City of Irvine 6th Cycle Housing Element, Amended Affordable Housing Strategy, and Implementation Plan

Harris prepared the City’s certified 2021-2029 Housing Element (involving 60,000 planned housing units). The Housing Element Update required creativity and complex analysis related to the redevelopment of commercial uses to residential to meet these requirements. Per State law, densities for affordable housing sites must adhere to requirements and the location of affordable units must be dispersed throughout the City in accordance with fair housing requirements. Hitta Mosesman, Harris’ lead on the project, has provided on-call housing services to the City of Irvine for multiple years while with a different firm. These services included:

• Preparation of an Amended Affordable Housing Strategy and Implementation Plan (a component of the Housing Element).
• Preparation of the Annual Progress Report on the Housing Element.
• Creating a first-of-its-kind automated and streamlined housing compliance monitoring database for over 80 affordable housing projects within the City. Data points included affordability/income requirements, applicable rents, covenant and developer agreement terms, number of units, income information (residents), and compliance determination for each project.
• Managing and directing a citywide property and building conditions assessment of every housing unit in the City built after 1980 (as an update to the survey completed for the 2011 Housing Element). Providing results of the assessment that measured various building and property conditions and recommendations for low-cost methods to ensure housing stock maintenance in report format.

The City of Irvine was the 14th jurisdiction in the SCAG region to receive Housing Element certification (out of almost 200 jurisdictions).