Planning Commission Deliberations on Zoning Map and Ordinance (if needed)   9/19/2023

I try.

I used to like time to crush you up with my hopes and dreams in an email exchange.

Yes, Creasy, am I about to begin?

Sure.

We are at 5 o'clock.

I know Mr. Palmer is not going to be with us this evening.

All righty.

Good evening, and I think we're ready to begin our deliberations for the evening.

This will be a work session.

Just for your information, we will not be taking public comment from Zoom or from the floor, but we will take public comment via email.

So Ms.

Creasy will give you her email address, and she'll give you the address that public comments need to go to.

There are basically two things that we really need to do tonight.

We need to give the NDS staff direction and very

very direct direction, not specific because we're not going to write the zoning ordinance for them, but we want to give them a good general idea of where we're going to go with the anti-displacement zones, with the anti-displacement zones that used to be called these sensitive zones.

We need to give staff a good idea of where we want to go.

If we are not able to reach consensus, what I will end up having to do is ask for a vote on what may be some options that Mr. Fries will give us.

The other piece is the special exemption process.

We need to give Mr. Fries and his group direction on what we want to do with that.

And once again, hopefully there'll be consensus.

If not, we'll have to

Let me just give quick logistics.

So as the chair noted, we aren't going to have verbal comments from the public, but we are taking written comments and any written comments we receive during the meeting will be attached to the minutes.

Individuals can email me at creasiem at charlottesville.gov.

Emails have started to come.

Also for our in-person audience, we have cards and pens if you would like to provide written comments instead of email comments.

That is an option as well.

All right.

Thank you, Mr. Chair, members of the Commission.

Good evening.

So as noted, our goal for this evening was to hit on some of what we know are kind of the bigger topics that you guys are still looking at as we look towards

finishing this work up.

The two of those that we've identified for this evening are the what was formerly called the sensitive community areas, now is anti-displacement overlay and then special exceptions for form standards, something that came up I believe at one of your more recent meetings.

So I'm going to start and this is not a presentation.

as much as the room is set up for this to be a presentation.

So I'm hoping that this can be more of a conversation.

But I think the first kind of threshold question when we think about the anti-displacement overlay district is whether or not to have one.

I'm going to highlight

some of the issues around that.

And then I anticipate a conversation amongst you all and amongst all of us in that area.

But one thing I wanted to note, I'm hoping everyone had an opportunity to review the RKG study that was in your packets for the public hearing last week.

I know when this came up at the Housing Advisory Committee and at the Housing Advisory Committee there was a lot of concern around the RA and the sense that there were a number of that the greatest number of the greatest the most attractive areas would potentially be those areas that are at risk of displacement in the RA but also note that

When we added in the analysis of the RB and the RC districts, and remember that there were no RB and RC districts in our designated sensitive community areas, that part of the role of the medium intensity of the RB and the RC districts was to actually draw some of that new development away.

That was part of the anti-displacement strategy is to create opportunities for new development in other parts of the city that haven't necessarily seen that

type of development in the past.

Still do it in a way that was sensitive to the scale and context of those places, but identify places that had access to amenities like parks and transit and schools and so on, and allow for a certain amount of density to happen in those areas.

And what I note is that our rate of change analysis did in fact show that is working, that there are going to be units that

are drawn to those locations.

So part of what we identified early on in the concept of addressing the issue of displacement is in fact bearing out at least in the results of this model.

But to come back to this question again around doing an overlay, I think there's a number of pros and cons there.

And you guys have heard me a number of times identify where our concerns are on staff

in the notion that anything we do that reduces

the potential for development in the areas certainly reduces that potential for displacement but also reduces that potential for additional value for those homes and those properties.

And that's something I think we need to continue to bear in mind and then also recognizing that there's nothing we can do to stop the single unit, the single family flips that we know are occurring in those areas, that those are going to be part of

what has happened and is leading today to the displacement those neighborhoods are experiencing and will continue to happen going forward.

And then also thinking about the RKG study, remember the limitations of that study because it does not take into account

the actual characteristics of the lot that was beyond the capacity of what could be accomplished in that work.

The other thing I'd note is, as again, you guys have heard me talk about a number of times, our goal is to

come back at a future date with both an anti-displacement strategy conversation that we've opened with the Housing Advisory Committee and clearly more work needs to be done on that and to come back with our first small area plan following this project being in the 10th and Page neighborhood.

So a lot of the conversation has been about how a anti-displacement strategy in the space could be a bridge between the adoption of the zoning ordinance

and an adoption of a more specific, a more tailored set of recommendations towards this issue in both that neighborhood and other parts of the city.

So I'm going to leave it there.

Let me just ask a general question to make sure that we're all on the same page.

Do we all believe that the anti-displacement overlay is necessary?

In the form of a zoning overlay?

I don't believe that it's necessary.

I think the I'm more concerned about the periphery of these neighborhoods than the neighborhoods than putting a zoning.

I'm more concerned about affecting the zoning of the periphery than affecting the zoning of the neighborhoods themselves.

So a zoning overlay, is it necessary?

Well, that depends on what else we do.

or don't do or recommend.

Let me ask you to hold up.

Well, and there's a third one, too.

But just to say, some of those don't involve an actual overlay, and there's an option that may not.

So I'd be happy to talk through them.

But is it absolutely necessary?

No.

Does the second point that the hack made in the recommendations about if we do, this is why we need one and why it won't work?

Yes.

Okay.

I have given this a great deal of thought.

I see two, well, I see many potential ways forward.

At this time, as part of this process, I could see it working if it is part of a citywide anti-displacement effort in all zones so that it is consistent and we can defend it in court.

That is pretty consistent with my thinking as well.

I don't think that we need an overlay in a certain section of the city.

I do think that some sort of protections need to be in place and separated on different timelines seems sort of reasonable to me.

All right.

While you're processing, would you like me to go to Mr. D'Oronzio?

Because they had two different proposals.

One that I think may have some legal issues, and the other one that is pretty soft.

Sure.

That sounds great.

Can I invite after that, Commissioner Solla-Yates, do you have anything in mind when you think about citywide?

Check your email.

What's that?

Check your email.

Well, tell us what you, well, let's, I mean, I was going to give him a moment.

All right.

So when the hack looked at this, we had, I mean, there's a lot of room for further discussion on this point in the hack, obviously.

The concern, and we saw the replacement rate of

the rate of change analysis too and it does have some issues that might knock the data sideways.

But having said all that, so option A was to look at something similar and the analogy I draw is something similar to the subdivision rules in some rural counties.

family subdivision rules.

So in family subdivision rules, when you have a chunk of dirt and you want to divide it and it's not zoned for easy division, you can give it to a family member, provided you have owned it for X period of time, and the recipient of the gifted carved-off two-acre plot at the end has to hold title for a certain period of time before they can subdivide it or sell it.

And so to take that concept this way, the suggestion would be to sort of season titling, by which I mean in these sensitive areas, if we identify them, if we had a way to say, all right, in order to move forward with development on a given lot, you have to have been on title for two years.

The idea behind that is that, I mean, that would be effective from day one.

So everyone who lives in these areas would be able to develop immediately.

But if they sold to a developer, that developer would have to sit.

And the idea there would just be to put a break.

