 Thanks for coming out on a Sunday night, really appreciate it and hope it will be a useful and interesting conversation. Our agenda basically as follows. We're going to ask Robert Liberty to speak for about 45 minutes. What I can tell you is that he is a confirmed visual learner and will be using visuals and that's great for the visual learners in the room and you know who you are. Then we'll have a brief response by three panelists from the community and city staff just based on what they've seen, what they've heard, any responses they want to provide. And then from there we'll go to about a half an hour of Q&A. We'll use the microphones. This is being recorded so we'll have them, it's not streaming live but we'll have an opportunity to ask some questions either of Robert and or of the panel. And so I'll introduce the panelists when we come to that part but for now let me just introduce Robert Liberty, he's currently the director of the Urban Sustainability Accelerator at Portland State University. He's a graduate of the Harvard Law School, he's worked in many roles at basically all levels of government to promote livable and sustainable cities and regions. As staff attorney and then executive director of the 1000 Friends of Oregon he played a critical role in making Portland a national model for livable communities. He served as senior counsel to Congressman Earl Blumenauer of Oregon assisting him with federal policy issues concerning livable communities and in 2004 was actually elected to the Metro Council, that's the metropolitan government in the Portland region and was reelected to that post in 2008 and then became director of the Urban Sustainability Accelerator in 2012. He's no stranger to Davis actually, he's been here and will be returning, he's been working with the Davis Joint Unified School District to brainstorm potential redevelopment options for the district property which is just across the street here and just raise your hand if you went to any of the brainstorming sessions on that. So some of you have met Robert and his team and they've been at the market as well. So we're really happy to have Robert with us and look forward to his talk and as I said when we're done we'll have some responses by a few panelists. So Robert go ahead and take it away. It's a somewhat intimidating audience not just for the reputation of the city of Davis but also people in this room have a lot of accumulated experience and maybe if I stay in the field another 20 or 30 years I can come back and be their peers. But in the meantime I'm here representing myself not an institution and my own views. So I've been to Davis long enough or enough times to develop personal friendships with typical representative Davisites and I think it's very important to know a community in order to speak knowledge about its needs. You have to understand things like what this house represents. So a little bungalow built in the 1940s was a place an accessible kind of home for people after World War II now valued four to five hundred thousand dollars. In the neighborhood of other bungalows also now at very high prices unaffordable to many people but having certainly a lot of charm a place where there is a lot of people on bikes all the time a lot of amenities including things that are very close to you like a farmer's market and that because of farceing policies the city comes to an end and you come to farmland and of course there's a certain bluish cast to the politics in the county all of it overseen by a governor named Brown actually it's governor Kate Brown and all the images I showed you were from my own neighborhood in Portland so there is plenty in common although there are definitely differences but what I'm going to describe and what I'll show you is what I've experienced and I think you'll see that there are things in common in fact if you were to pick a pier for the Portland metropolitan region out of the entire United States you know a city with which it would have the most in common that would of course be this region two regions of about 2.4 million people the largest cities in the Pacific Coast states that aren't on saltwater both of them on a major river in a major agricultural Valley so and by the way now have very similar home prices so these are places that despite obvious differences do have a lot in common and of course this winter you've actually had our weather we took a little bit about the context and then how it's expressed at this neighborhood and and level and city level so every city in Oregon has an urban growth boundary in fact there are a few cities that have a population less than this room they have urban growth boundaries and over the years they've been implemented this is the city of McMinnville city of about 28,000 you can actually see the urban growth boundary so this is familiar to you and Davis be familiar to people in Woodland for that matter right across the river from part of the Portland metropolitan area is Washington State which has its own growth management act each of those red dots represents a new house built since the turn of the century at 2010 so you can see there's quite a difference in performance in terms of protection of working landscapes between Oregon and our sister state Washington and this is a map that I had commissioned when I was on the Metro Council I said where where have the house been built in the last 10 years and turned out they they looked at 11 and a half years there were 99,900 in my law was 65 housing units built during that period and this shows where they're located the aqua our single-family homes the dark blue are multi-family homes and one of the mayors the suburbs looked at it and said Robert I don't understand there's no pattern he's now on the Metro Council by the way and I said Craig the pattern is infill and redevelopment so there's not as much development as the edge as there is in the core it's a little hard to see the lighter single family homes but basically the pattern is complete the reason he said there was no pattern was because he was expecting the pattern to look like the patterns the 60s 70s 80s or 90s growth at the edge nothing at the center what you're finding is distributed across the landscape this is the I know I can only do this in Davis because you're all walks just from having lived here and breathe the air so I can show things like this graph this shows where all the housing units went during that period so 90% of them went into the central urban growth boundary for the 24 cities in three counties 25 cities three counties for Portland and then the gold or light orange is the the other urban growth boundaries blue is rural residential which is really pre existing sprawl that predated 1979 or 80 and then the rest are in farm and forest sounds which is about 90% of the land area this is now pretty dated but this is at a metropolitan scale the Oregon part of the region I should say which is about 70% of the population the region this is the percentage of residential development that's infill and redevelopment and it's pretty clear now that it's well over 50% well over 50% so the dominant pattern of residential development and increasingly employment development is not greenfield development not at the edge but redevelopment center this is a comparison of 1990 to 2000 growth patterns between Charlottesville North Carolina and the Portland region and I drew in the urban growth boundary but you wouldn't even need it drawn in to show how the population is being settled so there's a vast difference in what a community is like when you focus on building on existing communities and existing strength on existing public investments versus growing out so a lot of Charlotte's growth is that you know two four ten twenty acre home sites yes and much worse than anything you see around here but this is very common for the United States in fact the eight largest urban areas in Oregon which includes some cities about the size of Davis have grown almost twice as fast as the average United States and use one half as much land so it's a fundamentally different pattern of growth now so I'm going to talk about this connection between the overall larger objective and obviously stopping sprawl has a lot of other benefits for the planet for wildlife or water for infrastructure for taxpayers but I'm going to focus on this reinvesting and existing neighborhoods in downtown so I'm going to begin with the kind of smallest unit of change accessory dwelling units which we're trying to teach ourselves to call small backyard homes and internal apartments no one knows what an ADU is right although of course in Portland you can probably hear it from your Lyft driver when you're coming from the airport I want to acknowledge Cole Peterson's website it's called accessory dwelling units dot I think org and there's an amazing set of case studies on this website and I've used some of his images others are photographs I've taken I'm working with Cole in a project we may have time to talk about it later so these are this is an internal accessory dwelling units actually a garage or a basement on a slope and it's in actually the northern part of the city of Portland looking across the forest park it's just a few hundred square feet accessory dwelling units are the largest is 800 square feet authorized in the city of Portland here's another one a garage conversion another this is one built new into house