-San Ramon cares a lot about preserving retail as it redevelops for more housing

-Generally the Council and PlanCom members are not thrilled to be adding more housing

-Several speakers came to say they want more housing

-This item was to basically kick off the presentation of the Housing Element, but staff also said there would be no changes to the draft HE before it is published because they want to make the tight deadline of Nov. 2022 to submit to HCD

-Planning Commissioner Corie Edwards seems pro-housing; said several things like 5-6 stories is not too tall, we should put less land toward parking, and objective standards shouldn't be aimed at making development less feasible

They are trepidatious of the coming RHNA number and are largely taking the advice that it will be difficult to change, but are still waiting to act on the 5,111 number. They feel it's very unlikely they can meet it, but (correctly) observe they will make significantly more progress than Danville, Lafayette, etc. The mayor referenced the joke "I don't have to outrun the tiger, I just have to outrun you."

They took the tentative number of affordable units and divided by 15% to make it sound like they had to build 20,000 units total - my guess is some of them knew that was not how you have to build a housing element, because Mullin densities, but they know it is how you achieve actual units.

All the other public comments I heard were pretty NIMBY. I commented first, mostly about what EB4E is about, how we're getting involved, and the benefits of greater density for everyone. Then I noted the new state laws that make them have to do more justification of including non-vacant sites or sites in successive housing elements, as those are very prominent in their 2015 HE. I was going to make a plug for missing middle, but the mayor interjected and asked if I had been advocating for the higher regional number at ABAG, and the brief (slightly frosty but civil) interchange took up my last minute. (I said not me personally but our org did.) 

The person after me was a highly bigoted woman, talked about affordable housing developers as the big bads and me as their agent, about density making us "like Shanghai or Singapore", and also threw in something about "the China virus." A man after her talked about the city being effectively forced to allow towers to accommodate the units (so again I wished I had gotten missing middle in). and concern-trolled about water and infrastructure. Then there was a more standard NIMBY talking about car congestion and ended with "Let's keep San Ramon the nice, peaceful, serene city that we all love so much."

Some of the council seemed to have a good idea of what the HE was going to require of them. Eric Wallis noted they had places zoned for mixed-use and due to SB330 (or he said thanks to Wiener) they couldn't remove the residential zoning until 2024. Mayor Hudson said they would work out a HE that no one would like, and implied they would cross their fingers and hope it didn't pan out as predicted, but then said explicitly that if someone figured out how to build affordable housing within its constraints the city would be "under the gun", e.g. have a difficult time rejecting it.

Hudson wrapped up with (approximate transcription): "So staff, come up with some miracle. Let's build a 50-story apartment in the middle of the creek. You can put it in my backyard." In context it sounded more like a joke of the kinds of stuff they did in the past than like an expression of what they want to do specifically, but overall they definitely see this as a threat to their interests.