Planning Commission Work Session   9/27/2022

How's it going?

A little bit better?

How are we sounding?

How's this sound?

Excellent.

Welcome all.

I see 5.30 for the joint Charlottesville City Council and Planning Commission work session on the comprehensive planning process, specifically the rezoning.

The first one, maybe the last one?

At this time, I think Mr. Freese, are you kicking us off here?

Very good.

I'm watching that commissioner like a hawk.

Just daggers in the eyes.

All right.

Ready for me to go?

Please.

All right.

Good evening, Chairman Sola-Yates, Mayor Snook, and members of the Planning Commission and City Council.

As you all know, my name is James Freese, Director of Neighborhood Development Services.

and we're excited to be here tonight.

This is a big milestone for this project.

It marks the end of a first phase of the zoning rewrite project and the beginning of the next.

And of course, as you guys all know, this is the third part of our Lyle Ball Seville Plans Together program, which began with our affordable housing plan, which was adopted in March of 2021, the comprehensive plan adopted last November, and of course today we're working on the zoning rewrite to implement both of those plans.

So our agenda for tonight is simple.

My goal is to go through this presentation really quickly because ultimately our goal is to listen and discuss this work with you guys.

I do want to take a moment to introduce our team that's with us here tonight.

We've got Jenny Koch online from RHI.

We have Lee Einswaller here in the room.

There we go.

And Christy Dodson, both from Code Studio.

Christy is online as well.

Philip Cash and Callie Seltzer from HRNA online.

Code Studio are, of course, our zoning experts, and HRNA are affordable housing experts.

And then here in the room we also have myself, Missy Creasy, Deputy Director of NDS, and Lisa Robertson, City Attorney.

So the agenda for tonight, again, is just an overview of the report.

So we can go ahead.

Thanks, Patrick.

Next slide.

So very simply, our goal for tonight is to answer your questions, get your feedback on these documents that we've been working on and we've been talking about over the course of the summer, and most importantly, to get your go-ahead to move on to the drafting of the ordinance and map.

So, as we all know, we're not adopting zoning tonight.

That's not the purpose of tonight.

And therefore, we don't really need to resolve any details.

What we do need to do, though, is get the overview question for you guys tonight is, are we generally on the right track as far as adopting zoning that will advance us in the implementation of our comprehensive plan and affordable housing plan?

Slide, please.

So back in June, we released the Zoning Diagnostic and Approach Report.

This provided an overview of the different ideas, strategies, approaches that we're proposing to bring our zoning into consistency with our adopted comprehensive plan.

Slide, please.

Then later in August we released the inclusionary zoning analysis.

This analysis looked at the creation of a set of inclusionary zoning recommendations, basically to include affordable housing in development as it happens.

It also included an analysis we're calling the rate of change analysis, which is looking at, in particular, how the housing market might respond to this new zoning within the general residential and medium intensity residential districts.

So over the course of this summer, slide please.

We've been involved in a lot of different activities.

It's really been our summer of zoning.

And I want to start by thanking everybody who became involved in this process over the course of the summer.

We had a little over 200 people come out to our open house event at the pavilion back in June.

We've done a whole range of events.

There's a lot of information here about the education materials we've done, the various communications methods, the in-person activities, that open house, also our door-to-door work in different neighborhoods, and pop-up tables, as shown here in the picture, at a number of events.

If you'd like more details on all the different things we've been engaged in this summer, any questions in that regard, Jenny will be happy to answer.

later on in the evening.

And, of course, we got feedback in a lot of different ways, both online and in person.

In particular, we did a number of neighborhood and group meetings.

And for those, I want to thank the organizers of those for inviting us into their communities to give us their feedback and ideas.

Slide, please.

So a lot of different ideas.

Obviously I didn't try and summarize them all here, but you did get a comprehensive summary of everything that we heard, as well as in the appendices, the actual every single written comment.

So you can peruse those as you like.

But some of the things that we've highlighted, I think this is one of the really important ideas is that across the board,

No matter what one's perspective is on the details of this work, there was widespread support for the idea that we need more affordable housing and more housing options here in the city.

We also had questions about the need for clarity around what we mean when we say house-scaled, concerns and interest in seeing more around tree preservation, historic preservation, stormwater management, et cetera, parking, lots of issues there.

A significant emphasis on the connection between zoning and climate change.

Desire to see more focus on multimodal transportation options and how we can promote and support those with the zoning ordinance and a lot of conversation around the particular inclusionary zoning proposals that we made and there will be more conversations about that certainly this evening as we go forward.

Slide, please.

Slide.

So I'm just going to briefly go over the contents of the report, just kind of hitting the major sections.

I trust everyone's had an opportunity to review that in detail.

The residential district testing was our method for testing potential zoning tools for infill residential development, looking at the general residential and medium intensity residential areas in particular.

The scenarios that were developed for that were meant to illustrate the maximum development potential.

Understanding that that's not necessarily the likely development of any given lot because we know there are always going to be physical, financial considerations that will limit the development of any individual lot kind of in the real world as it were.

There's some information here about some of the things we learned in that analysis, including the idea of dividing up zoning districts into house-scale districts versus medium-scale districts, creating variable requirements for separate districts for what we've identified as the sensitive areas within the comprehensive plan.

I'm not going to read all of these, but you guys certainly get the idea of the different

ideas that came out of that work.

Slide, please.

Relative to what we updated and you guys got the updated pages in your packets, we added new scenarios dealing with curvilinear and cul-de-sac streets.

something we heard clearly from the Planning Commission, so we hope those were useful.

And then we provided some clarification on what it means for a building to be house-scaled, and I'm sure that's something we can talk about further this evening.

Slide, please.

No key questions for this section.

Slide, please.

And again.

So the next section of the report was about better zoning standards.

This covers a wide range of topics, right, from

how we measure height to setbacks.

There's the administration.

How the ordinance would be administered is included in this section.

Overall, what's very clear is our existing zoning ordinance is really built on a greenfield development model, right?

It's geared towards that type of development and responds well to that.

But as we know, most of the development we see here in the city is infill and redevelopment activity, and we really need a zoning ordinance

that is geared towards that type of development and responds to the types of issues that arise when you're doing infill development.

So development on tight urban lots or redevelopment of existing properties.

One of the things I like to highlight here as well is the importance of the ease of use of our new zoning ordinance.

We want a zoning ordinance that's readily accessible to the average resident of the city so that people can pick this up and understand what can I do with my property or what can happen in my neighborhood or down at the end of the street.

Slide, please.

So there's a number of updates related to this section.

We clarified that the existing tree policies within our zoning ordinance would largely stay in place, clarified what it means for zoning standards to be flexible in order to support more housing development, and then wanted to make a very clear statement that our historic preservation rules within the zoning ordinance, the historic districts, the conservation districts, are remaining untouched.

We're not proposing any changes to those as they exist today.

This is also where two of the three key questions we've identified for discussion tonight can be found.

The first of these has to do with parking minimums.

I will read these again when we get to the end of the presentation, so I'm not going to read them now, but looking at the issue of reducing or eliminating parking minimums.

and then looking at the issue of subdivision and in particular what are the lot sizes the minimum lot sizes required in association with the subdivision of property and the city or what would what would what would be proposed so we'll be digging into both of those questions this evening side please

So and then perhaps the most significant part of the report and the follow-on report on inclusionary zoning was this issue of zoning for more housing affordability.

The diagnostic and approach report released in June really took a high-level look at this.

The inclusionary zoning really digs in deeper because it proposes the actual inclusionary zoning program as we've proposed it to date.

Sure.

Sure.

Does anyone have questions?

Just wanted to take that pause.

Okay.

Broadly, coming out of the affordable housing plan and the comprehensive plan, we're really looking at the five zoning tools on the right, which is allowing more units on every lot that's zoned for a single unit today, allowing more rental and ownership options, identifying and creating zoning incentives to increase affordability, the inclusion of your zoning ordinance itself, and then a toolkit to avoid displacement in at-risk communities.

Slide, please, Patrick.

The inclusionary zoning recommendation that's included in that report calls for a mandatory inclusionary zoning component.

So this is a requirement that for projects that are 10 or more units in size, 10 percent of those units must be affordable at a 60 percent of area median income level.

for a term of 99 years or effectively in perpetuity and that those units must be effectively indistinguishable from the other units within the project.

We're proposing this for the entirety of the city, not excluding any districts and not varying in relation to districts.

So that is both all the residential districts and the mixed-use districts.

So anywhere where there's residential allowed.

I should note it's for 10 units or more.

Where there's nine or fewer units allowed, it would be voluntary.

And then the incentives tied to this are a 25 percent density bonus for projects that are 10 units or greater, nine or less is a two unit bonus in the general residential and a four unit bonus in the medium intensity and then a parking reduction of up to 50 percent.

What's important, though, is whether or not you can accommodate that density bonus or those parking reductions on your site, whether you choose to use the parking reduction, whether you can accommodate the additional density on your site, the affordability requirement is mandatory as we are proposing this.

Slide, please.

So these are examples that show how that would look.

You see the five unit project on the right where it's a three unit project at its base with an additional unit plus an additional affordable unit.

Nine units, same basic concept and then the 60 unit development on the far right.

Side please.

We aren't proposing any updates to this section at this time.

Slide, please.

But in terms of key questions, there's a really important question here around this, an idea that's come in through the community comments and was included within a petition, generally proposing the idea that in the general residential area, up to medium intensity

medium intensity densities be allowed across the entire of the general residential area where all of the additional units are affordable at some level.

We will again come back to this question.

Side, please.

So where we are in the process, this is really the culmination of this first phase.

Now we move into drafting the zoning ordinance.

We're anticipating in the January timeframe to be releasing a draft zoning ordinance document and map and then entering into a review and comment phase for that work with the goal ultimately of having a final draft of the zoning ordinance and zoning map in front of the Planning Commission and City Council in the spring of 2023.

So go ahead and go to the next slide, please, Patrick.

So what I'm going to propose here is if there's any clarifying questions on what I've presented, I'm happy to answer those or poll my team members to answer those questions.

Just a question on that last slide we saw about the schedule.

I think previously you talked about having three different drafts of a third of the ordinance.

No, it's not a change to that.

Okay.

Mr. Mitchell?

Yeah.

Can you talk a little bit about yield on cost?

It looks like for a project to be feasible, we need 6.7 to 7 percent yield cost.

How exactly is that calculated?

By that I mean over what number of years?

I am right here.

Thank you.

When we looked at yield on cost, we were really looking for a for sale property that's pretty

For a rental property, we applied a capitalization rate, so basically valuing the net operating income on the property, so how much revenue it generates.

So if you were going to sell, imagining you the property owner, we're going to sell it, what would you make at that sale?

So yield on cost is really more applicable for the for sale position, but we also look at an internal rate of return and

Cap rates when we're looking on a rental properties.

So that is event-driven as opposed to a operating yield, a month-to-month operating yield, event-driven, the event being the actual sale of the property.

That's what I thought.

That's what you said, though.

The event-driven issue is a 2x on equity.

The 2X multiple in equity, but yield on cost is what I'm trying to get at.

Two separate products, right?

One would be rental and one would be... Well, yeah, I'm thinking yield on cost would be on rental, would it?

Yes.

Sorry.

So the way to look at that is the price to return rate.

So if you're satisfied with a 5% cap rate, you're willing to invest 20 times that amount to get that property.

At 10%, you're willing to invest 10% of that amount.

So an investor looks to get a 7% return once they've got themselves sorted out the costs in and that's what they've actually put in.

That's not a bad number.

Chair, I have a question.

Please.

So one of the things I'm trying to figure out is how AMI, we keep running into this affordable housing issue of definition.

We keep talking about AMI, but for many people that's very hard to translate into cost of apartment.

I know, so one thing I was looking at, at 60% AMI currently, one person's income is $39,360.

