City Council Work Session on Zoning & Affordable Housing   2/20/2020

Meeting to order for the Charlottesville City Council.

Thank you, Mayor Walker.

I want to thank everybody for coming today.

This is a work session that I think everybody is used to the phrase of hearing that we've got the comp plan, the housing strategy, and the zoning ordinance underway, and therefore a lot of times

That terminology seems to almost indicate to be a roadblock of some sort.

But today, we're going to be talking about some short term solutions that can be enacted by council that we hope can increase affordable housing opportunities in the city.

And also, I know that in the news, there is a lot of talk about quote unquote, missing middle housing.

I think this work session you're going to hear some really, I think some exciting things about how we can increase those opportunities in the city.

I did want to, I think the city owes some debt of gratitude to Ms.

Robertson, Mr. Sales and Mr. Oluska.

They've been working really hard on this presentation and I do think that some of the things you'll hear today are fairly innovative in using

our zoning and affordable housing tools to again increase the stock of supply in the city.

That's just all of our names so you know.

Our names and our titles so you know who we are.

So I'm starting off with a quick overview of zoning.

Well, not quick.

Feel free to chime in with questions at any point.

It's meant to be back and forth.

It's not meant to be just a formal presentation all the way through.

This presentation, anyone who went to the housing symposium in 2018 will recognize parts of it, but I've taken some pieces of it and then we've added in a lot of other stuff.

related to zoning to fit the meeting that we're in here in terms of a work session as opposed to just kind of talking to a crowd.

So I do want to start with kind of the underlying reasons for zoning, why we have it, quick history lesson, and then some ideas about how, you know, the authority and what it leads to in terms of, you know, why governments have kind of gone to zoning and used it.

And then the presentation gets into the planning process, how it can support affordable housing, and then specific details about the city itself.

May I interrupt you for just a second?

I forgot to announce that the City Council will be going into closed session at the end of this meeting to discuss term limits for CRB members.

We need to do that to send letters out.

And I was supposed to make that announcement at the beginning, so sorry about that.

All right.

So this is the easiest definition we can think of of zoning.

Zoning really regulates two major things, the design of buildings, the location of buildings, what you can build on a piece of property, and what you can do on that property and in that building.

The diagram that I have up there is kind of a very rudimentary, simplistic way of thinking about zoning.

Each of those zones, you'll recognize the coloration of those boxes as being kind of standard land use colors that we use on our land use maps.

But for each of those, you would have sort of dimensional regulations that determine how high you can build, where the setbacks are, and then also regulations about what types of uses you can do.

This diagram I would consider to be an example of what we would call Euclidean zoning.

When we mention that term, this is a little bit of the history behind zoning.

Euclid, we're not talking about the Greek mathematician Euclid.

We're talking about Euclid, Ohio.

and the story behind that is the town of Euclid, Ohio.

Euclid, Ohio is now a city, but the town of Euclid, Ohio passed a zoning ordinance back in the early days of zoning in American history, the early 1900s and they were under pressure from Cleveland.

They're adjacent to Cleveland and Cleveland had a lot of industrial development coming the way of Euclid and so Euclid zoned their city to prevent industrial development from encroaching into the city.

and there was a company by the name of Ambler Realty that owned a parcel in Euclid that intended to develop that parcel for industrial zoning and so they sued the town of Euclid it went all the way to the United States Supreme Court and in 1926 the United States Supreme Court upheld the zoning ordinance in the town of Euclid and doing so created the precedent that zoning is an acceptable use of the police power

under local government to regulate land use.

So we got Euclid v. Ambler, which is one of the landmark land use regulation Supreme Court decisions, and we got the name of our zoning.

One of the schemes of zoning at the time became called Euclidean zoning.

I would classify Euclidean zoning as being very much use-centric.

I know we've said this a lot of times when we talk about foreign-based code and the differences between

kind of old style zoning and form-based code, which is sort of a new way of doing things.

It's very focused on the uses.

What are you doing on the property?

So this would be kind of an example of what a Euclidean's are very, like I said, very overly simplistic, but each use is in its own box.

They don't mingle in any way.

They're separate from each other.

Okay.

So I mentioned the police power and that is the, you'll hear words like welfare, safety, some of the ones we have up there, welfare, safety, health and safety, welfare, convenience, even morals sometimes gets tossed around.

These are the goals of government and our regulations are supposed to be tied to those.

So Euclid B. Ambler very much said that

Zoning is an acceptable use of the police power.

The reason I bring this up is because, well, if you look at zoning, it's tied to, in many cases, it's tied to infrastructure.

You can understand why communities, in some part, try to regulate land use, because the infrastructure of their communities, they have to be able to support that development.

They need roads, they need schools, they need parks, they need utilities.

and you wouldn't want, if you have just kind of people being able to develop whatever they want on their properties, you could easily outstrip a locality's ability to serve those uses on those properties.

So it's definitely tied to infrastructure.

I mentioned the word morals and I did that for a reason.

Morals in the police power often referenced morals very early on in the 1900s.

Today you almost never hear it.

and the reason for that is morals has often been used in the police power as a means of discriminating.

Whose morals do you enforce?

Whose morals do you regulate?

And the reason I raise that is because some land use reformers that are really talking kind of cutting edge today have pointed back at the police power and some of the words in the police power with regards to land use regulation and saying that governments are kind of stretching beyond

What would be deemed acceptable land use regulations are ones that kind of promote a broader community.

One reformer that advocates for just using two words in the police power when talking about land use regulation, which is health and safety.

So I have a couple examples of just thinking about that.

If you use the standard of convenience or the standard of general welfare, well, whose convenience do you use?

Whose welfare do you use?

So one example would be traffic.

If traffic, if you're worried about convenience of drivers, by making their lives more convenient, are you making the ability for people on bikes, pedestrians, even potentially mass transit, are you making

their lives more inconvenient.

If you regulate from health and safety, there's a very different way of looking at it.

Similarly, parking regulations.

It's not really a health and safety benefit of parking regulations.

There's definitely a convenience regulation, convenience argument to be made, and also property values.

You often hear this in all kind of land use decisions, the impact on property values.

Well, if you regulate on the virtue of health and safety only,

You can't take that out of the equation.

Certainly it's in, you know, as a homeowner, it's in my general welfare that property values exceed inflation.

That helps me out, but it certainly doesn't help anyone who's trying to buy into the community from affordable housing standpoint.

So that is a little kind of edgy way of looking at things, but it is one way of kind of doing a lens and looking at your regulations and saying, what are these really here for?

Who are they really benefiting?

So some of those examples out there.

So those are the examples that we have in terms of the police power and how this ties into it.

And I kind of wanted you to know what the police power says.

Think about what some people are talking about because as we go through a few of the regulations that we're talking about.

Thinking back to how maybe health and safety or is this a general welfare or is this morals or something like that where there's much more of a subjective way of looking at it, these regulations.

What's the basis for them?

Why are they here?

So once again, the definition of zoning, building and use, everything you see on here are just, this is an example of zoning regulations that you'll see.

Just about every community is doing some form of the regulations on this list.

So this gets into, we now come to the comprehensive plan.

So the General Assembly, in the last 10 years, amended the Code of Virginia to require localities to consider affordable housing in their comprehensive plans.

So the text on the slide is almost literally taken word for word out of the Code of Virginia.

It's the things that we're supposed to look at when we do a comprehensive plan.

I want to focus on the last line though, implementation measures.

The reason I bring that up and in thinking about this I thought about an incident this past week where my wife was trying to get my kids excited about going roller skating at Carver and my son said instead he wanted to go skateboarding and the description of what he wanted to do made it clear he wanted to go skateboarding

at the city skate park.

My son's been on a skateboard once.

He's seven.

So we started to talk to him about what he would have to do to get to the point where he could, you know, drop into the bowl at the city skate park, which he wasn't really interested in it.

He's seven.

He's a first grader.

That's what I would expect.

But a lot of communities take that kind of approach with comprehensive planning, where they say, we're going to be these great things.

We have all of these great goals.

and that's as far as they go on their comprehensive plan.

So the Code of Virginia very specifically mentions, you gotta kinda think about this, about how you're gonna actually do what you say you wanna do in your comprehensive plan.

There's an implementation strategy, you need to have that.

So in our current code, you'll see, so that's the implementation stuff.

The way you implement these things is through your regulations.

So a good comprehensive plan will often have

The goals that we've set out, so good example, maybe we're going to be the greenest city in America.

That's probably a real popular one for a lot of localities.

Well, if they just say we're going to be the greenest city and they don't say anything more, that's really a kind of window dressing.

A good comprehensive plan will then say, well, what does being the greenest city in America mean?

What are the measures?

How do we measure that?

Are we going to reduce single occupancy vehicles, which is in our own comprehensive plan, the City of Charlottesville's comprehensive plan?

Are we going to increase tree canopy?

How are we going to measure whether or not we've achieved this goal?

And once you've identified those measures, you would then go through and say, okay, here are the strategies that we're going to follow to actively do this.

We can say at Green City of America, we can say we're going to increase tree canopy.

If we don't have tangible actions we're going to take to make those things happen,

How exactly is this going to happen?

So the main way we do a lot of this stuff with regards to affordable housing, the zoning ordinance is key.

It's the regulations that we follow.

All developers are looking at those when they come to us and try to build things.

If those are not in line with our comprehensive plan, we really haven't done the added steps that we need to do, according to the Code of Virginia, but also we're not serving our own comprehensive plan very well.

So one example we want to talk about today is incentive zoning.

That's where we get to the discussion part.

So incentive zoning.

I think everyone, probably in the room, I surveyed the room as best I could here, knows how our current zoning generally works.

We have zones, those zones have dimensional requirements on buildings.

When I say dimensional requirements, I mean height.

There's certain yards they have to have.

And then they have rules about what you can do in those buildings.

Zoning.

If a developer wants to stay within the prescribed limits of that zone,

We typically, they can build without coming before you, without coming before the planning commission.

We call that by right development.

That's a term a lot of people kind of scratch their heads about, but essentially the owner or developer has a right to build something as long as they stay within those limits.

As you're very familiar with, a lot of times they don't want to stay within those limits.

They want to exceed them in some fashion.

And our code sets out additional limits where you have to seek a special use permit.

Everybody's favorite application in the city.

We love SUPs, don't we?

