Elected Gilroy officials will need to amend a city law before
the project moves forward
Elected Gilroy officials will soon be debating the merits of a
city law change that could have a significant effect on how
nonprofit groups can build housing for middle- and low-income
residents
– a huge segment of the South Valley community that has been all
but priced out of home ownership.
Last week in a close vote, the Gilroy Planning Commission
– a technical panel that provides land-use recommendations to
the City Council – approved South County Housing’s Rancho del Sol
260-unit affordable-housing project.
Elected Gilroy officials will need to amend a city law before the project moves forward
Elected Gilroy officials will soon be debating the merits of a city law change that could have a significant effect on how nonprofit groups can build housing for middle- and low-income residents – a huge segment of the South Valley community that has been all but priced out of home ownership.
Last week in a close vote, the Gilroy Planning Commission – a technical panel that provides land-use recommendations to the City Council – approved South County Housing’s Rancho del Sol 260-unit affordable-housing project.
Barely. After an hour of discussion, the final vote ended 4-3 to send the project up to the council with a recommendation to approve.
The contention among commissioners who voted against the project is of the 260 units of condominiums and single-family homes, 66 would be sold at market-rate prices. The existing law governing such affordable housing projects – passed in Gilroy in the early 1990s – requires100 percent of the homes to be sold below market rate.
But South County Housing and commissioners who support the project argue that the old ordinance is inconsistent with the so-called Neighborhood District Policy – a component of the city’s general plan – adopted by the City Council last year. The policy says the city should strive to avoid bunching houses for a single income level in one neighborhood.
The Rancho del Sol project provides a broad range of homes that target a wide spectrum of incomes.
In addition, the revenue from the market-rate homes enables SCH to build homes that are even more affordable than the ordinance stipulates, putting home ownership in reach of, for example, entry level teachers who otherwise couldn’t afford homes that are simply below market rate.
City planning staff recommended the Planning Commission approve the project, subject to several boilerplate conditions.
“What each of you needs to consider is your comfort levels,” Gilroy Planning Director Bill Faus told the commission. “Should it be the letter of the law or the intent of the law?”
Tim Day, the chairman of the commission, said his concern is that the project would open up the affordable housing ordinance to market-rate homes. He subsequently voted against the project, as did commissioners Thomas Boe and Joan Spencer, who said the commission is charged with determining the merits of a project based on existing law, and if a project veers outside the defined law, then it is up to the city council to amend the ordinance, not the planning commission.
But Dennis Lalor, the executive director of SCH, told commissioners that the law in not consistent with the component of the city’s general plan that addresses the variety and affordability of housing projects. Additionally, the ordinance restricts builders’ “creativity and flexibility” in making affordable housing projects pencil out.
He emphasized to commissioners that affordable housing is not a bad word, and that SCH’s projects are designed to meet the income levels of the people who live in the community rather than providing expensive housing for people moving south from the greater San Jose area..
“South County Housing has built 750 homes [in this area] by collaborating with the city,” Lalor told commissioners. “The people we are serving are the residents of this community.”
Many of the people who qualify for affordable housing are professionals such as police, firefighters and teachers. Even lower-paying white-collar salaries can’t surmount the price of real estate in the South Valley.
The law also seems to fly in the face of the city’s Neighborhood District Policy, which aims to integrate a variety of types and price ranges of homes to avoid the history of single-income neighborhoods – at any level.
Lalor points to South County Housing’s Los Arroyos project that was completed in 2004 in north Gilroy. It contains a “range of choices and opportunities,” Lalor said, and is a seamless fit with the surrounding neighborhoods.
While the concept of “impaction,” – a concentration of affordable housing in a single area – is often cited by affordable housing detractors, Rancho del Sol’s target incomes average more than the surrounding census tracts.
For South County Housing, this was round two for the same project. The Gilroy City Council in a tangled pair of rulings in December approved a version of the project that featured 303 units, while by virtue of a 3-3 tie, shot down a key amendment to the city’s affordable housing law that is necessary to allow the Rancho del Sol project to move forward. South County Housing went back and reconfigured the project by eliminating the rental component and replacing it with additional entry-level homes and reducing the total number of units to 260, still more than the present law permits.
But that discrepancy was addressed earlier in the Feb. 2 meeting when commissioners approved a recommendation to change the text of the city law that governs the per-project unit cap. Under the new language, projects may exceed the cap (75 units per each of the three categories of affordable homes – single family, condominiums or townhouses, and rental units) if the developers meet specific criteria and the City Council approves the project.
The council will be addressing both issues on Feb. 27.
