(photo courtesy of city of Beverly Hills)

With legislation on state housing tabled until next year and a recent report from Sacramento suggesting home sales are on a downward trend, the city of Beverly Hills plans to move forward to develop affordable housing and work with nonprofits to make it happen.

Beverly Hills Mayor John Mirisch said he and the city council will also pass a Rent Stabilization Ordinance to keep residents in the area.

“We’re looking within the city at locations [to work] with nonprofits to create affordable housing,” he said. “We’re pretty much a built-out city without a lot of new development. That leaves us constrained with doing what we can.”

One nonprofit organization Mirisch named was the West Hollywood Community Housing Corporation. Since 1986, it has focused on “building homes and providing services that move community members from insecurity to stability,” according to its mission statement.

“I would love to work with them,” Mirisch said. “They’re purely a nonprofit and they’re in a neighboring city.”

The Beverly Hills City Council approved on May 3 the establishment of a Rent Stabilization Commission composed of two landlord representatives, two tenant representatives, two residents who are neither a landlord nor a tenant and three alternate candidates from the other three categories, according to updated summary issued in July.

Mirisch also responded to a report issued Monday by the state Legislative Analyst’s Office on home sales trends. The report suggested that overall statewide sales had dropped. Mirisch said the dip does not reduce the need for affordable housing.

“Let’s say the prices go down slightly – they’re not at the affordable levels we need,” he said. “[We need to] look at ways to create permanent affordable housing with nonprofit developers and make sure they get the funding.”

In the past, Mirisch has been critical of affordable housing legislation, once claiming in a previous interview that Sacramento legislators attempted to use the affordable housing crisis to eliminate single-family zoning with Senate Bill 50.

“To blanket an area up with zoning may be great for Wall Street, but it won’t do much for affordable housing,” Mirisch said. “We need to have policies for developers [as] a leg up. If we want to create affordable housing, we need to create policy rather than smokescreen some bogus justification that the market is not going to solve the issue. Building Porsches is not going to build Priuses.”

Authored by state Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco), SB 50 would allow higher density zoning near areas around public transportation. Because the city of Beverly Hills sits close to transit corridors, it would become subject to new zoning. The cities of Beverly Hills, West Hollywood and Los Angeles each opposed the bill, though it received support from Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti and Gov. Gavin Newsom.

SB 50 was tabled by the Senate Appropriations Committee until 2020.

The next city council study session will be held on Aug. 6 at 2:30 p.m. in Beverly Hills City Hall, 455 N. Rexford Dr.