Cohen quoted on adopted cap-and-trade guidelines for affordable housing program
Yesterday the Strategic Growth Council adopted guidelines for the Affordable Housing and Sustainable Communities (AHSC) program and scheduled workshops for early February to provide technical assistance to potential applicants.
California’s Strategic Growth Council is a state committee that coordinates a variety of activities by multiple state agencies, including efforts to improve air and water quality, increase affordable housing, improve transportation, and other issues related to quality of life in California. The Council was given the task of overseeing the AHSC program, created last year during negotiations on how to spend cap-and-trade revenue to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
The AHSC is tasked with reducing greenhouse gas emissions by encouraging the development of affordable housing near transit and by creating walkable, bikeable communities that encourage few car trips.
...
The Council and its staff committed to ongoing efforts to refine the guidelines to accommodate some of the objections and questions raised at the meeting and in public comments submitted to them.
But some of the disagreements may be unresolvable. Very different housing needs between rural areas and cities create conflicting priorities. Rural housing advocates said that the current guidelines, including density requirements, make housing that is appropriate for some rural areas ineligible for the program. And representatives from larger municipalities, including Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti’s office as well as the Bay Area’s Transbay Joint Powers Authority, urged the staff to remove the cap on amounts allocated to any one urban area, as that limits the participation of larger municipalities.
Another point of contention was about scoring criteria. Most of the emphasis on rating a project judges it on how well it delivers greenhouse gas reductions. The California Air Resources Board was given the task of choosing a method to quantify those reductions, and it chose the California Emissions Estimator Model, developed by the California Air Pollution Control Officers Association, for modeling greenhouse gas emissions from affordable housing.
Among the objections to this chosen method were several comments that pointed out that the model creates incentives to build only for the higher end of the low-income market. “Building for extremely low-income households would have a higher impact on greenhouse gas reductions because they have the lowest carbon footprint,” said Megan Kirkeby of the California Housing Partnership.
Stuart Cohen of TransForm agreed, saying that the data used for the model is already outdated.