Welcome everyone. uh tonight's uh plan commission meeting. Um we will begin with uh commissioners reports. Um Michael, >> yeah, thank you. Uh well, given the holiday break, I don't really have any
detailed sort of expand uh sort of uh progress from what was previously reported. But I was going to touch on the two sort of large housing projects that UVA's undertaken uh both at Darden and at the EMTT IV corridor where you know if you pass by on 250 for the
Darden one or if you go by um on Ivy Road you can start to see sort of the extents of both those projects more so at Darden where you start to see the massing kind of coming to completion but then along Ivy they've come out of the ground so they're no longer uh subgrade and so if you want to get a sense of
where sort of the limits are relative to the public realm Um it's becoming clearer each passing week and you know as they transition up and rise up you'll see a lot of progress this spring to hopefully they'll top out and um uh again sort of approaching summertime. So
>> thank you. Um I was just at tree commission meeting a week ago and they are preparing their state of the forest report to go before council I think in April. So there's a lot of work to put into that in terms of recommendations and the one that would
be most relevant to planning commission is this um create there there's work on creating a sort of pamphlet packet for developers on best ways to keep or preserve existing trees rather than planting new
trees because they offer so much if we can keep them. So, they've been working on um suggestions and kind of images on to do that better. And I don't think I have parks and wreck or got cancelled. I don't know. But I'm
going Thursday. So, I'll tell you more about that next time. >> I don't have anything to report. uh the Virginia uh general stakeholder work group uh working on the building code met on January 5th and 6th. Uh I
was not able to attend unfortunately but I understand a submission was made based on uh my p previous uh submission allowing uh my mine was allowing fourtory single stair residential. This was allowing five and sixtory single
stair residential uh with the same additional safety restrictions. Uh the committee did not reach consensus uh and it proceeds to the board for a vote. >> Interesting. >> Nothing to report. >> Okay. Um from the board of architecture
review um the only large item was the uh apartment building at 7th in Delivan in the uh Fifel neighborhood and the BAR I believe denied that project and um I believe it has been uh an appeal has been filed to council. So um we will see that project again. We won't, but
council will be looking at that project um in the coming months. Um uh neighborhood development services. Do you guys have any reports or want to go right into our tax abatement study?
>> Mr. Chair, I have a motion. >> Oh, sorry. Uh okay. >> I move to accept the minutes as written. >> Oh, yeah. We'll get rid of that now. Um any seconds? >> Second. >> Uh all in favor? Hi. >> Hi.
>> Um, that passes. All right. Um, >> oh, >> sorry. I thought you heard me. Um, Commissioner Silates, Commissioner Harness, >> what are you doing? >> Commissioner Cart, >> I don't know. What are we doing?
>> Do you want to do the NDS report? >> Is there anything to report for? It's all right. >> You were proving. >> You were still getting ready. I'm sorry. We're jumping around a little bit, but yeah. Um, so nothing from NDS or >> Oh, NDS report. I'm I don't have report now.
>> Um, all right. Well, how about the uh tax evance study? >> Great. >> Okay. Good evening. I'm Kelly Brown, director of neighborhood development services, and I'm just going to do a brief introduction on our tax abatement study.
Um, so I'd like to introduce you to Mike and Jeremy, who are here to present on the tax abatement item. Uh, at a city council meeting on April 21st, 2025, council charged staff with conducting research and analysis to determine if an affordable housing tax abatement program
could have a material impact to incentivize housing construction in Charlottesville. within the context of the high cost associated with housing construction. If such a program could have an impact, council also asked staff to define an optimal tax abatement program structure that could improve housing construction
financing and minimize administrative complexity. In June 2025, staff contracted with 3TP ventures to lead and conduct this study market analysis and model building to test the potential impact of an affordable housing tax abatement on the feasibility of housing
construction projects. The goal of this project, therefore, is to enable an informed recommendation to council regarding a tax evadement program in Charlottesville. So, 3TP has reached a point where they've prepared a final report and completed a feasibility model that they will present and demonstrate
for planning commission this evening. This is not an action item, but rather an opportunity for commissioners to learn more about this research, ask questions, provide feedback and insight, and learn how this feasibility model can help with the policy and programmatic considerations related to an affordable housing tax
abatement. So, here tonight to present their report and demonstrate the feasibility model are Mike Callahan and Jeremy Goldstein from 3DP Ventures. >> Where shall we do this presentation? >> You can do it at any microphones. Um, and just so you can move the slide to
the next slide. I'll just slide off. Perfect. >> All right. Um, well, just brief introductions. I'm I'm Jeremy Goldstein. Uh, and I was primarily responsible for a lot of the quantitative uh analysis and work on on that front. I'm joined by Mike Callahan as well. >> Yep. Hi everybody. Mike Callahan. I'm
Charlottville resident actually 3TP has an office on South Street. Um, and I was an adviser on this project working with Jeremy. So, I'll be the one leading you through the presentation this evening. We can go ahead and get started. Um, you should see here an outline of the kinds of
things we want to talk about. Mostly get you up to speed on what the reason for the the study was, what our methods were, make sure we're all on the same page about what tax statements are, show you a little bit about this tool that we built, and the findings therein, and then some of the the key takeaways. Uh, so there's quite a lot that we want to
talk about. If you can go ahead and go to the next slide. Um but perhaps the the biggest takeaways are here uh in this in this next little bit these sort of three main points. Uh we'll talk about the numbers themselves later but for the time being let's talk about the bullets which is not number one uh right
now looking at typical housing projects across uh across the city whether it be different housing types or in different submarkets. We're not seeing a lot of projects that can really pencil out as they say right now. There's effectively limited development feasibility. You can go to the next slide please. And the
thing is if we remove the inclusionary zoning from from that that math about about the current realities of the of the market. While that does make some small improvements in feasibility, it still does not create a condition where
uh like housing is easy to be built right now. So effectively this is like the the difficulties of the market. If you're hearing from local local development community that it's difficult to make projects work right now, this data concurs with that. It also concurs with the fact that inclusionary zoning has a has a role to
play, but is not the the the solitary reason why things are in penciling today. Lastly, tax abatements can help in this process, but I think we should be looking at some sort of alternative mechanisms or other ways to make sure that we're really aligning some of the
public sector concerns with say we don't want to overpay or overs subsidize um and the need to create more housing with this very real market dynamic of things not being able to pencil right now. So, we may want to be looking thinking a little bit more flex more flexibly about that. And while this study wasn't meant
to provide a definitive uh you know solution to this problem, it is meant to help inform those kinds of decision-making processes as we move forward. All right, so now let's go ahead and get into get into the weeds. So we'll start with the study purpose.
Um the overall purpose uh summarized here in these bullets. We want to evaluate the market as a standstay. Want to evaluate the impacts of inclusionary zoning from a from a financial perspective. This is very much a financial uh evaluation. This we're not going to talk a lot about administration
or some of the other very real burdens to making projects actually happen. Right now, we're still we're still mostly talking about the math, but we'll we'll venture a little bit into some of these other issues. We want to talk about the the financial or fiscal benefits of tax abatements in a couple of different realms. And then the other
task was to provide a mechanism for the continued monitoring, updating, evaluation of impacts and findings. So we don't want to leave you with a static picture of the market today when the market can change tomorrow. I want to give you something that allows you to continue to monitor over time. Next
slide, please. So there's a couple things that this project does and some things that it doesn't and especially sort of the tool which in some ways is really like the the the leave behind portion of this project. Um what that what that tool is and what what it isn't. Um it more more than anything
else it is a means to inform policy decisions. Uh and you can see those lines are sort of in bold and you almost want to say inform I wish is like double bold. It is not giving you the policy decision. It is helping to inform it just like the the more that private sector math is understood by those making public sector decisions I think
the better off we're all going to be. And that's really what this thing is about. Uh we wanted to provide you with a method that is transparent, flexible, and adaptable. In other words, it's something that you can come back to again. You can feel very clear about where the where the data comes from and you can be making changes to it over time uh as as better information comes
along. We don't want to act like we have all the answers. We want to give you the means to make those adjustments as we move forward. And lastly, this was really meant to be a collaborative effort, which meant it wasn't just us doing this in in in some back room. It was done with a lot of conversation with
city staff. It was done with a lot of conversation with local with the local development community. It was done with conversations with developers who had who aren't local who can also provide out outside context. Um, we wanted to make sure that this was uh as as inclusive as we could be in making sure
that we were we were doing our best to to understand and inform, you know, a pretty complicated housing market. Um, this tool though is is definitely uh not a handful of things. One, again, it's not meant to be the thing that determines the policy. There's a lot more to this than just the math. um is
certainly not a way to provide staff which will now have control over this tool moving forward to to sort of um supersede what a a private developer is saying about when when they're looking at their map. This is really meant not so much to inform a specific project but
typical projects the the standard one. Every project is unique and that's just something that has to be understood. And last it's not a blackbox tool. It really is like all the assumptions and things built in can can be adjusted and should be as we move forward. Okay, next slide, please. A little quick background and
need just so you know, this is this is one step in an ongoing thing that started several years ago with the identification of the need for more than 4,000 affordable housing units by, you know, in the next 20 years. And then a zoning code that was adopted that help that was meant in some ways to address this, which also included inclusionary
housing alongside a real financial attempt to provide some financial backing to that. and then sort of almost immediately noticing that market rate projects with affordable units haven't really haven't really come to fruition. So, the city wanted to know well what can we what can can we learn more about
that and uh what can we do as it relates to tax abatements which is which is something that has been brought up on several occasions. H how valuable an option is that um to improve the outcomes of housing construction. So then our goal then ultimately is let's build this tool, let's build this model that can help inform this this sort of
multivariate set of of of interests. Next slide. Um just making sure we're sort of on the same page about when we when we talk about tax abatements. We'll get a little bit more in the weeds on this, but overall really what we're talking about is some kind of reduction in taxes as a result of f, you know, of
of meeting the needs of that abatement policy, whatever the policy would be with the intent to improve the financial feasibility of projects that have affordable dwelling units in them. You can see it's, you know, it was authorized under this particular act. And it's really what really happens is that it's a it's a grant in which you
refund after the fact. So someone pays their taxes, then you reimburse them after the fact. Some of that stuff just to know. So we we do have to sort of operate within the bounds of of the of the state law. Next slide. Oh, and you can see you can always skip the those are just you know the headers. Um so
like a an overview of of the method sort of effectively a three-step process. One again collaboratively determine typical costs and revenues. And we'll talk a good bit about that and can get into as much detail as anybody wants. Um, two,
build a development feasibility tool that mirrors the private sector analysis process. Fancy way of just saying, let's build a proform tool, but let's add into that tool the means to analyze impacts of public interventions. And you can sort of see this is a screenshot of a portion of the user interface tab of
this tool where you can see that there's a section for project inputs and then a and then a section for policy testing. So that you can say under this sort of situation, what how do things pencil or you know what what's the yield? What's the IRRa? What if we add this policy? How does that change the yield? That's
effectively what this thing is doing. It's so it's calculating current feasibility of the typical project and then how does that change under these other under under a range of interventions. Our primary issue was tax abatement but as you'll see we tried to go a little bit further with this work because it was a good opportunity to do
so. Next slide. So why why a tool? Um hopefully this is you know sort of fairly clear to all of you already but part of it is just that you need to have something where that like a tool that can change with changing market
conditions. This is not the first time someone has tried to evaluate the fiscal feasibility of the housing market. But I think you if you you know if you've been here for some of these previous plans that are you know some that effectively you know come as PDFs it doesn't always take very long for the
the data and underpinnings to effectively have changed and then it makes a lot of the the findings therein however solid the methodology was not not as relevant anymore. We just wanted to avoid that. We want to give you an opportunity to to change with changing times and then also allow you this opportunity to start playing with with
with a wide range of interventions and sort of seed other things moving forward. Next slide, please. So, the inputs and to any proform of tool, they're they can become incredibly complex, especially for a specific project where there's real money on the
line and need to go out and get financing from other people, which is very often the case when you're doing more than, you know, enough units to to trigger the affordable dwelling unit requirement. Um, but on the whole, the basics are that you just, you know, you need costs and revenues effectively is
what what goes into that. There's just a wide range of costs. There's different ways you can calculate revenues and there's another handful of sort of financial assumptions that go into all all of this stuff. The thing is these things can be really unique to any individual project and they change with regularity. The cost of wood changes
quickly. The cost of ch steel changes quickly. Sometimes consultant fees change quickly. Time changes quickly. Um, and so nothing that we're presenting today, especially as we start to show you here's our estimate for the per unit cost of a wood stick built lowrise that I don't want anybody to get too terribly
focused on that because ultimately what we're really trying to do is one at least get in the right range of overall financial viability and have that and we've had that vetted um, you know, with people in and outside of this room. So we feel pretty comfortable at least with the order of magnitude about this. What we really want to care about is this
gives us an opportunity to make some apples to apples comparisons. If if this was what was the financial feasibility of this project, well, here's how it would change if we added this other stuff. And it's really the change I think that's that that matters most. But saying all that, we do want to show you some of the inputs and let you know what
what's in here. Go ahead and change the slide. One of the biggest ones, of course, is is hard costs. Really just comes down to sort of, you know, uh you know, labor and materials. Um, the way that we wanted to do that was to try and mirror
real projects that already exist in the city. So, we're not like kind of making up too, you know, too much of silly pro projects, but we wanted to eval, we were asked to evaluate a range of housing options from single family to high-rise, but I do want to note specifically not
student housing. So, that's not in here. And if there are questions about student housing, that would have to be kind of like an ancillary thing. the the the model is in place to begin to you know we've gone a good way on that it's just not part of this study but uh I do want to make clear that what we so we started
with an outside cost estimating software asking it to price out projects like the ones that already exist in in the city of of projects you know with these sorts of styles that you can see somebody you know put together um and then that was vetted with um local and outside
developers you know based on their their project experiences and then we made and then we made changes as a result. We we took other we took you know real world examples into into consideration and they were effectively always included in into our numbers. They didn't necessarily replace things but they
would they were always included as as part of that as part of that finding. So the next slide just shows you know something like you know here effectively the the the hard costs per unit for these different these different types of units. Again it's the these can change over time. there, you know, that one
person's number will will not be the same as another person's and we're fine with that. And there's nothing about this model now that doesn't allow somebody to say, "Oh, you know what? Townhouse these days, that's now it's 450. Oh, no, there it's 325 because they've gotten smaller." Fine, you can plug it in. Um, so but that's that's sort of the the base of those numbers.
