More poor planning by SLO City Council

October 8, 2019

By ALLAN COOPER

You probably know that the State of California has “gifted” housing developers a series of special concessions which are meant to incentivize growth, even when this growth cannot be easily accommodated into our communities. But did you know that our San Luis Obispo City Council and our director are granting housing developers special concessions that exceed, I repeat exceed, those required by the state?

On Oct. 1 of this year, the SLO City Council unanimously granted a developer the right to count his four bedroom units as two bedrooms and his two bedroom units as one. This effectively resulted in cutting his parking requirements in half. And this 1121 Montalban housing project is located in a single family neighborhood that is already plagued with a shortage of on-street parking.

The developer’s sleight of hand was to declare some walls separating the bedrooms as “temporary” and he persuaded our director to come to the absurd conclusion that these so-called “temporary” walls were not in fact “walls.” Of course it was never discussed that there would be no incentive to ever remove these “walls” (or are they to be called “non-walls”?).

The council chose to ignore the fact that they were not in compliance with their own parking regulations. They felt it was more important to build more housing even in light of these adverse impacts on the surrounding neighborhood and in spite of the fact that several residents went to the trouble to attend this council meeting to convincingly describe their parking problems (even using pictures in their powerpoint presentations).

 

At the end of public testimony, Councilman Gomez said that the residents are “overly-infatuated with their parking.” Christianson said that “parking was not needed.” Councilwoman Stewart said that she once lived without a car and was still able to get around town. And Mayor Harmon felt that the situation would improve if we only stopped using our garages for storage and parked our cars in them instead.

What is more concerning is that this is the third project of this type that the council has seen under appeal. What made this project different is that both the Architectural Review Commission and the Planning Commission finally determined that this disingenuous approach to sabotaging our parking regulations simply had to stop. But both commissions were summarily overruled on Oct. 1 by the council.

It’s a fact that the council’s expertise on good planning and design pales in comparison with that of these two commissions. And it’s also becoming painfully clear that our council and the director are succeeding in marginalizing not only public input (yes, we’re getting used to that) but also the credibility and effectiveness of these two advisory bodies.

If you ask the council about this, they will tell you that this was done to make possible two more deed restricted studio apartments. Yes, you heard me correctly, only two more affordable housing units! Carlyn Christianson assured us that the other 13 apartments would also be affordable because their bedrooms were small. This is absurd when you realize that identical apartments elsewhere are advertising and successfully renting their “four-bedroom” units at $1300 per bed. In the meantime, more cars, with nowhere else to park, will be flooding into our neighborhoods.