Now, I threw this at Jay on Thursday evening to sort of get

The essence of our conversation, his sort of professional off-the-cuff opinion was, that ain't going to work.

He thinks it's a takings, but he's still looking at it.

The second option was to have a sensitive area overlay, maybe with the sunsetted, that allows up to three units provided at least the first extra unit is affordable from day one.

to sort of make the development a little shortened there.

And then, you know, allow up to four if the unit is affordable and the original structure is maintained, allow one unit per lot by right.

In other words, so you're saying you sort of created a facto new zone of RA minus.

and they would be one unit unless you're building affordable on it.

That has its own problems.

The third thing that has just sort of sprung at me, which is not a zoning matter at all, and I have asked Jay for his off-the-cuff opinion on it, which he then handed off to Sharon, the consulting lawyer, because he wasn't going to be here, which is can we just keep this away from zoning at all and presumably we're spending

implementation money anyway to offer cash options for the development rights from the city or some other entity to, say, a three-year option.

which would allow the city to then move forward, and by the city I'm speaking pretty broadly, to move forward with six different strategies for developing affordable units in those areas, including selling off that option to someone who is going to do that.

Does that make sense?

I'm a little confused.

So in other words, you identify nine houses with big flat lots and you send out a letter to everyone and contact the nine property owners and say, hey, we want to develop your property sometime in the next three years with some assistance.

You'll get half the upside.

But then the owner is going to end up leaving.

Hmm?

Well, and most of them, I think Fifeville, for example, most of those houses are rental units.

Well, yeah, it would be to the owner to say, we're interested in developing this lot, and we're going to split the upside with you in some fashion.

We're paying you cash not to develop it otherwise for the next two or three years.

Yeah, well, it's going to prevent the wholesale development for anyone who agrees to that.

It couldn't be enforced, but it could entice.

But that's not really a zoning matter.

Right, it is.

I'll just offer that.

So Jay forwarded the proposal to me.

I get the idea.

I just offer that it would take us a fair amount of time.

Even if we could reach agreement that this is something the city wanted to do, it would take us a fair amount of time.

to put something together to that effect.

My feeling is consideration of an idea like that would be something that we'd want to be considering as part of a broader anti-displacement strategy anyway.

and so if the concern is I believe and anyone can correct me if I'm wrong on this but I believe the concern is to put something in place or not within the zoning ordinance that serves as a bridge between now and an anti-displacement strategy slash small area plan for 10th and Page and that type of work

Yeah.

I mean, it depends on how quickly you could stand something up.

Could you pull this together in 90 days?

Theoretically, yes.

But do I think that would happen?

Yeah.

I love your sense of what local government can do, but I suspect a program of that scale would take us more than 90 days to put together.

So, you know, if we're worried that, you know, we complete this rezoning and all of a sudden open the floodgates and somehow there's radical change in these areas,

I wonder if it would be best to just return to the Arlington style permit cap concept to limit the amount of change that could happen in that time.

Is it legally defensible?

Maybe.

We will find out and by the time the litigation has wrapped up we will have completed our anti-displacement policy and found a new policy.

My general view on this is that it doesn't much matter either way.

The status quo is a rapid change in these neighborhoods as a result of single family home flips.

And it seems to me that nothing about the overlay we're discussing is going to limit those in any way.

At worst, it could even, you know, exacerbate the problem where we may have at least had some of those flips add smaller and more attainable units

and instead they will become you know even pricier higher end flips.

So you know my view of the most likely scenario here is that even you know even if we don't pass any overlay the most profitable outcome on most of these small parcels is going to be that flip and if we do pass the overlay

So you would just to clarify you would we

It would be a citywide cap so as to not

Yeah, I mean, the concern is that that turns into some, and I haven't dug deep into Arlington, but the concern is that if you're arbitrarily restricting the development in one area but not in another, even if it's not arbitrary, it's for some sort of noble purpose, that that amounts to a takings.

So, I mean, well first off, I guess, I don't know that we've, I haven't heard any updated legal guidance.

The last I heard was when we were doing the comprehensive plan and received explicit guidance from Ms.

Robertson that the overlay we were contemplating was perfectly legitimate, even with the stated aims and, you know, reasoning for placing it that we had.

Second of all, to me,

It getting dragged out in court is probably more of a feature than a bug, right?

I agree.

I mean, we just need to acknowledge that this will redound to the benefit of litigators first, and that's what will essentially spend money on legal fees to keep it open, which, I mean, fine.

Yes.

Reading from the email I sent two hours ago.

Please forgive any grammar or general awkwardness.

Anti-displacement effort making the first single family home on a parcel require a special use permit so that Council can consider its effects on displacement.

This would also apply to de-duplexification efforts where two or more homes are combined into one.

Does not apply to infill with an existing home or homes preserved on site.

Can be ministerially approved by staff with affordability component to address displacement concern.

Recommend this either be citywide or a secondary process that is legally separate from the rest of the zoning process so that it can be legally challenged and delayed on a separate timeline.

If the second, recommend it include second apartment areas beyond current R1.

I also added the word demolitions, regulating demolitions in some way.

No, no, I wasn't seeking poetry.

Oh, somebody snuck a haiku into that thing in the middle somewhere.

I'm going to try and restate it to see if I get the concept.

I mean, you're saying where I have a vacant parcel,

and I'm proposing to build a single family house, I would need to get a special use permit.

Unless, that may be one of the places where you lost me.

No, you'd still need one, but if those conditions obtained, it would be administratively approved.

Specialties permits always have to go through a legislative process.

Oh.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's fine.

I mean, this was, we asked everybody to provide their comments into us.

Hosea, you have it.

We got feedback from Ms.

James, just to ask a quick question that's kind of the basis of this.

I have a lot of work to do to get to the point of knowing exactly what that timeline's going to look like.

I would allow, I honestly would allow at least a year

for the development of that plan because I think there's a lot of conversations that need to happen within the community.

First in identifying what are the most salient issues to be addressed and then in working through those issues.

Yeah.

Not holding anyone to it.

and I mean for me looking at the study the rate of change in the C and D areas which is kind of covers the areas we're talking about is 3.3 percent annually at the maximum potential limit.

Is that accurate?

Okay.

which there are none in these areas that we're talking about.

Keep in mind that that 3.3 makes the assumption that the number that built baked into that cake is the idea that the fair market value of the land as its potential is baked into the financial cake.

And that's very helpful for making this comprehensible, but of course we know that the quote fair market value of the lot is not what's going to be driving a lot of these purchases for whatever reason.

Did you just say that people sell their property for less than it's worth?

I mean particularly if it's a very fuzzy concept of it's going to arbitrarily be worth, not arbitrarily, but we are saying that because it has the potential to put three additional or two additional units on it, that the value of the land rockets up that way.

It may not necessarily, or the first change, or if it does, that first change of title, whoever buys it, is probably not going to be at that premium price.

I would argue that people selling their house for less than its worth is at the very core of this problem, right?

You have people who are selling for $200,000 and those houses are getting $10,000 of work and putting them and they're selling for $550,000.

You know, that's not a problem that can be solved with Sony.

It's something I think

We should be working with CAR to help fix with better seller's representation.

And I think it should be at the absolute top of the remedies we're pursuing.

