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Jan. 15, 2021 - Epoch Times
25:14
California’s Imperfect Plan to Reduce Emissions and Housing Costs | Erik Peterson
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So based on what you see, the driver behind all of this is the environmental law that was passed.
That's a big driver.
So you have the environmental law that passed that says you can't have any pollution.
This push to, you know, meet these environmental policies and, hey, we're going to have to force everyone out of their cars, and it's just ridiculous.
I've never been in government to try to force people to do things, and I don't like that this The state is basically trying to force us to do their will.
And local control, having that at the city level, land use is one of your biggest responsibilities.
You're the people elected to maintain the quality of life and to plan your community with the population of your community.
And we're basically getting orders from Sacramento, you will do this, or we're gonna sue you, or we'll have advocates sue you, or you know, and the people don't really like that.
They worked hard to get to wherever they are.
They chose this community to live in.
and the state's trying to change what that community is. - My guest today is Eric Peterson Eric, you serve on the City Council of Huntington Beach?
Yes.
It's great to have you on the show.
We want to talk to you about housing policies.
Okay.
So you've been serving on the City Council of Huntington Beach for a while, and you've been a mayor for a few years, right?
I was mayor last year.
This is my fifth year on, sixth year on council.
I see.
We want to learn from you what's going on with the housing policies of this state, what you have seen.
Well, the state is trying to control housing from Sacramento.
Plain and simple.
They want to Enact their housing policies, whatever those might be, on every city.
They're talking about affordability and housing, and they're talking about there is a crisis in the state currently with shortage of housing.
What is the perspective on that?
So the crisis is, I served on SCAG for three years, and if you go to their webpage, you can look at their executive summary.
And what is SCAG? Southern California Regional Association of Governments.
So this is a body that represents the LA, Orange County region, San Bernardino, Riverside, just the whole Southern California, less San Diego.
And they look at transportation and housing.
And they make policies.
They're part of the RHNA process.
That's where we get our allocation of homes we have to build and all that stuff.
So part of their goal in the LA region is to build more homes, a lot more homes, so that you live close to where you work.
So the housing crisis is we don't have enough homes where people work, in their mind.
Now the reason they do this is because the state said we have to get to 1990 CO2 levels.
Well, the only way to do that without mass transportation is get people out of their cars.
Now, we have a lot of people in the Inland Empire and in the Valley that drive into our region.
Well, you can't get to those levels if you live far away.
So, basically, they've said, well, we don't want you to drive, we want you to live here, so we're going to build homes.
I still haven't found anyone who's going to give up the 3,000 square foot home in Corona and move into a condominium just to be close to work.
My son's one.
He loves living by the beach.
He's a new engineer at JPL, which is in Pasadena.
He drives an hour and a half there and an hour and a half home, and he doesn't plan on moving up there because he doesn't like that area.
To live.
So people choose where they want to live, right?
And in Huntington Beach, all the residents of Huntington Beach chose to live in a suburban beach community.
And the state wants us to change that and make it more like West LA. And I think most of the residents of Huntington Beach, if they wanted to move to West LA, they would have moved there.
So the state's coming in and saying, nope, you need to build high-density apartments, you know, stack and pack, whatever you want to call it, so people can live and work here, and they're going to shorten their commute, and they have all sorts of different things that they want to try to put on us.
Now, one of the drivers is to drive the cost of housing down.
Is that correct?
Is that going to bring the cost of housing down?
Well, I suppose if you build enough of something that it's eventually, you know, going to flood the market and prices will have to fall.
In Huntington Beach, it's actually raised our prices.
We have these newer apartments built, and all the current people who own rentals in Huntington Beach look and they say, well, it's $3,000 a month they're charging.
I'm charging $1,200.
I'm going to raise mine to $1,800.
So it sort of got rid of some of our affordability we had naturally built into our market by adding these more high-end apartments.
So how it works with affordability, I don't think so.
When they're talking about affordability, it's You know, I can get a better rent or purchase price out in the Inland Empire or in Riverside County or in the Valley than I can living by the beach.
So they want to somehow get those rents into Huntington Beach, but they're not building the same product.
They're just building one product, which is high-density apartments pretty much.
So I don't think it's going to work out the way they want it to work out, but they're trying to not give us the option at all.
Now, it's packaged under affordable housing.
So I hear this, and I was very confused about it.
I hear affordable housing and housing, and what does that element look like on the affordable housing side?