about two blocks from where I live you can see the entrance on the side then they have French doors so there's some light coming in so that's very important in Portland so these are all internal units this is my neighbor's house actually he's now in the Metro Council he had the position I had so I get to make this joke he lives in that wing that's like an accessory unit on the left and I say they say well how's Bob doing in the Metro Council said he's great but you know he looks down on me so now the main house is occupied by the children the grandchildren so that's an attached accessory dwelling and these are examples of detached so these are small backyard homes this is about a 420 square foot cottage I think it's being used for someone's parents ultimately for them you notice by the way it's close to the setback property line here's another one smaller I think probably under 400 square feet cottage this is one friends of mine built about five blocks away it's the location the garage it's about the footprint of the garage I think it's probably just barely over 400 square feet and then older one that's about 10 blocks away two stories and finally a more robust one that's just been completed at about half mile from where I live so they're on the same property as the main house they don't have to there's certain requirements that they have to resemble the roof pitch in some of the windows if they're larger but not so much if they're smaller many people choose to make them blend in this is across the street for me it's just being finished there's actually paint samples and this is an accessory dwelling unit over a garage and like the others I actually know them so I'm they're just moving in this is part of the main floor master bedroom upstairs this year so far people have filed 600 permits for accessory dwelling units in Portland and it is taking off very rapidly we're involved in a project to make it much easier to build them if you have questions about that I'll be glad to talk about it because I think we will have time missing middle housing this is a phrase that's gained certain amount of currency around the United States and here are illustrations of what it is so it's basically duplexes triplexes fourplexes things that look like boarding houses and they were built all over the United States and cities big and small for a long time until prohibited by zoning to illustrate how this looks ensemble and I use these Google Earth images from a street I lived on for many years it's actually very hard to get the images because the trees obscure things from Google Earth so I took this aerial view and what you see there is on the right is a courtyard complex I lived in identical one that you see at the end of the street in between those two garden court apartment buildings are three single family homes and the other side of the street are three single family homes and then an apartment building has about 12 units the garden garden court apartments I think have about 18 or 19 each this is another view gives you a better idea you can see the white roof on the apartment and then there's the edge of the apartment and obscured is another building that's in back of that tree in the middle of picture and then that gray building that looks like a Dutch clone at home I lived there for about 10 years it's a fourplex it's a shotgun fourplex you could design these to all have four separate yards and light on three sides very very appealing design not I don't think an architect design I think this is a standard design from about 1915 this is a picture the garden court apartments I lived there for about five years then in between that the other brick building this one back here in our house was this this is a threeplex and this by the way is what the fourplex looks like in fact someone said I said yeah I live in the fourplex they said I thought you lived on Quimby and I said I did it used to be blue so the blue house with the Dutch clone I said yeah and I said there's four apartments there and I said yes you said oh my god I thought it was a commune and you could redesign these again to have four so you have a shared entrance in front and back and have four yards if you wanted so it's a very adaptable design I'm gonna talk about low to mid-rise starting out with something that you've had some experience with here in Davis and this is not from Portland this is from white salmon Washington cluster cottage housing so the homes are 300 about 700 square feet what's wonderful about them I took a pretty famous landscape architect from China here and showing them things in the Northwest I feel like I'm showing them miniatures because the scale which they do things in China so gigantic you know but he really was impressed and he asked about the maintenance of the landscape and I said what's a homeowner's association you don't have to take care of anything it's got advanced sustainability features in particular around water this is a semi area so this is actually can be quite a bit higher density than existing single family homes on 6,000 square foot lots still lots of green these are two projects that are pretty interesting the one on the right is senior housing commissioned by about seven or eight families seniors it's passive solar passive energy which means it's net zero for energy consumption in fact it produces slightly more than it uses one of the fellows said if it's a cold day if you get really cold we could turn on a hairdryer but mostly it's their body heat that warms it and I'm gonna show you the interior and then off to the left you can see some woodclad buildings these are actually very small studio units and there's this might surprise you but you're looking at the building to the right continues but you're looking at about almost 30 units it's a closeup of the senior co-housing this is interior the first year after this planet so there's an interior garden quite beautiful and they have a guest house as well this is the entrance and or this is in that senior housing looking toward these very small studio apartments and this is the entrance into the studios so they're quite small but that also makes them much more affordable and they have they all have separate entrances so there's no common entrance this is a completely different kind of building this is a skinny house built without much in requirement of a setback but on half-sized lots by the way if it's not clear already you are not required to like anything I show you that is not what this is about you're getting a sampler or smorgasbord and if you don't like pickled herring you don't have to eat it right so but I'm showing you what is happening when you allow infill and redevelopment what it looks like in the different forms it takes this is actually maybe it isn't compelling to you it's often complemented a woman I think it was one of her first works as an architect built this mixed-use project it's just got two units upstairs and two commercial spaces downstairs there's something about the proportions that almost everyone talks about how handsome it is a building designed by another person with design training it's got commercial and three units he lives on the upper floor and has a beautiful roof deck with views of the city this is on the street near Arturo Street near I live which has undergone a remark none of these are downtown by the way remarkable transformation there was an old house on this property and it was I wouldn't say it was unusual but it was handsome a sort of typical early 20th century Portland four square and they saved it and moved it to another corner of the property then built this which has a pastor going to a backyard garden with commercial space a very unusual design this is the house that they moved and there is a lot of sustainability features and they celebrate that on the outside of the building there are also townhomes of different types this is a mixed-income community in a working-class suburb of Portland called Milwaukee which is really beautiful rain garden in the middle and now you you may have noticed that most of the new housing does not try and pretend it's from an earlier era the architecture is contemporary architecture but there are other there are efforts to make things blend in although it might be a little bit of a problem of hyperthyroidism in the case of this structure but and this is one that's going to be built fairly soon it's all brick-clad and it will definitely look like something for about 1910 finally at the upper end of mid-rise is this new this is under construction now it's condominiums and it's in north Portland what's one of things interesting about it it's timber so when it's finished will be the tallest timber building in the United States but only have that title for about a year because another taller building under construction and in Canada the building in 20 stories interesting little known fact safer for fires it takes a lot longer to burn through that wood laminated wood than it does for steel to fail and there are actually steel buildings that have wood wraps around the steel now to retard their collapse a little bit about low and mid-rise retail and office including redevelopment so this is a very common phenomenon you've seen it here in Davis which are homes long and arterial that has been a transit route for over a hundred years and they're converted and so again I'm only expressing my own thoughts many people like a