working my heart out. We'll go ahead and start the meeting. Good evening. Welcome to our 6 p.m. of the November 30th, 2021 meeting of the Santa Cruz City Council. I have a few announcements and then we'll move on to our meeting. Today's meeting is being broadcast live on Community Television Channel 25 and streaming on the city's website at cityofsantacruz.com. If you wish to comment on an item today calling it at the beginning of the item you're wanting to comment on using the instructions on your screen, please mute your television or streaming device once you call in and listen through the phone. Please note there is a delay in streaming so if you continue to listen on your television or streaming device, you may miss your opportunity to speak. When it is time for public comment, press star nine on your phone to raise your hand. When it is your time to speak during public comment, you will hear an announcement that you have been unmuted. The time rule will then be set to two minutes. You may hang up once you have commented on your item of interest and I would like to ask the clerk to please call the roll. Council Member Watkins. Here. Council Member Johnson. Here. Council Member Cummings is currently absent. Golder. Here. Mayor Brunner. Present. And Mayor Meyers. Present. Thank you, Bonnie. I see Council Member Cummings is present. Okay, we will go ahead and I just want to just for the public tonight's meeting is a study session so we are happy having oral communications at the end of the evening as we typically would in a normal council session so I just want to make that announcement. A fund or a general business item and that is the regional housing needs allocation update which is agenda item number two on our agenda or on our agenda this evening for members who are of the public who are streaming this meeting if this is an item you want to comment on now is the time to call in using the instructions on your screen. We're going to have a presentation and then we will have discussion and we'll go from there. So I'm going to turn this over. I believe Matt is going to be our staff for this. Good evening, Mayor. I'm actually going to hand this over to Heather Adamson with AMBAG to begin the presentation tonight. Thank you, Matt. Welcome, Heather. There she is.  Heather, I see you in a box but I don't see it. Yeah, there you go. Can you hear me now? Yes, we can. Okay, and can you see my screen? We cannot see your screen yet. Okay, hang on one second. I thought it said share but it's not actually sharing yet. Apologize for the delay. No worries. Okay. And while that's loading I just wanted to brief council. We're going to hear from Heather Adamson with AMBAG first talking about the arena process and then for some council discussion with Heather questions then we'll be following with a staff presentation furthering the arena discussion and the housing element process next steps to come. Thank you, Matt. Take it away, Heather. Okay, I'm still, can you guys still hear me? I'm still having trouble stirring my screen so maybe either Bonnie or Matt. I have the presentation. Okay. I'm happy to share. Perfect. That would be good. And Heather, we understand you have a bit of a time constraint tonight so we'll be respectful of your time to make sure that we keep you, I think you have till 6 o'clock. My other meeting got pushed back a little bit so I'm available to about 6.45, 6.50. Oh, thanks very much for letting us know. Okay, welcome. We can see it now. Perfect. Okay, so good evening, council member. Tonight I'm going to talk about the six cycle regional housing needs allocation or some may know it as a RENA for short. My name is Heather Adamson. I am the planning director at the Association of Monterey Bay Area Governments for RENA or AMBAG. So let's get into it. Next slide please. So a little bit of background. I don't know who's controlling. It's me. Hold on one second. Okay. So just a little bit of background. This is something that AMBAG is responsible for doing every eight years. It is, there we go. Okay. It's something that AMBAG is responsible for updating every eight years. It is tied to the schedule of developing our sustainable community strategy. And that change was made back in 2008 as part of Senate Bill 375. We're a little bit unique in the Central Coast area, although AMBAG is the Metropolitan Planning Organization, the federally designated transportation planning organization for three counties, Monterey, Santa Cruz, and San Benito counties. We are only the council of governments for Monterey and Santa Cruz. And that is a state designation. And San Benito cog is responsible for preparing RENA for the three jurisdictions within San Benito. And so AMBAG is responsible for the other 18 jurisdictions, 16 cities within the two counties of Monterey and Santa Cruz. As I mentioned, this is something we do every eight years. Our last time we were talking about this was back in 2013, 2014. I'm not sure how many books were on the council then, but a lot of things have changed since the last cycle. The six-cycle planning period for our RENA period is from June 30, 2023 to December 15, 2031. It's a little bit of an overlap from our last RENA cycle, our fish cycle, but that is determined by the California Department of Housing and Community Development. And as I mentioned, it's tied to the adoption and preparation and adoption of our local sustainable community strategy. AMBAG did receive, the state is responsible for preparing a regional housing needs termination for each region. AMBAG did receive this back in August a few months ago. And this is how many units the region must plan for as part of their housing element updates. Our determination for six-cycle was 33,274 units. To put this in perspective, this cycle from 2014 to 2023 was 10,430. So that is more than three times the number of units from the previous cycle. And I'll explain a little bit why that happened. Next slide, please. So the RENA process is outlined in statute, and it's very specific and very specific of who has responsibilities for what. It starts at the state level with the California Department of Housing and Community Development, HDB, and they work with the COG AMBAG in this case and the Department of Finance on collecting data about the region, very specific housing, job, employment, all kinds of data, age data, race data, all kinds of data. We share that information. They use that information in analyzing and producing their RENA determination. This started in early 2021 and AMBAG, as I mentioned, received that determination from HDB at the end of August. They came to our board meeting in the September board meeting and presented information about how they came up with that determination. Then it moves to the AMBAG realm. AMBAG's responsibility is to develop a RENA plan. The main part of this plan is to develop a methodology to allocate the number, the complete number of units, housing units that were assigned to each local jurisdiction. We need to develop that methodology. We need to put that draft allocation of units for each of the jurisdictions in the draft plan. We go through a public process and review and potential appeals by local jurisdictions of the draft plan and adoption of the final RENA plan. This has started earlier this year and AMBAG has worked very closely with our local jurisdictions planning staff. We've been meeting monthly for most of the year to discuss the RENA methodology and RENA allocations and then providing updates and getting direction from our board as well. A new component of the sixth cycle is HDB, the California Department of Housing and Community Development, now is responsible by changes to statute to review and approve our RENA methodology. Each region can develop their own methodology, but HDB must review and approve it. This is completely new for the sixth cycle process. Once AMBAG has finalized the RENA plan, which is expected to do in 2022 next year, then it gets turned over to the local jurisdictions like the City of Santa Cruz. Your each jurisdiction is responsible for updating their housing element. As part of that housing element, AMBAG isn't involved necessarily in developing your housing element that is entirely up to the each local jurisdiction how that is done. Discussion and reviewing of the draft housing element and any policies or actions that go into the housing element is a conversation between each local jurisdiction and HDB because it is ultimately HDB who reviews and approves your housing element, HDB's housing element. Each jurisdiction will receive a RENA allocation and that's what they need to update and plan and potentially rezone in their housing element or as part of their housing element development and that must be done. The deadline for our region's jurisdiction is December 2023. From start to finish, this is a couple of years process and AMBAG has been trying to work quickly and prudently through and requesting early consultation with HDB so we could make sure we give jurisdictions as much time as possible to prepare their housing element. Next slide, please. I want to talk a little bit about what's new and this will kind of explain why everyone's RENA numbers have been going up in six cycles. So we had a number of legislative bills that went into place, went into were approved and went into law a few years back and it led to increased RENA allocation for all jurisdictions or for all regions and everyone's RENA period is a little bit different. AMBAG is sort of later in on the six cycle compared to other regions of the state. Other regions have gone through this already. Our friends to the south and Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo, they've already gone through their six cycle and have the RENA plans and a number of the jurisdictions have already done their housing elements. Our friends to the north and in the Bay Area, they're just wrapping up their final RENA plan and their jurisdictions will be preparing their housing elements. So we're going to look, everyone's in a little different timing but we all have these new issues that have led to greater increase in RENA allocation. A lot of it has to do with the bills listed on the screen above that were passed and enrolled having to do with setting vacancy rates. The state doesn't want to see a super low vacancy rate. They want to see a reasonable available of housing stock available. Overcrowding is a huge issue for our region and we have a number of jurisdictions that are very very overcrowded and that is one of the biggest reasons why AMBAG region got a large increase in the RENA allocation compared to last time. Higher than average housing cost burdens as compared to other regions. We are not allowed to use under production of housing growth or because we have a stable population growth to reduce our RENA goals. We cannot do that. And then another new factor that we have to do and have to look at is require our methodologies to promote fair housing and reduce income and racial segregation when allocating the housing. And so this is a new factor that we've had to consider in developing a RENA allocation methodology that we have not had to consider before. So it's gotten a lot more complicated. Next slide please. So as I mentioned each council government and AMBAG in our region is responsible for developing a methodology that is appropriate, region appropriate. But they almost further and support the five RENA objectives and they're summarized on the screen here. Increased housing supply and mix promote infill equity and environment, ensure jobs housing balance and fit, promote regional income parity, and informatively furthering fair housing. And what we heard predominantly from the state over and over again, the last two objectives really are what they're focusing in on. Those are the new objectives. The RENA statute allows for some flexibility in how we develop our methodology, but it very clearly says what can and can not be used as allocation factors. And keep in mind, even if AMBAG board approved a RENA methodology, we still must submit it to the state for their review and approval. If they don't agree or confirm that it meets it can't just meet. It has to further support the five RENA objectives. They can send it back and say please continue working on this. So it's a balance. Next slide please. So AMBAG, as I mentioned, has been developing methodology options over the past seven, eight months for discussion at the planning staff level with all our local jurisdictions, as well as with our board of directors. And the priority factors that our RENA methodology has been focusing on is expected housing growth, existing jobs, existing transit access, a resiliency factor that takes a look at wildfire areas and sea level rise because perhaps we should not be focusing additional housing in those type of areas and then promoting fair housing and reducing income and racial segregation when allocating housing. We took a draft methodology for just multiple draft methodologies for the session. At our November meeting we held a public hearing to receive additional feedback from our board in direction as well as public comment. We did receive a number of public comment so much so that the board took action to continue the public hearing until December 8th at a special board meeting. So we'll be having the meeting next month continue the public hearing on a RENA methodology and the board at that time is expected to select a RENA methodology and direct staff to submit that to the state for review. Next slide please. So just a little just following up and kind of wrapping up about the schedule. We've been working on RENA development really at the planning directors forum which is planning directors from all local jurisdictions in the region meeting almost monthly sometimes twice a month since spring to develop this and of course assessing and getting direction from our board. We are as I just mentioned expecting our board to select a methodology to submit to HCD for review and approval. Assuming they do approve the HCD does concur that the methodology supports and furthers the RENA objectives so provide that determination to us in early 2022 it's about 60 day review period depending on when we get this the board will then take action on a preview not as its final methodology either in February or March and direct staff to issue that draft RENA plan including every jurisdiction's official RENA allocation and that's expected in March. There is an appeal period a public review period an appeal period for local jurisdictions if that happens we haven't had appeals in the past with the past cycle but of course there's been many appeals through the six cycle in other parts of the state. If that happens then that will happen in spring and into summer. If that does not happen the final RENA plan could be approved as early as June and if we do go through the receiving appeals then we'll go through the appeals review process appeals hearing and then we can most likely would adopt a final RENA plan in September so it just depends if we get appeals on the draft RENA allocations. Bottom line is each jurisdiction will need to prepare their six cycle housing element and submit that to HCD for their review and approval by December of 2023 and I'd be happy next slide is just a question slide with my contact information and so that's just a quick overview of where we are. Matt of your staff has been attending all the meetings and I'm sure if you have any specific questions related to City of Santa Cruz comments as well as Director Cummings has attended the board meetings and has provided comments and feedback on that but I'd be happy to answer any questions that you may have on the RENA process. Thank you Heather. I'll turn this over to Council for questions. Here I see Martine Watkins. Thank you for the presentation