Westwood South of Santa Monica Blvd. HOA endorses and supports the “OUR NEIGHBORHOOD VOICES” ballot initiative campaign now underway. The ONV campaign is the best hope that we and other communities across our state have to regain local land use and planning authority from the State legislature.
We call on all our WSSM residents, whether single-family, condo or apartment residents to take action. Density added to our neighborhood will affect ALL residents for when there is a power brown-out or outage, water line or sewer line break, it affects us all. Housing built without parking affects us all. Construction permitted to be built without setbacks will result in the loss of our neighborhood trees and urban forest. Density without infrastructure improvements is a recipe for disaster. Housing without parking will put pressure on all our streets and will make life more difficult for all those (residents and businesses) who rely on our streets for parking.
Why This Initiative Campaign is Needed
Background
On January 1st, Senate Bill 9 (SB 9) went into effect across California after having been passed by the California legislature and being signed by Governor Newsom. SB 9 and its companion bill SB 10 both target single-family / R1 properties to “upzone” them to permit the construction of multi-family housing.
While SB 9 was referred to as the ‘Duplex Bill” it permits much more than 2 units to be constructed on an R1/single-family zoned lot. It permits each R1 lot to be split in half and then each half can have 2 – 4 units – which means that what was an R1 lot can now have between 4-6 units on it. SB 10 will allow up to 10 housing units to be built on a single-family lot but as currently written first requires cities to “opt in” to the measure. This upzoning is being allowed without the provision of any improvements to a city’s infrastructure to absorb the new density.
Both bills ignore the fact that earlier legislation had already been adopted by the State legislature to allow the construction of Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs) (“granny units”) and Junior ADUs on R1 properties –overriding local rules and minimum lot size requirements for their construction thus permitting as many as three households to be established on a single-family lot. SB 9 and SB 10 were touted as being needed to address California’s affordable housing crisis. YET, neither one of these bills requires a single unit of affordable or low-income housing. Rather than provide the needed tax credits, financing and/or subsidies needed to incentivize the creation of affordable housing, the State electeds have instead passed these and over 3 dozen bills in recent years that adopt one-size-fits-all statewide land use and zoning policies that override and micromanage local land use planning authority. Many of these bills also allow projects to override long-established California environmental review standards (CEQA) meant to identify and mitigate negative impacts.
The housing bills have been passed based upon the “trickle down” theory of economics. While acknowledging the need for affordable housing, the backers of these bills peddle the notion that increasing the supply of luxury and market-rate housing (any types of housing) will somehow reduce the cost of housing and result in the eventual creation of affordable housing. This simple supply and demand model has never been proven to be true as applied to housing and, in fact, there are many studies that document the fact that the construction of new market rate and luxury housing results in the increase in housing costs in nearby areas! And, the upzoning of land results in higher land values and higher housing costs making it harder for individuals and families to buy a home.
The impacts of SB 9 and SB 10 will affect all stakeholders – not just single family property owners. By failing to provide for infrastructure improvements needed to support the new density now permitted, the quality of life for all is diminished. Our infrastructure is already over-burdened and yet the bills are silent as to the need to provide companion measures to fund improvements in the infrastructure – electric distribution, school capacity, water availability and the need for parks and open space to support a growing population. The measures also reduce parking requirements and setback requirements resulting in the loss of mature trees that make up our urban forest and provide needed cooling and help to reduce urban heat island effect and that contribute to greenhouse gas reduction goals. Most of these measures assume that if one lives anywhere near transit that they no longer will need to have (or park) a car and thus parking requirements are removed or severely reduced and no mitigations for added traffic that accompanies added density are considered.
One-size-fits-all land use policy should not be crafted to apply to a state as diverse as California. Local governments have been given very ambitious housing goals by the State via the Regional Housing Needs Assessment process (“RHNA”) and instead of micromanaging how cities must reach those goals, the legislature should be providing incentives and tools to help local communities and governments to reach those goals UNDERSTANDING THAT LAND USE PLANNING IS best done by those most familiar with the resources available in an area.
The Solution — Our Neighborhood Voices 2022 Ballot Initiative Campaign
As a result of the continued misguided approach taken by Sacramento policymakers, citizens and local cities across the State are banding together to place the OUR NEIGHBORHOOD VOICES (ONV) initiative on the November 2022 ballot that will return land use and planning authority to local municipalities.
