housing – The San Marxist

Hours 0:00 – 0:55, 11/14/23

November 19, 2023November 19, 2023 by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Hello all! Short meeting this week. But still interesting!

Item 5: We are purchasing 6.28 acres on the corner of Hunter and Dixon, here:

This is exactly where Hopkins turns into Hunter, by the way. We’re talking about the field opposite the VFW:

It sometimes has horses in it.

This is part of a giant $60 million dollar project to address Purgatory Creek flooding. (We don’t yet have the $60 million. That part will take a while.)

It’s hard to find a map of Purgatory Creek, because everything online refers to the natural area at Hunter and Wonderworld:

But we’re talking here about the actual creek, which starts at Purgatory Creek Natural Area and flows up towards Belvin, then cuts across Hopkins to Dunbar, and then keeps going toward the river, meeting the river near the Children’s Park:

(This slide wasn’t in the packet, so it’s a low-quality screenshot. Sorry!)

About a decade ago, I had a random conversation with an old-timer, and they told me that Purgatory Creek was re-routed at some point in history – like some hair-brained engineering scheme conceived in a honky-tonk and made real. The idea was that this had caused some of our current flooding problems.

They didn’t provide enough details for me to make sense of the whole thing, so consider this an open invitation: can someone fill me in on how we’ve meddled with Purgatory Creek over the years? I am very curious!

Here’s another view of the whole thing:

(Also low quality! Sorry.) It’s going from Wonderworld over to Dunbar, and then from Dunbar over to the river.

So what is the project? What are they doing?

(More screenshots, sorry.) Basically it’s going to be a giant channel to catch stormwater and take it to the river.

Phase 1 is supposed to start in 2026, going roughly from Dunbar Park to the river:

Phase 2 is still 5-10 years out. (We move slowly.) This part is Phase 2, Dunbar out to Wonderworld:

It’s also supposed to eventually have some trails and nice features for people to use.

…

It occurs to me that if they put paved bike trails alongside it, this would be an incredibly handy bike path for getting around town safely.

Biking directly from the river to Wonderworld, skipping all of downtown and Hopkins? That could be really convenient.

Along these lines, I’ve long thought that we should put bike paths along the railroads – why should bikes be constrained to car-paths when we’ve already got these giant rail lines cutting directly across the city?

Just look at these railroad lines!

Imagine if there was a little side path that allowed you to use the railroad bridges to get across the river. You could take the future Purgatory Creek path from Wonderworld all the way to the river, and then take the railroad-adjacent path across the river, over to Aquarena, and north up to Blanco Vista. You could avoid all the cars on Post Road, Aquarena, and Hopkins!

And then you could bike directly from Aquarena Springs down to Target! After all, the trains go right along I-35, behind Target. If you work at the Outlet Malls, it would take you almost all the way there. If you live on the northeast side of town, you could easily get back and forth across I-35!

(I didn’t make this up! It’s a real thing, called Rails-with-Trails.

There are a ton of resources at the Rails-with-Trails link.)

…

Back to our little patch of land, across from the VFW.

Saul asks, “Will this help the flooding on Bishop?”

Answer: Not really, no. There’s a separate project, the Bishop-Belvin project, that is aiming specifically at that.

….

Item 6: Each year, Hays County gives San Marcos $85,000 to provide library services to county residents. The other local libraries – Wimberly, Buda, Kyle, Dripping Springs – all get $35,000 to serve the county.

The per capita funding has gone down dramatically in the past 20 years. Our funding has grown, but not as fast as the population of Hays County.

The presenter did mention this: “As the population has grown in Hays County, the percentage of users outside the city has actually gone down. As these other towns build new libraries, people go to their home library.” But I wasn’t clear if she was referring to the entire 20 year span, or just the past 2-3 years.

They also get $120,000 from Friends of the Library each year, which is also helpful. (For comparison, the library gets a little over $2 million from the city budget.)

Let’s just take a moment to appreciate how much our library does:

It really warms a crabby marxist’s heart.

…

Item 12: We’re going to purchase a Smeal aerial fire apparatus for the Fire Department for $2,300,000.00.

via

That’s my best guess as to what we’re getting. I’m not a fire truck expert.

…

Item 17: LIHTC Projects. I feel deeply ambivalent about this item.

LIHTC stands for “Low-Income Housing Tax Credit”.

Say you’re a developer and you’re going to build some apartment complexes. The city offers some incentives for you to include some low-income housing. LIHTC is a federal program that helps us give tax credits to developers, in exchange for a certain number of below-market-rate apartments being built. (Another one is a density bonus – you can build more apartments per acre – if you agree to keep a certain number at a cheaper price.)

Here’s what we require from the developer: you have to offer 5 of these 8:

What kind of tax breaks do you get for doing this? I’m not actually sure. This line is on the LIHTC application:

So I suppose you get a 4% discount or a 9% discount on your property taxes.

Here’s the key line for this meeting:

A minimum of 25% of all units within the project shall be affordable to households at or below 30% percent of the AMI for the duration of the tax exemption

What does this mean? First, AMI is Area Median Income. Now, San Marcos gets lumped in with Austin for this computation, so:

Median Income for a 4-person household: $122,300
Median Income for a 1-person household: $85,600

This is obviously a little ridiculous for San Marcos – our single-household median income was $42,500 from 2017-2021. But still, legally we’re going to use Austin’s $122,300 number as the reference point.

Ok, next: “households at or below 30% percent of the AMI”. In other words:

30% below Austin’s median income for a 4-person household: $35,050
30% below Austin’s median income for a 1-person household: $24,550

These are the people we’re trying to help with these LIHTC projects. This includes roughly 30% of San Marcos, or 21,512 people.

Last time with this key sentence again: “ A minimum of 25% of all units within the project shall be affordable to households at or below 30% percent of the AMI for the duration of the tax exemption”

In other words, if you want the tax breaks, then you need to make 25% percent of your units affordable to people earning less than $35,000. Let’s say a big apartment complex has 200 units. So then San Marcos gets 50 units that are affordable to people in poverty, from that one LIHTC project.

Here’s an important question: what’s the current situation? We say there’s a housing shortage, but by how much exactly? How many more apartments need to exist for those 21,512 people, so that everyone can find affordable housing?

We did an excellent Housing Needs Assessment, but it’s out of date – it uses 2017 data. It desperately needs to be updated yearly. But still, in 2017, this was the situation:

Adding up the first six rows, we had 9935 total rental households (in 2017) that earned less than $35,000 a year, and we had a shortfall of 4233 rental units.

