Tag: occupancy restrictions

Hours 1:00 – 1:42, 3/5/24

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Items 15-16:  Burying power lines

All new developments have to bury their power lines.  

In other words, this is bad:

whereas this is good:

There’s a lot of reasons why this is good practice:

Ok, great.

Whisper South and Whisper South Industrial are here:

Whisper South has requested skipping burying their electrical lines.  Staff denied the request. So they appealed to City Council.  

City Council agreed with staff, and denied the request as well. 

Good job, Council!

…

Items 17-18:  The Neighborhood Commission 

Maybe the Neighborhood Commission is my arch-nemesis?  I disagree so hard with them that steam is coming out my ears.

They sent Council two resolutions, on Occupancy Restrictions and Purpose Built Student Housing.

  1. Occupancy Restrictions

Back in April 2022, Council voted to loosen occupancy restrictions from a max of 2 unrelated people in a house, to a max of 3 unrelated people in a house. Unfortunately, the code wasn’t updated for another 18 months. By this point, Max Baker was off Council and Matthew Mendoza was on it.

Matthew was in a panic over the idea of 3 unrelated people living together. He tried to get everyone to vote against it, and it failed, and then tried one more time. He clutched his pearls so hard that he’s probably infertile now.

It finally passed, officially, in October. So it has been in effect for six months. But in a sore loser move, a subcommittee was put together “to study the issue further”.

The Neighborhood Commission is pissed off.

They want the rule to revert to a max of two unrelated people.

Listen: a cap of two unrelated people is batshit crazy.  They clearly hate students, but banning students effectively bans poor people as well. (I really don’t care if that’s accidental or on purpose.) This prevents poor people from pooling their resources and being able to afford the rent in a quiet neighborhood.  That’s super gross!   

Who actually thinks City Council should be in the business of policing who is married?  Why are we micro-managing people’s private lives this way?! 

Usually people will say “It’s about parking!” or “It’s about noise!” or “It’s about wild parties!”  But there are other mechanisms for dealing with noise and parties.  (Namely code enforcement and rental registries for landlords.)

What about the extra cars, parking on the street? Listen: your desire to keep street spots empty is less important than other people’s right to affordable housing. I don’t know why we allow “empty street spots” to be a weapon that existing home owners can wield against renters. Home owners do not have a right to keep street spots empty.

But let me be fair: surely the neighborhood commission gave thoughtful reasons, right?

Unless I’m missing something, they’re saying that three friends living together is causing all this:

  • Rising costs of home ownership
  • Impact on residents remaining in their homes
  • Impact of landlords attempting to put 3 unrelated students in a home
  • Negative impact on the neighborhood

Wow. That is high on blame and short on details. If something is going on, spell it out explicitly, because right now it looks unhinged. (Also home prices are currently falling.)

What does Council do?

Remember the subcommittee that was formed? It hasn’t met yet, mostly because it doesn’t have a purpose.

Jane Hughson calls for the subcommittee to meet within 30 days.  The subcommittee is Matthew Mendoza, Mark Gleason, and Alyssa Garza.

Shall they meet?

Yes, they must meet!! Jane, Matthew, Mark
No, it’s over, this is dumb: Alyssa, Shane, Jude

So the informal vote fails. They do not need to meet.

But wait! There’s more from the Neighborhood Commission!

  1. They hate Purpose Built Student Housing and rent-by-the-bedroom leases. 

There is an argument that RBB leases are predatory. (I don’t exactly agree, but we’ll talk about this extensively in the Bonus P&Z section.) But for now, it’s safe to say that the Neighborhood Commission is not upset because students are being exploited.

The Neighborhood Commission is saying this:

They do not want student housing complexes. I think this is clear.

So let’s summarize: they do not want students renting houses in neighborhoods. They also do not want apartment complexes to cater to students.

This is just delusional. Look, we have a university! With a lot of students! They are entitled to live in this town!

If students are throwing obnoxious parties, then we need to properly fund Code Enforcement to shut those down. If you have a problem with rentals, hold landlords accountable. This commission thinks that shutting off the actual supply of housing – this human right that we all deserve – will somehow lead to different behavior by students.

What does Council do?

It’s a little perplexing. Jane Hughson moves to postpone the discussion.

Her explanation is that they didn’t put Rent by the Bedroom (RBB) on the agenda, and so legally Council cannot discuss it. She wants to put both RBB and Purpose Built Student Housing on the agenda, so that Council can have the appropriate discussion.