Why we must all help qualify the initiative for the Nov. ballot:
The Our Neighborhood Voices Initiative, if approved by voters in Nov. 2022, gives each city council the power to override state land-use and zoning laws by adopting approaches that actually serve local needs. (In the unincorporated areas, county boards of supervisors will be empowered to set local zoning and land-use law.)
The Our Neighborhood Voices Initiative is highly sensitive to environmental, equity and policy laws that protect us all. The Our Neighborhood Voices Initiative does not let cities or counties undo the broader laws such as the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), California Fair Employment and Housing Act, the Coastal Act, or Housing Element Law.
The Our Neighborhood Voices Initiative was created by a group of diverse, bipartisan city officials and community leaders who describe SB 9 and its cousin SB 10 as “Two damaging laws that essentially tell us to ‘sit down and shut up’ about what is happening right next door to our homes while developers demolish single-family homes and build multi-story, multi-unit projects.”
To get the OUR NEIGHBORHOOD VOICES measure on the November ballot, everyone who cares about our neighborhood and the quality of life in our City and the State must help. This campaign is a true grass roots campaign and its success will depend on each of us networking within our personal spheres of influence (friends, family, neighbors, work associates) to gather signatures of registered voters. This campaign will not have the resources available to pay signature gatherers as so many initiative campaigns do. We must be the army of petition circulators who make it possible for 1 million registered voters to sign on.
It is our belief that once people understand what is at stake, that they will sign the petitions AND lend their support. It is up to each of us to help to spread the word.
We hope that WSSM stakeholders will sign the petition and will also help to spread the work to friends, family and co-workers. Hopefully all will help to gather signatures of registered voters from within your personal sphere of influence.
This campaign will need to collect just over 1 million signatures by early April to qualify for the November 2022 statewide ballot. As this is a true grass roots effort there will not be the millions of dollars of special interest money available to pay signature gatherers (who are paid as much as $3-5 for each signature they obtain) to reach the goal. Success will be reached via an army of concerned Californians who translate their concerns into action.
Will you circulate this information to friends and family, share this info with your neighbors? Invite your neighbors over to sign the petition? Sign up with the campaign (http://ourneighborhoodvoices.com) to help out at targeted larger scale events. Set up a card table in your driveway, outside of the local school, post office or busy activity? Be creative!
Those who believe that this is a critical matter will need to educate others to build a force of signature gatherers who will get us over the State’s required signatures to qualify for the ballot.
We support policies that will result in the preservation and construction of affordable housing and housing for our workforce. We do not support zoning policies such as SB 9 and SB 10 that essentially allow developers to plan where housing will be built – cherry picking locations to maximize their profits with little regard as to the impacts on the community and those who live and work there.
More info is available
You can find additional info about the initiative at the website: www.ourneighborhoodvoices.com.
Additional background information can be found at the United Neighbors website: https://www.unitedneighbors.net/
A fact sheet/Q & A can be seen at: https://ourneighborhoodvoices.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Our-Neighborhood-Voices-Handout-3.pdf We will be arranging for a zoom presentation from one of the local campaign leaders in the near future. Watch for an announcement in an upcoming WSSM email blast. But, don’t wait to get started!
Signature gathering rules & tips for success
Gathering signatures is easy. However, there are a handful of rules that must be followed to ensure that the signatures you gather will be counted toward the goal. The process is simply explained in a short video that can be found at: www.ourneighborhoodvoices.com/action .
There is also a handout on signature gathering available: https://ourneighborhoodvoices.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Our-Neighborhood-Voices-Volunteer-Signature-Gathering-Toolkit-3.pdf
A video prepared by United Neighbors to help fight against SB 9 and 10 that has relevant background info can be viewed at: https://youtu.be/EC12KUzpeoA.
WSSM has a supply of petitions. (They cannot be copied and must be original documents.) Each petition has lines for 8 signatures. We will deliver petitions to you or you can pick them up from one of the WSSM Board members. Please let us know how many petitions you would like to have and where the petitions should be dropped (or if you would prefer to pick them up). PLEASE USE “ONV” in the subject line of your email response sent to info@wssmhoa.org, or call 310 461-8998 to place your petition order and/ or to request additional information.
Finally, the initiative needs and welcomes donations from concerned individuals. No doubt there will be huge pushback from those who seek to profit from the new state laws. We must match their dollars with grass roots donations and people-power! Please consider donating generously: https://www.efundraisingconnections.com/c/OurNeighborhoodVoices
To Sign The Petition and for Further Action Information, Contact:
info@wssmhoa.org
310-461-8998