Since then:

Prices have surged
A lot has been built (but at what rental price?)
A lot more people have moved to San Marcos

So it’s really impossible to speculate. But my read is that we have an increasingly severe housing shortage for the poorest third of San Marcos. Let’s say we need 4,250 rental units for people earning under $35,000, just because it’s the next nice even number.

To achieve 4,250 affordable units, we only need to build 85 more LIHTC apartment complexes around San Marcos! Right now we have eleven LIHTC projects, and five more that are in the works. This is an excruciatingly slow way to chip away at those 4,250 units.

One last detail on the 25% number: that number was set in March of 2022. Before that, you only had to set aside 10% of your units. So that 200-unit apartment complex would only bring 20 newly affordable units to the table. Only 212 more apartment complexes needed at this rate!

[I’m being a teeny bit of a jerk. This one mechanism is not supposed to solve the housing crisis all by itself. It’s just one tool among many. But in practice, we have very few other ways of generating affordable housing.]

So here was the question being debated on Tuesday: should we stick with requiring that 25% of units be affordable? Should we go back to 10%? Or should we settle somewhere in the middle?

Council quickly settles on 15%: it should only take 15% of your units to qualify for tax breaks.

So what’s the rationale? What’s wrong with 25%? Basically, developers have stopped applying for the program at all. The tax credits aren’t enough to offset the cost of setting aside 25% of their units for low-income housing. The math doesn’t math, as the kids say.

Are developers the bad guys? Eh, not really. They’re not here to solve housing affordability. This is not their problem.

What does this mean then? It means that this is a terrible way to create enough affordable housing.

The honest truth is that this is too big a problem for San Marcos. Poor towns and big cities have high needs and rich towns and rich suburbs have very small needs. Making cities solve their own individual housing crises is idiotic. We actually live in a wealthy state! Texas could meaningfully reduce housing unaffordability, if this state cared about anything besides outlawing trans kids and punishing refugees.

Given that there’s no real solution anywhere in sight, should we:

Require builders provide 25% low-income housing, and have fewer applications? or
Allow builders to only provide 15% low-income housing, and have more applications?

Answer: poor residents lose either way.

…

One final note: Other places build a lot more public housing than we do. For example, Vienna was written up in the NYT recently. (Gifted link – shouldn’t be paywalled).

Given that the US doesn’t have much appetite for building a lot of high-quality public housing, the best way to bring down housing prices is to build an excess of housing that is close to people’s jobs and schools. Put guardrails on what kind of dense housing developers can build, and then let them build it. (My preference for the guardrails is to allow more condos, duplexes, 4-plexes and 8-plexes in quiet neighborhoods, and then some large scale apartment complexes as their own standalone thing. Clearly the Old Guard in town prefers strictly single family housing and massive apartment complexes. But I digress.)

This is actually something that Texas has done better than California. It’s easier there for a few people to gum up the process for a developer indefinitely, and so you end up only building out in the middle of nowhere. Hence the enormous sprawl and wild housing prices.

City Council workshop, 7/3/23

July 9, 2023July 10, 2023 by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

City Council Workshops were fascinating. There were two topics:

Homeless Action Plan
Housing Action Plan

First, the Homeless Action Plan.

San Marcos hired a guy named Robert Marbut for five months, to write a report about what we should do to help homeless people in San Marcos. He gave the presentation on Tuesday.

First off, Max Baker is very wary of him. And rightly so: the Wikipedia entry on Marbut is pretty awful:

According to The Huffington Post, Marbut’s advice to most communities was to limit food handouts and build a large shelter that stays open all day and doesn’t turn anyone away. He called his approach “The Velvet Hammer”; since then he has said he prefers the phrase “The Velvet Gavel”.^[11]

Marbut’s methods were criticized by housing activists who preferred a policy widely adopted since the 1990s called “Housing First,” which finds apartments and houses instead of shelters for homeless people.^[11]^[12]^[13] Some activists called Marbut’s approach outdated, punitive and patronizing to homeless people, and more effective at hiding them from downtowns than at solving homelessness.^[13]^[2]^[10]

In response, Marbut said, “I believe in Housing Fourth” — awarding permanent housing after residents have shown their personal lives are in order.^[11] “I often say, ‘Having a home is not the problem for the homeless,'” Marbut told the magazine Next City. “It’s maintaining a financial stability that allows you to maintain your homestead.”^[14]

In Pinellas County, Florida, Marbut consulted on a 470-bed shelter called Safe Harbor, which opened in 2011 in a former jail building next to the current jail outside of St. Petersburg. It was run by the sheriff’s department and included a “penalty box” in a fenced-in area of the parking lot where residents who broke rules would sleep. Most residents stayed for less than a month, according to sheriff’s department data, and few were known to have found permanent housing afterward. Between 2011 and 2013, 7 percent of those leaving the shelter found permanent housing, 3 percent went to another shelter or a friend or relative, and 67 percent headed for an “unknown” destination.^[11]^[12]

His presentation on San Marcos was mixed. Parts of it were really good! For example, he stated several times that criminalizing homelessness does not work. Arresting homeless people does not work. He was clear and emphatic on this point.

But parts of it were total garbage. For example, he believes that “handouts promote homelessness”. He can fuck right off with that bullshit. You know who gets a lot of handouts? Wealthy people! They get the mortgage interest deduction for big houses and second homes, the estate tax, the social security earnings limit, and many, many more. They get legacy admit assistance for college. Robert Marbut himself gets handouts, and yet he is not homeless! It’s a Christmas miracle.

He criticized “housing first” policies, but his evidence against them was dishonest. He implied that “Housing First” policies have been tried in San Francisco, LA, Phoenix, Portland, Seattle, and Austin, and consequently, homelessness has skyrocketed in all of them. It’s a bad-faith argument, and he should know better. Their homeless populations haven’t skyrocketed because of a housing first policy; they’ve skyrocketed due to the wildly rising rental costs and the shrinking supply of affordable housing. The fact that he gave an intellectually dishonest characterization of the other side makes me suspicious of a lot of what he says.

His argument goes: If you don’t treat the addiction, domestic violence, mental illness, and so on, then the homeless will be right back on the street in six months. (I don’t think that’s how Housing First policies work? I don’t really know.)