One third of that income is what they should be spending on housing, including utilities.

So that means the total amount that they should be spending on a property for one person

at 60% AMI, the rent plus utilities should be no more than $1,181.40.

Now, questions around that are what utilities are we including?

How are we going to enforce that?

if these are rental properties in particular.

It's easier to enforce that when it comes to sellable properties because that's a one-time set amount.

But if we're looking at rental properties, we are going to have to have people in place to make sure that is being enforced for the next 99 years.

has to monitor the requirements.

So anytime the city's investing money in affordable housing, someone needs to be monitoring that.

Now, a lot of times there's somebody else investing in the property, so you can have agreements and share the monitoring of costs.

For inclusionary zoning, generally you won't be able to because these are private transactions.

In terms of the calculation on the affordable rent, yes,

Johnnie the way the math seems right, I don't have the rent calculation right in front of me.

For a one bedroom, we don't necessarily map it to a single person, so those rents aren't going to match up exactly.

Utilities, you can look at, actually your housing authority has to put out utility allowance numbers, so you can use that as the backup numbers.

Partially, as you guys write policies and procedures for this,

or as the city establishes policies and procedures, you can establish how you want to consider utilities, but you will update the rents for all of your affordable units every year and how much rents can go up for all your affordable units every year.

Now you can peg it to long-income housing tax credit or other federal standards so you don't have to do these calculations yourself.

That's probably what we'll end up recommending in the administrative policy, but rents do change for affordable properties annually.

I would just also add

You know, referring to the administrative costs, our previous recommendations when we did some work on the CAF in a similar way say that, you know, additional monitoring is going to be needed for affordability covenants, particularly long, like practically in perpetuity covenants, because that falls on such a small number of staff right now.

I just wanted to make sure that I was going around the right way because, again, we talk about AMI, but that is really hard for many people to understand, to translate over to the actual dollars and cents of rent and utility costs.

And I'm assuming, though I haven't, that we are also recommending then that we are following this with VHDA guidelines that one-third of the AMI

is given towards rent and utility costs.

And not to saying, but that additional caveat is put in there so that it can be translatable to how much someone out of pocket is spending.

Yes.

Thank you.

Thank you, James.

We've talked enough.

Yeah, I guess one, I mean, is it a, this sort of free-for-all's okay, I guess?

Yeah, okay.

So one question I had, and I guess it was in the IZ presentation, so all of the analysis that went in, very cleverly done, very thoughtfully done, about 10,000 parcels, and I guess this was basically with the sort of general residential approach,

Yeah, that's generally the expectation.

Yeah, so surprisingly low, it's going to get even lower.

That's the top end of what we think the number will be.

So when we do that analysis, we look at

So whether it's actually financially feasible, but there's all kinds of reasons why you won't see that happen as much.

And if you look at other places that have allowed for middle density, they don't see the volume of development you might expect.

And that's one, homeowners not making financially rational choices and still choosing to do single family even if there's a way to make more money doing a multifamily development.

development capacity to actually do it.

So I'm sure it feels like there's a lot of developers in Charlottesville, but this would be many, many, many, many projects, hundreds of projects.

And just the development capacity in many markets to take on these smaller kinds of projects is generally we find that lags the market actually allowing.

And then there are numerous other aspects about sites.

So we couldn't look at topography issues.

The other thing that goes on is that it's really that's tied pretty closely to the rate that homeowners are and homeowners investors and owner occupants are selling their homes right now.

It's not a huge

There isn't a huge when you up zone like this, and even when there is a creation of additional value, there's not a huge shift in homeowner behavior.

Again, for the same reason I said earlier is homeowners aren't economically rational.

They are making decisions based on when their kids are graduating from school or if they're going through a divorce or, frankly, when it passes away and then they're ready to move to a different house.

Even when there's massive appreciation of property that doesn't tend to shift

dramatically shift the rate people sell the houses.

So I guess one takeaway I took away from that was simply that I think the sort of concern that many residents have that all of a sudden the whole city is going to be infill developed I think is not going to happen unless I'm missing something.

Right.

As you'll hear me often note is a lot of our objectives broadly within the comprehensive plan are going to be met not just with zoning but with other activities, other things we might do that might at the end of the day be more important than the zoning.

But in terms of increasing production numbers, you guys already know that requires city investment.

That's something that you guys are already wrestling with and dealing with.

Right.

That has not been, that is correct.

That is what our analysis shows.

That has been how this has played out in other places.

The pace of change is real.

This is real change, but it's not the radical change in their neighborhood that people might be afraid of.

Additional questions?

Please.

A quick question I had was I saw that we probably still have to do the cash-in-lieu option.

Is that a state requirement?

Philip, this was a question about the fee-in-lieu.

I was going to say that it's generally best practices, inclusionary zoning, that you do that.

I'm not sure if state law requires it, but it's a good thing to have, and you can set the fee high if you want to encourage people to build on site, and you can set the fee a little lower if you want to generate revenue to put into other projects.

There might be at some point, and you can change over time, there might be at points where you really want to generate the revenue so you can pay for additional vouchers or a homeless shelter or other housing priorities.

But where you set the fee really drives the behavior.

It doesn't have to be a floor area ratio calculation.

Okay.

There's a number of different formulas out there that, I don't know, Philip, I should let you speak to this.

You've got it, James.

Everything you said is correct.

You can do it as an FAR, but you don't have to.

You can do it on a unit, you can tie it to bed.

A lot of places we've done it, we've dyed it to a number of bedrooms so that we don't create perverse incentives about building small units or only building certain types of units.

Mr. Mitchell?

Don't know if it is appropriate to talk about this now or wait.

I'll throw it out there and you can decide.

The recommendation still suggests that we need to move critical slopes out of the zoning into the water protection chapter.

If we do that, the question I've got is what will be the role of the Planning Commission and what will be the role of Council?

And the reason that I worry about that is I still believe that we should still make recommendations and council should still make the determination of whether the community benefits more from allowing a steep slope to be disturbed as opposed to go undisturbed.

And the example that leaps immediately to mind is the Housing Authority in South Bird Street.

So where are we on that?

Well, so, and my immediate response is I look forward to hearing from your colleagues as well about that.

I mean, our perspective is it also depends on what your objective is with regard to critical slopes.

As we've proposed at this point in time, looking at the critical slope

policy both as it is written and as it's implemented.

Our inclination is to shift that to a staff responsibility and make it part effectively of the site plan review and stormwater review process.

Effectively, it's operating today as a special use permit.

in nature because it goes to Planning Commission and City Council.

So now if there are elements of what is accomplished by the critical slopes ordinance that we want to roll into the zoning ordinance, we could consider that as well.

I think I know where a lot of these guys are, but the worry is that most of the development that we're going to do is going to be infilled, and most of the development that we're going to do are going to be really difficult places to develop.

I want to go back to the affordable housing for a minute, especially with

with the acceptance of housing choice vouchers.

Well, I know legally everyone in the state of Virginia has to accept housing choice vouchers.

We all know that there's ways of getting around that.

One of the biggest two ways are background checks and credit checks, as well as making your renters pay first, last, and one month rent security deposit or two months rent security deposit.

I, so two part answer.

One, I'm not a lawyer and I do not know what's legal in Virginia.

putting the law, whether it's illegal in Virginia or not to do something like that, to the side for just a second, but right now it's important.

There are examples of inclusionary zoning policies where there are significant rules about how you screen and select tenants.

And that's generally addressed more on the administrative side, but you can set up all kinds of standards for both not allowing for credit checks, but also

frankly, not having the normal property manager be the one screening the tenants for these particular properties.

Now, any changes you make in that space, you want to make sure that you have a good administrative system to make it work because when it's not well designed, you end up having units sit empty, which actually is a real financial harm to the developer and doesn't advance our goal of affordable housing.

So there are examples of that working well and not well.

We're happy when we get to the more administrative side, we're happy to share those side, but

In other places, I don't know about the law in Virginia, but there are plenty of examples of assigning it over to housing authorities or assigning it over to nonprofits or assigning it over to specific entities who are going to manage the screening and the selection and filling those elements.

And sometimes if done well, that's good for the developer because this is a different segment of the population than they're probably marketing the rest of their units.

And they have to have a different marketing plan and a different outreach and a different screening process.

And that's a real administrative cost for them.

If you can fill their units and give them tenants they feel generally comfortable to good tenants.

I just I think this is an opportunity that we can look at some of that that we normally don't consider when because again it's fair market it's fair market.

The state says is pretty lenient when it comes to saying you can deny things on a lot of you can find loopholes pretty easily to deny somebody.

And unless it's a VHDA or a LIHTC property, you can still be a full-time student and qualify.

Mr. D'Oronzio?

Yeah, so, I mean, there are tools in the toolbox that aren't generally used because they're awkward, but if you start combining a couple of them, I think you can address some of what you're dealing with.

For example, it's an equal credit violation straight up to consider the source of the money.

so there are and if you're using credit checks as a workaround which a lot of people do and it's easy to prove that they do you can smack them pretty hard under that unfortunately that requires in most cases a state you know you've got to sort of piggyback on federal law that that

and they're stingy about what they allow states to enforce and not and under what circumstances.

That's not really mine.

I accommodate equal credit from a different direction.

On the issue of vouchers as part of the inclusionary zoning program,

I would definitely want us to explore the kind of pilot program I think it's New Haven Connecticut did where they paired vouchers with their inclusionary zoning program I believe in New Haven it was similar to us they had 10% of units required to be affordable and then on top of that 5% had to go to voucher holders and

and their housing authority had a first right of refusal, not of our ownership, but of who the tenant would be.

And I think that would just have a huge benefit of getting the AMI level of who's benefiting from this down to zero to 30 percent, help us get through our existing wait list for vouchers.

And

I'm sorry, can we just add one real quick?

Yeah, so I just want to jump on what Mr. Cash said about kind of bringing that verification of income and that, like, marketing to get a pool of tenants in-house.

I think there's a lot of advantages to that.

We see something similar in the county where they're starting to create a wait list because 50% of their affordable units were timing out because they couldn't find a buyer and they kind of reverted to market rate.

So I guess the question is, at what point in this process do we create those rules and that in-house office and expertise to make something like that happen?

Is it when we're done and we're ready to start implementing this,

Happy to respond.

I think we need to consider the administration part now.

We've made previous recommendations and you've been, I think, in the affordable housing plan about sort of that on-ramp to staffing up for the affordable goals that you guys have set.

So there's staffing need for sure for monitoring.

And we can, I think the final version of our analysis includes the governance and administration recommendations.

So you actually haven't seen all of those yet.

You've seen just the analysis first.

So when we go to actually draft

The policy, you know, we would be including all that.

We would be including language on the voucher piece, which we just discussed, you know, using New Haven as a precedent.

Also would want to be specific in there about, you know, how

How vouchers get utilized, the income of those vouchers, basically a policy that in no way hinders or makes it more difficult for voucher holders to access these units.

But again, that's in the policy, that's the public policy goal.

On the back side is the administration of that goal.

So we would be giving you recommendations on both of those.

one through the policy itself and then on the other side is like, what does that mean in kind of real terms for, you know, for staff on the ground?

Yeah, that's great.

So what I'd like to propose is we've got a set of key questions that are important for us in terms of moving forward into the drafting phase.

One, two, three.

We can bang through those.

And then I'm put down as question number four to come back to critical slopes.

I have a discussion in that space.

Meantime, everyone can also start thinking about what other things we might want to try and cover tonight, other issues or concerns with where we are today.

And I'm going to go ahead and step down out of the hot seat.

and invite Leah.

The chair recognizes Leah Ainsweiler.

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

So out of this set of questions, really the first two, I'm going to help manage that conversation.

And the final third one is for HRNA.

So Code Studio will be dealing with the question of what goes in the zoning ordinance.

