Tony Strickland: I will continue to stand up for my city against state overreach

Huntington Beach finds itself at the center of the fight over housing because of one reason: we dared stand up to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s outrageous mandates and defend our Surf City values.

We remain pro-housing, but insist on housing that reflects our community and the reality on the ground. What we are not ever going to be are rubber stamps for Gavin Newsom’s vision of turning every community in California into his failed experiment of San Francisco, America’s worst city, whose decline began on Newsom’s watch as mayor there.

For starters, little about the governor’s housing math has ever made sense or been realistic.

Too much, too fast: Over the last eight-year period, California’s statewide housing goal was 1.2 million new homes. Not even half were built. But this time, the goal has been set to 2.5 million, five times what’s been shown as possible in this state. There is simply no way to meet this mandate, given the walls against homebuilding the governor and his allies have been standing up for years.

No updated research: Studies have shown that upwards of a net 750,000 people have moved out of California in the last few years, but yet the underlying data behind these demands hasn’t been updated at all. What will soon grow to close to a million fewer Californians, sick of Newsom’s failures, yet the same stubborn clinging to a faulty plan.

Impractical urban utopian dream: It is simply unrealistic to expect Southern California to add 1.34 million new homes in just the next few years, with barely 300,000 of those planned to come out of the entire Inland Empire, where land is plentiful and less expensive, and many communities are desperate for growth. Insider political deals killed any hope of real growth, not anything Huntington Beach is doing.

The governor is plenty familiar with abusing emergency powers to shove the state down the throats of local governments and the people, while living up to none of those responsibilities himself. During the pandemic, he shut down Surf City’s beaches, schools, churches, and restaurants, while famously dining at the French Laundry himself. But he’s done little to alleviate the housing crunch besides levelling threats.

Here are the facts:

If they were serious about housing, they wouldn’t exempt their backyard. Marin County, Gavin Newsom’s hometown, has an exemption from the state’s housing quotas. Wealthy Silicon Valley communities like Atherton have applied for exemptions. Those communities are not sued and lambasted and slurred in the media, because they vote for and fund Gavin Newsom’s campaigns. But Huntington Beach is singled out. Ask yourselves why.

If Sacramento was serious about housing supply, they would reform CEQA, labor law, eliminate mandates, invest in real transportation infrastructure and let housing be built where it wants to go. About 95% of Californians live on 5% of our land, and we have plenty of room for new housing. Instead of letting homebuilding flourish where it can, the governor continues to halt scores of development in the Inland Empire with outrageous environmental rules.

Attacking multiunit housing: Perhaps nowhere are Gavin’s mandates more plainly hypocritical than when combined with his ongoing attack on landlords, making California the worst state to own multiunit housing.

The primary causes of our housing shortage and affordability crisis are extreme environmental regulations, unreasonable labor demands and ridiculous and expensive mandates from Sacramento on how and where housing can be built.

California should free our home builders, who successfully built the housing that supported California growing from 10 million people to 35 million people in the 50 years after World War II, from these mandates. That should be our housing policy. But the governor, as always, is more concerned with press and politics than sound public policy. And it shows.

This isn’t a question of being pro-housing. We want to, and no doubt are going to build more good projects in the coming years. It sure won’t be north of 13,000 units though, because Huntington Beach is nearly built-out already, aside from areas like our precious wetlands. We will do what is right and appropriate for Huntington Beach to grow and build for our future, just not what Gavin Newsom tries to mandate from hundreds of miles away.

That’s what local control is to me. Fighting for my city. Not bending to the opinion of an out-of-control governor, dead set on doing to Huntington Beach what he did as mayor of San Francisco. Huntington Beach is iconic as a suburban beach community, and that deserves protecting.

Tony Strickland is mayor of Huntington Beach.