I suppose that I would need to see what the MIHP in particular suggests for rezones in a particular community, but rezones are a legislative process and an expectation that all rezones that involve housing should be approved is contrary to a legislative decision-making process. I agree that the 5 year timeframe allows more flexibility than what is implied in the DWS reporting requirement.
I really struggle with the State getting involved and forcing justifications of rezone applications that involve housing. Communities will have a knee jerk reaction to such oversight/overreach and likely only place the least effective/simplest to achieve strategies in their MIHP. GPs could also suffer with some communities just placing agricultural land uses as their “vision” for the future.
I grew up in planning here in Utah where we didn’t have all these “nanny-state” ideas coming from the Hill all the time. We would go years without legislative changes – those days are long gone, unfortunately. Yes, we have a housing crisis and in some cases we as a profession add to the problem via laborious processing and maybe impact fees, but the real issues are: material prices are way up, labor shortages and wages insufficient to attract people to work outside in 100 degree summers, financing, demand, income not keeping up with rising costs, and greed.