HRNA will be working with us on affordable housing.

So the first question is really about parking.

And I know all of you are

have read in the literature about parking.

We're hearing about it all the time, you know, one way and then the other way.

And it is, I am going to say, a bit of a pseudoscience.

One of the things that truly happens with parking is that as it gets tighter, people make alternate choices.

At what rate, at what pace, in what kinds of ways, not quite certain what would happen here.

Don't really have solid answers.

It's not because we're not parking wonks.

We spent a lot of time working with a lot of parking wonks, including several of the most famous ones, and we still have no answers for you.

This is not a definitive science.

And that's the biggest challenge.

So I don't have just an answer.

But the question to you really is, would you be willing to support the idea of reducing parking, whether only for affordability, only in certain portions of the community, however you might like to support it.

Are you willing to support changing the thinking in Charlottesville about how parking is handled?

and I'm going to suggest that no matter what we decide about this issue the management of parking from the public front needs to be increased.

So we are going to have housing in places where we don't currently have housing.

We're going to perhaps have more housing than we expected in certain portions of the community, and therefore we need to think about parking management.

because it really is a management challenge.

If you count the overall spaces, et cetera, and you could magically move people around, we probably have enough spaces altogether.

It's just that certain times of day or when certain activities happen, we have challenges that are associated with it.

So parking management some of the ideas that would be embedded in that would be time of day management.

They might be management associated with residency if this is regarding neighborhoods.

They might be associated with commuting.

We've seen parking examples where permit parking is allowed to be bought for the purpose of commuting at certain hours trading off presumptively for someone who is leaving the neighborhood for someone who is entering it and hoping that those work in conjunction with each other.

Also, there is likely to have to be a fee component associated with this.

We can't make this work on the free parking model.

The free parking model doesn't allow us any dials to turn to create more and less demand.

and it's just like the Lexus lanes on the freeway.

When the price goes up, less people drive in it and therefore the capacity of it stays.

You're just managing those kinds of things.

We are not talking about managing it in real time here, likely, but we are talking about managing it in some fashion, whether over the course of a day, over the course of a month, the course of a year.

So the question to you is,

especially in trade for enhanced affordability and enhanced walkability and other kinds of elements that come along with reduced parking.

Are we willing to seriously consider reducing parking either in some bracket related to affordability or in some portion of the community like you already have considered it downtown where you've made your own investment in parking.

I'd like to go around the room, starting with Mr. Mitchell.

Like the way you framed this, the parking management piece, I am very willing to support a reduction, significant reduction in the parking requirements for new residential development.

Yes.

But I think we need to be very strategic when we think about the overall parking configuration

and I'll repeat my mantra.

I would like to see Charlottesville be a destination as opposed to a place that people would drive around or pass through as they're going to football games or going to Monticello or going to the wineries or going to Foxfield.

Mr. D'Oronzio Yeah, so yes, that's my answer.

And sort of to follow on a little bit.

it seems to me that philosophically here I mean we don't have a science here as you said it's it's it's you have inferences you can draw and trend lines that you may but you're not well you can't it's not reproducible experiments got it it seems to me that one of the sort of one of the larger concerns of the public is

parking vehicles, traffic, et cetera, and the impact of any development on it at all.

And in sort of reviewing this, the comments and the hundreds of pages of emails and such, we need to be much more aggressive about parking anyway.

because the impetus that I think that brings people to the table to start yelling about parking and traffic and that it may be a development, but it's really a constant problem.

And we all know that it's not going to get better.

and unless we change our behavior, we change the way we as residents change our behavior, we as a community change our behavior and we as a government actor change behavior pretty significantly, we're not going to move that needle at all and that needle has got to move and we can't be held hostage in all of this to parking.

and what we're going to do with, you know, I mean, how we take care of and house people is somehow going to be driven by how we take care of a 4,000 piece of Chinese steel that's, you know, burning hydrocarbons.

So I sort of make that point and to, you know, Commissioner Mitchell's point, yes, to make it a destination and we're going to have to get aggressive with that to move that needle and maybe that means

sort of tram-like stuff from larger lots to move people into the downtown from leased land in the floodplain where people are parking their cars so they can come into town or something.

Appreciate that.

Thank you.

Yeah, I'm in support of reducing parking.

The one thing that I guess that brings me a little bit of concern is if it can't work with the free parking model, which, you know, makes sense that it doesn't, because it has to tie in with another program that supports people that can't afford, you know, the

So I think one of the keys there is to spend your revenue in ways that support that segment more heavily than other segments.

And that may mean focusing on bike lanes and helping support the adoption of e-bikes and whatever else you can do that provides alternatives that are in a way different price range and begin to make sense for a certain category of people.

So I can definitely see that.

There's also roadway design as you move forward and consider how your roadways are built.

Yeah, I think a follow-up to that, you know, response about turning the investment back in the community is also a concern I have if we waive parking requirements in areas where the sidewalk infrastructure isn't adequate and you just sort of pushed cars and people and, you know, conflict

and Burton, you know, the existing neighborhood in that regard.

So I could see, you know, being very closely at general residential or even medium intensity mostly and trying to understand, you know, where's that trade off.

And right, I would want to understand how we would manage that parking in an equitable way as well.

But your parking management strategies sound really interesting,

I'd be very interested to hear more.

I guess finally, I would like to, I think we should consider the cost implications of some of these management strategies.

It will clearly have to be a continued operating cost.

I said really great stuff, sorry.

Yeah, I fully agree.

I think parking should be market-driven.

I'm not too worried about the larger developments.

A larger developer is going to be smart enough to know that if they need a certain amount of parking, they're going to put it on there.

on their sites.

So yeah, it's more of a concern with, you know, people who live in the neighborhoods that might lose their parking spot that's currently out in front of their house.

And, you know, are we going to do a citywide permit parking or something in all the residential neighborhoods?

You know, and yeah, like Liz said, if we do that, who's going to enforce it?

Are we going to, you know, what's, is the city going to put money into making sure that permit parking is actually enforced?

So, yeah, in general, yes, I would be fully supportive of letting it be market driven.

Thanks.

Yes, I guess in short, I'm also fully in support of market driven parking requirements, eliminating parking requirements.

I'm not really under any illusion that people are going to stop putting as much parking as they can fit into their buildings but you know I think everyone agrees that we want to move to a city where more people get around without a car some people think that's a great goal but is laughable in practice and I think the answer to that is that

you know we don't really know right these things are going to change over time and I don't have any confidence in our ability to keep updating these continually as they as practices change both from exogenous factors like e-bikes becoming popular because you know cheap electric motors are a thing now and the you know 150 plus million dollars in infrastructure improvements that we're planning around the city and I currently have funded

You know, we're looking at 2% of parcels, you know, changing every year, right?

It's not going to be a rapid change, even if none of them were to include parking, which I'm sure they almost all are.

But I think it makes a lot more sense for people to make their own choices for themselves.

And then I also think you kind of have to divide it into commercial parking requirements and residential, right?

and commercial are even more, I think, of a kind of nonsensical pseudoscience than the residential stuff, right?

You look at our code and everything from bowling alleys have a certain number of parking spots per lane to bakeries per square foot, right?

And I think all the parts of the city, the places that people like to go, we don't comply with those.

the amounts are made up and those you know business owners in particular can I think decide for themselves how much they think their patrons need or they need to have a successful business so those in particular I think we should eliminate I think I agree with with Mr. Ronzio that

you know even right now even if we were to ban all building across the city people are already mad about the on-tree parking situation and that badly needs management for residential you know we have a better idea of how much parking for how many cars each household has available right now

I generally agree with everything I just heard.

I mean, obviously UVA, we manage parking every day and day to day as well as big events.

And I'll just say, yeah, there's a lot you can do with technology these days that wasn't there even five years ago.

And so I think, you know, to take a close look at that and it'd be a lot different than what people really have in their mind.

I think it's interesting to think about you know how many parking spots do we have in the city and where are they I haven't seen that analysis maybe maybe Rory's thought about that I think that could go a long way for you know kind of formulating these plans and I really thought what Commissioner Habab said about

Thank you.

For me, yes.

I like the way Hartford rolled it out.

That seems reasonable to me sort of in chunks.

I'm very concerned about making this a net win for accessibility.

We are not the most accessible place in the world, and I think we can do a lot better, and I think this is one way to do it.

Shifting to Ms.

McGill, please.

Thank you, Chair.

I have quite a few thoughts, actually.

It's a difficult situation.

Like you said, we are not the most accessible community.

Being an older city, we're taking what we've already got and trying to make it work.

I do think I'm more prone towards letting them work.

I'm not big on parking minimums.

I think a lot of that is kind of a pseudoscience that was just kind of made up.

I do see people working to get rid of vehicles more.

It's going to take time, though, and we also have to address the fact that we have significant infrastructure issues to support non-motor transit.

We also have to face the fact that we are the urban center for a large rural area.

um I think things like park and ride lots could assist with that to a certain extent um that we're actually park and ride lots right near 64 exits 29 exits 250 where majority of people actually come in and then going to key centers but all of that's going to mean we have to have a good robust transit system um which we are trying to work on

I've got a lot of hope for the microtransit coming forward and the microtransit that's being piloted right now that that could potentially help with some of the issues that people are worried about of being a single mom trying to get to groceries trying to navigate all of that especially in areas that don't have sidewalks on either side of the road

So I think a phased approach is a good idea.

But at this, I mean, but I also think the market's just not going to stop making apartment is not going to start putting in no parking spaces.

Because they're looking to sell it.

And so market dictating has some pretty strong

I lean towards, that's where I'm more towards, is letting the market dictate and not having parking minimums.

I would like to bring up that I do hope in our zoning that we are anticipating electrification and that in the zoning itself, we are putting in that as new construction needs to have the ability to handle electric vehicles and electric charging

Yeah.

I think, you know, when it comes to building 100 percent affordable developments, I would absolutely support either reducing or eliminating parking requirements in order to get both deeper affordability and more affordable units.

across the city, I think it makes sense to explore seeing where there are areas in our ordinance where the parking requirements are overly excessive or don't make much sense.

I think there's plenty of room to reduce it.

The only thing that gives me a little bit of hesitancy about the final question, which is completely eliminating parking requirements citywide, is just in making that decision, I feel like I would be flying a little bit blind in terms of not understanding

what we should expect the practical impacts of that to be, which gives me some hesitancy around that final piece, again, completely eliminating it citywide.

Because of others in mention, I think we just have to acknowledge that our public transportation system and bike-ped infrastructure is not very usable for a lot of people, particularly if they need to get to work on time and could get fired if they're 10 minutes late, much less an hour late, because the bus system wasn't reliable.

and we're at least 10, 15 years out until I think we have implemented our regional transit vision plan until we have bike pad infrastructure that's fully connected and you know I was talking with several people earlier today about parking and you know I think it is true that we could expand parking requirements and people would still have the same if not more complaints about parking that's just

the nature of life.

But I do think there are some real tensions.

You know, neighborhoods like Tenth and Page and Fytheville residents are very concerned about parking and parking that's taken up by UVA students and UVA staff members.

And I just hesitate to use acknowledgement that there's a lot of people who are working families, working parents, who our bus system is not adequate for them.

their transportation option is going to need to be relying on a car.

They don't feel they have the option or desire to follow the transportation decisions of, quite frankly, wealthier young professionals.

And that's just a class tension that I think is worth

I'm thinking about a lot and concerned about understanding that if we're going to go all the way, I want to understand what the implications are and understand what actual level of bus service do we need to make that not have a negative impact on working families.

Appreciate that, thank you.

There is some recent experience, finally, that has been reviewed.

Buffalo was one of the earliest, and we're no Buffalo here in Charlottesville, I understand that.

But there are a variety of places.