But his counter-proposal isn’t entirely bad, either. He says, “Treat your way out.” Give people shelter while connecting them with help for addiction, domestic violence, mental illness, and so on. I’m not disputing the need for services.

I’m just very worried about the part where you withhold housing in the meantime. How long does it take people to “earn” a key to an apartment or some sort of permanent housing? And what do you do with someone who will never overcome their addiction or mental illness? Is your plan that they live their life in a shelter forever?

Anyway, here’s his five major points:

“Stop the Growth”

Marbut wants us to only help locals. “The worst thing you can do is convert out-of-towners to in-towners!” he quips. He claims we get lots of homeless traffic from the I-35 corridor, and we can’t give handouts to everyone.
- This is fine if you’re talking about homeless people from Austin. It is absolutely true that San Marcos cannot afford to take care of an Austin-sized population.
- This is cruel and inhumane if you’re talking about refugees from Central America.

What exactly does this mean? How would it be implemented?

He is clear about a few details that sound reasonable:

Only ship someone to their hometown in conjunction with a coordinated care team. (But will we actually do this?)
Do not send domestic violence victims home under any circumstances.

I can believe that – sometimes – connecting people with their family can be the path to stability. But it just depends on how humanely it’s implemented.

“Improve the Overall System Through Increased Effectiveness and Efficiencies”

It sounds like he wants a team of people to go break up homeless camps, and connect them to resources.

Again, he stresses that arresting homeless people (for anything short of violent felonies) does not work. And it sounds like we already have a HOTeam that goes out and does this sort of thing, and it includes officers, and they supposedly don’t arrest people for being homeless.

It’s hard to sell me on the idea that cops should go and break up homeless camps. You need to do some work to convince me that they won’t just destroy homeless people’s possessions and make them scatter and start all over.

Expand Capacity

There’s a court case, Martin vs. Boise, where six homeless people were kicked out when a shelter closed, and then promptly arrested. The courts ruled against the city of Boise: you can’t arrest people for being homeless unless there are enough beds for them.

Currently we are not Boise-compliant. We need more shelter space. We should partner with Southside and the Salvation Army. (Updated to clarify: Those are Marbut’s recommendations. Salvation Army has a problematic past.)

Once we’re Boise-compliant, he wants us to have “zero-tolerance of encampments.” What is he picturing, besides arrests? He already said not to arrest non-violent homeless people. How is he imagining forcing people into compliance? (Again, my mind goes directly to things like making homeless people give up their pets and come with you, or else destroying their possessions and making them scatter and start over.)

We should also be partnering with some of the SMCISD and Hays ISD employees who focus on homeless families. We also need a LOT more affordable housing. Both of those sound good.

In the future, build a right-sized Homelessness Assistance Center.

So that’s the spiel. I’m very skeptical of parts of it, but other parts of it are okay, if they’re implemented well.

Mostly City Council has very little to say, aside from some bland platitudes.

Alyssa Garza asks a key question: where did he get his data on San Marcos homelessness? he says he collected it himself, by going out on multiple occasions and talking to people. He’s implicitly claiming that he collected data using sound statistical sampling methods, and didn’t just wing it.

This article is extremely critical of his data claims. It sounds like he does, in fact, just make shit up. (In fact, Marbut claimed on Tuesday that he reduced homelessness in San Antonio by 80% in the 2010s. The linked article points out that homelessness actually grew in San Antonio during that time.)

From here, staff will bring forth a possible plan for City Council to adopt, to help homeless people in a coordinated, effective way.

Housing Action Plan

In 2018-2019, we carried out a big housing action plan. Then City Council just… didn’t approve it. They just shrugged it away. It’s really insane. It’s just been collecting dust here, ever since.

Now we’re waking up the slumbering giant, and bringing it around again! The numbers are now out of date. City staff will update the numbers, and get the ball rolling. (Incidentally, these are the numbers I’m always crabbing about not having, whenever we’re considering new zoning! I’m very pleased right now.)

It did go to P&Z last time, and P&Z passed a number of amendments. Most of these are focused on wealthy, secure people. Those redlines are still in effect. We shall see.

Hours 1:00-5:00, 8/2/22

August 7, 2022August 7, 2022 by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Four hours of zoning cases! There are five big cases. Oddly enough, the first four are all located very close together. It’s either a weird coincidence, or they’re connected in some way that was not made explicit.

Yellow is at the intersection of East McCarty and Rattler Road. On your right, if you’re going from Amazon to the high school. They want to build apartment complexes. I think it’s okay.
Orange is huge. It stretches all the way to Old Bastrop Highway. Terrible sprawl.
Green is right between Embassy Suites and Amazon. Heavy industrial – bad idea, gets voted down.
Blue is low-income apartments with wraparound services, by the same people who run Encino Pointe and Sienna Pointe. This is complex, but on the whole I think it’s good.

Furthermore, we passed an additional little piece last summer, here:

It’s supposed to be these little rental houses, by these guys. (This is why I want to keep a running list of “what got approved but hasn’t yet gotten built”.)

Anyway. Yellow’s up first!

Items 25-26: 40 acres, at the intersection of Rattler Road and east McCarty:

So if you’re driving from Amazon towards the highschool, this is on your right, just as you get to the intersection with Rattler Road.

There’s a big housing/apartment thing going in right next to it. Amazon is near the top of that photo.

The developer wants CD-5. When City Staff promotes the category “CD-5”, they make it sound like Sesame Street:

A walkable, dense-but-not-overwhelming, charming little scene! Shops and apartments. Sounds great!

In reality, here’s what gets built:

That’s literally the apartment complex that is next door, on McCarty, to this one being proposed. (I just grabbed that photo off Google Streets.)

And listen: I am in favor of apartment complexes! They are more environmentally responsible than single family homes. They are economical. We have a lot of renters in San Marcos.

My point is just the double-speak: we’re pretending that this zoning will bring a charming row of brownstones, with bodegas on the corner, but developers do not buy in. We used to have a way to force developers to build what we wanted: PDDs. But we retired PDDs in 2018, when we redid the Land Development Code. We should not have done this! Totally unforced error.

Back to the yellow plot. Is a giant apartment complex here a good idea? I have a (different) good idea: my five criteria. Let’s do it:

1. Price Tag to the City: Will it bring in taxes that pay for itself, over the lifespan of the infrastructure and future repair? How much will it cost to extend roads, utilities, on fire and police coverage, on water and wastewater?

