Discuss
Taupe Avenger @TaupeAvenger
27 Jan 2019
I'm beginning to think that cities should be banned from contracting to build "affordable units" and should be required to just buy existing housing on the open market and rent it out.
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So Palo Alto just approved (maybe not final approvals, but I think the difficult ones) its first affordable housing for seven years. paloaltoonline.com/news/2019… The project proposed is a *lot* denser and bulkier than what would be allowed for a market-rate project.

First affordable-housing project in seven years wins approval

On Monday night, the Palo Alto City Council approved the city's first development for low-income residents in more than seven years.

paloaltoonline.com
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Without that extra density and FAR, I think this project would have been a lot more expensive per unit. In my ideal world, that extra density and FAR would be allowed everywhere. Would requiring that affordable housing go through the standard rules help get us there?
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Or would requiring affordable housing go through the market-rate construction rules just mean the city spends the same affordable housing money on fewer units? Unfortunately, I'd guess the latter is going to be the much more substantial effect.
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There are also special cases, like housing for developmentally disabled adults (as included in part of this project) that may call for different sorts of housing than market-rate.
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But the biggest difference in unit type here is really that they're a lot smaller than typical market-rate for Palo Alto... which perhaps Palo Alto needs a lot more of, but which the zoning code discourages by having limits on so many numbers that there's an obvious result.
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Replying to @davidbaron @MarketUrbanism
By that, I mean that when you have caps on units/acre and caps on floor-area-ratio (and also height and setbacks, but those are less important in Palo Alto), then a developer who wants to maximize use of the parcel tries to max out both units/acre and floor area, which...

Jan 27, 2019 · 6:09 AM UTC

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Replying to @davidbaron @MarketUrbanism
... yields a relatively standard average unit size (depending on which multifamily zone it is, something in the range from normal-ish 1BR or small 2BR, to 3BR/4BR, although the largest is about to shift smaller in zoning changes (RM-15 → RM-20) currently under discussion).