What's RHNA?

RHNA is a target number of housing to plan for in every community.

---

Before a Housing Element is updated, the state provides a target for how many homes to plan for in every city, town and county that is required by state law.

They look at several factors like how many jobs there are, how close people live to their jobs and schools, population, and how many new jobs and people we are expecting. It can help to think of it as:

the number of housing we need, minus the housing number we have, equals the number of homes we plan for.

They then assign each region a target number of how much housing to plan for called the Regional Housing Needs Allocation or RHNA (pronounced ‘ree-nah’). It is then up to our region, and in our case, the Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG) to decide how much of the regional need should be met by each city, town and county, based on their size, their jobs and how they are expected to grow by 2050, according to Plan Bay Area. To learn more about how they did this, visit here. 

Almost all cities in the Bay Area have a significantly higher target this RHNA cycle than in the past.