Tonight the City Council considers it. I spoke before the Planning Commission on Tuesday night (very late) and was covered by Fox 7 (including screen time I missed seeing, although my cow orker says I did pretty well) and the Statesman. Oddly, KVUE spent the most time with me but didn’t even run a story on the meeting (admittedly it went so late everybody had to cover it on Thursday instead of Wednesday). Maybe once they figured out I was ‘the crackpot’ they abandoned the story.
The Chronicle’s fluff coverage of this issue makes me sad. I alerted them to this impending fight a couple of weeks ago, but all they’ve done is this analysis-free notice-like blurb.
Planning Commission gave a thoughtfully skeptical endorsement – raising the FAR for lots with duplexes or garage apartments to 0.5 (which completely lets us of the hook and is a great help to our neighbors, as well as reducing MOST of the city-wide affordable housing disincentives in the original ordinance).
It’s being fought vigorously by the Task Force, who, frankly, doesn’t like secondary housing units in general (as well as multifamily development in the urban core. And McDorms. And superduplexes. Keep pluggin’ them loopholes!).
Meanwhile, the one city council member who bothered to respond to me is apparently using boilerplate about how this ordinance is a supposed “compromise”. (Not the PC version, but the original 0.4 FAR version). How, exactly, is this a compromise? I give up the right to develop my property and in return I get to live among people who already developed their property in the way I’m now not allowed to do?
The rhetorical gymnastics people will go through to avoid simply opposing bad neighborhood actors are just amazing.
No further crackplogging for a while – parents are in town.