I think the key finding from that work is that people are, in fact, producing parking.

perhaps at different rates, et cetera.

But in Buffalo, for example, they have not had to resort to residential permit parking programs.

They are,

constantly talking about one for their most active development portion of the community in Elmwood, but so far at least there's not a residential program been put in place.

So it is interesting to watch it play out.

Yeah, and one final thought just very quickly is I absolutely think it's necessary for the city to look at citywide parking management strategy and analysis because I think that's another piece of it that we're not there yet that needs to happen no matter what we do or don't do.

Yeah.

Thank you, Rory.

Yeah, so I, everything that's been said so far, I'm in general agreement with, you know, like so many things that we're dealing with, it's, we're trying to resolve legacy issues, and because of that, we can't figure out a way forward, and sometimes I think we're just gonna have to, like, take a leap, you know,

I think that having a robust parking group within Mr. Free's portfolio or someone's portfolio and staffing that and maybe do that the contractor I don't know but I am for us thinking long and hard throughout the entire city about what parking is really necessary and I think you know having the market decide that

there should be there should be a price involved and if you're living in the city to have a place to have a car there should be some sort of I agree we should do we should be thoughtful about equity concerns and particularly you know for these these sensitive areas that we've talked about so I think in general yes we should we should the overall focus on parking throughout the city I would like us to be more proactive and thoughtful

and I guess engaged in.

As far as parking minimums for development, I would say, let's err on the side of not having them.

If we're only looking at like a couple percent a year, and if we're talking as well about with developers, they're going to include parking anyway to get people to come, it seems to me that it's kind of a

It seems to me like it's a red herring to think that that's going to be some major issue that's going to cause major problems throughout the whole community.

Thank you.

When we think about parking minimums, we so far talked about it or thought about it primarily in terms of

of the commercial areas, downtown areas, where the premise is that parking lots and garages will satisfy the demand, that's not really very likely in a residential situation.

So the premise of eliminating parking minimums for residential property has to be that a significant number of the occupants can make due without access to a car.

either because there is transit available or because it is a close enough walk to where they would need to get to or because e-bikes or whatever.

I will say, as somebody who has ridden bikes in Charlottesville for more than 60 years, the hills can get really rather daunting.

They were daunting when I was eight.

They are daunting when I am 68.

There may have been a time in the middle where they weren't too bad, but at each end, they've been a problem.

So the question, I guess, I think we need to think, and one of the commenters, one of the letters that we got, I think, made a good point about this, that if we eliminate residential parking minimums in areas that have good transit access, that makes sense.

If, for example, we were to eliminate parking minimums and then have a significant development of some sort built in the middle of Greenbrier where there's no transit for at least a half a mile most places, that's simply not very reasonable, I think.

It's also an area that's not really walkable to downtown unless you're hardcore and again the bikes can be tough.

So there's some places where it makes some sense, some places where it doesn't.

I think we need to think about that critically and to look at how we tie

transit and transit availability and increased density that furthers that transit availability and in places where we think we're going to get the kind of density necessary or where we think we're going to be able to make sure that there is adequate transit, then it might make more sense.

The other point that I would make here, two other points, first is that

I've been struggling with this since I was on the Planning Commission 40 years ago and the one lesson I've learned over the years is that whatever we're doing, people don't like.

and we have every five to eight years come out with there's been enough buildup of frustration that somebody comes out with a new parking plan.

We've still I suspect still got in a warehouse someplace all of the parking meters that were erected in 2017 which we took out

in the wake of August 2017 and concerns that downtown was going to be seen to be inhospitable.

The point is that we've got all kinds of these solutions in our history and none of them has turned out to be terribly satisfactory or maybe we just haven't had the patience to stick with any of them long enough.

The last point I would make is that one of the bits of management that is going to be essential in addition to all of the nice theories that you've got, it's got to be enforcement.

and we've got to be willing to know that we're gonna get stuck with parking tickets and that that's just part of having parking management and a lot of people don't like that.

Mr. Wade, please.

Thank you.

So, man, after hearing everyone speak, I have several thoughts and comments.

First of all, I will be in support of looking at reducing

the parking and the parking requirements.

But after doing this type of thing, doing transportation for the county for many years, we love our cars.

And we could do all the incentive that we can.

It'll be difficult.

last year when I love walking the 10th and Page neighborhood and I recall walking on the street, I forgot the name, I believe it was Anderson, just outside the parking permit area and I was talking to a resident and she had gotten some produce and some things from Lowe's and she was trying to load it in, you know, take it to a house but she couldn't get the space in front of her yard.

and it was a car there and she said, you know, that person works at UVA.

I talked to them, nice person, they can park here and it's a good little distance to the university but the university had incentive on a watch or something that if you walk you get incentive.

So it was like a win-win situation but not for the residents.

So, and I just think a few weeks ago, we went to see our daughter.

She's a student in Northern Virginia.

She lives in the Burke area.

And the complex that she lives in, they don't, I think they probably have a parking minimum there.

and what happened is that all of the adjacent streets around you think it's like the Christmas party type of thing, cars lined up all along the major adjacent street outside of the development and I think that if we don't do this right we're going to get that type of scenario we just have to

be collaborative with the adjacent localities because they're more likely going to be the ones coming in, working at, and we want to incentivize businesses and things to come to Charlottesville to build and to start, but they have to know that these are going to be the parking requirements.

This is kind of where we are at this point.

We mentioned different localities, and I think that's

is good, but we have to remember Charlottesville is 10 square miles.

We don't have a lot of options to do different things, and as we said, most of the property is already used, so we have to kind of keep that in mind when we're using different examples that Charlottesville is 10 square miles.

one of the what I do now is I do employment so one of the first things I ask them is like what do you want to do is like what's your transportation like you know and so if they're in the city and they're on a bus line I was like let's work and so that's what I tried to work with

if they have transportation it really can open up some options a lot of people don't you know they rely on public transit so I think that that's something we really must do and Sina mentioned that the micro transit that we're working on so one of the things that talking with Mr. Freeze that he said that you know once this is done is really not done because it's dynamic we can that's it's not set in stone so I think we're gonna have to be willing that whatever we decide

people ain't going more than likely like it and we're going to have to be willing to say okay this is not working out the way we thought it would be and so let's go back and change it and not take a three or four or five year process to do that and so that being said

I'm for it.

I would like to see the impact on affordability, but I think it's definitely worth reviewing.

That's very helpful.

It's very helpful.

Shall we go on to the second question?

So the second question is really about lot splits.

So as proposed, we are suggesting that the various lot size residential neighborhoods

get their original lot sizes as the minimum size of a lot to subdivide to, meaning if you had a larger lot in that neighborhood, you could split it into two lots only if you had whatever the current number is.

so that actual lot splits, meaning true subdivisions, would only happen at the same rate that they do today.

All those people have that option today.

They would continue to have that option.

So that's about allocation of rights and leaving those underlying allocation of rights the same.

Even though we're increasing the rights, the number of lots that people would be allocated would remain the same.

that's what we have proposed to do now having said that there are lots of reasons to consider other options and folks have brought those up including Rory of course and so I would like to have a conversation about that but before that I want to remind everybody of an idea that is also embedded with this concept

There is this sense that the additional units that we are proposing to allow on existing single family lots would most likely be rentals and that we're pushing a rental model.

and I want to remind everybody that we have proposed an idea in there and perhaps not successfully illustrated it for you but proposed an idea that is called a sub lot which basically says there's a zoning lot that is allocated rights and has obligations as a whole

But there could be a lot for sale, which is a smaller piece of that.

So if you had the main house and three new units, you could actually have four sublots.

There would still only be one lot.

So all this does is allow more people the opportunity to buy less land.

Now the alternative to sublots and the management of density that that model kind of implies, the alternative to that is

you could definitely have no minimum lot size to subdivide to in which case we still have challenges associated with subdivision.

So right now subdivision requires street frontage and it requires a certain width.

And those are there for a very real set of reasons which is about access and especially about fire safety.

And those would remain true in the sub-lot model

because the full lot would have that access, but the sublots would not individually necessarily have that same access.

But they would have to meet the building code.

They would have to meet the fire code.

So they are passing those tests.

But there is an option to have no minimum lot size at all.

As each subdivision came forward, those decisions about access, life safety, et cetera, would have to be made on the basis of the subdivision itself.

And it would mean that the subdivision

process and discussion might be more complicated because there would have to be, especially the fire department would be heavily involved in determining whether they felt your lots were appropriate and met the fire code.

There are options all along the spectrum.

One of the options proposed is use a single lot size citywide and we could certainly do that.

One of the intents of what we have done in the diagnostic and in the modeling is to show you the implications of a variety of lot sizes which would generate different mixes of unit types, different availability of various unit types in different parts of the community.

If we were to use a single lot size and a single allocation of rights citywide or an allocation of rights that was based perhaps on the form and bulk of the building instead of on an imaginary number that we have plucked out of the sky

there would be options for even more flexibility.

So there are many places you could land on this spectrum.

We chose one to present to you in the diagnostic and in the modeling and we would now love an opportunity to kind of talk about that and make certain of where we stand.

It is the difference in terms of the drafting between drafting fundamentally multiple sub-districts that are associated with today's district in our one large general residential district that we've proposed.

Those multiple sub-districts would have different variables.

The metrics would be turned up and down.

or whether we really do use a uniform set of standards across all of that land in which case we only have to draft one district.

I was wondering if Mr. Freeze had an opinion on this, from a management perspective, from making this happen in the future, like pulling it off.

As Lee said, there would be more subdivisions if you go with a no minimum lot size scenario and there's probably a larger process there than we might see in the sublots.

We're also, though, kind of untested in the sublot territory, so I don't know exactly how that would play out from an administrative perspective as well.

So I can't give you a definitive answer.

That's fine.

It wasn't no, so.

No.

Other questions before we do a round robin?

There is.

Yeah.

Christy, do you have our subplot drawing?

I do.

Could you share that?

So this is an example.

Sure.

So we have modeled this and it conceptually shows that, you know, you may have a site and that site can consist of

lots and those lots are based on the minimum lot width and the minimum lot area.

Wherever we land on those, whether they're today standards or there's some other standard, the concept still remains consistent.

So the site would be divided into lot and it's the lot that all of the zoning requirements would apply to.

So your setbacks would apply to the lot.

Even if you divided that lot into sublots,

Then your setbacks, your front setbacks, your side setbacks, you know, whether it's one single lot or divided into four sublots, you know, maybe in sort of this configuration, which would be sort of a cottage court potentially or an existing house in the front or some accessory units in the back or something more like a sort of townhouse model that are sort of thin sublots.

What the zoning would apply to, so the number of dwellings you're allowed to have,

Those affordability requirements associated with that, the setbacks, any building coverage requirements, height, massing, that's all going to apply to the zoning lot.

And then the individual sublots are essentially just there for property ownership.

So that would mean that you could, you know, there may be some easements that would be required.

So we want to make sure that there would be access through the sort of front lots to provide access to the rear

units, whether that's vehicular access or pedestrian access.

There may be some easements.

But the idea is that whether this is fully a rental model or whether it's for separate owners, that we're still controlling things based on the lot rather than the sublots because we want the configuration of those to look the same.

and that way the model of whether it's for ownership or for rent doesn't have different outcomes from a form perspective.

Okay.

Sure.

Nothing much.

I do believe that

a more aggressive sub-lot, I mean a more aggressive reduction in lot sizes is good and splitting them up is good.

I am quite peaked by the sub-lot concept.

So generally speaking, I'm generally in favor of disposing of minimal lot sizes.

for a variety of reasons, and I won't enumerate all of them.

The sub-lot idea here, and particularly if we can deal with these side-lot requirements and elimination of those, that unlocks an enormous amount of potential in a couple of things.

One, in housing under four-plex models and how those are financed.