I’m guessing yes. It’s on roads that are already built for heavy traffic, and there’s already utilities run out in this way. Cops and fire department already cover this area. I think it’s ok.

2. Housing stock: How long will it take to build? How much housing will it provide? What is the forecasted housing deficit at that point? Is it targeting a price-point that serves what San Marcos needs?

We never have this information on hand. Nag the city planners! They need to update the housing deficit! They need to forecast these things!

3. Environment: Is it on the aquifer? Is it in a flood zone? Will it create run-off into the river? Are we looking at sprawl? Is it uniformly single-family homes?

Not the worst sprawl – it’s adjacent to an existing development, and fairly close to Amazon and Embassy Suites, and not as far out as the high school. With the high school already beyond it, it feels like a gap that should get filled in.

It’s not on the aquifer. It’s not single-family homes. I think it’s fine, environmentally.

4. Social: Is it meaningfully mixed income? Is it near existing SMCISD schools and amenities?

Not meaningfully mixed income. Not near existing amenities. Gleason asks about this – any chance of including some commercial? The developer says nope. Just apartments. So it whiffs hard on this category.

5. The San Marxist Special: Is it a mixed-income blend of single family houses, four-plexes, and eight-plexes, all mixed together? With schools, shops, restaurants, and public community space sprinkled throughout?

No, but a blogger can dream.

All in all, I think this project has merit. Affordable housing, between Amazon and the high school. Adjacent to existing housing. I would vote in favor of it.

The vote:
Yes: Jane Hughson, Mark Gleason, Jude Prather, Shane Scott
No: Alyssa Garza, Saul Gonzalez, Max Baker

I’m honestly not sure why those three voted against it – it makes me wonder if I’m missing something? Max had asked about emergency response times and flooding, and the answers hadn’t been particularly unusual.

Items 26-28: 400 acres, on Centerpoint road. Ie, #2, the orange one:

So first off, this thing is massive, much bigger than the last project. The last item was 40 acres, and this is 400 acres. Also, the last item is on a major road (McCarty) and this one is on dinky country roads.

This is already annexed. It sounds like someone dreamed of making it into houses back in 2016, under the name “Gas Lamp” district.

Okay, the big orange square got split into three sub-projects:

Here they are together:

So the developers want it to be half Light Industrial, half houses, and then a teeny bit of really dense housing.

First up is the Light Industrial:

It sounds like it will be a bunch of warehouses. I’m thinking of the kind of thing you see way out on Hunter Road, past Posey. Max Baker is worried about us becoming a warehouse district that other towns dump their warehouse industries on.

I am not concerned about becoming a warehouse town. Warehouses are cheap to build, and cheap for local businesses to rent, and cheap to re-purpose. The ones on Hunter seem to mostly be small, locally owned businesses. Whereas building a bunch of vacant office parks is much worse: expensive to build, expensive to rent, expensive to repurpose.

However, I would vote no. Not due to warehouses, but due to 400 acres, which might be majorly inconsistent with the upcoming VisionSMTX plan, and is definitely huge sprawl. The totality of this project is not good.

The vote on this light industrial piece:
No: Max Baker and Alyssa Garza
Yes: Mayor Hughson, Jude Prather, Shane Scott, Mark Gleason, and Saul Gonzalez.

Part 2:

CD-3: massive single family sprawl.

We’ve got our recipe to follow here! Here we go:

Huge and undeveloped. Very expensive. Thumbs down.

WE NEVER KNOW. Nag the city planners! They need to update the housing deficit! They need to forecast these things!

3. Environment: Is it on the aquifer? Is it in a flood zone? Will it create run-off into the river? Are we looking at sprawl? Is it uniformly single-family homes?

SPRAAAAAAAWWWWWL. All single family. Not good. (At least it’s not on the aquifer.)

4. Social: Is it meaningfully mixed income? Is it near existing SMCISD schools and amenities?

I doubt this will be meaningfully mixed income. This is so far from any existing amenities, unless you plan on buying groceries at Sak’s Off 5th Avenue.

Sigh.

This portion is 0/5. Terrible, horrible, no-good, very-bad project.

The vote on this piece:
No: Max Baker and Alyssa Garza
Yes: Mayor Hughson, Jude Prather, Shane Scott, Mark Gleason, and Saul Gonzalez.

Part 3: Little pockets of CD-5:

Remember, CD-5 is supposed to look like this:

But is really this:

In the top little bit, Mark Gleason makes a motion for “no residential”. It passes 7-0. I don’t really get why. An apartment complex facing the outlet mall? Spoiler alert: there’s about to be apartments right there anyway, when we get to the little blue square proposal.

He also moves that one of the other two triangles be downgraded to more CD-3: single family housing. Also passes 7-0.

The vote on the three little triangles:
No: Max Baker
Yes: Everyone else.

My opinion on the whole 400 acres:

It’s a bad idea to pass a sweeping decision on this giant parcel at this moment. We have a new master plan coming up. Do we even want 200 acres of warehouses and 200 acres of single family homes over here?

At one point, it was mentioned that Chief Dandridge is opposed to all this annexation, because we don’t have police staffing to cover all this extended area. When asked why he didn’t speak up, the answer was that he is waiting to discuss their needs at the upcoming budget meetings. So maybe wait for the upcoming budget meetings?

Finally, this fails the five criteria. It’s poorly planned sprawl, with no amenities. Why are we recreating mistakes that the rest of the country made 30 years ago?

………………………………….

Item 29: Heavy Commercial, the green square between Embassy Suites and Amazon:

Mayor Hughson and Max Baker think this is a terrible idea, because Embassy Suites is supposed to host all our guests. Heavy Commercial is the most hardcore industrial zoning. This sinks like a stone:

The vote:
Yes: Jude Prather, Shane Scott
No: Mayor Hughson, Max Baker, Mark Gleason, Alyssa Garza, Saul Gonzalez

There’s a second vote on a “hard no” or a “soft no” – essentially some fiddly technicalities with whether to make the developers wait a year or substantially re-tool their application, before coming back.

Hard no: Saul Gonzalez, Max Baker
Soft no: Mayor Hughson, Alyssa Garza, Shane Scott, Jude Prather, Mark Gleason

So the developers can bring it back with less effort.

….

Items 30-31: Low income tax credit apartments, the blue square behind the outlet mall:

So this is complicated, but I think the good outweighs the bad. It’s going to be apartments that are priced below market rates:

(“AMI” means Area Median Income.)