So, with a special use permit, you know this, they come before planning commission, they come before city council, ultimately takes a vote.

You can, in some cases, increase height.

There are limits on what you can ask for under a special use permit.

There's several problems with it.

The first one I would call your attention to is the fact that there's a lot of resources required to just go through that process.

There's an application fee, there's time, costs with it, there's a lot of resources in terms of the application package.

So there's a certain bar that only certain people can get over in terms of the ability to just go through the process and the cost to do so.

Secondly, I think it was planning commissioner Lisa Green made a really good comment within the last few months about kind of the frustration of the SUP process leading to a condition where you almost have this individualized zoning for each parcel.

That's really confusing to the public.

Enough time passes, it's really confusing to staff, in fact, because then we have to try to do a lot of research just to figure out what you can and can't do on a piece of property.

So that patchwork really does make things difficult.

And on the topic of confusion, I would also say that I've been a planner for the city for 15 years.

We have a really well-educated, intelligent populace here.

And I've seen so many people just struggle with the SUP process.

And at some point, you have to say, it's not the people trying to understand this.

It's the process itself.

Is it also true that the General Assembly sets an exact formula for every SUP in terms of the amount of housing that can be built or the amount of money they pay into the housing fund?

For the affordable housing section of our code, there's a couple numbers we keep batting around.

And in the spirit of the work session, I want to make sure I define those.

We often mention section 3412, that's chapter 34 of the city code, chapter 34 section 12, which is our affordable housing section.

That was a specific act of assembly in 2008 that gave the city of Charlottesville the authority to pass that specific language.

At the state level, all localities are subject to one of two sections of Chapter 15.2 of the Code of Virginia.

There's Section 3404, which a certain limited number of communities are allowed to basically do an affordable housing ordinance.

And there are some limits in there, but it's fairly broad.

Albemarle County has that authority.

We do not, obviously.

All the other communities that aren't in 2304 are in 2305.

And 2305, you're correct, Councillor Payne, has a very specific limit of a density bonus in exchange for a percent affordability.

It's a 30% density bonus for 17% affordability.

Those are the maximums.

In the lead up to this, I kind of pulled out all the by right densities in our zone, ran it with 30 and 17, and just looked at it and was like, man, that's not a deal any developer is going to take.

Two additional market rate units for providing 12 affordable and I get two additional market rate units.

The math doesn't really make a whole lot of sense.

So that's the unfortunate part of 2305 is if you're one of the other communities, you're stuck with that, those limits and those limits in some cases, particularly, I would guess probably urban centers like ours don't really work very well.

And that's what we're under.

We use the special legislation that granted us 3412.

We could go to 2305 at any time.

Just to clarify, there are SUPs that could be pursued that have no housing component because the use isn't housing related.

So they don't have to fall into that.

Non-residential.

For schools and private schools.

There's also a limit on the size that before you trigger going into that you have to kind of hit 1.0 floor area ratio on your site.

So as I was saying, the SVP process tends to be tough to grasp.

There's public hearings, there's public meetings.

Before the public hearings, there's this whole layer of designer and planner speak that's not really English, that we all know how to speak, but some people don't.

You make comments at the public hearing and they might not be germane to the topic, but they feel the public is just having a really hard time engaging with it.

So the reason we bring up incentive zoning is because it's an alternative to this.

Incentive zoning, you write bonuses into the code that are specific to aspects of development that you want to see.

But it's all in the code already.

There's not a discretionary process whereby

I have to go to the Planning Commission or I have to go to the BAR to get this stuff or I have to ask City Council for permission to do this.

So an example of what incentive zoning might look like, let's say on the downtown mall where we already don't require any parking, we set a height cap of four stories for lack of a better term.

I'm just pulling this out of the thin air.

If you have a four-story height maximum at Byer Wright, anybody can build that.

The existing two and three-story buildings could be enlarged without any kind of special permission.

They could do a Byer Wright development.

But what we could also write in the code is to say, well, if you do structured parking, because we like you to have your parking on site, if you were to do structured parking at a certain ratio, then you can do an additional floor.

If you provide us affordable housing at a certain ratio, 10% or whatever, you get an additional floor.

If you do anything that's a civic benefit that we identify, you get certain bonuses.

The reason, I think, from my perspective that I like it is because it's in the code, it's stated, the public knows it's there, council knows it's there, staff knows it's there, the developers know it's there.

If I do this, I get this.

I don't have to do this and then ask for permission to get something.

So that's an idea that we have floated out there, and we've kind of been investigating in the past of, well, could we just codify all of this?

And a lot of that has to do with the frustration of the SUP process, especially the fact that we've traditionally used the SUP process to allow people to do additional height and density, residential density.

It's called a special use permit for a reason.

It's really supposed to be use-based.

If the height's appropriate, the height's appropriate.

Trying to adjudicate between certain levels of height on different sites, that's a bit of a challenge in identifying those impacts of it.

It'd be much easier if the SGP process were kind of moved off into potentially objectionable uses.

I did one of these over at the Martha Jefferson Hospital where there was a medical laboratory.

Okay, well there might be something related to the operation of a laboratory near a residential area that we need to investigate.

But it's not, that's where the SGP process kind of is intended to be used.

We've been using it for height and density bonuses for a long time or increases for a long time.

So in an incentive zoning, if we were to implement something like this, how discrete are each of these allowances to a specific area or a specific use?

You can do it per zone.

I mean, we have probably too many zones now.

But you can do, based on what zones you have, you can kind of say,

Here's the overall maximum by right height we're looking for.

Height bonuses are probably the best thing you can give, but there's probably, as we do more research, we may find other ways that people can have employed these in the past.

But you definitely want to scale each of these zones to the areas that they're in.

So later on in the presentation we're going to have some recommendations for you as to some short term things we'd like to see you do.

To follow up on that, there's a number of different ways you can do it depending on what your goals are.

You can use incentive zoning on a district by district basis.

You can take a look at allowing it throughout the city wherever you have certain conditions that you define ahead of time.

The key to successful incentive zoning is making sure that the things you allow by right

are scaled or measured out in an appropriate amount so that any additional use or density or whatever type of bonus you're giving will actually incentivize the thing you're trying to get.

So as Brian said earlier, right now one of our challenges is that we have all these different zoning districts but we don't have very well calibrated

by right heights, by right densities based on recommendations that are concrete in the comprehensive plan in each of the areas being regulated.

And so what that means is that it's really difficult to use the type of incentive, density incentive that's in the code that we have access to already.

So one of the things that the consultant who's working on the comprehensive plan is gonna really have to look at is

making recommendations for what are correct densities citywide and by different areas of the city and look at those densities specifically in relation to where the best opportunities are for affordable housing or other things the city wants to accomplish.

So this is a current list of some of the items that we've run up against in terms of the limits that our current zoning ordinance places on development.

A lot of this is focused on the low density residential areas, partly because they make up over half of our zoned area in the city.

So you notice a number of these.

Once again, I would call your attention to

The reason for zoning, the police power, how many of these are based on health, safety, are there the general welfare convenience, what's the rationale behind these?

Because that's one of the things that our land use reformers that are talking about this type of thing are really urging people to look at.

What was the reason for some of these things?

Was there a good reason when they were put in, but now it's something that can be dealt with under the building code.

So an example of that I would throw out is setbacks.

We do have a five foot setback in most of our low density residential districts, if not 10.

Well, the building code deals with structures.

Structures can go all the way up to the property line.

We are in an area where they all do.

There are design changes that come along with that, but the building code handles them.

The building code has rules that are in place for all of that stuff.

So that was one of the kind of things they lobbed out.

Certainly we may want to say, well, you know, we're cool with five foot setbacks or 10 foot in the R1 zones, but it's not because of a fire issue because the international building code can deal with the issues of putting

uh structures on property lines and in fact our building official used to have a picture of a duplex

where there's a required firewall between two units and one side caught fire and the other side was still there, just perfectly fine.

So the technology does work and it has advanced a lot and we're gonna see a lot more of this.

You've seen, I'm sure you guys are probably familiar with the project about to start next to the ACAC gym.

That's a cross laminated timber building.

So heavy timber, much taller than most wooden buildings are allowed to go.

Someone approached me about bricks that are being grown out of mushrooms.

That was you.

Yes, okay.

I talk to so many people, I forget who tells me what.

So bricks grown out of mushrooms.

This is really cool stuff.

One thing to keep in mind is that the need for some of these regulations can change over time.

So, particularly when you're out in more suburban areas or rural areas, the reason you have larger lot sizes is that people needed to get septic systems on their lot.

Earlier, there's still a few places in the city where there are remnants of old septic systems.

There are few and far between these days, but

as you become more developed and you have public utilities your lot sizes can get smaller so you don't necessarily need them for health or safety anymore and you're over in the convenience or comfort and it's making a choice as a community how close do I want to live with other people so at one end of the spectrum you have your typical sort of suburban lot which is

you know 8,000 square feet it might have a 25 foot front yard there's lots of space there's a big yard for people at the other end of the spectrum you could be living in a high-rise apartment building in you know a major city in China where

units are small, you all live very close together.

I would add that we're going to roll into minimum lot sizes here, but one of the things I would add is our code actually has other minimum lot sizes if you are not on city water or not on city sewer.

Your minimum lot size goes all the way up to 20,000 square feet if you're not on either.

Our utilities department won't approve those anymore, but we still have a remnant of that in our code from the days when people were not on our city utilities.

You pretty much have to connect at this point.

So these are the minimum lot sizes for single-family detached when you see SFD.

That's what we're talking about.

Single-family detached dwellings in the city.

If you look at our zoning map, there's a pale yellow color.

That's the R1 zoning.

That 8125 is the minimum lot size and next to that is the density that that would do create in a perfect setting, perfect subdivision setting where every it lined up perfectly, every square inch lined up perfectly.

Most of our R1

neighborhoods are probably around one to two units per acre, probably closer to one.

The 6,000 square foot standard is for the rest of the city.

Any zone out there, if you're trying to do a single family detach, doesn't matter what it is, it's 6,000 square feet.

The irony of this is

In just about every neighborhood you go to, you will find lots that are smaller than this.

I even was concerned about this, and I was like, I need to make sure North Downtown is absolutely this way.

So I went and pulled up North Downtown on RGIS, and the first lot I clicked on was under 5,000 square feet, and the appraised value for this year was over a million dollars.

So there are examples of this all over the place.

