Council takes tough vote on housing

State mandate left city leaders with a choice of where but not how much

Redondo Beach Councilman Zein Obagi found himself last month in an unenviable position for any elected official:

He had to vote against a campaign promise.

But the newly elected councilman did just that when he was part of a narrow 3-2 majority that recently approved a new land use plan. The plan includes a zoning change that paves the way for nearly 2,500 new homes to be built over the next eight years. Most of those will be in North Redondo Beach, a portion of which Obagi represents. Obagi had campaigned, ahead of the March election, on slow growth and limiting housing density in North Redondo, already the most populated part of the city.

But despite his misgivings, Obagi — and the city as a whole, for that matter — didn’t have much of a choice.

That’s because the increased density stems from a state-mandated regional assessment that will require Southern California to add 1.3 million new housing units by October 2029. And Redondo Beach, despite years of planning, criticizing the state law and trying to reduce how many units the city had to build, was staring down a deadline that required it to approve zoning changes by this month.

Had that deadline passed, Redondo Beach would have faced potentially severe consequences, including fines and possibly having state regulators impose zoning decisions on the city.

Despite the council approving the zoning change, however, residents may not see any visible consequences right away. While the zoning change allows increased density, developers still need to choose to build in the city. That process takes time.

There is a housing crisis in Los Angeles County and across the state, however. So it seems inevitable that, by the end of the decade, Redondo Beach will be even more crowded, much to the chagrin of city leaders and many residents.

“While I don’t favor us adding housing anywhere,” Obagi said, “the severe consequences means we have to handle it the right way.”

Housing tends to be a controversial issue in Redondo Beach, a city known for its picturesque ocean views, strong community identity and relatively high property values.

A majority of voters have shown repeated resistance to large housing projects, with opponents

arguing that more housing naturally brings more people and more traffic.

Voters, for example, rejected two projects proposed in 2013 and 2015 to replace the AES power plant largely because of planned new residences.

In 2017, the city reached a court settlement with the developer of the Legado project, on Pacific Coast Highway and Palos Verdes Boulevard, to reduce the number of allowable new apartments and condos.

And the developers of a controversial revitalization project for the SouthBay Galleria, approved in 2019, reduced the number of apartment units from about 600 to 300 at the urging of elected leaders.

But Redondo Beach, as well as virtually every other city in California, has not been able to evade the state’s efforts to solve the housing crisis.

A California law requires periodic assessments of housing needs by region. Those assessments are meant to guide cities as they work on updates to their general and zoning plans, which lay out yearslong goals and details specifics about how to achieve those goals, respectively.

In Redondo, the process of updating those plans began in 2017, when volunteers with the General Plan Advisory Committee analyzed the city’s zoning map and eventually made recommendations to the City Council for an updated land use plan.

But the Southern California Association of Governments, a joint powers authority comprising 191 cities that is in charge of this area’s Regional Housing Needs Assessment, released a draft of local housing needs in 2019.

That plan was finalized earlier this year.

SCAG used a complicated formula that includes affordability, income, home values, proximity to transit and jobs among other factors to determine how many new homes each city within the region should allow.

The RHNA showed that Redondo Beach would need to allow builders to construct homes for 2,490 new residents by 2029. Nearly 60% of those need to be low-income or very low-income units.

While that total figure is larger than the ones set for both Hermosa Beach and Manhattan Beach — 774 and 558, respectively — it was not close to the greatest number in the area. Neighboring Torrance, for example, must allow for 4,939 new residents. Long Beach, the largest city on the L.A. County coast, must build enough units for 26,502 residents.

Still, Redondo Beach fought to get its number reduced, but SCAG rejected its appeal.

Councilwoman Laura Emdee, who joined Councilman Christian Horvath in opposing the city’s new zoning update last month, criticized the RHNA formula, saying it disproportionately affected Redondo Beach.

But SCAG has argued the RHNA is about ensuring an equitable share of housing.

“RHNA does not necessarily encourage or promote growth,” SCAG says on its website, “but rather allows communities to anticipate growth, so that collectively the region and subregion can grow in ways that enhance quality of life, improve access to jobs, promotes transportation mobility, and addresses social equity and fair share housing needs.”

Indeed, the number of new residents Redondo will need to accommodate by 2029 is a small percentage of its current population, based on 2019 census figures, about 3.7%.

That percentage is only marginally more than Torrance’s — 3.4% — and less than Long Beach’s 5.7%.

The City Council’s criticism of the assessment, though, seems to have several layers to it.

For one, there is the general opposition to building any more housing in the city.

For another, officials have rankled at the idea of the state forcing the city to build more housing.

Mayor Bill Brand has been the public face of that latter criticism, repeatedly saying the real battle is in Sacramento, where state bills once again threaten to take away local control.

“The only reason we are doing any upzoning in Redondo Beach is to meet the requirements of the state,” Brand said. “There is a war going on, and it’s got nothing to do with Redondo. It’s a building industry association and all their monied interests versus our quality of life in all of California.”

But then there are concerns about what the assessment will mean to specific areas of the city, particularly North Redondo Beach.

Before the council’s May 18 vote to update the city’s General Plan, Redondo Beach already allowed up to 1,278 new homes based on current zoning where the full capacity was not built out yet.

As a result, the city had limited options when figuring out where to allow more than 1,200 additional new homes.

The decision came down primarily to North Redondo Beach. Much of the land use update was hashed out over a series of late night City Council meetings in April and May, after it was clear what the city’s final RHNA number would be.

North Redondo Beach made sense in many ways: The South Bay Galleria shopping center, for example, is located there. The shopping center will soon boast a major transit center as well.

North Redondo Beach is also adjacent to the industrial region near Northrop Grumman. Building near economic and transit centers is a major goal of the RHNA.

But North Redondo Beach is the densest part of the city already, home to roughly 26,000 people, Emdee said, compared with 20,000 folks to the south.

With the added zoning densities, North Redondo could end up housing as many as 42,000 people and South Redondo 25,000, according to Emdee’s own analysis.

Emdee and Horvath both represent North Redondo council districts and oppose increasing density there.

Emdee favored spreading the new housing units more equitably throughout the city.

The RHNA assessment formula partly relies on current housing within “high quality transit areas.”

Because of that, concentrating housing in North Redondo Beach, Emdee said she feared, could cause the city to have an even worse housing needs assessment in the future.

“What’s frustrating is that if people don’t understand the formula,” Emdee said, “you are setting yourself up for failure eight years from now.”

But the city had to do something with the June deadline bearing down on it.

Allowing more housing was, based on the RHNA, a fait accompli. All Redondo Beach could do was figure out where to put it.

“It was a heavy decision but not a difficult one to make,” Obagi said in an interview. “It’s one that I thought might not be really popular but it’s defendable. Putting housing near the transit centers and the freeways is kind of rule No. 1.”