HomeMy WebLinkAbout02-09-22 Public Comment - D. Loseff - affordable_attainable housing incentive conceptFrom:David Fine
To:Agenda
Cc:Brit Fontenot
Subject:FW: affordable/attainable housing incentive concept
Date:Wednesday, February 9, 2022 10:18:25 AM
Please share this as public comment with the EV Board and City Commission.
David Fine | City of Bozeman Economic Development
From: David Loseff <dploseff@gmail.com>
Sent: Wednesday, February 9, 2022 6:46 AM
To: David Fine <DFine@BOZEMAN.NET>
Subject: affordable/attainable housing incentive concept
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David,I applaud the effort of you and the affordable/attainable housing task force group in seekingways to create market driven incentives for addressing our area's substantial and growingworkforce housing needs. I had a couple of suggestions for your consideration on ways tooptimize the affordable housing incentives. As I understand it, you are consideringestablishing incentives on a project basis.....eg if using 5% of total units being dedicated foraffordable/attainable housing....and using the example of a 60 unit upscale project of which 3units (5%) gets allocated for affordable housing in exchange for various benefits such asincreased allowed density or other.......my suggestion would be to make it flexible such thatthe developer can satisfy these affordable/attainable housing conditions via providing housingat an alternative location and not just limit it to providing housing in the specific upscaleproject. This would be analogous to how I believe it works with meeting parkingrequirements for new developments. A specific recent example was where Holloran receivedapproval for building his 140 room AC Marriott Hotel without building a single new parkingspace.....but instead he relied on long term leases arrangements for parking in a separatelyowned Medical Arts Center parking lot. More generally, developers can satisfy parkingrequirements without paying cash-in-lieu fees if they can provide alternative parking onproperty off of the proposed development site via long term UDC leases or long term privatelease arrangements or simply allocating privately owned parking spaces from a separatelocation. In the case of parking requirements, the city wants the alternative site to be in relatively closeproximity to the target development parcel (ie. 300') since the parking requirement is used tomitigate parking impacts arising from the new development. However, with respect tocreating workforce housing, i think that you can be more flexible in the location for thisaffordable housing being further away from the target development site since the affordablehousing incentive objective is to create more usable workforce housing within our communityand not necessarily at that specific target development site. In fact, it would probably be betterto locate the new affordable housing units in an area away from the upscale housingneighborhood and much closer to the services, schools, Streamline bus routes, grocery storesand other amenities which would be more convenient for working families and individuals.
To take that concept further, you may want to allow for several developers to apply affordable
housing from a single multifamily building to satisfy these requirements. For example, if youhave three 60 unit upscale developments going up in the Mill District which would require 9
affordable/attainable housing units (5%), you may want to have that housing need be satisfiedin a separate 9 unit or 12 unit or larger affordable/attainable housing building than demand
that each of those three 60 unit upscale developments place 3 units each within their respectivedevelopments. That approach would also allow for the development of more affordable
housing in larger scale and greater efficiency........and then lets the upscale oriented builderbuild his project per his skill set and get a separate party which specializes in building
affordable/attainable multifamily apartments do their thing. It may even incentivize morespecialized affordable/attainable housing type builders to enter our market and develop in
scale.
In any event, just a few thoughts for your consideration.Kind regards,
David Loseff