6,000 is kind of the typical Belmont 50 by 120 lot.

That's I think where that number comes from.

It's been a long time.

These have been here a long time.

I'd say Greenbrier is sort of the classic example of maybe some of the slightly larger plot sizes.

It's a more modern original subdivision than

This is definitely something the consultants have been asked to look at.

What we've heard for a long time is

I do know that in the code there is an exemption for two family dwellings.

For a two-family dwelling, you have to have 7,200 square feet for a new lot with two units on it.

And there is an exemption in there from lots platted prior to the 50s, like the 54 or 56.

And there was a zoning map done around that time, so that might have been the last time that this was changed.

Certainly, there was a major rezoning in 1991 when we took

a fair amount of the R2 zoning in the southern kind of two-thirds of the city and converted it to the R1.

It was R1A at the time it became R1S.

Right.

And there's sections, there's a street up north of where I am.

It's really close to the county boundary in the northern part of the city that a woman came to the council several times because she was frustrated that the lots there are, every house is built on two lots that are 25 feet wide.

And when those houses come up for sale,

If a developer buys them and rips the house down, they can build two 15-foot wide houses, which somebody did.

And that was very frustrating, but that was often the style of development.

Back in those, you know, about 170 years ago, a subdivision would come in, the developer would parcel things out in terms of, I'm going to do 50-foot wide lots or I'll do 20-foot wide lots.

And people would just say, okay, I'll buy

three lots or I'll buy five lots and then they'd build their house over the property line and it wasn't a big deal until nowadays when they have to go to sell it and you've got a property line running through your living room that creates some problems but yeah that was kind of that was just the way subdivisions were done.

So a lot of these numbers should be familiar to you.

The 55% number has been batted around a lot.

Of the zoned land, our roads are not zoned, so that number would drop if you included all of our roads.

But it's either R1 or R1S, and those zones only permit single-family detached dwellings on a lot.

And you can only have one principal structure on a lot.

And so one of the things that the single-family detached housing type, we've said this before, but that's the single most expensive residential unit type that you can build.

An example of this would be the costs of housing developing multiple units don't go up in a one-to-one fashion.

So an example I would give is, say, a typical residential lot will just use a round number of $100,000 in the city.

That's around what a vacant lot might cost in the city, depending on where you are.

Well, if I am a builder and I buy a $100,000 lot and I can only build a single-family detached dwelling,

That property already has $100,000 of cost before I've done one bit of work.

So then I've got to get permits.

I've got to do the drawings for that.

I've got to hire labor.

I've got to get materials.

All of that cost gets rolled in.

I think the average cost to develop a single-family detached dwelling in America is around $275,000 these days, so $375,000 house minimum.

If I could do two units, already the $100,000 gets split between the two units, so they're already at 50.

My permitting cost is probably not much different.

My drawings are probably not much different.

My labor is probably not much different.

I got a few more materials because that might be a little larger, and I've got to do a firewall in between.

But at the end of the day, I might spend a little more on that building, but I'm dividing the cost across two units.

That price drops.

And what we see when we look at residential construction is actually kind of a stair step effect where

As construction gets larger, at some point it hits a kind of a threshold in the building code where something new is needed.

Sprinkler system, if you get big enough and you can't do wood construction anymore and you have to do steel, there are major jumps in the cost of construction per unit.

But at the bottom of those kind of steps is your most affordable, those are your most affordable units.

As we're going to see in the next slide, a lot of those unit types that take advantage of those cost savings at that point, or the ability to spread them out, aren't allowed in zoning.

So this is a rather famous drawing from Opticost Design that did it in 2015.

It's been widely disseminated all over the place.

The missing middle housing.

And the point of the drawing was really to kind of look at

In looking at zoning ordinances around the country, a lot of people who've been trying to build in these areas have found that

You can only do certain types.

So the types that are grayed out, those are the ones that are very easy to do in communities across the country.

You can do single-family detached homes, and then you almost have to skip to mid-rise apartments.

We're not quite that bad.

The duplex, obviously, you can do in the R2 zones around the city, and we even allow some townhouse development in our R3 zones.

But you can see that there's a variety of historically used residential types that the zoning really doesn't support or doesn't even permit.

So we've got a couple examples of these on these next slides.

One is the quadplex.

So I gave you the example of a lot where you do two units and decrease costs now divided by four instead of by two.

And these houses are, as you can see, you can appropriately scale these to be into single-family neighborhoods.

There's plenty of streets in our community with large houses where you could put one of these right next to it, four times the number of units.

You may not have as many occupants as a large house with a large family in it, but they fit right in and you've got quadruple the density in that structure, even though the structure is roughly the same size.

These would be considered multifamily structures under our zoning ordinance.

Three or more units in a building, it's multifamily.

You're stuck in the R3 zones.

Can't go to R1 or R2.

Courtyard apartments.

One thing we didn't note on the list of things that are constraining housing is lot frontage requirements.

So in order to do a new lot in the city, you have to have 50 feet of road frontage.

So there are plenty of lots out there, particularly if you look at the Ridge Street neighborhood.

It's just one that I'm always harping on.

You'll have very narrow, deep lots that go.

They may be an acre or more.

But because they have less than 100 feet of road frontage,

They're limited to one principal structure.

It's usually zoned for a single-family detached dwelling, potentially two.

You look at some of these, that depth becomes an asset if you're able to build this type of unit.

And you can get a lot of units in there.

They're fairly small, fairly affordable.

It's an affordable construction type.

The other thing I would mention about this, particularly if you look at the picture on the left, is the perils of using units per acre as a measure of intensity of a development.

So if the building on the left, in the picture on the left of that kind of left side building, I count four units in that.

If it's mirrored on the other side with two on the end, that's 10 total units.

That's on half an acre, that's 20 units per acre.

It's a one story building.

So we have to think about scale more so than units per acre because there's a lot of problems with using units per acre as a measure of intensity of development.

Our maximum height in the city is 35 feet.

In the residential zones?

In the residential zones.

Both of these buildings under 35 feet because you measure to the midpoint of the pitched roof so that second one they might be over a basement but yeah definitely the one on the left is well within the bounds of our dimensional requirements but you can't do the number of units.

Bungalow Courts.

The reason we included this is because there actually are a couple examples of these in the city.

The Belmont Residences on Druid Avenue.

There's five units off of a common driveway.

The Cottages on Fifth Street in Fifeville.

There's two sets of them.

There's six units around a common parking space.

both of them couldn't be built under R1 and R1S or R2 two of them are planned unit developments the other one is in the Cherry Avenue corridor it's in a multi-family zoning that was the only way they could pull it off so people either had to seek out special permission through the PUD process or

They had to find a mixed-use property, and that's one of the issues I think with our zoning is anybody who can acquire, even if we do allow some of these forms that we showed in that missing middle housing diagram, you can build them in the multifamily zones or the mixed-use zones, but if you're able to acquire one of those pieces of property, you're probably gonna maximize it, and you're probably gonna skip right to the mid-rise apartment and do as much as you can.

You're not gonna do one of these housing types.

The land's probably too expensive, to be honest.

So one final thing, and this kind of ties into for my piece, and this kind of ties into what Lisa had said earlier.

If we take nothing else away from this, we need to realize that city council controls what can be done in the city.

Lot sizes, types, all of that stuff.

But if you're going to get the actual physical changes,

The development community is going to be the ones that have to come to the table and build it.

So we have to fine-tune this so that we are getting what we want in our comprehensive plan and meeting our goals, and it's actually going to happen.

So they control how much will be built.

That was my point.

And then I will pass it to John, who has his slides next.

All right, I'm the new housing program coordinator.

Six months, not that new, but new.

And I'll be going over the enabling legislation.

So the state, this year, is looking at a lot of new legislation for affordable housing.

So that's very big, and I'm watching that closely.

But so far, affordable housing is considered a public purpose, so public funding can be used to increase affordable housing in localities, because it's such a huge issue all around the country.

And the city has had a long standing commitment to providing financial support to nonprofits that are providing affordable housing within the city.

State legislation authorizes the city by ordinance to subsidize private for-profit developers who construct or rehab affordable housing in the city.

We currently aren't doing that in the city of Charlotte, well in the city, but the state gives the city the authority to do that.

And there's also state laws that enable zoning incentives, which Brian just went over to provide density bonuses.

He went over 15.2-2305, which is the 17-30 split.

Currently, our zoning, it's not calibrated to really take advantage of that.

So we're using a different zoning ordinance that was passed in 2008, which gave the developers the option of either paying it to the fund, building on site, or building off site.

And if there's any questions while I'm talking, please feel free to ask them.

All right, so there are currently some foundational documents that the city uses.

I use them along with the HAC when making decisions with the CAF funding.

So in 2010, the city created, well, passed the city council housing goals for 2025, which identified the goal of making 15% of all units

in the city supported affordable units.

And supported affordable units are units that have some type of funding mechanism or just a mechanism in general like deed of trust restriction that made the unit affordable for families that are in 80% AMI or lower.

And within that, there were three policies that were created.

And they were created by the HAC and passed by the city council.

The first policy identified who was eligible to use the fund and the targeted groups.

And the HAC recommended only nonprofits and CRHA could utilize the fund.

But for-profits could use it, but they would have to go through the nonprofit to access the fund.

Housing Policy 2 focused on incentives the city could provide to developers, such as waiving tap fees, giving additional bonuses, waiving some of the development costs.

And then there's also the comp plan, which has a housing chapter that's focused on what the goals of the city are focused in that plan.

And it helps us determine where are we with determining

how funding is expended.

So we look at how many goals will be accomplished by each recipient that applies for funding.

And the City HAP is the City Housing Assistance Program Policies and Procedures.

And that document is really geared towards the housing rehab portion.

So that was passed in 1980 and was last revised in 2015.

Before you go on, one thing I'd like to point out, as Mr. Blair said in his introduction, right now we seem to be in a place where everybody's waiting for something new to happen.

We have a consultant.

We're talking about updating the comprehensive plan.

But it's important, particularly for those of you who are new counselors, to understand that the city's had a collection of what I'll call policy documents for a long time.

John monitors how many new units are built with the money that goes through the affordable housing fund.

One thing we're hoping for at the end of the comprehensive plan process is that the consultants will not only update these things but pull everything into one centralized

master policy document.