Aren't they supposed to be cheaper for people to rent?
They're supposed to be.
Like I said, in Huntington Beach, it's had the adverse effect.
Basically, a developer can come in, and in Huntington Beach, we say you have to have 10% affordability.
So an affordable or low-income apartment is like 60% of the median income.
That qualifies them for that.
Thing is, it doesn't apply to people in Huntington Beach.
It's a free-for-all.
It's a lotto to see who gets those.
So we're not actually helping the people in Huntington Beach directly to get that 10%.
So if they build a 100-unit apartment, we have 10 that are affordable, and then that's open up to the whole market, not just Huntington Beach residents.
So a few people get a break, but affordability, again, they're trying to get The same rents that are in a different region at the beach or right off the beach or something, and it just doesn't work that way.
I mean, even if you go up to, say, Santa Monica, where it's very dense, or, you know, West L.A., it's extremely expensive rents down on the beach.
I mean, they have some rent control up there, but as you get closer to the shore, it gets more expensive.
So from what you see, it's not going to really drive the cost of housing down with these new development plans?
I haven't seen it.
I haven't seen it at all.
And what's the percentage of the, what numbers are they giving you guys?
What mandates do you have to, in terms of numbers, and how many homes do you have?
Well, so the fifth cycle, Rena sent, so we had to build Huntington Beach 1,350 affordable units.
That was our number.
Newport got five.
Or no, Newport got two, Costa Mesa got five, something like that.
Those are neighboring cities.
So there's an inequity right from the start, right?
Their methodology is bizarre, how they work with it.
And they keep talking, well, we're going to have all this influx of population, but the population, according to SCAG, has actually gone down in the region.
Yet they keep saying, well...
It's going to keep going up.
The reason why they say it's going to go up is they assume people are going to move from the inland into the region.
And they need to, again, get what they consider affordable housing in our communities.
But, like I said, if you're building one type of product, how are you going to move a family from a home that they enjoy to an apartment?
I mean, it's a completely different type of living.
And they keep saying, well, the millennials like this.
There was a study released last week, I think millennials are one of the biggest homebuyers now.
Single, detached family homes.
So that's not working out for them either, because they get married, they have kids, and guess where they want to go?
They sort of like that suburban.
The good schools, the suburban area.
When they're young, they like living in West L.A. and, you know, having that.
And some people stay there, some don't.
We were a suburb, and we still are, of L.A., Huntington Beach is.
So based on what you see, the driver behind all of this is the environmental law that was passed.
That's a big driver.
So you have the environmental law that passed that says you can't have any pollution.
Now, I grew up in Southern California, so I remember stage one, stage two, stage three smog alerts.
I remember not seeing the San Gabriel Mountains, except in the winter.
Every now and then, and you were surprised that there was mountains there.
We've done good.
You know, we've done good.
The catalytic converter solved a lot of that back in the 70s.
This push to meet these environmental policies and, hey, we're going to have to force everyone out of their cars, and it's just ridiculous.
I've never been in government to try to force people to do things, and I don't like that the state is basically trying to force us to do their will.
And local control, having that at the city level, land use is one of your biggest responsibilities.
You're the people elected to maintain the quality of life and to plan your community with the population of your community.
And we're basically getting orders from Sacramento, you will do this, or we're going to sue you, or we'll have advocates sue you.
The people don't really like that.
They worked hard to get to wherever they are.
They chose this community to live in.
And the state's trying to change what that community is.
Okay, now, do you think they have done sufficient studies?
You mentioned that they've done studies that millennials like this kind of living, this kind of housing.
Do you think they've done sufficient studies around understanding would people want to live in these units and also go to work using public transportation?
Do you think they've done any serious look into it before planning for it?
I don't know if they've done enough.
I mean, if you talk to the young kid, if you talk to my 19-year-old, he'd love to live in an apartment and walk around and do everything.
But in the end, he's also said, hey, when I get married and have kids, I want a big ranch somewhere.
So it changes, and it changes, I think, on what your goals are in life.
And sometimes the city life is just something you love.
You look at New York, a lot of people love it, stay there, but then there's a lot of people there, they make their money, and then they retire.
They go down to Florida and retire.
So, how much they like it, I don't know.
And all the studies, every time someone needs a study, you can get whatever result you want, right?
That's statistics.
If you ask the right questions, you'll get whatever answer you want.