and for the overview of the process and for all your work in getting it to this place. My question was in regards to the overcrowding definition is that like double that housing that year is that how that's defined? Yes so of course there's lots of definitions of overcrowding. RENA is using a specific HCD standard and so for it would mean it's a very conservative definition of overcrowding and so it would mean an overcrowded for example so when a two bedroom house if there were three people in there that would be considered an overcrowded unit. Yeah okay that's like that. Thank you for clarifying. Yes. Council Member Brown and then Vice Mayor Bruder. Thank you for the presentation and for all of your work to try to make sense of very complex data sets and set of goals and just kind of everything that you have to consider. I have a couple of questions actually I think I have three and maybe I'll ask the first one that I know is specifically for you Heather. In the and then the other two may be some overlap with our staff as well so I can hold off. So in terms of the initial draft and the current number is that in the allocations I'm just trying to understand how you know where the decision points were how we and how the City of Santa Cruz ended up getting that additional 530 I think it is somewhere around there. Units as I understand it part of the change was about including additional or increasing within our allocation the number of units that were allocated for the categories where we have not been meeting the goals in particular in the very low and extremely low income categories and to some extent low although we did pretty well this past round overall relative to the arena the goals so where did like where did that come that extra 530 units come come from because I imagine that the overall number didn't change in terms of the allocation for them for ambag jurisdictions so I'm trying to understand that and then I also am interested in trying to understand where you know density bonus projects fit into these allocations we have as you and you mentioned some of them state laws that now allow for significantly higher density in areas that are zoned for lower density and so are we is the I just can't get clear on the density bonus units count towards our renewables I think they do and I am trying to figure out how that fits into the overall question of where we're out with our general plan and whether our general plan can accommodate the increases okay well I'll answer your first question I can answer that one great I'll leave the second one for city staff okay okay so over the last few months well let me start back in spring and summer because there's a number of priority factors we can include we started with reviewing all the regions who have gone for a six cycle before us and looked at their methodologies and looked at what they included in their methodology as priority factors and big regions little regions all throughout the state everyone did it they have very similar components but you can measure things different ways and so we work with our planning directors and board of directors and identifying what was important and at that time using expecting housing growth jobs and looking at what already had you know somewhat frequent transit either 15 or 30 minute frequent transit because the idea was is you'd want to assign more housing unit where there already is transit that could support it for infills and then a resiliency factor came up as looking at a wildfire zoned and high-risk areas for sea level rise so at that time this is over the summer we kind of narrowed down the priority factors and then getting them to sort of assign a weight or ranking this is a high priority medium low and so what we came once we have a number assigned to us the 33,274 number in September we could then apply basically a formula of these different components awaiting and so beginning in September and October we have some initial drafts that had the city of Santa Cruz an allocation estimate because keep in mind this is just an estimate until the draft plan comes out was around 2800 units or something like that for the city of Santa Cruz that was discussed I believe that number was the one that was discussed at our November 10th board meeting that's what we call their revised draft methodology we got a lot of feedback and asked to continue the discussion that's when the board took action to continue the public hearing until a special December meeting and not take action they provided some direction on additional factors to consider and one of them was using the affirmatively part of their housing as a factor and the data that we used to that was a racially concentrated areas of affluence so we looked at those areas around the region and that looked at jurisdictions that were above 200 of the poverty level we looked at a regional average and then we looked at the jurisdiction average and for those jurisdictions who met that were considered affluent we also looked at racial areas as part of this where the concentrations of areas percent white and we took the regional average and those jurisdictions that were above that met the the initial categories initially we had used this information just to shift the height of the unit so if you were in this racially concentrated affluent area you would get a higher percentage of very low and low units as compared to other areas that might give more moderate and above moderate feedback we got from both board members some board members as well as a lot of public comments both in letters and at the public hearing itself was we needed to do more and we needed to allocate units based on that those racially concentrated affluent areas at the same time hgd staff reached out to us and asked to do an informal review of our methodology and so we had submitted what we had presented at the November 10th meeting they came back and gave us some feedback and one of their key recommendations was yes you do need to include a allocation factor that will actually allocate more units to these racially concentrated affluent areas and that's where the difference of what was presented initially at the November 10th board meeting of around the 28 2900 versus what was presented at the planning directors yesterday that was closer to 3400 and so that where the difference come in is we added that new factor and reduced the weighting of another factor to accommodate that based on feedback and that was presented yesterday and if anyone is interested email me but all the details like you can everything are available online and back.org in case you do want to review that but that's where we are in terms of sort of an allocation estimate and so we got more feedback yesterday and so we are now preparing materials for next week's board special board meeting and we'll be presenting that but what I can say is all the alternatives that we've looked at the different options that we looked at have an allocation estimate for the city of Santa Cruz probably anywhere from the 2800 to the 3600 area so and sort of that's where it is and it's it's much larger than your the cycle allocation of course but our keep in mind everything is larger because our determination was more than two times bigger so yeah so that's where the difference of the 500 came in it's still a draft estimate and but it's a change and so rena methodology is approved by the board submitted to hd approved by hd finalized by the board and then drafting the plan comes out but it is just something to give it a sort of an estimate of what jurisdictions are looking at thank you so if I could just just to make sure I'm understanding this so what I think I'm hearing is that um because of the changes in waiting of factors it may be that different jurisdictions within the ambag purview will have different percentages relative to their population that may not correspond in the same way like my understanding is that it's generally been you know based on percentage of population and growth and they stay kind of somewhere around I think it's like eight percent or something but because of the changes in waiting in the methodology that's where we're getting the I don't want to call them disparities because we're talking about addressing some really significant disparities and so I don't even want to compare you know disparity in allocations but is that am I getting that that it's it's about the some of the particulars of of the the character of the Santa Cruz housing stock and demographics yeah so I mean everything changed with six cycle so what we did in the past is no longer an option the state's not looking at it like that they don't want regions to look at it like that they don't want jurisdictions to look at it like that and so um yeah so everything's different and because of the specific statute equity and affordable housing in affluent areas to provide opportunities maybe to those who haven't had them in the past and higher resource areas is a huge priority of the state and that is you know from our conversations with the hd and what we've seen of other methodologies is is really a key focus of that's what they're looking at thank you next I have vice mayor breuer was was councilmember brown's second question answered yeah I can um sorry I can say that question councilmember brown but I know we only have heather for yeah I thought yeah okay we'll go back I'll put you back in the queue councilmember okay heather thank you so much it's nice to meet you um that was um very helpful I use spoke of the method methodologies promote fair housing and reduce income and racial segregation can you speak to that process here in the city of santa cruz how if you could just what that process looks like well it's new for six cycle for each region and for the in this case ambide to need to consider it as part of our methodology development when each city like the city of santa cruz updates its housing element it will have to go through its own process as well and there's guidelines that the state has has been developing and are on their website on how to do that and so I don't want to speak for the city but that is a conversation that you know I'm sure your planning department will be having with you teams later tonight or beginning next year as you start to update your housing element because we're looking at a adaptation line but then the city is going to have to look at it okay well here's our number our unit number that we need to update for a housing element and then you need to look at it at the jurisdiction level okay um okay and then quick question on slide six um bonnie is it possible to quickly go back to slide six i believe side six was the methodology the factors okay looking at the priority factors i think that's what you're referring to yeah and um like jobs house housing growth or am i on the right yeah you're on four one more five six there we go there's um okay the priority factors and okay thank you my question has been answered thank you thank you okay is that it yes now to councilmember comings thank you mayor hello good to see you once again um i had a number of my questions have been answered and it's great to point out that um you know a lot's changed since the last housing element because i think for a number of people that i've been hearing from uh that's been the concern is why are we seeing these huge disparities in numbers and it sounds like um the state's putting a lot more pressure and well one has changed the methodology and was really trying to put pressure on jurisdictions to provide this housing i'm just curious curious so i mean it was you know a few months between and kind of probably less than like a month and a half between what was brought forward um at the most recent meeting with the planning directors and what we saw last time they're having that 500 unit increase is pretty dramatic and so i'm and at the previous meeting one of the things that i brought up was that you know one of the thresholds they had used um i think it was around trying to look through the report which was around um you know being above the poverty level and we were kind of like right at 1% being at 66% with the threshold being at 67 and then um you know this new methodology even though it was that 1% we're now we now it's kind of went up 500 units in terms of um the number of units that we need to provide and so i'm just curious if you can speak to that a little bit like you know with having two kind of methodologies recent looking board i know you mentioned it a little bit but i'm wondering if you can kind of um get into a few more details around those two categories one was poverty level one was kind of racial composition and how just such a small percentage difference we've now shot up you know so many units and we see that change i know like looking at salinas i think they went down about 2000 units and there's been a lot of variation shifting in the number of units across the different jurisdictions and so i'm just wondering if you can speak to that a little bit um the clarity yeah so the version that was presented at the november 10th board meeting and by convening did not have um a component of a factor that considered uh the racially concentrated areas of affluence or rcao for short and to get at that afforded affordability furthering for housing issue as part of an allocation so what was presented yesterday for the planning factors and the feedback we got from both the state and uh public comment and from some board members was we need to ensure it as an allocation factor so what we did previously it was a very job existing jobs focused methodology and so looking at where the jobs were um and that was an 85 percent of um it's basically 85 percent of roughly um a little more than half of the units um we reduced that to 50 percent so in order to accommodate a new um um allocation factor of the rcaas and so that was at 35 percent the other thing we heard was there was two jurisdictions as you mentioned that um qualified as uh racially either um affluent or racially concentrated and but not both and our previous definition has said you need to be both and so we got comments that said it shouldn't be all or nothing um you should consider those who meet one of the categories which was the city of vana cruz and fan city uh down in monterey county and so we assigned that uh a partial and so um basically your allocation went down um in the jobs factor in terms of the allocation of units but it was offset by a higher allocation at a partial rcaa allocation and so um it wasn't a fool um if we had counted the city of vana cruz and fan city of 100 percent of both racially uh concentrated as well as affluent areas um it would have been much higher but we had only allocated um a partial um identification of that because you didn't meet the threshold for both of the categories only one and so um your number did go up um uh but um it didn't go up as much as it could have if we didn't do that sort of a sliding partial credit um and i'm just curious because i hope that yeah that does that answer your question that helps um i'm just kind of curious um in terms of like the total numbers because i think the intent was that um many members of the public who had contacted me as ambag rep were concerned with the fact that we were getting less allocation towards very low and low and more allocation towards moderate and above moderate but what we have is kind of overall an increase in the total amount of um housing and so and then you also mentioned that you know there's a potential that it's between you know kind of this 28 and 3600 level and so i'm just kind of curious as to what um controls that because i think a big concern is that you know within the city limits were pretty built out and you know with sv35 kind of saying if you don't meet the development requirements