Thread: California Today: A Spreading ‘Yimby’ Movement

Look at Palm Springs and Palm Desert to Indio, California.

All the Date Palm farms are GONE! Used to be you could drive quite a few miles of open land, Date Palms and Ice Cream Shakes and cute little shops.

Now over run by illegal aliens...destroyed the beautiful desert. Mile after mile of neighborhood destruction...it is a cesspool now.

840 new homes: Gated Altair Irvine to host grand opening Saturday near Great Park


Altair Irvine, an 840-home gated community near the Orange County Great Park in Irvine opens to the public Sept. 30, 2017. (Tomoya Shimura, Orange County Register/SCNG) 7 COMMENTS

By TOMOYA SHIMURA | tshimura@scng.com | Orange County Register
PUBLISHED: September 29, 2017 at 8:32 am | UPDATED: September 29, 2017 at 9:41 am


IRVINE — An 840-home guard-gated community just northeast of the developing Orange County Great Park will open its doors to the public Saturday, Sept. 30.

A joint venture by homebuilders Lennar and Toll Brothers, Altair Irvine encompasses 10 neighborhoods. The homes, all multi-story and detached, range from 2,909-6,579 square feet and have three to six bedrooms. Prices range from roughly $1 million to $2 million.

Home prices at Altair Irvine range from the low $1 millions to the low $2 millions. (Tomoya Shimura, Orange County Register/SCNG)

The builders tout the community’s resort-style amenities such as a clubhouse, three pools, spas, links to public trails and parks. The clubhouse, scheduled to be completed next year, includes tennis courts, bocce ball courts, a courtyard, a barbecue area and more.

“It’s truly an oasis, a paradise in Irvine,” said Jeremy Parness, president of Lennar’s Southern California Coastal Division.
Students living in Altair Irvine will go to Irvine Unified School District’s K-8 Beacon Park School and Portola High School, which is across Irvine Boulevard from the community.

Lennar is building six neighborhoods and Toll Brothers four.
Parness said the two builders complement each other, as Lennar offers all-included type homes and Toll Brothers more customizable homes.

A view from a model home window shows Altair Irvine’s ongoing construction. The gated community will eventually feature 840 homes near the Orange County Great Park. (Tomoya Shimura, Orange County Register/SCNG)

http://www.ocregister.com/2017/09/29...ar-great-park/

Gov. Brown just signed 15 housing bills. Here's how they're supposed to help the affordability crisis


A new fee on real estate transactions is among the housing bills that California Gov. Jerry Brown signed into law Friday. (Rich Pedroncelli / Associated Press)

By Liam Dillon Contact Reporter

Gov. Jerry Brown has finalized lawmakers’ most robust response to California’s housing affordability problems in recent memory.

The “15 good bills” Brown signed into law here Friday morning include a new fee on real estate transactions and a $4-billion bond on the 2018 ballot that together could raise close to $1 billion a year in the near term to help subsidize new homes for low-income residents.

"It is a big challenge. We have risen to it this year,” Brown said.

The governor signed the legislation surrounded by lawmakers and advocates at Hunters View, a $450-million project in San Francisco that is redeveloping what was once crumbling public housing into new homes for 700 low- and middle-income families. Speakers at the ceremony hailed the package of bills as a sea change in how the state handles housing issues.

“Today California begins a pivot from a housing-last policy to a housing-first policy,” said Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco), who wrote one of the key measures.

Still, the array of new laws Brown signed Friday will hardly put a dent in the state’s housing problems. Developers need to build about 100,000 new homes each year beyond what’s already planned, simply to keep pace with California’s population growth.

Money from the bond — assuming it’s approved by voters in November 2018 — and the new real estate fee is estimated to finance about 14,000 additional houses a year, still leaving the state tens of thousands of units short annually, according to the state and third parties. Moreover, all the bond money could be spent in as little as five years.

. .Legislators and others in attendance emphasized that this year’s package of bills was only the start of what they planned to do on housing.

“We know we have much more work to do,” said Assemblyman Richard Bloom (D-Santa Monica), who authored multiple bills in the package. “And we will keep working this issue for as long as we need to.”

Here’s a rundown of how the bills aim to address different factors that add to the state’s housing problems:

Most of the money raised by Senate Bill 2, the $75 real estate transaction fee, and Senate Bill 3, the $4-billion housing bond, would go toward helping pay for the development of new homes for low-income residents, defined as people earning 60% or less of the median income in a given community. So in Los Angeles that means a family of four having a combined income of less than $54,060 a year.