You have to apply and have a sufficient income to qualify. It would be better if there were more apartments in the lowest income range – these are the most vulnerable people in our community. But: more good than bad.

The Workforce Housing Committee had a number of concerns – not near public transportation, located in a low intensity zone, a higher percentage of apartments reserved for that lowest tier of income, not close to things like grocery stores. But the people running the place were very good at sounding like they’d be happy to change and accommodate all these concerns. For example, they’re providing shuttle service two days a week, for a minimum of ten hours, and they’ll work with residents individually.

So here we go:

Not relevant. This is a publicly-subsidized program intentionally built to address inequality. (We forgo all local taxes on it, and they qualify for special loans and grants.)

329 units. And committing to a price-point which is underserved.

3. Environment: Is it on the aquifer? Is it in a flood zone? Will it create run-off into the river? Are we looking at sprawl? Is it uniformly single-family homes?

Not on the aquifer. Not in a flood zone. Not particularly close to town either, but apartments are far more dense than houses, and it’s fairly close to existing development.

4. Social: Is it meaningfully mixed income? Is it near existing SMCISD schools and amenities?

Not meaningfully mixed income, but serving a public good. Not near schools and amenities, but offering transportation and a facilitator to help residents get to the grocery store, doctor’s appointments, etc.

Well, no. Nevertheless, I’m cobbling these together to give it a “Pretty Good”.

There’s actually two votes, one on the tax credits and one on the agreements.

Tax Credits vote:
Yes: Mayor Hughson, Alyssa Garza, Shane Scott, Saul Gonzalez, Mark Gleason
No: Max Baker
Abstaining: Jude Prather

Development agreement vote:
Everyone voted yes, besides Jude, who abstained.

(I’m not actually sure what Jude’s conflict of interest is, but I’m not concerned about it.)

So there you have it. We have talked about all the colors in the map.

This episode has been brought to you by the colors Yellow, Orange, Green, and Blue, and all the letters inside the City of San Marcos Land Development Code.

…

Items 1-2: But wait! There’s a fifth development! (After all, this part of the meeting really does take four hours.)

Remember last time, we discussed the far flung development with the power plant in the middle?

As best I can tell, it’s that little red triangle waaaaaaaaaay down at the bottom. (I even took the time to draw in the little yellow/orange/green/blue colors for you!)

This is so far away. This is insane. Do not annex this crazy little triangle and build houses on it.

The guy who owns the power plant shows up and discusses the noise and light pollution. He is exempt from city restrictions on noise and light pollution, because it’s loosely connected to maintenance needed to stay prepared for emergencies. However, he doesn’t want to deal with the legal and regulatory headaches of having a bunch of cranky home owners in his backyard.

Do we need to walk through the five criteria?

Terrible on costs to the city.
Housing stock? No idea. It’s 127 acres, so it just depends how big the lots are and how much gets eaten up with power line buffers and power plant buffers, and roads, etc.
Environment? Far from the river but terrible on sprawl.
Mixed income? Near amenities? Who knows on the income, but it’s not near anything but a lot of buzzing power lines and a noisy, brightly lit power plant.
Not my little utopia in any way.

This is a terrible idea. But here’s are how the councilmembers stake their positions:

What a terrible idea: Max Baker, Alyssa Garza, Saul Gonzalez

It’s okay, as long as home buyers are informed that the power plant is noisy AF: Mayor Hughson, Mark Gleason

This is aces! : Jude Prather, Shane Scott

In the end, it’s postponed. Staff will put together a protective covenant that satisfies Hughson and Gleason. Then, together with Jude and Shane Scott, this dumb, far-flung project will get approved.

Hour 1.5-4:00, 7/5/22

July 10, 2022 by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Hour 1:30 – Annexing and Rezoning

Item 21: This is a proposal for 470 houses, way out past the outlet mall and past the Trace development. This is sprawl. In general, I do not like isolated subdivisions plopped down in the middle of nowhere. It requires way more mileage of pipes and wires to get them hooked up to the city, it causes more wear and tear on the roads than closer developments, it works against having a functional public transit, and so on. It takes a toll.

It’s that little red pin dropped way at the bottom.

Saul Gonzalez asks my favorite question: Will this pay for itself?

This is a really important question. Approving a development costs the city a lot of money. Much is shared by the developer, who hopes to turn a profit, but not all. Like I said above, a new development needs water lines, wastewater service, electric lines, emergency services, access to city services and facilities, and contributes to wear and tear on streets and infrastructure.

So developments cost the city money. Developments also bring in tax revenue. So will the tax revenue eventually cover the costs? And this bit is crucial: will it cover the lifecycle of the streets/power lines/pipes, as they age and need repairs in 20 years? Have we accounted for this in our budgeting? (Usually not. But we should.)

So that is important question #1: Will this pay for itself, not just costs incurred during the immediate build but also estimating life cycle repairs to infrastructure?

Here is important question #2: When is the estimated time of completion, and what is our predicted housing deficit at that time?

We have mountains of housing that has been approved, but not built. The city staff need to continuously be explaining to council (and P&Z) what our current housing deficit is, and what it is predicted to be in the future, as different developments are built and more people move to town. (Ideally broken out by affordability.)

Important question #3 is: Is this environmentally responsible? Is it on the aquifer? Is it suburban sprawl? Does it incorporate duplexes and 4-plexes and 8-plexes throughout the single-family region? How much driving will residents be required to do?

This one isn’t the worst, insofar as it’s not in the aquifer. But I still resent far-flung communities, and I resent that it’s uniformly going to be single-family.

(We can’t mandate duplexes and townhomes and things like that. This came up at P&Z. We used to be able to, when we had PDDs, and then we threw them away for mysterious reasons.)

Important question #4: Is it mixed income? Is it near amenities?

We have very little meaningfully mixed income housing in San Marcos. Even when new builds like La Cima include multi-family, they segregate it from the single family portion. That’s not great. It is much better for everyone when there is a wide diversity of income levels in a neighborhood, kids attending schools together, different social classes forging connections and co-mingling their lives.

Similarly, developments get built without thinking about where people will shop for groceries, or go for dinner, or whatever. The idea is that the free market will save the day, and you won’t have a food desert. Then you get a food desert, because the free market does not save the day. (Fortunately, city code guarantees access to parks and some public spaces. Because the free market will not save the day.)

So Council should always ask those four questions, in order to evaluate a proposal. As is, we do not have the answers to any of these questions.