Because the absolute most important thing is that the folks who've owned their homes there for decades actually get the value that they're worth.

Is there an effective way to deploy that?

I mean, for lack of a better term, do you spam out to every property owner in those areas and say, do not even think about selling your house without consulting somebody?

And then have Carr pick up the ball and maybe they do it?

Say, don't even think about selling your place without talking to a realtor?

I don't know.

Yeah.

So, I mean, I think the other complication with any zoning solution here is that

You know, we're kind of talking about what we have called sensitive areas as a monolith in the future landings map, sensitive areas anyway.

We've heard different things from different neighborhoods, right?

Tenth of page is the one that's really driving this conversation right now, I think.

Fifeville has been a little bit more ambivalent to an extent.

We've heard from the Meadows, several people in the Meadows, that they absolutely do not want any restriction on maximizing the value of their property.

I think what I worry is that we apply something, we do a focused

Yeah, all right.

Yeah, me too.

So it looks like I think on the map having the overlay there as a reminder is still important for when we're doing rezonings nearby those areas or in those areas.

So what you're suggesting is that it remain on the map.

It may remain a guiding light for us, but we don't codify it.

What I like, I like that.

I like keeping it on the map, so it's a guiding light.

I like not codifying it in an ordinance.

And then I like the idea of each neighborhood is different and you've got different needs.

Meadows has different needs.

Fifeville has different needs.

Tip and Page, they have different needs.

And I like the idea of, again, keeping it on the map, using it as a guiding light, keeping it in mind as we make decisions as we go through the neighborhoods, writing small area plans that are unique and special to the needs of those neighborhoods.

You want to challenge that?

Well, the challenge to that is that that doesn't really apply, that doesn't put an interim tool in anybody's hands.

We're just saying we're walking away from sort of an interim tool.

Relying on the small area plans, you know, and we're optimistic.

I mean, I firmly believe we can get one of them done suit to nuts in two years.

Do I think we can be on parallel tracks with more than one and get them done in that time frame?

The rate of change, Mr. Bob, just kind of walk this in.

I mean, three houses in?

Oh, the C&D, the anti-displacement neighborhoods.

Well, one, so the weaknesses with that are, number one, it doesn't know anything about the lot except its designated size, except its designation and its assessed value and, you know, if it's a recent sale or not.

It doesn't know if it's flat or hilly, doesn't know about the conditions of the street, doesn't know anything about that.

So that's a huge wrench.

and that will also drive how much development can happen on it.

So to contrast between 10th and Page and the Meadows

The Meadows has these lovely one-third and one-quarter acre lots, and they're flat by the standards of Charlottesville, not Kansas.

And, you know, 10th and Page, you're not going to find a lot like that to be had.

So that's going to skew things more towards those areas.

And then, of course, yeah, I think it's difficult

What's baked into the cake is we're assuming that someone's going to have to pay the full after improved market value for that lot in order to develop it.

And because people are not rational, that ain't going to happen.

And developers aren't going to play that game.

Are there any further questions?

If not, can we move to adjourn?

No, I don't have any.

I mean, I've got three that I... I mean, we've got two and a half from the hack.

That's the seasoning issue?

That's the first one.

Stay two years.

You've got to be on the title for two years before you can develop sort of thing.

Well, anyways, that wouldn't change or stop what's happening today, right?

Yeah, if you can keep it as a single family.

But I think Rory's right.

That's happening.

What we do is not going to move that needle.

And I just want to add, before we get too focused on the small area plan part of this, just noting also that we want to amend the affordable housing plan with a more robust anti-displacement strategy.

It looks at what we're already doing, what capacity we have to increase or improve what we're doing, and what are there other tools that are out there.

Because as Rory said, as I think we've all said, zoning is not the only tool, it's not even the best tool in the toolkit.

And it's interesting, every conversation I have with folks

about this anti-displacement issue keeps coming back to, well, are you looking at tax relief?

Well, are you looking at rent relief?

Well, are you looking at education around property costs?

And that's because those are the tools that we really need to be putting in place.

That shouldn't take as long as a small area plan.

I received feedback from Ms.

Okay.

Yeah.

All right.

So, you know, in the near term, I wonder if there are some quick and easy non-zoning tools we can do concurrently with implementing the zoning.

Things like sending out a mailing to everyone in those neighborhoods that says, hey, here's the CHAT program, here's the real estate tax relief for the elderly and disabled program.

These are your options.

Also, this is what your property is assessed at.

Fifeville Neighborhood Association did a really good job of starting a conversation around these types of tools and bringing a lot of people around the table to talk about it.

So there's some work to build on in this space.

I mean, we've got, for Preston Avenue, it's known as CX-5, and there's a little chunk of CX-8.

And I'm not going to lie, I mean, I think at the end of the day, we need to have as much density on Preston as we can get, but it needs to be sensitive to the neighborhoods.

And I don't know if we can set up a way that

A CX-5 project would be Dairy Market all the way down Preston.

And it would be by right.

There would be no chance for the neighborhood to come in and say, well, we'd really like you to put in some services that we can actually afford to use or anything like that.

It could be whatever the developer wants it to be, and chances are it's going to be expensive.

So I don't know if we need to look at maybe Preston needs to be CX-3 with some sort of

So that's not exactly what CX-5 is, right?

CX-5 is more like 10th and Dairy all the way down Preston and CX-3 is more like Dairy Market all the way down because that's the problem I think with this idea that you can just downzone and make something sensitive is that just gets you

Dairy Market, which was perfectly by right, you know, an applauded historic preservation keeping the feel of the neighborhood, you know, a single tall story and what a three-story office building on the back.

And, you know, you could have, you could mimic that all the way down perfectly legally under any zoning you could

feasibly put there.

Private property?

I don't know if we can't.

I mean, you can ban housing there if you want, but I think it's just going to make outcomes worse.

What I want to do is make it do something that entices the developer to actually go through an SUP process.

So, I mean, I think maybe you could have proactive economic development, you know, programs that seek to engage developers and create the sorts of uses we want to see.

I think you know maybe there's some development manual tweaks we can make so that things adjacent to I mean I guess things on the scale we're talking about require TDM plants they need to have meetings anyway but you know I would argue that maybe anything near a sensitive neighborhood should have a at least a community meeting even if it's not forcing binding changes at least you're opening up an avenue of discussion

But, I mean, that's a tough nut to crack, right?

If we kind of break things out a little bit, the question of how to create leverage is, we know the answer to that, you apply a special use permit.

So you down zone the property and you require a special use permit to exceed the height.

So that's your mechanism.

Whether that gets you a different outcome at the end of the day in terms of what

what businesses are able to locate there in the future is kind of a different question.

So the Cherry Ave project is a great example of that.

There's a strong desire for a grocery store.

There's not a commitment from that developer to produce a grocery store.

There is a commitment to give it a good solid try.

And I don't anticipate the ability to do better than that in any other negotiation.

I mean, I think what it

is going to come back to each and every time is land ownership.

In the existing scenario of Preston Avenue, quite honestly, the services that have served those adjacent neighborhoods, the businesses, are, dare I say, largely already gone.

We've already seen the brew pubs and the restaurants move into that corridor in the existing condition without changing a single building.

