Anyone who has ever waited until about 11 p.m. on April 15 to do their taxes may know how the City Council members felt Tuesday. Facing a ticking clock to pass an overall city housing plan or face the possible loss of tens of millions in state housing funds earmarked for city projects, the Council found themselves between the proverbial rock and the concomitant hard place.
  
Under consideration by the Council Tuesday was the “2008-2014 Housing Element of the General Plan,” basically the city’s long-term plan for developing needed and affordable housing. In order for the city to be eligible for certain state housing funds and grants, the city must have a state-certified housing plan in place. The deadline to have the plan submitted for certification by the state is June 3. Another hiccup is that submitting a plan is simply not enough. It has to be a good plan… and the state checks. State officials evidently have no qualms about refusing to certify housing plans if all the dots and crosses are not properly placed.
  
The biggest head on the chopping block if the city does not get its plan certified is $37 million in state funds that were intended to be seed money for a $200 million 386-unit development at Long Beach Boulevard and Anaheim Street.
  
So, why the last minute approval by the Council, just weeks before the drop dead submission date?
  
Well, interestingly the city has been working on this housing plan since 2007. The Council itself approved the draft version of the plan in October of last year and the draft had already been subjected to a 60-day review by the California Department of Housing and Community Development–those pesky Sacramento bureaucrats that must eventually certify the final version of the housing plan. The draft plan was returned to the city by HCD on Feb. 19, as in three months ago, with pointers about how to bring it into compliance.
  
Then, well, things slowed down a bit. The city Planning Commission took nearly seven weeks to incorporate the recommended changes suggested by HCD before they approved the revised plan and forwarded it to the Council on May 7. It took the Council until Tuesday night to actually agendize and talk about the topic.
  
Just to make things even more interesting, council and the public were presented with three pages of additional changes to the plan by city staff, less than an hour before the council meeting.
  
Despite initial resistance by several council members to incorporating the changes on such short notice, the seven present council members finally voted unanimously to approve the plan with the majority of the changes intact.
  
One problem though of rushing something like this through at the last moment is that sometimes one goal–in this case the state certification and housing funds–can sometimes outshine the real reason of the housing plan, i.e., to assure that Long Beach has enough housing for all its residents and more specifically affordable housing.
  
We can get some inkling of how well this plan might work to address this by looking back at some of the previous city housing plans.
  
The 2008-2014 Housing Element plan approved Tuesday is an extension in many ways of the previous 2000-2005 housing plan. That plan called for the development of about 1,000 units of affordable housing over five years. In the end, it fell well short. A city report in 2006 found that between 2000 and 2005 the city had developed 119 very low income units, 43 low income units and 60 moderate income units. In total, these 222 units amounted to just 22-percent of the housing plan’s original goal.
  
In the same way that the new housing plan grew out of the previous one, the 2000-2005 plan was an extension of the 1989 housing plan.     
  
The 1989 Housing Element Plan took what can only be described as an “interesting” attitude toward affordable housing. The 20-year-old document made no bones about the fact that affordable housing was not the city’s priority at that time.
  
“Long Beach views its existing housing stock as its greatest resource of affordable housing, and will stimulate and support continued maintenance and reinvestment in that housing stock,” said the document. And by “that housing stock,” it is referring to whatever existing affordable housing was already in Long Beach. Translation: We [the city] are not putting a penny into new affordable housing.
  
The document goes on to say that the city “will not sacrifice long-term quality for short-term affordability in new or rehabilitated buildings.” Again, my governmenteese translator tells me this meant that the city wanted market rate “quality” housing as opposed to affordable housing.
  
Just in case my translator may be out of whack, the city spells out its priorities for housing more clearly later in the document, where it announces plans to encourage the development of 24,000 new housing units in the city.
  
“In the immediate future, the emphasis should be on for-sale housing for first-time homebuyers and upon upscale residential development in and around the downtown area.”  
  
To be fair, and in retrospect, this was somewhat understandable as the previous plan, in 1978, had focused on revitalizing or developing hundreds and hundreds of properties throughout the city with no attention to neighbor makeup, aesthetics, etc. The legacy of the 1978 housing plan is still visible in the city, with neighborhoods composed of odd mixes of residential and apartment housing, especially in the older residential areas. Not all of these perhaps misplaced developments were “affordable” housing in the modern context, but the 1989 Housing plan was a direct reaction to the Wild West atmosphere of building and redevelopment under the 1978 plan that many believed had tainted the character of the city.
  
However, the 1989 Housing Plan, while reviling the previous effort from 11 years earlier, did little to increase the stocks of affordable housing. In fact, the stated goal of the plan was to not increase affordable housing and even to reduce it by 3 percent.
  
So the past two major Housing plans have called for or accomplished the noteworthy goal of building 222 units of affordable housing. That is not a sparkling record for a city of more than 170,000 housing units.
  
According to projections by the state Housing and Community Development folks, Long Beach will need (during the 2008-2014 period) a total of 5,440 affordable housing units. The city housing plan approved Tuesday currently lists nine projects that would add 613 affordable housing units to the city roster. In fact, all but 107 units are already completed.
  
So if nothing else, the current City Hall team has managed to create nearly three times the affordable housing units than the previous two long-term plans combined.
  
For once, I will end this column with a pat on the back to those that made this happen. Now there are only 4,827 more affordable housing units left to plan and build before 2014.