The Lafayette City Council will hear a report Tuesday concerning its options when it comes to implementing Assembly Bill 2923, which requires municipalities with BART stations to up zone their parking lots for future development.
The state standard, which must be met by July 1 this year, requires a minimum residential zoning of 75 units per acre and five stories. In Lafayette, that would mean at least 825 units on the 11 acres of parking lot space.
In January, the planning commission unanimously recommended the city explore proactive zoning of the 11 acres, instead of defaulting to state standards.
In February, the council directed staff to come back with options pertaining to how the city can proceed with zoning and design standards. Another question will be how development at the site would fit with the city’s state housing requirements.
According to BART’s development goals, the Lafayette site won’t be developed sooner than 2030. The Lafayette City Council meets virtually at 7 p.m. Monday and can be seen at http://bit.ly/LoveLafayetteYouTube.
Pure idiocy.
Here we go again. If I had to do it over I would go into real estate law. The city of Lafayette and their citizens would provide endless opportunity for work close to home.
Umm… not real estate law.
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It’s land use law.
Am I missing out on some of the information here? Where are the commuters supposed to park? Is this some kind of transit village fantasy where the apartments will be filled with happy bankers and programmers commuting on BART to the city?
The BART lot looks full every time I drive past it.
im guessing they do what they did at pleasant hill bart station? Build a parking structure.
Lol, Of Course it will be Approved.
This is what residents get when their city “leaders” are all onboard with the ‘sustainability’ / UN Agenda.
+1 …. another stupid idea … they should make it a 2 or 3 story parking structure if the politcos are pushing mass transit
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Walnut Creek also rezoned their BART station around 2010.
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… and the world didn’t end.
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It’s the State legislature pushing every city to provide “adequate” land to accommodate higher density housing in and around transit centers.
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If ya’ll want to complain, hit up your State rep and State senator.
That’s comical. Like the do anything but what lines their pockets.
Walnut Creek has spiraled down the drain, particularly in the BART-adjacent areas. Trinity Avenue is lined with deranged transients day and night, and the city has become a magnet for organized retail theft and targeted rioting (really just an apolitical pretext for proletariat opportunism and menace), bum fights in once family friendly parks, car jackings and gangland shootings outside of seedy nightclubs. People who want to live in nice places should strive to do so, not demand that nice places accommodate marginal households.
Yeah, the world didn’t end, but a once promising, aspirational city descended into a flooded pothole of mediocrity.
Oh good, a huge high density eye sore right next to the freeway and train tracks should fit right in with Lafayette’s look and feel. Having a transit agency that can’t even do that right branch out into housing development was a real stroke of genius.
That’s right our Democrat leaders here in California and more people and more and more density but they don’t want to build dams to save water or build power plants to make more electricity… and they don’t want Farmers to have more water to grow more food. Sounds like a plan for disaster
@Badge1104….Have you been out to the valley in the last few years? The “food” being grown now is overwhelmingly grapes for wine production, not many vegetable crops anymore.
Remember, if you voted Democrat your getting what you deserve.
AD
Or … as Camela harris said. …. if your voted Demo, you got what you wanted.
They are too dense to understand that comment. But yet they will keep voting for the same thing and ask for more.
The government wants everyone to take a bus to Bart.
You’ll fall in line eventually.
Or get a new government.
Your choice.
We’d love to take the bus to Bart. Unfortunately, there’s no bus line within walking distance of 50% of the city’s residents. Now we’re planing to build handout houses so unproductive proletariat dreck can jump the queue at the expense of precious parking spaces?
Policies that punish productivity and reward hapless dependency are antithetical to upward mobility. “Equity” once referred to ownership in the fruits of industry for those with the discipline to delay gratification. In recent years, the word has been hijacked by sociological arsonists hellbent on degrading everyone’s living standard appease to the least productive proletariat savages.
Lord help me please. BART will be required to replace all parking 1-1. The developer of the new housing will first have to build a structured parking lot and then they can proceed with the new homes. It worked fine at Pleasant Hill Station.
If you want an economy, you don’t want all of your young people to leave. I think a nice 1000+ square feet apartment that could be sold as a condo once cost have been recovered would be nice with BART and freeway access. Who wants to live a million miles from them? If we are going to keep any economy in California, we need to stop populating other states with our younger adults who can’t buy homes here. The law that allows us to divide our lots will take at least 20 years to notice any change, and much longer to have any real affect, so our state and cities needs to get more aggressive now with building homes.
@SB – Agreed 100% in principle. Fiefdoms like Lamorinda need to allow the market supply function to absorb demand. For years, the noxious NIMBYs have used local zoning as a shield to repel true market rate development.
There are literally hundreds of physically buildable acres here.
That acreage will turn over to new owners (heirs) seeking to cash out in the coming decades, and there is ample demand to absorb denser development across the region.
“Affordable housing” (code for handouts) for which productive people who cannot quite afford market rate housing earn too much to qualify replacing parking spaces for transit users promises to import neediness and (as you note) export young, productive families. Social engineering to flip the bell curve of the normally distributed economic clustering sows alienation and resentment while shrinking aggregate economic output.
SB: You have very much bought into the goals of Sacramento Democrats to plan communities especially creating high density housing projects. Many of us have a deep mistrust in such government planning. The “projects” in Chicago built in the 1950s and early 60’s including the Robert Taylor Homes high-rises were famous for decay, crime, race issues, and financial issues and as they were being torn down in the 1990’s were used as an example of poor government planning. The shopping mall craze of the 1960s and 70’s many times created self-contained malls that were purposely separate from the towns and bankrupted surrounding retail. Time and shopping habits changed and now we are stuck with declining eyesores like SunValley mall, while other malls are getting torn down. Now, we have a bunch of Democrats in Sacramento who want to create high density transit villages. What could go wrong? Everything. Government should not play housing developer.
