Public Interest Briefs

Orange County’s watered-down affordable housing program has remained largely unchanged for five years now with the County’s Board of Supervisors rejecting repeated CLIPI initiatives to strengthen the program and to settle the pending litigation. With a full-blown trial on the horizon, CLIPI and Orange County attorneys have searched for ways to have the matter heard quickly and efficiently. Carlyle Hall, CLIPI’s lead attorney in Mosley v. Orange County, recently announced that CLIPI and County Counsel have agreed to jointly hire retired Court of Appeal Justice John Trotter to hear further arguments and to conduct the trial on the legal adequacy of the county’s affordable housing program and whether county officials are perpetuating income and race discrimination with their land use practices.

The lawsuit was triggered when a progressive affordable housing plan adopted by the supervisors in 1979 during former Governor Jerry Brown’s administration was repealed in 1983, shortly after the newly-elected Governor George Deukmejian took office. The supervisors' administration would take a far less aggressive stance in enforcing the affordable housing laws. 

Meanwhile, Orange County real estate prices have continued their uphill spiral as the region maintains its position as one of the most affluent counties in the state. The average price of a single-family home in Orange County today is about $176,000 with the result that the middle class, let alone the lower-middle and lower income wage earners, often get priced out of the market. 

“As Orange County housing prices rise, the big landowners’ and developers’ profits rise and, to some extent, the tax base increases, giving the supervisors more money in the county budget,” said CLIPI’s Lisa Foster.

"But what has happened, especially in the fast-growing south county areas, is that many people with jobs at the large south county industrial complexes can’t afford to live near where they work. They end up crowding the freeways and polluting the air as they commute back and forth from Riverside, San Bernardino and Los Angeles counties where homes are more affordable. And this makes for even greater problems.”

The jobs/housing imbalance in Orange County recently led the Southern California Association of Governments (SCAG) to conclude that at least 11,000 new affordable units of affordable units need to be built in the county in the next five years to meet minimum housing needs of the less-affluent population.

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