So where other communities are having success in establishing and retaining those neighborhood-serving businesses is in creating new opportunities for people to own the land or for the community to own the land and or the business and establish that in that place.

But we find ourselves similarly to where we've been in the anti-displacement conversation, the affordable housing conversation,

is not the strongest tool in the toolbox because zoning is just regulating land use and we're trying to proactively promote land use solutions that support that community over time.

That's about ownership and subsidy and those are the strategies kind of in that bucket.

Do you use a special use permit to try and leverage to try and get some of those resources into the project?

That's an option, right?

You can use a special use permit as leverage to try and get some resources that would support those ownership and subsidy objectives.

But you always have the flip side that someone can choose not to pursue a special use permit and move forward with what's there.

All I can do is kind of set up the scenarios for you.

Yeah, I mean, I think for the special use permit route to be effective, you need to be credible that you would actually, you know, award the special use permit under the conditions that you're asking for, ideally, you know, in advance so that expectations are set.

And I don't know that

That is necessarily a credible thing we can say right now.

I will say, you know, Preston has a unique maybe opportunity for city-owned land because we can essentially create an acre of land by fixing the 10th Grady-Preston intersection and use it for something useful rather than a big grassy lot in the middle of a street, which we've talked about.

There was a plan floated to fix that acre in 2004?

There's been lots of plans floated.

The mayor at the time was flogging it and he ended up face planting on it.

But they wanted to move that.

And it was 1.6 acres or something that could have been generated.

Yeah, I mean, I think, well, that's the sort of thing, this sort of conversation I think you'd have in a small area plan process.

But I think, you know, in terms of whether zoning is an effective tool to kind of use an SUP or a downzoning with a, you know, hinting at a potential allowing an upzoning or an SUP in the future to hope that we get what we want by bringing them to the table, you know, I wonder if that's going to be effective.

And I feel like you're going to make

I hope we can figure out a way to do that because once we pass this plan I think you know we're gonna the Stony Point Development is gonna they can do exactly what they wanted to do in the first place.

They can only do it if they give us 50 deeply affordable units though.

That is that is

Yes.

Yes.

Thank you.

Thank you for reminding me of that.

Checkerboard the whole thing.

That's kind of devious.

I like it.

Yeah, but I mean, how practical is this notion?

I mean, I like, you know, Rory, your notion of, look, you know, it's a lot easier to get an SUP if you're doing, if there's, everyone's much more amenable to an SUP if there are three affordable units in that building or whatever, you know, or 10 or whatever.

Your essential argument is that you hold that as the key to the kingdom, that if you want to do what you want to do in this SUP process, the setbacks have to be so-and-so, you've got to have affordable blah, blah, blah.

Well, no.

I mean, I think that's what we should be doing in our... All of them, anyway.

Yeah, exactly.

Those are the rules we're making.

That's the zoning ordinance we're talking about.

We would require, and if they're trying to do 400, 500 units, and they're trying to do seven stories in CX-5, those need to be 50 units affordable at...

50% AMI, which is, you know, really significant, actually.

Oh, no, all day long.

So, Mr. Chair, could you perhaps see where everyone's sort of sitting on this?

Well, let me feedback what I've got.

And then you guys can walk me through what I'm missing.

There are a couple, maybe three areas of agreement.

One, zoning ain't going to get the job done.

So that's not the way to go about this.

The other piece is, even though Zoning won't get the job done, we cannot forget where these sensitive neighborhoods are.

So we don't do away with the overlays that are on the map, just to remind us and just keep that there as a guiding light.

We also think that each neighborhood is unique, each of the sensitive neighborhoods are unique, and that each of them ought to have their own unique approach to being protected, and that's through small area plans.

But so we all agree on that.

Where we are, where we have not landed, the plane is on.

What happens in the interim to me now in the smaller plans?

And what happens in the adjacent properties?

What happens with those?

We haven't figured out exactly how to handle those.

Did I miss anything?

Wow.

Where are we on Rory's notion of Picasso's notion of the mediocre borrow of the great steel and just stealing Arlington's idea of capping building permits?

Would that help?

So would that help us?

Would we easily get ourselves in a situation where someone could say, you're not approving these things on their own individual merits or things that are getting prioritized in the wrong direction?

Never mind.

I have two unresolved thoughts that I'd like to return to.

Demolition permits and deduplexification regulation.

Yeah.

So I'm going to start with the second one.

The notion there is to actually have essentially a no net loss policy.

when it comes to residential units, right?

So you could have a requirement that you can't turn a duplex into a single family or otherwise reduce the number of units on a given lot.

The first one, in terms of regulating demolitions, I actually am not sure what we can do in that space.

So if we're going to do a no net loss policy, is there

I mean do we want that to be consistent for example if anything that has a commercial input I mean I'm I'm of the opinion that anything in the RA zone that you build has got to have a residential unit in it period so any of this can any of these sort of small commercial operations that have caused all this storm and drying amongst people you know if you're going to build a convenience store it better have an apartment in the back of it sort of thing that's sort of does that sort of lend into a no net loss policy

I mean, could we make that that broad?

Just like, you're going to build an RA, you've got to have a residential unit, and if you're going to, you know, if you've got two units, you need to end with two or three.

Well, I'm not against approving them.

I don't think we need to do that because they're an SUP.

The reason I think it's necessary is that if we've zoned a lot, RA, that's to put as many as four families on it, and we're just sort of saying there's potentially four units that are never going to be built on that property.

Well, that's a grandfathered... Sure, but I don't want to argue with your example.

Yeah, I don't want to argue with your example.

Yeah, I mean, I just sort of spit that out.

I think so.

If we could have a clear idea on demolition, I think that may be useful.

What are you thinking about in terms of demolition?

Well, it's those areas that are covered by some form of historic district.

Precisely.

Well, I mean, I guess you would just say it's a historic district, right?

Certainly.

Well, right.

That's one of the things that's in the toolkit, right, is considering a historic district in those areas.

I think, again, that's the type of thing I would want to consider in concert with those communities.

I wouldn't necessarily want to right now go forward with something like that.

Just on the no net loss, I'm a little concerned about putting that citywide, just because I think there's a number of scenarios where you might want to permit the flexibility in there, and maybe there's details on how that's written.

For legal reasons.

I know that we've mentioned, or the legal mentioned that permits we can't, but I mean this works even better than having a permit cap because

Mr. Chairman, if I might, whenever you start looking at putting caps on things in the zoning context, unless there's clear authority that has been upheld, sometimes there's clear authority and then it's struck down.

I would have to caution you that trying to put any caps on number of permits, number of demolitions is going to not be considered legally authorized and also runs into the issue of, and I'll explain it this way, if there's a limit and there's a cap, then there's going to be a race to see who can pick up permits.

Back to sort of a and I am we sort of when we go over this we keep coming back to we you know each individual community and group needs to figure out and we need to come in the city needs to sort of bring that forward and examine that acknowledging that that's true I go back to the idea of a sunset provision of some sort that gives you know yes it it

It does make every problem look like a nail, so it's a hammer, but it's a two-year deal to sort of slow the process, put a halt until we can start putting some of those other things in place.

And I'm not sure what that looks like in terms of

Well, yeah, I mean, that's the whole point here that we're trying to keep an avalanche from sweeping through those neighborhoods.