that then allows that law to kick in and really kind of eliminates local control over development so the more units that are under the rena goals the less you know more likely sv35 is going to kick in and so i'm just kind of curious you know around what drove those overall numbers up when i think the concerns that we were going to lose less prioritization towards the very low and low um especially since we've done really well with moderate and above moderate production and we've met i think all except with the exception of our very low we've been able to meet our rena goals and this proposal 3400 would really kind of limit our ability to you know be good housing producers and meet our rena goals yeah to your comment about the change in the income categories um the feedback we got from both the board and the public and hdb was to add um you know the asph of the category um as an allocation category but we also got feedback from hdb that you know if you do add that as a priority category you really should reduce the shifting of the the above moderate to very low and to moderate to low and so that shift previously in the november 10th that income category shift for those rcaa areas were was 50 percent so half of the units would be shifting if you fell into that area for both categories um city of fancras would only be partial the feedback we got from hdb was if you do add it as an allocation unit allocation then you should probably reduce the income shift and so that's where um your overall number in that proposal that was presented yesterday did go up but the number of units in the very low and low were reduced and you're above moderate um you have more of a percentage in the both moderate to moderate and so that's sort of um the trade off that you know those two options present um but that was that particular change was based on direction given to us from hdb staff heather i just want to be respectful i don't know if you can answer this question very quickly but um do you have this would be my just my one question um some way other ones have been asked um do you have any uh lens into what the review process will be like with hcd is there any kind of guidance that they've produced or do you have any any sense and then is it at a staff level or is there a commission associated with hcd that does this i'm just not clear exactly there um no there are no guidelines set up um for a six cycle review this is new but um we are probably in the second half um so they've indicated certain metrics that they look at and those are metrics that we've shared with the planning directors and board um so uh yeah it's it's by hcd staff it's not a commission level there are no set guidelines or anything that's produced for this and so um it's a 60 day review and so we um it's a lot of data sharing so assuming the board does take action you know we'll need to prepare the submittal for hcd um i've heard from other regions and hcd there's there's some back and forth and asking for additional data um but um we've been coordinating with them for the better part of much of this year so far in trying to gauge uh this process and obviously you know i work well if there's guidelines with the other planning work we do has guidelines associated with it and so this does not necessarily have those guidelines and so um it's it's a little uncertain because the board technically could approve something and you know when we make it push back from hcd that says no um we want to see some additional modifications and so um that's why we were very strategic and starting with what they had approved for other regions is a starting point um because we we knew that if they had approved other uh methodology for other regions you know we would be on a better footing than starting from scratch and do you know if there i mean let's say that they kick something back and i mean i don't envy your position you're sitting up yeah you're doing work for a button for 16 different jurisdictions and you're and then you got your own board um is there some kind of process that you know or is it just back and forth they send you a comment you respond you know is it just or or is it going to be like um you know they look at everything they give you their decision uh or is it sort of an iterative back and forth where you're going to have to be coming back to jurisdictions it's just like it just seems like it's going to be really complicated to figure out how to react to this it has been yeah it has been complicated and so far and i expected to continue to be complicated um there is uh they have 60 days to the uh review of the draft methodology um what we've seen is they provide a like concurrence letter or documentation back to each region saying yes it meets this blah blah then the region would then approve that as final methodology and issue the draft rena plan if that doesn't happen within 60 within 60 days if they say no here's your flaws um i assume there would be some conversations before that official letter came out um but if we couldn't resolve that they would issue that letter we would go back to our board and the planning directors for trying to address whatever concerns they identified we would then submit another draft methodology and then they have 90 days for review so we don't really want to be in that situation because the further we go with the rena development process the methodology the less time that you jurisdiction knows the rena numbers um i'm hoping we don't get there i'm hoping that the you know we consulted with them along the way they um um uh i i can tell you that you know if we went back to the option that was considered um and discussed that our november 10th board meeting based on the feedback we got i don't think that's really a viable option to go back to that methodology option because we heard feedback on how to approve it and what they wanted to see and so we kind of moved on from that um so you know we're hoping that the board takes action next week we bring back uh the other thing is once the draft rena plan is released each jurisdiction is able to appeal the rena allocation and hcd is also able to appeal jurisdiction's allocation that's a change too so i mean it's just gotten really complicated so sounds like it's a good way to not build any ironically wow okay um yeah this this sounds very cumbersome and and hard really for local jurisdictions to just try to you know to forecast so wow um well that's that that was my question just trying to get a lens into what what this may be like um uh is there any other uh council members with questions for heather this evening seeing any hands up okay well heather i think we got you out just in time so thank you very much for coming to me yeah i would encourage anyone who's further interested or want to stay more engaged and even get any more any more details in a presentation to attend our board meeting next next wednesday December 8th at 6 and i want to thank you all for your time and feel free to email me or contact me with any additional questions you may have okay thanks so much great thank you and matt i think we bring this back to you is that correct for additional information uh our senior planner catherine donovan has a brief presentation as well from staff um would you like to hear that now sure okay great she's gonna talk about our uh our current rena status with this fifth cycle and next steps going forward with the housing element coming up and then i just want to make sure council member brown's question it's you know gets addressed by either of you guys would be great thank you okay i'm going to try and share my screen now you can see it catherine it's uh it's on slide view it's not on uh full view there you go how's that that is in notes view right now oh we've got three screens going so you're more uh you're more talented than i well i get three screens and none of them are doing it right okay settings oh there you go you're good to go i don't know what i did but it worked so good evening mayor and council members i'm catherine donovan senior planner with the advanced planning division and as matt said i'm here to give you a brief overview of the city's process or progress in meeting its fifth cycle reading rena and what we're anticipating for the sixth cycle and the processing um for updating the housing element um this slide is extremely dense so let me just guide you through the really important numbers if you look at the first green column this is our fifth our current cycle that's our rena allocation and at the bottom the total allocation is 747 units the second green column on the far end is what we have remaining to to uh meet our targets and as you can see we have 123 very low units that's all we have left that we need to meet the rest we've um actually exceeded and these numbers are um up to 2020 they do not include uh this year i did a quick and dirty um review of our housing this year and um we have no large projects that we'll be bringing in any very low income unit so there's a couple of small projects so we might get you know a handful but it wouldn't make any significant change um and so this brings us to the sp35 determination and the way this process works is that we submit our annual housing element progress reports to hcd um and at two points during the cycle at the midpoint and at the end of the cycle they review our our totals to date and they um compare them to our rena numbers and they see if we have met the proportionate amount so at the midpoint they see if we've met 50 percent of the targets for each category and at the end of course they see if we met everything um and if we don't meet our above moderate um then sp35 is triggered for projects for any project that meets the city's inclusionary requirement um we have met our above moderate so that does not apply to us but if the if we don't meet our proportionate share of both the low and the very low by mid-cycle then sp35 is triggered for any project that has um 50 percent of lower income units and lower income means low and and below um so any project coming in that has 50 percent lower income units uh is under the sp35 process this is a second very dense slide um and this shows the projects that are pending um that that have potentially have very low income units in them and i only put in the larger projects because small numbers aren't going to help us at this point and and we usually don't know about the small ones as much as we know about the larger ones so as we as you can see we have a number of projects in the pipeline that could bring us those 123 units that we need um the question is whether these will actually come to fruition before the end of our fifth cycle um and basically i just wanted to show you this slide to show that there's definitely the potential that we could we could do that um i make no prediction on the timing because these types of projects can take a long time particularly if they're using a variety of different funding sources which is common with affordable housing projects so um we're we're cautiously optimistic so going into our sixth cycle as as you learned from that discussion with heather the numbers have increased significantly um and our most the most recent draft that we saw which we've already discussed was that um the numbers went from uh 2,800 or 2,900 to 3,400 and that's that's a lot of units particularly when you when you keep in mind that our current unit our current unit the total is 747 units and then the embag board is meeting in december and could potentially approve the methodology and you heard all that from from heather so our current housing element runs through the end of 2023 um and we're planning to release an rfp early next year um to start on our sixth cycle housing element and we need to get we need to get going on this even if we don't have our arena numbers we know they're going to be big numbers we know we're going to have to do a lot of analysis of our properties and um it's it's going to take a lot of time so that sooner we can get started the better we're not going to wait till we get the arena we're going to move ahead with this and then the housing element itself um is being funded by our local early action planning grant the lip grant and it will be due to the state to the state in december of 2023 there are some recent um legislative changes that have added uh some sort of time-consuming processes to the housing element so um there's both more that has to be in the housing element and we have additional public review time frames that are mean that we have to get it out earlier so so we're getting prepped for this so in the housing element um we must be able to demonstrate that we have sufficient property that is zoned to provide the housing in our arena allocation um in our fifth cycle we were able to meet that that um allocation through our existing general plan land use and we didn't have to make any land use changes um but meeting this new cycle allocation is going to be challenging and it may require um general plan and zoning changes um i i was in a webinar today but put on by ambag or i'm sorry by abag and they are one year ahead of our our schedule um and they were saying that it is now typical to do your zoning updates ahead of your housing element because the changes in state law have given such a short time to to do those zoning changes and if you don't do them it's basically um as if ab as ab35 is kicking in so so that's going to be really important as we move forward on that um the other thing that has changed with state law is that um additional housing can be built without changing zoning particularly in our low income sorry our low density housing in our single family housing zoning so um the passage of a lot of the um adu ordinance changes and the passage of um sp9 are going to increase the number of units that we can uh claim but without crunching the numbers we won't know i i doubt very much if that is going to be enough on its own but it's a help and that is my presentation for tonight and i'm happy to answer any questions and if we wanted to start with um council member brown for thank you that would be great keeping me in the queue um yeah so i mean i think your last statement sort of touched on the one of the questions that i had about our ability to use since we don't know what developers are going to request in their density bonus projects um we can't really necessarily count on those units but i'm i'm just trying to to figure out um if as the city uh sees it you're including the possibility of maximum density where it's allowable um under the density bonus as kind of part of the analysis of whether or not we have we are um our general plan could accommodate that kind of these kinds of numbers i think we could we could propose that we would have to have a very strong and convincing argument um on the last housing element we went back and forth with hcd on our numbers a lot and i was very conservative in how i calculated how many units we could provide um and there was definitely pushback even even with you know i had to explain every little thing that i was doing and so i think actually if we don't meet our low income our very low income number so that we are still subject to the sp35 that actually might be a stronger argument the problem is of course we won't know until after the housing element is due so um you know it's things like that if we could if we could tell that we were not going to be able to meet that and we just said you know we're going to be subject to sp35 we know that they're going to do this that and the other thing um then and we know that we're going to have density bonus uh applications and so therefore um that might be convincing um they're they're a hard sale you know they're they're not easy they're they're not making it easy on us they want to see that housing and they're