But this is just wrong. Look at the agenda:

Rent by the bedroom is actually right there, on the agenda! How did no one correct her? They literally read that blurb out loud at 1:30:56, here.

(I mean, I truly don’t care. Let’s postpone. It’s not urgent.)

….

Council or city staff: if you’re reading this, I do have one practical suggestion:  

If you’re going to regulate RBB leases, you should require that leases include an option to rent by semester, for a modest surcharge.   Students need some flexibility to be able to take internships, or graduate in December, or move home for the summer.

Since the complexes are profiting off of being quasi-dorms, they should provide this benefit specific to students, like a dorm would.

Hours 1:55 -2:55, 10/2/23

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Next up! 

Item 9: Updates to the Land Development Code.

We discussed this in August and in September. There are just a few remaining issues to hash out. Here we go:

  1. Should staff be able to approve the most mild, least controversial restaurant alcohol permits, or should they all go to P&Z?

For now, all restaurants and all bars will go through P&Z to get their permit. (Discussed here before.)

A subcommittee will look at carving out some exceptions. For example, hotel bars generally aren’t close to neighborhoods, and aren’t generally rowdy. Maybe City Staff can just renew those on their own.

2. Developers have to donate land for parks, or pay a fee instead. If you’ve got just a little infill development of 4 to 8 units, should you have to pay a fee towards the park system?

No one on council really felt strongly about this. They compromised at 6 units: if you’re building a little development with 6 or more units, you need to pay a fee towards the park system.

3. If houses are only allowed to be 2 stories in your neighborhood, and you’ve got a little rooftop patio, does that count as an extra story?

It used to be 25%. If 25% of your roof has a structure on it, it counted as an extra story. Now it’s any structure at all counts as an extra story.

(Discussed here and here before. I accused them of being killjoys.)

4. Should we continue beating a dead horse on this occupancy restriction thing?

Yes, yes we should.

Quick background: San Marcos has restrictions on how many unrelated people can live together.  It’s been two. Back in May 2022, Council agreed to loosen them from 2 to 3.  

Matthew Mendoza balked at this in August, and then tried to roll it back to 2 in September.  The vote failed 4-3.  But he’s still all heated up about it, and makes another motion to amend it back to 2.

So first, some facts:

  • In San Marcos, it’s only certain housing that has occupancy restrictions. Basically, single family neighborhoods. 
  • In these neighborhoods, you can have any number of people, but only up to two unrelated people.  
  • Here’s how we define unrelated: “A family is defined in the Land Development Code as any number of individuals living as a single housekeeping unit who are related by blood, legal adoption, marriage, or conservatorship.” 

Here’s what city staff say:

Whenever neighbors complain, they’re not actually mad about the number of unrelated people.  It’s always noise, or parking, or the trash, or yard not being kept up.   We can deal with the noise/parking/yard complaint.  It’s not literally the marital status of any of the tenants that’s the issue, so this ordinance is not needed.

Here’s what Matthew and Jane Hughson say:

Landlords want to be able to rent to three tenants. So if you increase this, landlords will buy up housing stock and let it crumble into shitty, ill-maintained housing that exploits tenants.  It’s bad for renters, and decreases the available housing stock for people who want to purchase a home. 

Here’s what I say:

Actually, I want to say two things. I want to refute Matthew’s argument, and I also want to make a separate argument on why you should get rid of occupancy restrictions all together.

Look at Matthew’s argument:

When your chain of cause and effect becomes really long and stretched out, that is often a sign that you are writing bad policy.

If you’re worried about those Bad Consequences – low housing stock and shitty landlords – this would not make it onto the top 100 of effective things to do. 

What you’d do is:

  1. Build more housing. (All sorts.)
  2. Hold landlords accountable. Enforce code violations and fund a city lawyer to send letters to landlords on behalf of tenants. 

Furthermore, his facts aren’t right.  Letting bedrooms go unfilled reduces available housing.  Occupancy restrictions decrease housing, which is the opposite of Matt’s Bad Consequence #1. 

So I have yet to see a compelling argument for these restrictions. 

Arguments against – and here’s where I get pissed off:

  1. Why is the city meddling with whether people are married or not?  A married couple can take in a tenant, but an unmarried couple cannot?  Three friends can’t rent a house? This is gross.
  2. There is a serious housing shortage.  You should be able to put people in bedrooms. You should be able to flexibly problem-solve to provide housing on the fly, when someone you care about is in a pinch. 
  3. We just talked at length for two meetings about the burden of property taxes on Grandma.  Grandma should be allowed to take in her friend’s grandkids as tenants.  Grandma’s primary asset is her house, and she doesn’t want to move, but it’s more house than one person needs. Let her share.

