Citizens throughout the Southern California region were left shaking and scratching their heads as Governor Gavin Newsom and officials with the California Department of Housing and Community Development upbraided the City of Montclair and warned its officials that the city is not doing enough to comply with state policy and laws intended to create affordable housing.
Montclair was called onto the carpet over its alleged lack of compliance with Sacramento’s mandates despite being within the top one percent to three percent of the state’s cities which is actually meeting the state’s demands that local governmental entities facilitate the construction of homes and/or apartments to offset California’s housing shortage.
The rebuke from the state that included threatened legal action against the city, which already stands as the most densely populated municipality in San Bernardino County, came as Montclair has embarked on preparations to accommodate what is anticipated to be the most intensive series of high-rise residential complexes in the Inland Empire.
According to a March 25 press release from the governor’s office, Montclair, together with 14 other California cities and/or counties, has not laid out plans to allow for the construction of new housing across all income levels.
The next course of action after the warning is a lawsuit, the release said.
“I’m disappointed on behalf of the state and the people of California that after years of effort, we still have communities that aren’t meeting the needs of their residents,” Newsom said in the release.
The city has accommodated substantial development of single family home subdivisions at its south end bordering Chino and southeastern end bordering Ontario in recent years. In addition, over the last nine years, approaching 1,400 units of high-density housing have been added to the city at its northwestern end along Monte Vista Avenue. At present, the city is working toward accommodating close to or exceeding 2,000 units of even higher-density housing – multifamily/apartments within or around the city’s transit district near the Montclair Transit Center located off along Richton Street east of Monte Vista Avenue.
The State of California, working with regional planning agencies, has made a determination of how many dwelling units of all types and price ranges that the counties, cities and communities in the state must theoretically allow to be built within their jurisdictions over the timeframe between the end of 2021 and the end of 2028 to redress the state’s housing shortage. That calculation, known as the Regional Housing Needs Allocation, also referred to its acronym RHNA, specifies that Montclair should allow for the construction of 2,586 dwelling units during that seven-year span. Montclair has proven since 2021 to be the one city in San Bernardino County coming closest to meet the state’s mandate in that regard.
According to the governor’s office, those jurisdictions that have received a notice of violation need to “come into compliance,” such that those which “fail to do so within the next 60 days… are subject to potential legal action by the state.”
Governor Newsom’s and the California Department of Housing and Community Development’s threat to take legal action against Montclair has resulted in a realization that state officials are arbitrarily defining standards and compliance in a way that is damaging not only Sacramento’s credibility but its authority. In this regard, it appears that Montclair has gone beyond the planning stage for addressing the state’s homelessness and housing crises, while state officials remain focused on the planning phase and unfocused on actual progress toward the goal. The misapplication of the state’s authority in this way has led multiple other cities around the state, virtually all of which have made far less progress toward meeting the Regional Housing Needs Assessment goals than Montclair, to question whether the state’s standards can be legally enforced if they were to be subjected to a test in a court of law.
-Mark Gutglueck