Listen: I actually think really highly of city staff. I think they work hard, and I’ve particularly thought that the interim city manager, Stephanie Reyes, seems to be doing a great job. However, on developments, they’re trapped by their forms. The form for the information they put together for P&Z and Council probably hasn’t been updated in at least 15 years. The form needs to be massively revised to provide P&Z and Council with the answers to these four questions.

To recap:

Will it pay for itself, over the lifespan of the infrastructure? (Denser development will score better.)
When is it estimated to be built, and what is the forecasted housing deficit at that point?
Are we looking at sprawl? Is this on the aquifer? Is it uniformly single-family homes?
Is it meaningfully mixed income? Is it near existing amenities?

Answers: who knows, who knows, yes, and no.

….

But wait! There’s more! Back to that red pin at the bottom of the map, above.

One final thing that makes this particular tract unpleasant is that it contains the Hays Electrical Power Plant. A rural neighbor shows up and describes what happens when the boilers are cleaned: for 3-4 days, it sounds like you’re living next to an airport, 24/7.

Is it bad for your health to live very close to an industrial power plant? In my quick look at what counts as environmental health risk factors, I’m seeing things like this: “presence of hazardous waste sites and facilities (landfills, incinerators, Superfund sites)” but I’m not seeing power plants in those kinds of lists. So I’m tentatively thinking it’s a nuisance and not a health hazard.

Here’s what does not count as evidence: the fact that the state of Texas allows it, and there are examples of neighborhoods next to power plants in Austin and Seguin.

Overall, I still don’t like the subdivision.

The vote:
Yes: Mayor Hughson, Shane Scott, Mark Gleason
No: Alyssa Garza, Max Baker

Abstain: Saul Gonzalez, wanting to find out more about the health risks.

But then Saul switches to “yes” in order to bring it back for a second reading. He is clear that he’s just doing this to get more information, and not because he’s made his decision.

…

Items 23-27: Several items about Whisper Tract, the ginormous development going in on the east side of 35, up north across from Blanco Vista.

One has gone back and forth to P&Z and to a committee, about zoning one part Light Industrial, right near the Saddlebrook mobile home community. The problem is that while we notify the owners of property, we don’t notify the renters. And mobile home residents generally don’t own the land under their home, so they weren’t notified. We’re being jerks here.

Council carves out some bad-neighbor exceptions to light industrial, and passes it. The other Whisper items all pass, too. Whisper is huge.

…

Item 28: There’s a little patch of land west of I-35, between I-35 and Blanco Vista that gets re-zoned. It’s at this red pin:

This is right near the apartment complexes tucked in that same little tract of land. It had been General Commercial, and now it will be CD-4.

CD-4 is fairly dense – picture apartments or townhomes. You’re allowed to put some corner stores in. It’s pretty reasonable for that location.

Item 39:

Suppose you’re driving up from Seguin, on 123.

This is the intersection of 123 and Beback Inn Road, which is a really great name for a road. That red house on your left is the Full Moon Saloon. That giant expanse of empty flat space on your right, starting at the light, is the topic for Item 39.

It’s too early to really answer the four questions above, but that’s certainly way out in the middle of farm land. And the presentation claims it will be “predominantly single family with some commercial.”

Council decided to put together a committee to work with the developer. Max Baker, Shane Scott, and Mark Gleason will be on it. Those three make for a highly combustible group, and Max is outnumbered. We shall see how this goes.

Hour 1, 5/17/22

May 22, 2022May 22, 2022 by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Citizen Comment:

The landlords are very mad about the three-month eviction moratorium. It was implemented in March 2020. We’re one of the few holdouts that haven’t lifted it yet, mostly because Hays County did a spectacularly abysmal job giving rental assistance to tenants. The idea was that with a few extra months, maybe more money could be dispersed and keep people in their homes. Evictions lead to homelessness, which derails lives permanently.

This time, the landlords were arguing that the moratorium is bad for tenants, because it allows them to rack up more debt, which then counts against them when they are eventually evicted anyway. Their other argument is that the job insecurity caused by the pandemic is long gone. (Their actual argument is that they would like to collect rent every month. This isn’t itself a crazy argument!)

Look, landlords are generally a problematic group. They leach off renters’ income by virtue of the fact that they had wealth earlier than the renter did. They benefit from a housing crisis and generally try to absorb as much of someone’s disposable income as they can. However: asking landlords to forgo the money that they’re legally entitled to is also a problem.

So here is the key question: is the eviction delay a worthwhile way to prevent homelessness?

Glad you asked – we actually had a council workshop on homelessness just two weeks ago! What are their recommendations?

(From here and here.)

Oh. Those are very high-level. That’s a whole ‘nother geologic time scale from 90-eviction moratoriums.

So here are some more immediate things I would like to know:

What is our total housing stock, broken down by affordability?
What is our total housing need, broken down by affordability?
What were the recommendations in the 2019 Housing Needs study?
How is the implementation going?

Those questions should be front and center, every time we are discussing zoning, housing, short-term homelessness, or affordability.

In 2019, San Marcos did a major housing needs assessment. There is tons of good data in it, most of it from 2017. We desperately need to be updating this every year.

So for example, here is our rental stock from 2017:

(From here.)

This should be updated every 2-3 years!
– the 3rd/4th columns should come from Census and American Community Survey data, which is released every few years.
– We know the number of new units that get occupancy permits each year. This is already aggregated here and here.

But the hard part would be finding out how much apartments are being rented for. Since 2017, those 15,884 total apartments have all risen in cost, so they’re not in the same categories as they used to be. For example, the 4163 units that were under $875/month in 2017? Those must all be in the < $1250 or < $1875 categories by now.

So the gap is presumably way worse in 2022 than it was in 2017, but we don’t know by exactly how much. Still, two questions down.

~~What is our total housing stock, broken down by affordability?~~
~~What is our total housing need, broken down by affordability?~~
What were the recommendations in the 2019 Housing Needs study?
How is the implementation going?

So I dove into question 3 next. I found this, and got excited:

Three year implementation! Why, if we started in 2019 then…[counts on fingers…2020…2021…]…we should have really made some great progress!

So I got into the housing needs assessment.

Table of contents:

That looks like the right spot.…flipping to chapter IV…

There are four top needs, starting on page IV-2:

Additional affordable rentals for residents earning less than $25K
Displacement prevention
Starter homes and family homes priced near or below $200K and increased ownership product diversity
Improve condition and accessibility of existing housing stock.