The measures also will go toward new construction to benefit the homeless and farmworkers with a small percentage of money reserved to help pay for middle-class housing construction. For those homes, residents will be able to earn up to 150% of median income in the highest cost areas — that’s $135,000 annually for a family of four in Los Angeles, for example.

Both measures include dollars for other efforts besides helping subsidize homebuilding. Half of the money raised in the first year under SB 2 will go to cities and counties to update neighborhood development blueprints and other planning documents. And $1 billion of the housing bond will go toward home loans for veterans.

SB 2 is expected to raise $250 million a year by charging people a $75 starting fee to refinance a mortgage or make other real estate transactions, except for home or commercial property sales. The most anyone can be charged is $225 per transaction. SB 3 would authorize a bond that will be paid back with interest by tax dollars earmarked in the state budget, though the veterans will repay their loans themselves.

Housing advocates and academics cite burdensome regulations, including some local governments’ lengthy approval processes, as a problem limiting the state’s housing growth.

A trio of measures aims to whittle down some of those rules. Senate Bill 35 forces cities to approve projects that comply with existing zoning if not enough housing has been built to keep pace with their state home-building targets. Such projects must also reserve a certain percentage of homes for low-income residents and pay construction workers union-level wages and abide by union-standard hiring rules.

Assembly Bill 73 and Senate Bill 540 give cities an incentive to plan neighborhoods for new development. Under AB 73, a city receives money when it designates a particular community for more housing and then additional dollars once it starts issuing permits for new homes. In these neighborhoods, at least 20% of the housing must be reserved for low- or middle-income residents, and projects will have to be granted permits without delay if they meet zoning standards.

SB 540 authorizes a state grant or loan for a local government to do planning and environmental reviews to cover a particular neighborhood. Developers in the designated community also will have to reserve a certain percentage of homes for low- and middle-income residents and the city’s approvals there would be approved without delay.

Money to implement both laws could come from the new real estate transaction fee and the bond.

Because of a 2009 court decision involving a Los Angeles developer, cities are not allowed to force builders of apartment complexes to reserve a portion of their projects for low-income residents. Those policies were called an illegal expansion of rent control.

Now, Assembly Bill 1505 changes the rules so that cities can once again implement low-income requirements. San Jose already is considering a policythat would force developers to set aside 15% of their projects.

Typically when developers agree to build low-income apartments, that agreement lasts a certain time, often between 30 and 50 years. Afterward, owners of the property can charge market-rate rents. The California Housing Partnership Corp., a nonprofit low-income housing advocate, recently estimated that 14,000 low-income units in Los Angeles County are at risk of losing their income restrictions in the next five years.

Assembly Bill 1521 requires owners to accept a qualified offer to purchase the apartment complex from someone who pledges to continue renting the homes to low-income residents.

The state now runs a tax credit program giving large banks and other investors incentives to help finance housing for farmworkers. Assembly Bill 571 expands that effort with an eye toward making it easier for developers to bundle it with other sources to build farmworker housing.

Every eight years, cities and counties have to plan for enough new homes to meet state projections of population growth. This process, however, has not led to sufficient housing production to meet demand.

Three new laws expand requirements for cities to plan for housing. Assembly Bill 1397 forces local governments to zone land for housing where it could actually go, instead of putting sites they don’t intend to approve in their housing plan. In one example, La Cañada Flintridge rezoned a big box commercial property for apartments or condominiums, but city officials later told residents any new homes on the site would be almost impossible to build.

Senate Bill 166 makes cities add additional sites to their housing plans if they approve projects at densities lower than what local elected officials had anticipated in their proposals. The goal is to make up for the housing units that weren’t built.

Assembly Bill 897 instructs cities to analyze how long it takes developers to actually build their projects once they’ve been approved, and then take steps to shorten that time.

The Housing Accountability Act passed in 1982 prohibits cities from saying no to housing projects that meet zoning requirements simply because they don’t like them. But such cases are hard to prove. Three measures, Senate Bill 167, Assembly Bill 678 and Assembly Bill 1515, will beef up the existing law by making it easier for developers to prove a city acted in bad faith when denying a project, and by upping a city’s penalty to $10,000 per unit they rejected.

Assembly Bill 72 gives the state housing department more authority to investigate cities that don’t follow through with their housing plans and refer cases to California’s attorney general for possible legal action.


http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/...htmlstory.html

Deport the illegals...housing crises solved.

Clean up the neighborhoods of their filth and crime!

Many new home buyers want a NEW house that no one else has ever lived in before, making it truly THEIR HOUSE.