We can offload some city money into private hands because for 3.5% down, you can do a four-unit property.

Secondly, if you configure them on a sublot that way and you decide that the common walls are actually property lines at a later date, then you've got four units that you've generated out of four rentals.

And if they're all connected, it's a further...

It unlocks other powerful tools in how we can finance affordable housing because, amongst other things, you can condoize that and then you can get access to very – well, now there is no cheap money left for people.

But you can condoize that and that can be a very powerful tool.

tool to subsidize affordability because now you have a condo association and what that pays for and who funds that condo association are wide open so you can say hey all the utilities are covered by the condo association the condo association is subsidized by

whatever so in terms of building up flexibility for things that we can do and that's just sort of one direction let alone the density issues of having more in fewer places etc and I think the fire department and I have not spoken to anybody in the fire department about this but these access issues are evolving all of the time and it seems to me that a lot of their modeling for access is based on fire trucks from the 1960s

and that fire trucks from the third decade of the 21st century operate more like Abrams tanks when it comes to having to get access to something and if your neighbor's house is burning down I'm sorry your fence and your bushes are gone and that's just the way it is

So, yeah, I'm in generally favor of it.

I think that we should explore it more fully.

I think it opens up all sorts of flexibility on how we finance, on rent versus ownership, on flipping them back and forth to one another, on how we can go about getting deeper subsidy to different places.

I think it's a must-have.

Thanks.

Thank you.

Thanks.

I'm also supportive of producing lot sizes and really interested in the sublot idea.

The question I had was maybe you already answered this, but how do you track the affordability requirements?

That's a really interesting question.

In the model that we've proposed, that's not an issue.

And so I'm not certain that we've completely thought that through.

Those additional sublots are principally sublots for tax purposes, right, and for title purposes.

and so they sort of exist but don't exist in terms of the zoning.

So we don't have a zoning problem if we use them.

We have potentially some of these other affordability and other management problems.

I think if we head down this road then Code Studio and HRNA will have to talk about that and I'm not worried about tracking initial sublots because we have some clients that have successfully done it.

I am worried about tracking sublots of sublots of sublots if those begin to happen.

Ms.

So one of the arguments is to have no lot size minimum.

So then theoretically a sub-lot could become a lot through the subdivision process if there's no subdivide two size.

Right, which is, you know, speaking to the intent of, or sort of the, yeah, the intent of the underlying zoning, whatever that might be, but allowing for that homeownership, which I find very intriguing and, you know, didn't quite appreciate that before.

um similarly one of my well um if it's true that the one of the primary justifications behind minimum lot sizes historically was to maintain a minimum property value threshold for a city and that's something that you know we're saying

Actually, no, we want to offer neighborhoods to have a variety of property values, then that seems to be a good avenue to explore.

From an urban form and kind of like good urban form, good design, streetscape, I would be curious to understand how

those are implemented in a way that don't result in kind of hodgepodge carve-outs and you know it sounds like there's a lot of other things in your report that you did that also govern subdivision and so I'm sure there are those tools that's just something that occurs to me that just in an effort of kind of right maintaining the neighborhood patterns that

that we like in some of our older and also maybe newer neighborhoods, looking at that.

But certainly I'm very interested in the idea of opening up more homeownership options.

Thank you.

So I came into this meeting thinking 100% eliminate lot sizes, minimum lot sizes.

And I swear I read your report and I apologize that I did not pick up on the sublot thing.

It is very intriguing and I think what would be important is just to make sure is it as simple as, you know, subdividing a lot or in terms of, you know, I can imagine, you know, in my neighborhood,

people might wanna take advantage of having an accessory dwelling unit in their property, but they can't afford to build it.

So it would be much easier for them to sell a chunk of their parcel and have someone else build on it.

So if it's that simple and it's that easy, I think that makes a lot of sense and that does promote more home ownership versus, you know, the way I was understanding it is if you wanna maximize your lot and have four or five dwelling units on it,

I mean, no one can do that unless they're a developer.

A homeowner is probably not going to afford that.

So in that sense, yeah, if this sublot thing could work, I think that does solve a lot of problems and does make things simpler because, you know, I'm still thinking reducing lot sizes is a good idea, but you do have the issue of how much frontage you have to have.

And, you know, if...

I forget who said it before, but we need to have a very serious conversation with the fire department to make sure that this will work.

If the sub-lot thing doesn't work with the fire department, then I would definitely recommend eliminating minimum lot sizes.

Because, yeah, if they...

if they don't allow you to have your little subparcel behind another house, you're kind of sunk.

But I do think that is the best way to, most properties in the city have large backyards that could fit another parcel, and I think the sublop thing seems to make the most sense for that.

I have one more thought on here.

Thanks.

I guess I am not, well, let me ask a couple of clarifying questions.

Sell it as if it's just a parcel.

Okay.

And then,

Well, I guess I don't really understand the idea of eliminating lot sizes for zoning lots.

The whole point of a zoning lot, really all it is here, is saying that's the unit that gets your three home.

So if you could infinitely subdivide, then I could subdivide it down to a square of this carpet, and that gets three units, and that one gets three units.

No, you would have to shift to a density restriction.

It could be a high one, but you would have to shift to a density restriction if we lost the lot size.

Yeah, fair.

So, yeah, the question is, if we assume some minimum lot sizes for zoning lots,

you know what should those be and I guess I kind of made an assumption in my report and I'm sure you guys all read my seven page document at least the first page but

So, you know, we don't really have minimum lot size in the city, right?

Not exactly.

You know, if I'm building a bakery, there is no limit on how much I can subdivide the lot.

I can have 100 bakeries as long as they're relatively small and fully parked, right?

for what we are calling the smallest zoning lot in the general residential districts.

And, I mean...

Obviously I've made my argument in my document, but the

The reasoning for that doesn't really make any sense to me, or I think in an objective sense, it does not make any sense.

It's really just a historical artifact where it's not associated with what really your current distribution of lot sizes is.

It's just based on what was R1 in the beginning, back when it was R12 family and everybody else within unlimited density.

So the only straight-faced argument is that's the allocation of rights today.

It's easiest to keep that allocation of rights tomorrow because it takes one argument out of these changes.

Yeah.

So it's a little bit less of a change, but it means having twice as many standards.

So I'm all for making your job a little bit easier.

at the expense of making our job a little bit harder of explaining it.

What do you think about sublots?

I think sublots are great.

I'm a little confused as to how they wouldn't also be subject to the fire problems, right?

Even in a single lot, right?

No.

You have to follow the fire code, but how you get your access is much easier because now we are no longer talking about a formal access for the lot, right?

We are only talking about access for your house.

And so the 150 foot hose hall, for example, is the most important element, not the width of the street necessarily.

So that will be...

the game changer is how close can you get a fire truck and can you get it within 150 feet of the building?

Great.

Yeah, I think I think that's great.

Cool.

Yeah, I think it's a good idea.

It's great for just making homeownership attainable to have your fee simple plot of land.

I

Maybe.

So the maybe is, again, we'll have to meet building code standards and fire code standards for that thing as though it were being subdivided in spite of the fact we are setting aside other subdivision requirements.

That thing will still have to be buildable.

That makes sense to me.

And then I think that's all reasonable.

I do have some concerns about how setbacks work around your zoning lot.

And in particular, well, it's a little bit tangential, I think, to the subdivision conversation.

I think in urban form, we want to be very careful about our front setbacks, our side setbacks, and our rear setbacks.

And the way you set those is going to determine, you know,

The form the buildings take, the way they face, whether, you know, the windows look out onto the streets or onto their neighbors, and a variety of other things.

And I think we do need to work out exactly what that all looks like, but it's a little bit tangentialist submission, so I won't harp on that right now.

Thanks.

And I think the other thing maybe to mention is, you know, I suggested we standardize our lot size.

And the obvious thing, I think, is maybe to do what the R1S is.

But even in R1S right now, like a third of R1S lots are already too small to be conforming.

And what you standardize that to, I think, is still kind of an open question.

I don't know that it's necessarily 6,000 square feet.

Sounds good.

I don't really have any comments.

I will say, maybe this is becoming moot if we get rid of lot sizes, but when I hear square feet, it's a little bit harder in my mind to understand than acreage is.

Maybe if we're subdivising a million times, that becomes moot also.

But I think in reality, in our city, maybe hearing a little bit of acreage talk in addition to the square footage talk,

Yeah.

I know I always go to Google.

I was going to Google and, you know, how many?

As for me, I think smaller is better, consistent is better.

My home is about 2,000.

I think it's fantastic.

I would suggest looking at that kind of analysis.

Ms.

McGill.

Thank you, Chair.

A couple of things.

I think we've cleared up that

There wouldn't be a way to utilize this to kind of subvert by the sub lotting, subvert the SUP process to stop the need to bypass the affordable housing overlay.

I don't believe there's any subversion possible here.

There is the ability to create sublots that are as large or larger than existing requirements, right?

So don't think of these as always being the smallest kind of possible thing you could create, in which case you could see a future re-subdivision

Right, to like

So density fundamentally would not exist.

There'd be a practical density at some point, but density would be a very specific factor almost lot by lot.

based on what people produce there.

There would be a maximum density set for new lots, but we are also enabling the same number of units on any existing lot, not as non-conforming, but rather we're saying that all of them are conforming and allocating them the same rights.

So the tightest lot today would still be able to do three new units and save the main house if that was possible.

I'm not certain it's possible, but maybe, you know, tear down the main house and do three new units, even if they're very, very small.

Okay.

They don't.

How do planned unit developments fit into this?

The planned unit development is a model for flexibility.

The level of flexibility that we're already talking about is higher than most planned unit developments are getting.

So that tool is challenging because it's always a one-off

and someone gets these particular rules and then someone else gets these particular rules.

It's very hard to do enforcement for those areas, very hard to manage those over time.

Thank you.

Another question I have on this.

Oh, sorry, I've been taking notes as other people have been speaking.

So sometimes my handwriting is a little bit harder to read.

Mostly I want to just kind of my gut reaction when I heard that, you know, lot splitting to meet the location that particular area is minimum lot size just kind of gave me a gut check on redlining and that if we do that and don't make it a minimum lot size across the entire city,

we're not taking this opportunity to rectify that but enforcing old lot sizes that were propagated during redlining so I would be against having various different lot sizes throughout the city I just I don't feel

I just feel that that's continuing something that we have a chance here to begin to actually fix to some extent.

I do agree with previous speakers that I believe a lot of our lot sizes are more about

old equipment and old standards versus what our current capabilities are, what our current building materials provide.

A lot of our technology is what actually reduces our house fires now versus in the 40s and 30s.

So guiding that kind of safety more towards

Lot sizes and accessibility is where I go.

Thank you.

Yeah, I think a lot of people have already discussed it, but I would say generally

open to eliminating the minimum lot size requirement if not eliminating I think the smaller the better to be the big picture goal would seem to be allowing more of the type of development of small starter homes and

more affordable home ownership and rental opportunities that exist in a lot of the non-conforming lots that we can't build today that I think actually a lot of people like, even just in terms of the built form, much less the fact that there could be more affordable

yeah I mean I think the overarching goal would be how to get how to incentivize that more it would seem our current standards are one barrier to that and I would also second what Commissioner d'Oronzio had said about some of the issues beyond minimum lot sizes that I think also contribute to making it harder to build that kind of development including issues with subdivisions and other things so

No, that's good.

Thank you.

The struggle is real.

Yeah, so I...

I'm in favor of smaller lot sizes.

I think the notion that you mentioned of providing a recommendation, it sounds like looking at, what I'm hearing you say is that looking at existing lot sizes as they've been built through the years, many of which are non-conforming, you could make a recommendation of what you thought was an appropriate

I think the notion of completely disbanding, saying no minimum lot signs, sounds good in theory, but it seems in practice that would run into some barriers.