forceful about it yeah i wouldn't anticipate high council members leave out there i i wouldn't anticipate the that hcd counts um uh capacity associated with the density bonus towards certifying our housing element um that said when um the bonus projects come through those units do count towards our current cycle and meeting those needs but for for certifying that we've for a certified housing element showing that we've got that capacity i wouldn't bank on hcd allowing that such a so for planning no but reality yes if that's if the reality works okay got it and then one other just while since i have the floor and ask my other question um where and i always wonder this and i never remember to ask where does ucsc fit into the picture for our um rena allocations and what we count for meeting our commitments um they sort of don't um you know that the dormitory style housing does not count in the unit count and um so some housing provided by the university that's provided in apartment style housing can count towards the rena and if i mean they've got their long range development plan yeah i it would be i i would not count on them i would not count on that housing because there's just too many variables i'm gonna add to that too and just say that staff and faculty housing can count towards rena as well uh like like kathryn said there's only certain styles of student housing that can count and currently hcd doesn't count dorm style housing as one of those right the independent kitchens i think that's one of the factors that could um make it as as kathryn was saying the apartment style so depending there there may be some opportunities to count some of those but in large part the dorm the dorms will not and so the majority right and i don't know you know for the city it's based on the zoning for the university and we'd have to check with hcd it might be that they would allow us to count on their um long range development plan but i'm not sure of that thank you thank you councilmember um just going to do a time check um we still have another item tonight so it i've got shabra justin and then martin thank you mayor thank you kathryn for the presentation you answered one of my questions um my other one is around um so if we if we don't meet the mid cycle and then the end of our cycle with the rena goals um clearly sp35 and such policies kick in what are what are some other ramifications or impacts that we would experience like would it preclude us from certain grants to the state like what are some of the other things that we're looking at yes well not if we don't have our housing element approved then that interferes with the the grants if they're not meeting the um the targets does not interfere with the grants um the biggest thing i mean i almost hate to say anything because it's it's been a moving target these last few years with the housing legislation but um the biggest thing is that is the sp35 and then um getting getting the housing element itself approved and if needed getting any um properties that we need rezoned in order to meet the amount of available property um we have to do that within a year and if we don't have it done within a year and that's a year of of our due date so a year of the the due date is is in december of 2023 so if we haven't resumed them by december of 2024 then it's basically as if um sp35 was kicking in everything is is by right and ministerial all of our housing approvals and that lasts for the entire cycle so that's not a position we want to be in i see but but not meeting the rena goals doesn't affect grant eligibility it's the housing element that would affect eligibility right and how about anything around um transportation grants is that also impacted no and actually the other thing that is and uh does have an impact is whether we do our progress reports um so if we don't turn on our annual progress reports then we're not eligible for a lot of the grant funding but we're we're always good about that so thank you i will add to the the grant discussion uh while it doesn't currently impact our our grant funding uh hcd recently rolled out a pro housing designation which cities can apply for so they they have a list of a number of a number of ways to to meet this designation and one of them is is a is providing more rena and in our housing element or you know more units in our housing element than the than the rena uh the rena number uh so there is a way to get points through rena for for that pro housing designation and we are starting to see state grant funding uh be weighted on uh whether cities have pro housing designations or not uh both both in transportation and public works grants and in planning grants so i i think that's something uh the city could look into in the future uh to be more competitive in future grant funding thank you so much thank you council member council member walkins i'll go to next thank you yeah thank you for the presentation i think most of my questions have been answered the only question i had was in regards to the adu's because i know we were trying to really highlight you know by design affordability where where do they fall in or in terms of the designations uh they've kind of been all over the place because we've done those those surveys we've done we did some informal surveys which i wait i um got hcd said it was okay to do that and then we've also done a formal survey two and a half years ago and we just did one again this year um and so when when the surveys have shown that the uh prices for adu's are lower we've been able to claim the adu's on either our um low or moderate income but there was a couple of periods where we couldn't even do that and i haven't tallied all of the responses we've gotten yet from our current survey but they're not looking i'm shocked at how much people are charging okay okay yeah okay that's helpful to know i appreciate that you know the intention was sort of by design and then just sort of looking at the agenda report i mean it's kind of like dumbfounding how many jurisdictions don't meet anything close to their rena goals and um just yeah i really want to acknowledge and thank you all for your work and how far we've come as jurisdiction you know even though we didn't quite need it i mean we're much further ahead than a lot of jurisdictions in our state so anyways i have to say that that big number that's coming up is really scary that is really scary yeah i agree thank you and council member comings thank you for the for the presentation i um just one question i'm kind of a little sad that our ambag um staff person's gone but i'm just wondering um is you know in terms of hcd and just like the tracking of rena and maybe the city's role in tracking our rena numbers is there any requirement that it's a net gain of housing because i would imagine that you know or in in order to make space for more housing there is a likelihood that you're gonna tear down some housing and you know in terms of affordable by design in the sense that like if it's been here for a long period of time the higher it's a higher likelihood that older housing is going to be cheaper housing right and so i'm just wondering if we're tracking that at all in terms of you know we're losing in terms of older housing and how that influences our rena numbers um we do track the housing that's being demolished and it is subtracted from our totals there's unless you know so housing that's that's cheaper simply because it's older is it's just counted as as above moderate unless it has some um unless there's a some kind of a deed restriction or an agreement for for a lower income and and we have replacement requirements for so if if affordable housing is demolished the housing that replaces it has to replace that affordable housing so we don't we don't lose it as long as it's officially designated as long as there's a there's a agreement for it but if it's but if it's just old and cheaper because it's old we don't get any in in addition to if being indeed restricted the state's replacement requirements for affordable housing also apply to if a tenant was in those was in that unit also was lower income right so so that person may be you know living in an older unit as well that would that would still apply to the replacement unit requirement thanks man i forgot that part yeah just a follow-up to that i'm just wondering is there anything the city could do in terms because you know i mean if there's an older unit that's you know being rented for lower and like let's say that the tenant isn't you know section of housing voucher technically low income i mean i'm just wondering if there's a way because i guess the reason why i ask is it's going to be really i mean we struggled to meet and we didn't quite meet you know producing the amount in this rena cycle and there's a potential that we're going to have you know close to four times as many units and that's going to be really difficult to achieve especially given our kind of geographic structure and being pretty built out already as it is so you know and this isn't a question that needs to be answered right now and maybe we can like follow up with our legal counsel but i think that you know it's something worth considering if there's ways that we can you know officially designate certain older housing um and being able to incorporate the new housing that's built to replace that you know within our rena goals so that we don't you know count something that's actually being rented out affordable as you know market or you know moderate or above moderate um and then the one other question that came up so that that's more of a comment than a question i would say um and then um the one question i do have though is that you know we still do have single family homes being uh produced and i'm just wondering you know in terms of new single family homes that are being built does that kind of factor into our arena numbers as well or how are those it does but you know surprisingly uh so the quick and dirty look i took at this year's housing to date we had um there were about 300 units that that permits were issued 200 of them were for that the um pacific front laurel project another approximately 80 were 80 us and then there were a couple of multifamily projects that were maybe another 10 or 15 units and there were about 10 single family homes so this year particularly we've always been you know 80 years have been a steady stream for us but this year they really kicked up and i think that was kind of pandemic driven people were home they were saying we want some more space um yeah and we do have you know that pipeline that pipeline slide that i did we had there there's over a thousand units in that um so there's there's a and we have two more years to go in this cycle um so i my prediction would be that we'll get close to 1200 housing units built in this in the fifth cycle the problem is the low income that we need right and i guess the last question i have is um is there any way we could use section eight and maybe this is for you anybody kind of in planning but i'm just wondering you know we have the provision of certain units going specifically to section eight programs if that's a way for us to get to you know providing units for low income people because we just you know building those units alone it's like 200 to 300 thousand dollars you know just to get government subsidies for low income units and without the government you know our state or federal government kind of giving us that money you know section eight is one way we can actually take people who are in those categories and put them in housing but i don't know if that actually suffices or is sufficient for us to meet our radicals so i'm wondering if maybe you could speak to that at all um there's there's two different ways that section one is the individual section eight vouchers and there's a real shortage of those so i wouldn't even i i've heard that there's a something like a 10-year waiting list in the county but there's another process that is that this section eight projects and i don't know much about them someone in our housing department could tell you more but that is another funding source that is sometimes used in our affordable housing projects and that's that's about the extent of my knowledge i know that it exists i know that we have that some of our our projects have used them but i don't know how difficult it is i don't know what the how easy it is to to get one this is bonnie bonnie looks come with economic development a number of the projects in the pipeline on the slide that kathryn showed do include project-based vouchers as part of the funding mechanism and you can count those as long as they're project-based vouchers or for your renegals thanks bonnie and councilmember if i we still need to go to public comment so i'm wondering if there's a way maybe we can yeah if you can follow up with staff individually maybe on some of those questions that'd be great done so but thank you um i will go ahead and take this out to see if we have members of the community that would like to comment on this item and then i can bring we can bring it back to council for further deliberation so if you are here to speak on this tonight um i do see a couple of hands up already so that's great um but if you are interested in uh speaking to item number two the regional housing needs allocation update now is the time to press star nine on your phone to raise your hand when it is your time to speak you will hear an announcement that you've been unmuted and then we'll set the timer for two minutes so if i don't see your name on your um listed as you raise your hand i'll call off the last four digits of your phone number first up i've had i have andy shifrin can you hear me yes we can okay because i'm not calling and i'm just i just zoomed in so i'm glad thank you um my name's andy shifrin i'm on the planning commission um this matter the ring of numbers has not come to the planning commission yet but i have had i've had a chance to review the material presented to the council i only have two issues that i want to talk about first is the total number of allocated units to the city in the revised dam bag memo um there's been a lot of discussion already about that um i'm still unconvinced the it's you change a couple of the assumptions and all of a sudden the numbers change and i do think that it's important for the city to push back on the um on the on the increase in total units the um original number of units that the city got was about eight percent of the total which is about what the city's population is going to the 3400 it gets up to 10 percent of the population it would be equal to about 10 percent of the units um i'm always a little suspicious of how we have a lot of variables just making a few tweaks here in there and all of a sudden everything changes um as you know already with the 2870 units compared to the current housing element it's a very very significant increase that has been as you've been talking about as the staff's been talking about so i hope that the council and its representatives will really put a push on in bag to reduce that number to back to where it was whether you'll succeed or not i don't know the processes of conflicts um you know it's my but it leads me to my second point which is that the overall rena process is essentially an exercise in shaming it in this round it is creating a demand that is unmeasurable and i think that um in a way it's done publicly i mean consciously to try to force the city to do force the the amount of development some of the indications about why it's unreasonable one is that in the past year sorry i just if you could wrap up i'm trying to trying to make sure everybody's got time tonight to speak thank you okay let me just there is a population forecast and the total allocation is just too