Converting an old mining pit into 1,800 homes


The 25-acre Seed Park at 3Roots San Diego would provide new ball fields for Mira Mesa residents. (Hanson Aggregates)

Roger Showley Contact Reporter


A 412-acre rock quarry in Mira Mesa, approved for reclamation in 1994, is being replanned to include a 25-acre community park instead of industrial development.

Lehigh Hanson, a subsidiary of Dallas-based Heidelberg Cement Group, expects to submit a new master plan for what is called “3Roots San Diego” to the city next month. It would be located between Camino Santa Fe and Camino Ruiz, south of Mira Mesa Boulevard and straddling an extension of Carroll Canyon Road.

The change in plans was driven in part by the rise of the millennial generation and their impact on housing demand.

Lehigh Hanson consultant Brian Myers said residents in their early- and mid-20s may prefer downtown, North Park, Uptown and other urban neighborhoods with lively bars and a hip vibe.

“But when they get into the early family-formation years and need a place to raise their family, this is an alternative to that urban environment, yet with the urban lifestyle amenities they’ve come to enjoy,” Meyers said. “We like to refer to this community as the ‘alt-Urban’ plan.”


The assumption is that many of those downtown dwellers already have to commute north to job centers in and around UC San Diego, Torrey Pines Mesa and Sorrento Mesa. If they lived at 3Roots, they’d be home already, a future promotion might say.

3Roots San Diego, is expected to complete the first homes by 2021 if current schedules hold. That’s the same year that the San Diego Trolley’s Blue Line is scheduled to open an extension from Old Town to UC San Diego and Westfield UTC and provide a mass transit alternative to travel north and south to those job centers.


Looking east from Camino Santa Fe, left, and Carroll Canyon Road, right, 3Roots San Diego would include a commercial hub, foreground, a variety of homes beyond. (Lehigh Hanson)

Together with the neighboring Stone Creek project to the east due to start in 2030, the two developments could boost Mira Mesa’s current population of 76,400 to nearly 95,000.

Since 1953, Carroll Canyon has been a prime source of aggregate, sand, gravel and clay for numerous construction projects.

“It was our flagship operation for many decades,” said Marvin Howell, director of land use, planning and permits for Lehigh Hanson who worked for the previous mining owner, H.G. Fenton.

Active mining ceased in 2016 and site resembles a treeless moonscape, gouged out by earth movers and mining equipment to extract rock and gravel for countless building sites.

Howell said the site’s red clay has been used for infield soil at many baseball fields. Concrete for freeways, hospitals, schools and other construction projects used aggregate from the Carroll Canyon mining pits.

“If we didn’t have Carroll Canyon, it could get very expensive to ship stuff in from the outside,” Howell said.


The Routes district, located just east of Camino Santa Fe and north of the Roots Collective commercial zone includes major collector streets and paths to other parts of the project. (Lehigh Hanson)


In the 1990s the first phase of the Fenton-Hanson quarry was converted to Fenton Technology Park, where 600,000 of the planned 900,000 square feet of office and industrial space have been completed so far. About 3,500 people work there with another 2,000 in future buildings, Howell said.

But as Lehigh Hanson got ready to implement their 1994 plan, officials decided to create a transit-oriented village as called for in the city’s latest general land-use plan and climate action plan.

The original master plan called for 52 acres office and industrial uses, mostly south of Carroll Canyon Creek. The new plan proposes a 25-acre community park instead, not only because Mira Mesa needs it but Lehigh Hanson would have to deal only 20,000 additional vehicle trips, down from 30,000.

“The biggest opportunity we ran across was the need for a third community park,” said Brian Myers, a Nuquest Ventures consultant helping Lehigh Hanson get the land entitled for redevelopment.

The park has yet to be designed but it is expected to include several baseball and soccer fields that would be lighted at night. The planning group would like the park to be built before housing goes in, but the timing has not yet been settled.

“It’s funny — everybody likes parks,” said Jeffry Stevens, chairman of the Mira Mesa Community Planning Group.

“People will move to live near a park but if you try to build a park next to houses, homeowners always show up to protest — it never fails.”

The Mira Mesa planning group and Planning Commission both endorsed the preparation of a new master plan earlier this year. The related environmental documents are expected to be ready next year and lead to City Council consideration in 2019.

“The response has been very good to it,” Stevens said. “All the improvements are positive. There hasn’t been much controversy.”

At a community open house earlier this year to showcase the plans, residents and business owners generally liked what they saw. But they still had questions about the details.