You can you can go on to the next slide. Uh, land cost is another one of the important components. Uh now I you should I should note here that getting accurate land like price for land right now has been very difficult for several reasons but primarily which there just haven't been a ton of land sales. So
what we really started with instead was assessed land values. We did go back and look at the small handful of sale of of sales land sales that there have been in the in the city especially over the last few years. And there did for what it's worth there did seem to be some pretty solid alignment between sort of 2023
2024 land sales of which there were at least a few more and the assessed uh land value. So it's not a bad place to start from but it's also the you know that this these can change pretty wildly over time. But what we really want to do with these was to effectively create tiers of like submarkets because right
the prices in one part of town are not the same as the prices in another part of town. Even if the construction materials cost the same the the land isn't the same. And so we wanted to use this sort of tiering system, but it really just means from tier one to tier five, as you'll see in these charts moving forward. Um, it really relates
just to from sort of the most expensive assessed areas to the least. This map is showing is is a map of the assessed land value per acre. And it won't surprise you see sort of the darker colors indicate higher prices or higher
assessed land values. Um, but we did not want to go ahead and say that that there is say a let's say a downtown submarket for now that's high priced, but it doesn't necessarily have to be in the future. Nor should there is it the case that there might be projects outside of downtown that would get downtown type
prices even if they don't show up on this map as such. So instead of these tiers being submarkets in the way maybe you're used to them being like Fville, we'll call it a neighborhood. It that's not that's not what this is. It is effectively a place that has the you know the land costs and then
commensurate rents associated with the types of places that currently fall under this sort of tier one the highest the highest or the tier five the lowest or any in between. I know it's a little a little uh can be a little confusing. I apologize if I didn't explain it well but hopefully you get a sense of what
we're trying to do here. Uh you can go to the next slide and you can just see now when when we vetted this with a local community there was there really like there was no real consensus. While we were able to sort of reach a reasonable consensus on construction costs there just wasn't a real consensus on land costs. I expect these numbers
are very likely to change over time. And it's even the case that for some for for some folks who run performance this is an input to see how it changes yields. For others, it's in fact like the the land cost itself actually relates to meeting a bottom line first and then
whatever money is left over becomes the land cost. So there's not even like consensus on how to how to price all these things. So I just be be aware I I wouldn't I wouldn't fight anybody about changing a single one of these numbers. I'd be fine with it. You can go to the next slide. In some ways that's true with soft costs
too which mostly just have to do with fees whether they go to the to the city for you know reviewing things or to like the you know consultants for drafting plans or doing legal and that kind of stuff. The one thing I want to note about this you can actually already sort of move forward from from this slide. The thing I want to note here is that uh
the model ties soft costs to time. So if you were to discover over time that it's taking longer to get stuff done, that's a material soft cost. That's real and we want the model to to account for that. Conversely, if there's situations in which things can go faster, that could
theoretically have a benefit um to cost. Though we set at least a minimum thresh there's no maximum. It could just keep going up and up and up and up. But we did set a minimum like at some point there's only so many savings from that. We didn't want to overemphasize say oh you've got this great new exhibited to review it's saving you millions. Like no it's not. you still have to drop the
plants. So lastly, then there's revenues and some other sort of financials, but most of what we did was we pulled asking rent, we pulled rents for that, you know, apartments.com on on projects that that we felt were uh representative of of tiers one through five uh for each of
these kinds of building costs to the extent that we could find them. We didn't necessarily find a robust number of comps all across our five tiers and six uh uh building types, but enough to at least give us some some reasonable numbers to to start from. So that's our market rate rents. And then affordable
rents are just based on area wide median income, a proportion of that number. So that's just, you know, that that changes every year, but that's a that's a static number. There's some other stuff in this model. All of which can can have substantive changes on on outcomes. And they were all vetted uh w with with uh with at least some portion of the group.
No, everything was looked at by at least somebody else besides us. Um but again, all can be modified as as we need to. All right. I think that's the last of the like yeah of just the background. Now let's go ahead and get into the tool itself. So this tool provides two critical
standard sort of proforma outputs. Yield on cost and IRR. Are folks familiar with both of those or did any any definitions needed? Happy to do it. It's just very quickly just so you >> for the public please. >> Yep. Okay. So, so um so for yield on cost that's that is really focused on
how much you're effectively getting as a return once a project is stabilized. So it cares about your net operating income relative to the project costs. That that's its role. So it's in some ways a very simple kind of calculation but is after you know it it doesn't care about
time. The thing is time matters tremendously in a lot of these projects. So you don't So it's nice to know that you've got sort of a stabilized yield once everything is up and running and you've got rents. By the way, I should have mentioned these are all for rentals. This is this tool is just looking at rentals. Um so once you've
got a stabilized project, it's interesting to know how much money you're generating every every month. But the other side cares about time too and when think when did you have to buy the land? How long did it take to get things running? When did you start getting rents? And that and the way that you would look at that is with internal rate
of return. Um, which is almost like inscrutable calculation that you just put into Excel and it gives you a number like the actual math is is effect you know is is it's it's like a goal seeking thing that it's trying that it's trying to do to get to a net present value of zero. So mostly you just say just let
the machine tell you what the I what what IRR is. But they both have sort of, you know, um, generally standard thresholds for what counts as feasible or or not feasible. And that's what we really care about are those are those thresholds. Um, and so this so we built
that into this into this model along with a couple of other types of measurables that I think might yield a little bit more information uh for uh public sector folks besides just the private sector uh finances. And we'll show you that in a little bit. But again
that what we really care about is the difference in these performance metrics with and without policy interventions. That's really what matters. So it doesn't matter so much that this one's a 5.2. What matters is that with this addition becomes a 5.7 and that gap of half a percent is the thing that is
effectively the thing that matters. All right, next slide please. Um this is just a little screenshot of the of the tool interface. will will I think have an opportunity to play with it if if people are are interested. But mostly what this thing is doing is it's
giving users an opportunity to make selections about the development type in the subm market, how many affordable units you're supposed to have at various AMI bands if you want, what kind of policies do you want to test, and then on the right that's all sort of on the left and in the sort of dark yellow. And then on the right are the overall
findings of yields and IRR with and without these the policy changes, what the difference is and then some additional other summaries of the costs and benefits of of these incentives and we'll show you some of the the findings uh from at least one example so you can
see kind of the relative impacts. >> So just on this one just a quick orientation. So it looks like the deep mustard color that's sort of guiding the user. These are must fill out sort of cells. And I guess where we're seeing the green and the red is pretty obvious intuitive that this is where you trigger into possible and then this is where
you're probably not likely. The red's not likely. Okay. Thank you. >> Uh next slide. Okay, great. So um oh did so it looked like maybe okay. >> Uh so let's go ahead and now get into some of the findings from the from feasibility with these key questions in
mind. What is the feasibility of a typical project? What has the inclusionary zoning policy done to affect feasibility? How would incentives, tax abatements or others impact feasibility? And lastly,
how are city revenues affected by the use of these incentives? And let's show you what we found. So step number one, we just looked at current condition market feasibility which as noted includes the inclusionary zoning. So
these again are the sort of the typical findings as as mentioned before was like you know red seems bad, green would be good. It this is missing. I'm sorry to say this is what happens when I submit something a week ahead of time is I only in the last in the 11th hour do I realize I missed to adding a key where green is you know green means
effectively you've reached kind of the standard threshold for something to be like likely developable yellow which we kept as actually kind of a wide band is to say look there's a chance that under the right sort of conditions projects of this type have a have a chance of getting built um and then red was like
well boy these look pretty these look pretty tough you know be and effectively What we're seeing is that as of now, new construction feas financial feasibility looks pretty limited and that the only thing that maybe seems to be penciling out or has the chance of penciling under
just the right conditions, especially if the right under the right revenue conditions, would be a high-rise building that has really good rents. And you perhaps can fill in the gaps about what kinds of projects might meet that might meet that criteria today. Um, but lots of lots of rents. And this is
just this has nothing to do this is you know a lot of this is out of Charlottesville's hands. Um but what if we removed inclusionary zoning? What if that had never existed? How would that change um uh financial viability? How big a deal is inclusionary zoning on its
own? And that's the next slide. Well, effectively what we found is I mean this is not it's not a sea change. It's not like all everything turned green, but you see a little bit more a little bit of improvement maybe even in some other kinds of kinds of products,
but in general yields tend to increase by about 50 basis points. IR increasing maybe 2%. Uh it's still pretty difficult though for uh for stuff and uh for stuff to pencil out and it does suggest a need for right now if you want things to get
built that there's there's space to provide incentives or you know or interventions to make projects pencil. All right, next slide. So now we get to tax abatement. We want to talk about two different kinds of approaches today.
Um, one is the what is generally the what people talk about for tax abatement, the the standard is a valuebased abatement, but we also want to sort of I expect introduce folks to this to a to a rent gap abase abatement which I think was originally brought to us through someone from Livable Seville.
Am I is that correct? >> Yeah. So part of the part of the uh you know feedback uh the feedback loop and all all this work when we presented this to Kadre presented to to the hack um uh you know solicited solicited feedback from folks across uh uh city staff um
that was one of the things that that came to us was hey take a look at this at something that Baltimore is doing and and we'll show you a little bit about that but just so you know so that the valuebased abatement is effectively the the abatement is on the improvement value associated with that project i.e.
the the building. So it doesn't care about you know land price the land cost stays the same and the and the tax related land stays the same but what gets abated is the building itself the tax on the building itself. Uh a rent gap abatement very different. It is really focused on the difference between
market rate rents what that what that unit would have rented for if it was offered to the market um and the rent that is mandated as affordable. Right. Right. And that and it so it is an abatement of the gap between those two numbers. All right. So those are the two things we want to show you. I think the
next slide is going to be a summary. Yes, it's a summary table of the val of running the model on an example a mid-rise project in tier in a tier three area. So kind of the average prices, average rents, average land costs. Um
that that was subject to inclusionary zoning and then and then gets an abatement. The rows are different levels of of abatement. Um and as you can see if you look in the first sort of two columns or or columns two and three I should say that you can see that as you
as you add abatement uh increasing the abatement amount you you improve the yields and you improve irr. Um but I also want to note um the next two the next two columns which is maybe another way to evaluate
to the efficacy of this sort of work. If you've mandated that a unit has to be uh offered to someone at an affordable rate you're effect there is an effective like loss in income uh uh or in revenue
associated with with that requirement. And under this particular project, that amounts to $13,000 a month. The abatement return associated with each of these abatement percentages, you can see doesn't get anywhere close to $13,000, right? Full 100% abatement on
all the improvement value. Great. There's still an effective gap between what what the you know the the financial mandate of inclusionary zoning and this in this style of tax abatement. So that that's another way to sort of evaluate h how good is this how good is this uh
program? Um, another way to look at this is, well, this is if we didn't have this abatement and somebody built this project, how much money are we effectively giving away? Because this is one of the things I think folks are concerned about. Are we just giving away money? Well, how much is that? In this
case, uh, this would amount to as much as $50,000 plus in tax revenue waved because of this tax abatement. Now, on the flip side of that, there are lots of times where in some ways what you're trying to do is provide an incentive that creates a unit that otherwise
wouldn't have existed, a project that otherwise wouldn't have existed. So, the other way to look at this is to say, well, how much new tax revenue do you actually still get as a result of this project being ex existing with the presumption that nothing would be there otherwise. And then you can see, well, you can get
maybe as much as 530,000. Maybe it drops down to 5 to490,000, but it's still $490,000 of tax revenue that wouldn't have otherwise been there. Now, of course, there are costs associated with the people who live in this unit, etc., etc., but I mean that it's important, I think, to think about this from multiple scales. A, you know, what are just the
basic financials from the private sector side, which is something you should know about, but doesn't necessarily need to be the only reason that you make a decision. How much are you really giving them relative to what's being lost, and how much are you giving away relative to what you might be getting back in return? So multiple ways of thinking
thinking about this and this is the way in which we hope that this sort of information sort of informs a decision. But let's go ahead and go to the next slide and show the version with with that rent gap where the abatement is tied to the to the gap. So let's say we've said an average rent is $2,500 a month and we're saying that the
affordable rent here is about $1,500 or so a month. I don't I don't remember. I'm sorry off the top of my head. Um and all of these things are built with like you know there's a mix of studio to threebedroom units etc. So this is just an average rent anyway. But now we're abating that difference.
