On Tuesday, February 24, a Concord City Council vote approved the City’s plan to rezone certain parcels in predominantly white, predominantly wealthy neighborhoods, in order to allow for increased density and affordability in these areas rich in community resources and opportunity. This rezoning program is a simple step that in many ways has been stripped down from its original vision and intention. Still, it is a crucial step towards allowing for more affordable housing in the Bay Area’s suburban communities, and its eventual implementation will reflect years of organizing by dedicated community members.
What is AFFH?
Concord committed to this rezoning program as part of its duty to “Affirmatively Further Fair Housing.” When the Fair Housing Act was passed in 1968, it directed the Federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to administer all of its programs in a manner that would Affirmatively Further Fair Housing (AFFH) throughout the United States. That means HUD was required not only to avoid or respond to specific instances of housing discrimination, but to take action that would proactively disrupt ongoing patterns of segregation and exclusion in the nation’s housing market. In 2015, during the Obama Administration, the then HUD Secretary Julián Castro implemented a new rule which extended the AFFH mandate beyond HUD and required all local agencies (like cities, counties, and public housing authorities) to take actions that would Affirmatively Further Fair Housing at the local level. With uncertainty about whether this local AFFH rule would withstand changes in federal administrations, California passed AB 686 in 2018, enshrining the duty of every California city and county to proactively work towards inclusive and equitable housing opportunities at the local level.
In particular, AB 686 requires that local jurisdictions describe their programs for AFFH within their Housing Elements. A Housing Element is a planning document, required by the Department of Housing and Community Development and updated every eight years, which lays out a City or County’s plan for meeting its State-mandated housing goals during the subsequent eight-year period. These goals have traditionally centered on providing an adequate amount of housing to serve the population. But since the passage of AB 686, Housing Elements must also describe how the jurisdiction will make sure housing is built in a manner that ensures integration and equitable access.
Campaign Origins and Concord’s Housing Element
The first time Concord was scheduled to update its Housing Element after the passage of AB 686 was in 2023. At that time, EBHO members and other community advocates recognized the power of the Housing Element as a tool we could organize around in the pursuit of housing justice. AB 686 required the City to create AFFH programs within the Housing Element and once the Housing Element is certified, a slew of other State laws require local agencies to implement those programs with sometimes severe consequences for failing to follow through. In close partnership with the Raise the Roof Coalition, EBHO members considered: How will we take advantage of this opportunity which arises once every eight years to ensure the City of Concord commits to bold actions addressing inequality in our housing system?
The coalition focused on two major underlying issues faced by Concord community members. First, the instability faced by low-income Concord renters after the recent expiration of local eviction moratoria enacted during the COVID-19 pandemic. While the short-lived protections tenants enjoyed had expired, they still faced dramatic rent increases that were not matched by rising wages. Second, the coalition noted Concord’s segregated housing opportunities. Almost all housing affordable to low-income community members is clustered in Concord’s downtown and along the Monument Corridor, with practically no opportunities for affordable housing in Concord’s Southern and Eastern neighborhoods. These more exclusive neighborhoods are, perhaps unsurprisingly, disproportionately white and wealthy when compared to Concord overall.
The racial and economic segregation we see in Concord is no accident. Most of the areas that are predominantly white and wealthy are zoned to only allow single-family homes. This means that by law, apartment buildings cannot be built in those parts of town. Historically, buying or even renting a single-family home is far more expensive than renting an apartment or buying a condo. An integrated community requires an integrated housing stock, something Concord lacks.
The Raise the Roof Coalition decided to organize while the Housing Element update was being written. This way, we wouldn’t have to advocate for housing justice policies in a vacuum. Instead, we successfully urged the City to commit to a roadmap of housing justice policies in one year, and could then follow up on those policies over the course of the next eight years, with the added strength of a legal commitment on the City’s part to pursue these policies.
At this stage, we were able to get the City to incorporate two particular programs into its Housing Element update (HEU): A tenant protections program, in which the City committed to begin drafting a rent stabilization and just cause for eviction ordinance within 90 days of publishing the HEU; and an AFFH rezoning program in which the City committed to begin rezoning parcels within exclusive neighborhoods to allow for more dense, affordable housing.
Concord finally passed its rent stabilization ordinance in April of 2024, the culmination of over eight years of tenant organizing in which utilizing the Housing Element process proved a crucial step. One year later, that ordinance was almost repealed. Powerful tenant organizing kept a scaled back version of the ordinance in place. (The struggle to establish and maintain tenant protections in Concord deserves its own blog post). Meanwhile, the work to implement Concord’s AFFH rezoning program continued.