The common thread is non-traditional living situations.  Why should non-traditional living situations be banned?  A few people want to live together, and they can’t, because the city can’t crack down on shitty landlords? That’s dumb as fuck.

Bottom line:

  1. Hold landlords accountable for providing safe, well-maintained housing.
  2. Build a variety of housing in neighborhoods, not just 3- and 4-bedroom houses. Build four-plexes alongside houses so that people can rent apartments in quiet neighborhoods.
  3. Stop micromanaging who is married and who isn’t.

One final point: Yes, landlords buy up housing stock. But listen: being a good landlord is a lot of work. Make bad landlords be good landlords, and some of them will decide it’s not worth it. Hold landlords accountable for maintaining safe and well-maintained properties, and their profit margins will go down, and they’ll be less likely to buy up your housing stock, and it’s better for tenants, and neighbors.  Win-win-win.

Here’s how the conversation goes, after Matthew makes his basic argument:

  • Shane Scott points out that letting someone rent a room may help them afford their property taxes.
  • No one knows the occupancy restrictions in other cities more generally, but College Station sets it at 4 unrelated people.

(I went hunting, and couldn’t find much. Austin puts it at 6 unrelated people.)

  • Jude Prather: I’ve been in this situation. I know plenty of respectable, good neighbors who have had three unrelated people living together at various times. How do you tell people they can’t do this, when housing is unaffordable?
  • Matthew: but Minneapolis got rid of their occupancy restrictions and they went to hell in a handbasket!!
  • Jude: Actually, Minneapolis went the other way. Their housing costs actually resisted inflation. What about a compromise, where you can take in extra tenants if it’s owner-occupied?
  • Alyssa: Let’s remember that occupancy restrictions are rooted in racism and classism.
  • Jane Hughson: NOT IN SAN MARCOS, IT’S NOT! The history here is NOT racist!

 In San Marcos, its origins are mostly anti-college students. But the folks in power did not shed a tear that it was also disproportionately impacting poor and non-white community members.

Also, confidential to Jane: I wouldn’t go betting the farm on San Marcos being a bastion of anti-racism.

  • Matt: I’m trying to protect renters!

(Ahem. Establish a tenant’s council, then.)

  • Mark Gleason: My worry is keeping people in their homes. So I’m in favor. I think people should be able to rent out a room or two.  I don’t think it affects whether or not investors buy up houses.  I’m okay with owner-occupied only, though.
  • Jane: Let’s postpone the whole thing for two weeks!
  • Matthew: I’m just sad about the historic district.
  • Jude: San Marcos is clearly an outlier. We’re not trying to get rid of the rule altogether. 3 unrelated people seems like a good compromise.

The vote:

Jane keeps talking about creating a subcommittee and postponing it for two weeks.  It feels like she’s just unwilling to recognize that she’s lost this vote.  Both Jude and Alyssa gently say that they would be fine just letting it go.  

She forms a committee anyway – Matthew Mendoza, Alyssa Garza, and Mark Gleason – and Alyssa says if there’s a committee, she at leasts wants to be on it.  

When actually forced, 6-1 vote in favor of committee.  The committee will consider whether three unrelated people should only be allowed when one of them owns the house. (We really only want to micromanage the marital status of renters, I guess.)

…

5. Should the notification radius for a giant ungodly thing like the SMART Terminal be bigger than for a dinky little development?

Yes. The notification radius should be proportional to the size of the development. We’ve been over this multiple times.

Staff says no, and gives this as their reason why not: “If we made the cutoff at 500 acres, then developers will just come it at 499 acres!”

In other words: it can’t be done because developers will game the system.

Give me a fucking break. How about this: “For every 25 acres, you have to notify 400 ft out.” Not to brag, but that took me all of ten seconds to write down. I bet someone can spend 10 more seconds and come up with something even better.

Thankfully, Jane is also not satisfied with staff’s lame evasion, and says, “I don’t know the best way to do it, but there’s gotta be a way.”

So this will go to committee.

…

In the end, the whole set of revisions will be postponed until December 5th, to give all these committees time to meet

Hours 4:07-5:45, 9/19/23

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Item 20: Updates to the Land Development Code. 

We went over the proposed updates last month.

