Nearly two years after the state’s deadline, Santa Clara County is close to finalizing plans for its future housing goals, but the long delay could eventually lead to more sprawl in rural areas prone to wildfires and floods.
Across the Bay Area, cities and counties were supposed to submit the state-mandated planning document, which is called a housing element, by Jan. 31, 2023. The plan helps local jurisdictions map out a blueprint of where new homes should be built in the next eight years.
While the 15 cities and towns that make up Santa Clara County created their own individual plans, the county was required to strategize where homes would be built on unincorporated land that falls within the county’s 1,300 roughly square miles, but hasn’t been claimed by any city.
In a Dec. 31 letter, the state told the county that its housing element meets all of the “statutory requirements.” The Board of Supervisors is expected to adopt the plan at its Jan. 28 meeting.
Throughout the newly two year process, the county faced “several challenges,” Joanna Wilk, a principal planner for the county, recently acknowledged at a board meeting.
Santa Clara County saw a more than 1,000 percent increase in the number of homes it’s expected to build between 2023 and 2031. During the previous eight-year cycle, which ran from 2015 to 2022, the county was required by the state to build 277 homes. Now, that number has grown to 3,125 homes. The Bay Area overall is expected to build 440,000 new units by 2031.
In a statement, the county called the number “unprecedented.”
“The most extreme obstacle is the inability for the unincorporated county to provide adequate access to basic human services such as water or sewer to accommodate extensive housing growth that is typically provided in urban areas or unincorporated cities,” the county’s statement said.
Only small parts of unincorporated county land falls in urban areas, like the 150-acre county fairgrounds in East San Jose or the 115-acre defunct Pleasant Hills Golf Course adjacent to Lake Cunningham that has long been eyed for housing. Large swaths of the unincorporated county territory is rural — agricultural land hugging the city limits of Morgan Hill and Gilroy or abutting the Santa Cruz Mountains along Saratoga and Los Gatos. Other stretches already are protected parks or open space preserves.
The county said that they had to come up with solutions to “accommodate the increase in housing without compromising its rich natural resources in the unincorporated rural lands that also support one the state’s greatest commodities, agriculture.”
But the nearly two year delay came with a penalty called the “builder’s remedy.” A provision of the state’s Housing Accountability Act, the builder’s remedy allows developers to propose projects that don’t follow local zoning laws in cities and counties without compliant housing elements as long as 20% of the homes are affordable.
Since the deadline, the county has received more than 30 preliminary applications. But many of the proposals aren’t towering apartments or condos that housing advocates expected. Instead, they’re entirely new subdivisions of single-family homes.
Alison Cingolani, the director of policy for the pro-housing nonprofit SV@Home, said these projects “abuse the intent of the builder’s remedy.”
“Builder’s remedy is intended to result in housing in jurisdictions that have historically not aided housing development,” Cingolani said. “They were not intended to convert agricultural and open space land or place housing in places where it’s going to be sprawl or increase greenhouse gas emissions as folks are forced into long commutes.”
Supervisor Otto Lee, who serves as the president of the board, said in a statement that “it’s become like the Wild West because of the builder’s remedy process.”
“Going outside the planning process creates real dangers for our community like urban sprawl, pollution, water shortages, traffic congestion and fire risks,” he said. “We can’t have the wrong type of housing in the wrong places and end up without the affordable housing we need.”
Alice Kaufman — the policy and advocacy director for Green Foothills, an organization dedicated to preserving open space — said many of the builder’s remedy proposals are on “prime farmland” or on hillside parcels with wooded slopes. Some of the projects also are in FEMA flood zones or in areas at high risk for wildfires.
Building in these areas, Kaufman said, “would be putting people in harms way.”
“The vast majority of wildfires are caused either by human activity or infrastructure, like power lines,” she said. “Putting more infrastructure and more people into the Wildland Urban Interface is very likely to result in an increased risk of fires, which would impact everyone not just the people living in the new homes.”
But the county might have some recourse, according to Kaufman.
State law says that cities and counties can deny a builder’s remedy project if it is “proposed on land zoned for agriculture or resource preservation” or “does not have adequate water or wastewater facilities to serve the project.”
The county declined to say whether it would exercise that power, writing in a statement that “it is too earlier to determine the outcome of any builder’s remedy application submitted.”