Amending a certified Housing Element — Menlo Park even knows how to do it.

Companion opinion: Requirements, priorities, and the feasibility question at Menlo Park’s downtown plazas.

A certified Housing Element is not cast in concrete. A finding of substantial compliance by the California Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD) merely reflects the agency’s judgment about a slate of proposed sites at a moment in time; state law asks a jurisdiction to keep enough feasible capacity in place to meet its Regional Housing Needs Allocation (RHNA) across the planning period — not to defend those exact parcels forever or freeze them as irreplaceable. So, when sites in a certified plan are no longer feasible, the amendment process lets a city swap them for other locations that still pencil out, without reopening the whole element.

That pattern runs through many of the communities charted in this report: Carmel-by-the-Sea amended after its City Council directed staff to find alternatives to sites it had deemed unsuitable; the City of San Mateo amended to settle litigation over inventory sites that could not deliver the units credited to them; and Portola Valley went through a rezoning cure after HCD revoked its compliance for earlier incomplete zoning work.

Even Menlo Park has been through the amendment process once during the current Housing Element cycle — proof that it knows how the process works and what it takes to secure certification of an amended plan. But its single amendment to date — adopted January 23, 2024 (Resolution No. 6888), amending the element first adopted January 31, 2023 — earned certification after a set of HCD-requested conforming and monitoring-implementation changes that were more process than substance. HCD approved that revision, which proposed no site substitutions, and found the amended element in substantial compliance in its March 20, 2024 letter. Whether the City should use that same process to reconsider its downtown parking-plaza priority sites — sites this publication and other critics consider ill-suited to the housing, and that the City maintains are feasible and appropriate — is taken up in the companion opinion, Requirements, priorities, and the feasibility question.

The grounds driving amendments in communities neighboring Menlo Park, and across the state, cluster into three patterns:

• Rezoning-deadline cures (Rocklin, San Bernardino, Portola Valley, Foster City), where HCD had flagged incomplete rezoning under specific numbered programs;
• Site-infeasibility swaps (Carmel; Costa Mesa); and
• One litigation settlement (the City of San Mateo).

Before looking at those in detail, one caveat belongs up front: HCD does not publish a consolidated, text-searchable list of “approved amendments” — its Power BI compliance dashboard tracks status but does not distinguish an original adoption from a later amendment. This roster was therefore assembled jurisdiction by jurisdiction from HCD letters, city records, and CEQAnet filings, which makes it a dated snapshot, not a census. Two dates worth watching: the January 31, 2026 three-year rezoning benchmarks HCD has applied to Mountain View and Campbell, and Half Moon Bay’s dual HCD and Coastal Commission review.

Further context helps, because “amendment” as a category can cover a single procedural fix like Menlo Park’s, a multi-year rezoning cure under active HCD enforcement like Rocklin’s, and a live, contested growth-control dispute like Half Moon Bay’s. Any individual entry here should be read against its own underlying HCD letter before it is relied on for legal, journalistic, advocacy, or policy purposes.

Another question worth separating out is how much of this activity stems from the Builder’s Remedy versus jurisdictions correcting infeasible sites on the merits. The Builder’s Remedy — Gov. Code §65589.5(d), part of the Housing Accountability Act — lets a developer bypass local zoning on a qualifying affordable project once a jurisdiction’s element falls out of compliance, and stays available until compliance, including completed rezoning, is restored.

Checking each confirmed roster entry against that standard, none appears to have been triggered by a filed Builder’s Remedy application: Carmel’s and Costa Mesa’s changes were driven by identified site infeasibility; Rocklin, San Bernardino, Portola Valley, and Foster City were rezoning-deadline cures against a compliance clock; the City of San Mateo’s was a litigation settlement; and Half Moon Bay is a useful negative case — its Planning Commission was told in March 2026 that the City’s position is that the Builder’s Remedy does not apply within the Coastal Zone. Menlo Park does have pending Builder’s Remedy applications on file, including the 80 Willow Road project, but those exist independently of its Housing Element amendment.

A final note before the roster: “infeasibility-driven” and “Builder’s-Remedy-driven” are different legal postures and conflating them overstates how adversarial this amendment activity was.

Roster — approved amendments

Confirmed against HCD letters and city records as of July 24, 2026. Not a complete statewide census.

Costa Mesa (Orange) adopted a local amendment 03/17/2026 — removing 17 opportunity sites and adding 2, filed as a CEQAnet Notice of Exemption 03/24/2026 under SB 131 — but no independent HCD compliance letter exists for that action and the City is within its 180-day No-Net-Loss window (Gov. Code §65863), so it is listed separately rather than among the approved amendments.

Roster — pending amendments (Bay Area & South Bay)

Status as of July 24, 2026. “Pending” includes draft/comment stage, HCD review, and post-violation cure periods.

At a glance

The amendment process (Gov. Code §65585)