Report 2020-108 Recommendations
When an audit is completed and a report is issued, auditees must provide the State Auditor with information regarding their progress in implementing recommendations from our reports at three intervals from the release of the report: 60 days, six months, and one year. Additionally, Senate Bill 1452 (Chapter 452, Statutes of 2006), requires auditees who have not implemented recommendations after one year, to report to us and to the Legislature why they have not implemented them or to state when they intend to implement them. Below, is a listing of each recommendation the State Auditor made in the report referenced and a link to the most recent response from the auditee addressing their progress in implementing the recommendation and the State Auditor's assessment of auditee's response based on our review of the supporting documentation.
Recommendations in Report 2020-108: California's Housing Agencies: The State Must Overhaul Its Approach to Affordable Housing Development to Help Relieve Millions of Californians' Burdensome Housing Costs (Release Date: November 2020)
Recommendations to Housing and Community Development, Department of | ||
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Number | Recommendation | Status |
11 | To ensure that all local jurisdictions make sufficient efforts to provide affordable housing, HCD should, by June 2021, develop and implement procedures for actively monitoring local jurisdictions that are not on track to provide the needed lower-income housing units included in their housing plans. Specifically, HCD should identify local jurisdictions with severe underdevelopment of affordable housing and indications of high need for that housing, and it should initiate reviews of those local jurisdictions that include steps to identify why they are not developing needed affordable housing. HCD should then provide technical assistance or take enforcement actions as necessary to help resolve any issues it identifies. |
Fully Implemented |
Recommendations to Legislature | ||
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Number | Recommendation | Status |
1 | To ensure that the State can identify the extent to which its financial resources are supporting its mission to provide a home for all Californians, the Legislature should require HCD to prepare an annual addendum to the State's housing plan and report to the Legislature, beginning January 2022. The addendum should include up-to-date information and identify the following:
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Legislation Enacted |
2 | To ensure that the State has sufficient data to determine how much affordable housing it has supported and to maximize the impact of its funds, the Legislature should require HCD to develop the housing data strategy component of its housing plan with input from the Tax Committee and CalHFA. At a minimum, the housing data strategy should include the following:
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Legislation Introduced |
3 | To ensure that the State awards financial resources for housing in a more timely and efficient manner, the Legislature should create a workgroup including the Tax Committee, HCD, CalHFA, and other industry representatives such as private lenders and developers, and require it to do the following:
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No Action Taken |
4 | To reduce administrative redundancy and streamline a portion of the funding process, the Legislature should eliminate the Debt Limit Committee and transfer its responsibilities to the Tax Committee, including reviewing applications and allocating bond resources. To ensure a thorough application review process, the Legislature should also require the Tax Committee to develop a sufficient quality control process for reviewing applications for bond resources, including multiple levels of review. |
Legislation Introduced |
7 | To help ensure that all local jurisdictions mitigate key barriers to affordable housing in the near term, the Legislature should amend state law to do the following:
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No Action Taken |
8 | To ensure that local jurisdictions make sufficient efforts to facilitate the development of needed affordable housing in the long term, the Legislature should require HCD to develop and submit to the Legislature specific and objective standards—for example, a maximum number of parking spaces required per housing unit—for how local jurisdictions can mitigate barriers to lower-income housing development across all the potential barriers they control, such as zoning and parking. HCD should tailor these standards to ensure that local jurisdictions implementing them have made it feasible for developers to build the housing necessary to meet lower-income housing goals. The Legislature should also require that HCD consult with local jurisdictions; regional governments; and affordable housing developers, advocates, and researchers in determining these standards. The Legislature should consider this information when developing legislation to mitigate additional affordable housing barriers: for instance, it could require local jurisdictions to adopt the standards for all potential affordable housing sites in their housing plans unless they provide reasonable justifications for using different standards. |
No Action Taken |
9 | To facilitate timely and needed affordable housing development in local jurisdictions that are not approving it, the Legislature should amend state law and consider the constitutionality of establishing an effective appeals process for developers of affordable housing projects. For example, it could consider doing the following:
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Legislation Introduced |
10 | To better leverage local and private resources and develop more affordable housing, the Legislature should consider amending state law to award a significant amount of nonhousing or flexible funds, such as existing transportation funds, to local jurisdictions based on the number of lower-income housing units they have approved relative to their needs allocation. |
No Action Taken |
Recommendations to Tax Credit Allocation Committee, California | ||
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Number | Recommendation | Status |
5 | To ensure that the allocation of bonds aligns with the State's housing priorities and that its awards process is sufficiently transparent, the Tax Committee should, by May 2021, establish regulations to do the following:
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Partially Implemented |
6 | To ensure that tax credit awards are targeted to areas that require the most support from the State to finance affordable housing, the Tax Committee should immediately identify areas from which it has not received applications or areas with fewer awards per population and use that information to inform regulatory changes to attract more affordable housing developers to those areas. |
Fully Implemented |
12 | To ensure stronger enforcement that encourages project owners to keep housing affordable and habitable, the Tax Committee should amend its regulations to take more meaningful disciplinary action against housing project owners that show patterns of noncompliance across multiple inspections. These changes may include but are not limited to the following actions:
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Fully Implemented |
13 | To ensure that it complies with federal law, the Tax Committee should report all instances of noncompliance to the IRS unless federal law or guidance provides an exception. |
Fully Implemented |