California Planning Grants for Affordable Housing Development

In 2019, the state of California launched the SB2 Planning Grant program aimed at addressing the state’s housing shortage and accelerating housing cost challenges. The main objectives of this program are to accelerate the housing approval and production process while also increasing affordable housing options, particularly for lower and moderate income households.

Local governments around the world are deploying community engagement to better understand housing needs in their cities, plan housing development projects, and stem the growing global affordable housing challenge. Our team at Bang the Table has started to work with California cities to deploy a digital community engagement program that will support their housing planning and development projects and further meet the requirements of this grant.

Grant funds can be used on the following activities for cities across the state:

• Updates to general plans, community plans, specific plans, local planning related to implementation of sustainable communities strategies, or local coastal plans.
• Updates to zoning ordinances.
• Environmental analyses that eliminate the need for project-specific review.
• Local process improvements that expedite local planning and permitting.

We’ve seen digital community engagement for planning projects broaden reach for better representation from community, keep community informed as projects progress, and capture demographic data that makes community-informed decision making easier for city officials.

To further support this important initiative in the state of California, we’re offering a starter package to launch your dedicated community engagement portal and launch your housing planning projects. The package includes access to eight online engagement tools through the EngagementHQ platform, strategy and training sessions to expand engagement capacity for your teams, and one project finder widget that can be installed on your corporate website to drive visitors to your engagement portal.