_{Thumbnail photo: Battery Point Apartments near Joe Hamilton Elementary School is one of a handful of housing projects in Crescent City that is being developed as part of California’s statewide housing goals. | Photo by James Brooks}

A statewide proposal that has its origins in a Riverside County community and aims to enforce local authority over California’s housing and land-use initiatives put Crescent City’s mayor pro tem at odds with her colleagues on Monday. 

Citing the University of California and Harvard University’s Joint Center of Housing Studies, Candace Tinkler noted that the Golden State is home to six of the top metropolitan areas with the highest share of cost-burdened households. 

About one in three renters in the Los Angeles metropolitan area spends more than 50% of their post-tax household income on rent, she said, and as of last year there were 1,000 more homeless people in San Francisco than in all of Missouri.

“We have a problem in the State of California,” she said. “If communities were able to solve it on their own — they haven’t found the initiatives to do that.”

Tinkler cast the sole dissenting vote on a Resolution of the General Assembly of the League of California Cities to create a working group to lobby for a Constitutional amendment or other initiative that allows cities to determine how to implement statewide housing initiatives.

According to City Attorney Martha Rice, the proposed resolution comes from the Riverside County city of Murrieta. The cities of Banning, Calimesa, Canyon Lake, Moreno Valley, Norco, Torrence, San Jacinto and Temecula have provided letters of concurrence in support of Murietta’s resolution, according to the League of California Cities’ resolution packet. 

The “primary statewide organization representing California cities” will hold its annual conference in Anaheim next month with Councilman Jason Greenough representing Crescent City. On Monday he applauded the effort to combat what he says is state overreach.

“Any time we can claw back some of that authority to the local level is a positive in my opinion,” he said. “There has been a lot of state overreach in the recent past.”

According to Rice, the League of California Cities’ effort would preserve the state’s authority to make statewide housing goals and to enforce Constitutional and civil rights associated with housing requirements, building and safety standards and environmental protections. 

The proposed initiative or Constitutional amendment would protect cities from state requirements that conflict with their locally-adopted zoning or density requirements, Rice said. 

It comes as several housing developments are in the works for Crescent City. They include Harbor Point Apartments, a DANCO Communities senior housing facility that celebrated its ribbon cutting in February. 

Battery Point Apartments, a joint effort from Synergy Community Corporation and Step Forward Communities at Gary and E streets, is in the process of being constructed, though extensive rain in December 2025 and stricter seismic safety requirements have delayed progress.

Another significant development, a mixed-use residential and commercial complex called The Redwood Downtown is slated to replace the old Daly’s Department Store building at 3rd and J streets. Initially proposed through Community System Solutions, DANCO Communities has taken this project over. 

Since 29 out of the development’s 36 units would be rented to lower income households and it will be near a transit hub, The Redwood Downtown is exempt from any minimum parking requirements Crescent City would impose. Community System Solution’s initial proposal called for two off-street parking spaces.

Crescent City resident Doug Dye urged the City Council to support Murietta’s resolution calling Battery Point Apartments an open wound “that is directly due to the state density bonus law.” Dye also predicts that The Redwood Downtown would be a site of death, destruction, devastation and disaster because of its proposed location within the tsunami inundation zone.

“Push back on the state density bonus law,” he said. “I cheerlead for that every time I come down here. Those laws override local density standards or invalidate locally-adopted housing and land-use decisions and it would be nice to get some of that back.”

County resident David Garcia noted the ability to tailor Crescent City’s housing development to its needs might be worth fighting for. However, he said he’d hate to drop the ball on the progress the city has made to ensure its residents’ housing needs are met, but collaboration and compromise is never a bad thing.

“Our housing issue might not be as severe as maybe the state says, but I think this spirit of why they want to provide oversight comes from a good place. We do have high rents and we do have some homeless people in the community,” he said. “What I am afraid of is if we lose momentum or if we don’t have a City Council that I have so much faith in, it might create a vacuum where the strong voices, what I believe is the vocal minority who may have a more NIMBY-type attitude, which is not in my backyard (are heard).”

Greenough and Tinkler’s colleague Steve Shamblin, who was on the Planning Commission before being appointed to the City Council earlier this year, said he felt the city’s hands were tied with respect to Battery Point Apartments. Though he didn’t elaborate, Shamblin said he would have liked to see small changes made to the development, but “we really couldn’t do that.”

Shamblin also noted that while many cities are falling short of meeting their housing goals, Crescent City has made progress, but he feels that a working group may help come up with a better solution.

Tinkler said that while the state’s housing policies aren’t perfect, she’s skeptical about the proposal to create an initiative to further local control.

“I don’t think any community should be exempt from doing the right thing to be part of the solution for our state’s housing,” she said.