much there's never going to be the subsidy to provide the unit the very low income units it's going to be a you know hundreds of millions of dollars and all this is just an exercise in getting this setting the city up for failure so i think it's important to recognize that thank you thank you okay i'll go to phone number ending in 2174 a star six to unmute yourself phone number ending in 2174 if you could unmute yourself please right pressing star six yes we can okay good for a while you couldn't thank you jillian greensight um well this is quite shocking and it feels very unreasonable and it seems very lacking in skill on the part of ambag i'm new to relatively new to this i don't know if um also looked at is the caring capacity of our schools our hospitals our police our fire just to take housing numbers without a context seems very unwise i hope you will push back i'm sorry that um miss adamson left i have a question um and this is perhaps one of the assumptions that mr shiffram was mentioning uh if i heard it correctly the overcrowded category was three people with two bedrooms now to me that's absurd i know families come in groups in different configurations but two parents and a child that's two bedrooms is not um overcrowded so six people with two bedrooms now we're talking so i think some of these categories should be really examined and peeled back and confronted i don't know how the wealthy category was judged we have a lot of people i'd be one of them who is not well off but it's in a house that the value is you know ridiculously high has nothing to do with my income level and there's a lot of people like that in santa cruz will be gone soon anyone who buys the house recently is by definition well off so those categories definitely need to be looked at and if it was all but when you bring in market rate housing or even moderate rate that creates the need for more low-income service workers that's been well-documented un reasonable thank you thank you next we have phone number ending in four nine six five hi hi there we can hear you hi um yes my name is kandace brown and uh i um i did attend to one of the end make meetings and there was a lot of dialogue sorry hot dog is playing in the background um there was a lot of dialogue about the methodology and there's been a lot of new factors and parameters put in this that which is brought to bear this very large number compared to last time you can't even really almost compare the methodologies so you really need to dig into the methodology to see as the previous callers alluded to um to see if it's reasonable when governor Newsom talked about 3.5 million housing units it's a very flawed analysis and yet it's not been widely publicized because it was offered by the governor mckinsey study said 3.5 million us as c said 2.8 ucd said 1.8 and lao said a million so i would be curious to know even the baseline to what was the baseline number from which they then spread this out to the different jurisdictions because some of these studies and original premises were found to be very flawed also i'm very curious about the fact that we're 30 students and there's no analysis that takes into account our demographics there because many people or students don't necessarily need a kitchen they can live in a dorm like setting and it would be far more affordable um we also have a very large tourist population with hotels i would be curious to know how that plays into it and whether somehow some of those housing units could be considered housing units um i know there's some hotels that do have kitchens and and students in fact are living in them so i think there's areas where there's a lot of housing being offered but it's not sort of based on the analysis by ambag and i hope that that would be brought to bear in consideration and also it's very disconcerting to consider that ucd may not be considered almost at all the 45 population increase so we have huge impacts right now in our city and you know how we can accommodate that is a great concern transportation water and infrastructure in particular thanks bye bye thank you next i have kyle kelly hey all thank you so much uh mayor vice mayor council members this is kyle kelly um sorry i just want to point out for this process the the rena process and the allocation itself is is regional so any amount that that gets contested uh we'll go to a different uh jurisdictions so you kind of have depending on how you view it it can be mutually assured destruction um i think it's great for us to get more housing we shouldn't be demanding that watson bill and selenus build the housing and require that people commute in and i think it's worth noting from the american community survey um from just a few years ago that nearly 20 000 people commute from watson bill to santa cruise to work um we're not even building 20 000 units um and i personally think we should make room for the people that do work in santa cruise um so that's an important thing to think about beyond just the overcrowded conditions and i see this is somebody that has a family of five we lived in a two-bedroom apartment um it meant that some of us actually had to live in the living room uh because that was that was one of what was available we couldn't necessarily find family-sized apartments so you know as somebody that has faced these issues and knows how it ends up affecting a lot of people kind of across the region i i want everybody to think about like who it affects and and that you know we are actually affecting a lot of other areas within our region um and i think you'll find that you know if if we go through the appeals process like like folks did with with abag um you know basically everybody gets to vote on it within within ambag um to to find out if you know if if one city's jurisdiction can be appealed so that's that's probably what what is ahead of you here but i do want you to think about you know are we going to do our part within the region and what is it going to look like to the other jurisdictions um thank you thank you next i have elizabeth conlan good evening everyone this is elizabeth um i just want to challenge the notion that was brought up that we are built out um for my personal experience i can share that i live in an apartment complex with eight one bedrooms this is next to a one-story single family house so if we allow more small apartment buildings like mine we could easily house 10 people like the number of people live in my apartment complex instead of the four people who live next door i also think that while the rena floors may be kind of scary i think it's a really good opportunity to make progress on our climate goals um i'm really shocked reading housing forums where people are desperately searching for housing in the region and there are folks who work here who study here who are commuting from places like selenus and we have a real opportunity to take those cars off the road um as well as the equity issues that kyle brought up so um yeah appreciate your time thank you thank you is there anyone else in the audience tonight that would like to speak to the council on this item now would be the time to raise your hand uh you can do that by pressing star nine on the phone and i will look for your hand to go up this will be the last call on this item okay okay i'll bring it back to the council on this item and tonight um the recommendation is that the regional housing needs allocation report is uh accepted and it sounds like there's will be more work to do as we move ahead um but this is meant to be sort of a you know an update report i'd look for a motion from council council member comings i'm happy to um accept the report i will just i just want to make a few comments though which is you know i share with the public that you know i'm very concerned with the fact that that we struggled to meet our rena goals to get to 744 units across all those categories and now to get to 3400 units it's going to be really challenging and so i agree that um you know we need to push back against that um because it it seems like it's going to be not only difficult to reach but then it's going to take a lot of our local control away um it'd be good for us to track the affordability by design units because a staff kind of implied and what we heard was that although some are built by to be affordable by design um they're actually not guaranteed to be affordable and it sounds like many of them are not actually you know when they're rented out they're not being rented out at affordable rates so that's something that i think that we need to track moving forward um the city should also consider um ways to you know make sure that we're meeting our affordability goals i think we discussed that around you know if we're tearing down units that are being rented affordable if there's ways to put provisions in place to kind of track that and also considering include increasing our inclusionary percentage by using section 8 provisions to help us address the low and very low housing income needs while also providing developers with market rate rents and um i've spoken to a few developers who expressed that that's something they might be interested in considering and then lastly you know and this goes to the point that was just made by i think the last two collars you know um we need to produce and it would be great if we could produce more of this affordable housing but i think the biggest constraint is how are we going to fund that and given that the state has a 31 billion dollar surplus the city should consider writing a letter to the state to demand that the state provides funding for cities to help them meet these very low and low goals um you know cities shouldn't be penalized by the fact that we're trying to meet these goals um but we don't have any funding to meet them and um you know the most difficult housing to create is very low and low income housing so um i think that moving forward you know saying to the state that while we recognize the need to produce housing you know with very low and low being the most difficult to create if they're going to put these constraints on us they should also provide us with resources to meet these goals so those are the comments i just wanted to share um but i'm happy to move the um to accept the report from ambag and um and i'm happy to also take comments um i've been taking a lot of notes throughout the meeting and we'll be sharing them as the ambag representative when moving forward um to the next ambag meeting i'll go ahead and second that oh go ahead vice mayor do you have a second for that okay i was going to second that motion to accept the report okay great um i do i just so so that maybe the public just is aware i know that we've had some pretty good success recently um with some of the affordable housing um competitive uh competitive brands in the state so um you know hopefully we can keep that up um i know that we did get pacific stations south fully funded um including about 22.9 uh million dollars worth of funding and hopefully we'll we'll hopefully see some additional support so i just want to recognize our staff that what is available we are aggressively going after and they are are reaching a lot of great success so um just so the public knows that our staff is meeting with a lot of really good success with some of the states funding that is available um to getting to those uh very low income units so well um just want to thank the planning staff kathryn and matt and uh for your time tonight and we really appreciate the thorough report and the discussion and um we'll move on to our next item which oh i'm sorry yes roll call though please can i just confirm did you go with vice mayor brooder on the second i did yeah i'm going to have her be the second yes okay councilmember wadkins i calentary johnson hi brown hi coming councilmember golder is left um vice mayor britter that motion passes six four and uh with councilmember golder being absent okay we'll move on to our next agenda item which is i agenda item number three objective development standards for multifamily housing community review draft study session for members of the public who are streaming this meeting if this is an item you want to comment on now is the time to call in using the instructions on your screen okay um we will have a brief presentation by staff on this and then uh council will ask whatever questions of staff i'll take it out to public comment and then we'll come back and deliberate so i'll turn this over to sarah noisy and um matt van law great good evening councilmembers mayor um my name's sarah noisy i am a senior planner in the advanced planning division and i am joined this evening by um our consultant team that has been working with us on this project to develop objective design standards for multifamily housing um so i'm just going to share my screen and we can get started can everyone see that yes we can sarah great whoops let's do it over there okay okay so my name's sarah i'm being going to be joined tonight by meredith ruff and pristen hall who um have been working with us on this um on this project for the past year we're going to go over some project background we're going to walk you through our community engagement that we've done on this project you know mayor you said we would have a brief staff presentation i'm going to do my best but there is we have a lot of stuff to cover it's been a big project and we have a lot to talk about and i'm just i'm actually really excited to tell you about all the work that we've been doing yeah you're right sarah i i did look at everything and you're right i i should say that we have a very thorough uh staff report and president yeah i we're gonna try we're gonna try and keep it so you know between 30 and 45 minutes but um it's a lot we're gonna keep moving that's great so um after we go over the community engagement that we've done so far we're gonna the consultants are going to talk through some of the key terms that are you know you need to be able to use the names for these various different features of zoning um to be able to understand the standards that we've written and then they're going to talk through some of the development standards that we've um created as in response to the preferences the requirements of the state law and the preferences of the community then i'm going to talk about the mixed-use zone districts that we'll need to create um we'll have a section about the amendment to the general plan that we're considering and and some changes to the way we process permits and some other policy issues that have come up through the course of this project we'll talk about how we're working on refining the standards at this point in the process and then we'll go through some next steps so first project background um you may recall that in 2012 the city adopted the 2030 general plan um our zoning ordinance does not fully implement that general plan for sites that are designated for mixed use so at the end of 2019 our staff pursued a grant from the sp2 grant funding source to create some objective design standards to um provide standards for multifamily housing we were doing this in response to a change in state law which was the passage of the housing crisis act of 2019 which says that we must use objective standards to review multifamily housing development proposals when they're submitted um the standards have to allow for the planned capacity to be fully realized on um parcels throughout the city and it contains language that the the um cities shall not reduce the intensity of land use and then reductions of intensity include that means reductions to height density floor area ratio which is a site standard lot coverage increases and set increases in open space or minimum parcel size anything that would lessen the intensity of housing and it takes us back