mixture of funky and fancy when it's all one or all the other and I feel that way about architectural styles it's not the same so you have these renovated buildings adapted buildings that are kind of charming and a bit funky and then you have modern condos next to it and they seem to work well together this is adaptive you reused by a pair of brothers the McMenements who are geniuses at this I will say softly for some reason their food is never any good but this is a former grade school that is now a spa a conference center overnight lodging and pub and it's interesting walked on they everything's painted inside read they have artists artists do this work you walk I was walking through this school hallway you know and they had images of the children from the 1920s and 30s and I look out a window and there's people in a hot tub right outside so it's very different but they've done a lot of adaptive reuse and this is in the middle of a neighborhood and now you have a much different kind of mix of uses there this building on the left was an old appliance sales store it's now got creative office space in it would do well in this kind of market you can ask questions about later they took a concrete saw to the inside and cut through and openings put in showers meeting spaces with roll-up garage doors it's for people who are graduated from their home office or you know their spouse has told them they have to leave or the marriage is over and it they rent up really quickly in the ground floor is restaurants and different kinds of retail so a lot of the material it's designed to be appealing but inexpensive this is a new mid-rise office not in downtown it's one of the surprises is this is now being built on in neighborhoods which are highly desirable for young well-educated millennials this is actually advanced seismic standard it's on rockers mid-rise and with timber cladding has a nice interior courtyard this is a larger scale that's one project taking advantage in the shift and terrain it has a hardware store a grocery store apartments professional services it's just being finished now it's called loka at the goat blocks which is a odd name but what happened was there was a building on the property that was probably built in about 1900 and burned and the property was cleared and it was about two acres and the owners got tired of maintaining it so they brought a herd of goats in and it's amazing the goats became adopted by everyone people knew their names they had their own website and with a webcam monitor the goats so when after three or four years they announced that you know they were going to redevelop the property there was all this uproar and there was a search to find a new location so the goats removed to another redevelopment site which by the way is about to be redeveloped so I don't know if they cause it or just victims of gentrification but they named they decide to call it loka at the goat blocks and they have goat imagery built into it so this will be finished near the fall but it's a you can see the goats on the lower left so it's a it's a very interesting design there's more intimate spaces again mid-rise now one of things that seems to have happened on its own was the evolution of small public parks and private spaces that function as public spaces it's a very simple there's good examples in Davis very important I think ingredient actually makes a lot of economic sense I have a video of the space this is about seven blocks from our house it's a food cart pod and the landscaping is in bins and then gravel and awning there's a 27 food trucks there's also a double-decker boss that sells dresses and an airstream bus that sells men's toiletries and there's music on Friday night and I we go there fairly often in the summer and we were there last fall I guess and I realized that people all around the table were all people from out of town we're coming there because they couldn't get this in their own community and it's got some mediocre food and it's got some spectacular food which is a nice mix plus beer out of the side of a trailer so that is a created and by the way that the it's hooked up to the sewer but they have a steel shipping container that operates as a bathroom it's actually very creatively designed all low-tech very inexpensive and it's an activator for a neighborhood if you need that this is a group of this is delegation of people from Lansing Michigan who we're giving a tour to and we're having lunch at a new grocery store in a redevelopment area and what you're looking at is actually the parking lot so they blend it by having plant sales and other things out there just to create a buffer so all the space you're looking at is completely private and privately controlled but of course anyone can come there and have lunch so it's it really softens the effect in the entrance of the parking structure across the way this is another restaurant Bollywood theater at the edge of that redeveloped appliance store all they did was they this is actually the way it was set back there was parking in front becomes an area for food and drink this is a more interesting one this is a nursery in the middle of a extremely rapidly transforming neighborhood of North Portland it's called pistols nursery and you walk in through door and all of a sudden you're in a nursery you can see it here in this Google image off to the right you can also see another courtyard to the left this makes a big difference in your perception the other thing is as our retail consultant said often these buildings are too deep for good retail you don't want to go into shoebox in the farther back you go the lower the price so there's things you can do one is if you cut out the space you actually haven't lost much that's valuable light goes back and you now have a very attractive space for restaurants and other kinds of retail this is a dresser private space this is an old motel parking area and it's a very very handsome garden has another view of it and a living wall that's one of the few examples from downtown this is a new development and the use of art I really liked here and a kind of low-key quiet space though for mid-rise development this is a little side courtyard and a new development and on the right even though it's considered a no-no is a big grove of bamboo and the nice thing about the bamboo is it's grows fast and it has a nice sound when the wind blows and shade and actually we do get hot in Portland so we need shade this is an illustration from affordable housing project with a lot of internal green spaces that can make it welcoming and allow somewhat protected areas for children to play another I should say I got two more downtown images of Pocket Park in downtown with a lot of active spaces giant chess set there and water features and then a small one-acre contemplative park which is a wetland recreated downtown so designed non-fractive recreation although a friend of mine is a naturalist urban naturalist said they went there once and people put goldfish in the pond they're not supposed to do that right but Osprey came and started removing them so made for a little more excitement well now those are the images I'm going to talk about programs and policies that support or inhibit infill and redevelopment and I want to begin with the recognition that our planning and zoning is really based on a paradigm from the 1940s and 50s and that was a future that we saw unfolding at the time and that is still very much embedded in our thinking so here's an image back when America was great men smoked and women waited on them and really this this idea about this is the American dream is still reflected in our plans and regulations it has a long life span we think I'm amazed the number of people think this is the American family right remember them the Nelson's you know Ozzie's dead June's living alone you know Ricky is living with the unmarried partner and I forgot the youngest one's name Ricky David David David's the older one right so David David's probably living with a man in San Francisco Ricky is a survivalist somewhere I mean it's not that's not true anymore I'm sorry these are a little out of order so in 1970 46 percent of households in the United States were one or two persons it's 62 percent so we think about the housing we're talking about almost two-thirds of the population are in households of one or two persons our regulations are based on the idea that the Nelson's are going to move in and a third are non-family households so they're not related not married this has been we've been moving this direction for a long time so this is what America is now in Yolo County 22% are two parents with children so the Nelson family is less than a quarter and by the way in Yolo County is not different from the United States a few percentage points but this is this is typical the United States about a quarter of the households are two parents with a child and here 23% are just one person so we cannot be thinking about this building the cities for the Nelson's because that era is gone another thing that's going our malls so there's hundreds of dead malls this one happens to be in California I don't know where and there's many reasons for it but the fact is that there are hundreds of malls there's even a website called dead mall dot com I think you can look at stories about malls and when they were alive and why they're dying retails changing Macy's this winter