Creates a local preference, incentivizes particular housing types, establishes a minimum percentage for special needs units, analyzes constraint of the inclusionary requirements. The policy is somewhat contradictory--committing to increase a variety of unfunded inclusionary requirements while also committing to study the potential market constraint such requirements might cause. Ideally a study happens first.
Establishes program to subsidize deed-restricted ADUs
Provides ministerial review for projects meeting certain criteria, including any multi-family project that includes 20% lower-income housing. SB 35 without the constraints!
Commits to ballot measure allowing two ADUs in high-resource neighborhoods
From the project description of the Crestmoor, 300 Piedmont Avenue, there will be only single-family homes, and only (8) homes will be affordable, but it does not state what AMI will be eligible for the homes. Since these are single-family homes, San Bruno is putting most of, if not nearly all, of the density burden on District 4. I would like to see the number of designated homes for affordable housing increased and/or policies prohibiting short-term rental and imposing escalating fees on vacant units to address these concerns.
From the project description of the Crestmoor, 300 Piedmont Avenue, there will be only single-family homes, and only (8) homes will be affordable, but it does not state what AMI will be eligible for the homes. Since these are single-family homes, San Bruno is putting most of, if not nearly all, of the density burden on District 4. I would like to see the number of designated homes for affordable housing increased and/or policies prohibiting short-term rental and imposing escalating fees on vacant units to address these concerns.
I would like to see a mandate for affordable housing on the identified pieces of land, with eligibility for single-person households of 70-80% AMI and an increasing eligibility percentage of household size.
Fee reduction for lot mergers for larger multi-family projects.
Amends Ordinance No. 1284, San Bruno's local density control initiative, to allow two homes per lot by right in single-family neighborhoods and increase densities in the downtown area
Rezones for denser multi-family housing on some significant opportunity sites, including Tanforan, a defunct mall that could accommodate as many as 1,500 new homes--or more, with density bonus.
They are pretty much just words. A clear strategy needs to be set in place to accomplish this goal. Nothing even has to be done for another four years. I would like to see clear milestones they intend to hit and a clear implementation plan. If there are challenges and barriers set in place that need to be addressed before concrete action plans can be developed, they should be made clear to the community.
I would like to see a mandate for affordable housing on the identified pieces of land, with eligibility for single-person households of 70-80% AMI and an increasing eligibility percentage of household size.
The Housing Element APR will be discussed at this event. The APR form itself is included in the packet.
https://sanbruno.ca.gov/AgendaCenter/ViewFile/Agenda/_03182025-2310
The summary is that through the end of 2024, we're behind (25% of time elapsed, only 7% of units with building permits), however projections for 2025 are very good -- we expect to be almost halfway through our RHNA count by end of third year, ahead of mid-cycle review. The Tanforan chunk will also hit somewhere after 2025 and take care of more than a third of our total. We're overall optimistic that we will be on-track for the mid-cycle review, and will actually meet our RHNA (for the first time ever).
HCD told them that they didn't do their re-zoning correctly, but only required small changes. They should get re-certified soon.
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:
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."
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.
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.
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).
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.
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).
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.
If you look on the Slack, we had a live thread about the meeting.
https://yimbyaction.slack.com/archives/C012YR5EZ3N/p1653613468579949
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.
I am not making a comment because I will be hearing basically this same report from the dais in a few weeks.