With Rancho Cañada gaining planning commission approval, more questions raised on affordable housing
A Monterey County planning commissioner who voted to send a Carmel Valley housing development being proposed by Clint Eastwood to county supervisors for approval is now questioning whether more can be done to ensure future developments are affordable for central coast residents.
“It's a crisis I think there are solutions for,” said planning commissioner Kate Daniels.
New housing developments like the one going up in Marina are too expensive for many local residents who are being priced out of the market in many cases by out-of-town buyers.
That has Daniels questioning if anything can be done to make future developments more affordable and accessible to locals.
“What are some of the ways when we have these new developments when we add housing to the housing stock that we can actually condition them in a way if that's possible to house Monterey county residents,” said Daniels.
“And to slow down this pace of properties becoming second homes and third homes for folks who do not live in the district,” the commissioner added.
Daniels posed the same question to county leaders at Wednesday's planning meeting where commissioners considered Eastwood's 140 unit housing project on the former Rancho Canada golf course.
Under county guidelines, 20% of all new development must consist of inclusionary housing which includes affordable and workforce housing.
In the case of Eastwood’s Rancho Canada Village, his project calls for 40 units to be affordable and workforce housing. That’s 28 percent of the project, higher than the county’s 20% standard.
But any future requirements on new development could raise the ire of developers who may see it as a roadblock to development and their bottom line.