they said they're closing a hundred stores including one in downtown Portland Sears is shutting 30 stores Sears and Kmart stores by next month and there are one after another the chains are closing their stores so suburban malls Ozzie and Harriet it's over McDonald's I remember in the 60s going with my parents to try this new restaurant in the suburbs and we actually never went again but it was definitely a phenomena and it symbolizes a lot about America this is McDonald's headquarters currently outside Chicago until I think next year they're moving here downtown Chicago so employers are moving from the suburbs and there's a lot of office parks that are now troubled and closing just like shopping malls Conagra maybe one of the largest egg businesses in the United States they're moving from this location to this location that's the merchandise mark in Chicago and of course transportation is changing and I think a lot of people dismiss this but if you look at the number of companies that are investing in autonomous vehicles now and the fact they're testing it a bunch of communities it may not be coming tomorrow but it is definitely coming and it's definitely going to change things which way it changes is highly debatable but I think the technology is going to be arriving and perhaps the only thing left from that Jetsons image is this which may have somebody read a seen a story about it it is a taxi drone that's autonomous and it's battery powered it's supposed to be tested in Dubai this year so you get in it and you can fly within 50 kilometers and all that's in front of you as a pad now I'm not going to be the first but it's a symbol of change and then of course here's another bigger symbol of change our planet our climate is going to be fundamentally different used to be called global warming but it's really climate change it's more chaotic and unpredictable and you can't attribute any one event to a system change but collectively they confirm what scientists have known about what happens when you add energy to the environment and it's not just climate change it's the burden of consumption on the planet and whether it can sustain a population as present levels I've been going to China a lot until until last year and it's actually very moving to see a country that was extremely poor have such affluence now and what you see at meals though is from eating at the bottom of the food chain they're eating at the top of the food chain and they're not they're not doing anything that we haven't also done but the scale and speed of it is mind-boggling I mean it's just kind of overwhelming when I go there I said I feel like someone from Britain who went to Chicago in 1900 like it's overwhelming and what this means is is that China can't feed itself now has to have a navy an air force communication spy satellites it's colonized Africa are they bad for doing that no I might remember we did that but it means that the burden on our ecosystem to supply what we need is growing very very intense so we need to think about using getting a higher quality with less quantity so I'm going to talk about the problem with residential zoning so this is what we how we've approached it in Oregon in Oregon every city has to zone enough land for all types of housing that are needed and all types of housing are needed in every community so every city and every county with urban areas has to have zoning for apartments manufactured housing small lots the whole spectrum there has to be clear and objective standards for housing now this is maybe the most important thing that you can do you can have standards like fit into the character of the neighborhood and that was very deliberate on the part of the policy makers saying we have to have housing and we cannot allow communities to become exclusive enclaves and exclude people and make them drive distances and keep them out of their schools and so on that's not an Oregonian approach so we have to have clear and objective standards for all housing then in the Portland metropolitan region another set of requirements which were minimum densities for new development not maximum minimum all virtually all residential zones were modified there were minimum lot sizes were reduced and then at a at a regional level you had to allow accessory dwelling units on all lots and single family zones this would happen with the lot sizes for new construction in the Portland region this is single family homes now when you get down to the bottom end that's actually the size of lots that were built all over Portland when it was growing city four to five thousand square feet that was standard that was for everyone so we went from more than a quarter of an acre to something that's more like a tenth of an acre the city of Portland has gone farther and they've made a lot easier we don't have tests about are you same members of the household and so on you can have a lot of things that would accommodate students and Davis actually they made a lot easier to build accessory dwelling units every corner lot can be a duplex and then it's created zones that are the EX zone and some others that they call just about anything you probably can't refine you know reprocess nuclear fuel rods and so on but otherwise it's pretty much open-ended which is more like even goes beyond form-based zoning in some ways now in California I know there was an effort to do this with accessory dwelling units but after the passage of the legislation 1062 cities adopted zoning rules designed to thwart this state policy so in Los Angeles adopted zoning requirement that you had to have a 15 thousand square foot lot to have an accessory dwelling unit so there aren't they aren't built only 20 percent of the lots of that size in Los Angeles Portland's going poised to go a lot farther now in the single family most of the single family zoned land to allow a range of housing types that was of the type that was allowed for many years until the 1950s so very shortly you'll be able to have an internal accessory unit and an external small backyard cartage on every lot you'll be able to have four plexus duplexes triplexes and four plexus this is over a large part of the city we felt this is the only way to accommodate the pressure we're feeling about rising population growth incomes and trying to keep the the city a place that was accessible now about parking i understand you'll have someone speaking about this who's much more knowledgeable than i am but this is a big deterrent to infill and redevelopment here's a display from the city of Portland of different kinds of parking types uh no parking tuck under parking surface parking podium which means inside the building uh mechanical everyone know what mechanical parking is there's a lift and it stacks cars well it sounds like a car's been crushed that's not what happens but actually have a much narrower space you can have three cars in a 12 or 15 foot space and then there's a key or a card in your cars brought out it just makes it a lot less space intensive for parking cars than underground but there's huge differences in the price so if you're building something you have to if if they say you need two spaces for two bedrooms you're adding a hundred and it's we want it underground because we you don't want to waste a surface lot in an area that has a lot of value and potential it's a hundred and ten thousand dollars the cost of every unit to put it underground by the way when the surface lots when i talk to people in the midwest they say you should put the operating maintenance cost because snow clearance and so on is actually very expensive and then in more severe climates the asphalt buckles so there's actually a much higher price for surface parking in the upper midwest and then they did a research in the impact on rents and i've enlarged the impact on rents won't go through it all through a very elaborate analysis so if you're a developer you have a certain performance to meet depending on whose lent you money and you can you can if the market is unbelievably tight yeah you can charge whatever you want just about but you have a floor you're not going to build anything unless you can least get a decent return and if you build in the price of parking a lot of things are infeasible and that was very clearly shown in portland when the parking was reduced parking requirements so this is the standard for onsite parking for apartments within 500 feet of a transit street or 1500 feet of a transit station one to 30 units no parking 31 to 40 units two tenths of a space per unit 41 to 50 a quarter of a space per unit and 51 or more a third of a space per unit now when the some developers have a market segment where they they want parking and so one of things that's been interesting is watching what the developers were going to build in parking what they feel is appropriate and it's now at 0.6 per unit so if if they're going to build parking what they do is they they only supply 0.6 or if they build more you have to rent the parking space separately and they can rent it out which is a much more efficient use like if you don't want it then we'll sell it to someone else or you can rent it to someone else who can go into a pool it's 0.6 and when the this is actually an increase in the parking requirements by the way not a decrease this is an increase if you have bike parking or shared you know car service car sharing arrangement you can get out of some