Public input needed to address affordable housing issue

Del Mar City wrestled with the knotty Housing Element problem of providing affordable housing in the City, and prepared to adopt locations for such inclusion which raised an uproar with the majority voters who defeated Prop J in November. Why? The City wanted to include most of it in the downtown commercial zone!

Yielding to such uproar, the City is holding further workshops to find a better solution.

The following are some solutions to consider for the affordable units:

  1. Challenge the 10 unit penalty added to the 12 allocation for the current period, leaving 12 instead of 22 required to provide. It appears the City didn’t do enough to challenge the penalty. This penalty was arbitrary – not based on pre-determined criteria, or applied evenly to all cities not meeting their allocation. Penalties have to be known, so they can be weighed against the decision to not comply.

2. Include the Public Facilities zones in the area for possible inclusion. One person recently suggested putting affordable housing at the tennis court location. If we have to provide affordable housing, that location should be a lot more beneficial to the Del Mar citizens than the tennis courts!

  1. Did you know that we have approximately $720,000 sitting in a Housing Fund? Why couldn’t that be used as a starter for developing the required units as suggested in #2?
4. It is continually said that we get credit for providing subsidized housing (to eight families at approximately $70,000/year), but the credit we get is


used to calculate the number of affordable units we are to provide for


period. So why not allocate that $70,000/year to providing the required units in #2, and those eight families can live there?
  1. If government has the power to eventually require us to destroy our City of Del Mar through the Housing Element, there is another option – unincorporate and become part of the County. These periodical allocations of required affordable housing apply only to cities and the County,


neighborhoods like Rancho Santa Fe, La Jolla and Del Mar.

I’m sending these suggestions to the city. Be sure you send yours to them right away so we can handle the affordable housing in an agreeable way.

Ralph Peck Del Mar