Voters in Newport Beach – home to some of the most expensive zipcodes in the country – will decide next year if they want to toss out a state approved housing plan for one that zones for fewer homes in a coastal town that officials have previously said is built out.
It’s a move that, if approved by voters next November, could set up a legal challenge between Newport Beach and state housing officials as city council members in neighboring Huntington Beach continue to challenge their own state mandated housing quotas in court.
It comes after former Mayor Marshall “Duffy” Duffield and local organizations collected nearly 9,000 signatures for a ballot initiative that would throw out the city’s current housing plan which zones for over 8,000 homes and replace it with one that zones for 2,900 new homes instead.
[Read: Will Newport Beach Voters Take Over City’s Housing Plan?]
“Housing expansion of this magnitude will significantly impact traffic, public safety and our. Overall life quality in the city,” said Curt Fleming, a resident and proponent of the initiative, at Tuesday’s city council meeting.
“The Responsible Housing Initiative supports and facilitates the city’s efforts to meet local housing needs and state law requirements, while also ensuring that voter preferences take priority over the interests of housing developers.”
At Tuesday’s meeting, city council members voted unanimously to put the initiative – dubbed the Responsible Housing Initiative – on the November 2026 ballot after two elected officials spoke out against the measure but agreed to put it on the ballot because organizers got the necessary signatures.
City Councilman Noah Blom said the initiative is being funded by one of the largest developers in the city – Ken Picerne – and called it an effort to stop projects by other developers from being built.
“Why is the person that has the most apartments under construction funding a voter initiative to stop anyone else from building anything?” Blom said at the meeting.
“It’s counterintuitive how many units are up in the airport district right now under construction from Mr. Ken Picerne, whose name was on the top of that ballot initiative, it’s very interesting,” he continued.
“I’m not ever going to kowtow to one developer who’s trying to make more money than everyone else because he wants nothing else built.”
According to a city staff report, it could cost the city up to $143,606 dollars to put the measure on the November 2026 ballot.
Newport Beach Housing Plan & State Mandated Goals
At the start of the decade, city leaders were tasked with zoning for over 4,800 homes – of which over 2,300 homes have to be for very low and low income families – by the end of the decade amid pressure from state leaders to address California’s housing shortage.
At the time, Newport Beach leaders pushed back on the number, calling it unrealistic and arguing in part that because the city is on the coast there is barely any land that is not regulated by county, state or federal agencies.
Last year, Newport Beach officials approved an amendment to a housing plan that zones for almost double of what they required to zone for by the state arguing that they had to follow California law.
“The City can’t just plan for 2,707 new affordable units, because that would assume all future projects would be 100% affordable, which is not realistic based on previous development experiences,” reads a city webpage on the housing plan.
“To address this, the City’s Housing Plan includes a buffer of extra units, allowing for market-rate units to help support and subsidize the creation of affordable housing.”
Councilwoman Robyn Grant said the state requires them to adopt a housing plan and the initiative would put the city at risk if approved.
“After extensive legal analysis and public outreach and workshops and hearings and meetings and more meetings, this council approved an updated general plan to bring Newport Beach into compliance and avoid serious penalties, including the loss of local land use control,” she said, adding that she opposed the measure.
“Given the ballot initiative, Newport Beach residents will ultimately decide whether they agree with this measured approach to safely moving forward with the mandates.”
Supporters of the ballot initiative argue that the city council’s approval of the housing plan violated the Greenlight Initiative, a voter approved law from 2000 that forces city leaders to ask for a vote of the people when they significantly change the city’s general plan.
Last year, an OC Superior Court Judge ruled that the plan did not violate the city’s charter after two groups, Still Protecting Our Newport and the Newport Beach Stewardship Association, filed lawsuits against the city to try to put the housing plan to a citywide vote.
Jeff Herdman, a former city councilman, said city leaders are purposefully trying to mislead residents to believe the initiative is an affordable housing measure and that residents should have a say in what the future of their city looks like.
“We were first told that you would comply with (the Greenlight Initiative), of the city charter by allowing us to vote on the housing plan, but after two years and at the last minute, you reversed course, claiming that California law barred a local vote,” he said at Tuesday’s meeting.
“You’re also improperly interfering with our constitutional rights to control the destiny of our community.”
Under the ballot initiative, the city would zone for 2,900 new homes of which 2,160 would be for low and very low income families. The rest would come mostly from other housing projects already in the pipeline.
Orange County’s median income for a four-person household is close to $128,000, roughly $13,000 above what’s considered low income, according to the California Department of Housing and Community Development.
A four-person household making less than $72,000 a year is considered very low income.
Blom said the city already tried to get state approval on the housing plan in the ballot initiative.
“We started with this option. Actually, this was the first thing we did when we brought this to the state and said, this is all we want to build and they said no,” he said.
He also said approving the city’s housing plan was not an easy decision for the city council.
“We all agree we want responsible housing. If we could, we would secede Newport from the State of California, because we manage it a lot better than the rest of the state,” Blom said.
“We didn’t set the rules Sacramento did, and we’re doing what we can to give Newport the best chance in that.”
Hosam Elattar is a Voice of OC reporter. Contact him at helattar@voiceofoc.org or on Twitter @ElattarHosam.