There's always some sort of statistic somewhere you can pull.
Now, if these plans don't work out, and there's a lot of investment into housing and public transportation, how's it going to impact us?
Well, if it doesn't work out, I mean, you have someone who owns the property, and if they can't fill it, you know, what are your options?
You can apply for it to be Section 8 housing, you know, that type.
I don't think they're going to be knocking these things down.
But, you know, it becomes a burden on the community if you keep lowering rents, lowering rents, and then you get, you know, bad customers in there.
I don't know.
It could be detrimental to the city.
When Huntington Beach, we originally had a plan that basically, it's called form-based design.
The developer could come in and as long as you could fit whatever you wanted in the little piece of land you bought, you know, build as high as you want.
We didn't give them parking requirements, no height limits, anything like that.
And when I got on council, I said, you know what?
I love this city.
I'd love some great new development, but we need to have some standards that complement our city.
And that's what I've been fighting for.
You know, if you have two people living in an apartment, you probably need two cars.
At least in my city, because we don't have a lot of public transportation.
And the old plan said, oh, you only need space for one car.
So by adding extra parking, cutting back on the height, and giving setbacks so you're not so crammed in, building right to the street, we got sued.
And we won on a lot of those saying, yeah, you can require parking, you can require setbacks, you can put height limits on it.
Which is a good thing, but the state does not like that.
They want just go for it, build whatever you can.
It's going to be an urban community, whether you like it or not.
And the transportation side is more risky, right?
If the transportation doesn't work, the housing will be there.
Yeah, and in Huntington we have a bus route, basically, and OCTA Orange County Transit Authority, they've cut our buses because we just don't have ridership.
We're sort of the end of the line.
In the summer, we'll get people going to the beach, but during the year, where the bus routes are don't really go anywhere within the city that people take, and most people, it's a community of single-family homes and condominiums and apartments, and most people have cars.
So we don't have that infrastructure.
We can't get the Same sort of bang for our buck like if you're up in the Bay Area, right?
You can live in Danville across the Bay, jump on the BART, go downtown, and easily catch transportation somewhere.
It works there.
In D.C., they have the metro.
It stops at night.
But, I mean, they have it.
You can get to Arlington.
You can, you know, get out to Virginia and stuff so people can go in.
Well, we sort of had that years ago with the Red Line in L.A., but...
That all got taken out, and it's impossible to build something like that now.
I mean, land is so expensive.
The plans you shared with me on the SCAG, which I had seen them.
Yes.
There is a lot of money going to go into transportation.
Yes.
Based on this plan, that people would live in these dense areas, and then they use the public transportation.
Correct.
What's going to be the impact if people don't use...
There's a chance that people will live in these areas, And then they may not use the transportation...
Well, and that's the thing.
They focus on transportation corridors, so you build around transportation corridors, and you're supposed to have jobs around transportation corridors, too.
It seems there's more building of homes than actually attracting businesses.
So these people are still going to have to get to work somewhere.
And California, it seems like they've made it their mission to try to force good companies out of California through regulation.
And I think we really need to focus on trying to get those good jobs back, whatever they are, And then find out what people will do.
They're trying to sort of plan this whole area But the planning's missing pieces.
The jobs part.
The jobs part is a big one.
So you're moving people into a dense area and they still have to commute for jobs.
Like if we built all apartments down Beach Boulevard and Huntington Beach, we still are going to have to leave Huntington Beach to go to our jobs, which is, you know, come down to Irvine, to Newport, or L.A., Or like my son to Pasadena.
So regionally, and then there's a lot of businesses now that have flex times too.
Like my son goes, he lives at five in the morning, so they let him start early and he comes home in the afternoon versus, you know, the typical eight to five.
So I think businesses are Understand the traffic and everything.
But instead of building more highways, we're building more people, you know, more places to put people.
And it's congested, and I don't see it getting any better.
Now, there is a lot of push behind these initiatives.
Who are the people that are pushing for this type of housing model and the transportation model?
This is the funny part.
It's the most bipartisan thing around.
You have both parties pushing for it, whether it be from a development standpoint or an environmental standpoint.
You have people on both sides of the aisle pushing, and it's the citizens who are sitting here going, hold it, I didn't move to this place.
And I don't want this in my community.
And then they call us NIMBYs, and they call us all this, or if you're going to add to my community, make it look like my community.
Don't make it look like another community.
