The Carpinteria community showed up in full force at the South County Housing Element Workshop last week, where planning staff were blasted with questions over the recently released interactive map showing sites deemed by the county as candidates for rezoning in order to meet South Coast housing quotas.
Their message was loud and clear: Carpinterians do not want agricultural land to become housing.
In the scramble to meet the state’s guidelines to certify a Housing Element plan before the February deadline, counties across California are forced to reckon with the reality of expanding their housing markets without expanding their borders. And as the deadline approaches, the consequences grow even more severe: Local governments that do not meet their deadline to certify could lose their discretionary authority to review housing projects, in effect granting developers a near-free pass to build any projects that meet minimum local standards.