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HomeMy WebLinkAbout3/5/2024 Item 8a, Walker kathie walker < To:E-mail Council Website; Shoresman, Michelle; Francis, Emily; Pease, Andy; Stewart, Erica A; Marx, Jan Subject:Housing Study Attachments:Cal Poly Housing and Enrollment presentation 10.17.2023 (1).pdf This message is from an External Source. Use caution when deciding to open attachments, click links, or respond. Dear Councilmembers, Housing has become a key issue in SLO and I'm happy that the city is considering options to expand opportunities for more people to have the ability to live here. The housing shortage in SLO is a relatively recent problem. Thirty years ago, a single-income family could afford to buy a house. A 3-bedroom house on Mill Street near Johnson Avenue sold for $150,000 in the early 1990s. After sitting on the market without an offer and the listing expired, it was purchased directly from the owner. With inflation, $150,000 it would be around $330,000 in 2024. Today, that house would cost about $1,300,000 and most dual-income households could not afford it. Much of the issue is a lack of supply versus demand. One group that consumes much of the housing in SLO is college students. I've seen the charts produced by Cal Poly and heard their housing presentation at the city council meeting on 10/17/2023. I can only speak from my observation and experience of my grandparents, my parents, my adult children, and myself living in various neighborhoods in San Luis Obispo. My parents lived in Monterey Heights and it was exclusively permanent residents but today, many of those homes are college student rentals. I live in Alta Vista which once housed college professors and other long-term residents but now, nearly every house is owned by real estate investors and occupied by college students. Many homes in the neighborhood north of Foothill where my children grew up have become rentals for college students. The Housing Needs Study Session report in your agenda cites the disparity between a homeownership rate of 38% in SLO compared to a homeownership rate in California of 55.8%. 100% of houses sold in my neighborhood over the past few years have been to an investor/non-owner-occupant and rented to college students. It's not surprising that investors are buying up homes when you consider that the going rate for a rental house in our neighborhood is $2,000 per bedroom so a 4-bedroom house rents for $8,000/month or more. Here's a house that's near my parents' previous home on McCollum that's renting for $15,000/month. It's advertised as 7 bedrooms but I have visited the house many times before the former owners sold it to an investor, and it only had 4 bedrooms, and there is no record that there was an addition. In any event, a family or the "workforce" can't compete with those sorts of prices. It's also unfair to college students to have to pay such huge amounts for rent. During Cal Poly's housing presentation to you on 10/17/2023, it was revealed that Cal Poly's enrollment is increasing by "300,400,500 students" and the same input of "modest growth" of their students has been happening since at least 2019. As Andy Pease pointed out, that sort of growth has a huge impact on the city's housing stock. (See transcript, attached) 1 I realize Cal Poly has plans to add more housing on campus. They have made promises to build more housing for years and they have not been able to keep up with their enrollment. When the yakitutu dorms were completed, many of the rooms were filled by existing students who were shifted from overcrowded rooms in other dorms on campus. The current plans for the development on Slack and Grand which will initially provide homes for faculty and staff, were scaled way back because of the soil conditions, but Cal Poly has not yet identified another location to build more housing. Cal Poly has also said they have an issue with the availability of water for future development. I have watched the situation evolve in the city over the past 30 years. Cal Poly is in a conundrum of "catch-up" that they, themselves, created which has affected the housing market in SLO. It has also increased the price of housing on campus because they charge the market rate per bed for living in the dorms. It's a catch-22 situation. I know you are aware of the problem and encourage you to push back on Cal Poly to hold them responsible for housing more of their students on campus because that is one component that will help ease the strain of affordability in SLO and make things easier for their students. I'm also concerned about homeless college students and have known several. Cal Poly and Cuesta College prohibit their homeless students from sleeping in their cars on campus. I support a safe parking program in San Luis Obispo for residents and also feel that Cal Poly and Cuesta should implement programs for their unsheltered students. I also support the city offering standardized