of the parking requirements the result of this was very rapid construction a lot of areas that really needed housing because it finally made sense they could make money if they had had to do structured parking they wouldn't build just it wasn't possible so by the way i want to know that all this happened in Portland without the slightest hint of controversy it all of this has been hard this is a modest example this is an office building downtown no parking it's actually a 15-story hotel is going to be built in the kitty corner no parking now if that seems challenging to you think of arkansas so for all non-residential properties no parking requirement now Fayetteville Arkansas is about 15 percent bigger than davis but it's not near any big metro area and it has about 80 percent of the students at the University of Arkansas as are at UC Davis so this is not revolutionary now a lot of places are undertaking this effort another inhibition is decision-making speed and delay i heard for many years until i worked more with the valver said well time is money what does that mean actually means they have a period in which money is available and they have to pay interest on it and you might think 15 to 20 percent profit is obscene but if it's four years worth of effort you know it's four or five percent and a lot of developers they use other people's money they're the ones who set the terms so i've become more appreciative to what speed can mean in getting something done and not having a lot of risk and money that's at a very high rate of interest waiting for things to happen this is from the legislative analyst's office local agencies took an average around two and a half years to prove housing projects required an environmental impact report so keep that in mind in Oregon the local woman has 120 days and the date the application is complete to have a decision now do they always honor that no because they can ask for extensions and if you're a developer you don't want to make someone really angry that you're going to see all the time but but i would say that that it is definitely an aspiration and the local governments take it seriously 120 days start to finish that includes all local appeals you have to be done in 120 days if you appeal a decision from a local government it goes to a tribunal in Oregon called the land use board of appeals they fear virtually all appeals from all local government decisions on land use and uh this for those of you who are considering about citizen participation you might be interested in this if you went to the hearing and spoke you can appeal and it does not matter where you live so let's say you were in Portland you were bored you went to city council hearing it said you know i'm looking at this code that doesn't seem right you testify you can appeal doesn't matter where you live because that's regarded as one of the tools for making sure that the laws are properly enforced so it's very easy to challenge it but there are no trials the trial which is the fact finding occurs before the local government and the local government has a responsibility to find facts that address the law so the discipline is not put in the court but but sent to local officials to act like judges it's a role you may have heard this phrase called quasi-judicial as i learned in law school quasi means not but but it actually means you have to act like a judge like you don't make policy you have a set of criteria of a set of facts do you meet the standards that's it not i'm going to rethink the policy so that is required and if it's not met then the decision can be repealed i should say reversed and returned you have three weeks to file the appeal there are no extensions it's absolute three weeks miss it done 119 days after the final local decision you have a decision by the language board of appeals yes they can ask for extensions occasionally but not very often and it requires the agreement of both parties so think about this 119 days after the final local decision you have an appellate review trial tribunal it's completed if you want you can go to the court of appeals and the court of appeals has to have a decision 168 days after the land use board of appeals decision so if you add those all up basically 13 months from the time of the application until you're done through two levels of appeal and all the local government proceedings now does that advantage developers i don't think so i think it focuses everyone's attention it's a very open participatory process but there is speed and clarity and i think it makes a big difference in achieving the outcomes you want in your plans finally i'm going to conclude with a very brief quiz and design review which is the before and which is the after image this is being built on our street nearby any guesses how many people think the top image is after design review maybe about a third how many think the bottom image is after design review about a half the top so this is one of the issues of design review and i actually think we have a problem in our city with it it becomes kind of an unfettered expression of the aesthetic taste of the architects it's not clear to me in a lot of cases that it's made any difference but it certainly does add to cost and expense so i think there's something to be said for using it sparingly or advisory but i'm not convinced that it's actually yielding us better designs with it with a few exceptions well i want to say one thing and then we can have some conversation and that is i think there's a lot of understandable angst about the speed of change and in our neighborhood it was very rapid it was not years it was two or three years and our street was transformed home started to change and there's sometimes a belief that if we can stop the physical changes we can preserve what we love about the community that is if the buildings stay the same the place is staying the same but that is not the case we're in a very dynamic rapidly changing world and nation and you in california or a state at the forefront of these changes the buildings can be the same and it can be a completely different place because the people who can live there will only be the affluent and ultimately a lot of us in in my neighborhood said we would rather have a lot of change and keep the character and mixture of people the same than keep the buildings the same and we can't live here it's not a hard it's a hard choice but i think it's one that you know we're continuing to grapple with i'd be glad to answer questions and thank you for your patience okay we'll have an opportunity for questions in a few moments i'm gonna ask the three panelists who are sitting here to come on up i'll introduce you quickly and we'll need one more chair over here so what we're gonna do is we're just gonna i'll introduce them in a second when they get up here we're just gonna ask for whatever reactions you have to robert slides or presentation thank you so we'll start on this end we have virginia thick pen now retired virginia has had a long career as a developer and builder of infill properties in davis she's past president of the downtown davis business association and served on the board of directors of the chamber of commerce next we have steven wheeler steven is a professor in the human ecology program at uc davis he's the author of three books on how different planning and design strategies can work together to produce more sustainable communities and then next to steven is mike webb who is our assistant city manager and director of i'm sorry i'm just getting backwards sustainability and community development yes i got it right sustainability and community development so in whoever wants to go first uh i'd ask you just to take a few minutes um not too much time just any piece of the presentation that struck you from your perspective that you'd like to follow up on we'll just hear your comments and then we'll go immediately to public q and a after that uh who'd like to go first all right steven i see that hand coming up go ahead you're first yeah thanks robert first of all okay i'd like to thank robert for wonderful presentation it's always great to see images of portland oregon and other regions up there and looking at them i am inspired because portland has developed a culture of creativity in planning historian car carl abbott has called it the organ planning style it doesn't mean they never have problems and they never make mistakes but they do have a lot of different players who come together to make things happen uh members of the business community members you know of nonprofit organizations environmentalists elected officials and they just build one thing on another slowly until they have something that's pretty remarkable and i would love to see us do that a bit more here another theme that emerges from robert's images is that design matters it matters the specific mix of forms the variety ways that vegetation and planting and on-site drainage and things like that maybe are mixed in with buildings the ways that we have people oriented spaces not vehicle oriented spaces the ways that we have formal and informal uses of places and creative moves like opening up the interior of blocks in a downtown to get sort of a three-dimensional space that is fun and vibrant and makes you want to be in that town how we get good design is an interesting question design review boards may not be the way to go one thing we