Members of the Ceres Planning Commission and the Ceres City Council voted to approve the city’s new Housing Element to replace the one last crafted in January 2016.
State law requires cities to regularly update their Housing Elements within their General Plans to ensure planning is taken place to accommodate the house numbers set by the state, called the Regional Housing Needs Assessment (RHNA) allocation.
The commission approved the document last week in a 4-0 vote (Dave Johnson was absent); while the council gave its approval on Monday in a 4-1 vote. Councilman James Casey was the lone dissenter.
While cities plan for housing needs, construction of new units is completely dependent on the private sector, which is currently hamstrung by a number of factors. They include the high cost of materials, land, and building fees, interest rates that are still higher than they were years ago, an inadequate supply of construction workers and state regulations.
Kylie Pope of EMC Planning Group, Inc., the consultant hired by the city to prepare the 2023-31 Housing Element, gave a presentation on the 518-page document. She said California needs an estimated 2.5 million new housing units to play catch-up and an estimated 34,344 units need to be built in Stanislaus County over the next eight years. Ceres would need to build 3,361 units for its part in meeting regional housing demand.
“The city has to identify ways to accommodate these units,” Pope told the commission. “Again, that’s the whole purpose of this Housing Element.”
She noted that the penalty for failing to do so could result in developers invoking what’s called a Builders Remedy whereby they can ignore zoning rules “and build projects that may not necessarily align with the community’s vision unless the city can prove a clear risk to public health or safety.”
Having an approved Housing Element means the city can qualify for a myriad of state housing grants.
“The good news about that is the city’s gonna need a lot of those grants to make the implementation piece of the Housing Element go smoothly,” said Pope. “So you guys are in a really good spot.”
Anastasia Aziz of EMC spelled out to the council that state Legislature is ever cranking out more laws in an effort to speed up the building of housing in California where it’s expensive to live due to lack of enough units.
“At the end of 2023 the city had constructed approximately three percent of those units, or 79 units within that fifth cycle, eight-year period,” said Aziz.
Some cities have defied the state and not complied with Housing Element requirements, Aziz said, but are likely to face financial penalties against them by the state attorney general and called that a “reflection of the affordability crisis in housing within the state.”
Ceres has been out of compliance since Dec. 31, 2023. It now is.
The state sets requirements for how many units need to be built for four income categories based on area median income. Aziz spelled out for the council that the median income for a four-person household (typically two income earners and two children) in Ceres is $92,600 per year.
Above income for a household of four persons is considered $111,100 annually.
Very-low income households in Ceres earn less than half of that median income. Ceres has been designated to build 706 units for that bracket.
Other categories are low income, moderate income and above moderate income.
Pope and Aziz said that historically cities struggle to see development of lower income housing units because it’s hard to make them pencil out financially.
Milt Treiweiler said the state’s mandates ignore the need to preserve farmland for farming and not housing.
“We are sitting on the best farmland in the world,” he said. “That’s not even a consideration in this plan and that’s disaster.”
He called growth plans as unrealistic, saying there are plenty of places in California to build on land not suitable for farming. He likened the expansion of cities onto farmland to building houses in Yosemite Valley except “this is even more important than Yosemite Valley for food matters.”
The Housing Element pegs most of Ceres’ next wave of home building in the area called the West Landing Specific Plan area south of Service Road and east of Central Avenue. That area can accommodate the building of 2,631 units.
The Whitmore Ranch Specific Plan which is south of Whitmore Avenue and east of Moore Road, could see development of 372 units.
Another 670 units are potential in the rest of Ceres on vacant or underutilized parcels, accessory dwelling units, often called granny flats.
Commission Chairman Gary M. Condit asked what kind of population numbers will come out of those developments. At 3.5 persons per dwelling, according to Community Development Director Lea Simvoulakis, that equates to a population growth of 12,800 residents.
“That’s assuming they develop,” said Simvoulakis. “Again, the city is not in the business of developing housing.”
West Landing was approved in 2012 and hasn’t developed since due in part to the lack of an available sewer service. The city is, however, working on plans to add infrastructure along Crows Landing and Service roads to “spur development.”
“No one wanted to be first in because there were significant public infrastructure lifts. With prices in California it’s difficult to make a project pencil.
To help facilitate the building of more housing, Ceres will allow for smaller lot sizes, provide incentives for Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs) as required by state law through streamlined permits, reduced setback requirements, reduced parking requirements and reduced fees.
Also, with the construction of new single-family units in the West Landing Specific Plan, the city will require construction of at least 10 percent of new single-family development to include either an ADU or JADU (Junior Accessory Dwelling Units).
• Provide a density bonus to development projects that restrict 100 percent of their units as affordable to lower and moderate-income households.
• Allow “low-barrier navigation centers” by-right in areas zoned for mixed uses and in nonresidential zones permitting multi-family uses, if the center meets specified requirements.
• Pursue becoming a “Pro-housing” community to be given preference and, in some cases, additional points when participating in various state-funded programs including the Affordable Housing and Sustainable Communities (AHSC) for disadvantaged communities, and Infill Infrastructure Grant (IIG) programs.
• Encourage mixed commercial/housing developments when they contribute to the city’s balance of housing in relation to jobs and/or provide affordable housing for low- and moderate-income households.
• Streamline processing and permit procedures by updating the Ceres Municipal Code to simplify and clarify both the required permit type(s) for multi-family residential uses and the decision-making authority.
Simvoulakis said higher density is more attractive to developers because they can build more units but the public doesn’t necessarily like it.
“We love to see (higher) density as a planner. I would love to see us build up rather than out. That’s just the reality all the time in the Central Valley.”
The Housing Element, last crafted in January 2016, is long overdue for an update – it should have been completed in 2023 – but hit a snag requiring significant edits to comprehensively respond to the state’s 90-day “findings letter.”
The document notes that like many other cities in California, “Ceres has had little success in meeting its housing needs.”
Between 2014 and 2023, the city issued only 79 housing permits, a small fraction of Ceres’ Regional Housing Needs Allocation (RHNA), which called for 2,571 new housing units.
Of the units built, 71 were for above-moderate-income housing, seven were for moderate-income housing, and one was for low-income housing.
Commissioner Condit asked about whether the city could handle essential services for future residents and Simvoulakis said the city would be legally obligated to find a way unless the council were to declare a building moratorium.
Condit said that of today Ceres has only 23 patrol officers which he stated is not adequate for the existing population. He added that the General Plan calls for 1.3 officers per 1,000, meaning Ceres is short nine officers.
“It’s tough for me to vote yes on items like this when frankly the council hasn’t really put the forethought into issues around public safety and our infrastructure when it comes to sewer and water,” Condit commented.
Simvoulakis said that the 2018 Ceres General Plan calls for Ceres to grow from 48,214 residents currently to 79,000 people by 2038. However, at a recent StanCOG meeting, Ceres was projected to have only 50,000 residents by 2050. That is due to a declining population resulting from folks moving to more affordable and politically favorable states.
The Housing Element may be reviewed by the public by visiting to and www.ceres.gov/193/Planning-Division, clicking on the Housing Element link