Mr. Larry: In an environment controlled by the Democrats in Sacramento with their authoritarian housing mandates to build called the Housing Element, your comments are puzzling. I’m not sure why you cheer on development. If you liked to live in a sea of houses why are you here, you could be living in Orange County or Mexico City. There is not a time I travel very far and don’t see housing being built like what now lines the freeway near Pittsburg. Recently there is a massive new development near the Antioch bridge. Did that solve the problems? Did you see prices fall? No. They will never be done. It is like throwing gasoline on a fire. Developers and most politicians and apparently you have some kind of fanatic desire to have wall to wall housing. This was a much better state 10 million residents ago, before water shortages, PGE planned power outages, brush fire season, and traffic jams. In addition, the population growth of the US has slowed sharply, leading to calls from the Democrats to massively increase immigration. They are trotting out their old chestnuts that immigration is strength. There are over 2 million illegal aliens in California and assuming most of them are currently housed, if you kicked them out you would have far more empty houses and condos than you would know what to do with.
@To Do List – I want LESS government control over private property owners’ land use decisions. If incumbent land owners prefer fallow empty lots in their community, they are free to purchase such vacant land and do nothing whatsoever with it or donate it to a conservation trust. Outside of eminent domain government will not force landowners to develop anything at all.
Unfortunately, such liberty is asymmetric: Local zoning restrictions inhibit landowners’ right to develop their property. Where demand exceeds legacy supply, such restrictions preclude market clearing supply. The resultant imbalance causes dead weight losses which we all bear in the form of reduced productivity, inefficient resource allocation and lower economic output.
As you note, lots of new housing has been developed on the fringe of the metro area. Few, if any productive people want to live hours from work or raise their families in marginal communities with social dysfunction and poor schools, so they leave the area. All that will remain are incumbent townies and the needy proletariat, who (as we’ve seen) will elect for leaders who deliver housing handouts and force development of underclass dwellings in places that have most veraciously restricted private property rights.
Mr. Larry: We agree on some things, not others. I’m not buying into your idea that bedroom communities should be run like a factory looking at its productivity, resource allocation and economic output. This is not yet a Soylent Green world. Towns and cities create some sense of community and decide for themselves how that city or town develops within legal boundaries. That’s why there is local government. Much of the development you mention is not about adding in-law style homes for current owners, but rather outside corporate developers buying up land and then threatening to sue to put in huge developments, and then settling for some compromise. Meanwhile, the house buyers get richly subsidized by the city because they do not pay the extra costs of that housing: traffic congestion, added school trailers, fire, police, burden on PG&E electricity, added stress on declining water supplies, and so on. You are effectively handing them thousands of dollars of your own money to move in because you are bearing the burden for all of that, not them. Again, there is more than enough housing in California and you are letting the politicians and Democrats create a false scarcity by having open borders.
@To Do List – I see, you DON’T want the government to impose building mandates in your neighborhood, but you DO want the government to impose use restrictions on private landowners in your neighborhood. In other words, the government (“politicians and Democrats”) is bad if it doesn’t do what you want it to do, but the government (only “local government” though) is a heroic savior of Americana and apple pie when it does your bidding.
I feel the same way. Join the club. We’d all like policies that only advance our interests and marginalize competing interests.
Unfortunately, I can’t have it both ways, but neither can anyone else. The externalities you describe (eg, traffic, utilities) can be managed, and the notion that new house buyers reap a subsidy is economic fiction. Indeed, new home owners pay much higher property taxes than Prop 13 freeloaders (which I am gradually becoming, BTW) and legacy townie princelings (which I expect my kids to become).
It’s not my place to determine whether there is enough housing in California, nor is it yours or anyone else’s. Each landowner makes that decision based on their priorities and market conditions. In general, when the cost of an essential asset like shelter rises faster than the price of labor, economists would deduce that there is insufficient supply to absorb demand. New supply would naturally allow the market to reach equilibrium, however zoning policies here tend to prevent meaningful price discovery.
Of course, upper middle class welfare vis-a-vis agency mortgages and the mortgage interest tax deduction distort the validity of price signals. Mortgage rates reaching 5% and federal tax rates still historically low will test the validity of shelter price signals.
I’m not sure if we are saying the same thing, but I would give much more development freedom to existing owners and less to outside investors or to the state legislature playing developer with the high density initiatives. For example, I know a developer and lives in Southern California and just because he talks with us he has scouted out various local properties here. He has no stake in the community and will not bear the cost of increased traffic and such if he puts in a development here. The state officials pushing high density housing now will all be long gone and retired and will not bear the burden of their poor decisions just as those who lobbied for the Chicago projects in the 1950s didn’t bear the cost.
I do believe you put too much faith in economics 1 demand and supply curves. Such models might work for apples and oranges in Safeway, but housing is subject to forces that oranges are not such as market interest rates and investor demand. When something is a financial asset, the demand and supply curves that work so well for oranges in Safeway kind of fail. For example, the fact that prices are rising in an asset market like stocks or housing just by itself creates higher demand, unlike for oranges where a price increase cuts demand. Recall the buying frenzy leading up to the 2008 meltdown? And yet again, I will point out that some amount of high housing prices in California is the result of illegal immigration due to ongoing Democrat policies so is intentional.
AB 2923
year 2018
SENATE RULES COMMITTEE
‘Office of Senate Floor Analyses’
Page 1 scroll down to “SOURCE: ” and read what’s printed there.
Page 7, review chart entries for “Height minimum ”
https://tinyurl.com/au5zhsp
Not sure what final bill has in it.