So just by means of example, we're saying there's a $1,000 a month different in difference and we're going to abate somewhere up to that in this just in these cases up to that $1,000. And you can see the yield changes and IRR changes. And if actually do you mind going sort of back and forth between the previous the previous one and this one. So you can see if you just sort of go
back and forth and you're just looking at yield changes and IR changes and keep going back and forth back and forth that the the version in rent gap is actually much higher. uh this is a so this is a much sort of stronger has a much stronger financial impact. Okay, now we can just stay with with rent gap. The
other thing that this does is at least if you did a 100% abatement, the whole point of it is you're giving back the monthly loss. So it's $13,000 loss, it's a $13,000 abatement. That's that's the purpose. It doesn't have to be that number, but you can see you can reach that more easily under this under this
sort of mechanism. Now, that of course means a much higher amount of uh a much higher amount of uh revenue waved uh and effectively lower new tax revenue. But again, it may well be that this sort of this sort of abatement may
increase the probability of a project getting built because you've had a larger financial impact. Okay. >> Can I sorry, can I ask a quick question on that last uh chart? I just want to make sure I understand everything correctly. So this the second to last
column annual revenue wave. That's annual tax revenue that that the city is waiting for. >> And I should have said annual tax revenue waved. Absolutely. Sorry I didn't do that. >> No, that's exactly right. >> Um I have a question about I guess both
of these. Um in terms of the cost to the city of the abatements of of either form, is this looking at the first year the project is built? I I think we're doing a 99-year requirement. Is that right? >> So, is this sort of averaged over 99
years, the first few years? What time frame are we talking about? >> This Well, this would be over the time of the abatement, >> which itself, which itself could be Well, no, you could you could have I mean, you could have an inclusionary zoning requirement for 99 years and have a tax abatement for 6 months. That'd be up to you. This is part of the policy. >> So, what what's modeled here?
>> Uh, this is basically what would happen for the course of the year. >> Okay. So, those costs would presumably the gap narrows every year. you might assume. So this >> it might >> the numbers might depend heavily on the duration of the abatement. Is that correct? >> It would it would depend on the on the
on the duration of the abatement. It would depend on which of which of these methods you use. One that is more focused on the on the existing market rate prices of that particular project would certainly have changes in the in the gap year-over-year. >> And is that is the duration of the
abatement a parameter in Yes. >> the tool? Okay. Great. >> Yes. Yeah. It's not doing it. It's not really ultimately at this at this stage. It's the it's the last thing to tweak. It's not doing a lot of like kind of like net present value changes right now. And it and the the tool itself the
the the way in which that would sort of manifest itself is in um you know like downstream downstream effects and the model maybe too much detail but it's really like it's only looking at 30 years and if you wanted to build it to look at 100 years then you would see more robust. So it it kind of gets
there's a cap on it as it stands for right now. But all those things can be can be changed over time. Yeah. I mean at some stage we were really just looking kind of at a at a macro scale how how valuable is this sort of thing um more than really trying to get down
to say how long should we be doing this for as as of now. All right. So I think we can move on to the to the next sets of slides. So this is just a little bit of like some pros and cons on these two. Um the the number one pro for the valuebased abate abatement it's like that's the standard.
It's the industry standard. It's the one that's tried and true people that that's what you see all over the place. Um but there are a couple of cons associated with it. It doesn't fully close the a market gap. Um and and I think there is a there this is going to be a little like this is not um a technical finding.
This is a little um one could sort of just sort of think through this a little bit logically that the best opportunity is to use an abate like that this that that kind of abatement doesn't look like it's very often going to make a project pencil when it otherwise wouldn't and as such
it may be the kind of thing that's particularly useful in really good market conditions but it doesn't make a huge difference in bad market conditions doesn't um that doesn't mean it's still not beneficial and I'm Sure, there are projects that would be able to become that would pencil that otherwise
wouldn't. It's so this is just sort of probabilistically it may not address some some of these like getting us to the finish line in tough times. Um a rent gap abatement uh the pros really are that because it's tied to market conditions, it really is addressing the financial loss that is associated with
inclusionary zoning. This is I mean in a person could reasonably say this is an unfunded mandate and and doing something that's focused on addressing that unfunded mandate. is probably the best the best way to do that. Um, and this and because it's more robust, it might be more beneficial in in a wider range
of of economic times. Um, so that's good. Uh, the number one con, it's rarely used. We we found this Baltimore example. Our project wasn't to do a deep dive into the Baltimore version. So, this is mostly just trying to get information from them and they were like, "Well, we just sort of started it
and we don't have a lot of results yet because they're dealing with the same macro level housing conditions that Charlottesville is." Um, you know, so there there's probably some some number of administrative hurdles that would exist. I wouldn't I wouldn't say like gung-ho, let's do this, but it is sort of intriguing, but there things that
still have to be have to be figured out. Um, and it doesn't and it still has the same like if it's a very strong market, is it you know, how would you know if it's needed? All right, so uh we can go on to the the sort of wrap-up thing. Oh, sorry. While I mean technically not in our scopes, we didn't go very far down this
path. It was easy enough to sort of program into the tool a couple of other standard kinds of incentives for uh for housing feasibility. So, we built those into the model that includes gap financing and land provision, a reduced
that's really reduced um development review timeline. So, reduced timeline to get things to market and forgivable loans. they're just they're sitting there ready to be used. We've got a couple of examples so you can see oh they also have you know demonstrable improvements on IRR and so it's not surprising that you'll hear that there
are other places that use multiple incentives at once to make something happen and this is part of why there's no no single one that's the silver bullet but these can some of these can be sort of layered on top of each other and the model allows for that. You could turn on two policies at the same time and and see what happens. So that so
that's that's there too. It's just not it hasn't been done in as a robust a manner as some of the other parts. Okay, with that I think I'm on to the the the final the key findings slide. Thank you by the way for giving me so much time to talk about this. I hope it's been helpful. But here are the key
findings. One, market conditions are challenging right now. It's just the case. And inclusionary zoning adds adds a financial burden to that challenge. It just does. Traditional tax abatements can help. There's no question. It's a net positive. Um, but they would look today
to be insufficient on their own. I I don't think you could make a reasonable recommendation that this is a thing that needs to happen today to solve your problem. But you could recommend it today because it can be part of a it can be part of solving problems. Next note is that there may be it may be worth learning a little bit more about
this sort of this rent gap tax abatement model sort of vetting it um you know like with with those who would have to do it. What are the things that we we need to be thinking about as far as as you know, are we missing anything about how this would really work? Are there other kinds of administrative challenges that we would that we would need to
face? Because it does look like it might be a better balance between some of these public and private priorities. It really does help make the make market dynamics sort of the crux of what it is that we're trying to all all work towards. Uh and I think that makes a lot of sense. Saying all that, there may be
other incentives and policies that would be needed to make this work. And lastly, for the purposes of future exploration, future adaptation, this leavebehind tool, I think I hope is a mechanism to to keep this part of the conversation beyond just, you know, the the
submission of our of our report uh later that later this year. I think that's it. Thank you for the time. There is uh I think the final slide just has our our contact information for for me and Mike. It's just our first names at 32 Ventures.
Uh happy to take any questions. Is there going to be a live demo of the tool or um I wasn't sure if that was part >> You want a live demo? We'll do it. >> I was curious uh one of the questions I had and I didn't have a chance to spend time with the tool, but uh do you take into account sort of completion time for
the is escalation built into the tool? >> It is. Okay. So, so you can sort of modify when it would open up. Okay. Yeah. >> Oh, here he is. >> But there were other I think other questions. >> Go ahead. I have a few. I've been I've
been making a pile. >> Thank you. This is exciting. Uh accessibility issue, red green blindness. Um >> Oh, thanks. >> Please. >> Uh >> can do >> developers often will uh when they're crying to me uh will talk about uh the
hurdle rate for a loan that a hurdle rate that you can't just pencil. You have to make enough profit that the the bank gets big feelings and you know makes make them happy. Did you consider that? Well, I would hope that um the Well, I I you know, honestly, I
don't I don't know if we really did the all we really said was that if you reached a particular yield, that might mean that it is likely to be feasible. That that's really the the full extent, but it may well be that this this hurdle rate needs to be something that would be
ultimately included uh in in any other version of this. But at some point, again, this is our interests on I think on the public sector side are a little bit more what what are the tools we have available to us to affect positive change and that
ain't one of them you know talking to the bank isn't one of them and so it's a little bit more like well here here are the impacts of the tool the the tools that we have and and is this you know does this is this worth is this juice you know is this worth the squeeze is juice worth the squeeze
you in order to get an effective um desired yield. >> Did you did you base that all on like current interest rates? Like what like did you use a spread over current interest rates or do you use >> No. And I'd be h and that's that's an
easy thing to change for right now. It really is just like it's just like the sort of red yellow green like oh it's a seven and right now that sounds like that's probably like you know projects like that would be likely to pencil but again this is not you know it's not your particular project right it's sort of a it's sort of a typical >> commissioner has a good point that I
don't think hurdle rate's the right term for for debt but it's >> there's certain spreads that developers and lenders will look at you start a project and so that has to be moving with interest rates because I think you and I talked about 3 years ago something
at a five and 3/4 might have pencled out and now it has to pencil out at like a seven or six and 3/4. >> So um which is why time makes a huge difference. You delay us a year and interest rates move in the wrong direction. >> That's right. >> Okay. Sorry.
>> I would love to have a local person with in-depth knowledge provide some information about that to to me at some point. I won't I won't volunteer anybody but just just making a note for the record. For about oh god five years >> for about five years uh the city of
Charlottesville has been trying to get permission from Richmond uh to do a split rate tax to tax uh la uh land at a lower uh amount than buildings. >> Um the the oh sorry can I see if I can get back land at a higher amount than buildings. There it is. Mhm. >> Um with the hope that this could reduce
the acquisition uh land acquisition costs, uh reduce holding costs, uh and uh improve the profitability of of uh for-profit and nonprofit development. Uh I'm guessing that is not in the model. >> No, because it's right now it's modeling
your existing condition, but if you wanted to change it, then it would Yeah, it's it would just be a field that would get changed. Yeah, no problem. >> Those are all my questions. Thank you. >> I want to say first of all, I really appreciate this tool. I think it's not necessarily the point of the study, but
having this accessible can really help some people that may not understand how these work and be able to build themselves a model this way can really get in here. I haven't yet played around with myself, but just looking at sort of the input screen here, it appeal appears to be relatively straightforward. So, I just want to appreciate that.
>> Thanks. Uh my my comment more is is about you you talked about this a few time that really it's about the delta between with and without that's really what matters in some of your matrices. I'm curious to know
what project return on cost or irr did you pick for those tables that sort of showed the results like I have that um you were showing a half a percent yield on cost improvement and 2% IRRa improvement >> and I think knowing the base yield or
the base IR is important because a change at a 5% IRRa is going to be smaller than the exact same monetary change at a 10% IRRa. So I'm just curious to know what the results of the project were when you started playing around with these.
>> Oh well, so uh there's we we ran that same sort of table on on lots of different scenarios and it sort of can all the automated to do so. And really that was just kind of like a generic kind of finding. Sometimes it was, you know, it would go as high as half a percent. Um and it wouldn't always go to
half a percent. I think that in some ways depends on the the inputs of the project, the project type. But that's, you know, effectively that's all in here. You wanted to you wanted to try and test the the viability of a particular style. Um, then then you would be able to get a sense of that a
little more of that that particular project type. And for what it's worth, there's really nothing to prevent you from making specific changes even away from the typical. So you can see here in the mid-rise tier one project, we're assuming it's 135 units with a ground
parking and uh you know um uh uh three spaces for every four units. So but you could you could go ahead and change those if you wanted to. Uh you would just have to go and hit reset to default at some point to make it go back to the original original typical. So you can try and and mirror some sort of real,
you know, real life project if you want, but it'll never be as robust as the versions that that folks are doing. >> So I'm hearing you say that some of those results slides that you showed isn't necessarily specific to a project, but is sort of a med compared to That's
right. >> the many projects that you looked at. >> That's right. Yeah. >> All right. Thank you. And then last one is when you talk to local developers about this, >> did they give you a delta that they're looking for? >> No. >> That would help. >> No. >> Okay.
>> Uh but but also it wasn't it wasn't asked. Okay. >> Um you I mean we we I think I hope we were we were upfront with folks about what it is we were looking for. We're looking to try and make this thing as as reasonable as as we could um so that it can help inform decisions moving
forward. um as opposed to this being the thing that's like the you know some part of a negotiation that's happening right now to to decide on a number. So that like that kind of question wouldn't even necessarily come up or or that kind of answer wouldn't have come up in the kinds of questions we were asking. >> Okay. Thank you.
>> Yeah. 10 or 12 or something like that. They can change >> because that commissioner agreed with. So the the exit assumed that no real estate the beatment lasted all the way to >> the end of the >> and then you and then you exit. >> Mhm.
