For the first time since 2000, Irvine is pursuing a comprehensive update to its general plan.
How the City Council has chosen to proceed will have major implications for housing, transportation and affordability in one of the nation’s fastest-growing cities. The stakes are even higher ahead of Irvine’s first-ever district elections as councilmembers attempt to balance appeal to constituents with planning decisions that affect all city residents.
Councilmember Mike Caroll called the recent preliminary approval of the plan’s housing element the “single-most important vote” that the council has made. The council approved plans to zone for more than 23,000 new housing units in its 2045 General Plan update, a roughly 8,000-page tome of documents that sets the vision and regulations for every element of city planning.
The number of potential housing units approved is far less than the 57,000 units the state of California asked Irvine to zone for, but it still falls in line with the minimum units required by the state housing mandate.
Critics say 23,000 new homes would not be enough to drive down housing costs in the city, which is currently the hottest housing market in the United States. Proponents say it’s just enough to avoid costly litigation with the state while preserving local control of major planning decisions in a city renowned for its local master plan.
In their compromise, councilmembers seem to be walking a tightrope between a desire to preserve Irvine’s low-density suburban history and an urge to prepare for a higher-density, urban future.
Irvine is now more than 50 years old, and its identity as a master-planned community is at a crossroads.
Early city planners designed Irvine as a series of suburban villages built to maximize appeal to homeowners. That vision has come to fruition as 93,000 acres of undeveloped Irvine Company land became distinct communities such as Woodbridge, Turtle Rock and University Park, each with their own shopping centers, schools, parks and pools.
The appeal to homeowners has endured — maybe even accelerated.
Irvine has also become one of the most expensive cities in the country. The median home is listed at $1.7 million. Median rent costs $4,800 per month. The median family in Orange County, which earns a household income of $106,000 per year, would qualify for low-income housing in Irvine.
“We’ve become a city divided between haves and have-nots,” Irvine resident Doug Elliott said at a recent council meeting. “If you were fortunate enough to buy a house in Irvine 25 years ago, congratulations, you’re probably a millionaire. But the rest of us are largely renters doomed to that status for the rest of our lives if we continue to live here. We’ve become largely a city of millionaires on the one hand and lifelong renters on the other.”
Housing availability and affordability are separate but intertwined problems across California, not just in Irvine and Orange County. And the state is trying to tackle them both by mandating cities to zone for more — sometimes significantly more — housing. Here in Orange County, Huntington Beach, for one, chose to fight its mandate — leading to litigation with the state that the city lost and promised to appeal.
Irvine, for its part, has been asked by the state — via the Southern California Association of Governments, a regional planning agency — to zone for more than 57,000 additional housing units in its 2045 General Plan, a number Councilmember Larry Agran said would “eviscerate” Irvine’s master plan.
Adding 57,000 new units by 2045 would increase Irvine’s current housing stock by 50%.
Carroll compared it to Irvine absorbing Garden Grove’s entire housing market and population of 170,000 people.
Instead, councilmembers recently approved a plan to zone for less than half of that number: 23,610 units. That’s the number the state mandate actually requires Irvine to zone for, according to the California Department of Housing’s Regional Housing Needs Allocation, usually just called RHNA.
The additional 30,000 units the state asked for are considered a buffer to make sure the city hits its mark, City Manager Oliver Chi explained.
Irvine does not need to build any units, just zone for them, and the council is doing that by opening up certain areas in the general plan for higher density, mixed-use development where housing and retail will be closer together.
Housing advocates and some environmentalists say the zoning change is necessary to accommodate Irvine’s growth — it’s on pace to soon become Orange County’s most populous city — while addressing housing inaccessibility and climate concerns. Higher-density neighborhoods theoretically mean fewer and shorter vehicle trips and, therefore, less carbon emissions.
The plan’s detractors argue Irvine has built more housing units in recent decades, including affordable housing, than any other city in Orange County. They say adding so many new housing units on top of that would ruin the character of the master-planned city and could paradoxically make emissions worse as increased traffic overloads existing roads and freeways.
“Before the council are two starkly different visions for the city of Irvine,” resident James Huang said at an Aug. 13 meeting. “A handful of people want to see it become the world’s largest gated community locked in the past. The rest of us imagine it as a place of housing abundance and sustainable living.”
When Irvine was incorporated in 1971, planners called the fledgling city a “blank slate.” The Irvine Company’s extensive control of so much land enabled a type of master planning unavailable to other cities in Orange County dealing with myriad landowners.
But the blank slate has become nearly full.
In a couple of years, when Irvine and developers build a 930-home planned housing tract north of Portola Parkway as part of the creation of the Gateway Preserve, the city will have at least 23 distinct residential villages. It will also be close to running out of undeveloped land that has not been set aside for nature preservation.
Current city planners have accounted for what they call “buildout conditions” by proposing that Irvine comply with its state housing mandate not by building outward, but by becoming denser in key areas. The plan calls for the approval of mixed-use zoning in three areas: around the Great Park, around the Spectrum and in the Irvine Business Corridor.
City staff suggest that by planning the 23,610 housing units — zoned at a minimum of 50 units per acre — exclusively in these three areas, Irvine can strike a balance. It can comply with its housing mandate, accommodate growth and preserve the character of lower-density neighborhoods, such as Woodbridge and Turtle Rock, where single-family homes and townhomes have been the norm since the 1970s.
On. Aug. 13, in a 4-1 vote with Agran the lone naysayer, the City Council more or less adopted city staff’s recommendation to zone for the minimum required 23,610 units instead of either noncompliance or the state-recommended 57,000 units. The city could approve more housing in future planning updates, but projects for additional dwellings above 23,610 units would have to receive special approval from the council.
Still, there are a couple of catches with the city’s plan.
First, the council wants to count UC Irvine housing units toward its mandate, but that’s unlikely to happen.
In 2021, the city asked the state to consider as many as 19,000 UCI housing units as part of the city’s mandate. The state refused, and there is no formal appeals process, City Attorney Jeffrey Melching told the council.
Still, per the council’s direction this month, staff committed to lobbying “aggressively” to persuade the state to change its opinion three years later.
Of note, Irvine also unsuccessfully appealed its RHNA allocation in 2020, arguing the regional planning agency unfairly assigned Irvine too many units based on what the city called inaccurate assumptions about transit, open space and job accessibility. It was one of 52 local governments to appeal its 2021-29 housing needs allocation, of which, the state approved only two.
The second catch is that part of Irvine’s proposal violates a multiagency land use plan around John Wayne Airport where existing ordinances related to airport noise and safety prohibit zoning for new residential units.
The City Council voted on its intent to overrule that land use plan and will likely make it official after a subsequent public hearing and four-fifths vote in October. But if for some reason that plan falls through the cracks, or if one councilmember has a change of vote then, Irvine’s whole general plan update could become noncompliant with state regulations.
The city has until mid-February to finalize its plan update.
“I really do believe that this council has a moral obligation and a moral responsibility to approve this general plan because this is about smart sustainable planning that not only safeguards and protects our quality of life as Irvine residents,” said Councilmember Tammy Kim, “but it addresses the affordable housing needs that we so desperately need, especially in this housing emergency, because we have essential members of our community who cannot afford to live here.”
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