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Responding to recently enacted housing legislation, Palo Alto City Council on Monday kicked off the complex and sometimes controversial process of overhauling city rules for the approval of new residential projects.
The goal of the effort is to establish new “objective standards” – clearly defined rules that will govern the design of new buildings. Unlike the existing rules, which tend towards more subjective orientations such as neighborhood compatibility, the new ones are clearly measurable. They cover everything from parking lot sizes and window styles to yard dimensions and the “vertical rhythm” of the building.
Like other cities, Palo Alto is revising the rules in response to recent state laws such as Senate Bill 35 and Senate Bill 330, which effectively prohibit the city from turning down housing projects. eligible on the basis of subjective criteria open to interpretation. The new “objective standards” – which by definition require “no personal or subjective judgment” – respond to this problem by giving the city a suite of new tools to steer new developments towards officially approved designs.
The specificity is sometimes striking. A proposed rule specifies that an upper storey of a new building adjacent to an existing structure must have a minimum frontage break of 5 feet wide, 2 feet deep and 32 square feet in area for every 36 to 50 feet surface area of a building. front length. Another proposed rule states that buildings greater than 25 feet in height and 70 feet in length and facing a public street must not have a “continuous frontage plan greater than 70% of the length of the street. the unmodulated facade of the upper floor, which may include bay windows. “
Monday’s board discussion was the first in a series of public hearings on the new objective standards, with the next set for October 25.
Planning director Jonathan Lait said the purpose of the effort is to take existing subjective standards and “make them objective so that we can continue to honor our interest in those design criteria or those aesthetic standards that otherwise would not apply if any of these housing project criteria arise. “
“There have been concerns about removing some aspects of the code and weakening some standards, but the intention here is really to reinforce the things that this community over the years has really embodied in terms of design. and aesthetic interests, ”Lait said.
The new proposal is the product of more than a year of public hearings and conversations between city staff and local architects, developers and consultants. This included eight meetings with the full Architectural Review Board and five more with the specially appointed ad hoc committee of the board, as well as three hearings before the Planning and Transportation Commission. Both boards ultimately voted to approve all of the revisions prepared by staff, although some members of the Architectural Review Board expressed concern that the new rules were a bit too prescriptive and could lead to a design “to the point”. ‘cookie cutter’. Osma Thompson, chairman of the board, said Monday that even with that concern, the board member felt the new standards “would push designers towards a really good cookie at the end of the day.”
“We have attempted to phrase this document with the utmost intention of promoting high quality design at Palo Alto,” Thompson said during Monday’s hearing. “We know of other cities and other projects that are creating guidelines and we intend to continue to monitor the implications of these standards on projects and intend to revisit them if necessary in the future. “
Not everyone is happy with the new rules. Some architects have suggested that they are too restrictive. Architect Heather Young pointed out a new layout in the objective standards that requires a lateral setback of at least 10 feet. The layout, she noted, would dramatically reduce the building’s width on a 50-foot plot on El Camino Real, creating an “awkward and unattractive mass.”
“The idea that a good or even acceptable design results from layering unique fixed dimensional requirements on all projects, regardless of site, use, context or style, is an illusion that completely misses the point. ‘opportunity and nuance that take our cities to heart need to be filled to be happy, ”Young wrote.
Some residents also challenged the new rules, but for the very opposite reason. The new objective standards, they argued, would not be as effective in protecting the existing neighborhood from new development as the existing context design guidelines.
The Palo Alto Neighborhoods coordination group, which includes representatives from various local neighborhood associations, argued in a letter that the new process for adopting new design standards is flawed because it places little demand on the public (other than developers, architects and consultants); it did not include an impact analysis; and it did not include clear comparisons between the existing rules and those proposed.
“The proposed ordinance removes privacy protections for residents near a new development and removes long-standing contextual protection rules,” wrote Sheri Furman and Becky Sanders, co-chairs of Palo Alto neighborhoods, in a statement. letter to council.
There are at least two projects in the city’s development pipeline that are said to be immune to changes in the city. One is a proposal from the Sobrato organization for an 85 townhouse development at 200 Portage Avenue, adjacent to the building that until recently housed Fry’s Electronics. Another is a 48-home development that SummerHill Homes plans to build just east of Greer Park at 2850 Bayshore Road. Both build on the streamlining provisions of Senate Bill 330, which freezes planning standards put in place by the city at the time of the application and prevents the city from changing the rules or requiring density. weaker.
Senate Bill 35 is of greater concern to Palo Alto staff, which creates a streamlining process for residential developments in cities that fail to meet their housing targets as part of the regional allocation process. housing needs. This means that in Palo Alto, which is far behind the regional mandate for below-market housing, projects that offer affordable housing are eligible for streamlined approval. At the same time, the city has produced enough housing at market rate during the current housing cycle to prevent developments at market rate under SB 35 rationalization rules.
That, however, could change during RHNA’s next eight-year cycle, with the city facing a mandate to create 6,086 housing units between 2023 and 2031. If the city falls behind, these developments will go through the streamlined process. Objective standards will then be the city’s main method of asserting its design preferences.
“Four years after starting our RHNA cycle, if we are not able to meet our housing production at market rates, then that’s when these objective standards are really going to come into effect,” Milk said.
“This is what we are preparing for and trying to anticipate through this business.
The board agreed that the exercise is worth continuing even though it was not ready to immediately endorse the multitude of code changes proposed by staff. Some members suggested additional standards. Mayor Tom Dubois and Deputy Mayor Pat Burt both wanted to see more provisions protecting the views of residents. Council member Greer Stone preferred to place more emphasis on residents’ privacy.
Council members Eric Filseth and Lydia Kou both advocated a cautious approach, noting that council may not have an opportunity to undo its efforts to relax zoning rules. Filseth pointed to what he called the “growing spider web of state mandates” and suggested that lawmakers have shown that they are “very serious about getting into the business of government. ‘municipal architecture’.
“It’s not the state that is forcing things on us,” Filseth said of the proposed objective standards. “We are the ones who prepare for the state to impose things on us.”
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