>> Okay. You have to pick an exit price. >> Yes. Mhm. >> Did you factor in that the next buyer doesn't have the real estate tax, so their NOI is not going to be as good, so they might not pay the same amount? >> Uh, no it didn't. It didn't. and and uh
>> yeah, I mean I think these are it's a really good example of some of sort of like the the real world issues here that I think will are always going to be kind of project specific because truth be told the chances that I'm exactly right about what the rents were for this project in year 11 are like zero right I mean so all of them are just kind of
assumptions and under under this sort of modeled environment what what is it that we find >> you grew did you grow did you grow rent every year and other opex every year but kept Real estate taxes. >> The real estate taxes are are are
related to the only time we care. Yeah. The >> the real estate taxes are related to the assessed value of the property. Um so they should be rising uh every year. >> Full maintenance. So they should be zero. >> Oh well yeah sure. But well so it it
comes up with the assessed value you know so that if it's if it wants to be sold at any given month it can be um and but then yeah then it red then it removes the whatever the amount of the abatement is um that's required. Yeah, cuz I appreciate because
>> the benefit of this is >> Jeeoff if this is going to continue. Um I mean could you actually just come to the microphone so at least the everyone can get the benefit of your questions? >> I'm not really there wasn't scheduled for this. Um >> but if it's well I mean it seems like it's useful information but I also feel
like it's um anybody listening in is going to have no idea what's going on. >> Okay. probably doing something that I'm not supposed to, but it's still >> I know you were part of this process. >> 600 West Main Street. Um, okay. So, we were talking about, uh, in an assumption
for to get an IRA, you have to assume some exit date, whatever that is. >> So, um, so you picked a date like 10 years and through that the real estate taxes were zero, I guess, right? Because you had a full abatement. Well, they were related on what on whatever you
whatever you actually put in for the for the abatement. >> You can you can set the you can set the abatement. You can turn it on or off and then set the percentage. >> Right. But you were showing how the abatement doesn't help that much necessarily in getting that different yield
>> up. But I'd like to look because what happens is real estate taxes are like 33% of our opex or something. Yeah. So if that stays at zero and doesn't grow and we can control other opex
>> and grow our rent then maybe that gap is you said you didn't use the net present values for example >> so I I think we have and it's also goes to irr like if you can exit in five years there's just a lot of variables other
than other than just like the going in yield on cost >> and also how you can go over time and get the benefit of the real estate tax abatement versus maybe two, three, four years. And also how the burning off of it
kind of decreases value. It also seems you also did net present value that when it burns off and the city gets the real estate taxes for let's say the 20 years and you net present value that versus the real estate taxes on that piece of property today.
my my economics have shown sometimes it's like an 8 to 10x of what they get today. Like they get 40 grand and over the time they would get 400 grand. >> So um that would be a good thing to factor. And also I would really change your naming of it because I don't I
don't think the city's giving anything up. I think it's a city investment in its infrastructure just like a bridge or anything else. I think that um this and this is a place for cities to make investments because of housing shortage
um and the other economic benefits that kind of flare out from housing. So um the the giving I think paints it in like you know developers are out here like you know give me something. I think it's really just the city invests right now in affordable housing and the city
invests a lot of different ways in city infrastructure. this is just another way. So, >> Oh, for sure. Yeah. But I just I I want I I want to be respectful of the wide range of opinions about this and that's in some ways why that is mentioned. I I I I'd like there to be if if you look at
this through a you know through a a developer lens, what does it tell you? If you look at it through a a person who's skeptical about development lens, what does it what does it tell you? And as long as I think as long as we're we're trying to go go through it the the widest list we can of the the ways in which this can be viewed that that's
that helps get to I mean I don't mind at all and I'm not debating but I'm just I'm just you kept using giving you and I was sitting there and I was like >> it's really because I'm thinking about the philosophical part of this and I'm thinking about people watching it and I'm thinking about people going
>> why do these people need and and I don't think it's a giving I think it's a it's an engine it's an impetus It's it's what cities do to drive the engine of the economy and um >> that's
thank you. >> Yeah. No, no, no. Well said. >> Any other planning commissioner questions or comments? >> Well, I just again looking at the presentation, you started with the yield on cost with just the market feasibility. You just did the analysis saying like guess what? It's hard to build right now. You did another one
that you sort of took the same sampling and you said, you know, if we removed inclusionary zoning, it kind of moves but not in a fundamental way. Did you think about overlaying the same data set through the rent gap and through the other one just a couple scenarios just
to sort of visually continue that thread saying that with these things look at things turn green. You know, I was just curious if that thread would be helpful. Uh granted it's different once you actually look at real projects but just to sort of give a case point to show those baseline and how it plays out.
>> Uh no I I could imagine that that being helpful um as as as a visual aid um and only just in the sense that because these are all sort of typicals and rounded numbers. I I I wouldn't want to sort of overemphasize like aha doing
this at this exact percentage is the is the solution to this problem that makes >> I wonder if it's like a matrix. it's like six runs and you show how you mess with it, those things can start to shift and there could be avenues if you really drill down on the numbers to change the landscape. So,
>> no, I think I think there's plenty of evidence that that these can can change the landscape, especially if you are savvy enough to make put things that do things at the right time and take advantage of them in the in in the right way. Yeah. And I think in some ways this tool will never be able to capture all of that stuff, nor really I think should
it necessarily necessarily attempt to. I think in some ways it's just it's good to know that there's there's merit in an abatement. It's not a it's not a cure all. Those who want to take advantage of it, I I bet can do can do great things with it and maybe make make positive change.
>> And this last question I had was not about this tool or the study. This question for Kelly and NDS was did the city and again this is very naive but this is new construction, new rental construction. Has there been any precedent or exploration of tax incentivization around existing
inventory, ways to create abatements to take existing stock, give owners a reason to maybe lower the rent um and offer them at a lower rent? >> No, we haven't considered any sort of policy in that vein.
>> Did you have any examples of where that's been done elsewhere? something I've just thought about if there was a way to I've seen other sort of tax abatements for other investments or other sort of whether it's sustainable or um >> storm water or other things. I was just curious if there was a way to say hey if
you shave your rent down on your existing rental property you would maybe pay less property tax or something and again I'm not sure it's different because you're >> this is net new revenue that you're basically giving some back. This would be taking existing revenue and decreasing it but >> it's the same type investment that I think Jeff was talking about. Yeah, it's
an interesting idea for sure. The only thing that I'm familiar with is tax abatement programs or tax credit programs for making um investments in the property uh like rental rehab type >> credit programs, but nothing that would
seek to reduce the the rent. So, it's it's an interesting concept, something we can think about. >> I just think building is tough right now. So, is there a way to sort of crack this nut looking at existing inventory? Yeah. just occurred to me uh it's often hard
to work across silos uh really in any organization. Uh we have a an economic development uh team uh here at the city. They're very good at problems like this. Uh have they looked at this? >> Yes, they have. They've been involved. Chris Angel staff and the tax assessor's office was involved in some of this.
Helped set cap rates and exit cap rates and some of this some of the financial details. Yeah, lots of folks been involved. I've got a question. I'll I'm trying not to ask a policy question because I know you didn't look at policy or like what's what's the right policy, but I think the
and you didn't look at kind of the burden to administer an abatement program, but I do think that is something that we will probably want to consider and council want to consider, but looking at the three um example cities and there's sort of like the two strategies, the traditional tax
abatement and then there's the rent gap abatement. Could you just kind of summarize how like how does a traditional abatement actually get operationalized? Like I'm building a project. So do like does the city have
to tell me um here's the percent or the the of of the future tax revenue that we will refund to you or and then is there something that has to happen every year in a city department to make sure that this is administered? And then similarly
with rent gap like does that have to is that a a oneanddone calculation or it happens every single year? >> No, I think all those are are are done are done annually and there's compliance components to all this stuff. I I I I won't pretend that I'm an expert in in the administration of of this stuff for sure. So there we're reaching the end of
the things where I think I'm the I'm the number one choice for doing this stuff. Um but yeah, I mean it is certainly an ongoing uh administrative burden on both sides. Um you I can at least tell you sort of anecdotally one of the things here. So as cool as it is to say, "Hey, we made
you whole through this rent gap method, there are other costs besides just those that that come up with with the creation of the requirement of affordable housing that may not necessarily just be shown on a on a proform spreadsheet. That are the kinds of things that that will come
up if you wanted to go down this path. And you know some of them have obvious financial costs and some have you know karmic costs to deal with just you know the headache costs to deal with but the they're all real any additional component that you're putting on to folks who are just trying to it you know
often times just return the debt that they that they acrewed by loaning the money from somebody else right these are major projects every one of these examples are you know seven eight sometimes nine figure projects no one has that money it's all loan from someone else and you know often times the capital that you're raising does not
care about the policy that you've put in place. It's looking for a return and and then that the the the burden of getting to that return is on the is on the developer and that's just like a real hurdle they've got to deal with and anything you're adding on to that uh probably has a has a additional cost
beyond just the financial one. >> Any other questions? >> Um I think I have two actually short ones. Um, one just so that I understand, you have in the matrix an entry for single family homes, but comes into play for 10 or more units. That's right.
>> Is that talking about a cluster of 10 plus single family homes or what does that mean? >> I I I think at this stage it's it was just a it's a kind of like a placeholder. Are there are there real world situations where you could have this be applied to single family housing
or is this this is the portion that was assessing the market in general? >> So the scope of study for the tax abatement study was really to look at um where the city policy comes into play requiring um affordable units and that's
at 10 plus units. Um so we did not look at the potential for tax evatement on those um on on infel projects. >> That's that's my confusion because there's a row in the output for that. >> We still wanted to know that we still wanted to know the the feasibility. >> Okay.
>> But it wouldn't really come into play. >> It wouldn't really I think in in in reality it would not come into play. These are sort of like yeah >> that makes sense. That's why I was confused. And then I think >> and maybe should be honestly maybe should be removed from that matrix truth be told for that reason. Um, and then
really quick, I think this is a question for staff. Um, just to sort of sanity check the the modeling that you're doing and saying, okay, most most land tiers and most top apologies are not feasible to build right now. How many units are in the pipeline under the new zoning
ordinance as of now? I think we uh have worked through um review of two or three units. >> Oh, units not develop. Okay. >> Not not a lot. Okay. So, >> it is red indeed. >> Um thank you.
>> Sure. And I guess Yep. Your turn. >> Yeah. Thank you. I decided it didn't make sense for me to sit back down again. Um, so, uh, Kelly Brown, NDS director again, and I am here to present another, um, uh, presentation as kind of
part of the NDS report, um, on, uh, a another study that we are, uh, getting ready to embark upon, um, looking at our, um, affordable dwelling unit manual, uh, with a specific focus on the Inloo fee requirements for, uh, student
housing and non- studentent housing. Um so I have a presentation to share that um provides an overview of some background on the topic of student housing and um and what we're looking at in this study
um a timeline and really hoping that it can be an opportunity for um planning commission to provide uh some feedback on the scope of work to really inform the study approach moving forward and desired outcomes. and we would be returning to you with um updates um once
the study is underway. Um so again, what I'd like to try to share with you today is some background on student housing, some initial observations on um areas of concern or or or questions for um what we want from
our policies for um requirements of in fees for student housing and non- studentent housing moving forward. um what we have proposed as a scope of work for study um an approach to community engagement um some potential options uh really one set of options that we may
want to test um through through this study um and a timeline uh for that work. So go ahead Patrick you can keep moving. All right. So, just by way of um history of student housing uh here in
Charlottesville, um UVA enrollment growth has steadily increased and uh increase the demand for student housing. Um as many of you know, um students historically really lived on grounds in a limited capacity. Um and then also in
older apartment complexes near UVA. Um that includes in converted single family homes and small apartment buildings. Um, and what we're seeing recently as enrollment has grown um, and uh, construction costs combined with
feasibility of development has changed over time, private developers are now stepping in and building purpose-built student housing um, around grounds. Um, within walking distance to ground seems to be a really important consideration. Um, another key feature is the provision
of fourbedroom units allowing for rental by the bedroom. You can keep going, Patrick. Uh so this is by no means a comprehensive assess market assessment of student housing um or really a comprehensive assessment of supply and
demand but just some some kind of highle statistics to provide some foundation for understanding um what the what the city is really facing in terms of need for student housing um and you know how that's being met. So, total
undergraduate and graduate enrollment at uh UVA, uh one statistic I found online was 26,470 students. Um unfortunately, I broke a cardinal rule and did not document my source when I put that on the slide. Um
if you go on the UVA website, um and looks at their quick facts and figures, it puts it closer to 27,000 actually, 18,000 undergrad, 9,000 graduate. Um so um you know we're we're really kind of within that that ballpark hopefully um
in terms of the statistics we can find online. 7,000 beds approximately are on grounds 4,000 for first year students. Um the 2030 plan that UVA um is following really aspires to house all first year and second year students on
grounds. Um there are five projects currently under construction offgrounds um that are looking to meet um some additional need. Um this map here shows the locations as you you know as I mentioned previously
they really are hugging close to um that that that proximity to the university. Um but a total of um a little over 3,500 additional beds. Um so there is still quite a bit of unmet um demand so to
speak for housing. Um many students are still living uh in uh in residential neighborhoods and in the county as well. You can keep going. Um in terms of definitions of student housing in the
development code, um it is defined as projects that run by the bedroom within a half mile of campus grounds. Um some other things to understand about student housing. Um national reports note again as I mentioned previously there is a trend a desire for private
bedrooms and bathrooms high-end amenities um really to locate these um near campus. If you can get uh commercial development on the ground floor like you see there in that um Jolly Roger and Greensboro example. I think that's commercial space. Hard to
tell. Um that's that's a great thing. Um and it is it is happening that sort of development is happening here in Charlottesville. Um but around the country as well. Keep going. Uh so um you've seen this slide before
just by way of context I did want to share that um you know we are looking at the development code at policies and regulations that were established when we adopted it in 2023 and seeing you know what's working not. Uh hopefully
we're going to get to the opportunity tonight for you to consider um um many uh uh tier one and tier two recommendations for development code changes. Tier three studies are really much broader in scope. You can keep
going actually Patrick. Um um require a lot of um engagement and thought for how the process should lay out to look at key questions and develop recommendations. Um so looking at the um affordable dwelling unit manual and this
question of student housing actually really does represent a tier three study that um we have determined is was appropriate to bring forward as a priority on our work plan having housing now part of NDS and also given a number
of questions about our student housing policies um as the new development code is looking to be implemented. keep going. Uh so just a little bit more background as well. Um as as you all know there are
a lot of provisions in the development code for um what intensity of development is located in different places. housing is located um located in all is it I'm sorry is it permitted in all districts
>> except for the industrial district even >> yes >> so housing is permitted pretty much everywhere um there are a number of overlay districts um that govern some special features and special requirements
um such as our entrance corridors, our architectural design control districts um There is no specific overlay district for where student housing can and can't be built. It's just that a specific geography was established for where you
need to require a different um type of inlue fee if you're not providing affordable dwelling units. So, I think that's just important to understand that it's not um that we are permitting student housing in some places and not in others. It's actually permitted everywhere. Um
and we need to make sure that we are pro not um restricting different types of housing. Um it's just that we created this geography to govern um how we are uh allowing for affordable an infee
payment for affordable housing. Keep going. And so these are the specifics on that policy. um the affordable housing requirements that is for um non- studentent housing so residential development generally any project that
provides more than 10 units um is required to provide 10% of units um at 60% of the AMI or less or pay an inlue fee bonuses uh for units is permitted if you are providing um those affordable
units at 50% of the AMI or you have to pay the same fee uh for non- studentent housing that inl fee is equal to the average total cost per unit of developing a residential unit in the Charlottesville market based on a bedroom count up to three units. So
basically the con construction cost uh for student housing the requirement is different. Again I I I described the um the definition of student housing. Um for student housing actually no affordable units are required on site um
but you may achieve bonus height um and an inloo fee is required. The inloo fee for student housing is different. That is based on the difference between the value of a market rate unit and that of an affordable unit which we um have used the term value gap to describe that.
