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Approved 12/7/2016 4 Presenter: Craig Benedict, Planning Director 159 160 Craig Benedict reviewed the abstract. 161 162 Kim Piracci: There was an affordable housing lady here once. It seems to me that one thing that was brought up 163 was that affordable housing isn’t available in Chapel Hill and Carrboro, a lot because the students are renting the 164 affordable housing and driving the cost of that up. And it seems like since there are some dorms empty the 165 University could require freshman and sophomores to stay on campus. Thus, alleviating some affordable housing 166 issues. What happened with that idea? Anything at all? 167 168 Craig Benedict: Yes. They’re been rebuilding on their campus new dorms for the last 7-8 years, and they have 169 moved a lot of people back onto campus. Now at the same time they want to increase the enrollment. Speaking 170 with UNC there’s probably more people living on campus percentage wise than t here are in a lot of universities. 171 That’s probably something that we’re not going to immediately be able to resolve among the Planning Board. That’s 172 another issue. What we can help with is, in the designated areas under our jurisdiction, what we can do to suggest 173 areas for density increases for multi-family or something like that. You’ll probably see one of the initiatives that 174 we’re talking about is new regulations for recreational vehicle zoning or the Commissioners have put away some 175 money for either Mobile Home Park, maintenance reinforcement to keep them so they don’t go away, or possibly 176 the creation of a new mobile home park. Where if the mobile home park gets purchased and you lose 20 lots there 177 we could have another place for them to go in the interim. So that’s the type of housing creativity. That we are 178 allowed the clustering of houses, different size houses. We don’t have any rules in our zoning code that say every 179 house has to be 1500 square feet in this zone and 2000 square feet in that zone. There are some local 180 governments around the United States that do have those types of standards. We amended our school impact fees. 181 They’re not adopted yet. To say that someone that has an 800 square foot or smaller house has to pay an 182 extremely reduced fee; I mean, you still could have children in a small house. But it’s not the $11,423 you have to 183 pay for a single-family house in Chapel Hill. It’ll be $500. 184 185 Tony Blake: So you’re going to put a sliding impact fee based on square footage? 186 187 Craig Benedict: Based on square footage in that case, bedroom count in another case. We’re finding out that multi-188 family 3 bedroom plus have equivalence to the generation rate to an equivalent 3 bedroom house. So there’s been 189 a dramatic suggestion for a change with the multi-family in the Chapel Hill and Carrboro school district. It was only 190 $1286 for any type of multi-family unit down there. It wasn’t based on bedroom count. And now it’ll be $10,000 on a 191 3 bedroom plus unit. The 0-2 bedroom multi-family units are relatively small impacts. So we’re switching around a 192 bit and now that we saw the technology we have now to have some better mapping and cover uses better, similarly 193 with information about new housing. So you’ll see some more stuff come forward with smaller lots. I n the rural 194 areas of the county I think the smallest lot is 65% less than a 40,000 square foot, which is almost like an acre. In an 195 area we would like to go even smaller. If you can put an 800 square foot house you don’t need a 20,000 square foot 196 lot. 197 198 Tony Blake: Affordable housing is always best deployed where the work is and that unfortunately is also where the 199 university is. So the competition there in Chapel Hill is terrible and that leads to the gentrification where people or 200 landlords buy up a lot of the older houses, split them up into many bedrooms and you have people parking on the 201 lawn. So I don’t know how you solve that but I still think the University has to be a part of that. 202 203 Craig Benedict: And there may be an opportunity in the coming year that if the County wants to buy 20-acres of 204 land for affordable housing we may come up with a plan development and make up the standards ourselves, 205 amongst staff, reviewed by this Board and then we’ll say, “who wants to build on this?” so our contribution would be 206 purchasing the land, maybe getting utilities to it and taking it through the entitlement stage, because as you’ve 207 heard the re-zoning process scares a lot of developers. It’s an unknown legislative process. If we take it through the 208 process, that’s a big hurdle out of the way and then they know that they can move quite quickly towards the 209 development of an affordable house. 210 211