AGENDA PREVIEW: Twentynine Palms Planning Commission, March 17, 2026
A required housing report gives mixed news, and the City proposes formalizing the policy for street addresses on new construction
The Twentynine Palms Planning Commission meets Tuesday, March 17, at 5 pm at City Hall to take up two items: the city's annual housing progress report and a proposed policy on assigning addresses to undeveloped properties. These may seem routine after the tension of the last meeting held on March 3, but it is not without consequence.
The housing report tells a discouraging story. With fewer than four years left to meet state targets, only a fraction of the homes required to be built by the state of California have materialized, and low-income residents have been left out entirely. The addressing item may sound routine, but it has real consequences for vacant lot owners.
This will be the first meeting chaired by Max Walker, with Jim Krushat as Vice Chair. Commission Chair Walker held this role as recently as 2024, when he succeeded Jim Krushat in the lead spot on the dais.
The 94-page agenda packet is linked here. This will likely be a quick meeting—no need to pack a snack.
PUBLIC COMMENTS
After Planning Commission announcements, attendees can comment on items not on the agenda. Public comments on agenda items will be requested when the item is discussed. Fill out a green comment sheet for public or agenda item comments and hand it to the staff, usually sitting at the desk at the front of the room on the right side. Residents have three minutes to make comments.
You may also email comments to Planning Commission members and Community Development Director Keith Gardner and request that comments be read at the meeting.
CONSENT CALENDAR
1 Housing Element and General Plan Status Annual Reports
Ordinarily, the Consent Calendar consists of meeting minutes and procedural issues that need to be a matter of public record but don’t require discussion. Whether or not the Planning Commission pulls this item for further consideration, these reports include information that’s important for residents of Twentynine Palms to know about. (The Staff Report is linked here.)
A little background: Every eight years, the state of California tells each city how many new homes it needs to plan for broken down by income level. The goal is to make sure cities aren’t just building housing for wealthy residents while ignoring everyone else. This requirement is called the Regional Housing Needs Assessment, or RHNA.
The City of Twentynine Palms 2022-2029 Housing Element, prepared under former Community Development Director Travis Clark and City Manager Frank Luckino, set a goal of developing 1,105 housing units by 2029. Six separate drafts were submitted before State approval in February 2023.1
Housing is divided into categories — housing for people with very low incomes, low incomes, moderate incomes, and above moderate incomes. The City is expected to make progress across all of those categories, not just one.
State law requires cities to file an annual housing report tracking progress toward their housing goals. Once approved by City Council, this report goes to the State Office of Planning Research and the California Department of Housing and Community Development.
So how is Twentynine Palms doing? Not well. With the 2029 deadline less than four years away, the city still needs 889 more homes to meet its goal. The good news is that last year, 57 building permits were issued — but only 5 homes were actually built. And every one of those 57 permits was for moderate-income housing. Not a single permit went toward housing for low, very low, or extremely low-income residents.
The city’s struggles with this aren’t new. State housing officials had already flagged Twentynine Palms for falling behind on its planning obligations early in this cycle, before construction even began.
Since 2021 no very low income housing has been permitted or built
In 2023, 27 units were added
Out of 43 residential build permits at the City, only 24 units were constructed2
At the current pace, the math is stark: five homes built per year won’t get the city anywhere close to 1,047 by 2029. And with no affordable housing in the pipeline, the residents who need help the most aren’t being planned for at all.
Our 2024 coverage of the RHNA housing goal notes that “the top planning priority for the City of Twentynine Palms is listed as affordable housing. However no affordable housing projects are listed on the engineering spreadsheet of current projects (page 102) and little progress has been made in the last year except in the area of self build housing.”
A 90–100 unit affordable housing project on the City-owned parcel west of City Hall was under contract with Milestone Housing LLC from 2022 to 2024, and the City committed $1 million to the project. It went through conceptual design, had a site plan proposed, but never broke ground. As the Desert Trumpet reported here, the developer's conditions of approval expired in October 2024 with nothing built. It is unclear if the City is pursuing a new developer and also not evident—after a search through the City’s budget reports—where the $1 million allocated to the project has been transferred.
It isn’t required for the City’s housing goals to be discussed in a public forum. But it matters. This report gets sent to City Council and then forwarded to the state as a measure of the city’s progress. Ensuring affordable housing was once a priority for Twentynine Palms. Now it seems like an afterthought.
PUBLIC HEARINGS
Property Addressing
The second item on the March 17 agenda asks the Planning Commission to weigh in on a city policy about property addresses, specifically, when a vacant lot can get one. Right now, the city won’t assign an address to an empty parcel until the owner submits plans to build something on it. Staff is asking the Commission to help turn this practice into an official written policy.
One conundrum that needs to be worked out is that the Twentynine Palms Water District generally won’t install a water meter on a parcel that doesn’t have an address. So if you own a vacant lot and can’t afford to build yet, you also can’t get water service because you can’t get an address.
The one exception in the current system is for agricultural use. Landowners can get a water meter for a lot without an address if they sign a declaration that the water won’t be used to grow cannabis.3
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AI was used to research the Desert Trumpet archives for past stories.
The Desert Trumpet has reported frequently on the RHNA, including the State’s rejection of the 2021 housing element report. See also a report on the May 17, 2022 Planning Commission meeting. Here’s the 2023 report. This 2024 coverage notes that “the top planning priority for the City of Twentynine Palms is listed as affordable housing. However no affordable housing projects are listed on the engineering spreadsheet of current projects (page 102) and little progress has been made in the last year except in the area of self build housing.” See also an overview from last year.
Source is past Desert Trumpet reporting.
The City of Twentynine Palms bans all commercial cannabis activity and prohibits outdoor cultivation. This is consistent with the San Bernardino County framework but is codified separately in the city’s own municipal code. The City allows personal indoor cultivation of up to six plants by residents over the age of 21.