Solana Beach City Council receives update on RHNA progress

Solana Beach has issued permits for 178 out of 875 housing units that the city needs to accommodate as part of the state’s Regional Housing Needs Allocation process, but none yet for very low income units, according to an annual update at the March 26 City Council meeting.
Through the sixth cycle RHNA process, which runs from 2021 to 2029, Solana Beach was assigned 875 total housing units to fit within the zoning in the city’s housing element. It was a higher allocation compared to past RHNA cycles because the San Diego Association of Governments assigned units based on proximity to jobs and transit.
Of Solana Beach’s 875 units, 316 need to be for very low income households, 159 for low, 160 for moderate and 240 for above moderate. Those classifications are based on county median income.
So far, at the halfway point of the sixth cycle RHNA, nearly 150 permits have been issued combined in the moderate and above moderate categories throughout Solana Beach, 32 in the low income, and none in very low.
According to city planners, more housing is in the pipeline to bolster those numbers, including an application for 42 affordable housing units that are part of a larger project with 345 apartments.
“Even though the number of permits issued is only 20% of the City’s RHNA allocation,” reads a city staff report, “the percentage of the permits issued by income category is equal to or greater than the RHNA goals for individual income categories for above moderate, moderate, and low income categories.”
Solana Beach and other coastal cities have long expressed frustration with their RHNA assignments.
Solana Beach Mayor Lesa Heebner said during the council meeting that the 875 units is “an impossible target.” The city typically builds affordable housing units that fit in the lower income categories as part of larger, market-rate projects.
She said the city would have to build about 4,200 new housing units to meet its very low, low and moderate allocation, assuming that 15% of those units were in the lower income categories. By comparison, the entire city has a little more than 6,000 units.
“We have been building like crazy, and the number that we got in our RHNA allocation was so outrageously high that it’s impossible to meet,” Heebner said. “These are huge projects for us.”
The city had appealed to SANDAG and filed a lawsuit, along with the cities of Coronado, Lemon Grove and Imperial Beach, in an effort to get their RHNA allocations lowered. Both efforts were unsuccessful.