And you get pushback from both sides.
Whether you're saying, oh, well, you don't believe in climate change, or you don't believe its impacts, or on the other side, you're not a property rights guy, you know, because you're not letting people just do whatever they want with their properties.
In California, they're zoning, right?
And when you think of property rights, you think of everyone's property rights in those communities.
When I think of property rights, I think of the 200,000 people in my city and what they spent their money on, their private property.
And that, I think, outweighs the one guy who wants to build 500 units on a piece of property, which impacts our fire, our police, our sewer, our water, everything else.
So it takes from everyone else to do that.
And there's development impact fees, but those are one-time fees.
It doesn't go on forever.
So there's a lot of aspects to it.
It's being pushed from a lot of different ways.
You'll see conservative groups or so-called conservative groups are pushing for it.
And then you'll see environmental groups pushing the other way.
And like I said, the people in the middle are the citizens saying, what's happening to my city?
And unfortunately, they're a little complacent because they don't come out and complain until Their house is shadowed by some building.
So it would be nice to get people out there, but I can tell you, once they see what's going on and see how it changes their community, they do get involved.
In Huntington Beach, we've had the citizens from across the political spectrum in unison on this stuff, saying, you know, we don't mind some development, but don't do this to us.
And how many homes are there in Huntington Beach, roughly?
Is it like 80,000, 90,000?
Yeah, yeah.
And we have a lot.
We had a really good mix.
So in Huntington, you could have apartments.
We have mobile homes.
We have, you know, little homes built in the 60s to little bigger tracks to mansions on the hill and mansions on the beach.
So we had a wide variety of options.
And you had built-in affordability there.
When I grew up, you know, you graduate high school, you move downtown.
Now downtown's a little expensive.
But you'd get a little apartment there, and then as you matured, you moved up, you know, somewhere else in Huntington.
But...
Like I said, with these bigger apartments coming in, very expensive, very nice apartments, it's changed.
It's changed.
It's taken some of that affordability out.
I have a cousin that lives downtown and she said her rent went from $1,200 a month and now they're $2,800 a month.
Yeah, because if I'm renting an apartment and I said, well, I'm renting 800 square feet to you and down the street they're doing 600 square feet and it's a newer place, but they're charging three times the amount that I'm charging, I'm going to raise my rent because it's the supply and demand.
So there's an adverse effect.
Yeah, there has been.
And now what do you recommend for the policymakers?
What should they do in California to solve these, the challenges with affordability?
I think with the policy makers, I think what they really need to do, I, for one, I think communities We should be able to create the community that their citizens want.
They shouldn't be forced to do anything like that.
That's part of what we are, local city leaders.
We should be able to be in charge of our land use and how our city is built and planned and everything.
We shouldn't be forced to build things because, you know, LA's a mess and it wants to get rid of some of its mess to Orange County.
Or, you know, we need people from the Inland Empire that they're not going to want to leave their homes to come live in an apartment.
It just doesn't make sense.
So I think they really need to focus on doing what the state needs to do, and that's, you know, try to attract good jobs here.
You know, go out.
Economic development.
And, you know, there's this argument that, well, housing's economic development.
If I do it, you know, you get the extra tax, you know, property tax, and there's jobs.
Well, the jobs are temporary, because after it's built, the jobs are gone.
And the property tax, depending on where you live, it's not that much.
In Orange County, we get 1% of our property tax.
Go up to LA County, they get 3, 4, 5, 6, depending on when you signed your deal.
They get a lot much more of their property tax back.
So Orange County, they actually still consider us rural, even though they're trying to make us urban.
So we're a giving county.
We give a lot to the state and we get very little back.
And I think for all we give to the state, the state should be over there advocating.
For the state and making policies that attract business and stop regulating people to death.
So you think if jobs come, then people can solve the housing issue on their own?
Well, I mean, if you have a good job and you make more money, things become more affordable, don't they?
You know, and it's sort of upsetting when I see people come to the diocese and say, I'll never be able to afford in Huntington.
It's like, how can you have that attitude?
You know, you get out, do good, you know, get that good job.
We have every opportunity in the world to do well.
And we have people in Huntington that are low income, all the way to very Very well off.
And it's a great community, and I think the state needs to just focus on doing good for the state as a whole and not trying to micromanage our city affairs.
Okay, do you have any other remarks?
Thank you for having me.
It was great to have you on this show.
Thank you, Eric.
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