Residents feel betrayed after Carmel’s mayor does a 180 on the city’s housing plan.

A letter from Carmel Mayor Dale Byrne to the California Department of Housing and Community Development that would upend a community effort to amend the city’s housing element sent shock waves through the village recently, just as HCD is about to rule on the amendment.

“People felt personally hurt,” says Victoria Beach, a co-founder of Affordable Housing Alternatives, or AHA for short. The group has been working collaboratively with city staff, with input from HCD, for over a year to craft the amendment that seeks a creative solution to a state mandate to add 349 housing units to the city, including 149 low-income units.

Byrne was part of AHA before he was elected in 2024. Last November, he and the rest of the council gave verbal approval to move the amendment forward to HCD. Byrne indicated at that time he had concerns but said the city had no other option.

The original housing element, certified in 2024, included a requirement that the city issue a request for proposals by December 2025 for a housing development on at least one of the city’s two parking lots, the north Sunset Center lot or the Vista Lobos lot. Alarmed that it would result in a large low-income project concentrated on one lot, AHA members sought to find another way.

The members paid for a consultant, a top expert in California housing elements, and spent hundreds of hours doing research and crafting a multi-pronged plan that includes transforming hotel rooms into apartments, encouraging accessory dwelling units, building above commercial sites and adding housing to church properties. Beach says HCD has been touting the plan to other cities as an example of how to tailor the state housing law to fit unique situations.

In a March 20 letter to HCD, Byrne argued that parts of the AHA plan will not work and makes the case for pursuing an RFP to allow developers to build on the parking lots, presenting the lots as “the only locations capable of addressing both our housing needs and our long-standing parking constraints,” by integrating underground parking with development that would benefit senior citizens and workers.

“By removing city-owned sites from this amendment before [the AHA] approach is tested, we risk closing the door on a once-in-a-generation opportunity,” he wrote.

An attorney representing an unnamed client, Peter Prows of the San Francisco firm Briscoe, Prows, Kao, Ivester & Bazell, wrote to HCD that the city has “no substantial evidence to support a finding” that the hotel conversion plan will work. He urged HCD to find the amendment inconsistent with state housing law.

Residents say the two letters combined leave them questioning Byrne’s motives and fear that the push to keep the RFP process for city lots will benefit developers. Byrne denies he’s trying to benefit anyone other than the city itself.

In the meantime, the amended housing element was sent to HCD on March 27 for final approval.