many of us have talked about in davis that robert didn't mention is having a form-based code for the downtown which basically focuses not so much on the uses that go within each building but the general form and character that we want to see and that is something i think we'll have more discussion about in this in this town and maybe mike can speak to that as well and last thing i want to mention is the desire not to become an exclusive enclave because i think davis is in great danger of doing that and i moved to davis from berkeley quite a while ago and berkeley is also many places in california are becoming very exclusive enclaves so we do need to change we do need to think about new building forms that can accommodate lots of people at different incomes things like very small units things like minimum densities of new development minimum heights rather than maximum heights parking is something that gets in the way of development i think there's a chance that 10 or 20 years down the line we won't need so much parking maybe because when we walk out the door here we'll call for an autonomous vehicle that will take us home who knows but i look forward to a discussion on these topics creative a culture of creative planning making design matter and work for us and figuring out ways not to become an exclusive enclave thank you thank you steven um mike or virgin thank you very much and good evening everyone especially taking some time out of a sunday evening and coming on down to talk about this i think very important topic yes steven wheeler mentioned i expected we we will be seeing quite a few community conversations moving forward our city council has given direction for us to move forward with a update to our to our core area specific plan which is our downtown in core core area of the city as a as a key effort in really advancing that before we do a whole citywide general plan update in large part the the interest there i think is is an expressed interest on the city council's part and staff is very very interested in this as well is the idea of taking and utilizing a form-based approach um i would agree wholeheartedly with steven that um i think as a from a zoning perspective and a land use regulation perspective we've got very we've become very mired in the numbers um with a lot of focus on things like density and how many feet tall a building is as opposed to how does that building look and feel and interact interact with the community in the neighborhood um so getting back to those kind of design routes um some some reflective comments on robert's presentation um of i would say up until you get to about the mid-rise discussion uh interestingly enough we have very very fine examples of all the types of projects that robert that robert went over um from cluster cottage housing at aggy village to uh projects like uh paenia house del Rio live work the row building uh downtown um you know tall skinny houses as we're seeing emerge out at villages at willow creek condominiums downtown with mission village mission villas on b street uh you know stacked flat condominiums out at the cannery um so we have some some very and there's many more um that i'm not noting there but we have some very nice and fine examples of a very well thought out well done projects in this community how can we do more uh more of those um so as we move forward to the the query a specific plan update uh i think it's a very exciting time for the community to really come around and discuss what and really focus the efforts on what is the vision for the community what do we want to see the downtown and the core area uh be and and become as a community so those are all things i think that that reflect well on on robert's comments and very much appreciate you coming out and speaking with us thanks mike virginia hi well um i'm reflecting on how long it's been since i've been retired i'm not totally retired but um what i may have to offer is maybe a little more historical perspective because now when i go downtown instead of working downtown all the time um i look around and say wow this is a wonderful infill development that chock or somebody else has done some beautiful beautiful examples of densification and i think about how hard that would have been to get approved 30 years ago or even 20 years ago and so i would like to think that it has somehow gotten more streamlined and that there is a better understanding and appreciation for higher density towards a more vibrant and livable downtown um so i i think that's very encouraging and i would also second what mike said that we already do have many of the kinds of housing types um being created and having been created in davis um everything he mentioned plus uh at least three excellent co-housing communities which are higher density and encourage sharing of assets including cars um rambling back to downtown i think that our downtown has a huge huge advantages and i'm stating the obvious here but by being compact and in a grid and by our terrain being flat and our climate being more or less benign we are able to do so much more with walking and bicycling than in many cities and yet i think we still persist in having a very suburban mentality about wanting to get in our car and drive to within 50 feet of our destination and when i when i hear robert's comments about reducing parking requirements again back in the day when we were designing a project you started with a parking and the parking drove the entire project so i'm happy to see that changing however i think that without um an excellent mass transportation public transportation or wider acceptance of cycling even scooters like you see a lot of in europe or tiny tiny cars it's going to be one of our bigger challenges as a side note when my daughter lived in a one of the places she lived in san francisco there was no parking but she had a car and in addition to her rent i think she paid three to four hundred dollars a month in parking tickets and damage to her car not to mention the break-ins and so you can't it's very hard to keep the one car to a person expectation and not require some kind of parking i also think a lot about what it would have been to continue to live in san francisco if you were juggling a stroller and a baby and groceries and maybe a dog how do you do that when you park seven blocks away which which do you leave in the car while you make that trip so um another topic that interests me a lot in this discussion is um how design absolutely affects behavior and um interaction and community and um i was fortunate enough to cut my teeth and in construction and um judy and mike corbett's village homes and um got to witness firsthand how intentional design of open spaces that encourage community interaction actually caused that to happen amazingly enough and i see it everywhere um right down to say clustered senior housing where you put the mailbox is not on the edge where the postal carrier can get to the measly you put it in the center under a gazebo with benches around it's a design decision that gets people out there communicating with each other so um that's just a tiny example of the kind of ways that design if if done well um can affect the way people live and the quality of life and security safety um everything like that so um i the other swing i have seen in davis is from projects being approved based on parking and zoning and low density to more like in the mid 70s to 80s projects giving given more approval because of compactness in higher density mixed income housing um and then a swing back to big large lots and um the kind of development where you really don't know what street you're on no sense of place or community and in reaction to that we are now so we have now been seeing um an attitude of we don't want any growth we want nothing nothing new nothing more dense because look what happened look what happened out there we don't want anything and so we've thrown out in many cases the baby with a bathwater in order to not have more bad development we sometimes fail to recognize when there's a good proposal so that's what i'm hoping to see more of and more acceptance of higher density so when you propose granny flat behind the house you don't expect all your neighboring properties to come out in opposition to it because they're concerned about the traffic and the noise and you know you hear that so it requires a shift i think a shift in thinking and i'm happy to have robert here as a shining light to help encourage us in that direction and to see that our attitudes really are changing so thank you thanks um just one or two reflections from one council member and i'm glad that my colleagues bret lee and mayor protem and lucas ferricks are here tonight to hear this conversation as well um i think the the projects that mike ticked off around the city that have been approved in the last two years where the greatest diversity is happening in the city right now are interestingly not in the core they're around neighborhoods whether it's the del rio live work or the dense single family residents in south davis and it shows me that there is creativity happening around the community and if you don't live in one of those neighborhoods chances are you're not seeing it so there is a fair bit of diversity i think that's encouraging and i think it shows that even in established neighborhoods or places where zoning would suggest a certain use there is the