Churches, Lakewood's future low-income housing sites?
City staff is considering the possibility of zoning religious institutional property for 1,301 lower-income housing units. Meeting on May 26.
Lakewood’s churches, synagogue and other religious institutions may be allowed to start housing people under a Housing Elements plan being developed by city staff.
“There is a little bit of pressure from the state on, you know, the potential for developing low-income housing, especially on religious facilities,” said Aaron Barrall, one of the project leads for drafting Lakewood’s updated Housing Elements plan. “Churches are not required to build housing on their property.”
Lakewood must update the Housing Element of its General Plan every 8 years to accommodate projected regional growth. The city held an online community meeting May 5 to update residents on its progress.
The last cycle required Lakewood to ensure that zoning laws allowed for an additional 403 housing units. This time, however, Lakewood must rezone the city to allow for 3,922 new housing units through 2029.
Lakewood staff is considering zoning religious institutional property for 1,301 lower-income housing units, as well as 51 moderate income housing units, according to a report presented by a city contractor May 5.
“The city is considering different sites where religious institutions may be located for new housing,” Barrall said. “The city is really considering this because of recent changes to state law that have really encouraged affordable housing production on religious institution sites.”
The state assigns each city a number of housing units—Regional Housing Needs Assessment (RHNA)—that the cities are required to plan for by updating its Housing Element plan, which is part of the cities’ overall general plans.
“While jurisdictions are not required to physically build the total number (of) units in their RHNA allocations, they are required to create the zoning and other plans that would allow a developer to build those potential units,” wrote Avalos in an email.
The city fought its high allocation of additional housing that it must zone for through 2029, even lodging formal appeals.
Scouring through the February 2021 appeals report, the Lakewood Populist found that while Long Beach supported other cities’ ability to make appeals against RHNA allocations, Long Beach insisted on it not being given any additional housing mandates despite having large swaths of open space, extremely wealthy residents, and a supposed progressive electorate.
“We fought the good fight. We presented our case at every turn,” said Avalos at the May 5 meeting. “Our attention is now turned towards complying with state law.”
Besides allowing religious institutions to provide affordable housing, city staff and its contractor are also considering the following ideas: more accessory dwelling units, such as people living in garages; mixed-use sites of residential and commercial sectors, which is very common in large cities; zoning for additional housing in already crowded apartment blocks or multi-family units.
More crowded housing in East Lakewood?
East Lakewood holds most of the city’s multi-family units, according to a zoning map provided at the May 5 meeting. Coincidentally, the two neighborhoods holding a large proportion of these multi-family units is also where nearly half of Lakewood’s homicides have occurred this millennia, according to an interactive map published by the Lakewood Populist.
Other ideas mentioned at the May 5 meeting are: inclusionary housing, requiring developers including affordable housing in their plans; crowding more Lakewood residents into tighter living spaces by reducing parking and landscaping requirements.
Get involved
The city on Wednesday is holding its last online Zoom meeting on the Housing Element draft before it gets completed and sent to the City Council. Lakewood residents can click this link to take an online survey and register for the May 26 meeting: https://www.lakewoodcity.org/services/planning/2021_2030_housing_element.asp
Lakewood residents can also email questions or comments in English or Spanish to city staff, senior planner Paul Kuykendall (PKuykendall@lakewoodcity.org) or Community Development Director Abel Avalos (Aavalos@lakewoodcity.org). You can also call either at (562) 866-9771, extension 2344 or 2301.
Timeline
