Framing a New Conversation About Housing in your Community

A Housing and Public Engagement Toolkit for California

California’s Housing Crisis

The Role of Public Engagement

How to Engage Your Community

Housing Policy Considerations

Legal Procedures and Public Hearings

Funding Opportunities

California is in desperate need of additional housing.

  • 20%|Of Californians Spend More Than Half Their Income on Rent
  • 3.5 M|Homes Need to be Built by 2025
  • 40%|Of Californians Struggle to Afford Housing

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How to engage your community.

The Institute for Local Government developed five pillars for successful community engagement to support and assist local governments with designing and executing land use and housing planning. Click through below to learn about each pillar and see what you can do to involve your community in the process.

Pillar 1: Think

When you are ready to develop a housing plan or seek community input on a housing project, take time to do some initial planning to ensure that you will be successful.

Pillar 2: Initiate

Once you have thought through the steps in Pillar 1, it’s time to start developing your public engagement approach and outreach plan.

Pillar 3: Engage

Now that you have thought through the steps in Pillar 1 and designed your public engagement and outreach approaches in Pillar 2, it is time to implement your plan.

Pillar 4: Review

In our busy workplaces, it can be challenging to set aside time to evaluate our efforts. However, public engagement is rarely a single event, but rather, an ongoing relationship built on trust and communication between local officials and the community.

Pillar 5: Shift

After reviewing what worked and what could have gone better your agency has the opportunity to make practice or policy adjustments.

What are communities doing?

Case Story

Santa Cruz Fine-Tunes Its ADU Approach: Lessons Learned

The City of Santa Cruz has been experimenting with ADUs since the early 2000s. As of early 2019, Santa Cruz had approximately 475 ADUs, with about 50 more units coming online each year.