pre-approved plans for infill and ADUs because they allow construction to take place faster. The idea of offering pre-approved, standardized plans for ADUs was suggested to the city council in 2017, to ease the cost and speed up the process of construction. Since then several cities and counties in California have provided this service but San Luis Obispo has not. This year, Assembly Bill 434 went into effect and requires all California cities to have a pre-approved ADU plan scheme in place by 1/1/2025. The legislation gives cities an option to charge a fee to access the designs and I encourage San Luis Obispo to offer the plans free of charge, especially for owner- occupants of properties, to make the process more affordable for those who may benefit by adding an ADU to their property. Thank you, Kathie Walker 2 City Council Meeting 10/17/2023 (link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvp4BJu2M4Q&t=2058s) Cal Poly Update for Housing, Infrastructure and Enrollment Plans (@ 29:37) Michelle Shoresman: It looked like with the housing that is scheduled...it looked like, and I believe you said that the first new beds would be in 2026 -ish? So what does enrollment look like in the next few years? And will there be those increases in the next few years that we have to worry about impacting the community until those new beds are available ? Terrance Harris, Cal Poly Vice President for Strategic Enrollment Management : The best way to articulate that is, the growth will be very modest over the next couple of years until housing increases. So, our incoming students – this year we had an incoming first year class of 5,300, transfer class of 900 – our plans for ‘24 are not really any different than that. We plan to bring in the same. We’re far off but it would likely be similar for ‘25 until we have additional housing capacity. Once there’s additio nal housing capacity, we might begin to up the incoming student population to accelerate that growth. But it’s modest. You know, 300, 400, 500 students depending on how, what graduation rates look like, retention rates look like. Our very, very early indications for ‘24 look like, if we brought in another class of 5,300 freshman, 900 transfer students, that it would increase our enrollment by 300 to 400 students. Not a significant, not an extremely significant growth . Michelle Shoresman: So you really are planning to, for the next few years, kind -of keep enrollment level-ish until 2026, or...? Terrance Harris: I would call it modest growth and again, the big push is making sure we retain our current students. Making sure that we increase unit loads and utilize the summer to the best of our ability as opposed to saying, Alright, we’re going to have a class of 5,800 or 6,100. Those type of things we’re not looking to do until we have the housing capacity to do so. Michelle Shoresman: So the new numbers are sort of based on ongoing student numbers to a certain extent? Terrance Harris: Yeah, so one thing you have to keep in mind is that, as students come in, if the class of 2019 was smaller than the class of 2023, you also have modest growth there. So we’re not looking to increase the input. We’re only looking to take care of what we currently have right now. And keep the input steady until we have the capacity to do something different. Michelle Shoresman: Got it. Thank you for the University Admissions 101 class. (Laughter) Erica Stewart: Thank you. Councilmember Pease. Andy Pease: Thank you so much. Great information. I’m super intrigued by all those water pieces coming together and look forward to hearing more as that advances. Looking for water; Always an intriguing conversation. I appreciate that over the last few years Cal Pol y has surveyed students in terms of where their school address is. So that was always a concern for us. Like where are these students? It sounds like of the typically 13,000 students are living off campus, maybe 1,000 of those are outside of the city limits of San Luis Obispo and the rest are kind of in the city? Rough numbers? Keith Humphrey: You made me do public math last year and I screwed it up and had to send you all a formal email. About 11 percent of our off-campus population lives outside of the city of San Luis Obispo. And I’m not going to do the math on the spot and embarrass myself again. Andy Pease: Okay... so eleven percent -ish. So one, I just want to thank you for doing that work and continuing to provide it. Cause, as we’ve often talked about, so glad for the students that live on campus and those requirements, et cetera. The number that impacts us as a city is how many are living in the city. Bodies, like how many bodies are living in the city. Because “three or four hundred doesn’t make that much of a difference.” In general, I agree. But for us, as a city, to build enough housing for 300 to 400 is huge, right? So those are the communication that we just need to keep up with each other on.