to um where things were as of january 1 2018 so we're working with the general plan that we have in place at this point as everyone here i i imagine is is well aware sp35 also is a factor here which allows us to only use objective design standards so when we're subject to when we're reviewing an sp35 development proposal we're only allowed to use our objective development standards so under the housing crisis act of 2019 we can use subjective zoning standards we just can't use them to reduce the intensity of the development but we can still kind of apply some of these standards that are a little bit more subjective as long as they as long as we maintain the development capacity of the property um and then on top of all of these as as has come up earlier this evening the density bonus law does still apply i mean that is still part of the reality we are going to write some objective zoning standards and in the case of density bonus projects the way they hit the ground is going to look could look a little different so an objective standard is something that can be um known ahead of time and measured relative to an exterior standard so um typically they're illustrated graphically so i have an example here that's um an objective standard that comes from our um downtown plan that's showing you know a minimum 40 of the frontage or um not to exceed 50 feet and then there has to be a break in the building facade and um you know the top floor can't be more than 60 of the floor below it and all of those just kind of push on the building envelope that that's allowed to be built and it's done in a really objective measurable way so it's easy for developers to understand if they're meeting the standard it's easy for staff and decision makers to review if the standards are being met and in theory the public can then also understand what could be built on a parcel so so far on community engagement we um started sort of kicked off this process doing a bunch of analysis and you know sort of analyzing our existing site standards in the zoning and the general plan and as part of that what fed into that analysis was talking with a group of developers about you know how they've been experiencing working with our zoning standards and general plan then in uh spring of last year we had um a webinar called designing Santa Cruz for all that really gave us this wonderful opportunity to talk with the community about a lot of the history of housing policy why we might need objective standards what the goals are for the state with all of the housing policy that's coming down and a lot of the history of like what has given us the land use patterns that we are living in today um you know sort of what's the history behind that I'm going to walk through a couple of those slides in a minute then we spent um the summer in June and July doing um a survey to define this community character and then we held um some focus groups later in the summer to sort of fill in some of the gaps that we had in the survey responses that we had gotten so when we were when we did our designing Santa Cruz for all presentation um we wanted to provide the community with some historic context for our current housing policies and essentially what we what we wanted to get into was that zoning was really a tool for racial and economic segregation when it was originally created and we had um guest speakers that came to our that attended this webinar and presented with us Gretchen Regan Hart of the California Rural Legal Aid and Diana Alfaro of Midpen Housing came to talk about you know what's the history of housing and what's been the ramifications of that both on economic stratification as well as racial racial segregation and concentration which is something that you know just came up in the Rena discussion um and then we also sort of connected that to to the recent bills we've been having from the state in regards to housing so you know we also kind of talked about what's you know the full spectrum of housing policy involves protection of existing of tenants so that's things like eviction moratoriums um fair housing law and housing vouchers those apply to people and protect people in housing there's preservation which is the issue that um uh council member Cummings was just getting about at about like how do we keep sort of existing lower like lower cost market rate housing on the market when you know there's all this incentive for redevelopment so things like in affordability restrictions inclusionary policies unit replacement unit legalization kind of helps keep housing on the market and preserve some of that existing stock and then production is also a component of good housing policy and that's things like zoning and permit streamlining and density bonus and the Rena process and this project is related to production and zoning the idea with um creating objective standards and limiting our jurisdictions to objective using objective standards review development um is that this will streamline the process and and increase housing production and so um we just have some facts here about the estimated um you know number of housing units that might be needed statewide and um you know there there are various estimates of that number and um however you calculate them California ranks 49th in the nation in terms of housing units per capita and there is some connection between the number of units that are available and the how easy it is for any individual to find housing that they can afford so further on in this in this presentation when we had our guest speakers come to talk they talked about um you know racial due restrictions this these exist on housing units all over Santa Cruz County this one comes specifically from Richmond mansion in capitol uh um and zoning can start to address can start to address racism it was created with sort of some racist intentions to segregate people based on income which then income was inherently tied to race and um it's left us with these patterns so the map that you see here um on the right is one dot per percent broken down by racial category so there are blue dots that show where white people live there are um green dots that show where our african-american black population lives and then there are um orange dots for people who identify as asian and um orange or i'm sorry red dots for folks who identify as asian and orange dots for folks who identify as um hispanic or latino and um you can kind of see how those dots especially those latino dots are really concentrated in a few neighborhoods and then um the blows blue dots are representing the Caucasian population are really spread out throughout our single family homes um throughout the city so um essentially by adjusting our zoning code we can reduce discretion and reduce opportunities for discrimination if we can produce more multifamily housing units jurisdictions can create more opportunities for a wider range of income levels to live in those high opportunity areas and um you know all of this is intended to make our housing process more fair and to create a more level playing field ideally this also makes it easier for affordable housing developers who are going to create those you know deed restricted income qualified units that are going to stay permanently affordable gives them a more even playing field by creating some more certainty because those affordable housing developers just have a harder time dealing with uncertainty in a process they don't have as much um capital or capacity to sort of weather the that appeals and you know long processes and stuff um let's skip that one for now so the state has been working on legislating housing equity theoretically state passes a lot it gets implemented through a city program and that leads to an increase in housing supply i'm sorry my dog is knocking on the door apologies and and the state is really getting involved in enforcing these state laws so um you know you may have heard by now that um the the budget is really that the governor passed is really focused on holding cities accountable for providing their fair share of housing as it says right there at the top and then um just i think maybe a week or two ago um our attorney general tweeted out the creation of this housing strike force that is really focused in the ag's office on um ensuring that state cities and jurisdictions cities and counties are following the law and you know processing applications in the manner that they expect them to be processed so um as i mentioned earlier we like one of the primary components for defining community character um that we used was a survey we got over 800 responses a total of 40 of those were in spanish um we got the feedback that we received really showed a desire for active ground floor uses and spaces we had kind of mixed feedback on exactly what um uses we wanted to see on the ground floor because there was both a lot of support in this in the survey and in focus groups on creating ground floor commercial areas that can serve neighborhoods but then also um fair amount of support for allowing residential only buildings to be built in commercial zones um folks wanted to see wider sidewalks better pedestrian environments and then outdoor amenities open space landscaping there was also demonstrated some some support for making rental housing more feasible which usually involves things that make housing a little bit cheaper to construct housing uh rental housing is typically a little bit harder to make pencil out at least in our current market um and then a preference for architectural freedom variety eclecticism i'm going to go through a couple of the um couple of the responses you have this the full set of responses i think in your packet it's on our website if um anyone wants to look look through it from the public so um we asked a question about how much retail space do you want to see and we got you know a whole host of answers most of them were that there should be somewhere you know some buildings to most buildings should have some kind of commercial activity that was about half the answers and then there was another 34 in that green category that said they wanted to see some kind of activity on the ground floor but it didn't necessarily have to be commercial activities so shops or restaurants um so that's you'll see that reflected in the standards that we wrote um what's most important for new housing to or new buildings doing on on these um i'm sorry on the primary corridors so on so kell on water street on ocean on mission street we asked a question about what's most important for buildings in those areas to include even if they do increase housing costs so like you know where are we really kind of drawing the line about like we really want won't accept anything less than this and the most commonly selected answers were architectural details and then ground floor shops and restaurants so that just kind of gets to this idea that we want to see architectural features we don't want just you know flat really contemporary looking buildings that came through pretty clearly in our focus groups as well um and we want to have activity at the ground floor especially on these like primary commercial corridors um and then this these questions both kind of relate to what type of architecture is Santa who's interested in seeing and i thought this was really striking this paragraph on the left um asks about you know do you prefer a more uniform look or a more eclectic mix and as you can see we had two-third of our answers said that they preferred a much more eclectic mix of architecture and then um on the right some of this text is a little hard to see but the um the blue bars uh indicate a selection so we have um you know various pieces here of features of a building so building materials building colors breaks in in walls variation and walls um changes in the roof shape building decoration landscaping or building entries and the blue bars show um the option that selected to um you know create some options for architects to choose from the red bars are the option to um you know leave it just completely open and not set a standard let the architects decide and then the green bars are having the city dictate a really tight standard and i think that's interesting that in all of these the green bars are the smallest um you know it sounded like our community was really interested in creating a palette of options or just leaving things open for architects to decide about and then lastly um i want to talk about heights we'll talk about this more a little bit later but um we we asked a question about you know for buildings on these major corridors again where we have a mix of market rate and affordable units what's the maximum height that you'd support in those areas we know from our analysis at the beginning of the project that we needed a minimum of four stories especially on for those sites that are on soak hell and water and brand supporty that have that higher um mixed use high density land use designation in the general plan we're gonna need more height than is currently allowed in our zoning code so we wanted to add we wanted to ask this question you know we need a minimum of four stories in those locations and you know kind of how do you feel about this and i thought this was really interesting because you know 27 percent so the largest chunk did choose four stories which is you know kind of something i'd expect i was surprised to see how many folks chose something larger than four so five stories is shown in red six stories is shown in green no maximum height is shown there in purple so that was like over 60 percent of our um respondents or right around 60 percent of our respondents chose um you know something larger than what we needed a taller height and then similarly this bar graph on the right shows you know sort of trade-offs for less expensive housing um the most frequently selected answer was increased building heights so um this tells me that there is a diversity of opinion around height in our community it's definitely a topic that i'm sure we'll continue to hear about um but i just think it's worth noting that there we do have a lot of folks in our community that are ready to accept taller buildings so after we did the focus group after we did the survey part of what we did in the survey is we collected demographic data one of our goals for this process was to really incorporate equity as a goal for the outcome and a goal for the process and so we select we um collected demographic data and then we checked to see if we were hearing from a representative cross section of the community and where we saw kind of gaps in the survey demographics we we went out and pursued a focus group with those populations to ensure that those voices got included and represented in this process so we looked at who was missing from that process and then also based on where we expect most of the new housing development to happen who was and so where is it located and then who's likely to be affected by that new housing so then we ended up so that was kind of the thought process that we went through and we ended up having holding a total of six focus groups last summer and then we also connected two interviews we met with groups of students a group of young adults so adults under 35 under 35 um uh we had a meeting with the Chicanx and Latinx community with a group of low income households a group of renters and a group of residents east of the river the themes that came out of those focus groups were pretty similar to the themes that we heard in the survey so there were strong opinions about architecture and that really a strong preference for this eclectic mix and sort of a dislike of very contemporary modern flat and unarticulated buildings really strong preference for architectural features but not necessarily anything like we want