potential to do some really creative and attractive places for people to live the other thing is i do live in the core i live in one of those buildings that um you know someone hold up as an example of what we should have in the core of the lofts and one thing i'll note about it is there are um there are six residential units on the third floor i rent one of them with my wife um i think i said that right one two three yeah seven and um there are that many parking spaces underneath uh and half of those parking spaces are empty most of the time meaning we have to rent those spaces in addition to our rent and uh half of us are opting not to park in those spaces and not to not to use them and so the issue of parking uh was the i'm just laser focused on that the parking densities that were shared from the from the portland experience which you if i heard you right robert you said that they had been increased over what had been proposed um to me demonstrates the future of our city but i have to combine that with reality that we still do have i think arguably a largely suburban mentality where even fairly short distances are viewed as necessitating a motorized vehicle i'm and i'm not sure as a you know as a policymaker it it's not clear to me where you know when the dam is going to break when we're going to start actually having some uh some places that are proposed with very very low parking ratios that we will accept by exception uh and see what happens uh whether we're already seeing it and just not seeing it uh which is what i think is happening um and what we do about the question of storage uh university town there are parents some of you in this room are those kinds of parents who want their kids to have cars at school so that they can get home if they need to or do other things that they may need to do and so the question in in my mind at least uh in relation to some of the projects that are coming for us is how do we encourage or enable or discourage or not enable uh longer term storage of cars where people literally not getting them out even once a week perhaps but have them there because someone else in their life is suggesting you should have a car there while you're at university so those are just some comments and reflections briefly on what was said um i saw someone handing out envelopes what was that alan okay good there's your there's your one pitch for a contribution we do these uh this is not covered by the city of davis we do note donate the space but we are glad to take contributions so that the ad hoc organizers can continue this i'm going to ask lucas to come on down and help me out um the way we're going to do it is lucas i'll have a roving mic um i'm going to just see where the questions are and sort of say your turn here's the deal find your question in your comment really quickly so if you're if you're finding yourself rambling off into a comment find your question if you don't find your question i'm going to ask you to find it so i saw this hand first then we'll go there and then we'll go there and you can stand if you want to say your name you're free to you don't have to um and if you want to address your question one person that'd be great uh well this is sort of to the city because um my name is larry crane i'm a retired civil engineer environmental hydrologist i've been involved in some level in sustainability and natural systems in the early 70s the key to me in this is the automobile when will we recognize that the personal automobile is not part of a sustainable infrastructure and actually take an aggressive action to do something about it if it's a chicken and egg question will people need to have transportation before they get out of their cars let's get out of the cars let's make a electric based public roving transportation system the center of what we do in davis because we had an opportunity with village homes on having sustainable infrastructure that recognized certain other elements besides transportation particularly storm water management which is a new big deal we've dropped that ball so let's not drop the ball again i'd like somebody to give an analysis of how much the value of the space is from the parking in front of your house to your driveway to your garage that that would be worth given the value of of property these days and if that brings in additional revenue to the city in terms of tax revenue then that revenue can be used to create the system that will make it possible to have zero parking developments and that's just that one aspect i think will will really kick things off does any it wasn't really a question there was a comment um i think i asked for questions we'll make sure we get questions future did you anybody want to react to that mike i'm sure has that back of the envelope calculation of the tax of the value of the land right there yeah no i'm sure that that that price tag would probably be tremendous though i'm sure just seeing from the numbers that robert had up on how much it cost to construct a parking space i think what 20 000 roughly you had in there for structured parking parking garage for example i'd probably argue that's that's probably on the low side for for california it's probably upwards of 30 plus here from what i've seen so that values tremendously high i think that the key you mentioned two key words one is system um and you know absolutely transportation is looked at and has to be looked at as a system where where and how does davis in our community fit within that system in the in the region for example and what can we be doing in working with say cog with capital corridor with our other regional partners to be better interconnected than we currently are to give that option you know make that option readily available for folks to make that make that decision like i'm going to forego the car the vehicle the other just key piece to this i think the this kind of that system's puzzle is jobs and jobs housing balance and that's something that you know communities are often looking at which is where are we relative to not only how many jobs we have within the community vis-a-vis housing within the community but are they are they matched you know or our folks needing to find themselves going elsewhere commuting if you will elsewhere to sacramento or the bay area or even farther in some cases to to find those those positions so no no silver bullet answers by any means it's it's an incredibly complex topic but one that absolutely is worth diving into and i would say as he's passing the mic i mean the the next generation may be making the decision for us i don't know how many of you have kids who are opting out of automobiles for long periods of their lives some not adopting him at all even well into their thirties i think robert had one quick thing he wanted to add to that and then we'll go on to the next question i was impressed during the dinner conversation about all the opportunities for extension of existing transit service or that may be cost-effective so you may be close to providing those kinds of options the other thing is safety is a primary determinant about bike bicycle use for transportation in europe there's actually a segment of the population identified by age over 75 who use bikes so i i can i've commuted to work on a bike for 25 years and now i'm looking at the backs of people passing me on the bikes and when they go past some of them are definitely older than i am and i think one of the reasons that happened is we're getting more and more segregated bike lanes so you have a great climate flat terrain a reputation infrastructure between those two things i can't imagine you can't do something pretty breathtaking and e bikes are coming down in cost hi gene jackman um i wonder if in portland at some point you took uh had granny flats where granny flats were infill if you had a limitation on the number of cars because i see granny flat going into my neighborhood and their university students but they four of them have a car and the granny lives in the the back unit and uh so you've got so many you've got five cars then and uh i think that's what feels more objectionable than infill of more people one of the differences between what i described and what you experience here as a university town we have a lot of press from student housing so i don't think the experience of portland is that relevant for that issue i do think that some universities are being more aggressive about how they whether they authorize or not students to have cars and some of that is done out of respect for the host community we're going to go here and then we're going to go to the back i saw this hand and then i saw that hand back there hi elizabeth dubin um so your presentation was very compelling and we all have heard how wonderful portland is even if we haven't been there um so you expressed a couple different ways that portland is like davis and um i agree but there are pretty obvious ways that it's not like davis and one of them is the existing building stock and the type of buildings that we have here so portland and many other cities have something very different to work with when they're creating these mixed-use environments they have a lot of large turn-of-the-century uh commercial factory buildings and you can carve things out of them you can make courtyards in them and we're kind of going the opposite direction where we have low density small not terribly substantial