Yes, yes! Those are big needs! (And “Displacement prevention” is right there, tying into the the 90 day eviction notice debate.)

So what is the action plan? What is in the “Addressing Needs” section?

Oh hrm. What the hell.

There are actually some useful recommendations in the glossy brochure version of the Strategic Housing Action Plan, but it was labeled as the draft version. I was trying to find the legal version. But that’s when I realized that everything was still labeled as “draft”. Then I saw this on the city webpage:

So did we really spend a year and drop a bunch of money on consultants, and then just…never adopt the plan? It’s just sitting there in draft form? Or is it just that the website was never updated?

Oh, this is such a riot.

At this point I was rabidly curious. I found the city council minutes from October 15th, 2019, but it wasn’t there. It turns out that it didn’t go to P&Z until October 23rd, and it finally went to council on November 6th, 2019.

The Strategic Housing Action Plan came from P&Z with a number of edits. At council, they discussed it, and punted to a Council Workshop.

So I went hunting for the workshop. Finally I found it, 12/3/19. It wasn’t a workshop on the Strategic Housing Action Plan, it was on the new Comprehensive Plan. Workshops don’t have minutes, and I didn’t watch the video. But this is taken from the packet:

So it was never approved, because it got absorbed into the Comprehensive Plan process, which is in progress. This is VisionSMTX. It still has at least another year to go. And Comprehensive Plans are vague – they’re not going to promise funding or commit to specific details. So it will be years until someone puts together a new housing plan. (I have vivid memories of the SMTX4All housing project – I just assumed it had been passed and implemented!)

To recap: we’re sitting on housing recommendations from 2019, with data from 2017, while we dither about what we might like to look like in 2050.

I really do believe in longterm planning. But waiting to address a housing crisis like this is just lazy and infuriating.

The problem is those “controversial policy-related items” referenced in the workshop snippet. You can read what P&Z wanted to kill here, on pages 17 and 18. The Strategic Housing Plan was seen as a money grab by realtors, and only interpreted as a fight between realtors and the integrity of existing single family neighborhoods. There was no actual focus on the struggle of people in San Marcos to find homes. Basically, it’s a lot of nimbyism and fear of infill. (Infill can be done in a shitty way! Infill needs to be done very carefully! But the recommendations from P&Z just ignored the actual problem.) But at least P&Z actually passed the damn thing, unlike Council.

So we held a massive housing plan and never implemented anything. And rental rates exploded in the meantime. That sounds about right.

(What were we talking about again? Should we end the 3-month eviction moratorium? At some point we’ll have to, but it sure would be nice if we could get rental assistance to those in need beforehand.)

…

Item 1: Presentation by GSMP

The Greater San Marcos Partnership gets $400k/year from the city of San Marcos, per this contract. For context, the entire city budget for 2022 is $260.5 million dollars. So while GSMP is exasperating, we really are only talking about 0.0015 of the city’s budget.

Per the contract, GSMP has to come get updates to the city. GSMP is doing a lot of outreach and education. They’re holding workshops – financial literacy, a mentorship thing, innovations, cybersecurity. Sure. A resources database. Strengthen! Produce! Support! Identify challenges! My brain just turns to mush when I hear corporate verbs.

Max Baker is worried that GSMP will bring businesses in that aren’t good for San Marcos, and attempts to pin him on the quality of jobs at, say, Amazon. But the speaker is perfectly skilled at side-stepping questions.

For example: “You claim you’re working to bring in big businesses and supporting small businesses. Don’t companies like Amazon undercut small businesses that you claim to support?” asks Max, quite rightly.

“The large companies diversify our economy! There are spin offs! Different intellectual properties spin off and source locally!” the GSMP guy responds cheerfully. Which is an irrelevant answer – new spin-off companies don’t protect existing small businesses in any way. He actually has the cajones to claim that Amazon is known for having good labor practices, from what he hears. You can practically see the smoke pour out of Max’s ears.

Anyway, GSMP is dumb, but this whole thing is small potatoes. The speaker doesn’t do anything wrong exactly, but it’s unsatisfying.

Hours 3.5-4.5, 4/5/22

April 10, 2022April 10, 2022 by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Items 17 and 19 are both about affordable housing, in different ways.

Item 17: Extending the Covid Disaster Declaration, and whether to keep the 3 month eviction delay ordinance.

On the Disaster Declaration: Keep it, because it makes us eligible for funding. (But also, there actually could be another Covid wave. Right now, risk is low, and we should take our masks off and enjoy normal life. But the winds could shift again, and we’d have to respond to that.)

On the Eviction Delay: currently it takes 3 months to evict someone. According to the Justices of the Peace, the eviction rate has stayed roughly steady pre-covid to covid. The issue is whether we should go back to normal. (What is normal – evictions on demand? One month grace period? I don’t actually know.)

The argument in favor is that this costs landlords the rent money that they’re entitled to, and we’re clearly back in a healthy job market, so any Covid hardship should be over. The counterargument is that the Emergency Rental Assistance program has been an absolute shitshow – thanks, Hays County! – and people need it, but haven’t been able to get it. Furthermore, evictions lead to homelessness.

This is true and well-documented. There are two main categories of homeless people – first, the visible homeless, with mental illnesses. These are sometimes called chronically homeless. This is who most of us think of when we think of homeless people. The other group is the temporarily homeless. This group is much more invisible. These are people who may have been living a fairly stable life, but they were financially precarious, and then they were hit with one or several events, and now things are in a tailspin. The eviction is an outsized, disproportionate consequence for the bumps in the road that led to it. It’s unsafe, unstable, extra-expensive, and it then takes years for people to recover some financial stability, if ever. It’s traumatic for children, and there are often children involved. (Traumatic for the adults, too.)

The problem is so much bigger than just the three month eviction delay. We need a universal standard of living. We need housing guaranteed for all.

Side note on housing: The federal government used to build a massive amount of low income housing. Somewhere I read that in some cities in the ’70s, they were building ~200-300K units of housing every year. In the ’80s, we mostly switched to Section 8 vouchers, which meant that no new housing was being built by the federal government. Production of cheap housing plummeted. People on Section 8 vouchers now have to compete with everyone else for housing. All of a sudden, affordable housing became a limited resource, and then it became scarce. The free market has not created a glut of cheap housing. The government needs to build it.

