Attended the meeting of the Land Use Task Force yesterday, where a couple of interesting issues were discussed.  While the discussion led by Craig Call about the state of impact fees was very informative, most interesting to me was a report from Cam Diehl about the discussion his board had on Monday about the various proposals being considered for legislative action in the upcoming session by the CHA and the UEOC.  While I don’t necessarily disagree with the actions being considered (see recent blog posts for a list), it does make me wonder how they will be received and find success.  A couple of recent news stories from elsewhere around the country emphasis again the nature of such actions.

The first is a story about land use reforms implemented due to state mandates in San Diego.  One of the things that the League and others have been saying to the CHA, the UEOC and legislative committees is that a lot of actions on housing affordability and land use have been taken in the last couple of years by legislature, and it takes time to see if they are working.  Instead of just rushing to put in place more things, some of which may interfere or negate previous actions taken, we should wait and see how things play out.  This “warning” is confirmed by the experience in San Diego, where the California legislature has put in place a number of top-down zoning reforms.

Three years into California duplex law, San Diego homeowners start to cash in.

SB 9, or the California HOME Act, allows homeowners to split their lots in two and build up to two homes on each parcel — even if local zoning restricts the property to a single detached house.

… a study  last year found the law’s impact on housing supply was negligible, at least in its first year.

“It does take a while for the general public to know about the law, and for planning departments to adjust to state laws,” Alameldin said. “Planning departments are just overworked all across the state and they have to keep track with maybe 100 new California housing laws per year.”

Another outcome from such top-down legislative mandates has been either outright non-compliance, or lawsuits.  A number of such suits have been filed in California, Montana, Minnesota and other states, halting the implementation of the land use reforms.  A story from New Jersey is just the latest example.

Twenty-two New Jersey towns suing to overturn the state’s affordable housing law are asking the state courts to put the law’s requirements on hold while their lawsuit plays out.

Earlier this month, 13 New Jersey towns joined an original coalition of nine in a lawsuit to invalidate the state’s law passed by the Legislature this year, which laid out guidelines for calculating how much affordable housing each town must create over the next decade. The towns claim the law unfairly requires them to build more and more housing without accounting for how much development they can truly support.

If the motion is approved, it could throw a wrench into New Jersey’s ambitious plan to try to tackle what officials claim is a 200,000-unit deficit in low-priced housing for the state’s most rent-burdened residents.

How all these lawsuits will play out is unclear, but it certainly has put more delay on the process of implementing reforms and getting a result.  Now Utah has seen much more collaboration between the state and local governments on the measures passed up to this point, but that may change.  In Cam’s report yesterday on his board discussion, he said that on some of the issues things got pretty animated by those local elected officials who are serving on his board.

The CHA was to have met yesterday to finalize it’s recommendations for legislative action items for the upcoming session, but the meeting was postponed to next week due to the unavailability of both co-chairs.  It’ll be interesting to see where this all goes in the coming days.