City council weighs next push for affordable housing
Code changes. Building incentives. “Front-loading” citizen protests. The council was prompted to consider these and other options during a work session this week.
The Laramie City Council is looking to tamp down on the community’s severe housing shortage and is considering ways to encourage housing development in zones across the city. The city’s next steps could include zoning alterations, building incentives, parking changes, or a range of other options presented during a council work session Tuesday.
Derek Teini, the city’s community and economic development director, ran down the current state of Laramie’s housing stock, highlighted the actions taken by council thus far, and presented an exhaustive list of the various code changes, funding schemes or other steps the council could take to empower the construction of more and more varied affordable housing options.
“I don't necessarily believe all these things are right for Laramie,” Teini said. “However, I think I'm not doing my job if I'm not at least telling you what places are doing to change housing in their community.”
Laramie is not on track to hit its 2030 housing goals, despite significant housing reform passed over the last four years.
A 2015 housing study found Laramie would need about 4,100 new residential units by 2030 to shelter its existing population and account for the growth Laramie was projected to see.
So far, only 611 new units have been built in the city of Laramie, meaning there will need to be an explosion of development in the next six years — increasing the city’s current housing stock by more than a third — for the city to hit its 2030 goal.
Closing the gap between what Laramie has and what Laramie needs will take the development of denser housing, Teini said.
“We will not get to that number through single-family housing — period,” he said. “Impossible. We cannot do it. We cannot catch up. It has to come through multi-family development.”
The council does not take votes during a work session, nor was the body presented with anything to vote on. The work session Tuesday was meant solely to set the table, to preview possible avenues for action and to begin the city’s discussion about what comes next.
Teini’s full presentation can be accessed through the city’s website. Below are some key takeaways from that presentation and the brief discussion by councilors that followed.
The city could have a role to play
The presentation declares: “Through the review of existing codes and standards, development of new codes or modifications could be made that promote housing development in the community. By continuing to allow staff the ability to keep a pulse on development, areas of code that pose problems can be adjusted and codes that promote housing can be bolstered.” Several slides outline changes the city could consider including:
The reduction of fees related to construction (especially for projects explicitly aiming for affordable housing);
The reduction of requirements related to public improvements (water, sewer, stormwater, and streets) that are often an expensive hurdle to development;
Modifying parking codes to either eliminate or reduce parking standards and requirements;
Modifying zones to allow denser construction, offering density bonuses, or implementing maximum lot sizes;
Encouraging “residential infill” via incentives and promoting the construction of affordable housing on vacant lots already serviced by city infrastructure;
Expediting review processes;
Using land banking or housing trusts; or
Pursuing public-private partnerships by, for example, leveraging city assets like city-owned property, staff time or expertise to make otherwise infeasible affordable housing projects possible.
To be clear, the city has not committed itself to all of these possibilities (though it is already using public-private partnerships). As Teini stressed during his presentation, these are simply housing reforms attempted by other communities across the U.S., which Laramie could look to for inspiration.
Councilors seemed amenable to cutting red tape generally. Mayor Brian Harrington said the proposals that allow developers greater flexibility “are more compelling” and could be pursued by the city. The mayor added the city should allow developers “to tell us what's working for them.”
The concept of zoning is safe even if changes are currently on the table
Many of the roadblocks standing between developers and the construction of denser, more affordable housing have to do with zoning — the set of restrictions that classify some areas of the city as single-family-only neighborhoods, others as neighborhoods where duplexes and four-plexes can be built and yet others as areas where multi-story apartment buildings can crop up.
The city has already made alterations to both single-family and multi-family zones, generally reducing requirements and allowing for denser housing.
But a new movement to eliminate single-family zones altogether has been gaining steam across the nation. While the provision was presented alongside other zoning alterations, councilors rejected the idea, with even some of the council’s more progressive members saying they “have no appetite” for such a proposal. Outside of the political difficulties of instituting such a change, Teini provided other reasons such an action might be untenable. He said eliminating zoning would require an expensive outside study and a massive overhaul of the city’s existing code.
