City Council Rushes to Approve a Plan that Could Add 57,656 Apartments & Housing Units

On August 13th, the City Council voted 4-1 to adopt an amendment to the City’s General Plan that would allow up to 57,656 apartments and housing units to be built in Irvine. (Vice Mayor Larry Agran voted NO.)

The action came in response to a state mandate on all local jurisdictions to drastically increase housing stock, and especially affordable housing stock.
 
As part of that mandate, Irvine was directed to add at least 23,610 residential units, of which some 10,000 must be affordable for low income households (less than $126,250/year for a family of four in Irvine) and very low income households (less than $78,900).

Meeting the affordable-units mandate may require allowing up to 57,656 total units since affordable housing is built at a loss by developers so they need to have enough higher-priced units in a project to make it profitable to build.
 
In making the motion to adopt the amendment, Councilmember Tammy Kim called the plan “smart, sustainable planning.” She urged the Council to quickly approve it.

Vice Mayor Agran disagreed, noting that while he strongly supports adding thousands more affordable housing units in Irvine, the six previous General Plan amendments in the City’s history had all been done with broad discussion and careful planning.

Agran pointed out that the state deadline is still six months off and “we’re being asked to override all sorts of environmental concerns” to rush the amendment through. He said that in the past, “we took every possible minute that was available to us, to get it right.”
 
Agran explained that “it is not manageable to build 23,000 units, or ultimately 57,000 units.” He noted that every new household will bring one or two automobiles that will be “on the same streets that are already [heavily used]. The environmental documentation shows that we will have deteriorating air quality that can’t be mitigated, greenhouse gas emissions that apparently can’t be mitigated, adverse land-use effects that can’t be mitigated, additional noise that can’t be mitigated, and transportation problems that can’t be addressed. This is why I say we need to take more time.”
 
Agran said: “I’ve got ideas about how we might be able to address affordable housing. Not by using the old model of giving developers the authority to build tens of thousands of new units, and then we get maybe 15% or 20% that are affordable. Through careful planning, we’ve managed to get to 5,100 affordable units in town. We’ve got to significantly increase that number. The only way to do that is to sit down with the Irvine Company, which owns 35,000 apartment units in town, almost all of them rented at market rates, and we have to talk with them about making 5,000 of those units affordable by writing down those rents, right away.”
 
Agran asked the Council to take the remaining six months allocated by the state to develop an alternative plan to meet the affordable housing mandate without approving massive new construction. He urged the Council to follow Irvine’s award-winning past by doing “things that are responsible and consistent with our City’s planning process.”

In the end, the Council majority ignored Agran’s concerns. They also voted — again, 4-1, with Agran voting NO — to disregard warnings from the Airport Land Use Commission — a State-created agency that weighs in on all development near John Wayne Airport. After reviewing the General Plan amendment that would add 15,000 housing units in the Irvine Business Complex neighborhoods near the airport, the Commission voted 6-0 against the proposal, concluding that many of those encroaching units would be exposed to undue noise and safety risks.