Program Development and Advocacy
The specific requirements of Concord’s AFFH Rezoning program can be found within the City’s Housing Element in Program 8.6: AFFH Rezoning. Where some communities took up the mantle of AFFH rezoning by rezoning full neighborhoods or corridors, Concord’s program was more limited. The City committed itself to rezoning at least 20 acres, spread out across specific sites identified by the City Council, that would collectively have capacity for at least 1,000 homes within Concord’s exclusive, wealthy, and predominantly white neighborhoods.
The major work before Concord’s staff and City Council then, was to identify the most appropriate sites to be rezoned. The timeline laid out in the Housing Element was to begin identifying sites in December of 2023, gather community input and conduct an environmental impact report throughout 2024, and officially rezone a final selection of sites by December, 2024.
From the outset of the site selection process, the coalition realized the program would be met with considerable resistance. Residents of the wealthy neighborhoods where rezoning was proposed to take place organized swiftly and turned out en masse at community engagement meetings to oppose any rezoning in their neighborhoods. Turnout from this group was so substantial that community meetings were relocated from Concord’s City Council chambers to the Centre Concord Ballroom, an event space accommodating up to 400 people. Rhetoric opposing rezoning was often steeped in racist and classist language. Some speakers decried “those people” coming to “our neighborhoods” and others asked why we couldn’t build housing for “them” in other parts of town. Residents insisted they didn’t oppose affordable housing, they just didn’t want it here. The sentiments of the group were summarized by one speaker who shared “I just don’t want [affordable housing] in my backyard.”
In response, EBHO and our partners at the Raise the Roof Coalition worked hard to ensure these were not the only voices guiding the implementation process. We attended every community meeting and advocated for a program that, instead of seeking to offend the fewest people, sought the most significant impact on Concord’s patterns of segregation and affordability. We hosted webinars and teach-ins to inform community members about rezoning law and how to engage in Concord’s site selection process. Importantly, we also convinced the City to host one of its community input sessions in Spanish at the office of Monument Impact – a partner nonprofit serving immigrant and tenant communities in Concord.
We also engaged our partners in the nonprofit affordable housing development space to find out which sites, if selected, were most likely to actually be developed as affordable housing. Their expertise was necessary to ensure the rezoned sites didn’t go undeveloped after rezoning, but could actually bring affordable housing to new neighborhoods. By the end of this campaign, we had engaged the full breadth of EBHO’s coalition: nonprofit affordable housing developers, service providers, faith leaders, tenant unions, and of course, individual residents of Concord who demanded a more affordable home town.
A Long Term Campaign
Ultimately, the voices of opposition to Concord’s AFFH Rezoning Program were overwhelming, and they succeeded in delaying and setting the tone of the site selection process. With a few notable exceptions, many city leaders adopted the attitude that the City should select as few sites as possible and seek to implement the program in a manner that ruffled as few feathers as possible. For most city representatives, the goals of affordability and integration became afterthoughts, if they were thought of at all. Many of the most promising sites for affordable housing development were eliminated from consideration and the continuous demands for more community meetings by residents who opposed the project delayed final site selection well past the original 2024 deadline, all the way into 2026.
However, because we had organized so far in advance to incorporate this program into Concord’s Housing Element, the City was legally required to complete the rezoning program. At their meeting on January 27, 2026, the Council voted on a final plan for rezoning. The plan includes five sites to be rezoned and will meet the program goals of rezoning 20 acres to accommodate up to 1,000 new homes. This plan was a slight improvement over a previously proposed plan which included only three sites, one of which was likely only to be developed as market-rate housing. This final plan was officially approved one month later, on February 24, 2026.
This was an extraordinary campaign that demonstrated our coalition’s persistence, breadth, and capacity to set and follow through on long term goals. We remain committed to using the Housing Element planning process as a powerful tool for binding local governments to programs promoting equity, affordability, and housing justice.
The campaign also highlighted the intensity of opposition to affordable housing and the prevalence of Not-In-My-Backyard (NIMBY) attitudes in our communities. Ultimately, the final result of this process is not best understood as a total loss or a sweeping victory, but as a critical first step. There is no guarantee that any of the rezoned sites will actually be developed as affordable housing. But without this rezoning, these neighborhoods wouldn’t have even allowed for the development of the 1,000 new homes that are now possible there. That’s why AFFH Rezoning is best understood as a campaign about opportunity: Concord has now created the opportunity for up to 1,000 new homes. Next, we have to help those homes get built, and ensure they are affordable to anyone who wants to live there. Then, we work on creating the next 1,000 homes. In the meantime, we’ll have to work tirelessly to bring a majority of the community into alignment with the idea that every Concord resident has the right to a safe, stable, and affordable place to call home.
EBHO’s Contra Costa Committee meets monthly to plan campaigns for housing justice in Concord and across Contra Costa County. Contact EBHO’s Senior Policy Associate, Joey Flegel-Mishlove at joey@ebho.org, if you’re interested in getting involved in our Contra Costa advocacy work.