Like, I can't do what I want with my property.

So I'm not sure what that answer is, something like that overlay that was earlier contemplated about having to have an affordable unit that Lisa Robertson said, hey, they think this will work, and just say it's a two-year sunset.

Mr. Chairman, if I might, and I hate to be so negative.

or a string of negatives, but there is no authority to do sunsets.

When you adopt a zoning ordinance, it is the ordinance.

It's not a temporary ordinance.

It is the ordinance until you amend that ordinance under state law.

I have to say, as I told Mr.

d'Oronzio.

This issue has come to me relatively recently.

I need to talk to Mr. Frias about it and Mr. Stroman further, but I think the appropriate way to do it is the way that Mr. Frias has already described, which is outside of the zoning ordinance, provide various incentives or disincentives through other processes.

Now, arguably, you may need some money to do that.

So you sure it's going to take us more than 90 days to stand up an option regime?

Okay.

All right.

Ms.

Pandek, are you saying that even the kind of original concept where there's no cap in terms of a permit limit or anything but just that there are different rules that apply to particular areas of the city such that an affordability requirement is applied for the second unit.

I don't know that I can answer your question.

In my mind, because maybe I'm not understanding it, there are two aspects to your question.

One is can you select areas

in the city that you want to give special attention to or protection to.

The answer is that that might be possible, assuming that you can articulate specific public purpose reasons that distinguish them and that the requirements are uniform within them.

So that's possible.

That's not the question I've been asked.

What I've understood was that there was an intent to

make across the city changes.

And then separately the question is, do you have to do it in the zoning ordinance?

And the answer to that is that you can provide incentives, financial grants, or not provide incentives to certain areas with not providing grants, assuming that whoever's making the grants has some flexibility, and I can't speak to that.

I haven't looked at the tax relief, but the answer is that we'd have to go back and look at the separate authority.

And when you say more, I haven't looked at what authority, what you're using right now.

All right.

Thanks.

So it looks, once again, it looks like we're back where we were at the beginning, again, with those three things that we talked about that we agree on.

And that as opposed to doing something in the interim through a code ordinance, we have to stick to education incentives and disincentives.

Sorry, let me make sure I'm hearing the three things where we are right now.

Again, the things I think we're all agreeing on, zoning ain't the answer.

The other thing is we do want to keep the overlays on the map just as a guiding light to keep us focused on protecting those neighborhoods.

And the other is we want to immediately, as soon as we get through this, begin focusing on the fight fields

and 10th and Pages and all the other sensitive areas so that each unique neighbor gets its own small area plan.

And in the interim, there's not much that we can do in the code to protect these sensitive areas.

And the best way to protect them is developing some sort of incentives or disincentives.

owners as relates to what their properties are worth.

That's where I'm hearing from my colleagues and the lawyer.

I think Rory is smarter than I am on this issue, and I'm going to defer to his opinion on that, which is not to.

I mean, you know, I guess to to steal man your argument for a minute, like while it's true that you could put a food hall on every single block and put a dairy market everywhere, you know, maybe like obviously there's money to be made in building housing, even with the significant affordability requirements.

And maybe that's enough of an incentive to get people to come to the table, to get this particular person to come to the table, you know, to come and beg us for more.

The risk, of course, is that you get the buy-write development, which is how you end up with, you know, a nine-story half-empty office tower on Garrett Street instead of a bunch of apartments, studios renting for a thousand bucks a month.

you know it's a risk we could take and it's you know a risk we could take temporarily under the idea that we would potentially change it in two years which might make it more of a risk because he currently has an option to buy the site and you know could act on it in the meantime under that buy right scenario so you know I wouldn't go so far as to say that

is not of any value to try to get someone to come to the table.

Well, you said the risk was the nine-story office building.

Yeah, yeah, the nine story was a different district, different risk.

But yeah, I mean, that's the risk, right?

I've had Kathy Galvin on the mind recently, so I'd like to say a Kathy Galvin term, synthetic TIF, tax increment financing.

I mean, I'm not sure how, I mean, it gets us money.

I'm not sure what we do with it.

I mean, I just, not directly the zoning.

a useful tool, right, something to be considered.

I heard ideas at the, yeah, as you noted at the HACC meeting, interesting ideas in the TIF world.

I think there's a lot of opportunity in TIFs, but purely from a zoning perspective, I mean, from the SUP idea is, it fundamentally is a question of

do we use that tool to create leverage to garner resources that we can apply towards the needs that are being identified?

And it's recognizing the upsides and downsides of that.

The downside is the risk that the SEP process itself becomes a deterrent to that type of development.

Rather than attaching it to the use, I would propose that we do effectively a special exception type process and attach it to the height.

If it's not zoning, it's something else.

So the concern here is that it seems to me that we've got an economic development piece, we've got a housing affordability piece, we've got some other piece

that if those things do not do we say this isn't in zoning we need to handle it outside of zoning that you know zoning is our wheelhouse here but we need to I mean somehow well the rest of this has got to get stood up and moving fast

and not, oh, you know, and we really have to mean it, that we're going to stand it up and move it fast and that most of this will get done in 2024, you know, so in terms of programs to stand up, and I mean, we're not going to get small area plans on that fast, but whatever programs we put in place, we've got to design and build them, stand them up and get them out the door.

That's not really our wheelhouse, but I don't want to feel like we're passing the buck, too, to people who, you know, what wheelhouse is, you know,

Who are we passing the buck to and do they know it's just been passed on them?

I guess I'd also say, you know, if you were to do that, you know, ratchet it down and offer the carrot of, or, you know, offer the possibility of an SUP for more, I think you would have to do it more than even our, like, more than CX3, right?

Like, even that is probably too much where it becomes somewhat attractive to just do CX3.

And you would have to, I mean, probably effectively mandate the build form that's there in order to make any redevelopment unattractive indefinitely for those parcels.

A whole lot of parking, single-story, old, you know, small footprint, auto-oriented buildings.

to make it untenable to proceed by right.

I mean, I'm not sure the goal is to make it untenable to proceed by right so much as it is to say where a project gets to a certain scale, we're looking to effectively negotiate a community benefit because

The Tenth and Market Project did, I think I'm getting the stories right, it was four stories and it went through an SUP for a fifth story for the original project, right?

Okay.

But was it from four to five or was it from five to six stories?

Okay.

That's what I thought.

So are you getting close to getting something you need?

I appreciate that.

What's the sense of the commission on this point?

Facebook.

Let me repeat what I think the consensus is.

And the consensus, again, is zoning ain't the answer.

We need to keep the overlay just as a guiding light.

So that's there.

But I was actually referring to the corridor.

Oh, OK.

Sorry.

I think I would want to tie that to the

of those areas that were identified as anti-displacement areas.

TBD, but I think to come to, in order to kind of state

a valid public purpose and treat everybody within the district uniformly.

I actually like the idea of basing it on square footage.

Yes.

nearly every corridor in the city, really, except for High Street, 29, and Fish Street, right?

So it's West Main, it's Preston, it's Cherry, it's Avon, or at least Avon north of Elliott.

It's a lot of Fish Street, actually.

Yeah, right, like this proposed area central project is really four buildings or something, right, depending on how they do it.

