settlement provides a timeline for completion of the multifamily rezoning effort in order to avoid a court-imposed building moratorium, or a temporary hold, as "a remedy for the county's failure to provide affordable housing," according to a county press release. If the county does not obtain its recertification for its housing element
by Aug. 15, the Humboldt County Superior Court will impose a permit moratorium that could take effect on Oct. 3.
Housing for All is asking that the county complete rezoning by July 31 in order to obtain the recertification in time.
"The Board of Supervisors has decided it is in the best interest of the county to enter into this settlement to avoid having the court impose an immediate moratorium," Chairman Mark Lovelace said in a press release.
Community Development Services Director Kirk Girard added that the agreement allows the county some flexibility to complete the rezoning without the possibility of a judge imposing an immediate moratorium after the Aug. 15 deadline.
According to Jan Turner, an attorney with Housing for All, the judge will be able to determine how widespread the moratorium, if one is imposed.
"He could take certain areas out of the county on the basis that they have no impact on whether or not the county would be able to build affordable housing," she said.
Conner said the settlement will ensure that the county is eligible for grant funds, such as the First Time Home Buyers Financial Assistance program.
"If we're not legal for the home grants, we believe that here is effectively a moratorium on affordable housing in this county, while the rest of the market rate housing just goes along," she said. "Housing for All is interested in creating more choices of decent places for people to live. This would include people who work in our stores and restaurants, people who take care of our children and parents and elderly people who are on fixed incomes."
The county must rezone enough parcels for 980 multifamily units in order to be in compliance with state law.
Rezoning has become a heated topic among residents throughout the county who are opposed to what they see as multifamily housing in their neighborhoods. The county recently launched efforts to conduct several public hearings on the matter to garner public support.
Girard said the settlement is in line with the county's plan for rezoning, but it creates more pressure to finish the process quickly.
"It certainly puts brackets on it -- no room for slippage," he said.
Turner said she thinks the "political opposition" created by a group of residents who campaigned against rezoning would have stalled the rezoning process if it weren't for settlement.
"I think the county is completely committed to doing this because they are legally vulnerable," she said. "It's not just about them getting money, it's about them wasting taxpayer money defending lawsuits."
Both Turner and Conner said representatives for Humboldt Sunshine have not been present at a court hearing in about nine months. According to court records, the next court date is scheduled for Tuesday.
Kay Backer, a spokeswoman for Humboldt Sunshine, Inc., said the group is continuing to pursue its portion of the lawsuit.
"We have said for a couple years that our terms of settlement is that the county get an accurate land inventory for this new housing element, and they don't have it yet," she said. "They aren't close yet."

Keeping up with the Rezoneses

The county retooled its plan for siting multifamily housing but some folks are still dismayed

(JUNE 23, 2011) The cinnamon reek of portable toilets, ranked by color and brand on the north end of the lot, pervades each breeze. Staccato bursts of sharp sound punctuate the white noise of trash and recyclables being dropped off, sorted, crushed and baled. Crash, clatter, screech, scrape. Sniff deeper: diesel and rotting meat, bitter garden discards, sour booze dregs, sweet soda treacle. Dust. Listen again: bone-thrumming rumble of trucks and forklifts, cars and pickups.

With this sweet-foul noisy mix, Greg and Christine Cain, owners of Humboldt Sanitation & Recycling of McKinleyville, raised their kids, put them through college and lured them back home again to begin the cycle anew.

Operations manager Brian Sollom has worked for Humboldt Sanitation & Recycling for 15 years. One of the company's enterprises is managing portable toilets - which march in neat columns to the fence next to Ted Stodder's property, a rezone candidate PHOTO BY HEIDI WALTERS
GALLERY >
But now the Cains foresee a grumpy cloud gathering on the horizon that could upset their successful enterprise here on 12 acres alongside Central Avenue - the horizon, actually, being right over there at the north edge of their property, by the battalion of portable toilets. Just over the grassy ditch and fence topped with razor wire, an empty lot has been scraped clean of vegetation. Something is about to happen there.

What could happen, under a new county rezoning program, is apartments. Oh, maybe they wouldn't sprout up immediately. But that lot - 1.83 commercial-zoned acres owned by Ted Stodder - is one of 75 parcels that Humboldt County planners have identified as candidates for rezoning to dense multifamily residential to accommodate the 980 new multifamily housing units that the state says the county will need between now and 2014. Some of these 75 parcels are commercial, some are single-family. If Stodder's parcel is rezoned and apartments do go up, well, Greg Cain says, he can hear the bellyaching now, drifting down from the future.

