“There’s nothing like this anywhere else in the entire state”: Gainesville City Commission adopts inclusionary zoning ordinance, postpones minimum lot size ordinance to Oct. 3

BY JENNIFER CABRERA

GAINESVILLE, Fla. – At their September 19 Regular Meeting, the Gainesville City Commission passed an inclusionary zoning ordinance on second reading and postponed the second reading of a minimum lot size ordinance to October 3.

Inclusionary zoning ordinance presentation

The inclusionary zoning proposal required two ordinances: a Comprehensive Plan amendment and a Land Development Code amendment.

City Clerk Kristen Bryant introduced the Comprehensive Plan update, and Sustainable Development Director Forrest Eddleton explained that the update would allow a 50% increase in units in multi-family developments, part of a suite of tools that staff can use to compensate developers for providing affordable units; to get to a 50% bonus, a developer would also need to provide tree protection and some other elements in the City’s code. 

Eddleton said the ordinance amending the Land Development Code would get rid of the existing density bonus program, which has not attracted much interest from developers. The ordinance includes current elements such as pocket plazas, green spaces, and playground areas to earn density bonuses. He said staff recommended setting a lower limit of 51 units (more than 50) in the ordinance, although the Commission changed it to 10 units on first reading. Eddleton said the data did not support reducing it to 10; he said there are 29 developments that would potentially have been affected by the ordinance – 20 over 50 units and nine over 10 units. He continued, “So we have nine that are in between that 10 units and 49 units, and we have 20 developments that would be over that 50.”

Eddleton said that because of a state statute that requires cities to fully offset the costs of developers if they require affordable housing, the ordinance would require staff to learn more about building finance issues and real estate valuation considerations or hire consultants.

Eddleton introduced something he called the “relief valve,” one of the exemptions from the requirement to provide affordable housing units. The exemptions include assisted living facilities, planned developments, and developments that were approved before the effective date of the ordinance; the “relief valve” includes “developments whereby in the City Manager’s… sole discretion, after analysis of all materials and information provided by the owner/developer and all other relevant materials or information, determines that the cost to the owner/developer for the affordable housing contribution… cannot be fully offset, as required by the statutes.”

Eddleton said, “What has been presented has gone the furthest in the entire state for trying to provide these affordable housing units in new developments.” He said that both the 10-unit minimum and 80% AMI affordability are not used in many places, plus the ordinance requires that units stay affordable forever (“in perpetuity”). He said that most jurisdictions use 15 years or 30 years for the affordability period.

Motion for a 50-unit minimum

Commissioner Cynthia Chestnut said she was concerned that the ordinance passed on first reading (with a 10-unit minimum) “will negatively impact small, local, or conventional apartment owners and will not have the impact on affordable housing we’re looking for.” She read a prepared motion to change it to a 50-unit minimum and re-evaluate the results in one year. Commissioner Ed Book seconded it “for discussion.”

Book said he voted against the ordinance on first reading and asked Eddleton why staff recommended a minimum of 50 units. Eddleton responded that developments of 50 units or more would generate more affordable units for the time staff would need to invest in each development.

Saco and Willits support a minimum of 10 units

Commissioner Reina Saco said that the nine developments under 50 units would have resulted in about 15 affordable units: “That would have been 15 more homes for families that have jobs, that work, that contribute to our community and just need help.” She said she would be willing to limit the required affordability period to 20 or 30 years, which makes the costs easier to calculate.

Commissioner Casey Willits said he supported a minimum of 10 units and wanted the ordinance to apply everywhere in the city limits (the ordinance as presented only applies to transect and downtown zoning); he supported making units affordable for 30 years instead of in perpetuity and liked the idea of the relief valve, but he wanted to be able to change that if too many developments are exempted under the relief valve. He said his number one goal was “economic desegregation of our city, and that’s allowing people to live in all corners of the community, specifically high opportunity zones.” He said that 80% AMI is $61,040 in the city of Gainesville, and the rent for that two-bedroom apartment would be $1,716 – “I know that’s not affordable to everybody, but it does get working-class people into… different corners of the city.”