Public Comment

  • We relaxed parking restrictions downtown and it is having unintended consequences – The Parlor has bought up several private parking lots.
  • Several speakers talk about the development agreement notification radius again. They use that the radius needs to be “proportional to the size of the project”, and my little blogger heart swelled three sizes.

Council Discussion

One of the changes being proposed is to increase the occupancy restriction from 2 to 3 unrelated people.

(What does this mean? In San Marcos, in single-family zonings, you get only one roommate. You cannot have three unrelated people living together. This is a great way to maintain wealth segregation. And yes, this is totally unenforceable but we do it anyway.)

Matthew Mendoza starts off with a rousing cry against it.

You guys: the speech Matthew gave made my little blogger heart shrivel back down to the size of a blackened pea.  I could not disagree more with him.  

Matthew’s basic claim: if we let three unrelated people live together, then we’re on a slippery slope to ending single family zoning.  He claims that Minneapolis tried this, and it failed so hard that they’re undoing it.

For what it’s worth, it looks like he got every detail of the Minneapolis example wrong. They ended their occupancy restrictions, and then liked it so much that they doubled down.

And then, Minneapolis did exactly what Matthew is scared of – in 2019, they were the first major city to end single-family zoning. So far it’s providing gentle, incremental densification, the way it’s supposed to. (But rents and housing prices are actually falling there for an entirely different reason – elimination of parking minimums.  But yowza, we cannot handle a topic that spicy on this particularly epic-length entry.) Since then, several states and many cities have ended single-family zoning.

Matthew!! Why are you micromanaging everyone’s lifestyle? Let people have a goddamn roommate.

But also: YOU ALL JUST BEMOANED HOW EXPENSIVE TAXES ARE. LET GRANDMA RENT OUT AN ADU, FOR GOD’S SAKE! Let people live with their friends!

See how crazy-making this meeting was? The cognitive dissonance fried my wee brain.

(Alyssa does respond to Matthew, wearily: Who are we to dictate what counts as family, anyway?)

Here we go:

The vote on occupancy restrictions:

Restrict back to 2: Matthew Mendoza, Saul Gonzalez, Jane Hughson
Relax it to 3: Shane Scott, Jude Prather, Mark Gleason, Alyssa Garza

So it barely passed.

A stray thought: Jane voted 6th in line. She was a reluctant yes when this was discussed 18 months ago. I think she switched her vote mid-stream, because she could see it would pass either way. If Mark had voted after Jane, he might have switched his vote to match hers, and the whole thing might have failed.

Bottom line: It should never have taken 18 months after extensive discussion to bring this to a vote. It almost undid all that hard work.

But whatever: it passed.

…

Still on the Land Development Code: Businesses that serve alcohol have to get a Conditional Use Permit. (CUP). These get renewed by P&Z every three years. Should we separate out bars from restaurants, and only make the bars go to P&Z? Staff is proposing this, because it would save time and effort.

Jane Hughson makes a motion to say no, and stick with the current situation – all CUPs, both restaurants and bars – should go to P&Z for renewal.

The reasoning goes like this: sometimes restaurants are jerks, and are bad neighbors to nearby residents. Noise complaints aren’t addressed by the police. But at P&Z, neighbors can state their case and the restaurant owner will actually pay attention because they don’t want to lose their CUP. Then P&Z can attach conditions to the CUP – make the restaurant come back for renewal in one year instead of three, put quiet hours on the restaurant, that kind of thing.

I agree with Jane here. And sometimes you do get a lot of people from a single street, all pissed off about the same restaurant. This is a really important opportunity for community input, and we shouldn’t take this power away from community members.

As Jane puts it, “Sometimes our biggest problem child is a restaurant.”

One extra thought: It’s already a thing where bars try to pretend that they’re restaurants in order to get more relaxed treatment. If you let restaurants skip P&Z approval, even more bars will try to get reclassified as restaurants, to avoid scrutiny.

The vote:

Restaurants have to go to P&Z: Matthew Mendoza, Mark Gleason, Jane Hughson, Saul Gonzalez
Let restaurants skip all that: Jude Prather, Shane Scott, Alyssa Garza

So it passes 4-3.

Finally, Mayor Hughson has a few issues that are queued up for next time:

  • In the new (poorly named) “business park” zoning, Jane just doesn’t want truck bays for 18 wheelers. Little delivery trucks are fine, but she doesn’t want semis.