Would each of those be counted separately, potentially, or they would have to phase it to make that happen?

That could be counted as one development?

Number of square foot per parcel period.

So my anticipation is

I have some more off-topic spaghetti if it's helpful.

We have an annual capital improvement plan process.

Yeah, I mean, I think my biggest worry about this, right, is that we go right back to our 2003 scenario where we say we want all of these auto-oriented corridors to be retrofitted into nice mixed-use corridors with housing and now required affordable housing.

And here we just created this great mixed-use zoning code to do that.

But we made everyone run through this gauntlet of a special use permit process with extremely unpredictable outcomes that have only gotten more unpredictable over the last two decades and, you know, for this in particular I think would be the most unpredictable it's ever been probably.

And so you end up stifling everything and getting nothing.

But West Main certainly wasn't stifled.

Yeah, that's the one we got in the last 20 years, even took a decade for that one.

You know, I think a big...

Even before I got on this commission, way back in 2017, 2018, a big thing the commission was talking about as part of this comprehensive plan process was to make more predictable outcomes and defined rules for what we want to see in the city so that we're not leaving everything to negotiation up here.

And I think

We really need to question whether the rules we've defined are what we want to see.

And I think in a lot of ways the answer is yes.

We for the first time have required affordable housing with more deeply affordable housing required for what is being proposed on that particular site we're talking about.

and you know ultimately the things that we don't like about that are not really things that we can require at all it's that we don't like the guy who did it is doing it because he you know is seen as not having fulfilled his promises in the past and we're not well equipped to

in a zoning code create rules that apply to particular people for their behavior.

But I suppose you can do that with discretionary review, right?

You can deny anything you want because you don't like them.

You just have to say it's for something else.

But do we lose all of those benefits, all of those things we've been working for for the last, you know, seven years to make a better process in order to achieve that?

I think putting a process on something that's over a certain size depending on what that size ends up being it does give us a goal of trying to get more granular development which I think is a goal and I also don't think that we're I know there are people in the neighborhood who don't like the development because of the developer but it's also because

what the development contains in it which is stuff that is completely unaffordable to the neighborhood and

I don't know if it actually increases property values in the neighborhood, but it definitely, that's the, that is a strong belief that is causing gentrification throughout the neighborhood.

Well, are we talking about dairy market or are we talking about, you know, what's proposed in this next phase?

Because it seems to me the dairy market would continue to be allowed under this, even under this new thing, right?

It's not particularly large in square footage.

and certainly not in height.

I guess, I mean, the other thing that I think of is, you know, if it comes to property value, I think tax relief would be the answer, not a zoning issue.

And I understand

like this specific parcel.

We keep saying 50.

Were they proposing 500 units?

That's what the news has said.

400 to 500.

No.

And it does, it gives the neighborhood a chance to

Which actually brings me to another point on the development review.

There probably should be a mandatory community meeting for projects of a certain size.

It was one of the tree commission's recommendations.

So effectively there is, in that we've included the projects that trigger the transportation demand management, which is right now set at 50,000 square feet, are required to conduct a community meeting.

And now the intent there, not stated in the document, but the intent there is to recognize since the purpose of the transportation demand management plan is to address both the transportation system impacts, but also any

particularized impacts on the neighborhood from both a transportation and a parking perspective.

It behooves the developer to have a conversation with that community on those issues.

So we're setting that up.

just make it lower, too.

I mean, 50,000 is roughly, I don't know, 30 to 50-ish units.

We can change that to be any number we want that we think is fit.

50 seems like, you know, it's a big project.

Yeah, I mean, I'm fine with requiring more community meetings.

It seems like a pretty

All right, Mr. Breeze, what do you need from us?

Right now I'm taking away that we're going to draft some language relative to some form of discretionary permit related to corridors adjacent to anti-displacement zones.

So anti-displacement overlay, if you will, that's focused on corridor areas.

And we will

We will discuss that, put something together, and have that at the next work session.

So just for some quick context here, Dairy Market is 39,000 square feet, if I'm reading GIS right.

The office is 62,500 square feet.

And then the apartment building is...

Yes.

All right.

So the other topic we wanted to touch on tonight is

this conversation around special exceptions or some form of varying the form requirements.

So when I say form requirements, I'm referring to basically everything that represents a standard or requirement around the physical development of the building, so setbacks, height, building width, what have you.

It could be the active depth, could be transparency requirements, all of those things.

At a previous meeting it was suggested that there should be a form of special exception process related to that.

I wanted to note that the draft ordinance does right now offer two methods just so we know what's in there today.

One of those is that an up to 15% administrative modification so that means during the site plan review process under review we could do up to a modification of up to 15% of

Any standard not including density requirements, story, height, some of the basic kind of fundamental things that define the zoning districts don't vary, but other standards could at 15%.

And then there is the variances themselves, which have a hardship standard.

And I'd note that topography is frequently considered a hardship standard and one that certainly would come up in Charlottesville.

What's been talked about is a special exception process which would, as we've conceptualized it, would mirror the special use permit process.

So that would be a public hearing recommendation from Planning Commission and decision by City Council.

And we would suggest that in addition to kind of the standard criteria we use that we also look to criteria

related to the degree to which the project proposes to otherwise mitigate the issues of the standard that they're seeking to vary.

So one of those things the standard is in place to address, and there's some form of mitigation offered relative to those areas.

Something that we internally are still discussing, in fact, it would be essential for us to discuss this

Our legal counsel, Ms.

Pandek, we've heard from a number of people that the county offers a special exception process that actually does not go to the Planning Commission, incorporates a staff review that then goes straight to counsel and frequently is simply placed on a consent agenda.

I'm sorry, not counsel.

In the county's case, it's Board of Supervisors, but you get my drift.

It's frequently placed on the Board of Supervisors' consent agenda and carries forward that way.

that's been offered.

Our initial review of that was that we didn't see that as something that was possible, but it's been noted again as something that, well, the county does it.

So we'll be discussing that, but I guess my question for the Planning Commission in particular is, A, if there is an interest in

I guess we should start with the threshold question, is there an interest in this form of special exception process?

And we can discuss that.

If I put my architecture firm hat on, I'd say yes, that sounds great.

Having the special exemption process.

Having it at all?

Okay.

That goes to a Planning Commission.

If we can tweak that 15% administrative modification, that's a way to streamline it too.

It could be higher and kind of go through the same channel.

If we're having the community benefits meetings,

I mean, that's kind of the big benefit of those is you're almost like, you know, like it is going to be an SEP process.

And when it's a big project and you need to change some stuff, what's the community benefit?

If that's a thing that we're already going to implement adjacent to the sensitive areas or abutting the sensitive areas, I think that takes care of, you know, why we would want to have this.

So are you, let me see if I can sum up, you can tell me if I got it.

A lot of the need.

So I couldn't let it go with just one word, could I?

I hesitate on sort of expanding that too much because every time that you expand say the percentage you're opening up an opportunity for someone to say that they weren't being treated fairly compared to somebody else, right?

I mean this is supposed to be for relatively utilitarian purposes.

You're getting the special exception because it makes no sense to do this without the special exception which is

from an administrative point, kind of a no-brainer.

Yes, of course you're not going to put the driveway there.

That's dumb.

Yes, move it here.

