Housing Placement
Affordable housing coming to Agoura Hills is a good thing. The state needs housing. It's not about how much housing. It's about WHERE that housing is placed in terms of fire and evacuation safety.
The state has mandated that the City of Agoura Hills build 318 affordable units by 2029. The state does not tell the city where to place the housing or require that they build more than the assigned number of units. Those decisions are made by the city.
The city has selected 20 sites.
The documents below are taken from the Agoura Hills' General Plan and show, for each housing site, the "highest unit potential". The total housing units that will be part of the affordable housing project in Agoura Hills Housing Element after full build-out, according to these documents, could be 2,348. Note that Site G, the Regency Project, now underway where the theaters used to be, has a highest unit potential of 156. However, due to density bonuses* given to the developer under housing laws, the actual number of apartments for that project will be 278, a 78% increase. Likewise, the highest unit potential for Site B, Agoura Village West, is 182.5, but the actual number of apartments approved for that site is 238, a 30% increase.
The size of these projects is not the problem, but the LOCATION. Projects at Site B and A are both sizable projects. They are on Kanan Road, a major evacuation route. Why were these high density sites not situated away from Kanan?? (i.e. Sites D and H?)
*The "DENSITY BONUS LAW" is designed to encourage the development of affordable housing by offering developers increased development potential and other incentives in exchange for providing affordable units in their projects. It is found in California Government Code Sections 65915-65918, and allows developers to increase the density of housing projects (build more units than normally permitted) if they include a certain percentage of affordable housing units. Developers can exceed the maximum allowable residential density by as much as 32.5% in zones where multifamily housing is permitted, with the bonus amount tied to the proportion of affordable units.
15 0f 20 housing sites - that's 75% - are in the VHFHSZ, wildland-urban interface south of the 101 Freeway at the base of the Santa Monica Mountains. These sites have a combined highest unit potential of 1709 units, without density bonuses.