Now, there were tons of problems with the federal low income housing, largely because of racism. Buildings were not maintained and kept safe, and when you have a lot of people of color living in a rundown, dangerous area, society declares it to be a slum. But the answer is to fix federal housing and pay to do it correctly, not throw the baby out with the bathwater.

So back to the 3 month eviction delay: It would not be a problem to evict someone if they could move right into a safe, free, well-maintained, basic apartment. It also would not be a problem if there was not a five year waiting list to get a Section 8 housing voucher.

Believe it or not, I am actually sympathetic to landlords on this one, as well. They’re still responsible for the mortgage every month. But the stakes are so much more dangerously high for the tenant than the landlord.

Given how disastrous evictions are for tenants, and given that there is a huge pot of money that needs to be handed out, we should keep the 3 month delay in place while we work to connect tenants to the money. This also benefits landlords! If your tenant gets rental relief, then you get paid.

(Do I need to say that these arguments were all stated most clearly by Alyssa Garza? Yes, I should give credit where credit is due. She does a great job laying out the situation. In particular, she wants the city to help residents can get through the Emergency Rental Assistance program.)

Lastly: being a landlord comes with risk. Being a business owner comes with risk. Being a bank and lending money comes with risk. In different ways, these entities make money off of other people’s labor. If you eliminate the risk, then you just want to get richer by virtue of being rich in the first place. Nice gig if you can get it, but very antithetical to this Marxist’s sense of fairness. (Of course not all landlords are rich, and not all business owners are rich. But they are better off than the people being evicted, right?)

In the end:
Keep: Alyssa Garza, Jude Prather, Max Baker, Jane Hughson, Saul Gonzalez
End: Shane Scott, Mark Gleason

(The four who voted to keep all want more data on evictions and have sympathy for landlords. It’s a hard issue.)

Item 19: Also a housing issue. Right now, we have a ban on more than two unrelated people living together. Should we increase that to three people? Or more?

Historically, San Marcos hates its college students. And to be fair, historically Texas State was a massive party school. So the stereotype is that your neighbor will be a rental house with 15 college students who throw keggers every weekend and puke in your bushes. The idea is to prevent these students from living together.

(I actually have a theory that Texas State is much less of a party school than it was twenty years ago. Rising admission standards, higher level of economic anxiety within the student body, and fewer slap-happy white kids, for lack of a better term. It’s been a long time since we had an incident like the drunk girl who had a DUI driving her toy Barbie Jeep around campus.)

There are SO MANY reasons that this occupancy restriction is a terrible policy.

These bans are very classist and racist in effect, even if ostensibly the intent was anti-college students.
You should write your policy to address the problem you want to solve. If giant parties and noise and trash are the problem, then you’ve got a code enforcement problem. No one actually cares if the people throwing the party are siblings or nephews or whatever. (Max Baker makes this point.)

We look for workarounds – like the occupancy restriction – because code enforcement is hard. Right now, we have two code enforcement problems: we need to hire more code enforcement staffing, and we need to take on landlords. Unless you can penalize landlords, they will never care that their property has become a nuisance. Until we have a well-functioning, complete rental registry, landlords can obscure their identities and avoid penalties.

3. The occupancy ban is totally unenforceable, which means that it is violated all the time, and enforced selectively. When someone has an ax to grind with their neighbor, they can get them via this statute. If a neighbor has a legit complaint, then deal with the legit complaint. This just invites capricious and biased enforcement.

4. Fundamentally, we need more housing. People need to be able to double up and triple up, without fear of the law. However, this ordinance is so broadly ignored that I doubt repealing it would actually open up much housing. So while this is the focus of the debate, it’s also sort of the least important reason.

I believe Alyssa Garza brought the item to the agenda.

There are a couple of sub-debates:

Would raising the limit to 3 help?
What if we required a conditional use permit? (CUP)
What if it had to be owner-occupied? In other words, if you own the home, you can rent out a bedroom, but not if you rent?
What if some Dallas parents buy a house for their college kids? Are the college kids considered “owner-occupied” and then allowed to have more unrelated people? I cannot believe how much traction this one gets, because college kids partying was ostensibly the whole problem.

Several times this evening, Jude Prather appears to be very responsive to the kinds of arguments that Alyssa Garza puts forth. Both of them deserve credit – Alyssa for explaining herself patiently, over and over again, and Jude for listening with an open mind, and hearing what she’s saying.

Saul Gonzalez and Mark Gleason are very opposed to any change. They both believe fervently in the destruction wrought by these massive house parties, and 8-10 cars parked all over the lawn. My dudes: we are talking about three unrelated people. Not 8-10. Three unrelated people most likely do not have a boatload of cars.

Max Baker and Jane Hughson are annoyingly cautious about this. They want it to be owner-occupied, which basically means that old folks can rent out their kids’ bedroom, once their kids are long gone, to help offset the property taxes. This is just the lamest little situation to restrict your attention to. They also want it to perhaps require a CUP.

What’s even worse is that they’d consider it “owner-occupied” if a college student is living in a house that their parent owns. This is purely symbolic, because there has never been an actual rich kid who has restrained themselves over this rule, but the idea is completely inequitable and infuriating. Weren’t these the kids that we were scared would throw the massive keggers?

Alyssa Garza points out the classism and racism inherent these proposals. Who exactly has generational wealth? Who owns homes? Who can navigate a CUP process? Whose daddy buys them a house for college?

Mayor Hughson hems and haws, and ultimately wants community feedback. Unfortunately, this is a terrible idea. You do not consult the community when racism and classism are involved, because hoards of people will happily tell you how racist and classist they are. This will invite all the NIMBY-types to come out in droves, and generate the false impression that we are being terrorized by keggers in San Marcos.

(Max Baker does point out plenty of new builds have no residency restrictions. This needs to be written carefully, lest we impose new residency restrictions where they currently don’t exist.)

The vote has several parts:
– Should we move it up to 3 unrelated people?
– Should it require a conditional-use permit (CUP)?
– Should it be limited to owner-occupied homes?
– If so, should college students in Daddy’s house count as owner-occupied?

Shane, Jude, Alyssa: Yes on 3. No restrictions.
Max: Yes on 3. In the historic district, owner-occupied with CUP.
Saul: Only owner-occupied with CUP. College kids count.
Mark: Only owner-occupied with CUP. No on college kids.
Jane: I can’t decide without talking to people in the community.

In the end, this was just a preliminary discussion. Staff will draft something raising the limit to 3 unrelated people, and bring it back.