County grand jury has recently found that ADU-heavy housing-element strategies are bad. TBD whether the grand jury finding will matter to HCD.

Three general policy changes were discussed:

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1. Rezoning: previous draft relied on rezoning primarily in the North Fair Oaks to meet the county's RHNA affordable quota. Housing advocates provided public comment urging the board to expand rezoning to also include higher opportunity neigborhoods. Supervisor started the conversation in firm support for this effort, and Pine and Corzo backed him up. Mueller suggested the Board not weigh in on the issues and essentially let the planning department work it out, which was met with criticism

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1. Tenant protections: Corzo and Pine have been working on a tenant protection ordinance to strengthen just cause standards and explore options of a rental registry, etc. Advocates called on the county to incorporate these updates into the housing element. The county attorney provided clarification to the board that the housing element would have supremacy over an ordinance, and any future ordinance would need to comply with the element. The board generally agreed that since the ordinance is already in the works, there was no need to further slow down the element drafting process by incorporating tenant protections

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Housing for special needs: Board discussed a number of options that would strengthen the element's language regarding supportive/accessible housing. One such revision they seemed in favor of regarding lowering minimum parking requirements for housing for disabled individuals. The board agreed that that policy "made sense." 

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The Board ultimately pushed final decisions on these measures to the next meeting. The Board also discussed how the supervisors intended to allocate their Measure K money, but I didn't stick around for that. 

https://sanmateocounty.legistar.com/View.ashx?M=A&ID=998929&GUID=0D46FA6C-A477-4001-8780-87E9B4ED1E73&G=1088EC25-A43A-408F-A57C-73C0A70269AB

It was a general public study session where feedback was provided to support more affordable housing in our city in support of state laws

William Gibson - presented on (reduced) constraints, concerns from community re housing, HE goals, # of pipeline projects and ADUS. Commissioner comments. Inappropriate parcels should be identified directly to him. 

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Comments by Green Foothills, community members, including advocate for senior housing and advocates against sprawl. Commenters focused on the numbers being high and incorrect assumptions (e.g. ADUs = housing and all vacant SFH lots will be built out).

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Commission voted to submit as-is to the Board of Supervisors (did not respond to any of the public comments). 

The first part of this was a rehash from the previous meeting, but then the second half was the first public report on the full inventory, and included discussion of some of the programs being proposed.

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Concerns were raised that a few of the programs might be counter-productive (in particular there was one that was for imposing an EXTREMELY long timeline for affordable unit covenants, like 99 years, which could have effects similar to extremely high % affordable requirements, i.e. making projects infeasible).

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The staff also said that several sites that have been included in the inventory have live businesses, and they have not really looked at whether there's interest in relocating those businesses to redevelop the sites.

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If you look on the Slack, we had a live thread about the meeting.

https://yimbyaction.slack.com/archives/C012YR5EZ3N/p1653613468579949

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There was one person in the meeting I didn't already know, "Kirti", who seemed generally pro-housing.  She was interested at expanding or duplexing her property, to take care of her parents.  Unfortunately I didn't get enough info from the meeting to identify her.

There were less than ten attendees, but all were pro-housing. The initial presentation gave a lot of context upfront on what was a housing element, the history of our housing supply, and the numbers we are now required to hit. 

They requested feedback on the proposed sites, our thoughts on other potential sites. They also had us discuss policies and programs we thought were going well, improvements to be made and any new ideas.

It was a highly interactive and productive meeting. In the next meeting (May 26th), they will use the information gained in this meeting to discuss further how we plan to meet our housing needs. 

I'm ticking off "likelihood of development" here, but really the Planning Department is purely working with a buffer approach, not a realistic analysis of probability-of-development. And the Planning Staff acknowledged they're using only a 10% buffer over the RHNA number, lower than HCD's minimum guidance. Encouragingly, Council pushed back on that pretty hard and seems to want at least 15%, although given our track record, that's still WAY low.

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I am not making a comment because I will be hearing basically this same report from the dais in a few weeks.