For example, Vernell Fultz, 72, a 20-year resident wondered about traffic impacts. But she liked the idea new roadways could someday connect to a San Diego Trolley line that might be built along Carroll Canyon Road.

Eric Archer, 49, a resident for 25 years, wanted to know how buffer areas between 3Roots and existing neighborhoods would be managed to deal with possible brush fires.

Besides the park, the other major change from the 1994 plan would increase housing in the 40-acre village core at Camino Santa Fe and Carroll Canyon Road.

The original plan called for industrial, office and retail uses and 100 housing units. The new plan calls for 20,000 square feet of creative office, 120,000 square feet of retail and restaurants and 745 apartments, including 180 of low- and middle-income affordable units.

Lehigh Hanson planners hope that density would ensure success for a 1.5-acre transit center, where buses, shuttles and ride-sharing, bike and delivery services would be headquartered.

The new plan also includes extensive bike and walking trails, to make it easy to get to nearby jobs without a car. Carroll Canyon Road itself would be paved for 1.2 miles to complete a link to Camino Ruiz. Eventually, the road will connect Interstates 15 and 805 and help traffic congestion on Mira Mesa Boulevard and Miramar Road.

It’s too early to say what the housing and commercial developments will look like, since the ultimate buildout will be the responsibility of development companies that Lehigh Hanson ultimately sells to.

But the housing breakdown would call for a mix of single-family attached and detached for-sale homes, apartments and condos in densities of eight to 65 units per acre, the top number proposed for the village core.

The name “3Roots” refers to connectivity via paths and roads, sound principles rooted in good planning and heritage and the legacy of the site and the people who will live there.

That theme carries over into the names for the different sections.

The civic core is called the “Root Collective.” The community park is called “Seed Park.” Canopy, Routes and Meadows are the three housing zones of varying type and density.

Meanwhile, planning continues on a much bigger development, Stone Creek, proposed by Vulcan Materials on 293 acres east of 3Roots. The flatter ground would accommodate up to 4,455 apartments and condos in three neighborhoods.

Stevens said that project is half what Vulcan originally proposed but is 13 years from a start date, based on the developer’s latest thinking. The final phase wouldn’t start until 2040, a Vulcan spokesman said.

Based on Mira Mesa housing counts and population, these two projects alone could boost Mira Mesa’s population from the present 76,400 to nearly 95,000 over the next 25 years.


Roots Collective is the community's commercial hub but would also include nearly 800 housing units. It would be located on Carroll Canyon Road, just east of Camino Santa Fe. (Lehigh Hanson)


The Canopy homes section of 3Roots San Diego would be located on the northern section of the property overlooking Carroll Canyon. (Lehigh Hanson)


The Meadows housing zone would located south of Carroll Canyon Creek and adjacent to Seed Park. (Lehigh Hanson)

3Roots San Diego at a glance

Location: 412 acres east of Camino Santa Fe on both sides of Carroll Canyon Road

Housing: 1,800 units, including 195 single-family homes in the Meadows district at the south end; 520 units of small-lot houses in the Canopy district at the north end; the Routes district with 340 homes; and 745 apartments, condos and affordable units in the commercial core.

Commercial: The 40-acre “Roots Collective” hub at Camino Santa Fe and Carroll Canyon Road would contain 20,000 square feet of creative office space, 120,000 square feet of retail and restaurants and a 1.5-acre transit center.

Parks: The 44 acres of parks and trails would include a 25-acre community park with play fields south of Carroll Canyon Road and four neighborhood parks. An additional 205 acres would remain as open space and slopes and Carroll Canyon Creek would be restored and realigned.

Timeline: The developer plans to submit a project application in October with environmental review completed in 2018 and City Council consideration in 2019. The first homes could be completed by 2021 with buildout by 2025.

http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/...915-story.html

Originally Posted by artist

Now we make subsidized housing for the illegals and their anchor babies.

We have been doing that for decades.

First they lived in housing projects, then George Bush pushed HUD to make them home loans.

The American birth increase is very, very low (I mean Americans), this has to be housing for illegals, immigrants refugees, etc., and it will be on borrowed money which will be paid for by our grand and great grandchildren - If our debt doesn't collapse the country first.

The simple answer is to shut the door and send all who shouldn't be here, back to their own homelands. Since we can see that isn't going to happen, not even on a small scale, I don't know what we can do - other than cut the cable and withhold our monies from companies who hire these people, vote in the primaries and try to replace anyone now in office unless he/she has been a real, real advocate for immigration enforcement - not reform.