Keep going. >> Yep. I' I've heard this um described as a ban on affordable housing within a half mile of uh the university. Is that accurate or how how would you distinguish it? >> Well, so if it is student housing, then
no on-site units uh no affordable on-site units are to be built. If it's non- studentent housing, then the requirement um applies. So, it's not a ban per se, but if student housing is the more attractive
option to be built, then yes, you're not going to see affordable units built in those locations. Um, so in terms of a rationale for the, you know, what why why do we why do we have this this approach? Um, the the rationale um from when these uh requirements were
established was that student housing projects simply do not typically include non- studentent housing. Um, this is really because that student housing program is very unique. Um, it's designed to be to offer rental by the bedroom for students. Um, and there are
are obviously parental preference, student preferences for for what those living conditions and amenities look like. So, you're just not going to see non- studentent housing included in a in a student housing project. Um and so because of that there was a de it was deemed appropriate to not require um
on-site affordable units. Um and so because of that in looking at different um methods of calculating an inlue fee, when you compared the construction cost approach to the value
gap approach and the value gap approach was found to be lower, that was determined to be a more appropriate requirement because if you're not requiring affordable on-site affordable units, then how can you have a in fee requirement that's as high as the um
inley fee? requirement for non- studentent housing. Did that make any sense at all? >> Because it's hard to communicate. >> I think the essentially >> what you said makes sense. The philosophy I'm not sure makes sense. >> Yes, essentially a lower fee requirement was deemed appropriate given the lack of
an on-site affordable unit requirement. So that was then and of course this is where we are now and we're, you know, trying to determine if that still makes sense or if we should consider some other approaches. Um we can keep going.
Um in terms of that geography of where those that requirement um is applied, um it was determined that um that that requirement for student housing within a half mile radius of of central grounds
would be um essentially defined by the location of north grounds and central grounds through our zoning map where there is no zoning for those parcels and then a half mile radius outside um of that of those boundaries. Um, and so any project that comes
forward in that area, if it is proposing student housing, there is no on-site requirement for affordable units and the lower inlue fee requirement kicks in. Keep going. So, some initial
observations and concerns. Um, and I've alluded to some of them. Uh, number one, there's an inconsistent inlue fee payment actually structure for for bonus height. Um, so that's something that I just mentioned briefly, but if you are
um gaining bonus height, there is no um requirement that you pay an additional amount in an inlue fee to achieve that bonus height, despite the fact that if you were providing on-site units, they would have to be at the 50% AMI rather than the 60% AM AMI.
Um, in terms of just the student housing requirements specifically, um, there's a the lack of requirement for an on-site unit really limits as as you were just pointing out new affordable using affordable housing where student housing is the most financially feasible
reinvestment option. Um, student housing has a lower perm cost requirement for an enl fee. So that further incentivizes student housing. Um there's no consideration for conversions to non- studentent housing, no consideration for four-bedroom units, which is what we're seeing the most of.
Um and this this geography that was established uh that this policy apply within that halfmile radius really starts to impact neighborhoods where displacement is a concern. >> Can I really quick? >> Sure. >> Um when you say no consideration for
fourbedroom units, what does that mean? There's no number in the chart. What does someone pay to build a fourbedroom unit? >> So, right now we we don't we simply don't have um a metric that can be used. >> We we have to use the three-bedroom
calculation. So, that's something that just really more than anything else needs a a fix in the in the near term because we're seeing fourbedroom uh applications come forward. >> Keep going, Patrick. So um as I mentioned previously as we
look at what the scope of study should be uh for this effort um it is u part of an annual review that is required of the affordable dwelling unit um manual um but we are really using this review uh as an opportunity to focus in on refine
studying and potentially refining expectations for inlue fee payments broadly but bonus height bonus height projects specifically and also student housing. Uh so our next steps or what we're really proposing as the scope of work for this effort is um to try to answer a
number of questions through uh research um and analysis. Um we have hired 3TP u to actually help us with this. So they've left the room but um they'll be coming back I think at some point um to provide um a report on their findings on
this topic of um the inloo fees and student housing specifically. So um they will be for example updating the model to include student housing um and so that we can really uh determine um what approach to requirements for an inlue
fee payment provides this the best balance of incentivizing production of on-site units without limiting development feasibility. Um we'll also be looking at whether the current inlue fee payment structures accurately reflect con construction costs and the value gap method that's been proposed.
So just some basic kind of factchecking there. what are other Virginia jurisdictions doing? You know, what are the kind of the best practices? But then kind of zooming out, we're also we also want to take time in this study to make sure we have the right
understanding of what our goals are, what the guiding principles should be for developing some recommendations. Um so, uh what are the city's goals for student housing? Where do we think it should be located? um to the extent that that's something that we have power to control.
Um should an inly payment be greater for bonus height than for non-bonus height? Um so those are all questions that we want to ask through some engagement with key stakeholder groups and broad engagement. Um you can keep going Patrick. And so speaking of engagement
and stakeholders, um certainly uh want to make sure that our uh key commissions have an awareness and understanding of the scope of work. Uh we'll be engaging with property owners with UVA um Elmoral County, TJ, PDC, uh and advocacy
organizations to get their input on, you know, what are the answers to those questions about our goals and guiding principles. Uh we're doing outreach to commissions. um happy to report that we'll be using our new social um digital engagement platform, Connect Charlottesville, uh to do some digital
outreach that um hasn't been as easy for us to do in the past. Um just as a side note, um Connect Charlottesville is live. Um it it right now is really just focused on a number of um ongoing projects in NDS. Um that has been
something that OSA Kinlotan in our long-range planning group has truly led um uh that effort to make that uh happen for us. So check it out when you have a chance. Um but this study will be um featured in Connect Charlottesville as
an opportunity to get um to provide feedback. Um and then we'll do some focus groups and and pop-up visits as well with different groups that might be able to give some input. and and really the key questions I for the community and for stakeholders are what do you think is the most important
outcome for this policy? What should it accomplish for the community and what are some what are the impacts or unintended consequences that we want to try to avoid. So, one set of potential options that we could explore and and a lot of these are simply crosswalks from uh some of the
issues that I identified previously um would be to study the creation of an inl payment structure that increases the requirement for bonus height to reflect that the on-site requirement for bonus height is 50% of AMI, not 60% of AMI. Um, as it pertains specifically to
student housing, um, consider requiring on-site units for student housing. Just because developers won't build them doesn't mean that we shouldn't have a requirement. Um, especially if there's an an option to provide an inlue fee payment instead. Um,
I think that, you know, some advantages of that of exploring that approach are that it would address the potential for conversions to non- studentent housing. That's been raised as a concern. Um, and also would allow for on-site units, affordable units when financial market
conditions are favorable to that. Um, add an infee requirement for four-bedroom units. That's kind of a must do. Um, and then really consider that geographic criteria. Um, is there still a need given the potential merit of making the um, requirement for non-
studentent housing the same as for student housing? Um, are there other reasons to maintain a geographic boundary for some, you know, other reason? Um, and I think, you know, the merit of this is that it removes that unintended build student housing. And
then for all housing projects, I think, and this is a good tie-in with the tax abatement uh, presentation you just received, you know, consider if there are some strategies to help offset the costs associated with affordable housing production um, and facilitate investment. And that's I think there's
more to come on that topic. So in terms of our timeline, uh we have brought the consultant on board to start to do some of that um back of the house research. Uh update continue to update that model. Um look at what other jurisdictions are doing and um and try
to figure out what are the right approaches to help balance prod. Sorry, every time I do this, I can't help thinking about 67. Sorry. >> Oh, I know. >> Having kids. >> I feel you.
>> Um, what is in in the next part of this process, we will really do that stakeholder engagement that I mentioned to try to get feedback on guiding principles and then in the spring, we're hoping to be able to develop some recommendations for policy refinements
and amendments as needed. So, I think that brings me to the end of my presentation. >> Questions? Wow. >> Are there any sort of quick tweaks we could do to just get something rolling? Um, I'm I'm concerned that uh we're the
build cycle is sort of annual. Uh, since acting in spring means we're we're losing another year. >> Say that again about this cycle. So there's generally um you you generally want to get your uh approval done like in the winter or early spring so you can
start construction then be done before the next winter. Uh otherwise you're in for another winter of construction. It's you're you're in you're in a bad position. >> Um is it is there anything we can do to to tweak this faster to to get something rolling? >> Yeah. In terms of developing the the the
big picture policy, I think we want to make sure we take our time to do that so that the recommendations are in line with what the community as a whole really sees as appropriate, but I think we can take that back and think about if there's any little changes that could be made immediately. I think that's a good question to to flag.
>> This is 2026, not 2027, right? For when you guys are you're planning to have this wrapped up in a couple months. >> Yes. >> Okay. >> Yes. Hopefully that's what the presentation said. >> It is. Yeah, I mean we are from a yes >> that it's helpful perspective that this
is a pretty short time frame all things considered to try to get something done recognizing it's an issue. Um, I've got it's not really a question, just a thought. Um, because I think this is really important obviously in the neighborhoods especially surrounding
UVA. Um, and seeing kind of witnessing the discussions and conflicts between the LV Collective and then the um, Fightfield project. I feel like the the
diagram showing the boundary was reflect it was just like a parallel line. Maybe in talking to neighborhoods there's ways to adjust the line based on, you know, often we have like
hillsides or train tracks or like maybe bus stops. you know, other ways that we could refine that um mapping to be more in line with what how where neighborhoods see that divide because I think what we're seeing is that, you know, Main Street has very
different neighborhoods adjacent. Um, and maybe there's some neighborhoods that have more room for student housing that might be >> outside of that, but has a great, you know, great bus system and great more potential for walking to commercial or
whatever it is. So, um, anyway, I' I'd just be interested in looking at that as a >> um potential place for feedback from neighborhoods. >> Yeah, that's that's helpful. Good feedback. I don't know if I have this fully
formed, but um you know, I think the fourbedroom was a great pickup on your part because you're correct. I think those units and I think there's five bedroomedroom units in some of those developments, too. So, I think >> getting ahead of that, I think to Lyall's point about trying to do something quickly. It seems like a smart
thing to sort of incorporate. Um >> what I was trying to figure out is it seems like we just saw we were showing how building's tough right now. It seems like some of these loopholes actually making student housing maybe less difficult to build and we're seeing it uh with bricks and mortar going up. Um
I'm curious is looking at affordability and looking at these new products being offered that are approximate to grounds that are solely geared really towards a student experience because they're, you know, by a bedroom, not by a unit. And um I'm curious about what the sort of
the ripples are to existing historic student housing and should the city put a bullet point on here to cast what incentives can go in some of these historic neighborhoods, these single family that once were single family homes that have been subdivided into student houses. Is there a pathway for
those land owners to maybe return those into market rate housing instead of student housing? And you know, I just wonder if there's some part of the student housing study that sort of looks a broader net that's not just new development, but it sort of helps restore some communities that again were
historically single family homes or or multif family homes and weren't just student properties. I don't know what that is if it's a text. Again, going back to what we were talking about before, but >> I think you know whenever we do a study like this, it always um raises
additional questions, right? or areas of study or exploration. So perhaps that is um something that could be added is just simply a note that while we may want to keep the scope of this contained and be able to bring forward recommendations that meet this very specific need, it
could flag some areas for additional study in the future. >> So that's a good and that's a good example of one I think >> um for my sake and as well as the public's sake. I think I heard you say a couple times there's this distinction
between the geographical boundary for the ENLU fee versus the definition of student housing. From my understanding of what you just said, student housing is really just defined as rental by the bedroom. >> Or is there more to it than that?
