Business View Magazine | January 2020

218 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE JANUARY 2020 residential development,” Lopez explains. “The housing market really lagged in the last couple of years. Because of the recession, there were only a couple of large builders that were left – KB Home was one of them, and we had a local, non-profit development company that built farm worker housing – the Coachella Valley Housing Coalition. But when they were done with their projects, the only thing we saw was one large affordable housing apartment complex and then, we had about two years of real lag in housing development until the last 12 months, when we’ve seen four major development projects take off, including D.R. Horton, the nation’s largest builder, who has now purchased two developments in the city and they’re building out what were, previously, unfinished communities. So that’s a really positive sign for us; with all the jobs that we’re creating, I think it’s fueling the housing industry.” Another contributor to the city’s housing boom was its recent award of a grant from the state’s Affordable Housing and Sustainable Communities Program (AHSC). Administered by the Strategic Growth Council and implemented by the Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD), the AHSC Program funds land-use, housing, transportation, and land preservation projects to support infill and compact development that reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. “That’s $15 million to do an urban, mixed-use project that includes 115 apartments and a transit hub for the central bus transfer station in our downtown,” Lopez states. “We updated our General Plan in 2015 to create an urban center designation for the downtown that allows very high-density residential in combination with commercial,” he adds. “That set the framework for that and we’re in the process of updating our zoning codes and districts in the downtown to accomplish the next step of that implementation strategy. In addition to that, the State of California is really pushing for all of that to occur because they’ve created all of these incentives and environmental review streamlining