Land use: local planning: housing element program.

The Planning and Zoning Law authorizes the Department of Housing and Community Development to allow a city or county to substitute the provision of units for up to 25% of the city's or county's obligation to identify adequate sites for any income category in its housing element if the city or county includes in its housing element a program committing the city or county to provide units in that income category within the city or county that will be made available through the provision of committed assistance, during the planning period covered by the element, to low- and very low income households at affordable housing costs or affordable rents, as defined. In order for a unit to qualify for inclusion in this program, it must meet one of several specified criteria, including the criterion of being located in a multifamily rental housing complex of 4 or more units, converted with committed assistance from nonaffordable to affordable by acquisition of the unit or the purchase of affordability covenant and restrictions for the unit, and not acquired by eminent domain, and constituting a net increase in the community's stock of low- and very low income housing. This bill would revise the above-described criterion by changing the element of that criterion of being located in a multifamily rental or ownership housing complex of 4 or more units to, instead, being located in a multifamily rental or ownership housing complex of 3 or more units. The Planning and Zoning Law requires specified requirements to be met in order for a unit to be considered as converted by acquisition or the purchase of affordability covenants, and thereby within the above-described criterion. This bill would add to those requirements the requirement, for units located in multifamily ownership housing complexes with 3 or more units, that at least an equal number of new-construction multifamily rental units affordable to lower income households have been constructed in the city or county within the same planning period as the number of ownership units to be converted.