to we want you know like Santa Barbara is like everything is Spanish colonial there wasn't anything that was strongly like that just this variety and the the idea that there's detail we got feedback about um you know actually living in these new units so like creating housing that's like a wonderful home to have and place to be and that was thinking about things like security access to sunlight and having private open space access to private open space um there was some sentiment in a couple of our focus groups that came up that objected objections to building heightened shadows um are being used to constrain housing stock i was surprised to hear that in more than one of our um focus groups so i think that's worth noting very loud and clearly from all six of the groups we heard the priorities of affordability in housing livable and newer housing stock um neighborhood serving commercial uses things that people can walk to and actually want to use and live near um environmental sustainability for buildings um so everything from building material to the way the site is laid out to the type of lighting that's used to incorporating more trees and landscaping support for walking and biking for all types of users so this is wider sidewalks this is more accommodation for um for um non-automotive transportation options and then landscaping trees and access to nature were really important for our community and now i'm going to hand it off to uh Meredith and Kristen to talk through some of the key terms and some of the standards that we wrote in response to all of that great feedback thanks Sarah uh Kristen you're up to tell us our key terms i believe can everybody hear me okay yes we can hear you thanks um i feel a bit of the next slide please you know this is all um the standards themselves are quite technical and there's a number of terms that we use throughout the standards as a way to describe common elements of buildings and we wanted to just take a minute to talk through what some of these standard terms are that we use throughout the document just so that everybody can kind of be on the same page with how they work and what we're talking about so the first one is um building envelope and so a building envelope you can see in the image here is sort of a three-dimensional invisible envelope in which a new building can be built so it doesn't actually represent the development size or intensity but it does represent the kind of maximum extent that a building could take up so the maximum height or um how far it can come close to the property line but you can imagine a smaller building fits within this envelope which is guided by the next slide the far so far floor area ratio is a way that we measure development intensity or density so it's literally a ratio of the amount of development that's allowed in square feet of building divided by the amount of land so there's three examples here if you take the middle one that's the easiest it's 1.0 far on the very right hand side of the middle graphic you can see if you built um an entire lot with one story that's an far one similarly if you stack that up um with two stories that's you're only taking up half the lot you're going twice as high it's still an far one and if you were to stack that up over four stories which is in the middle here that's still an far of one but you're building a four story building on the quarter of the lot so you can kind of see how this works out if you go down to an far point five it's half the lot with one story if you go up to an far of two it's uh two stories on an entire lot so this is a way that we think about measuring density and this is indeed what the general plan uses to measure density so to put this together with building envelope on the next slide um this is a from a test fit that we did looking at a site at soquel and water and this is a building that has a 2.75 at they are and it's representative of what an actual building massing might be on this site so you can see the red dash line represents the envelope which is the maximum extent that the building can go up in height which is 45 feet in this case and you can see 2.75 far with parking and with courtyards inside of a residential building so that all the units have windows we get up to four stories almost entirely but not quite so this is just a way of kind of explaining how density works together with building envelope that the envelope is kind of a loose fit for that density to fit inside of on the next slide um the next term is a setback so the setback is the distance between the property line and the building and this is a section view so we're looking kind of vertically at the face of the building uh on the right is a kind of a larger new multifamily building and on the left is maybe a smaller single family building and you can see if these were rear yard to rear yard this would be a 10 foot setback from the rear property line on the next slide um just to complicate matters there's another thing called a stepback which sounds very similar to setback but it's it's at the upper floors you can have the building mass is it's an additional setback that's applied just to the upper floor so what happens here is a sense that the upper part of the building is sort of tapered relative to the smaller part of the building and your experience of the building is that it's got a reduced bulk um from that single family home for example on the next slide um there's two words that we use to describe the way that buildings meet streets the first is the frontage which is the total length of the building um from tip to tip and then there's building faces which are these individual walls that form a kind of a modulated appearance of the building so you can see here in different shades of orange we're showing different building faces and while in some cases we describe a maximum building frontage length or things that must apply to a building frontage we also talk about faces and how to kind of use those to break down the size of the building to make it seem more human scale on the next slide um so this term modulation I just used modulation is about variations across the entire building frontage that are large enough to create new pockets of indoor and outdoor space and they extend from the ground all the way up to the roof and they create multiple building faces so on the top you can see this is an example in red where you can see outlined there's these building faces that kind of project in and set back these are what we would consider a building modulation because they go from the ground all the way up to the top and create multiple building faces below that you can see there's just these kind of small projections of bay windows that don't project that that don't go all the way from the ground up to the top so we wouldn't consider this as kind of building modulation on the next slide okay so roof line also relates to building modulation so roof line is the variations in the shape and height of the roof that help break down the bulk of the building visually um so on the top you can see there's a kind of this staggered roof line that goes up and down and it's broken up and it helps create a feeling that the building is not quite as bulky towards the top and you can see that these different roof lines relate to the modulation of these building faces on the image below this is a building that doesn't have a varied roof line it's just got kind of a flat roof and it doesn't have a sense of kind of breaking down that bulk into multiple faces and just as referenced these are images that we actually used in focus groups and got feedback on and the one on the top is one that people responded positively to and the one on the bottom is one that people really universally did not respond positively to because as this kind of boxy look um and sort of unarticulated unmodulated on the next slide just putting it all together this is just an example of how all of these elements work together on one kind of building mass so you can see here at the entire building frontage we've described is broken into a number of faces that are modulated and you can see that they stagger in and out with the roof line that varies and on the sides we've included a step back from the side so you can see how the top of the building is a little slimmer a little smaller than the rest of the building and so this is kind of the way that we've described multifamily buildings and how we can work to break them down and we provided dimensions and kind of specific rules about how all of these things relate to each other and come together to kind of help make a better building design thanks christin so now that we know our terms we're going to dive into some of the key standards tonight just to orient you the document is broken up into two big sections one that dictates the design of a site and then the second one that dictates the design of the building and the items in bold here are the ones we're going to touch on tonight these are the ones we heard the most community feedback on and they're also the ones that are kind of the most prevalent if you're walking around Santa Cruz these are the things you'll notice so first I wanted to touch on housing technology and we heard from sarah that there was a lot of community sentiment to try to increase the feasibility of rental projects and housing production there's a big need for multifamily housing this was really noticeable in our focus groups with young adults and students where a lot of them were living with extended family members and really voiced how much the city needs newer and more livable housing stock so we proposed a couple of things to try to incentivize housing production and to also just see the type of eclectic styles in terms of the diversity of housing as well so you'll see in this diagram what we're calling or what is called a stacked flat type of housing this is like a four plex it's when the circulation is within a building and don't have individual entries of like a town hall would have and we've proposed to reduce the parking requirement for this type of building by 50 and the hope is that this will make these types of projects more palatable for developers and hit that missing middle housing it's so hard to come by we've also introduced a new housing type um live work units this is a residential unit that has a commercial component as well and the commercial use would be dictated by the underlying zoning a really great unit to have we think in the midst of this pandemic and then finally just wanted to point out that the standards in the document really do range from these small-scale residential projects to higher density apartments and so we do want standards that speak to all these types of housing as you heard from Sarah we heard that there's a desire to make the corridors more more active there's a lot of people that are living a car-free lifestyle here and we also know that green scraping green and landscaping can really make the pedestrian experience more pleasant so we have a whole section on walkability in the standards section one bead and it's really just about increasing connectivity we have standards on requiring new past passageways um when you're on the middle of a large block or when you're adjacent to an existing public way you want to build more alleyways and pedestrian paths to to increase permeability we also have a whole slew of standards on just how the foot traffic would work on a commercial corridor so making the entries um conveniently spaced and more attractive we also would propose to amend the municipal code to have street trees placed every 30 feet in addition to kind of the site design connectivity aspect of walkability we also focused on the ground floor since that's such an important part of the pedestrian experience and um as you saw in the pioneer graph that Sarah showed that there is um a lot of support for retail and restaurant and active uses on the ground floor so we propose that on public frontages so on public streets for adjacent to public parks we would have 100 active uses and there would be some exceptions to that but they would be to a minimum depth of 25 feet we also have a lot of standards around the design aspects of the ground floor such as the transparency the height the entries and this is all to to make the the retail or commercial ground floors more viable and interesting interesting we have standards on the sidewalks of course proposing that corridor sidewalks would be eight foot eight feet wide and actually 12 feet wide for at least 80 of the building when the frontage faces a corridor and finally we would prohibit parking between the front lot line and the predominant building face and require parking to be screened from public view regardless of whether it's in a podium surface parking tuck under parking etc so to touch a little bit more on that active ground floor part of the standards Sarah mentioned this but you have a little bit of attention where survey response focus group participants really did want active uses and storefronts especially restaurants and retail as opposed to professional offices or building lobbies but we also heard that um allowing 100 residential buildings is a good tradeoff to make housing more feasible and increase housing production so where we've landed for now is that we would have the 100% active uses in the commercial and tourist districts and that on corner lots we would and mixed use zones we would have it 100% non-residential uses at the corner for at least 30 feet wide on each side and then in the zones in commercial zones where residential is allowed we would have live work units on the ground floor trying to balance the the need for active ground floors and having some residential space as well as Sarah mentioned we know that community character and make sure to go hand in hand in Santa Cruz and we dug into this a little bit more in our focus groups and I think Sarah mentioned this already but we heard that there's a lot of value on private open space you can see that corridors and in some of these mixed use or multifamily residential buildings go unused whereas people really sought after their own balcony or stupor they could have a garden and of course we also just heard throughout all of our outreach how important nicely designed open space is so we have a quite a few standards around this um proposing eight square feet of planted area to 40 feet of building frontage as a ratio for landscaping and commercial mixed use zones and we also have a menu of options that open space programming would include so there would be a requirement to choose three out of seven items in group open space such as shade trees or children's playground or art components and then finally we to try to balance this desire for private open space you've designed an incentive where private open space like a balcony or a stoop would count for double for your open space requirement so if you're required to do 80 square feet of group open space per unit you could actually provide 40 square feet of private open space and it would fulfill that requirement and next moving on to what we're calling the upper level taper we know that height is a very sensitive issue and there have been concerns about child and privacy in this process and also in the corridors planning and we ask the community what the best policy is for to be a good neighbor when you have a project come in adjacent to a single family home and we heard that upper story side setbacks were the preferred method we also know that there is support for increased building heights you saw the amount who said no maximum height and so to be sensitive to all these items we're proposing a taper for the uppermost story of a building when it's four stories or more and you would be required to bring in your upper story by 15 percent and you