Eastman: Relief valve would be “just sort of an exit ramp from the whole thing.”

Commissioner Bryan Eastman asked whether City staff has the expertise to counter developers’ claims about their costs for the affordable units, saying developers would be “creating their own numbers to point to that relief valve and say… we’re going for this… Now you have this relief valve that’s just sort of an exit ramp from the whole thing.” He said he would “not want the relief valve around for very long… Since we’re the first ones in the state to implement something of this nature… [we might] need to make some tweaks… We have a Commission up here that is supportive of inclusionary zoning. The question is – what is the right way to sort of wade into it?… Making it legally defensible on the front end makes a lot of sense to me.”

Mayor Harvey Ward said he wanted to find a middle ground between 10 and 50 units. He asked about 25 units, and Eddleton said the City didn’t have any data on how many developments that would affect.

Ward: “I’m going to vote to pass something today.”

Ward said, “I’m interested in getting something passed today that is good and as legally defensible as possible… because we’ve been talking about inclusionary zoning since I’ve been on this dais, which goes back to 2017, and I would like to get something done and codify this moving forward… I’m going to vote to pass something today.”

Chestnut: “I’m not interested in being the pioneer in everything”

Chestnut said, “I think all of us are committed to inclusionary zoning. How we go about it is the issue. I personally am not interested in going whole-hog, if you will, implementing something all over the city when we don’t know if this is going to work.” She said she thought the staff recommendation was probably the most legally defensible method for implementing the policy, and she wanted to re-evaluate it in a year. She continued, “I’m not interested in being the pioneer in everything… Let’s be different for once – let’s go with something that we think might work, that has been presented to us by our staff, that we can defend.”

Saco asked Eddleton whether the ordinance included a two-year review period and Eddleton said it did, but Chief Operating Officer Andrew Persons said that was not part of the ordinance but “normal practice.”

Both Saco and Willits supported hiring another staff person, which would be necessary to help with evaluating the costs of the affordable units and negotiating with developers if the minimum was set at 10 units, and Willits said the position could be paid out of the $1.4 million in affordable housing money they recently set aside because that person would “help us get dozens and dozens of units… That’s probably the best money spent possible, the cheapest way to get affordable housing.”

Relief valve “would be applicable only in the case when staff and the developer agree that anything the City can offer to the developer does not fully offset their costs.”

Willits asked a question about when the relief valve would be used, and Senior Assistant City Attorney Sean McDermott said it “is not applicable when staff and the developer disagree. It would be applicable only in the case when staff and the developer agree that anything the City can offer to the developer does not fully offset their costs.”

Chestnut again argued for the plan presented by staff: “We do not have the money to hire new staff… We are really entering into a financial quagmire… We should not ignore what [staff is] putting out there on the table.”

Public comment

During public comment, Kim Tanzer said it’s typical to use a minimum of 50 units: “Your staff is telling you that it’s a red flag to drop it to 10 units… They’re also telling you that it’s unusual, as I understand it, to go as high as 80% AMI – what that means is, you’re asking two-thirds of the people who live here to subsidize one-third of the people who live here… There’s a reason that it’s not a good thing to be the first in the nation.”

Overall, three members of the public supported Chestnut’s motion, three people wanted the minimum to be set at 10 units, and one person opposed the motion.

Book: “I also do not want to be out in front at first”

After public comment, Book said he did “not want to be out in front”; he said he thought there would be more information a year from now about challenges faced by cities implementing inclusionary zoning. He asked Chestnut if she would be willing to change the affordability requirement from “in perpetuity” to 30 years. 

Motion confusion

Willits asked whether the motion was the right one for the agenda item, which had been announced as a Comprehensive Plan Amendment, rather than the Land Development Code amendment that implemented inclusionary zoning. City Attorney Daniel Nee said the presentation covered both agenda items and he thought the motion was “applicable to both.”

Eddleton said the land use changes in the Comprehensive Plan were needed for the inclusionary zoning ordinance to take effect. McDermott said the Comprehensive Plan Amendment needed to be voted on first because that is the section that “bumps up the allowable density to provide for the density bonuses that underlie the [inclusionary zoning] policy.” He said the second vote should be on an amendment to the Land Development Code, which goes into more detail on inclusionary zoning. 