“I'll just say, if you were to eliminate zoning or do that within our community, it would be catastrophic in terms of how we would function as a community, because everything in your codes are tied, pretty much, to zoning,” he said. “I don't even know how that would work within our community.”
Reducing fees or infrastructure requirements would come with a trade-off
Teini said construction could be incentivized by removing barriers to development — such as by reducing fees for affordable housing developers or reducing standards for the often expensive public improvements developers are required to make. The tradeoff with reducing fees is that the city still has to pay its staff and collecting less will cut into that budget. The tradeoff with reducing requirements related to public improvements is that it falls to the city to maintain those improvements down the line and cheaper, lesser improvements will have a shorter life before they need maintenance.
“Front-loading” protests against planned developments could benefit citizens and developers
Last month, the city played host to fierce debates about downtown housing and parking — a conflict brought on by one firm’s proposal to construct a multi-story apartment building where the First Street parking lot now stands. It would have added dozens of housing units downtown but at the cost of dozens of public parking spaces. Downtown business owners showed out in force to oppose the apartment building, arguing their customers needed that lot.
There were two meetings about that proposal and neither were pleasant for councilors, who stared down conspiracy theories about sanctuary cities, baseless accusations of impropriety against city staff, and a rowdiness among public commenters who refused to respect the mayor’s requests to not clap and cheer after every comment.
But those early-stage meetings, occurring before any specific plans were drafted, allowed the community to voice its thoughts and allowed the developer to save the trouble of developing a more complete proposal only to have it torpedoed by an unsupportive public further into the process.
“I think there are ways we can do that differently, but I think that process seems like it works,” Harrington said.
In the future, “front-loading” protests in this manner could be a way to include the public early in the process and air community concerns, giving developers a chance to address those concerns before proceeding or to pull a project when it’s clear it will not ultimately work.
Shumway is wary of this push for affordable housing
Councilor Joe Shumway said he was concerned about the possibility that slums might develop in Laramie and said the government should not be involved in promoting affordable housing.
“I think we can't start throwing everything that we’ve done in zoning and city planning out the door because we want to have more dense and more available housing,” he said. “It makes me uncomfortable to think we’re making all these concessions, all these changes, to redesign what our communities look like for the sake of having more housing. So, it’s going to be very hard for me to make every concession that you're suggesting, or even some of the changes that you're suggesting, just to increase the housing inventory.”
He added that just because private actors are failing to keep up with housing demand doesn’t mean society should pursue public action.
Mobile home parks present a tricky situation
The presentation briefly addressed mobile homes and the “alleged increase of predatory practices” currently plaguing the city’s trailer parks. Teini said he struggled to bring options for mobile home park reform to the council. Most of the things the city could take action on would not alleviate the problems mobile home park residents are facing.
“We could look at higher standards within mobile parks,” Teini said. “There’s a wide variety of things that communities regulate — but remember, we’re talking about quality standards usually. It’s not ever related to things like: when the payment’s due, how much they charge, whether they allow a dog or not, things like that. It’s not really what cities and communities are regulating.”
There have been pushes to elevate the aesthetic standards mobile home parks must conform to, but these changes often hurt the residents. Some mobile home parks have pushed “beautification projects,” which are sold as a sort of reform that will improve life for the residents themselves. In actuality, those projects benefit the private equity firms or out-of-state owners and investors who see the property value go up and raise lot rents in turn. It’s a process that threatens to price people out of their homes. The process of beautification itself often falls to the residents themselves, demanding of them unpaid labor or even the surrender of their pets.
“I have no appetite for trying to shut down mobile home parks [or] putting even more regulations on those folks,” Councilor Erin O’Doherty said. “I don’t have any appetite for being another entity trying to make them look pretty just because those of us who live in our nice, single-family homes don’t want to look at them. It’s hard enough for those folks and it’s the only thing they have and to put more regulation would not be good for them.”