So if you're able to provide a recommendation, I would support that approach.

And the notion of sublots, I think, makes a lot of sense.

just because I'm a little OCD, I might say let's just pick four, like you could divide this into four ways as opposed to ten ways.

I think trying to make it infinitely divisible would just make things very cumbersome.

But being able to divide it into at least four sublots would give a lot of flexibility.

Appreciate that.

Thank you.

So, I'll be real brief here.

My first comment would be basically to

I agree primarily with Chairman Sully Yates, but also with others that smaller is good, more consistent is good.

I will also add that a year ago I was doing a lot of research into the question of whether single-family covenants were going to turn out to be a problem, and one of the things that I discovered

in my research was that in most places in the city, the single family covenant designation had a sunset provision 25, 35 years down the road.

But a restrictive covenant that did not have a sunset provision was no subdivisions.

We've not asked yet whether sublots would be considered formally a subdivision, and that might have to be litigated before we really knew the answer.

But we will ask the attorney.

I'll be brief as well.

I'm supportive of the sublot notion.

And I think that in certain parcels we can look at eliminating the setbacks, but just in certain parcels that it's feasible.

And I think that it's probably been done, but I think that it's probably

Few enough that we can do that and not say all of it.

Did that again?

Yes, absolutely.

Outstanding.

Can I make one point on this?

Just a quick request.

I feel like we could improve our terminology here.

We've been using lot to refer to a zoning lot and then sub-lot to refer to your buildable or saleable lot.

I feel like that's causing a lot of confusion.

Maybe it's just a matter of

just always saying zoning lot to refer to the big one or if there's other words we can make up.

That's the best because that's really its function.

We do use site and lot.

A site might be a zoning lot, but a zoning lot might also be divisible, right, into a smaller set pair or three or whatever zoning lots.

So we will be very careful in the language in the ordinance and yes, we should all work among ourselves to try to use the set of them correctly.

I believe that we've started a glossary on the website and we'll try to make sure that each of those is clearly defined the way that we think they ought to be used and we'll see if those glossary terms help in that.

Awesome.

Please.

Thank you.

I'm going to pass the buck.

James, we're passing it on to Phil for the third question.

So Phil Cash is on for the third question, so I'm going to sit down.

Thank you very much.

I am.

And we're going to make sure Kelly Seltzer is here, too, just in case you have an actual technical question.

Yeah, I'm still here.

So third question here is really looking at middle density and allowing middle density in single-family neighborhoods through an affordable overlay.

When we looked at this in our analysis, we looked at it first through an incentive approach.

So if you were to allow that higher level of density, how much affordable housing would it create?

through more of an inclusionary standpoint.

You can do that.

It's going to give you a relatively modest amount of affordable housing through an inclusionary standpoint.

So about 10%.

That's not what the folks who are advocating for this when they talk about the example of the affordable housing overlay.

I think what Cambridge, Mass has done this.

They're not

They're not necessarily thinking about it along those lines.

They're thinking about it along the lines that if you were to allow this, then it lowers the total cost for housing on the land side and makes them more competitive for purchasing the site and opens up more sites for them for development.

And frankly, it allows for more scale and more housing.

Those are all valid points.

So like

This approach of allowing moderate density is not going to be a particularly effective approach for an inclusionary standpoint, inclusionary zoning standpoint, the way we looked at previously, but it can be a way to open the door to create affordable housing in general residential neighborhoods and make the subsidy necessary to build that housing significantly less.

you're almost certainly going to still need subsidy to build in housing, but significantly less particularly for targeting 60% AMI.

That said, if there's a bigger question here, I won't call Lee back up here to talk about zone and form.

We're HRNA, we are a real estate economic development policy consulting firm, not a land use or architecture design firm.

You are talking about potentially allowing middle density into general residential.

That's a significantly larger and denser property.

I have opinions on that topic, but I'm not an expert on that topic, so I will stick to my areas of expertise.

There is a real benefit here, and there are examples of middle density being done in this overlay.

First, we talked about Cambridge.

Now, Cambridge has a different building style, but it has worked in Cambridge largely in coordination with subsidy dedicated to local governments.

is very different than the inclusionary zoning.

It's a very different thing and should be thought of separately from the inclusionary zoning.

The inclusionary zoning analysis we've done and the analysis we did about, you know, general density and uptake for single family zoning for single family neighborhoods or general residential as you allow for, you know, up to five units.

So we're already up to five units for those kinds of developments.

The density, those locations, the real benefit is yes, you may get some affordable housing, there may be some developments take advantage of it, but you're frankly just creating units at a lower price point.

So affordability as opposed to affordable, those are lower price point houses closer to what households can, you know, more entry level homeownership, but that's not the same thing as getting to deeper levels of affordability.

So that's why we ended up at a recommendation focusing really on that affordability piece and allowing some

bonus, but you could take it farther.

You could go to, you know, general, I mean, to middle density, which is, you know, up to 12 units.

So I've given a long, somewhat rambling answer.

I'm happy to talk about any of it in more detail.

The really, it's a trade-off here about whether you want to allow that level of density, really primarily you're going to be for subsidized projects.

Just as a reminder on your CAF, which is the primary vehicle of subsidy right now, it's about $45,000 per unit on average the CAF is putting in.

Those are in, you know, larger multifamily projects, but given the land costs of most of your general residential areas, it would

represent an uptick in subsidy that would need to be committed for those areas.

But, you know, you all have committed to increasing the overall level of CAF.

I think to Philip's question, it's a density question and also a subsidy question because in particular, if the concern is, you know, improving opportunities, reducing displacement, and how do we encourage, you know, historically marginalized groups to

have entry points into neighborhoods that have been historically exclusionary.

MR. I've got questions, but I think I'll wait and wrap it into the discussion because it may be the discussion.

MR. Fine.

MR. Yeah.

Yeah, so I can take this one.

So hello, everyone.

Yeah, in general residential areas, the comprehensive plan calls for three units or up to four units if you keep the existing house and either divide it into multiple units or you add units to the property with it.

So what the question is asking about is looking to gauge how you all feel about

questions on this?

Do we think we've got it?

Mr. Bob?

I had a quick question.

I know when we first talked about using an overlay, there had some repercussions in the zoning and the way it was going to be written that we kind of voided that into some kind of affordability bonus type of description.

Would it make sense to keep that and have a tiered bonus for the purposes of keeping with the same language that we set up, or would we have that as an overlay?

All right.

So broadly, I think our objective is to stay away from overlays to the extent possible.

So leaving aside the subject matter of the conversation, like the term overlay has been used a lot.

We would build whatever kind of decision we would come to, we would aim to build it into the zoning itself and not an overlay is kind of a separate section of zoning that overlays on top of the base zoning.

So there's no practical consequence of that, right?

No.

It's just where it is written.

So in that regard, it really is what Commissioner Habbab is describing, right?

It would be a different set of standards.

I mean, I want to respect what Phil Cash said, that this is not part of the inclusionary.

We're not talking about something that's part of the inclusionary.

The inclusionary is a bonus system.

But yeah, it would just be another section within the base district that says this is another option available to a property owner or developer.

So yes, it would be essentially as Commissioner and Bob described.

You helped me with the you helped me with the yield question and the answer to the question that I would ask about this is this is not feasible based on yield

The other point I'd make is probably not feasible.

It may be feasible based on two equity multiples, but based on yield, this would not be feasible.

So the only way we could do this is, again, I think the question's been answered, is through subsidies.

And do we know how much money we have available for such subsidies?

I mean, I think the short answer is no.

We don't know how much subsidy we have or how many developments.

But what you're hitting on is exactly right.

The level of subsidy available would be the limiting factor on this type of project going forward, right?

Once again, the only value this has in the moment is, again, freeing up land to be developed.

Is that pretty much what you're saying?

Because, frankly, we can't make any decisions.

Sorry, but the adopted affordable housing plan is $10 million a year, so that would be the expected amount if we live up to that commitment, which I hope we will.

And if we didn't do Friendship Court, and if we didn't do GRJ.

Mr. D'Oronzio.

Well, I appreciate that.

So my general thoughts on this are

and I don't know if the math, maths here, but it would seem to me that if we were privileging affordability by starting with the base of general residential and my understanding of this is essentially we're allowing a sliding scale all the way up to the full max density of medium.

if it's workable, if it's physically workable.

But if we're trying to sort of generate affordable units, it would seem to me that the idea of an overlay or a privileging for

Affordable units needs to be set at a level that produces affordable units under general residential density in a more privileged way. So the sort of bonus that we're giving in general residential is, oh, you can go you can get your extra unit. I mean, does the math math if you say you can build Thank you. Thank you.

you can go to three and it's you can go to five if it's affordable off I mean does it make sense if we're going to start privileging in general residential to structure general residential to be more heavily weighted to privilege at the upper level of what we're calling general residential does that move our ball better and I don't know if the math maths for that but it but I'm in general anything that privileges the affordable housing and pushes that

is something I would generally support.

Yeah, if I could respond.

No, your math is fine.

It's just it's getting out of math territory and into urban form territory.

And so what we have seen based on market affordability, the numbers that we're getting from market affordability,

would mean a high number of units would be needed.

So then we get subsidized affordability.

the decision you have to make if you choose to go there in general residential is what is the urban form that you would allow and is it the same as what you would build under the standard market affordability or are you actually adding bulk adding mass additional story additional lot coverage

you know less parking less trees are we willing to go to those extents to get that affordability in those settings because we can get affordability we've proved out we think we've proved out that we can get affordability under the 10 and above units right under our IZ program

What we're talking about now is taking that up to 10-unit piece and trying to find a way to make it work.

And the way that you make it work is you give them more height, you give them more lot coverage, you give them something so you could get those extra units at a reasonable size on that land.

So that's the only point that I want to make.

You can choose to do that.

It will...

it will generate some results that we will struggle to write the right form rules to try to truly make it match it's not going to be a perfect match for existing neighborhoods but we're already pushing that envelope with what we're doing so you know perhaps this is is an acceptable thing but want to just have a real clear answer to that before

Sure.

I like the concept.

I think, you know, we have our regular, we'll have our regular bonus that gets us from what I read at least up to five units in the general residential if you provide an affordable unit.

And this, even if it's not, you know, quote, unquote, feasible for our regular developers, it's really opening up all the land for our nonprofits to develop.

I think that's a good goal.

The real questions, the valid questions about scale, and those are harder to tackle.

Yeah, I mean, I understand what this strategy is attempting to do and to allow for more affordable units in historically more segregated or wealthy and or wealthy neighborhoods.

But, you know, it's sort of also at the same time.

contrary to what we've said the density and form and height perhaps should be in those neighborhoods so you know it's kind of the what's a what is a housing size what is housing size and and if it's if it's

I don't know, smaller units, more dense fits in.

Is that good?

I think.

I think I support this.

For one, it's not likely to happen unless somebody's gonna, there's gonna be grants or subsidies or something like that that's gonna come in.

So it's not like we're gonna see 12 unit buildings popping up throughout all the city.

But at the same time, it seems like one of the goals of our comp plan is provide more affordable housing.

so you know we're saying all right if you can make it work if you can get the funding and you can do it and it's all going to be you know you got your three or four market rate units and everything above that's affordable go for it add up to 12 if you can fit them on the site you know the I think the forms that you guys are describing for the medium intensity residential districts are not that crazy they're not huge they're

Yeah, speaking to form and bulk, I think what I hear over and over from skeptics of the plan

The vast majority of people in the city say we care deeply about affordable housing and I'm skeptical of this plan because you're going to allow this bulk, especially in medium intensity, and you don't even know if it's going to be affordable.

and you know our IZ rules and our bonuses will help us get some affordability in in those new market rate projects and I think it's also important to have new market rate housing of course but I think practically everybody agrees that if something is 100% affordable or you know

Everything's affordable above base density. We're just extremely affordable all together. You're getting a lot of affordable units. We're willing to make those sacrifices, if we'll call it that, of seeing an extra story on the building down the block, of having slightly smaller setbacks, even maybe giving up some of our on-tree parking spaces so there's somewhere for residents of that new building. Thank you.

