The nice thing about maintaining a blog over time is that it makes clear that many issues are cyclical. History may not exactly repeat but it does frequently rhyme.

Consequently, I walked into the first “visioning open house” for the city’s most far-reaching and comprehensive rezoning effort in a generation last evening with more than a touch of déjà vu.

Background: the Housing Element, Measure Y, and Measure K

Before getting into that critique, let’s talk about the meeting itself. As a quick refresher, California housing law required the City of Costa Mesa to rezone to accommodate just over 11,000 new housing units of at various levels of affordability (the City’s plan for this is known as its “Housing Element”). To achieve that in light of Measure Y, the local ballot initiative that requires most rezonings to go to a public vote, the city put together Measure K, which sought to exempt most of the city’s commercial corridors from the vote-on-rezoning requirement. Measure K narrowly passed in 2022 by 22 votes, and now the city must actually do the rezoning in order to meet its legal obligations to the state. Oh, and by the way: we’re really, really late in doing this. Thanks to a couple of missed deadlines and a baffling 18-month delay in getting this process started, the city is woefully “out of compliance” with the State housing element process. Which means we’re just a nastygram from the California Department of Housing and Community Development away from facing real consequences for our tardiness.

If you have absolutely no idea what I’m talking about and you missed the meeting last night, don’t worry. They didn’t really explain any of it. While the whole bloody story is pretty interesting, there’s no time for that now. This is what you need to know: we are rezoning our commercial corridors, we don’t have a lot of choice in the matter, and we’ve gotta do it quick. So… let’s have a bunch of meetings!

The open house of high-level presentations and sticky notes

In service of this effort, the Norma Herzog Community Center played host to about 70 people for an “open house” to introduce the public to the rezoning process. I’d say 20 or so of those people were alternately employees of Dudek (the city’s consultant on the rezoning), members of the city staff, or current or former elected/appointed officials. The balance were members of the public, though most of them were familiar to me. This crew was then treated to a very high level presentation about the Housing Element process, Measure K and the city’s achingly imprecise and arguably self-contradictory goal to “diversity, stabilize and increase housing to reflect community needs.”

After that, participants were invited to walk around and review various large poster boards soliciting either demographic or conceptual feedback. One board asked what kind of housing — apartments, single-family homes, duplexes, etc. — folks had ever lived in. Another asked what the rezoning should prioritize, such as proximity to amenities, transportation connections, open space, etc. And another essentially asked the painfully vague question “what makes a great neighborhood?”, and asked participants to write their answers on post-it notes.

If you want the gory details, my buddy Geoff West has a much more comprehensive rundown of the scene, including pictures.

So, when I was greeted by a consultant-led presentation, big boards ready to be filled with sticky dots and comments, and the same townies I run into everywhere, the resemblance became uncanny to another recent “outreach” event.

We’re back to public engagement meetings that probably don’t matter

This meeting was almost an exact repeat of the kickoff to the Fairview Developmental Center process. Once again, the presentation last evening was so high level that the attendees were left scratching their heads: What parts of the city are we talking about? (The presentation didn’t say). What exactly is the city looking to change: density? FAR? Setbacks? Parking? What do those things even mean? (This was left to the imagination). How much say does the city actually have, and how much of it is baked in by State law and priorities? (The truth: there isn’t a lot of wiggleroom. The message last night: shhhh don’t worry about that).

But hey, there is good news! Well, it’s good news for me at least. I don’t have to write a whole post about where these kinds of meetings go wrong. I’ve already written it!

Pretty much all my critiques of that first FDC meeting apply to last night, save one: at least this time a couple of City Council members showed up, as I spotted both Arlis Reynolds (District 5) and Jeff Pettis (District 6) in the crowd. The rest were probably either on vacation or watching Mayor John Stephens mix it up with other local dignitaries at the OC Fair’s Demolition Derby. Their presence helped to lend a bit more weight to the proceedings, but once again, neither of them spoke. While I don’t fault Ms. Reynolds or Mr. Pettis one bit — this is the consultant’s and the staff’s rodeo, after all — I think my critique from the FDC debacle still stands:

By allowing Staff and consultants to stand out in front, residents intuitively understand that there is no direct accountability regarding what is said or expressed at these meetings. If the consultant politely gathers up all of the comment cards and lights them on fire behind the building, the Mayor and the City Council can plausibly argue that they still “ran a process” and that any errors in outreach were problems with the consultant. That gets a lot harder to do when those elected officials stand up and answer direct questions from the public.