>> And well, it's only referred to in the development code as rental by the bedroom and located within a half mile um >> within the boundary. within that boundary. Yes. Excuse me. >> It's only connected to the inclusionary
zone. It's not that that's the only time. >> We don't have a definition for student housing as like a a use that's permitted in some areas and not in others. >> Yeah. So, that's going to be the my follow-up question was you had also said that student housing is permitted citywide,
>> right? There's no restrict. So then the difference really is is inside the boundary is what sort of inloo fee. >> Yes. >> Okay. >> That's the extent of the >> and some of the concerns you've brought up is that potentially that inluff fee inside the boundary is over
incentivizing the creation of student housing versus some other forms of housing. >> Yes, that's correct. >> Okay. Thank you. Sure. Um, so I don't want to repeat a previous question, but maybe to add to it. Um, again, the previous topic was about the high cost of building in
Charlottesville. I think all the changes I'm hearing in in this presentation would increase fees. Um, we're adding more fees for higher bedroom counts, which by the way makes sense, but the effect is to make the fees higher given
what's being built. um changing the fees for the height bonus units again makes sense but the effect is to raise ISD fees and then I think maybe the biggest change I heard was and again I I get the
idea to harmonize inloo fees for student housing and non- studentent housing but it sounds like the inloo fees are much much higher for non- studentent housing like doubling your chart >> if you harmonize those by raising student housing inloo fees fees to match
non- studentent housing fees. You're talking about doubling them. Um, and that that seems really challenging to square with 3TP's previous presentation about how is already a material burden on
development such that we have three units in the pipeline citywide, >> right? Um, I think harmonizing by lowering the non- studentent housing fees to ma in loo fees to match the student housing fees makes a lot of sense. It lowers costs and I think I
think the rent gap just makes sense conceptually in a way that construction costs I don't personally get why that would be the model but I just I would like to hear more about h how we expect h how do we square we want to make development more feasible
with every knob we're turning makes development cost more under this plan if I'm reading it right which maybe I'm not. >> Yeah, just a clarification there. I don't think we know yet that it would be appropriate to bring the requirement for in uh for student
housing up to the same level as what is currently required for non- studentent housing nor that the current expectation for non- studentent housing is appropriate either. Um, so maybe that's something I can clarify in this presentation, but we will be looking at the inloo fee expectations for both
student housing and non- studentent housing to see if it's if it is providing the right balance of um promoting the provision of on-site units and still supporting the production of housing period. So we will
look at both of those questions and we just don't know yet. But another point to make is that I think a key question that we will be trying to raise through our engagement is what what are we trying to do here exactly with these inl expectations? Are we trying to
you know increase revenue for uses elsewhere? are we trying to um promote the production of on-site units or you know I I so I think those they're all still really open questions that were >> okay just just so I'm clear what I'm
hearing you say is that to har the possibility of harmonizing student housing and non- studentent housing inl fees might look like raising student fees to meet non- studentent or lowering non- studentent to meet student and those are both on the table >> yeah okay great other questions.
Um I I assume we'll have the chance to like weigh in on the in the the engagement port or the stakeholder engagement that looked like on the timeline was like February or something. So I guess will we have a chance like a work session or something to give
feedback to the study team? There will definitely be opportunities for additional engagement um and to weigh in Yes. on the the guiding principles and the goals uh for sure. >> Right. Great. >> Yeah. >> Any others?
>> All right. Oh, sorry. >> Go ahead. >> I don't have time to restudy it because I don't look at this very often and it's long. Uh but uh the the affordable housing plan is the best guide that I that I have on on those topics of what are we doing and why are we doing it. Um it's not terribly specific in some areas
which can create challenges for us and has >> that's that's what I have today. >> Yep. That's a good reminder. We do have some comp plan guidance to help us know how to move forward. >> All right. >> All right. >> Thank you very much.
>> Thank you. >> Um so now we have matters presented by the public. not on the formal agenda. So, um the zoning code uh text amendments will be a public hearing. So, um there will be a time to speak to that, but if anybody in the audience or
online has um wants to say anything that is not related to the zoning code text amendments, uh now would be the time. Um Dan, can you moderate that? >> Sure. So, if you'd like to speak in matters to the public, you may step forward and please provide your name. Um, if you are online, you can press the
raise hand icon and I will call your name out um, so you can speak and you have three minutes. Hi, Jeff Leavine again. Tonight's very interesting because what's laid out to you and you're really tuning into it.
the development community, the people who go into business to do this, they follow a the path of less resistance and b how they get an economic return on their risk and their capital. If you look at just everything that's been laid out, the structure is to build
affordable housing or maybe hospitality. Actually, one of my sites I pivoted from residential to hospitality because the economics didn't work. So things can work if you make the inloop payment so high, but you combine it with a real estate tax abatement
that's given if we build affordable housing and the math works, we'll be more inclined to build affordable housing because the math works. I will tell you that almost in every instance it probably pays to pay the
payment in le because you have no burden of that lowcost housing that you basically have to give away and you can finance that inlue thing and that's I want to talk to Jeremy about that in his model because his model always contemplates that you're building these
and you're getting less revenue which drags it down and so you need this tax abatement. There are ways what I'm saying is to put these together and I don't know if every department head is thinking collectively because also our code is meant to have density
and to go tall where you get the most bang for your buck. If you can if you can use a halfacre an acre parcel to build 300 units versus 12 acres building only three stories that's where you get the best bang for your buck. But our
code are Oh, I'm not supposed to talk about the code, but but if if you help the economics for larger projects, high-rise projects to give you the most bang for your buck, that helps. And if this amorphous thing not called the
code worked in a way that actually worked for an urban setting and wasn't laid out for basically green space because I'm going through it now where the code is just very difficult to navigate for urban sites that are made for the most density.
If the everybody spoke together about what everybody wants and what I constantly hear is the city wants housing. They want affordable housing, market rate housing. And what we've heard tonight, none of that is being built. Student housing is being built.
Some hospitality is being built. And you had a great point. The thought of raising in thought of raising any fee um and anything that makes this more complex, which are which are that thing out there called the code has made this even more complex to go through site plan approval and everything and adding
time. We're not together the private public sector and all the public heads on looking to get what we want. Right now there's this vision of encouraging development and everything in place does not do that.
>> Thank you. >> Thank you, Mr. >> Chair. I see no additional speakers and no raised hands online. >> All right. hand just shot up. >> Oh, okay. Uh, Valerie Long,
you may speak now. >> Thank you very much. Good evening, commissioners and staff. This is Valerie Long. I'm at Williams Mullen. I've enjoyed watching the reports this evening and appreciate the thoughtful comments that have been provided. I wanted to just provide some comment to
the most recent discussion you just had about the fee and loo rates for affordable or for student housing relative to non- studentent housing and the perception that it creates an incentive for student housing to locate
in certain areas so they can take advantage of the lower fees. Um, in our experience, we work with a lot of the large national student housing developers find that they are focused almost entirely on location.
Finding a location that is strategic for their market, finding a willing seller, and finding a seller who will uh work with them on a price that actually pencils. Most of the time by the time they uh find us and we're talking to
them, they've heard, "Oh, there's some sort of affordable housing requirement. We don't know what it is." Usually, they assume it's a requirement for a certain number of affordable units. We spent a fair amount of time educating them on all of the types of things that Director
Brown discussed today about the differences for Fe and Lou, where you can do units, where you can't do units, and what the different schedules are, and why they're different, and how it works, and why is there not a fourbedroom option, and all those things. They don't know any of that information. They certainly factor it
into their budget and their purchase price, but they don't start by looking at where can we go and develop student housing in the city and pay the least amount of money for our fee in L. That is definitely an afterthought. It is
obviously an important figure, but they don't start there. They're focusing on location. Thank you. >> Thank you. See, James Snder has a raised hand.
James, you can unmute now. >> Yes. Uh my name is James Snyder. Um I with uh I have a home at 206B Fifth Street Southwest. It's one of six units on a third of an acre called Oaklan
Cottages. Across the street are another six units on a third of an acre called Oakrove Cottages. And next door to us is a three-story uh condominium flat called Fifth Street Flats. These were all built 20 years ago
by a local developer and a local architect and they define what you're trying to get through your missing middle um effort. Unfortunately, they along with some historic homes on Fifth Street have been reszoneed to RX5
seven stories. They are damaging our property because with no setbacks, someone can come in and build student housing right next to our property line. And we have been asking since June to get this fixed. We
are the poster child of what you're trying to get done. you've together we have more units by several times built that define missing middle than you're getting built through all this time and effort out in the neighborhoods. We have
requested and had no response to how can we get our zoning fixed. It's going to create hardship on us. It's going to create disinvestment. It damages our property by removing any setbacks requirement. You have hundred-year-old homes which
are historic or contributing on Fifth Street which are now zoned for several stories. We're right next to the railroad tracks and you also have very high density tall buildings being built next to the railroad tracks. You may not know this, but the state of Virginia
hopes to include a passenger line from Charlottesville towards Richmond and and further east. These developments being built right on the property lines are going to make that eventual improvement to the Charlottesville station impossible. And the city has not
coordinated with the Virginia Passenger Rail Authority, which is a state agency that owns the property. They really don't know anything about what you're doing. There's some serious things that need to be looked at here. And while we're talking about bits and pieces and
studies and more consultants, some basic things like reszoning us back to what we should be so we can help show off what missing middle can be in terms of scale and livability. Instead, we've been punished with this out of the blue seven
stories RX5 zoning. We've been we've been talking, we've been at meetings, we've had no formal response from the staff. We've heard on occasion from the council, the planning commission, the board of architecture review concerns about, well, that's terrible. We're going to take care of it. I've heard no
outrage tonight from the commission. This is a problem that needs to be solved. Otherwise, you're going to have people building this stuff and you you you're going to condemn the city to not be able to ever get that passenger rail thing done. Right now, it takes five and a half hours to get to Richmond from
Charlesville because you have to go to Alexandria and then down to Richmond. >> All right. Thank you, Mr. Snider. Um, >> I have 17 seconds left. >> I You're uh you're you're done, but um I I think we can help you out a little bit. Um uh Matt or anyone else on staff. There
is a method, correct, for a reasonzoning for a private property owner to do rezoning. Is there a method for a collection of property owners to file a resoning? >> A resoning can be pursued by any property owner for their property. >> Uh there is a process. um staff is
always happy to help with that process. >> Okay. >> Uh you know there's it's it's not necessarily done as a collective, but you would you would do it for your property. You can come forward as a group for each, you know, one of the properties you own. >> Okay. So, I don't know if you heard that, Mr. Snder, but there is a there's a process that you could go through if
you wanted to reszone your property if um rather than waiting for council or um anyone else to do it for you, um it sounds like you you could do it yourself or as a group. So hopefully that helps.
Um any other online individuals or uh in Oh yes, please. >> Hi. Um I'm a thirdyear student at UVA. I live at Lambbeath 474 uh student dormatory and um I'm very excited for
the tier three amendments and I think uh the city's focusing its energy on the right directions and uh starting to address some of the problems the public is talking about a lot in the past months and I'm wondering about the communication the city has with the
private actors in or developers within Charlottesville and Al Maro uh because I remember a few months back when the tier one tier to uh zoning text amendments are starting. Uh there were a lot of energy and enthusiasm from developers about the communicating and working with
the city on working out specific solutions on tier three and t um amendments and having ideas on how to make development more feasible with the city. And I'm wondering if there's been movement on that front or will there be
any uh discussion be held in the near future because I feel like developers themselves of course look want to develop and want to make money and also of course want to bring positive impact to the city to the city itself but and they themselves have worked out the
financials more than the city probably has. So it'd be wise to get their opinions pretty early on and uh just get thoughts on that as this tier three process also going on. Thank you. >> Hi. Uh my name is Kim Pal. I'm the chief
operations officer for city schools and there was a mention about ripple effects with the uh high-rise student development. And I just want to make sure that this body is aware that there we do have recent precedent for a significant ripple effect with public school enrollment that occurred between
2010 and 2017 2018 where we were one of the fast after decades of no growth in our public schools. We actually had year-over-year growth of 3 to 8%. Um and it was when the new high-rise UVA student housing opened up on West Main.
It freed up single family home stock in the city in a way that hadn't been seen in a very long time. So you will face you will see likely um that opportunity with this next wave of um or this next push for high-rise student development. What happens of course as those parcels
free up. Well, that's some of the issues you're you're wrestling with because it'll all depend on how quickly developers scoop that up for more UVA student housing or whether it goes towards um single family homes. But we'll be watching all this keenly
from the public schools. >> Interesting. >> Okay. Anyone else? >> Mr. Chair, now I do not see any raising the door. >> All right. So, our next item is to go
into the zoning text amendments. Does anybody need a break before we jump into that? >> All right. Can we take a It's uh 7:25 now. Can we try and reconvene about 7:30? >> Yeah. Huh? >> Everything.