And so, to me, I think it's a no-brainer to allow additional bulk, to allow those bonuses for 100% affordable over increased density, over base density.

units.

I think there probably does need to be a little bit of leeway even within the normal bonus amount.

And I think there is language in the comprehensive plan.

In fact, I'm certain there's language in the comprehensive plan that supports both of those.

And even going to something like three stories, if you're at that five unit within your normal density bonus, I think is very reasonable.

especially considering the current R1 height limit is three and a half stories.

I'm still a little skeptical of how we're going to do that in the end.

I know we talked about 35 feet and putting two stories in 35 feet, you're getting high ceilings.

You don't have to max it out, but if you do, it seems like a weird incentive.

And to me, at the very least, we need to be maxing out the current

I think it's an absolute no-brainer to give those rights for additional bulk and just seeing a slightly larger building in your block.

I think in terms of aside from bulk how that's implemented as a bonus you know right now how it is in general residential three units is your base and then your bonus is you get one market rate unit if you get one affordable unit and to me it almost makes sense to keep kind of carry that pattern forward where

I think you guys obviously have done the math and on most sites that's not going to pencil anyway, but there might be some sites where that does work.

If we recognize that that's a good thing, I don't know why you wouldn't allow it in the hopes that it would happen.

And then on subsidized projects, obviously the penciling doesn't matter so much, and it will work there.

So that's what I would recommend for how to do that.

Mr. Palmer, what do you think?

Oh, where'd he go?

We lost him.

We lost him.

He would have said something very helpful.

For me, a core principle that I've been bringing into this from the beginning is how do we give people access to opportunity?

How do we deliver on these equity goals that we've been talking about all this time?

And I haven't seen it clearly in the code yet, and I think I'm seeing it here, and that gets me very excited.

I know this will raise some hackles because this could mean some visual changes in some areas, but we're talking about a small number of players who are out to do some good and I want to help them.

Ms.

Thank you.

Just want to clarify, I'm kind of comparing, I've made little columns to compare the two different plans because

The way I just want to make sure I'm starting at a base level of correct understanding.

I got a little confused earlier.

And as we've been talking, I've just been making sure I've been.

So what we currently have in the inclusionary zoning would give us.

It stays with the current density that that area is designated.

over the allowable by right is 60% AMI affordability.

What is that?

So to add, let's make sure I'm here.

So for general residential, if you build one affordable unit, you get two bonus units.

We have set up a mandatory inclusionary zoning policy for 10 and above because we think there's enough market rate units to actually support the affordable units.

We also set up a voluntary inclusionary zoning for less because there may be situations where it works or folks that are bringing subsidy or otherwise, for whatever reason, they're choosing to do the deal.

It's not general residential.

That's where I'm kind of clearing some stuff up here.

And you can- If you build 10 units, then you got to build one of them has to be 10%.

If you're at a site that can only build, you know, a middle density site, you can only build six units, then-

You don't have any requirement there, but you could get a bonus.

You can get bonus units and build affordable.

And for general residential, we give two.

For middle it's four and for general it's two.

So in a lot of ways, what we're talking about is just cranking up that bonus and maybe having multiple tiers to it for general residential.

So having a deeper level of affordability or allowing more bonus units.

There was a comment made about

allowing that one for one match.

So not requiring every additional unit be affordable.

Someone made that comment earlier.

You could do that.

And the reason you would, it still wouldn't pencil in most cases, but it would reduce the amount of subsidy you would need to do a development.

What we're talking about right this second.

I'm sorry.

We keep kind of going tangential a little bit into the, well, we could do this.

We could do this.

And I'm just, this is not my wheelhouse.

It's a bonus.

It's additional units in exchange for affordability, and you all have a great deal of flexibility on what level of affordability, but really the main thing we're talking about now is how far would you let folks take that in general residential areas?

and we don't have a great economic financial analysis for you on that because it's not the economics on the deal don't work.

It's going to have subsidy, but by allowing more density, it doesn't reduce the amount of subsidy that's needed and it does open the amount of land.

But what is being asked and proposed is in the other column

that it is proposing that all of them are 50%.

That is my understanding.

It's over the base.

The base in general residential is three new units.

So when people are talking about going above the base in general residential up to medium intensity, it's just raising the total number of units.

And I think there would be an open conversation about whether you would get the three market units

or not or whether all of them would have to be affordable.

All of those are ideas you guys could talk about.

The fundamental challenge that I feel we are really up against, we can go do the math and figure out the level of affordability and all of those kinds of things.

So as long as it is all affordable, it is affordable for the 99 years plus, which can that happen with a LIHTC property?

Because a LIHTC credit is usually a 30-year credit.

So a LIHTC credit's a 15-year credit, and there are 30-year affordability periods and 50-year affordability periods, and there are places in the country where people go to 99 years.

The major challenge that goes with that, though, you're flagging an important thing is, is there going to be sufficient capital to maintain and repair and upkeep the property, which is a very, like, by eliminating the rental income on a property, you create a challenge of, well, I can't raise the rent to pay for a new roof, so how exactly am I paying for a new roof?

And Callie and I would love to have a longer conversation with you about our views on how that works for tax credit developments, but it is a thing to think about.

And this is where I'm kind of going with this is I am all for this in a lot of ways, as long as we make sure.

And again, I'm not going to pick on students because I was a poor student.

I drove from Nelson every day to go to UVA and Piedmont.

So but unless there are, you know, when I work out the rents again, you know, you're looking at like it's 902 for, you know, difference down.

and rents that could be also utilized for student level housing.

Again, students meet the classification of being below 50, 60, 40, 30% AMI usually the students are living on loans.

Not that many of our students don't deserve good housing and fair and affordable housing so they can move forward in life.

But that's a separate area of our need.

So affordable housing programs can

and tax credit developments.

We aren't saying it has to be a tax credit development.

Right, but for this, the same rules could apply for the inclusionary zoning.

We could use, again, we haven't written all the administrative rules, but we could use tax credit-like rules for these properties.

I hear very clearly that

I also don't want to limit our population who does want to end up going and bettering themselves and have to choose between their housing and their.

So we've got to we've also got to look at something in that, too, that allows for people to grow.

So not I mean, I just don't.

So we're, I think this is more a piece that we can get into the administrative side about how we're defining students and what the different definitions and lines are.

Now if you're a whole- You don't get grants then.

I absolutely hear you.

So we can write these rules and try to make students include students.

Or we can write these rules and exclude students.

The challenge with including students is there is not an easy way to differentiate students who have low incomes because they're currently students and students who are coming from a low-income background.

There are rules and methods you can start to look at related to the family people are coming from, but that gets much more complicated to administer.

So there are, you all have flexibility, there are some fair housing limitations, but you have a great deal of flexibility when it comes to students.

But drawing the line is not a case by case situation, it's a line that applies to everybody.

We've been wanting to avoid using the word overlay.

This is a time to call it an overlay and we look back at the 91 up zone.

the early 90s down zone sorry and say okay that student area you're out it's the rest of the city that gets the overlay and that doesn't make it perfect but what we'll do is is that we'll if it will segregate that large student population area and unprivilege it for that general residential swing up to 12 if that's

Mr. Freeze?

I'm just in the interest of time.

I'm going to be the bad guy here for a moment and just say a lot of these are issues that are going to be addressed in the administrative section.

Ms.

Sorry, my brain always goes in more extensive ways.

Fundamentally, I don't think I agree with others as they spoke, but I don't think this is going to be a massive problem throughout the city as far as increased density all over that was zoned otherwise.

I think this is going to be very particular areas that still have some ability to increase some density.

And

Thank you.

Mr. Payne.

Yes, I strongly support the approach of the, I guess, additional bonus would be the correct terminology.

My just philosophically thinking about the approach to it and other things going forward,

To my mind, our comprehensive plan update and affordable housing strategy, the most important components were deeply affordable housing at zero to 30 percent AMI as the most critical point and 30 to 50 percent AMI above that.

And I think it's just important for us to acknowledge that inclusionary zoning is one tool.

All things considered, it's a pretty weak, limited tool.

It's better than nothing, but if we're expecting to rely on that, we're going to be massively short of our expectations.

And second is that supply and density are necessary but not sufficient.

And in my mind, it's critical to acknowledge that supply on its own will primarily benefit people in the first 30 years or so, at least, until that new housing ages, will primarily benefit people making $80,000, $90,000 a year, not a family, a single parent making $15 an hour full time.

All that to say the free market won't provide that deeply affordable housing.

That's going to have to come from subsidy.

That's going to have to come from our housing authority and nonprofit developers.

So anything that supports and promotes that, I'm fully in support of and think is absolutely necessary and critical.

It seems like this the market will not respond to, but it will help.

For example, the housing authority, if they had purchased land through a land bank, would have the ability to provide more housing under this framework.

Yeah, for all the reasons that Mr. Payne just elucidated and others, I think this is a great idea.

I support it.

I understand the point that you're making about having the trade-off being, you know, how do you get this to sort of fit with the form of the adjacent areas.

I think, you know, the whole piece about how much is affordable and what those levels are going to be will really

depend on the case itself specifics in Habitat or PHA or whoever in the case they can build and the funding they can bring to it.

So it will be decided on a case-by-case basis in terms of what that particular developer is willing to figure out or can figure out.

The only...

Concern I have about this and maybe this isn't a popular one to state but it feels a little bit like a one if I were a person in the public who was unhappy with all of this and had been unhappy for a long time and We said that your y'all said I wasn't on board then that was

I can claim to not have been a part of that you know the comp plan said this is general residential this is residential with the sensitive overlay or whatever we're calling it and this is medium intensity residential and there was all of this true roar and still is about

areas that are medium intensity residential and it feels like this is sort of like okay doing an end run around all those conversations that had and said oh well we'll just allow this to happen so you know I think it's a great idea I I think the actual number of developments that would happen will be very small but I just wonder from like a

A few thoughts.

The first, sort of touching a little bit on what Councilor Pinkston just said, is that we told folks last year that the difference between general residential and medium intensity level

would be related to things like the carrying capacity of the streets and other issues like that.

And that the form-based code was going to be something we were going to have houses, we would have buildings that would look

essentially like the other houses in the area and various other reasons that we were giving for saying, particularly for those spots where we took a parcel out of the medium intensity residential and put it back into general residential, that there was a reason for that.

And the reason for that had nothing to do with affordability.

It had everything to do with the conditions, you know, on the ground, on the street, what it was going to look like.

And this proposal basically, to touch a little bit on what Councilor Pinkston was saying, basically says, you know, we're abandoning that logic.

were abandoning that discussion that we had last year.

The second point that I wanted to make is that I think we have to acknowledge that this proposal cannot work without significant subsidies for each one of the units.

let us acknowledge that one of the purposes of the rezoning request and the future land use map and so on, one of the hope for purposes was that we would be able to incentivize non-subsidized market-based solutions, not more excuses for us to spend $45,000 or whatever the current figure is per unit.

Let's acknowledge at the very least that this is a very different philosophy from what we have previously been discussing here, which also gets to a third point that

If you, and I do not claim to be a great finance guy, but I spent some time trying to plug some numbers in, and basically the cost of the present value of, let's say, 10 years income stream of

the difference between 50% AMI and 100% AMI.

Wood for a two-bedroom apartment, according to the statistics we've got, worked out about $1,000 a month, 10 years, 6%, that's about $92,000.

Not $45,000, but $92,000.

If we want to look at a 99-year period, it goes to a little more than double that, about $200,000 difference in the income stream.