So one thing we're hoping for is a master policy document that has needs assessment, it has goals that can be measurable, that will have recommendations for implementation

and that separately you will have implementation measures which might be regulations or procedures that say how you would administer the funding in the affordable housing fund or how you monitor a unit of affordable housing that's constructed to make sure it stays affordable for the time period that you want it to do.

Right now the city has a lot of things kind of jumbled up together and one thing that we really need is organization, a policy directive that gets looked at every five years and that in between you're focused on implementation and not sort of continuous discussion of policy.

At some point you've really got to get to the implementation part and so some of this reorganization is going on but I just want you to understand we're not waiting for things to happen.

You all have had policies and goals and you've been applying funding to good use for some amount of time.

Does the city council housing goals define the length of the affordability period for a supported unit?

Well,

Goal is 80% and lower.

There has been a focus on 60% AMI and lower, but their policy does not define the actual affordability term period, which is something that we're going to get to next.

It's going to be a recommendation that we have a blanket term period on all affordable units, so it's not the recipient or the potential recipient telling us how long they will make the units affordable.

We're telling them how long we're going to make the units affordable.

A lot of places look not only at how many units do you get for the dollars that you've spent, but you break it down even further and say how many years of affordability did we get for the money that we had spent.

And that's a next level of sort of performance outcome measurement that we've asked the consultants to help us set up.

Okay, so this is a progress report.

So the goal is from 2010 to 2025, 15% of all housing units in the City of Charlottesville will be supported.

So today we have 2,196 supported affordable units, which is 11.7%.

Of those 2,196, 774 are either public housing or HCV units.

and then 88 of the 2,196 are SISRAP units which are program that the city created that mirrors the HCV voucher program that HUD administers.

And 26 of those 88 units are in the county.

City financial support.

So from 2010 to the current time, it's $24.59 million has been invested through the CAF.

I did not include what was invested directly through CIP for redevelopment of Friendship Court or redevelopment of public housing.

I only looked at what was invested through the CAF.

So of the new units, since 2010 it's been 297 new units.

And existing ADUs, Affordable Dwelling Units, rehab is 699 units.

Only 122 of them are under a deed of trust or promissory note.

And the issue there is a lot of the projects that are completed through rehab are small emergency repairs.

So they have a very small affordability period of one year.

So it's literally as soon as you complete the project, you have one year to count it and then it drops off again.

So then you're back to where you were at beginning.

So I see that as an issue and that's something that we will eventually need to figure out if the best practice is to even count them in the first place because they drop off so quickly.

and that's also a problem with tracking this information because it's rapidly changing depending on how much money is expended on a rehab unit.

So from 5,000, from zero to 5,000 it's one year.

From 5,001 to 10,000 it's three years.

So it really, you really only get the long-term affordability once you get up to like $25,000, $30,000 a unit.

But then you're still not creating a new unit.

You're just rehabbing and preserving that unit, which is definitely something we need to do.

And just to kind of get back to this theme about sort of the

The numerous policies and documents that are out there, I think these are in the 2015 document you referenced, those levels.

So if you're wanting to know more information about the rehab program and those levels and the affordability period, that would be found in the 2015 policy.

I can tell you about $12 million was spent to homeowner rehab.

Okay.

We did spend some funds to rehab multifamily.

And that's not included in the $12 million.

So probably about half.

Yeah, probably a little bit more than half.

And there are some units that have not been constructed yet that a recipient owns the lots to they just the units have not been built yet.

So there are going to be some additional units coming online, but I did not count them because a family is not living in the unit yet.

Okay, so what's working?

The city's doing a great job allocating a lot of funding to multiple tools to address affordability and equity.

There's an adequate number of programs from homeownership to include assistance with closing costs and down payment assistance.

The city has waived tap fees and some other, waived or reduced tap fees and other development costs for affordable housing, which is very important because it reduces the overhead when constructing.

The city is supporting LaTec developments throughout the city when local support letters are requested, and it seems like a lot of them have come online recently.

Carlton View is one, two, three.

Friendship Court is going through one, and CRJ is going through a couple projects that are LaTec as well.

and the cities also using other funding sources that aren't directly driven from the CIP such as CDBG and home funding.

Alright, so what's not working?

The comp plan doesn't set forth a strong centralized policy and strategy based on data.

It doesn't provide sufficient basis for zoning implementation.

The zoning regulations aren't calibrated to facilitate sufficient incentives for affordable housing construction.

where downtown you can build a non-story building, but you can only have 21 units in it.

So if we give them, if we pass the legislation with the 1730, they would only get a 30% increase of the 21 dwelling units.

So it really doesn't, there's no incentive there for them to access something like that.

So it's really, the zoning regulations really have to get calibrated to the right density

per acre, and we're just not there yet.

So if we pass something like that, it would probably produce less units than what we have produced with our current legislation.

The use of CAF funding isn't set up to be a sustainable source of funding to incentivize private development in conjunction with affordable housing zone incentives.

So in other funding, our CAF

is similar to the National Affordable Housing Trust Fund, the Virginia Housing Trust Fund, Arlington Housing Trust Fund, all those funds are loans.

And so the money's recycled back.

So you might have the initial investment of $5 million, but that $5 million comes back over time.

Your $5 million turns to $10 million to $20 million.

And we're currently not like that.

We're giving out grants.

That is very accurate.

And we have done that once before.

We did the same thing with a property that was getting ready to lose affordability.

The city provided funding for a recipient to purchase that property, and we gave it to them as a loan.

So every few years, they have to either come back and pay us that money back,

Or agree to keep that property affordable.

So we're never giving him money.

He is either always going to give us the money back or he's going to give us the affordability, which I think is a great model and is something that we should continue to do and increase the amount of times that we're actually doing it because

It reduces the amount of money that has to come directly from the budget and maybe we don't have to increase taxes or something.

We can continue recycling this money, doubling it, and instead of getting 1,000 units for $25 million, maybe we're at 3,000 or 4,000 units for that same amount of money.

And there's no consistent plan on awarding funds from CAF.

Their advisory commission is policy oriented.

My big issue is the varying affordability periods based upon level funding.

I think it should be a blanket policy that City Council creates that says, hey, if we're going to give you this money, this is the affordability period that we're requiring.

And if we're going to do it as long as your affordability period might be 10 years, and in 10 years you either pay us the money back or agree to keep the unit affordable.

And that's something that we need to do.

We definitely need to do it because, I mean, construction costs continue to increase.

When the 2025 plan goes

2025 city housing goal was created.

It estimated the city would have to provide $25 million to solve this issue.

Well, the city has invested $25 million and we have not solved that issue.

And actually, I believe that we've probably digressed a little bit because the amount of units that we're bringing online, a lot of them will lose affordability period before we even get to the 2025.

So I think it's really something that we need to jump on sooner than later.

I mean, it's something that we can't wait to do.

And I think that's all I have.

All right, so now we're at the portion of the program where the three of us are going to give you some recommendations.

We spent quite a bit of time talking together, trying to sort through, and there's some, the main issues that we're concerned about are

Short term fixes to in particular some of the things that John just talked about.

We really don't need to wait for a new comprehensive plan to start addressing issues such as what are the terms and conditions under which money from the affordable housing fund gets granted or loaned to people.

We don't need to wait for an updated comprehensive plan to talk about administration of affordable dwelling units.

We really need to do some things in the short term and we'll articulate those.

The other thing we spent quite a bit of time talking through is whether or not there are any areas of the city

which have some density to yield and in which people might be willing to create an additional unit or two or possibly three supported by some either renovation or new construction funding from the CAF.

And we talked through it and we have four major

We will.

We will.

Our first recommendation is that we would like to see you in the near term amend the zoning ordinance and establish a revolving loan program to incentivize the creation of a new accessory dwelling

program throughout the city.

Accessory dwellings are something that a lot of major cities that are very serious about their affordable housing programs are using.

They are perhaps not the source of the greatest number of units, but they are a consistent source of a few units in places that can really bear them.

We also would like to recommend that you amend the zoning ordinance to add an incentive provision, including allowing a revolving loan fund to incentivize a first step in achieving the missing middle housing.

As you may recall from Brian's slide where he showed photographs of a number of homes that look very much like single family

Detached dwellings, but there are larger homes in places.

There are a number of those, particularly in some of the older, more established neighborhoods of the city that could easily be renovated to create multiple units on the inside without having any significant visible impact on the surrounding areas.

We'd like to see you offer that as a program.

It's an easy way to get a little bit of extra density in a certain number of places and we hope that you'll give consideration to that.

Third, we are recommending, and this is a recommendation that in particular comes out of the city attorney's office, you really should have long ago established within your zoning ordinance a local ordinance that officially enacts an affordable dwelling unit program.

We'd like to encourage you to do that at this time and within that ordinance there would be authorization for every possible program or use of funding or initiative that's currently enabled by state law.

That doesn't mean you can't come back later if you get more authority from the state and add things in there.

But we really need to take that step of officially enacting in your local ordinances and legitimizing the efforts that you have been making of establishing that affordable housing program.

Lastly, we would like to see some major changes made to the day-to-day administration of the Affordable Dwelling Unit Program, and we'd like to see you restructure the Housing Advisory Commission.

It's currently 20-plus members, I understand.

We recommend that you consider transforming that into a 10-member working board that would serve as advisory to the housing coordinator.

The housing coordinator would become your leader in the implementation process and that board would work directly with him to develop regulations about how the program gets implemented.

One of the major things we need to do is to start establishing

sales prices and rental prices that apply to affordable dwelling units.

Right now we talk a lot about household income, but the most effective way to administer this program is to just set simple sales prices and rental prices that people

have to use with their units.

Those prices take into account which households can afford those rents but they also have to take into account the cost of constructing the types of buildings that are in there.

What we believe is necessary sooner rather than later is a working board that has expertise on it.

It should have

a real estate agent, it should have a banker, it should have a couple of design professionals, it should have developers that are experienced in the Charlottesville Albemarle area.

What John really needs is someone with practical experience

that can support him and advise him in how to establish sales and rental prices that will work for the city.

That board should also have as its members, which we'll get to in a minute, some other key stakeholders and we'll talk about that.

Tenmember is a number that is recommended in state law in connection with your existing authority to have an affordable dwelling unit program.

It's not a number we just picked out of thin air.

But again, it would be a working group, not a policy group.