That's fine with us.

I do have sort of a concern that it can just sort of be an inflection point for litigious people.

But I do like the idea of having it be very streamlined.

I think that it should be sort of shoved onto the Planning Commission's consent agenda.

Everything has to go to Council, just to be clear.

But if it's on the consent agenda of the Planning Commission, the Planning Commission can address those issues before it ever goes to Council and may effectively make a recommendation.

We spent 45 minutes of Planning Commissioner meeting time on it.

Yeah.

If I were to just kind of tweak or go back a little bit on what I was saying, what I would be afraid of is continuing the status quo that we have today where somebody applies for this and it comes to planning commission and then we're doing this trade-off condition thing that basically is the community benefits.

Mm-hmm.

that we're trying to do.

And if this is going to tell us that our form-based code is an issue, then maybe that's why it's beneficial.

And then we can tweak that.

And I guess if it is discretionary and up to us, we can then review that application towards our standards.

And if they actually can't meet them, then that tells us something.

So can I jump in?

So I think maybe this is my proposal or maybe other people propose it too.

I don't know.

So I really see it mostly as a relief valve for the form-based code because we don't know what aspects of it might, you know, once it hits reality, be problematic.

I don't see it as that sort of current specialties permit process of

effectively negotiating for things.

I mean, much more, you know, is this modification actively harmful to community?

Does it make the project, you know, slightly better?

Is it fine?

And sure, go ahead.

I mean, yeah, to go back to the driveway issue, if James has two exceptions to where to put a driveway in a year, fine.

Right, and so, you know, I do think it should be streamlined because it should be, you know, pretty low stakes, you know, is there enough glazing, like, can I put this bathroom in the front of the house even though it brings me 12% above or below the active depth requirement instead of, or active use requirement instead of 10% that you can waive.

And then,

Yeah, so streamlined, simple, not a big debate each time.

And just used to create that relief valve so that we can find these problems in situations where there isn't necessarily a hardship, right?

Like there is probably not a hardship that says you absolutely can't put that extra window on the front of your house.

I think there are a lot of scenarios that may or may not be hardships and I think we're really right now shaping up for a lot more work for the BZA which I think it hasn't historically seen a ton of which is probably fine like 1709 JPA is a great example right the other day they could have built five up here and five down here and instead they wanted to do like eight

But that's a huge topography difference that probably would have been a textbook hardship variance.

But I think there are a lot of cases like that that just might run slightly afoul of the new form requirements, slightly beyond what can be adjusted.

And, you know, some of those adjustments just by nature, 10% or like the percentage adjustment doesn't really give you much flexibility, right?

If it's eight feet, then your adjustment is 0.8 feet, which is not a lot.

The beauty of the percentage thing, though, is when it's small numbers, it tends to be small product.

Well, and also the small numbers stuff tends to also be the things that are like a side setback, like people care a lot about those.

I'm very conflicted on this topic.

I've looked at other communities that do this and this is actually fairly common in Northern Virginia which in general I don't consider as the best practice and I don't consider Albemarle County as the best practice either.

I think it makes sense in those contexts because the existing code is so bad and it demands a very strong process to work around the bad code.

We're trying to make good code.

My current

thinking is that we should make the best code we can right now.

And then as we roll it out, catch the problems that we see and turn that into even better code.

I'm more in the camp of I think we need to we do need to have an exception process at least for a couple of years I know we can't sunset it but we can always get rid of it later when we decide we don't need it but again just to catch the things in the code that are problematic and I'm thinking again also the JPA project I mean not just the height issues but you know the transparency the fact that there's a garage in the front of it and there's no other way to put a garage there

and technically our code says you don't have to have parking so I don't know if that qualifies as a hardship so it

Maybe.

I don't know.

I didn't get answers to some of my questions on that, but it looked like I tried to tear it apart like any architect would to find exceptions, and I got confused more than anything.

But I think we are going to find things that...

I'm just going to say, right, if staff agrees, right.

So from a code perspective, it'll simply say that it goes to the Planning Commission, it goes to Council, right?

I have a question on this item.

No.

Well, I have a question for you.

How do we cache those problems with the code to iterate on it if we don't have some way to know that there's some architect in some drafting office that's banging his head against the wall?

I mean, I guess you might yell at James.

Yeah.

I think the message is out.

What I'd say is I've never hesitated to entertain considering a change to a zoning ordinance where something is brought forward and we look at the issue and say not only is this an issue here but it's an issue more broadly and this makes sense to address and therefore we'll put forward to the Commission and the Council a change to the zoning ordinance.

I think that's perfectly fair and in fact I hope

That's true.

I didn't hear strong support for skipping the Planning Commission, but maybe I missed it.

You did that.

Fair enough.

Which kind of checks out with our understanding of what our authorities are, but

Just on that report, you could still look at the 15% administrative, because that's still in there.

Oh, that's still in there, yeah.

Oh, that's absolutely what I would use.

Yeah, absolutely.

And I'd note that that's, there are conditions, right?

That's not like a, you get a 15%, you don't.

Sorry, is it 15 now?

Because it was then originally, right?

It is, yep.

All right, you've got 15 more minutes.

I jotted some notes on, well, I don't know that we could, no.

Don't even want to tee it up.

I mean we'll dig.

So the next meeting our objective is going to be to present to you guys all the questions and specific changes that you guys identified in your documents to us.

Thank you for providing those.

We're going to organize those and provide responses, not necessarily with the intention of discussing everyone, but for you guys to pick out those that you feel you need to discuss.

will be bringing back some language from this meeting.

And then the other big topic that I don't think we can get tonight is there were a number of questions on the ADU ordinance, affordable dwelling units.

Is there any interest in talking more about the ADU stuff?

Or are you not ready?

If you're not ready then I think broadly what are the I mean I had a few things on it but like broadly what are the things in there that would be discussed controversial or I mean I think the main question that's been raised is around the term of affordability in rental versus home ownership

But so, yeah, the thing, we've been getting a lot of comments about that.

It clearly says that you can waive that for homeownership if it serves the public purpose, which is presumably aimed at exactly what all these comments have been about.

I haven't heard that.

One of the recommendations from HACC was just to take that out.

Right.

Yeah.

So what I was sort of warming up to that is that just take that piece out and put in some sort of distinct

The 99 year of affordability is the issue on the home sale.

It's just not a workable way to deal with that that doesn't send you sideways pretty fast.

So the idea would be to have built into, if we're building it under affordability, that there would be a

a roffer for the first arms leg, right of first refusal.

So it could be the city.

It could be one of the providers.

It could be depending on if there was money involved and from whom.

And because one of the things about an affordable unit that's housing is that if you take someone who does not have a house and you put them into an affordable house that they own, you have now

that is now a family that doesn't need a unit.

We're done.

And I just note that

I worked on a number of inclusionary zoning ordinances that did apply in perpetuity requirement on ownership.

It's not uncommon.

There's ups and downs.

It's simply a different philosophy in terms of are we trying to create a permanently affordable ownership unit for not just that family but the next one and the next one and the next one?

Yeah, I guess that's what I'm asking.

Well, it's not that it isn't still a foundation for building wealth.

They still have that unit.

They've still locked in a mortgage payment that's presumably can't then be raised like rent can be raised, and they still are going to get some appreciation on it.