Willits: “As long as almost two-thirds of people live in multifamily housing, two-thirds of our city is subsidizing the one-third that lives in single-family”

Willits said he believed the motion was out of order and added, “When we talk about 80% AMI, that is not… that two-thirds of people will be subsidizing one-third. When we talk about 10% of units, it’s far more clear that, yes, 90% of the people who live in a development will be, in essence, subsidizing 10, though we also know those offsets are things that the community has opinions on – how we value those, which two-thirds – but as long as almost two-thirds of people live in multifamily housing, two-thirds of our city is subsidizing the one-third that lives in single-family, that gets the nicest, the least dense, the closest to parks, the closest to good jobs, and all that. So I just reject that as an argument.”

New motion

After some discussion, Chestnut withdrew her motion; Willits made a motion to adopt the Comprehensive Plan amendment on second reading, and Saco seconded the motion. The motion passed unanimously. 

Back to Chestnut’s motion

Chestnut made a motion to adopt the inclusionary zoning ordinance that was passed on first reading with a minimum of 50 units, and Book seconded the motion.

Saco said the Affordable Housing Advisory Committee had been seeking community input on the proposal for two years, and “just shy of 400 units would have been captured if we had passed something two years ago” that was city-wide with a minimum of 10 units. She said she wouldn’t vote for Chestnut’s motion “because our community deserves better than that” and the City “can always scale back” if staff says it’s not working. She said she was fine with a time limit, even as low as 20 years, “but I’m not voting to yank the carpet out from under our community who heard a good promise, and we are now backtracking on it.”

Eastman said he was fine with 50 units because it didn’t make sense for staff to do all the work to dig into the finances of a project and only get one unit out of that, but “I really do not like the safety valve.” 

Chestnut clarified that her motion was to adopt the version of the ordinance that was presented at first reading, so it would have a minimum of 50 units, and the only amendment was to change “in perpetuity” to 30 years. That version of the ordinance did not include the relief valve. Persons said staff also recommended adopting a few corrections regarding structured parking and design standards that were made in the ordinance presented for second reading, and Chestnut added those to her motion.

Persons restated the motion: “With respect to the original staff recommendation on first reading, it’s the 50-unit threshold and the transect zones U5 to Downtown. That would be an amendment to what’s in the second reading, which would be inclusive of the changes that were discussed about structured parking as well as the design standards. And then what I’m hearing with this discussion is the substitution of – rather than have ‘in perpetuity,’ have a 30-year affordability time frame.” 

Ward: “We need to get stuff built, and I’m fairly certain that if we go in at 10 units, things aren’t going to get built.”

Ward said he would probably be voting for the motion because “I want something to happen, and… we ought to be listening to our staff because we hired them, and this is not what I want, but – and many of you know that I think the market is highly inefficient. I don’t think the market does great work most of the time, but supply and demand is a real thing. We need to get stuff built, and I’m fairly certain that if we go in at 10 units, things aren’t going to get built.”

Eastman: “I want to be clear that we are about to pass the strongest inclusionary zoning policy in the entire state of Florida”

After another round of public comment, Eastman said, “I want to be clear that we are about to pass the strongest inclusionary zoning policy in the entire state of Florida. There’s nothing like this anywhere else in the entire state. We are telling developers, when they come to our community, they have to provide affordable housing… Affordable housing is important enough to do it right because it is important that we have strong standards, and because this community has always been on the front line of doing good progressive policy, which this is, but we are going to do it in a way that it gets implemented correctly… I’m really proud that we’re going to pass this.”

The motion passed 5-2, with Saco and Willits in dissent.

Minimum lot size ordinance

After a short break, the Commission came back at 4:15 with the second reading of the minimum lot size ordinance next on the agenda and a full evening agenda. 

When they returned, there was a brief presentation on the minimum lot size ordinance, and then Eastman made a motion to continue those two ordinances to the October 3 meeting; the motion passed unanimously.