And going forward into the next decade, we hope that your policy decisions will be made

at the comprehensive plan level on a rolling five-year basis and everything in between is working administrative implementation of your goals.

Yes, so we went to Portland.

Portland State University was working on the affordable dwelling

Accessory Dwelling Unit program and they modeled the program that's taking place in Seattle, California and the Portland one itself.

And all those programs started off very similar to ours.

with a lot of restrictions.

Parking restrictions, height restrictions, homeowner occupied restrictions, size restrictions, lot setback restrictions, and they were having issues.

The units weren't getting built, and when they were getting built,

They weren't getting filled by income eligible families.

They were getting filled Airbnb or they were market rate.

So they took a look at what can we do differently.

So they started relaxing some of the restrictions.

They got rid of the parking restriction.

They got rid of the owner-occupied restriction.

They provide some funding to help make the units affordable while also adding the restriction of the unit had to go to a family that was 80% or lower.

And they didn't just provide sometimes money, they provided assistance with getting the plans.

They had a set of plans that were approved and stamp ready, so all you had to do was go down and put your application in and they waived development fees, waived permitting fees, waived tap fees.

So they got the cost as low as possible while also providing some funding that was a loan with some portion of it forgiven as a grant and now the portion paid back and the city was able to recycle those funds and build another unit.

So that's something that we decided that we wanted to take a look at here because we've had the program on the books but it hasn't produced a whole lot of units and the units that it has produced, they weren't affordable units.

So this is what we came up with.

I'll walk through it a little bit.

So currently under the zoning ordinance we call things interior accessory apartments and exterior accessory apartments.

We'd like to change the terminology up a little bit, but right now you're only allowed to have one on your lot.

What we would like to propose is that in addition to any interior unit that you may wish to have, you can establish an exterior dwelling as an accessory dwelling on your lot and that accessory dwelling could have one or two units in it depending on

the size of your lot, whether you could fit within the size constraints that we would have but it would still be an accessory building or structure so it would need to be in the rear yard or in the side yard we would have some size restrictions but we would relax parking requirements you wouldn't have to establish new parking spaces you could potentially move an existing parking space so you wouldn't lessen the parking available but you wouldn't have to increase it

Brian, our proposal is that we would allow an accessory dwelling anywhere in the city where there is a certain type of dwelling on a lot.

It might be a single-family dwelling, single-family detached, it might be single-family attached, it might be a duplex.

So we wouldn't be specifically going by zones anywhere you have one of those types of residential buildings.

You could have one of these units.

but we would relax some standards and we would offer some funding from the CAF to incentivize your doing this.

So maybe we support the construction of a new unit, maybe we help you do some remodeling of a building that you already have.

Brian, can you address a little bit

Yeah, as I mentioned, one of the issues that we see with a lot of these lots are, we mentioned the setbacks, but there's a lot of areas in particularly the low density residential areas where they have very large yards and

We don't see, right now you obviously have to be owner occupied to build an accessory dwelling unit of some sort.

It could be a basement apartment, it could be the cottage house out back.

It's one or the other.

So one of the big issues I think that we see with a lot of these things are the other items that come along with it in terms of the owner occupancy.

If you ever sell that property, then it's a single unit, so you can't sell it and then have rental income.

The two units come together as one.

If you sell or if you move out of the property, you can't rent that.

the house if you already have a tenant in your cottage it's you you have to pick one because you've moved out of the the house so that relaxes this the other one is the on-site parking required and that i've mentioned this in the past but there's a lot of neighborhoods particularly the low density residential neighborhoods where there's a lot of on-street parking that's unused

pretty much the entire day.

So we figure if you have already one on-street, off-site space, if you have a driveway, there's really, right now you are required, if you add a unit, to add another space.

Well, a lot of those lots may not have the room for that or that's an additional expense, that's additional tearing up the yard.

So that's one of the kind of ideas that we had out there is, you know,

I may want to build this or I may want to put it in my house but I don't want to rip up the driveway or rip up the front yard.

If I already have the parking space then I'm done and we have people that can, there's plenty of on-street parking available.

So the other idea behind this is

And once again, I talked about the incentive in my part of the discussion here is the incentive that you only get the additional exterior unit if you're going through our affordable program.

So you can still do what is by right now, which is the one unit, but if you're going to go to this, if you want this additional rental income or additional development right,

I think what I'm saying is the current rules that apply to accessory dwelling units.

So if I have a house, we can use my house, it's fine because John keeps riling me about my basement.

If I put it in a basement unit, I'm living upstairs, I'm renting the downstairs.

If at any point I decide to move out of that house, I cannot rent

the part of the house that I live in as a second unit if the basement is rented.

This is the rules right now.

There's the owner occupancy rule.

We're looking at, one of the potential options here is to get rid of that and allow someone to say, okay, my lifestyle's changed, my housing needs have changed, I need a bigger unit, but I wanna maintain this as affordable housing.

There's a lot of people out there who've explored this kind of as a, they wanna do something kind of altruistic.

So we would, through this working group we're talking about, establish the rents

that would have to be used for that unit.

So the one that has to be committed affordable would have to use those rents.

If you had another on-site, it could be a market rate unit.

I think if we're providing funding, so where it says we're providing funding to build the accessory dwelling unit, we might be able to put that because we have the owner occupancy required for that.

So we're trying to make this as flexible as possible so as many people who might, as possible who might consider it.

So you could potentially do this without CAF funding.

If you do, we'd get one unit that would be committed affordable under our regulations and our program policy.

If you choose to use CAF funding, we can through that, those financial policies,

And I, you already mentioned this a little bit, but I just want to underline, like in the documents you sent about Arlington, they list that their accessory dwelling unit program, once they created it to date, has produced I think around 10 or 11 units.

So this is producing a very, very small number of units, potentially in Charlottesville, single digit.

I'm guessing because even with loans the return on investment just takes so long most people maybe don't necessarily want to do it.

Doesn't mean it's not worth doing but I want to underline that.

Even though it seems to get a lot of public attention versus the number of units it produces.

So there's different ways that that can take place.

The model that we've looked at is potentially having a property manager that collects the rent payment, gives a portion of it to the actual homeowner, and then pays a portion to the loan.

And then the property manager collects a little portion as well for their services.

That's one way of doing it.

Or having a self-certification, which is also relatively easy, and other programs have used that.

with the self-certification model.

But I think we should make it as easy as possible on the actual homeowner, because a lot of homeowners haven't been landlords.

So by having a property manager serving as that role, it makes it easy on them, where they aren't chasing rent payments and having to worry about ensuring that the city's paid and they're getting their portion.

It makes it a lot easier on them and a certification issue.

And a program like this also addresses equity, which is something that I've heard city council talk about a lot.

It can ensure that a family that's maybe on the verge of losing a structure, a home here in Charlottesville, can stay in there because they're collecting additional rent monies that they weren't getting at first, while also creating an affordable dwelling unit that

wouldn't have gone on that lot anyway.

So I hear you, that's your number, 10 is small.

That's correct, 10 is small.

No, I agree 100%, and I think it's absolutely worth doing.

It's pretty small, and that is why, in particular, we feel like this is fairly low-hanging fruit that's worth trying in the short term.

We are not anticipating a run in every low-density residential district on hundreds of affordable dwelling units.

We'd also like to see if there is a demand for this out there, and the only way to find that out is to do it.

or to offer it and so we'd like to start with some smaller things that are manageable that we could use some updated policies and procedures on to sort of dip the toe in the water while some bigger policies are

are in the works.

We also, if this is something you were interested in going ahead and pursuing, we would want to make sure we draft an ordinance to make it clear that the accessory dwelling is not there to be an Airbnb.

And so you would use both your program regulations to prohibit the one committed that you would get, or if they get funding, you would also have a separate set of regulations that would construct that.

Just in general, already under the zoning regulations, in the low density residential districts, the only people who can do Airbnb's are people who own and occupy the unit as their principal residential structure.

We also need to watch out in some areas of the city for people who are purchasing properties and titling them in the name of an LLC.

Typically that's an indication that people are interested in running some sort of business, even a sole member LLC.

An LLC is a business entity.

We want this program to be used and offered to individuals who may need some help aging in place,

staying in place as a family, whatever the issues may be, but it's a baby step.

The next recommendation we have, we're calling it our missing middle incentive.

Again, it's a proposed baby step.

Again, in many places within the city, whether it's a low density residential district or whether it's in one of your

commercial districts or a mixed use district.

There are some large residential structures that are in place that may have some age on them that might be prime for some renovation.

And if we incentivize that type of renovation with some loan to support the alteration of that building,

with some relaxed zoning standards and with some encouragement to go up to, for example, four units on a lot in R1 and R2, getting to that.

Quadplex that Brian was showing you pictures of earlier in the presentation or up to six units total in some of your other districts such as the mixed-use districts or some of your commercial districts.

We feel like we can get a sense of whether or not

This might be a type of housing that will mix in well in various types of neighborhoods and that can be done in a way that will offer some additional units

in a fairly traditional setting, a fairly low density residential setting and much like the affordable dwelling proposal, we feel as if there won't be a huge run on this but that we'd like to see if there's interest in doing this sort of thing.

In particular, we want to make sure we don't want to encourage people just going out and demolishing housing stock to build fourplexes.

We very specifically would like this program to promote using existing housing stock but perhaps a home that someone

older hasn't had

tenants or even owners to be displaced and so any program whether it's a loan document or a committed for rent requirement is going to require that anybody who lives there now has an opportunity if they want to to live there after goes from one to four units.

Well, like Lisa said, we have a number of neighborhoods, particularly older neighborhoods, that have these type of structures in them, and you can see if your interest is adding density with the caveat that some of it is affordable,

then this is once again it's one of these incentives where you don't necessarily have to pursue this but if you do you jump through these hoops you get a reward at the end of it there's a lot of these houses that under our current zoning they are capped at one unit they're always going to stay one unit

and in some cases you may even have duplex structures that are in single-family zones that if they ever are renovated or if there's potential to look at them and go well I can only do a single unit here so if it's ever a teardown situation you're gonna actually lose housing stock.

So I think this gives an avenue for somebody to potentially come in and say, hey, there's another program.

There's another way.

So let's look at that.