>> We didn't. >> You've spoken before. I'm not sure that helps. usually. See, because you guys scolded me about the address thing last time. I didn't know. >> I don't know why the plan commission
needed stuff and B is so different. It is so hard to meet. >> Okay. Roll back, right? Yeah. Okay. Um, take it away. Hi, chair, planning commission, um, new
planning commissioners. Welcome. I'm Matt Alfie. I'm the development planning manager at NDS. And tonight, you are going to be holding a public hearing, um, related to a series of development code amendments and making a recommendation to city council. Next
slide. You have seen uh a few of these slides before in previous meetings. What you see here um is the background of the development code, the approach to moving minor amendments forwards and next steps. As I've stated in the past, the best way to think about this tiered
approach is the car analogy. I'm kind of the boring guy and when we talk about amendments, we're all geared up for the tier three, but think about the car analogy. Tier one is washing the car. Tier two is changing the oil, rotating the tires. Tier three is the car is making an awful noise and
it needs a new transmission. And so what we're looking at tonight is moving those tier one and tier 2 amendments forward. Next slide. The um in your packet you have a full outline of the tier one amendments, but
for general purposes, there are 63 amendments that we're proposing to move forward. These are addressing copying, editings, uh, scriber errors, legislative updates, um, and small changes. Um, next slide. As I said in your packet, the full the full list of
all amendments are available. But, uh, in this presentation, you just see some examples of those tier one amendments. Next slide. in addition to the legislative amendments we need to make to conform to changes in um state regulations that
happened on July 1st of this year. Next slide. And here we see um the tier 2 amendments uh and where staff is recommending 23 changes to the code. The purpose again is not to alter the intent sections of
the code. This is to provide clarity um to remove some uh misunderstandings and just to provide small changes that do not require much in the way of community engagement outside of the public hearing we're having here tonight. That is another distinction when thinking about
tier one, two, and three. Tier one and tier two really the public engagement should be happening here at a public hearing. anything that's tier three really needs to be a robust community engagement where we're hearing from the community and making the changes that um
are coming from our fellow uh residents. Next slide are some examples of the these tier 2s. Um again the full changes are in your packet with the full analysis um with them. So next slide.
uh the processes um to how we got here tonight has been an ongoing effort. One with uh many different touch points. Staff has been continuously collecting data on these issues and keeping track of them in the working document which is attachment C in your uh packet this
evening. Uh in addition, we have had a number of work sessions with this body to improve and refine the amendments that you are holding a public hearing on tonight. Next slide. At the most recent planning commission work session held on November 12th,
feedback was provided to staff on the proposed tier 2 amendments. Most of planning commission's recommendations were incorporated into what you're seeing here tonight. But there were a few uh areas that came up that um staff did make changes to and I wanted to make sure they were covered. Uh so you could
see staff's uh what we heard from planning commission and how we addressed it. Uh the first being the existing uh structure date. There was talk at that meeting of having a rolling date to allow structures that have been built for an x period of time to count toward
that um existing structure preservation bonus. The commissioners worried that a fixed date might exclude new units from qualifying from the existing structure bonus uh in after reviewing it. staff was concerned that uh having a rolling date could create loopholes and would
really need an engagement with the community if you wanted to go that route because even though it may feel arbitrary that that December 18th date, you know, might feel arbitrary, but there is definitely a uh decision was made as a community that structures before that date at a significance um
and we want to preserve them. Um definitely when you get into your conversation I can get into some of the loopholes staff would be worried about the rolling date and so that's why we're still at least recommending having a fixed date. It's definitely something we could come back to um and review in in the future but at least it would clear
up the issue right now we have right now which is there is no date and so something got a CO it could be viewed as existing structure the next day. The next was the side um setbacks for attached dwelling units. staff had kind of presented a alternate form. There was
a lot of good con constructive conversation in the work session. We went back and looked at it again and came up with a uh we thought a better solution by just putting the um attached side and detached side in each zoning district and then having the definition
uh covering that it has to be for the project. And that would help hopefully alleviate the concern that someone would just not build one half of the attached dwelling. And then finally, the the last one, next slide, was the fence and walls. Uh the
original staff's original suggestion was to define uh have a different definition of fence. There's a lot of good debate and conversation on that at the work session between the six feet and the 4T. The staff took that information back and reworked it to allow an more of an
exemption section within fences and walls. Um, and we went with 4.5 to get a little a little wiggle room for post when you're talking about 4 feet is what the commission talked about at the work session. And that would give at least room to have post and then have those 4ft panels. It also has the exemp exe
exception for when it's required for safe uh health and safety under the building code and when it's required for separation to state agencies such as ABC. Next slide. Um so you'll hold your
public hearing. Staff recommends you approval on these uh but you'll have your public hearing in your conversation and then next steps will be go taking these to city council. With that, I'd like to um say that I'm here with my staff, which I want to give a big thank
you to. This has been a big push for them over the last eight months. So, I really appreciate their efforts in all that they've done. But we are here to answer clarifying questions. So, then you can roll into your public hearing. >> All right. So, yeah, just questions and then I'm
going let the public talk. Um so, any any questions from the commission? >> I have I have one question. um on the I I remember the discussion we had about side setbacks for allowing attached dwellings. And so um the the wording
would would basically say if it's one project, you're building two attached units, the side the zero side setback applies where um where they're attached in the single project. Um, does that mean and it does a project
mean that both units or all units are being constructed at once or is there still the possibility that you could build one and then come back two years later and build the second? >> You could, but the project means that's part of it. You're planning to build four units. Now, you may phase it and say, I'm building four units
>> in four phases, but at least it's still documented and it's still part of a plan. >> Got it. Okay. That's that's kind of what I was hoping. And that's why we added in project instead of just the district. >> Okay, very good. >> Um
well, any other questions? I little question I I think um may not be an issue. So the you I apologize if you explained this last time the um needing a building permit for something um over 256 ft. Um, we're we're getting
rid of that requirement because the building code doesn't require permit for something smaller than 256 ft. Is that what we're why we're doing that? >> Uh, sorry. It's um, let me get back to where it is. Uh, this is um B.5. Um,
we've crossed out our permit is required for accessory use or structures exceeding 256 square feet of gross floor area. So, the implication is that you need a building permit for like a doghouse or something, but I'm assuming the building code doesn't >> correct. What we're saying is if it
doesn't need a building permit, you still have to follow the rules, but we're not going to make you go through >> that whole development process for your >> for your doghouse. It's very similar to there's a lot of things that don't that were we're basically held to uh
uh complaint driven like you know you you should come talk to us you know but if you don't do it you could get a citation. >> Okay. >> Okay. So generally someone adding a like going to Lowe's and buying a prefab shed to put in their backyard you guys are never going to see it unless someone
complains. No, it'd be it'd be kind of the conver if somebody bought that shed and put it in their front yard. >> Yeah, >> we would want we this kind of gets to that conversation too we had in the work work session where we originally were saying we didn't want maybe accessory structures in the front yard. >> Um but if we're allowing accessory
structures kind of anywhere, we at least want what's in that facade range to match all of our um development standards which that's one it's very this code is very much a form based code even though our last code was somewhat. This really is not so much about the use
whether that's a dog house or a shed in the front yard. It is a structure and a structure has design elements that it needs to have. It's going to be in that that area. >> Okay. Um other questions? No. All right. Um I guess is there uh
any public comment on this issue? Um, it looks pretty good. The edits, uh, the code itself is still kind of a mystery to me as to how exactly how it works, but all the edits, um, from the work session I remember a few months ago
look pretty good and reasonable. >> Thank you. >> Oh, um, I'm sorry, sir. Can I get your name for the record? >> Oh, yeah. I forgot to say it the first time. Um Joe Leang, a thirdyear urban planning and econ student, uh 474 Lambeath Fieldhouse.
>> Thank you so much. Is there anyone online? >> Online speakers, you can uh click the raise hand icon if you'd like to speak. >> Mr. Chair, I see no raise hands. >> All right. Um
comments, guys. I've got a little collection of them, but I'm going to save them. So, uh, anybody want to go first? Okay. So, I get to be the bad guy tonight. All right. Um, I'm going to be
I'm going to be nice. I swear. Um, so my concern, um, is that we've got, um, you know, we we talk about some of these things we can get around with a special exception process. Um, but that special exception process is um lengthy and
expensive. Um, and I don't know if there's some way that some of these things seem so small that is there another way to make them go faster and not cost as much. Um, um, you know, for example, um, setback
or yeah, exceptions to um, setbacks and build build to zones. Um, I understand it's the same exception process. It's $1,800 and you've got, you know, it looks like um Matt, you told me it was uh four to five months. Um
yeah. So, >> correct. >> Um and I I kind of I wonder what happens when, you know, you've got a project in front of the B and they want to, you know, push something back a little bit. Um
I mean, it sounds like that's we're holding up the project four to five months. um or um is does this special exception process have to happen if you've got um uh for that streetscape exemption? So when you've got the um an easement in
your front yard um and there's a opportunity to ask the administrator whether your setbacks can be moved back the amount of that easement is that the same >> no with this administrative that's happened during the review. >> Okay. >> So that that would happen just in the cycle of the review. You would not need
to go to anything that's administrative. You would need to go to city council. >> Okay. Um All right. So, this is generally just Well, all right. Anybody else who wants to have some sort of variation to that um that front yard setback? It's a four
to five month. Okay. Um that's a concern. I don't know if there's Yeah, it would I'd feel so much more comfortable with some of these things if there was a way to speed that up somehow. Um cuz I feel like that's the type of thing where there may be a
better project and um we're not getting the better project because waiting four to five months is too much of a risk. Um so um chair can you uh could you explain I mean when when you're talking about that
like >> I mean right now someone would have to go through that process to change like the setback. >> Is is your concern Could you just expand on on that concern? I guess because I'm not following for
the the codes at least. Yeah, I guess it's um I I'm trying to think of a good example, but I mean it's you know, I'm not sure why somebody would want to push their building back further, but
maybe they have a use they want to put in the front yard, like they want to have a I think we had a um uh somebody had tested the site where the um uh that apartment building that no one likes that's going not well the apartment building is causing so much controversy.