"Just picture a Saturday afternoon, people sitting on their porches trying to relax and having to listen to the noise of our operation," Cain said by phone one day last week. "A lot of people are home on Saturday, and that's our busiest day. But 365 days a year, seven days a week we're operating - 15 trucks leaving and coming back every day, hauling garbage, recycling and portable toilets; more trucks coming in three to five days a week to pick up our recycling commodities; 100 to 250 cars a day - twice that on Saturdays - dropping off trash and recycling."

Soon, Cain said, he's planning to expand his operations; he's got a contract with Humboldt County to start doing curbside recycling, so there will be more trucks. And he plans to build a giant shed to house the garbage and recycling operations to get people out of the rain.

"I know people have to have a place to live," he said. "But multifamily housing is just not a compatible fit here. I don't want complaints about noises and trucks."

This is the second time that the county has brought a list of candidate rezone sites before the public. The county has set a firm deadline for finally resolving the matter: The planning commission is holding community workshops between now and June 30, when it will hold a public hearing on the rezone proposal. The hearing will continue onJuly 14. Then the rezone will go before the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors.

That's a mighty short window, some folks say.

It's imperative to move quickly, the county counters.

The first time around with the rezoning proposal was wrenching - surprise, tears and gnashing teeth, cries of "you can't rezone my property, it's historic!" (that was in Redway) or other genuine grief, along with hyped-up ads and fliers papering neighborhoods implying that thousands of the poor and homeless were coming your way and who knew what troubles they'd bring.

That happened in January and February, when the county shared with the public its initial proposed list of rezone properties.

"A lot of property owners did not want their property rezoned," said Humboldt County Senior Planner Michael Richardson at a workshop in Eureka June 8 to show people the county's new list of proposed rezone properties, which came out in a draft environmental impact report June 1. "And it was just so heart-wrenching to hear all of this anxiety we were causing property owners. We got a lot of pushback. In the end, we decided if we want this project to work we have to start over."

Richardson is a soft-spoken man in his late 40s with long strawberry blond hair, a gently thorough demeanor, and the look of an outdoors fellow who's become trapped in a cubicle doing a job, alas, he loves. At the recent public workshops to explain the county's second round of rezoning proposals, he often came across as conciliatory, even a little sad, as he talked about possible impacts from the rezoning program and answered questions. And he didn't seem too surprised some people still distrust the county's motives and methods. But he also seemed determined that the county be allowed to move forward, and quickly, or it would miss out on some significant financial opportunities.

The housing element of the county's general plan has been deemed out of compliance with state law three times since 2009 - the latest was this January, when the California Housing and Community Development Department rescinded its certification of the plan, in large part because of issues over the rezoning program. If the county doesn't finish the rezoning plan and get its housing element recertified, said Richardson, then it will not be competitive for certain grants, such as those for fixing up or building low-income housing. Aug. 16 is the next application deadline for one of these grants - $800,000 to help first-time home-buyers qualify for low-interest mortgages and help homeowners get low-interest loans for repairs.

Plus, if the county's housing element remains out of compliance, the county could lose its ability to issue building permits and approve subdivisions. It could even lose the power to regulate emergency shelters: If there's some dispute over where it wants to put them, the courts could just tell the county where they'll go.

After the first attempt to find rezone candidates flopped, the county started searching for willing property owners. It ended up with 75 candidate parcels which, if it could use them all, would actually accommodate about 1,500 units. That's more than the 980 the state says the county needs to plan for.

"But I think it's a little bit scary we're not going into it with even more," Richardson said one day a couple of weeks ago in the interview at his office - a quirky retreat inside the bland, institutional planning department warren on H Street in Eureka. Years ago, his daughter and his now-ex wife helped him paint every plastered surface in a green-and-blue undersea mural with colorful fish and sea plants.

"I figured if I'm going to be underwater, it might as well look like it," Richardson said.

Richardson and other county staff have been trying for years to nail down how many unincorporated county parcels are truly suitable for multifamily residential development. The county is required by state law to update its housing element - one of seven elements in the general plan - about every five years. Since the 1980s, said Richardson, the state has been ratcheting up its requirements for what must be in the housing element. The county has to include in its element population projections, housing stock numbers, how much land it has planned to meet existing and future housing needs for a range of incomes, and more.