And additionally, just anecdotally, what we've seen, I spoke at one point with Jeff Werner, our design planner, about, and he's kind of

Seeing a lot of activity in at least conservation zones with larger structures that are now becoming kind of the outlet for our really high-income buyers and you know older structures that are being renovated into million-dollar homes or even larger higher priced homes so you're seeing a lot of that activity in some of those older neighborhoods maybe we can offer those owners that are looking to sell

I remember when Douglas Avenue, half of Douglas Avenue was over or under duplexes.

Right.

I mean, now they're all single family homes.

You know, the thing is very important that we're looking at not displacing any current homeowners.

That was one of the first things that we thought about.

I think Brian actually brought it up.

is this going to push developers to go send out a bunch of door knockers saying, hey, we want to buy your lot for pennies on a dollar.

So we wanted to ensure that we had a CAF loan that was available to homeowners who want to stay in place, but also want to add a unit to get some additional funding that's not going to be a accessory dwelling unit.

If this is something that you would like to pursue in the short term, what we would need to do is prepare an ordinance.

A lot of these homes may already be non-conforming either as to use or to structure, so we would have to identify the regulations that would be relaxed.

So if you're a non-conforming structure in some places,

your building may not be used to maximum benefit because you can't expand it.

So one of the things we'd like to see is we might allow people to alter an existing larger single-family home.

You could expand it horizontally.

You could increase your footprint, but we don't want you going larger.

We don't want to impact, you know, we want to keep that fabric of the neighborhood in terms of the predominant

We do want to encourage people to increase

What we would do is just relax your building setbacks a bit to sort of free up some space to add additional square footage, but not try to pick a square footage out of thin air to restrict what you would do.

We probably also recommend the same sort of relaxed parking requirements.

You would need to add new

onsite parking to accommodate the additional units.

And we also would need to be very careful so that we're not just setting up sort of mini, you know, Airbnbs for the whole thing.

We want to make

sure that this program because it is on a smaller scale in residential neighborhoods stays very residential in character just adds a little bit of density in places where it might fit.

So this is sort of an overall summary.

We've talked about this a lot.

We have a lot of thoughts and parameters that the three of us have discussed amongst ourselves.

And if it's something you're interested in, we can follow up really quickly with a proposed ordinance to be vetted through the public hearing process.

I keep hitting my computer arrow.

Program ordinance.

I talked a little bit about this earlier.

It's something legally that just needs to be done.

It's a housekeeping matter, but it's an important one.

We would recommend that we go ahead and get this type of ordinance on the books.

In the opinion of our office, it's not something that needs to wait for completion of the comprehensive plan update.

If you're interested in pursuing either or both of these sort of short-term density increasing steps that we've described, an accessory dwelling program or sort of a middle housing incentive program,

We would roll that into a proposed ordinance.

As I mentioned earlier, there are a few other things that are already authorized by state law that we would at least mention in the ordinance and then you would decide whether or not you wanted to implement them as part of perhaps a budget process.

So one example of that is there's state authorization

for you to

Every possible authority you have granted by the state today would be in here and then you choose when and how you use it either through the funding process or through an incentivization process.

And then finally, we would authorize the housing coordinator.

One of the things your program ordinance needs to specifically say is we hereby set up an affordable housing fund.

and in your case it's a dedicated fund within the CIP, it mentions it, it talks about it, you would identify a program administrator who is in charge of administering the program, authorize specifically regulations that go with it and we would ask you to consider authorizing the housing coordinator to begin

putting together the ability to implement what we're calling a revolving loan program to get pieces in place and regulations in place that would allow some, if not all immediately, but at least some of those funds to begin being used on a revolving basis through a loan program.

And then finally, within any ordinance, if you were to accept our recommendation, we'd like to see you restructure the Housing Advisory Committee.

We'd like to see you replace the large

advisory committee that you have which is policy oriented.

They're advisory to council.

What we really need is a working board.

A board that's constituted in a way that can really help and be a working group that supports your housing coordinator

in setting rental and sales prices and identifying the types of just administrative regulations that some of you were asking about.

You know, if we do this, can we put these restrictions on it?

Should we put these restrictions on it?

If we put these restrictions on the construction of an affordable dwelling or an accessory dwelling, is that going to further discourage people

There are some very specific areas of expertise that the state legislation that currently exists prescribes for this type of advisory board, and I've listed them here.

I think that our recommendation would be for there to be two city residents from the low-income community

people who can help advise on what types of places they'd like to live in, what their needs are.

One of those, if you'd like, could be a housing authority board member, but we'd like to see there be two low-income community residents.

We'd like to see there be a nonprofit service provider, someone who's experienced in the community with trying to prevent homelessness, but services that support a community that may have trouble either acquiring or staying in affordable housing.

And then the other components really are, for those of you that looked at Arlington's documents, they look at things through three lenses.

One is a financial lens, one is a development regulation lens, one is a services lens.

So it's a three-prong approach to the affordable housing program.

What we don't have right now is a group of people who can roll up their sleeves, work with the housing program coordinator,

and help us set realistic rent prices and sales prices that take into account everybody's needs.

We need to know and be informed about what the actual cost of construction of different types of housing are within the city.

We need to know the city can bring to the table the expertise of a planner who knows how the city's organized, knows sort of

some of the planning issues, but we also need people who actually construct these things, people who design these things, people who finance these things, and people who sell these things.

And so we think that the categories prescribed by the state law make a lot of sense and would also work very well in terms of supporting the housing program coordinator.

I will tell you, not to be too severe here, but the city is on its third housing coordinator in six years.

We're doing a lot of policy work, we're having a lot of discussions, but you really need to take this person that you've given this job to and empower them to really

Get things done and we're making a lot of progress on updating comp plan.

Hopefully we'll make some other corrections and how our zoning ordinance is set up and calibrated so we can Pursue more incentives.

Maybe we'll get some legislation from the General Assembly that frees things up but in the meantime the single

The biggest step you guys can take is to pare down this board, make it a working group, make it a group that supports Mr. Sales and the work that he's doing and your policy objectives should be focused in working through this comp plan process to make sure that all the policies and goals that you want to set are in that policy document and let John and this working group develop the regulations.

I've talked about the function of the new advisory housing board and the other thing I'd like to point out is we very strongly would like to recommend that the newly constituted board all be people who would not be eligible for any CAF funding during their tenure either as individuals, as employees of an entity that might be interested in funding or as

board members of an agency that might be interested.

And there's currently a council member that's on the hack.

Yes, we excluded that.

That is a possibility if you'd like to consider it.

I think I'm trying to remember in the legislation which category allowed you a number of choices but one of the reasons we would recommend taking a counselor off is that again we would like to separate the policy making function from the implementation function.

and we'd like to see your role best advised by through the comprehensive plan process and then on certain land use issues you already have an advisory body in the planning commission and we need to use that to maximum extent as well but

This group would assist John, and John would make periodic reports to you.

Any regulations that are proposed would need to be ultimately approved by you through resolutions.

They would need to be brought to you, much in the way that other resolutions are, resolutions where funding is granted to people from the CAF.

So you would still have a role in all this, but you wouldn't be part of the day-to-day implementation and the work that gets done to carry out these things.

But you all would still be the people saying, these are our goals, these are what we would do, you still have to approve all of the zoning and land use measures that might get implemented.

Well, I'm not yet, but it's something that I am going to be involved in.

Sound like you just need some direction from us.

We do, and it can be simple.

As I said, we've been talking about this for quite a while, and we are ready.

I have a couple of questions.

I also want to make sure that we're looking at things through a climate lens as well as we have taken on a very significant climate goal and how can we, I mean I like the fact that we're looking at you know parking requirements being taken away and these are all good things so just I guess I'm just suggesting that we keep that in mind and start really working on making sure we're bringing that lens to all of this

And we are looking at that.

I had a meeting not too long ago, maybe a couple weeks ago, about how we can implement a green build into some of the developments that use CAF funding.

It would be a requirement.

I know our standard now is relatively low, the universal standard, but we're working on creating a policy that's above the universal standard that's a bare minimum if you're using CAF funds.

And then there's even higher incentives, the more efficient the unit becomes.

So we are looking at that, and that will be a requirement when using CAF funding.

When we talk about equity, usually somebody who is poorer carries a much heavier load of the bills on utilities because it tends to be less efficient housing.

We actually think that this type of working advisory body that we're recommending is particularly well suited to helping give John and you regulations and program requirements that can bring all these things together.

For those of you who maybe looked at the implementation document that Arlington has, it's a list of all of the tools that are available.

It's just an inventory.

And what you do when you have a very nimble administrator and an administrative process is when you see an opportunity, when somebody comes in and says, hey, I'm interested in this

accessory dwelling, you know, how could I make this happen and what support can you provide?

Maybe it's not only a loan from CAF, maybe it's a loan from the LEAP program to upgrade a building that's a garage and make an accessory dwelling and make it energy efficient.

You know, the ability to

on a case-by-case basis when opportunities present themselves to have someone like John informed by a set of program regulations that have been developed very specifically with an understanding of how much does it cost to build, how much does it cost to live there, all of those things we think

So what we can do if we bring an ordinance forward, we can give you the list of expertises that are set forth in the state law.

So some of those categories say of your 10 people, I think five of them are prescribed specifically, it might be six.

But then you have a couple of positions that you can play with.

but you know it's very much geared towards practicalities but through a city planner or perhaps you know that process we can

Nothing says you can't also have your housing coordinator seek input from your environmental division and the people on city staff who have expertise in these things.

One of the things that advocates of missing middle housing often talk about is not only are single-family detached dwellings the most expensive to build, they're also the worst from your carbon footprint.

All of those housing types are much better, and so the larger you get, the more units you have in a smaller building, the better that is for the environment as well.

So some of this is a regional

where frequently you'll hear people oppose increased density on the account of the environment and there is some tug and pull here, but I think people have to think about if you increase the density in the city, how many of those people are no longer driving long distances to get to their jobs?

Right now, we've priced out pretty much all of our service sector employees.

Where are they coming from?

He's now a former regional planner but mentioned the opening of the Wegmans of the county and one of the county board of supervisors asking for a raise of hands of where the employees were working.

How many were in the city?

How many were in the county?

And no hands went up until they got to Buckingham and Madison.

I was just hoping that maybe as what is our retrofitting is going that we're just focusing on let's do increased insulation as part of this let's do you know vapor barriers and what can we do to really make these

tight, efficient units and not... If you look at the Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher Guidelines, there is a very strict utility allowance and usually people's utilities are much more than that utility allowance.