By the way, this is exactly how the FDC “outreach” played out: ultimately, the City Council did throw its consultant, PlaceWorks, under the bus. So when the public finds out what the Measure K rezonings are really all about — because, friends, it ain’t just a bland marketing effort to make “neighborhoods where we all belong”, but a comprehensive rezoning of almost every major commercial corridor in the city — Dudek better have a plan to manage the blowback.

Yes, it’s probably a sham. But it’s the only sham we’ve got!

But alas — a process critique isn’t even the heart of the matter this time. You want the cold, unvarnished truth?

Everything in this rezoning process that a member of the public could possibly have a meaningful opinion about is either superficial or not up for debate, and everything that is on the table is so subtle and technical that really only full-time professionals can reasonably opine on them.

Because here is what we, the public, cannot change, no matter how many sticky notes we place:

• The densities of most of the Measure K sites were set by the Housing Element years ago, and can’t be changed now. These densities will drive other zoning considerations, such as height restrictions, setback and FAR.
• Rezoning the land in our commercial corridors has nothing to do with other land use decisions, such as the structure/carrying capacity of our streets or the number of accessible parks.
• At the end of the day, the developer, not the resident, will decide how many units they need to ask for, and at what price, to make the development feasible to build, and this judgement is both technically demanding and subject to market factors beyond anyone’s control.
• Infrastructure capacity, such as sewer, water, electricity and school availability, aren’t just outside the scope of this exercise — they’re completely out of the hands of the city, as they are each governed by completely different governmental districts.

What’s left? Well, the big bogey in my view is parking standards, though those got zero mention at the event last night and they arguably fall into the “subtle and technical” bucket. Otherwise I think we’re basically left to argue over the merits of eucalyptus or palm trees, or the aesthetic advantages of rooflines consisting of mission-style terra cotta versus modern-farmhouse, standing-seam metal. Inspiring stuff.

Snark aside, I don’t really blame either the city or the consultants for running what is, at its heart, a sham process. That is what the State of California and its “transparency” laws demand. When you require to-the-letter compliance with State housing laws and thus reduce public meetings to a box-checking exercise, it cannot be any other way. So, for the record, I give Dudek and the staff an A for effort. The presentations and the poster boards were beautiful, polished and professional. The bilingual presentation was a lovely touch. It’s just that, at the end of the day, they’re pawns in this, just like us. They’re not bad. They’re just drawn that way.

So… what is the alternative?

This time around there probably isn’t one. We’re doing this on a crash basis — we essentially need to be wrapped up by November 2026 to avoid the State losing patience with us and suing us — so we may be committed to this check-the-box approach. There are thousands of words I could spill about how it didn’t need to be this way, but now, it feels like it is what it is.

Though I wonder… is there still time for a Housing Committee?

I do think there is still probably room for a housing or rezoning committee, not so much to steer/redirect this public outreach process (such as it is) but to come alongside and aid the staff in making the more technical recommendations this effort will require. Even a subcommittee of the City Council would likely prove effective. But, given that such a committee would be a political no-win scenario for its participants — saying no to the State isn’t an option, and everything else residents would likely want is probably out-of-scope of what this rezoning can provide — the city may well have to seek out residents to man it.

And look, if that gives you the heebie jeebies because you think that any such committee would inevitably be captured by this faction or that faction, or if you think it would just provide “public engagement” cover for whatever the city and its consultants want to do anyway, I have bad news for you: that’s the process we have now. The room last night was packed with insiders, both known and unknown to the general public. The next meetings will be attended by the same crowd. What do you think will result? Input general enough for insiders to frame whatever way they want, with the patina of public endorsement for protection.

So my advice? Drop the pretense and just do what Newport Beach did. Use the consultants and resident/elected committees to do the hard, technical work of drafting documents and making proposals. Then present those to the residents so that they have something to shoot at. That would leave us all a lot less befuddled and frustrated when we end up with a complex rezoning proposal that looks nothing like what folks wrote on their sticky notes last night.

Or we can just do the show-meetings.