"What had happened was, before, the state found that what a lot of jurisdictions have called 'housing land' couldn't actually be built on - the slope was too steep or there was no water or sewer," he said.

One example of this is in Shelter Cove, where 18 acres inappropriately ended up in the county's inventory of land (255 acres) that's already zoned for multifamily housing.

So in 2002 the county did a technical study, using GIS, to find suitable parcels that could be rezoned. Groups such as the developer-oriented HELP - Humboldt Economic & Land Plan - squawked that the county's land inventory was outrageously inflated. And they were right, turns out. Further study on the ground, said Richardson, with the aid of HELP and others, revealed that the GIS study hadn't accounted for such things as property owners refusing to actually develop their property. And it had included lands that couldn't be developed in the time frame necessary to meet the state mandate.

With this latest round, though, the county thought it had finally gotten it right. It had 64 property owners of 75 "juicy" (as Richardson puts it) candidate parcels that, for the most part, fit some key criteria: The parcels were flat, at least an acre, close to public transit and served by public water and sewer. And they finally had willing owners, Richardson said, and had sent notices of the workshops to them and their nearly 4,000 neighbors within a 300-foot radius.

Still there are complaints - many emanating from McKinleyville, the boomingest place in Humboldt County in recent decades, where the county proposes to rezone land for more than half of the 980 future units (53 percent).

McKinleyville, as its slogan goes, might once have been the place "where horses have the right of way." But now it's really the place where horses, and those desiring the rural life, have had to make way for more people. The unincorporated municipality is the third largest community in Humboldt County, has grown rapidly in recent decades in large part because it has been affordable, and is considered the bedroom community to Eureka and Arcata.

McKin

This county has been getting homeless grants of millions a year for the last three years, they have only been scraping off land and saying that they are going to build homeless and low income housing on the sites that they scraped off so they can get the grants each year, but they still haven't decided the zoning areas to put the housing on yet. This county has been lying to the state to get the homeless grants, and now the grant money has disappeared and the district attorney's office is being sued because they can't show dollar one of where the grants went to for the last three years. The supreme court has to decide the final say so of where the zoning will go because of the state mandate of so much homeless and low income housing is supposed to be built every year and has not been, and now even the supreme court is putting that off. Meanwhile we all suffer because of Scum lords and their third world conditions at first world prices, being payed mostly by federal money coming from veterans, disableds and welfare that are paying for these ridiculous prices of rent. Most of the industry up here besides logging and marijuana growing is in-home care, that is the care of the disabled. The unemployment is so high up here that the homeless numbers are very high and that's why they are sending so much homeless assistant grants up here to make housing and to put people to work building the housing, but they fight over where to put homeless and low income people in what neighborhoods, so nothing is getting done up here. And while they wait to get the zoning straightened out the homeless grants seem to disappear for the last three years. This should have been straightened out three years ago when they had the money instead of lying to the state to get it, this news paper article in the times standard shows this to be true:

The city of Eureka is suing Squires to recoup some of their money they have spent on forcing him to bring his property up to code and for all the police, fire department and hospital expenses because of the dangerous conditions of his properties and Floyd using strong-arm tactics on his tenants, or as we call him here, Mr. pistol whipper. He has had all of his 28 properties confiscated and brought up to code and put under property management, and they are not to manage any of their properties. The court and district attorney's office is making an example out of the squires to all the scum lords in California that they better straighten their act out and keep their properties up to code. Although, if they had built housing instead of stalling on where to put the zoning for homeless and low income housing, people wouldn't have to live in third world conditions like this in the first place !!!

