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HomeMy WebLinkAbout3/5/2024 Item 8a, Hershberger Hans Hershberger < To:E-mail Council Website Subject:Comment on Item 8a This message is from an External Source. Use caution when deciding to open attachments, click links, or respond. Members of the San Luis Obispo City Council, I feel honored to have been tapped for advice on housing strategy for this city we live in and love. I understand that it is just part of democracy, yet to learn something good and then get to pass it on to power is truly a special experience. I will attempt to write here with honesty and humility. I am aligned with a grassroots movement called Strong Towns. It seems, for the most part, to have an accurate and even bipartisan interpretation of the condition and story of our built environment. Furthermore, it has a laser focus on change from the local level. Inspired, I have formed a local action group, Strong Towns SLO, and will be writing on housing from the Strong Towns perspective. Strong Towns Method Strong Towns has two rules for healthy neighborhood change. No neighborhood can be exempt from change. No neighborhood should experience sudden, radical change. These two rules describe a situation where, through zoning or otherwise, our neighborhoods are not allowed to adapt to the needs of the community and where, through "cataclysmic money" or greenfield development, a whole region's worth of demand is funneled into the few neighborhoods where change is allowed to happen. It is the situation all across our nation and unfortunately well describes our beloved city. "If you've ever slightly cracked the lid on a boiling pot of water and watched the steam rush out, then you can understand what this funnel effect does to land prices and housing markets." To move forward from here we must "lift the lid straight off the whole pot." To that aim, the two main strategies I would like to touch on today are allowing the next increment of housing by right and removing parking mandates. 1. Allowing Next Increment of Housing by Right Strong Towns looks to our human past for insight into how to grow resilient, sustainable, and affordable cities. It is a story of incremental development, stable growth, and infrastructure investment following neighborhood success. It is the idea that a neighborhood can easily adapt to the needs of its residents. How do we do this in an age of zoning? We encourage and allow the next increment of housing by right. We encourage by offering free, pre approved designs for ADU's, missing middle, live above-work below units, and even small single family homes. This "Sears Catalog" strategy has shown success in South Bend of Indiana, Groveland of Florida, and Monterey County. Furthermore, places like South Bend are partnering with local banks, buying down interest rates to give community developers access to lower interest loans. This and revolving loan funds incentivize small scale developers who understand the needs of their neighborhood but are barred by a high financial bar of entry. 1 We allow by following the example of Edmonton and Minneapolis in allowing duplexes and triplexes by right in every neighborhood citywide. Furthermore, we can tie this potential for growth to our public transit system by allowing developments near frequent transit service to have 4-6 stories depending on the proximity to downtown. This may seem a bold step for a city like ours composed mostly of single family zoning. However, keep in mind that such was the case for the cities above. This blanket-upzone approach allows our city to evolve gradually from its single family stasis into the next increment of development while avoiding the displacing firehose development of allowed density in a select few neighborhoods. If we wanted even more sustainability in our neighborhoods we would also allow Accessory Commercial Units and bottom-floor commercial by right citywide. 2. Repealing Parking Mandates It's no secret that government officials and planners cannot predict how much parking is needed for a particular home or business. The models and tables used are often copied from other cities and so on in a tragic game of telephone where our valuable land is wasted for off-street parking. Many of those trip generating models overestimate how much parking is needed and completely lack the nuance of a neighborhood and its potential for other modes of transportation. What's more, such tables were generated decades ago and certainly cannot predict commuting changes rocking cities such as those from Covid. Even Randy McCourt, international vice president of the ITE, the group that makes these models, admitted, "We expected you to be smart! The thought was we'd put it out there, you'd be smart and use it well. It was wrong to put it out there without the cancer warning in big, bold letters: 'If you want to be stupid, copy these numbers, you're a moron!" We as cities did just that. Not only are parking mandates based on bad models, they kill affordable housing in the water. At best, housing developments, in an attempt to retain residential units, put their required parking underground where costs can go well above $50,000 per stall. This cost is then passed on to renters or buyers. At worst, "needed housing is not being built because parking rules make it infeasible." Somewhere in the middle, a developer has to reduce the amount of housing they can provide for people because they are forced to provide housing for cars. It's no wonder then, with parking mandates, that the only apartment that can be feasibly built is one priced for luxury. Repealing parking mandates is not even an abolition of car ownership, it is simply allowing for development to flex to the parking needs of a community. The alternative is a heavy-handed mandate based on poor science that kills affordable housing. Repealing parking mandates citywide is the bare minimum to allowing affordable housing in our community. Summary We should seek a sustainable city that is able to adapt and change, but not subject to cataclysmic change. Two keys to unlocking such a city are allowing the next increment of housing by right and repealing parking mandates. Both must be done citywide. Thank you for reading, see you at the meeting. -- -Hans Hershberger (505)358-0648 hans.hershberger@gmail.com 2