The only thing the requirement says

is that the next buyer of the house has to qualify for the affordable unit.

When I raise this objection, Councillor Payne suggested that I take a look at the Land Bank Land Trust.

It's essentially the same model as a land bank as I understand it.

So as I recall,

having not read the agreement in a year or so, the owner can get 25% of the appreciation between the price they bought it at and the new market price.

And it has to be initially listed for a homeowner at, I think, 60% AMI.

And then if it doesn't sell for 90 days with that restriction, that can get raised to 80% AMI, or maybe that's 80 and then 120.

But so presumably that kind of limits the sale price because an income qualified buyer has to be able to afford it.

But they're not able to capture a lot of that appreciation.

It varies land trust by land trust, but it's shared equity, so that percentage will change based on the land trust, but it would be shared equity that goes to the next home buyer, so you pass a wealth creation opportunity to multiple families as opposed to one.

In other words, the sales price.

So it's limited by?

You would pass the equity on to the next person.

The next purchaser.

The next purchaser.

And in a land trust model, that's doable.

What I see as a problem with qualifying subsequent buyers on this is that

First of all, 40 years from now, who knows what our wants and needs are going to be.

Second, that you really are absent using a land bank or land trust or a leasehold, or even a leasehold operation to a lesser extent of any type, that in sort of the free range world,

you may be jackpotting people if the fair market value of that property is much higher, okay well if you've got to keep it affordable who's coming up with the money to make that an affordable purchase and then how are you picking the winner and the loser on that and that can be pretty complicated as opposed to this is a way of building housing that's a permanent unit that's still going to be there

and we have one bite at the apple, but the beauty of the roffer is that if the market conditions have changed dramatically that the holder of that right won't exercise it because it doesn't make sense to.

So that gives you the outlet.

So in other words, well, this really isn't an affordable housing issue anymore.

The neighborhood is like this.

This is what's going on.

I mean PHA with, for example, ACHAP in the county with PHA and their accruing interest, you know, they're getting that money back for another family.

I mean the subsidy comes back, I mean one way or the other, particularly if it's on title, the subsidy comes back to the offer of the subsidy because it's got to be paid.

at some point.

I mean, unless somebody stays in there forever.

It's forgivable, but unless.

I just think it's a much more flexible way than tying ourselves to individual properties, having a 99-year affordability, because we're changing the ownership of those things several times.

Let's talk about rental units.

So I guess maybe to step back from the benefit of one approach versus the other, I wonder if it

I think it matters for us for what we're doing to require one or the other.

You know, if the worry is that people are getting, like developers are getting the affordable housing bonus and don't, you know, deserve it.

For home ownership, you know, they're only getting

that, or they're selling it for that affordable price the first time, right?

And so whatever restrictions are put on, they're still not getting anything more out of it.

And so if people want to pursue one model versus the other, you know, it's not like an unfair advantage to sort of like a gaming of the rules.

Well, yeah, but that would presuppose having the land trust there, and we don't necessarily.

And there's a philosophy that says that you drive the period of affordability and the type of affordability by the type of money you're putting into it, you know, from the CAF or from somewhere else.

You know, if you're going to put X number of dollars in per unit, you can say we want these to be affordable for 45 years.

That's how our math works.

And this, we're giving you this much money, we want it to be affordable by this definition for 20.

Yeah, but as far as the zoning is concerned, as long as the units are created one way or the other,

I don't know that we need to care.

Yeah, well, that's called a non's arm length transaction.

Making an exception to what?

It's that flexibility is granted to the zoning administrator to make the decision to say that something's been proposed that's a closed line effectively.

I can't say I followed that conversation entirely.

It's a little bit above my head.

But on thinking about that kind of benefiting homeownership over rental or making that a little more incentivizing for developers, I've thought about that.

And it is not necessarily a bad thing.

The more people have a buy-in into homeownership,

that are at lower AMIs, I don't see that as a bad thing.

Let's just throw that out there.

Well, I don't know that it is.

It's just really a question of

whether the first buyer gets the benefit or many buyers getting a little bit of benefit over time.

But it seems to me that it doesn't benefit the seller, the developer.

Yeah, but again, I think that that

I think the long-term affordability on the home ownership in sort of this arbitrary way puts the thumb on the scale in ways that we don't even really I hesitate to look at the ramifications and I'm glad James has got experience in managing those programs I just think that we might

that it's creating, yeah, I mean, the equity appreciation is a big deal.

I mean, I think that needs to be recaptured by the provider before that person takes a profit.

But that's done by the subsidy being a lien.

Just note on the notion with inclusionary zoning with the ADU ordinance is that it's internally subsidized by the project.

As is noted in one of the messages we just got, right, the notion is that the subsidy is not coming from the city.

Maybe.

For the R Zone bonus, we gave no actual financial incentive for it, right?

No, that's true.

So it's, well, if you feel like you're a good person, you can give a lot to Habitat or put the land trust or give it to them for a low price.

The way we have it, it's not being recaptured by the provider.

Sure, I understand.

Well, I mean, on the rental side, yeah, but those would be presumably rentals.

Maybe.

Always.

Yeah, well, and then we can have a method of converting, and, you know, if they condolize the building, we can put in methodologies to deal with that.

So it prohibits the habitat model and it arguably prohibits the land trust model because they're only 80 years.

And by prohibit I mean it says when a project demonstrates the affordability goals of the comp plan and affordable housing plan and the intent of the section are met, James can change it.

Which presumably means he will allow habitat to continue to exist.

Yeah, I think that making the model of how a lot of affordable homes and, of course, yeah, of how affordable homes for ownership get pushed out of the community, I think it essentially relies on the benevolence of the zoning administrator.

And, you know, who knows what James' successor will be like.

I mean, the committee that recommended his hiring was full of people of incredibly good judgment.

That may not be true in the future.

So I just think we ought to bifurcate them.

I'm fine with the 99 on the rentals, primarily because it pencils easily for people who are doing it.

And I'm with you, Phil.

No.

How do you guys feel, Mr. Schwartz?

As far as this topic?

Home ownership.

I'm not really, this is not my expertise, but I hear the argument for getting rid of the 99 years.

Yeah, I mean, I don't,

I lean towards 99 years being a better model.

I don't think we need to require it.

I think the fact that we're going into this saying we know that we are going to do these waivers all the time because we know that we think the Habitat model is good enough for this.

Maybe we should just go ahead and change it to stop the headache of it.

The process improvement expert, to the extent that I am one, says yes.

As much as possible, we should consider the expected uses and find a way in their process to make that clear and simple.

Yeah.

To be clear, like, you asked me,

whether it would be bothering me and it doesn't bother me.

My concern has been the statement made repeatedly that this is impossible, that it doesn't work, that it doesn't belong in zoning.

And those are all clearly false.

So I didn't want anyone to be swayed by that.

It's simply a policy decision.

Which way do we guys want to go?

I think you should make the argument of the benefits of the 99-year thing when it comes to CAF allocations.

Sure.

Yep.

No, I do not believe we are.

So I would move that we table this meeting and reconvene at the next scheduled work session.

All in favor?

Aye.

Aye.

Any abstentions?

Any negative?

All right.

Sure.

No second?

All right.