Land in Del Mar is at a premium. So it's a challenge to build more housing.
But the city needs to build more of it to comply with the state’s mandate for affordable housing.
“Del Mar has been assigned 66 moderate-income and 113 lower-income units,” Del Mar City Councilmember Terry Gaasterland said.
The city recently took another step in adding more affordable housing and it's using a new state law to do it. The California HOME Act — better known as Senate Bill 9 or SB-9 — allows developers to split a residential plot zoned for a single-family home into duplexes and fourplexes. It’s meant to spur more housing development in the state.
The Del Mar City Council unanimously approved an ordinance on June 19 to update the municipal codes to allow for that to happen.
Del Mar is completely built out and Gaasterland said this will allow the city to satisfy some of the affordable housing allotment. The state law does not specify that some of the new developments be affordable but the Del Mar ordinance does.
“Our SB-9 ordinance requires that one of the new units created by a lot split, or by simply building two Duplex units on a lot, will be affordable," she said. "That differs critically from the state. The state's SB-9 is based on a trickle-down theory that if you simply build more housing, some portion of it will inevitably be affordable. That doesn't work in Del Mar.”
SB-9 allows cities to add certain restrictions on new developments resulting from the law. Gaasterland said Del Mar's restrictions were crafted with residents' input and that helps prevent legal challenges.
“We did that to basically make it not have noise or light or privacy intrusion onto neighboring houses," she said. "For example, air conditioning units can't go into the setbacks. The windows need to be placed so that they don't look straight into another person's window. This makes it better housing for everybody.”
They are known as objective design standards. And they apply to window placement, retaining walls, fencing, lighting and screening.
According to a city staff report, 768 lots are eligible for SB-9 implementation, or roughly 38% of the city’s residential lots. They are mostly located on the city’s eastern side.
Because the ordinance also updates Del Mar's Local Coastal Program (LCP), it will need the California Coastal Commission's approval before it can go into effect. Del Mar is in the process of filing the updated LCP to the Commission. The approval process is expected to take up to 18 months.
