A city with room in it

The state’s housing allocation for Rancho Santa Margarita this cycle is 680 homes. Three hundred and twenty-nine of them, 209 very low income and 120 low income, are meant to be affordable. That is 48 percent of the total, and it is the part cities across Orange County consistently fail to deliver.

I am not talking about changing what this city is. I am talking about the deputy who patrols here, the teacher at our kids’ school, and the young couple who grew up in Rancho Santa Margarita and cannot buy in it. This is the same cost-of-living problem as insurance and after-school care, and it is the one with the longest lead time, which is exactly why it keeps getting deferred.

The city has already built the tool. In August 2024 the council adopted a rezoning package creating a Mixed-Use District, a Workforce Housing Overlay and objective development standards, on commercial and business-park land where existing buildings stay put and owners can add homes if they choose. That is the right shape: no bulldozing neighborhoods, no sprawl into open space, homes where the roads and utilities already are. The open question is whether it produces anything, and that depends on whether the council treats it as a box checked or a job started.

There is a hard-headed reason to stay on this, too. A city that keeps its housing plan in compliance keeps control of where and what gets built. A city that falls out of compliance can lose that control to a court, and to the builder’s remedy, which lets a developer bypass local zoning altogether. Building affordable homes and keeping these decisions local are not opposing goals. Compliance is how you do both.