couldn't just carve out notches on that upper floor you have to it would be accompanied by a decrease in the diagonal as well which is what this diagram is meant to show and this is an area that we know might I'm sure will be refined as we keep moving forward in the process and we have some area plans in Santa Cruz that have more specific standards than this and Sarah will actually also talk about some excuse districts that have additional setback requirements and so this is an area that we're definitely testing out with the community and I'm sure will continue to be refined I also wanted to note on this slide that we did look into some standards around shade and privacy and we just found that there was not really an objective way to regulate it so we welcome comments and conversation about that at the end I just wanted you to know that it is something we took seriously and we did not just ignore and then the last group of slides here are about breaking up those blank walls and creating architectural detailing and for all of these next coming standards we provided a menu of options for architects to choose from and given that this was one of the preferred ways for the community and for us to regulate these building types so to make sure we don't have those blank walls we have three options on these would apply when with building faces they're larger than 30 feet on public frontages and you can break it up with different projections and insets and building materials or these notches that could create balconies on corners we have extras extra ways to articulate the building as well you could have this diagonal cut create a chamfered corner you could have a little open space area of at least 30 square feet where you could slightly increase the height on that corner roofline of at least three feet above the adjacent roofline just make it make it a little more dynamic and then finally um architectural detailing as Sarah mentioned was um the most important thing for the community for buildings to maintain even if it does increase construction costs and so we have a menu of options we have four categories that have different architectural features and your developer or architect would have to choose two out of those four categories so those are some of the the key standards there are many many more in your document if you did have a chance to look at that um and we welcome comment on all of them if you do have comment or questions on them um I think we actually talked about the ones that are blended here um so I'm going to move us on to the next slide thanks Merida thanks Kristin okay so um now I'm going to talk about some mixed use zone districts so part of this assignment is to reconcile the existing discrepancy between our adopted general plan and our existing zoning maps and zoning code so um what we know already is that um you know we have high density mixed use housing that's planned along so-called water grants authority in ocean we have mid density mixed use housing planned along ocean and mission street and we know that height has been at times controversial in Santa Cruz so we're proposing um some new mixed use zone districts to implement what we have in the general plan and taller heights than in the than we have in the current zoning would really would be required so thinking about this the setbacks and stepbacks um that would go along with those is something that we are um really wanting to hear from the community about so through this like final process of community engagement um figuring out how those transitions work is going to be one of the most one of the key pieces of that so just for a little bit of context this those these are the existing standards that apply to I would say more than 90 percent of the sites that were designated for um mixed use development in the last general plan they're zoned in the CC zone district our community commercial zone district and so these are the existing standards a height of three stories and 40 feet there's no currently no additional height for mixed use the the floor area ratio that we that applies in these sites is either 1.75 or 2.75 currently there's no setback that's required for a commercial um property of butts another commercial property the setback can be zero for commercial districts a but a residential zone they have to match the setback that they come up against um you can do residential only in these locations and um when they're when you're doing a residential only projects you have um a development density that's equivalent to the rm zone district so that's between 30 and it's either 30 dwelling units per acre or up to 39 if you're doing all small units but when there's when you're doing mixed use in these locations there is no density established in the zoning code and so um we essentially just go back to that building envelope that's established through the far and the general plan and then the site standards in the zoning and that that sort of dictates how much housing can be put on one of these properties so under the state law we can't reduce what's here in these existing standards so what you'll see in these proposed on districts is that none of these numbers get smaller um you know or if they do so so example to trade off between setbacks and height you know we have to make sure that the full floor area ratio and the full um development density can still be accommodated on these sites so this is a map of the areas in the general plan that were redesignated for mixed use zoning the area shown in brown is for mixed use high density that's up to 55 dwelling units per acre or 2.75 floor area ratio um the area shown in orange has a similar far and density 2.75 and 55 dwelling units per acre in dark orange and then in the light orange that's the mixed use medium density designation and that has a floor area ratio of 1.75 and a maximum density of 30 dwelling units per acre so um in creating new zone districts we are only rezoning these sites that are redesignated in the general plan nothing more nothing less because of the way that the general plan interacts with the ocean street area plan we actually need a total of six distinct zones to implement both of those plans so um this is where we are at this point this is a very preliminary proposal and we are still fleshing out the details of it um and these are preliminary height suggestions recommendations proposals that we're kind of working with and thinking through so um you'll see on the right side of your screen that purple area those are the sites that are designated for mixed use high density and right now we're proposing a five-story height limit in that location um you'll see on the left side your screen along mission those sites are designated for mixed use medium density we're proposing right now a four-story height limit in that area and then um based on the heights that are already established in the ocean street area plan the heights along ocean would be maximum of three-story or four-story unless we go in and do an amendment to that ocean street area plan which isn't a part of this current process at this point we can go back and go into more detail there if anyone has any questions but that gets really technical really fast so um i'm just we're going to get into the more important issue about it which is about you know how do we choose a height limit and what are the what are the kind of pros and cons of choosing various height limits so um if we think about you know sort of the places where there is the most intense development capacity so places that are along ocean and along so-called water brands of 40 um where we have that 2.75 floor area ratio we have that 55 dwelling units per acre um we know we need at least four stories to facilitate that to accommodate that um with our current parking standards as they are um but if we can if we go to five that does create this more flexible design opportunity so we have space for additional setbacks or stepbacks at upper stories we have space for more landscaping at the at the ground level we have space perhaps to preserve more trees um it just provides a lot more flexibility in terms of design so there are trade-offs to be made as we as you can recall from looking at this picture of the floor area ratio I mean you can keep a building low and cover more of the site at the ground level or you can allow a building to get a little bit taller and you you can just see how that um creates space at the ground level for other types of things we might want to have um at that at that level so the big question that we want to hear from the community about we're hearing about right now is what's the best way to transition between existing uses and these new more intense uses as they come in as they are you know planned and going to be next to um relatively lower density residential neighborhoods so I'm going to walk you through the options that we are presenting to the public and you know gathering feedback about so this is the existing case so 2.75 far is allowed there you know if an application came in today um that we would we would allow that to be you know three or four stories whatever they needed to like hit be you know be able to accommodate that floor area ratio we don't require currently any taper or anything it's just a block so we're looking at a cross section here it's if this is um rear yard to rear yard with an r15 in our you know current zoning that would be a 20 foot setback um from the property line so first option is to go fully to four stories we incorporate this 15 percent taper on the upper floor and then the architect gets to decide how that taper is designed so it may not be centered between the front and the back it may be you know the taper may be entirely at the rear the taper may be entirely at the street side um or it may be on both sides and not really at the front or the rear but you know it could be open for um for the architect to decide another option would be to require where that step back is so that it's always at the rear so it's a it's a similar situation to option one but we're requiring that that reduction be taken off of the back of the property or where it abuts um a neighboring lower density use the third option is to create a wider um landscape buffer at the back and a wider setback so going from 20 feet to 30 feet on these sites when we do that it pushes enough of the volume of the building toward the street that we actually that we do need to go up to a fifth story we need that additional height in order to accommodate that full floor area ratio but it gives us this opportunity to have a wider a wider landscape buffer at the back and then we could still incorporate a step back at the rear or you know more flexibly on the building or the fourth option is to go with a with a model that's more of a daylight plane or this actually then affects the the upper two stories so the daylight plane would start at the third story and then um what we're proposing is that it would be at a 45 degree angle from that corner of the third story sort of going up and so it would push both of those stories toward away from the um residential use the adjacent use and toward the street so um that's a standard that that um probably is going to be the more successful at affecting you know daylighting and shading all of that really though depends on the orientation of the sites you know how they sit north north to south relative to one another um but these are the four options that we're kind of looking at and and thinking about and trying to figure out you know what is the way that we want to transition between these uses or is it some combination of these options that you want to have um you know I don't know if we could do both a really wide 30 foot setback and the the daylight plane we'd have to do some analysis of that about whether that would kick us up even taller but um you know that's just how we transition between these uses is really the trade-offs that we're talking about and that's what we get into when we talk about you know heights and setbacks they relate to one another and you know we just need to figure out what's the right way to transition from one from one use to another okay so that's a lot of the stuff about design that I wanted to talk to you about there are also several things that are going to be kind of potentially coming along with this package when we bring these design standards forward and I wanted to go through these with you as well these are in draft form at this point but um so as I've mentioned as we've been discussing um you know under the state law the city is really obligated to apply the development capacities that were in place as of January 1st 2018 um when our general plan was written it envisioned creating a whole set of zoning standards and essentially like a um a community benefit matrix that would allow housing to be within the range established by the general plan it was you know the general plan was written under a whole different set of state regulation than state law that um community benefit matrix was never successfully adopted we don't have that right now and so we still what we still have lingering in our general plan is this language that talks about um you know there there are specific criteria that you can meet that will allow you to get to this maximum we don't we don't have those we have no specific criteria that will allow you to meet that maximum and as we understand it in in um collaboration with the city attorney um we are not allowed to prevent someone from meeting the maximum that a site is planned for so what we what we're proposing to do is to clean up this language in the general plan so it reflects what we're actually able to implement and enforce so that's the intention this is sort of draft language that we would be deleting that reference to the criteria that just simply don't exist um and you know we're still kind of this may get refined and finalized before we bring it back but we just wanted to let you know that we're we're working on that there are two places in the general plan where a similar change would be made it would be in the mixed use high density land use designation and the mixed use visitor commercial land use designation um another thing I want to talk about is how we process permits for projects that meet these standards so um as has come up you know previously there is you know we're we're going to set all these objective zoning standards and then there's a density bonus project could come in and you know when a density bonus project comes in when they're applying for a density bonus they can waive standards they can't meet and they're entitled to request concessions some limited number of concessions that are things that um you know it affect the cost of constructing their project so um we hear a lot of concern from your council from our planning commission from the community about density bonus projects and how we can't really predict them and we're not modeling them um I understand that it's you know it's a little bit it's kind of a lot for staff to take in as well you know we work really hard on these standards we think they're really great and then to have someone just ignore them is sort of you know frustrating sometimes so we're trying to think of ways that we can encourage conforming projects to that projects that really do meet all of our objective standards and one of the tools that we have available to us is streamlining the review process and making that more predictable for developers so um what we're considering and I would really like to get some feedback from your council on this today is um moving to an administrative review process for conforming projects so if a project meets all of these objective standards we would process that administratively at the staff level and the only things then that would go to a pu