By Jason Islas
Staff Writer

August 5, 2013 -- Workforce housing in Santa Monica would cut back on traffic, reduce pollution and create more vibrant neighborhoods, experts say.

But as rents rise and the costs of owning a home becomes prohibitive for many, how can the bayside city provide housing for its teachers, firefighters, police officers and others who can't afford to live where they work?

That's the question the Planning Commission will wrestle with Wednesday as it reviews the City's Housing Element, a comprehensive report on the future of housing in Santa Monica.

With land an increasingly scarce commodity in the 8.3-square-mile city and funding for public housing subsidies all but completely dried up, that question will likely prove to be a complicated one.

“One approach that is contemplated in the LUCE (Land Use and Circulation Element) is that a development would satisfy its requirements to provide lower-income housing,” said Housing and Economic Development Director Andy Agle, “and then provide additional affordable residences above and beyond the AHPP (Affordable Housing Production Program) requirement that are targeted to workforce households.”

But, asking more from developers, who are already required by the City charter to provide housing for moderate- to extremely low-income families, could prove problematic.

“If you want the private sector and developers to take on more of the burden, they have to finance their projects, too,” said Iao Katagiri, director of Community Relations for the RAND Corporation, a Santa Monica-based think tank.

Katagiri chaired a 2007 task force convened to tackle the major questions surrounding workforce housing. Ultimately, the task force failed to finalize any recommendations because there was little consensus about how the City should proceed to address the need for workforce housing. (“Key Questions Remain for 'Workforce Housing,'” May 23, 2007)

Paul Silvern, a financial analyst who served on the task force, said, “There was a lack of agreement on what all of this effort should be pitched at.

“It was difficult to come up with any specific recommendations to target resources,” he said, adding that even then, those resources were scarce.

The very definition of what workforce housing is “depends on what kind of workforce you want in Santa Monica,” Katagiri said.

With a robust tourist industry that employees thousands of service workers, plenty of high-end retail jobs and a burgeoning tech sector, Santa Monica's workforce is economically very diverse.

According to the Housing Element, workforce housing must be affordable to households making between 120 percent and 180 percent of the median income in Los Angeles County, or between $84,000 and $130,000 a year.

Still, the question would require a more nuanced answer than simply keeping rents down, Katagiri said.

“In the U.S. we don't find that many people with families want to live in an apartment,” Katagiri said. “Especially in California, people with families want to have yards and that's hard in a built-up era like Santa Monica.”

But creating affordable opportunities to own a home in Santa Monica, where the median cost of a house has reached $900,000 in recent years, has proven quite difficult, especially since subsidizing homeownership is very expensive. (“Home Ownership 'Elusive' in Santa Monica, Housing Report," July 31)

Still, many have hope for creating workforce housing in Santa Monica, especially as City Planners prepare to undertake a complete overhaul of the 145-acre Bergamot Area, once the industrial heart of Santa Monica.

In response to the City Council and the Planning Commission, staff has begun exploring “incentives to develop workforce housing units, with particular emphasis on housing for larger households in need of units with two or more bedrooms.”

Among those incentives are included possibly expediting workforce housing projects, providing density bonuses for them and including workforce housing among the list of community benefits developers are required to provide.

Staff has also considered working with employers to help subsidize rents for their employees.

“There is essentially nothing available from the public sector for (workforce housing),” Silvern said.

Santa Monica's affordable housing program took a major hit when, in February 2012, Governor Jerry Brown killed California's 400 redevelopment agencies (RDAs). Santa Monica's RDA had provided millions of dollars a year for capital projects and affordable housing developments.

One thing that experts seem to agree on is that the answer to providing workforce housing isn't going to be a simple one.

“I don't know how to crack this very hard nut,” said Katagiri. “If we go looking for the single program that will solve all of our problems, we're going to be looking forever.”