    The point of this new zone is to be “good neighbor industrial” (which is what I’d name it). I agree that 18 wheelers are less neighborly than delivery trucks. Staff is worried that no one will apply for this zoning if you rule out 18 wheelers.
  • Notification radius for development agreements: Jane is listening. She agrees that it should be larger for larger projects.

    She also wants you to know that the city already goes above and beyond the notifications that are required by state law. (Sure, kudos. But state laws are mostly written by jerks, so that’s a low bar to clear.)

    At any rate, getting her on board here is a huge win, because no one else was responding.
  • A month ago, Mark Gleason got really mad about some house on Sturgeon with a rooftop patio. In response, staff is proposing that rooftop patios count as a “story” if they cover 25% of the roof.

    Jane wants it to be much lower: any rooftop structure counts as an extra story.

    My opinion: stop being a bunch of killjoys. Let people have their rooftop patios. Quit harshing my mellow, man.
  • Developers have to either donate parkland, or pay a fee. We’re updating the calculations to be more fair. If you’re only developing 4-8 lots, you can skip the fee.

    Jane: Why wouldn’t people in the 4 or 8 houses use our parks? Why exempt them from park fee? I’ll bring this back next time, too.

So there are a lot of fiddly details still to hash out.

The first vote, which is not the final vote:

Yes, let’s update the code: Everyone besides Matthew
No, I’m still mad about occupancy restrictions: Matthew

…

Item 21: SMPD body cams.

We rent them from this company called Axon. The company’s prices are going up. If we renew early, we can stay at the old rates. Save a million dollars.

We have 10 drones, btw. 

Alyssa: There are multiple grants available for body worn cameras. Did we seek any of these opportunities? 

Chief Standridge: We do not have an Equal Employment Opportunity Plan (EEOP) so we can’t apply for grants. We are aware and trying to fix that.

This is an interesting point. It turns out that we can’t apply for a lot of federal funding until we have an EEOP. It includes any Department of Justice or SAFER grants. We are definitely taking this seriously and working on one.

The vote to re-up on the body cams:
Yes: Everyone but Alyssa
No: (no one)
Abstain: Alyssa Garza

Alyssa explains that she hasn’t reviewed our SMPD body cam policy since it was last updated, and she can’t in good conscience vote on these in the meantime.

…

Item 23: Single use container ban!!

You guys. It’s been SUCH a long meeting. This last item is so popular and great – it’s a shame that I’m just now getting to it.

If you’ll recall, five hours earlier we had boatloads of community members show up to speak in favor of banning single-use containers from the river and parks. Volunteers pull out epic tons of trash from the river as often as possible, and we just can’t keep up. It flows down river and to the gulf. It’s bad for the river itself. 

So what happens tonight?

This is just the very beginning of the process. Mark Gleason and Matthew Mendoza are bringing it up to see if council is interested in moving forward with this.

So who’s in?

Mark is a hard yes. 

Jude: let’s do it!

Saul: Me too!

Matthew Mendoza: I live in Rio Vista! I’m desperate to see this pass.

Alyssa: Let’s focus on the education piece, and secure the buy-in of the community. Lean on park ambassadors instead of marshalls. Best practices. No unnecessary policing of our neighbors.

Jane: I’m in to move forward.

So everyone is enthusiastic! It’ll take some time and work.  I definitely want to give Mark and Matthew props for initiating the issue, though.

…

Q&A from the Press and Public

Listen, Max Baker spoke as many times as possible this evening, and he has a tendency to pack ten ideas into a three minute speech. So I’m cherry-picking, because this was entertaining.

First, Axon is the company that makes the body cams. Max accuses, “Are you all aware that there is a SUPREME COURT CASE against them for antitrust issues? Do your homework!!”

He’s right but he’s wrong: It’s exactly that – some anti-monopoly wonky lawsuit brought against them by the Federal Trade Commision. But I can’t see how that’s a big scandal.

Max also says, “This same company wants to design TASER DRONES. Lotta concerns about civil liberties in that regard.”

Max is entirely correct – they are batshit crazy and they definitely wanted to design m-f-ing taser drones. But also, shortly thereafter “Axon halts its plans for a Taser drone as 9 on ethics board resign over the project.” So at this point we can just marvel at the human capacity for inventing really, really bad ideas.

I’m not saying this company is any good. But given that they’re involved in an anti-trust lawsuit, I’m guessing we don’t have terribly many choices either way. Have fun dreaming about TASER DRONES!

Hours 3.5-4.5, 4/5/22

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.

  1. These bans are very classist and racist in effect, even if ostensibly the intent was anti-college students.
  2. 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.