So even though they're only supposed to be paying a third of their income towards their rents in totality, they're usually paying closer to 50%.

And that's why I'm hoping maybe if we are making sure we're working with that in mind as well.

So I would you know in terms of the like the zoning and policy changes I think they're all good things to move forward through.

I think there's maybe some details to hammer out like some of the things you were bringing up with the accessory dwelling unit program in terms of like what AMI levels are we looking at and stuff like that.

I do have a little bit of hesitancy around the recommendation for my understanding this is eliminating the hack and then having this group exist in its place.

and so I have a lot of hesitancy about that because I agree that an advisory board like this would be useful and needed and I think we need to separate out the hack from implementation and separate out the nonprofit community from implementation and there's definitely a lot that needs to change about the way the hack functions I think in particular the connection it has to the CAF and how that money is allocated and looking at measurements of the impact

but I still think there is a large positive role for whether it's reconfigured or in some kind of different way a policy group because I'm thinking just in a practical nuts and bolts sense I can think of three policies in the past couple years that wouldn't have happened without the hack

the program to get landlords to accept housing vouchers in exchange for support with retrofitting their buildings, the housing authority starting to administer its own vouchers, and although it's not a policy yet, a potential landlord risk reduction fund, and so I think we just as a council and as a community should be aware that if we totally get rid of the hack,

We are significantly reducing the community's ability to have input over housing policy and generate housing policy outside of city staff.

And maybe city staff is getting to a point where something like those three policies would happen in the future where they wouldn't have in the past.

I don't know if that's the case, but I think it's something we should

So those programs can still be introduced and proposed through the CAF.

So I mean, they could still happen.

Those aren't policies.

So those are programs that any nonprofit or entity that would like to receive money from the CAF can propose when the NOFA's issued.

They can propose creating the AssistRAP program or the Landlord Risk Reduction Fund.

But realistically, would they have been?

That's the question.

If you didn't have a body like the hack that's bringing together different sectors of the nonprofit community that maybe their work intersects in some way.

One perspective that we have about this is again I mentioned you're on your third program coordinator and these are things, these are initiatives, these are ideas that you want to encourage the person who is leading

your your effort administratively to be open to to seek out and that sort of thing I think perhaps when this group was originally formed the city didn't have a strong position or a strong person in that position but another thing historically that the city has wrestled with is everyone's great planners we talk about plans we make a lot of plans we talk about policies and

Whether or not you like the form-based code, look at that.

The policy level comprehensive plan document was approved in 2013.

The ordinance didn't even cross your desk until 2019.

This is what's happening with your affordable housing efforts as well.

And if you don't make a change,

You're going to regret it, I promise you.

And you're not going to keep some really good people who really do have the skills and the knowledge to lead you through this.

This is really important.

We just feel this so strongly.

All three of us are here.

And I just want to say I appreciate having the three of you here from different parts of this organization coming together obviously clearly have been working and discussing things and are going to continue to do that is very refreshing to me.

I know that for months we've been talking about how you know we have such analysis paralysis but we also have a lot of weigh-in coming in and I feel confident that when we feel like we have the right staff in place that we should recognize that there's a turning point by which we now are going to be relying on a strong

If I could make a couple comments.

First of all, I absolutely echo what Heather said.

One of the great frustrations to me has been the number of things that we've got sitting around that, for whatever reason, nothing has happened with for years.

I'm glad that we're getting some substantive proposals.

I have a couple questions, though.

One, I want to make sure that I understand the function of the new affordable housing board that you're proposing.

It says, through practical expertise, would assist the housing coordinator in establishing

Rents and sales prices applicable to all ADUs in the city, perhaps once every six months.

Okay.

The second question, or secondly, I said, over the last year or so, as I was talking to an awful lot of people about affordable dwelling units, I kept hearing over and over the complaint that the red tape associated with trying to get an ADU approved was just weighing them down, was taking a long time, was taking a lot of money, and I didn't try to verify all of these complaints.

My perception with accessory dwellings, these are right now buy-write uses.

The ability to get an accessory dwelling unit, which ADU am I talking about here,

To get an accessory dwelling unit, I know it's been mentioned, I think Cadre at one point or a group or someone in Cadre kind of mentioned that there's a provisional use permit process.

The provisional use permit, you can get it in 10 minutes.

You simply go in, fill out and say, I agree to abide by all the rules in the zoning ordinance.

The zoning administrator signs it.

You can get it, you know, or you can leave it and have it signed away.

So the ability to do one on your property is fairly simple.

Where there might be a little more time involved is the building permit and the actual design of the structure and then one of the things that John mentioned is a lot of communities that have been successful with this have actually had a form book and I believe, don't quote me on it, but I believe we've actually done that in the past because I believe there was somebody who worked on it, designed something that would be instantly approvable by the building official, the building official's already done it,

We can obviously update that.

I think one of the key things that came up here is you'd want to make sure there was a much, you know, kind of environmental, you know, look at that drawing through the environmental lens and make sure that you're getting as much energy efficiency, although the building code does have a lot of that stuff in it and they keep updating that as well at the IBC level.

But that form book makes it easier because then you don't have to go through the review process.

That's the only red tape that I can think of that's out there.

Certainly if you're going through the CAF, then there's another round there.

But investing in the form book and kind of directing staff to, hey, make this happen.

I was a homeowner who tried to do an ADU.

I got lost and stopped.

But then I also had additional problems because you know nobody marks the property lines and my shed is not on my property.

I did have one other question, at least it's a purely lawyer to lawyer question.

What's the code section that deals with these housing advisory committees and so on?

In the state law?

The state code.

The one I'm referring to is 15.2 2305.

Oh, okay.

It's in there, yeah.

An idea I had also had, I don't even know how possible this is, but this would only obviously be usable for external dwelling units, was even if we had four or five plans that were already drawn up, that somebody, if they liked the plan, could use, because again, this is coming from a homeowner who does have

Some experience back in the building world, but not for many years, and if I could just go and pick up a plan and like kind of choose between one of four or five plans, it's like, hey, I think this would fit in my backyard.

I like the look of this.

or we might even have contractors that are then used to building those plans and it can be an efficiency play.

And that's the whole restructuring and process we're talking about.

I think it would be really well suited to that.

So internally we can have zoning and environmental and building code official look at here's a basic set of parameters and then this type of advisory board can tell us.

Is this going to be cost effective to build?

Is this going to be all of the things that this board would be set up to weigh in on?

Is this a place somebody is going to want to live?

Is it going to be a comfortable place to live, a comfortable arrangement?

you know all of these things but we think that this process would be really well suited to developing exactly that sort of thing which would make it incrementally easier to get these smaller things and would put us in a situation to then start tackling the larger

So, just two comments.

Sounds good.

You know, I'm willing to review and try.

I mean, you definitely need something that works.

I just would hope that if

It's not working out like if it's a case where we do have individuals trying to purchase homes to knock them down and build these potential units if it becomes problematic that we assess that quickly and that's presented you know to council to change course if it's not having the intended

And I would say especially since the council, you know, even the last three members on board, there's been a lot of, you know, interest in campaigning around helping to

fix what the affordable housing issues.

and again I'd reiterate what some other people have said you know I know staff works extremely hard behind the scenes in a way that does not often get recognition and I do a lot of work clearly went into this and I think these are all very useful recommendations and I have full trust and faith and staff going forward to be able to make these changes because I know it's easy to talk about things it's infinitely harder to actually make it happen

I'll say my piece on it again.

I think the advisory board recommended.

I see the role of that.

The one that just little concern I have is that that created along with eliminating anything that even remotely resembles a hack without some discussion.

I don't know if that's necessarily the right way to go and I do think we might lose some things in that.

But again, I'll say my piece on that.

No, I know.

I just don't know if that's necessarily all the hack or... Right.

And to be clear, one of the things we're trying to do, it's not intended to be personal, but I gave the example of the form-based code.

We really would like to see you not doing continuous policy review and planning.

We really would like to see you get to a place where that

Policy level stuff is done every five years through the comprehensive plan.

Not to say you can't do something in the interim, but we're not recommending a constant policy review, because when you're so focused on that, you're less focused on the nitty-gritty details of doing stuff.

And so, as John mentioned, a lot of the examples you gave were great ideas for programs, really needed to come forward, we're glad that we did.

We don't want to discourage that, but if you all need an advisory group on policy,

What we're recommending is that it be more sporadic, that it really serve you and not sort of be tied to things staff is doing day to day to administer a program, but really sort of when data comes out of this working group and out of the housing coordinator's office,

What do you do with it?

Maybe that data comes out on an annual basis.

Maybe you have a group that meets on an annual basis to review and so that when you get to your five-year mark and it's time to update things, there's not as much work to be done at that point.

So there may still be a role for a group that is advisory to council, but what we're asking for is this group that can support your housing

In these next two years, we actually are really looking at the policy piece, you know, and all these components.

This is kind of the time is ripe right now, and there's a tremendous number of stakeholders involved, and rightfully so.

I would argue maybe too many stakeholders after the first meeting that I went to and looked around the room.

I just wanna make sure, and there's a lot of ways that this could look like, and maybe it'll happen anyway, but I just wanna be able to be absolutely sure that the community feels like, the broader community, that the city's housing policy is something that is in a black box, that they're able to see what's happening, be aware of it, that there's transparency around it, and they feel like there's meaningful inroads to providing feedback and ideas.

I just wanna make sure that that is always possible.

So again,

Outside of that there was one more specific thing I wanted to ask about.

I know in the documents sent about Arlington one of the things in the documents that they did was to change the basis for zoning from units per acre to floor area ratio.

Well, I am absolutely not a fan of units per acre, and I've said that specifically in our multifamily and mixed-use zones.

I think there's a lot of problems with that.

It discourages smaller unit types that we probably desperately need because of the way we count units.

Floor Area Ratio is certainly an acceptable way of doing it.

The way I've kind of seen it or kind of thought about it in the past is as a means of if you're worried about your dimensional requirements giving you the same building over and over and over, switching from a maximum height and setback

regulation to a floor area ratio allows a little more flexibility in those designers.

You give people a maximum height on a zone, you say your building can't be taller than this, but you've also got to hit this floor area ratio so you have to carve away at some of the box.

So if you're really worried about people doing kind of the same building over and over because they're maximizing their volume,

Floor Area Ratio is a way of tackling that where you kind of force them to consider how they put the boxes together and what kind of thing they do.