um um by West Haven, that site. Um Mitchell Matthews had come into the B to test that right before we adopted the zoning code and um they were going to put a hotel there and they wanted to have a um outdoor dining area out in front and that would have required a deeper setback and um I think everyone
on the B agreed this is fantastic. This would make a better project. Um but that would that project would have had to go through the whole special exception process. Now, something that large, I don't feel like that's such a big deal as much of a big deal as I don't know if there's a, you know, smaller projects,
this might really put a wrench in things. >> I I think and this probably is not going to be very helpful to this conversation, but I think it is, you know, as part of these amendments going through, you see that we're making some changes to our development review process >> and then there are some things we've
been working on in house for a while that are just on that process-wise. uh we would like to get those in place. Um you know it's it's changing the development major and minor development plan to just a development plan and having a major and minor site plan. I
think as we get through this round we could explore um something more you know trying to scale up or down special exceptions. uh might not be something for right now, but that could be something that would be
>> a path that we could explore for on the development review side. Again, how do we remove barriers? How do we speed things up? And it might not be a code thing, but just a scaling special exceptions because yes, if someone is building a 12story apartment building and they have a set of special
exceptions, they want to move forward. Yes, that probably is needs to be a little bit more owner owner and time to go through. not, you know, not um too bad, but if somebody is just trying to put a building in their backyard off of East High Street. >> Yeah. >> Um you know, a process that could be
quicker. >> Mhm. And I think that actually that's the the element workshop is kind of where I keep coming back to. It just felt >> kind of ridiculous how we ended up there. Um, and that's another thing is I'm wondering if um so um
let's see. Uh we've got a um the code allows you to add on to the back of an existing building um without having to uh build within the build two zone, but it doesn't let you put a
separate building in the backyard without doing so. And that seems strange. >> Well, this is more of a policy thing. So, this is um the code is definitely speaking to about bringing things up to the street. That is a fundamental part of the code is to build this more urban
where you're bringing things up to the street. So, where we landed is to at least have a relief valve for supporting structures, not the primary structure. We felt the primary structure if you're going to um do an addition you know it's
fine but >> that primary structure needs to be up to the street before you build a next primary structure but we at least in these amendments it's giving a relief valve that it didn't have before where you can do any structures. This is saying I can do I don't need to bring
that primary structure up into the build two zone for to add accessory structures to the site. This is the kind of the element example, but also the photos. >> Yeah. >> Um on EMTT example. >> And I guess my concern is that a a a
dwelling unit cannot be considered an accessory structure. And I I just I wonder about the examples where you've got a single family house um and they want to have another dwelling unit somewhere on the property. Um, and I know there you've got
in the R zones, it sounds like there's an exception for that with the existing building preservation bonus um, provision. Um, but I mean we've got a lot of houses and historic buildings that are in like High
Street is in the CX3 zone and um a lot of those old houses are well beyond the build two zone and um I I guess you know a way around that is somebody could add onto the back of them and physically
attach to the back of them but it just seems silly that you're physically attaching versus building behind. you're getting the same thing. Um, by forcing them to attach to the existing building, you're starting to require might be requiring sprinklers being added to the whole building. Um, or some other things
that just would drive up the cost of the project. I >> And and I will say, and I didn't say this in my presentation, but y'all I think you all are aware this is going to be yearly. Once we wrap up, >> I know >> once I wrap up this, we're jumping into 2026 with with lessons learned and try
to move things quicker. U one of the suggestions and I shared with you chair, you know, maybe we look at this in 2026, I'd be a little hesitant of >> blanketing all the districts, but >> using this example of um the preservation, if it was contributing
structures >> uh were deemed to meet Bill 2, that might be some but I I guess my my thought is th this would be a a little bit more of a fundamental change because the code is speaking
about getting to the street. >> Okay. >> And not not not saying it's it's pro or con, but I think that is the conversation we should be having more with with our communities because that is a fundamental change. >> Um Okay. Um
>> I do have something to that. >> Okay. Uh so I was heavily involved with the construction of the sort of the the theory of the the zoning. Um and the our thought at that time was that the special exception process would be
relatively fast and easy. >> Uh that it would be a a speedy and effective process. It would not be like a special uh use permit. Uh it would not go to council. uh it would just go to go to the planning commission, focus on, you know, just the the specific issues at hand and dispense with it um
efficiently um for for the good of the public. Uh that's against the law. Uh we have since learned uh no, everything goes to council. If it's a special exception, it must by law go to council. >> Um that uh changed I think in 2016 uh which was uh before my time. It's not my
fault. Um but we we are bound by law to to be more um thorough uh and public with these decisions which we weren't calculating when we wrote these. Um so that may may be a thought as we have learned that the process is more
burdensome. Um that may inform how we're thinking about this process. >> Okay. Yeah. Exact. I mean, ideally it would be like that where it'd be like going to the bar, you know, it's it's a one month, 30 days and a small fee and, you know, get some consensus and move
on. But I guess that's not going to happen. Um, but yeah, that's so again the same thing with if we need a special exception for um the active depth. Um I'm still really stuck up on stuck on the definition of active depth. Um, I
mean it's I don't know who I guess is there a a free administrative this is a bad hallway, this is a good hallway type thing or this this is a tiny little bathroom that's part of a residence, it doesn't count versus this is a multi-user bathroom that's not
allowed in this this area. I mean, how is that get resolved? >> So, under the how it's currently written, it's really prescriptive there. There's no administrative. >> Well, it's written that it's as defined by the administrator or something is in the um in the wording. Um I think that's
what you added. >> Yeah. That that but I'm saying what's existing now there is no >> uh administrative. So with with the modification you guys made, how is that with any project that someone's got because any office project is going to
have or if you've got a building, okay, you have a project in a DX zone, I think is a 30 foot active depth on the front facade, which I believe goes up the whole front facade. um someone puts uh I I guess they just have to come with their plans and say I've got this many
little closets in these offices and there's a corridor here but it's part of the office um and it's not a major circulation corridor. Is it just a informal review or is that >> So what I will say is again
one of the trade-offs a form-based code is is meant to be allow more freedom not about use it's about form but it does require an applicant to to have their ducks in a row a little earlier in the process so that that we can determine they are complying with
the development code >> early in the process. And so we are trying to be sensitive to not needing architectural drawings that early, but they've got to show us something that they need >> these active depths. So, >> uh,
I this is building in a little more flexibility. I think we would be consistent on how we use that flexibility, >> but if the body, you know, if if there was a better definition, uh, we definitely would entertain that. >> Well, I guess so. I'm wondering if someone builds apartments, um, there's
going to be bathrooms and hallways and closets and all that within the 30 ft of a active depth that's in a DX zone. Um, and I I hope I'm not misquoting. I believe that's how that the DX is defined is that the front facade has to
be 30 ft ground floor to the roof. Um, >> please correct me if I'm wrong if I'm making something out of nothing. Um, but if someone puts an apartment there, that's that's not by definition possible. Um, so I don't just
I I'm assuming that by reading this I'm hoping that what when it says, you know, as um determined by the administrator that the administrator will look at that and say, "Oh, these are all components of an apartment, so it's allowed within that 30 ft." Um, but the way it's written, I'm worried that it may not be
like that. And it there. When we wrote this, we were we were trying to give more flexibility administrator, but unfortunately when you get into the actual section on active depth, >> it it actually has these things like hallways, restrooms called out
differently. So that's I would have preferred to take them out of the definition, >> but because they're so tied into the code >> is why they're still in the definition. >> Yeah, it's it's it's the wall it's the fence and wall fiasco where it's so
integrated. um into it. Uh >> um I mean I this is one of those things that I feel like is a major problem or could be a major problem um depending on how it gets interpreted um that if
>> if this means another two weeks of kind of looking through the code for um stuff. But if you're telling me it's going to be another year, then >> I think it would I don't know if we'd have time to fix that section of the code to match. I'm less concerned
because the projects that this would really impact what we're seeing is they are probably going to be coming forward with special exceptions. >> Okay. >> Unfortunat I mean we haven't had large projects someone come forward to us and
say I'm doing this 100% by rent. I'd love that. I' I'd love not to see y'all. Um but the but the reality is just it's it's we're running into it with our >> with our topography where we're seeing some of the um
>> the uh the active death really on the front end becoming an issue because you're dropping down um and your and your plates, you know, aren't lining up and people aren't wanting to do the modular and so they're, you know, talking about coming to do special exceptions because they have exposed wall.
>> Okay. Um, all right. I'm going to go for an easy one at this point. Um, I love the changes to fences and guard rails. The one thing I would I notice is that for um for bullet point A, um, you say that
it's does not have a solid foundation. And I could imagine someone could build a masonry wall that would have a solid foundation. I don't know that you even have to have that line about >> well because the code is split into walls and fences and so there's a whole
list of requirements when you get into to foundation is a wall. >> Okay. >> And so we kept that in place because that actually is more permanent. So, it gives a little more um discretion to
city council if they wanted to do a special, but but walls are allowed in a lot of areas uh per district. >> Okay. So, we have a there's a difference between someone building a brick wall that's 4t high versus a wood picket fence that's four. Okay. >> The code breaks it up into walls and
fences. >> Um and so we didn't touch the walls because that really hasn't been an issue. has been the fences have been an issue. >> Okay. Um All right. I guess solid foundation is I mean that feels a little fuzzy, but I
guess it's all right. Um I'm trying to think if there's going to be if a fence I mean I guess they've got a little concrete might have little concrete peers or something, but that's something different, right? >> Yeah. I mean it's uh I think the pillars
would be fine. It's >> okay. Um, uh, let me just make sure I didn't miss something. Anybody have anything else? I'll just add, I mean, Carl, I think I'll add to what you're saying. I I
share your concerns about the um, active depth going all the way up to the roof. And I feel like after however many hours our work session was and we were all tired, we were like, why do we have, you know, we're starting to be like, why do we have this the build to requirement? like we want you to preserve the
structure, but then we say, "Oh, but it's not to the build two." This would make it harder for you to preserve the structure. And I I hope I I and right now I can't remember if some of these things are in tier three or not. But I think the I mean I agree these things are like longer term more substantial
changes to the code and I I I would be on board for taking a look at these things and um outside of what we're doing tonight you know discuss a more substantial change in the future
and I will say that you know what we are hoping as we roll into the 2026 amendments I am hoping it is not 60some and 20some I hope we can really pair it down that we you you know, planning commission as a body can work on and it's maybe like four or something a
little more manageable to to to dig into deeper but again are are tweaks not changing the intent of the code and so they really can again be this as the public engagement. Well, yeah. I mean, I
do hope that for next year we we do actually tackle some philosophical issues in this because I think we've got some disagreement between the commission and staff as to um and maybe I'm speaking for you guys out of turn, but I seemed like from our work session that
we definitely had some philosophical differences um that we'd like to study at least. Um, and I I'm I'm content if we have a work session every month that includes going through the stuff if that's what
we have to do to get this right. Um, I'm sure you guys don't want that, but uh, anyways, well, I guess I don't not I don't have anything to change since you guys have told me I can't. So,
>> if someone mo made a motion, they could make changes if they were needed. We have a motion. >> Can I ask a question? I'm not going to make a motion. I'm not I'm not allowed yet. >> Um, are there and this is purely procedural. I have no opinions about the content yet.
>> Are there topics in tier 2 that people on the commission want to see pulled into tier three to talk about more? Is that what you're describing? I think the issue is that we've got we want to make changes as fast as we can and there are issues that
changes we want to make in tier two that um are not we can't make them in tier two if they need to wait for tier three. So we keep trying to grasp at tier three items and pull them into tier two and we're getting told not to for good reason. It needs more public comment and
study. >> That makes sense. Okay. Um, for a motion, can we include some comments to council of like we would love to see these certain things change
in the future? >> Um, >> I I don't know if you necessarily need in the in the motion. I mean, we when we do our um city action memo, we we recap this meeting. If there's certain highlights that >> uh you want to make sure are captured, >> we will definitely include that. Mhm.
>> Uh it's just the motion when we go to city council, it's just we say planning commission recommended >> or or recommended denial or recommended approval. Um but so I mean if there's certain things you want city council to be aware of, I'll make sure to capture them and put them in the memo uh that
talks about this this meeting. >> I guess it one of the nice things is if it goes in the motion, there's um an understanding is whether it's kind of unanimous feeling amongst the plan commission. I don't know if we can pull that off or not, but um
>> would would do you mean things like the philosophy of having less special exemptions and fees and like just that idea of making things easier to >> do when they each site is so very different.
>> I mean, I think that's we we live in a very hilly place. there's not a really like neighborhood that looks like another, you know, in terms of setbacks. So, >> you know, it >> I would be on board with some kind of statement where that needs to be addressed
over time if it's, you know, >> yeah, I mean, if if the commission wants to, I guess, put it in the motion, they can put in the motion and, you know, to we could work on the wording as you >> the idea that we know that that's there's a there's still problems
getting things built due to the rigidity. I guess I guess what I would say though is I still would put them in the memo because the the motion isn't included. >> Okay. >> But so you can do it in the motion, but I would want to make sure I'm including your thoughts in the memo. The read. >> Well, then maybe we do our motion and then we do our we'll just have another
additional set of comments that can >> we can tack on for you um kind of summarize any ramblings that are coming from up here. >> Yeah. I mean just so they know what what y'all are feeling is important. >> Mr. Chair, I'd like to make a motion. >> Please do. Based on a finding that the
proposed zoning text amendments will serve the public necessity, convenience, general welfare, and good zoning practice, I move to recommend approval of the batch of zoning text amendments as proposed by staff within this report. >> Seconds.
>> I'll second. >> Darren, can you call a vote? >> Okay. >> Commissioner Solates, >> I. >> Commissioner Hares, >> abstain. Commissioner Karp >> abstain. >> Commissioner Yoder, >> yes.
>> Commissioner Rooker, >> yes. >> Commissioner Mitchell, >> yes. >> Chairman Schwarz, >> yes. All right. So, potential thoughts for commentary. I think one of the things I'd like to add
is um a serious look as to whether we want to maintain um build two zones um as opposed to just having minimum setbacks.
um a uh redefinition of um uh active depth and maybe even a consideration as to whether we need active depth.
Um and um I guess a a concern over or um the ability to add onto existing properties um without having to build in front of them or add additional uses, additional
buildings on existing properties without having to build in front of the existing structures. Yeah, I think could you could you like build that into the act? Sorry, not the active the build to like I think the buildated. >> Yeah, >> it's like we want to we want to
re-evaluate the build to how it works and whether we should have it. >> Yes. So maybe re-evaluating the build two zones in um uh in reference to existing buildings. Gotcha. And structures. Yeah.
So, uh, in an effort to preserve our existing, um, buildings, >> could we exempt existing structures from the built-in requirements? >> That would be an idea. >> Um, that would I think that would be a very
possible idea. Um I'd asked the question as to whether um um the BA could or any building in a design control district or IP could be exempt uh or any construction um in those
districts. So I mean that's just another rabbit hole that we could possibly go down. But um I think in general the yeah the idea would be how do we um just an investigation of the bill two zones um with an eye to um preserving
our existing buildings. Is there that general okay? >> Okay. I agree. Yeah. Any other things anybody has uh wants to add to this?
>> I'll just say that my general philosophy here is to do exactly what you're asking for. I think you're asking for a little bit of um consensus from us even outside the motion as to what we're sort of pushing toward council. And as a new member here, I do just want to say that
my general philosophy is to ease the burden that some of this stuff puts on developers. You brought up some good points here. Three or four or five months doesn't seem like a long time in the general scheme of things, but it really does have an impact when you're
thinking about building and people potentially taking out loans, and there's real monetary and feasibility impacts that come from that. So, my general philosophy while I'm up here is to try to ease some of those burdens from whether it's a homeowner wanting to add an addition or an ADU or anything
else all the way up to your professional developer. All right. Any further comments? We don't have Phil anymore. I I didn't look up what the event of the day was. >> Yeah, we should have them call in. >> Mr. Chair, I have some questions for staff if I may.
>> Yes, please. >> Uh question about uh the land bank. Uh we've we've been busy with other matters. Uh what is the status of the the land bank ordinance? Okay. Hello. So, um the land question of whether or not to create a land bank was
a question um posed well it's been a topic of consideration I think for many years. Uh it was a topic of consideration for the housing advisory commission last year. Um and a number of recommendations were uh being studied by
staff. Um through discussion with the hack um the decision was made to kind of put a pause on looking at the land bank for the time being. Uh there were a number of considerations related to that
recommendation, but that's that's kind of where things are at the moment. And um not to say it's not something that would ever come back as as a potential um opportunity, but I think we're focused right now at looking more
closely at uh the tax abatement uh uh tax abatement as a potential strategy and a number of other priorities for housing staff uh in NDS right now. >> Thank you. Uh I had a call today uh with
a a school board um member and we heard from a city schools uh employee tonight. Um both sort of singing the same song about uh better collaboration uh between the school board and the Charlottville planning commission. An issue very close to my heart. Um I shared some ideas, but
I just wanted to flag the issue that school board members want to work with us uh and and and and do better work together. Uh, so I'd like us to to think about that issue. >> Would anybody like to uh adjourn us? >> Mr. Chair, I'd like to make a motion. >> Mhm. >> Move to adjourn.
>> I will second that. Let's adjourn. Good night, everyone.