The affordable housing advocacy group that has asked the county for a widespread building moratorium is calling the county's proposal a "blank check."
Both parties are awaiting a response from Humboldt County Superior Court Judge Dale Reinholtsen, who will decide what parameters will dictate the moratorium scheduled to start Tuesday.
In court last week, Reinholtsen asked local attorney Bill Bragg, who is representing the county, to put his request in writing after hearing from him and Housing for All about what they think the moratorium parameters should be.
Bragg filed his motion following the court hearing Thursday. The document states the county shouldn't issue any building permits on lots zoned for multifamily housing unless the project has a density equivalent of 16 or more units per acre. The county plans not to approve any rezone or variance for properties that currently allow construction of residential multifamily or secondary units by right. All other applications for building permits, final subdivision maps and tentative subdivision maps would be approved if they're consistent with government code.
In addition, the county proposes that each time a development on multifamily-zoned property is deemed consistent with government code, the county shall forward a copy of the project application to the plaintiffs -- at which time they'll have 10 court days to submit any objections. Housing for All's proposal includes some exceptions, but the
group requested the ability to review any projects that may also be excluded.
"I don't think the court wants to end up sitting on as an arbitrator for the planning department," Bragg had said during the hearing.
Housing for All filed a response to the county's proposition on Friday, stating the county is required to refrain from issuing permits on units with fewer than 16 units per acre anyway, per the Housing Element. The response states the county is creating a "blank check on development" by wanting to grant all other projects consistent with government code.
"It is the opposite of a moratorium," the response states. "(This is) rewarding the very interests working to prevent the rezoning and prevent the county from bringing the (Housing) Element into compliance."
The objection goes on to state the county's proposal "merely gives interveners the right to object concerning development on a portion of the lots already zoned multifamily. It does nothing to preserve lots not currently zoned multifamily." In addition, the response states it shouldn't be Housing for All's responsibility to prove properties fail to meet government code. It should be the property applicant's responsibility to prove they are exempt from the moratorium.
Several other groups have weighed in on the issue.
Local attorney Bill Barnum, who is representing the Northern California Association of Home Builders and the Humboldt Association of Realtors, filed a brief asking Reinholtsen to reconsider Housing for All's proposal.
"A moratorium would have drastic consequences to the local community," Barnum wrote. "Construction activity is at record low levels. Halting construction, even for a short time, may well be the knife in the heart of many small businesses locally."
Another party, Forster-Gill Inc. -- the developer of the proposed Ridgewood Village project -- also tried to file a statement, but Reinholtsen concluded that he hadn't had any opportunity to hear their motion to file and wouldn't be accepting the brief. The county also filed an objection to Forster-Gill's motion to join the suit.
Forster-Gill attorney Richard Smith said the company would move forward, adding that their concerns are being brought up in a parallel lawsuit. Forster-Gill filed a legal action against Humboldt County in August, alleging that the county's failure to acknowledge the rezoning of the developer's 66-acre site on Ridgewood Drive does not meet state law for low-income housing standards.
After the hearing, Housing for All member Kermit Thobaben said all the group is trying to do is make sure there are homes for people.
"Our goal is not a moratorium; our goal is land availability," he said.
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Housing for All proposal:
Moratorium on all housing developments, except:
* Residential projects that meet a 25 percent affordability requirement
* Single-family homes under 3,000 square feet and assessory dwelling units, or a second unit not part of any subdivision
* Timber lands
* The construction or repair of public utilities or roads
* Residential remodeling and commercial remodeling that does not increase the square footage of the business by more than 3,000 square feet
County proposal:
* Moratorium on multifamily projects with a density equivalent of 16 or fewer units per acre
* No rezone or variance for properties allowing residential multifamily units or secondary units
* All other applications for building permits, final subdivision maps and tentative subdivision maps approved if they meet government code

An employment evaluation of Community Development Services Director Kirk Girard will take place Tuesday during the closed session portion of the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors meeting after being continued from a previous meeting in September.
As head of the county's planning services department, Girard has overseen several controversial issues -- including the recent multifamily rezoning process -- that have sparked lawsuits. Some county residents spoke negatively of Girard before September's portion of his evaluation with the supervisors.
County responses to the 2010-2011 grand jury report will be discussed during the open part of Tuesday's meeting. The supervisors will be evaluating responses to six reports received by the county in July. The county has previously responded to two of the nine reports, eight of which require a response.
In addition, the supervisors are expected to approve closing the Humboldt County Library for five days as a way to achieve some budget savings. The library would be closed Nov. 26 and Dec. 20-23. According to a staff report, the library receives much of its revenue from property taxes, which have remained stagnant during the past year and are projected to remain flat during this fiscal year. The library's website and all other online services would be shut down during the closures.
The board will make proclamations honoring Oct. 10, 2011, as the 100th anniversary of women's suffrage in California and
a proclamation that October is United Way month. Supervisors will also make a proclamation honoring the Great California Shake Out earthquake drill program that will be held Oct. 20 at 10:20 a.m.
For the complete meeting agenda and supporting documents, visit online at www.co.humboldt.ca.us/board/agenda/questys/.
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IF YOU GO:
What: Humboldt County Board of Supervisors meeting
Where: Supervisors Chamber, first floor, Humboldt County Courthouse, 825 Fifth St.