It's certainly an acceptable way of regulating a building.

You do have to set kind of those targets for every zone, but height and bulk will work, and we do have that in most of our zones, so we have that plus DUA, and that creates this mismatch where

We talked about that but we really felt that that particular problem has to be looked at more globally.

It's something we have made the consultants aware of that one of our biggest constraints in trying to figure out how to incentivize affordable housing is that our comp plan doesn't have, for the most part,

any density ranges in it and then we have all these density specifications in the zoning ordinance but for example in the comp plan it identifies the area around the university as being planned for your absolute highest density residential development.

Is that the area that in your zoning ordinance has the highest dwelling units per acre that you can achieve?

No.

So we've made the consultants aware that one of the biggest things that really needs to be updated in the comprehensive plan land use chapter is taking a look at what are the existing patterns of developments and how do we expect things to go.

and giving us something to work with.

And then in the ordinance, you might choose to use dwelling units per acre.

You might choose something different.

You might choose to allow more different types of buildings and structures.

You might use FAR some places.

You don't have to do it the same way every place.

Hi, my name is Walt Tyneke, city resident, and I'm a member of the Charlottesville Low Income Housing Coalition.

And I just wanted to say a couple things.

First, it's really nice to see staff working this way to kind of dig deep for coming up with alternatives to this significant housing crisis that we have in the city right now.

So it's kind of nice to see some creative thinking and thinking out of the box.

It was really great.

I thought the way that Brian started this off was really helpful.

Way back when he started this whole thing off, it seems like a while ago, but when he talked about morals and the moral issues that are at play here, not just the legal and technical issues and the zoning issues, but behind that are moral issues.

So just as a reminder and I think you know you're moving in the right direction but just as a reminder you know we have a significant history to correct in this town a pretty significant history of racism and zoning and the city needs to protect predominantly black neighborhoods by down zoning them and neighborhoods of privilege should be up zoned in this process so they could be part of addressing the 3300 city residents that currently are struggling with unmet housing needs

So, along those lines, I'm wondering, you know, in the spirit of what was talked about today about, like, coming up with alternatives that, you know, where we don't have to wait until all those moving pieces are done, I want to go back and ask you if there's any possible way that we can speed up the process for coming up with the equity housing strategy and the zoning code audit, because thinking about this as a two-year process,

It just seems like a hell of a long time and the city is bleeding low income people on a monthly basis because of the rising cost of housing.

So one other thing I was wondering in the spirit of what you suggested about like workarounds to waiting for those things to get done.

There were some creative things talked about here tonight.

A lot of them seem like they should get some support from council.

But I'm wondering if it's possible for council to set up a land bank strike fund now so that we can start purchasing properties for affordable housing development.

Properties in Charlottesville are not getting any cheaper by the month.

So I'm wondering if one of the things we can do in the short run is get that kind of thinking going in terms of getting some funding for affordable housing and affordable home ownership in town.

Hello, I'm Navarre Bartz.

I know some of you.

So I came here mostly to say, well, I've been working with Rory and Josh and a few other people on some ADU stuff, and most of it you guys have already kind of highlighted, like getting rid of the parking requirement.

and the owner residency.

A lot of this Pacific Northwest in California, they're kind of a little ahead of us on this, but as a member of the public, I wanted to say yay.

I like those recommendations.

I think they're good.

Also, coming from Soil and Water, which I'm one of the directors for Charlottesville,

Getting rid of those parking requirements is also good for our environmental stuff, especially stormwater, reducing our permeable, well, increasing our permeable area so we have better flow through of water and things of those nature.

Thank you.

Is there anyone else who would like to speak?

So in my head what happened when you sat on it and it ended up in the hole?

It happens a couple thousand times a year.

Okay.

Stop!

All right.

Well no, to talk about next steps, if the council would like at your March 2nd meeting we can have a resolution that would refer some of these items to the Planning Commission to begin the process of

Getting an affordable dwelling unit ordinance on the books, looking at these accessory dwelling unit reforms as well as the incentivized zoning for missing middle housing.

I'm supportive of that.

It seems to me that recognizing Michael's comments about the Housing Advisory Commission that we have now, the affordable

Affordable Dwelling Unit Advisory Board contemplated by the statute doesn't have to be seen as literally a replacement for the current Housing Advisory Committee.

I think we should go ahead.

There were four specific recommendations that involve, as best I can tell, all of them would involve the city attorney's office drafting something

either amending zoning ordinance provisions is the first one.

Adopt new zoning ordinance provisions is the second one.

Adoption of an ordinance.

Restructure the Housing Advisory Commission, which would be tracking the statute.

All of them require your office's efforts.

I think that's the starting point.

We should ask the City Attorney's Office to draft those, whatever implementing ordinances would be needed on those four points.

And then we can sort through, frankly, whether they've got to go through the Planning Commission and come here or just where.

Let's get started.

And the way one thing we can do to get started is to ask the city attorney's office to go ahead and start drafting.

We've got some ideas.

We can work to get those to you and maybe before even March 2nd and take a look at those.

Hopefully, then at March 2nd, I can at least put it on the agenda.

And keeping in mind that to say let's get going doesn't mean we have to start with a fully drafted 100% agreed to

So saying that we make this transition now and then we revisit that at the conclusion of this main planning process.

I mean I was, I do really see the, at a time when we were addressing the massive amounts of boards of commissions, I can't believe I'm going to say this, but the idea of keeping, I really like the idea of one separating out the day to day actual meeting to get the work done, but then also having a creativity group that is addressing creatively

on a more, again, policy level of thinking through programs, ideas that we're seeing a lack of in the city.

Right, and it sounds like the main goal, and correct me if I'm wrong, is one, trying to separate out the way something like the hack functions in terms of largely including the non-profit community.

Removing that from sort of that, even if there is not an actual conflict of interest, there's always the appearance of it if you have non-profits making decisions on money that directly or indirectly relates to their non-profits.

Removing that and trying to make sure that it's not making your lives significantly harder to do things.

I don't want to lose this.

But a lot of those were recommended in several different ways.

They just ended up being presented, right?

And they were presented by, I mean, over the years, if you go back and look, they have been presented by group members of the community, hack staff.

So it's just kind of revolving information.

The only point I would come back to is that the specific thing being suggested is actually to some extent the recommendations on the page that was posted here to restructure the Housing Advisory Commission is something of a misnomer because in fact

What is being suggested?

It would be an affordable housing dwelling unit program following the statute of 15.2-2305 subsection E, which has about ten different paragraphs.

Paragraph seven of which is specifically the composition of this board but paragraphs two and three and four are talking about helping to figure out the prices and then the rents and costs and so on and so all the things that were being described it's the group described in paragraph seven that would do all of those things has nothing to do with policy you can have the policy folks continuing to do policy

We really would like to see you match up your major policy review cycle to the comprehensive plan review process.

If you as a city council would like this advisory body to bring forward recommendations for major policy shifts, you know, that sort of thing,

If you keep this policy advisory group, we'd like to see them more oriented towards you.

Our recommendation would be that you not spend major time looking at policy more than once a year.

You kind of are looking at it.

just with an eye towards what's working, what's not.

Some of those adjustments would get made on a practical level, but if you're always, always, always talking about making the next plan or making the next policy, if you don't give yourself enough space to actually try it and see if it works, you're always just planning, you're not effectively doing.

And that's part of where we are.

We have so many smart people in our community.

We all want these things to be right and great and really productive, but we spend so much time developing them and talking about them that it takes us really long periods of time to actually do them.

or sometimes we make a plan and it takes so long to make the plan that by the time we do it everybody's saying we need a different plan.

So doing that, maybe just agreeing to do that every five years with interim reviews sort of at your council level maybe once annually would be fine.

but not this ongoing sort of monthly discussion.

Right now what you have is sort of a mixed up jumble of people who want to bring forward great new programs with also policy things and there's a lot of struggle of

What's staff's role?

Can staff even propose something to you without going through somebody else?

There's a lot of struggles going on.

And again, like we were saying earlier, I think that right now that we have this big initiative underway that is going to take some time, as much as we all want it to be faster, that we have a lot of folks at the table that are going to work through that and that's going to serve as the foundation from which at that time we will then determine what is that next cycle going to look like and how spread out is it.

And so I think this is like the ripe opportunity to take advantage of this major kind of milestones that we're looking at right now.

and I've observed the struggle for the last couple years and the tension and I'll be honest the first time I actually asked to be on the hack because I felt like I really wanted to try to bridge those things together in most of those two years.

We didn't have a housing coordinator, we had someone come and we're, I mean just there's just it's been some challenges and I certainly understand that and I have a lot of respect for so many people in that room but

So just one last question.

It says specifically four members shall consist of

All I want to say is a more appropriate place I think one of us should sit is on the steering committee, frankly.

I went to the first meeting.

Yeah.

That's where, you know, a lot of those discussions are going to take place and we might help keep them moving forward.

I mean, I don't know.

I just think that's actually a more appropriate place.

I mean, I don't know.

You can go to all these meetings if you want, I guess.

I mean, like you said, if it's open to the public, I mean, there's an element of anyone interested that can always show up.

You know, I think

I'm not like totally committed to it.

I mean, I think having a council member on it helps ensure like sort of a liaison between communication between what's going on in the public, even if they're just a non-voting member.

But in that case, you can always just show up anyway as well.

And I definitely agree.

Someone, it would be useful to have even just like a point person for this steering committee that's working on the complaint, because they're working on the complaint and the housing strategy and the zoning.

There's a lot there.

I'm fine just being on that steering committee.

The fact that they're public meetings is fine.

And they're all public meetings anyway.

Thank you all very much for putting the grain into this and actually presenting us with some things that we can actually potentially see happening in the near future.

And I'll be honest, Dr. Richardson, seeing this kind of collaboration, I'm excited.

The rest of our work sessions that we have in the next few months are like this.

I'm super excited about just having direction coming from staff.

This is great.

This was a lot of great work done and we're encouraging it.

Thank you.

Any further comments?

Section 2237-12 of the Virginia Code, I hereby move the City Council closes open meeting and convene in a closed session as authorized by Virginia Code Section 2237-11A1 for the discussion and consideration of appointing members to the following Charlottesville board, the Police-Civilian Review Board.

Second.

Aye.

All in favor?