How do we know how much housing we need?

RHNA (Regional Housing Needs Assessment – pronounced ‘ree-nah’) is a target number of housing to plan for in every community.

Before a Housing Element is updated, the state Department of Finance provides a target for how many homes to plan for in each region of California, as required by state law. Doing this work is essential to addressing California’s shortage of over 2.5 million homes, as identified in the Statewide Housing Plan.

The State looks at several factors like the number of jobs in each region, 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 State then assigns each region a target number of how much housing to plan for called the Regional Housing Needs Allocation or RHNA. 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 population, number of jobs, and how the community is expected to grow by 2050, according to Plan Bay Area. To learn more about how ABAG did this, visit this page.

Almost all cities in the Bay Area were assigned a significantly higher target for the 2023-2031 planning period than in the past. Newark’s target for this cycle is 1,874 new homes, compared to 1,078 in the last period. In the current period, Newark has been assigned a slightly smaller percentage of low- and very low-income housing units to plan for than Alameda County.

City of Newark RHNA 6 Housing Allocations for Planning

Percentages rounded to the nearest full number.

Income Category	Newark Units	Percent of Newark Unit Allocation	Alameda County Units	Percent of Alameda County Unit Allocation
Very Low Income (up to 50% AMI)	464	25%	23,608	27%
Low Income (51-80% AMI)	268	14%	13,591	15%
Moderate Income (81-120% AMI)	318	17%	14,438	16%
Above Moderate Income (121 AMI+)	824	44%	37,362	42%
Total	1,874	100%	88,999	100%