City Council to Discuss Seven-Year Housing Plan at Wednesday Meeting

The Baldwin Park City Council will discuss a state-required housing report on affordable housing, building policies and other housing issues at its Wednesday meeting this week.

The Council will be reviewing the 2014-2021 housing element, which the state requires for each city in the state to do to lay out how it will account for housing for the expected population growth that will come statewide in that period.

Baldwin Park has been assigned to account for how to build 557 units of housing in the city by 2021.  The city is not responsible for actually building the units but rather to adjust housing policies in such a way that it will be possible to build the units.

While many cities are allocated a large percentage of their units as lower-income housing, Baldwin Park's has been asked to strive for having 43 percent of those 557 units as housing for above moderate income earners, suggesting the city already has a larger stock of affordable housing than many in the county.

The housing allocation comes from a regional government organizations, the Southern California Association of Governments, which looks at census data, project population growth and assesses each cities capacity to build more units of market-rate housing as well as affordable housing.  

The results are an allocation for each city on how many new units of housing each city should strive to have built.  Each city works on a plan for how to achieve that goal through a public process that must be concluded by mid-October.

The Council meets at 7 p.m. Wednesday at City Hall.  The draft housing element can be viewed here