Obviously in the out years it gets to be a fairly small contribution.

The point is that what we would be doing is asking or hoping that somehow a contractor or a developer would say, I'll take a $92,000 hit on potentially eight more units

so that I can do what?

What am I thinking I'm doing as a result?

I mean, it's great if it's a nonprofit, but only a nonprofit is going to look at that.

And let's not be under any illusions that somehow or another you're going to get very many people other than nonprofits.

And of course, if it's a nonprofit, then we're probably back in the business of $45,000 per unit subsidy from the city.

So my first objection to it overall is that I think this is fundamentally different from and to some extent a betrayal of what we wound up telling people last year that if you're in a general residential we're distinguishing between you guys and the medium intensity residential

for reasons that are true planning reasons and not just political reasons.

And I think that while I'd be fine with the idea of maybe an additional unit or two or an additional unit if one of them is affordable or something like that, that's a

a little bit of a change, but it's not going from 4 to 12 or something of that degree of seriousness.

Mr. Wade.

I just have a couple of comments.

I think that from what's been said, I agree with what Michael Payne said.

Most, I think that I would like to specifically, having checked with them, have the housing authority be listed in

the plan as a strong component of the affordable housing because they are that nonprofit that can do it.

Part of their title is development or redevelopment.

I think that they can serve that role.

I think that they're willing to step up in that role.

When I was in school in Norfolk State, their housing authority played a major role in addressing their affordable housing.

It's not just one thing that can do it.

I mean, here we're looking at the housing fund.

We're looking at habitat and PHA and bonus units and things.

But I think that we need to have the housing authority.

They know what they're doing.

They know the population.

They know how to tap into those funds.

Some funds they can only tap into.

It needs to be a stronger point.

I think that we can get a lot more done units if they played a bigger role.

And thank you.

Can I ask one question?

Please.

And you all can just, like, shoot me down and say that's a horrible idea, Liz, but is this a situation in which our discretionary process actually would be helpful, right, to, like,

have these cases come to us, the Planning Commission and Council, and talk about the merits of what it is and part of the public process.

I'm sure we would hear a lot about increasing density, but we already do that.

So I don't know.

So in general,

Any discretionary process is a deterrent to asking for more.

So as planned at the moment, the only bonuses we are proposing are within the code and you can access them without saying mother may I.

I don't disagree that a public conversation can yield a better project but very often a public conversation yields consternation maybe even on both sides because there will likely be people who believe very strongly that the project needs to go through regardless of

the issues associated with its urban form or whatever else.

And there will be others who think that is a terrible thing you have done to them in their neighborhood.

And there will be no choice in that conversation but to set up that dichotomy.

We don't have a good way to have that conversation other than sort of a battle and a win or lose vote.

So I'm not certain that we shouldn't just do it once, meaning bodies like yours should make the decision once.

Actually, you'll have to make it twice.

You'll have to make a recommendation to us.

We'll have to draft the language and come back, and then you'll have to adopt it.

But fundamentally,

That brings us down to a much more of a policy decision.

And yes, while making that policy decision, hopefully you'll be hashing out the best answer.

It will be a more generic answer across the wide variety of neighborhoods and not a site-specific answer.

But doing that once is much more beneficial to all the players in the system than having to do it

continually.

And my guess is it would simply be avoided by all but the most stalwart entities who have maybe a great track record and really know how to do it.

If I could, I'd also add that, like,

Even if in the zoning it's a buy-right bonus, unless they're doing this with some outside Bezos money, like Mayor Snook said, they're probably coming to the CAF Committee for local funding, right?

And at that point, the CAF Committee will decide whether it's an appropriate use of funds, and I'm sure there will be a variety of projects asking for funds and, you know,

depending on the nature of the site and the project and all the sites and the projects, you know, this one in general residential might come in at $30,000 and therefore seem worth it per unit, whereas another one is $45,000 or vice versa, and then, you know, you decline the funding, right?

But then the decision is being made by CAF.

It's not being made by City Council.

It's not being made by the Planning Commission.

It's being made by, coming down to, regardless of the conditions on the street, we're saying, sure, we'll give you $30,000 per unit, or no, we won't give you $45,000 per unit.

I guess in, I know we're way over time, so perhaps this is for another time.

But I guess to summarize, I mean, my concern is also part of the comp plan in this discussion is that we would be prioritizing deeply affordable housing, not even just zero to 30% AMI, but 30 to 50 as well.

and under we should just be upfront that without this under our current zoning rewrite framework inclusion inclusionary zoning just to make it concrete let's say you're a single parent working full-time making $15 an hour absolutely nothing in our zoning rewrite process will benefit you at least for 30 years until that new housing ages and becomes affordable and I don't think there's been any analysis to suggest otherwise

There are still other benefits that make that worth doing for other reasons, but the only way we're going to get to that deeper level is public subsidy.

The free market is just never going to provide housing at zero to 30 percent AMI, probably 30 to 50 percent AMI in our city.

and I think we should just be upfront that that's with we have other aspects land banking housing strategy subsidy but when it comes to anything in our zoning if we don't do this we should be upfront that nothing about it is just as a concrete example that single mom making $15 an hour going to directly benefit them probably for decades and

A lot of people would consider that a betrayal of the goals of the COP plan as well.

And everything's trade-off, so I think the points that have been raised are legitimate.

Everything is a trade-off.

And the final point, again, just thinking concretely, is let's take a project like the affordable housing on Park Street that PHA is doing.

Yeah, I guess one major point of the comp plan, Councilor Payne, was to get to what you're talking about, the lower ranges of the AMI that you just listed.

But another part of it was to increase density in housing for missing metal and everything else.

Surely that's part of what we're doing here.

even if what you're seeing is true, and it normally is when you make a claim like that, so I'm giving you the benefit because you've read this better than I have.

But I guess my point is,

if we're it's not as if this is not doing good for the city this overall approach I mean it it is not by your analysis meeting you know one of the key things that we said we wanted to do which was the the lower ranges for AMI so I can appreciate that the question I have though is is that the case even with the MIR and the high intensity

I would think not really.

I mean, the inclusionary zoning may include a few units, particularly if we're pairing them with vouchers in some way, but the absolute number of units isn't going to be that much.

And again, just that

And there are people who make significantly less than this even, but again, like a single mom, full-time $15 an hour, I don't see it opening up housing options for them, even in medium and high-intensity residential.

Could someone from the team help me understand with the MIR and the high-intensity, are we getting some of that with the bonuses?

And the 60% AMI units are not households making $30,000 a year.

Right, right.

So we are not getting, like, I think the statement made earlier is a statement from something we worked through in the housing planning process, which I would acknowledge and agree with, which is land use doesn't get you the deepest levels of affordability.

Which is why our affordable housing plan that was adopted, zoning was just one piece of that.

And my point would only be is when the zoning piece, I think there would be some...

Symbiotic benefit, that terrible term, of combining our subsidy.

If you have 100% affordability, they're able to build more units.

Because we're landlocked in 10 and a half square miles, that's just going to help actually get more of that deeply affordable housing

realistically out into the community.

And the final concern I just have is, I mean, there's that example, you know, some people would say it's still a fight to even get a wage to $15 an hour, and they would consider that a win.

60% AMI isn't even meeting that.

There are plenty of folks who make less than $15 an hour who are making our federal or state minimum wage living on Social Security or disability income.

My concern throughout this whole process has been we have from the beginning said we're going to do both, focus on maybe that person making $90,000, $100,000 a year who still does need housing in our current market and we're also going to focus on deeply affordability.

My concern has always been and continues to be it's way easier to meet that higher end so we will fulfill that commitment for young professionals or middle class or upper middle class families who still need housing but we'll never actually fulfill our commitment

There's one other point that I wanted to make.

We are already saying we want literally hundreds of lots to now become medium intensity.

If we get to the point where we've filled up those hundred lots,

without doing any of this, and there's no reason why those hundreds of lots can't have $45,000 worth of subsidies on them if CRHA finds the correct opportunity.

We don't need to be going into the general residential at this point in order to use up whatever, to soak up whatever market there may be for this kind of project for probably the next 20 years.

I'd like to say something, too, on this.

again honoring that time, but we need to have a process that if there is a chunk of land that a nonprofit can move forward with, I'm going to use our local churches who have been recently coming forward with properties saying, you know what, I think I want to do something else.

It's part of my social mission to also be part of the solution for affordable housing.

If that is in a place that is general residential and we don't have something like this in place and we don't have an SUP process, how do we provide that?

Also the SUP process currently is prohibitively expensive, especially the small nonprofits who are trying to make that affordable housing.

So by having something in place that they can use with these more extensive deeper levels of affordability already in place gives it gives an ability to have

more deeply affordable housing.

Yeah, and again, I completely respect all of that.

It makes total sense.

Can I say something?

I think when we were all looking at the comp plan, too, we did look at the overlay, and we pushed that into the affordability bonus with an undefined number of bonus or affordability.

to figure out now.

So I think it still is in line with what we talked about previously.

And we did hear from what Commissioner Stolzenberg said.

Most of the public speakers from my recollection were in support of that move if it truly provided affordable housing.

to very briefly say what's in the plan you know there's a sub strategy of land use 1.4 that says consider deployment of an affordable housing overlay or similar designation to incentivize long-term affordability for a variety of housing types prioritize methods that support deep authority deep affordability and affordable housing overlays in caps there because it's exactly the thing we discussed last year at length that

The HAC, the Housing Advisory Committee, proposed.

And even in the general residential chart, the table defining it, it says allow additional units in height under an affordability bonus program.

I think we very much intentionally kept it on the table precisely to allow a program like this that would allow nonprofits to provide more deeply affordable units.

in conjunction with and supported by our commitment to funding our affordable housing plan.

And if I could also address the idea of it being kind of a betrayal of the planning, I think it's precisely because this is something that doesn't pencil, that we'll need an explicit benevolent nonprofit or CRHA-type partner to do.

You're looking at...

low single digits probably never in any year more than two of these in the entire city right you know reasonably that you feel.

I think anyone would agree really that any single street in the city could handle a 12 plex on it.

The areas we designated for medium intensity, though it will take many years to get there, could conceivably eventually be, you know, in 100 years, all 12 plexes under the plan.

And I think it's very difficult for me to see an argument where a street in the city could not see a single parcel go to more than four units or more than five units without hitting capacity.

When I think about the rugby house, the 12-plex that the whole rugby neighborhood was subdivided from, it's on Cottage Lane.

That is a small street.

Of course, it is also the only street, it is the only house, we're many blocks around, that meets those criteria.

Exactly.

And there's nothing in this suggestion.

that would say you couldn't have two of them on the street or three of them on the street.

Now, maybe we would have to write that in, but that's, I mean, it's kind of being written as though it's a buy-write at that point.

I think that's true, but it's because it's such a rare thing for it to happen because it's so financially infeasible that you're only going to get one, maybe two a year across the city.

I mean, is it possible, I guess, that a nonprofit could do the same street year after year and just go one by one?

They think that's just happened to them.

They've got two proposals within three blocks that are going to drastically increase their traffic and drastically increase the population density.

Well, and I think that's an important example because one of my concerns is if we're changing our fundamental land use decision-making process, you know, without this, are we setting up on our situation where we say we think that the projects on Park Street are a bad idea or shouldn't be able to happen?

And there were trade-offs with those projects, but ultimately we decided to support them because we thought the trade-offs were worth it.

Yeah, which I think brings me back to Ms.

I do want to add a quick question, actually, just because we heard it from the public.

It's the concept of or having that affordability requirement for homeownership might have a negative impact on some of our nonprofits, and I just want to raise that concern.

The years, the length of time?

Yeah, in terms of the length of time, and if there's

Before we adjourn, we do need to get a commitment from Mr. Freeze that two unanswered questions will be addressed.