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City Planning Commission reviews housing-entitlement report and credits Executive Directive 1 for higher approvals
Summary
The commission received a fiscal-year 2023–24 report on entitlement and housing activity and asked staff to provide additional data on units built versus entitled and cumulative Executive Directive 1 approvals; staff said the directive created a faster, largely ministerial approval path for many affordable projects.
The City Planning Commission on Oct. 10 received a director’s report outlining entitlement and housing activity for fiscal year 2023–24 and discussed how Executive Directive 1 has accelerated approvals for many projects.
Lisa Webber of the City Planning Department told commissioners the report covers the number of entitlement cases received, the cases approved during the fiscal year, and the total number of housing units — both market-rate and covenanted affordable. She said the report also shows geographic distribution across area planning commission boundaries and highlights entitlements and programs used to achieve those housing totals. “What’s notable is the Executive Directive 1 program was very popular and yielded the highest number of units, both submitted as well as approved, for the last fiscal year,” Webber said.
Commissioners pressed staff on the relationship between entitled units and units actually built. A commissioner asked whether staff could compile the number of units that have been built, not just entitled; Webber said staff can do that but cautioned the two counts are different and that verifying built units requires checking Department of Building and Safety records for issued building permits. She said projects submitted in the previous fiscal year can still be in process and that some projects appearing before the commission now were entitled years earlier.
Commissioner Michael Newhouse questioned a table showing proposed versus approved units and asked why roughly half of the proposed units were approved in the fiscal year. Webber explained Executive Directive 1 created a ministerial process for projects that otherwise would have been discretionary, speeding approvals for many density-bonus, Transit-Oriented Communities (TOC) and 100% affordable projects; staff noted letters of compliance for those projects are often issued in about 45 days. Webber also clarified that the table compares proposals received during the fiscal year to approvals completed in that year and said staff will include cumulative Executive Directive 1 totals from the program’s inception in the next report.
Commissioner Phyllis Klein asked why the harbor area is lagging; Webber said development activity there is lower, in part because a larger share of harbor lands are industrial and some areas are constrained by coastal-zone rules, limiting housing entitlements.
The commission asked staff to bring a follow-up report that: (1) reconciles entitled units with units built (using building-permit data from the Department of Building and Safety), and (2) provides cumulative figures for Executive Directive 1 from its inception through the most recent reporting period. The director’s office said it would return with those metrics in the next periodic report, anticipated in early 2025.