housing stock spread out and then we have these um isolated retail areas so we have i'm not talking about the core but retail areas neighborhood shopping centers neighborhood shopping centers so i'm wondering your thoughts on how we take what we have which is different than what you have and how do we um build up the same kind of rich mixed-use overlapping um multi-layered community without what i consider a very important ingredient to start with it's a good question there's obviously big differences in the building stock but actually of the new housing that i've mentioned uh you saw images of overwhelmingly it's new brand new from scratch the mixed-use uh kind of maker space and commercial use the existing stock of warehouses it's why the price is so high because it's a very limited quantity now replicas of it are being built i mean it's really obvious brand new buildings look like old buildings so most of the new housing uh is is new uh i think the opportunity to reuse even mid-century shopping centers there's a lot of creativity around that and god knows you have plenty of it in california people look at that and ignore it we have a consultant we've used in california michelle reeves who goes to tilt up uh you know warehouses and shows how they can be made something wonderful and i think with buildings like that it really is important to preserve each era some parts of it as long as you can make it useful and give it some utility and and make money for those who are going to do the redevelopment so um another example is the suburbs huge amounts of the suburbs united states don't fit what we are now and to me some of the most exciting projects are those are really interesting how do you redesign those homes how do you create some commercial uses to create some vitality and opportunity not to have to spend a gallon of gas to get a gallon of milk um so i think you have opportunities do things with a later building stock that will apply to more the united states and i'm you've got more than enough creativity in this town and in this state i think back there oh i just want to piggyback on if you could it maybe it'd be helped to stand i don't understand i want to i grew up in portland and i want to piggyback on what you were saying i used to walk or i grew up in southeast partland and i would walk around and i was so disappointed that i couldn't find a place to get a fun thing to drink or something to eat in southeast portland back in the 70s so we just have to take what we have and let it go from there and be creative of what we have like that strip mall by the co-op or over by pinia drive that little strip mall or out at lake boulevard that's you know the strip mall or whatever you want to call the shopping area you can do so much with what you have and then the people in the neighborhoods will go there and we just can't forget about the surrounding areas we keep talking about downtown but every little neighborhood i mean finally like belmont and hawthorne and laurelhurst down on 28th and ankeny i mean those were nothing and now they're everything i mean they're just you can walk from where i grew up to all these amazing places so you just have to take what you have in your neighborhood and just make it funky and interesting put it up an umbrella and a little bistro chair and i saw i this one and then i'll go over there okay yeah we got some other yep sorry i'm not seeing everyone i'm trying to look go ahead hello i'm david sandino i have a question for professor liberty um i like you to comment about the the streamlining of the environmental review and what goes into the environmental review in portland and whether there's an organ equivalent of sequa and then i have a question for the entire entire panel as what changes if any would you like to see for the environmental review process and davis so i'm gonna have to speak in generalities because as everyone knows there's lots of details and complexity to anything to do with land use regulation environmental review the short answer is there's no sequa equivalent in oregon at all there's no environmental impact reports required at all for anything the approach was we're gonna have a plan and we're gonna execute the plan and we'll look at impacts in the aggregate rather than doing them case by case it's a little oversimplified because the city portland does have some overlay zones but it's just it's completely different it's like a fork in the road we said we're gonna focus on the planning and not do the permitting and california took a different approach i will say that the california approach for certain kinds of resources has yielded better results than we have an organ but i think we're pretty happy with what it's meant in terms of urban and urban development and execution of urban plans thank you uh david thanks a good question um yeah it's from a i guess from a kind of a city staff perspective uh i would say that with respect to sequa um i think the greatest need is is uh to better and this involves a whole lot of wholesale change to the process but it's a better what it needs is a better merging of disclosure and policy consideration right now sequa is designed it's it's really structured to be a disclosure process and document that's its intent whether it's truly working very well that way is it is very questionable um yeah the sequa document doesn't tell you whether you should proceed with a project or not um that's what the the policy decisions are for uh a sequa document is intended to inform that process um and oftentimes i think just the role of sequa gets very muddied uh very quick um in in california but and it's uh i think strayed a bit from its original intended purpose when it was first conceived i'd like i'd like to add to that if i could i i i i agree with the direction mike's taking it and i think um i think there's some things underway with sequa that i would that i greatly value that i think we need to look at more seriously one is um two things that i would put together one is moving in a direction of looking at vehicle miles traveled as as an impact um and and what a given development will do with that but you can't separate that from i don't think an examination of an alternative that says the growth is going to go somewhere one of the problems that i have with sequa as it's often conceptualized is it pretends it seems to pretend that if this development or whatever it is we're considering doesn't happen here it simply doesn't happen and uh that arguably in a growing region and a growing state in a growing world is is just not true and so we're left with this picture that somehow the the impacts have gone away because we didn't do something when in reality we may actually be adding to the impacts and i think that level of analysis needs to be much more critically done i'm often left feeling like i really don't know because i'm really not asking and so it's kind of a question of making sure we're asking the right questions at this point in time that'd be my perspective do you want to i think we'll take maybe four more questions so we have one okay great we'll go we'll go with those and if there's anyone else with a burning because we want to get you out of here soon but we want to hear the question so go ahead catherine did you want Steve to talk first yeah go ahead Stephen i'm going to sidestep sequa but since we brought up the environmental topic i was very glad you had climate change in there and we need to as a city be a global leader in responding to climate change and every new building in some way if i think it's possible it needs to be zero net energy we need to start thinking about that kind of thing that's the environmental impact that really matters thank you hi katie brinkley i'm a planner and also a mother and recently moved to davis and one of the things that brought us here is davis has amazing public schools um compared to the surrounding area and just in general and i noticed your talk um hopped over school quality and affordable housing and i wonder if you could tell us a little bit about how those two components changed in portland over the years with the the zoning changes well uh nationally the phenomena of the decreasing number of households with children meant that school quality was less of a determinant of where people lived which is one reason so many places have undergone revitalization because school did not matter portland public schools are pretty good and compared to place the midwest you know 95 percent of the children in the city go to public schools and go to private schools i don't think they're terrific and they're variable and has a big difference on where people live there's another underlying problem too which is a school choice within the school district tends to reinforce racial segregation so uh i think what has happened though very interesting from the perspective of school district is they're not selling any more property because their schools are filling up and they're now having to lease space because the school population is going up now that's really in effect of the whole city being revitalized and people moving in it's a large-scale phenomena but at least we're not wasting public resources and they're selling off school property because there is no need for it as for affordability our response to that is increase the volume of construction because the demand is in the core that's where the greatest displacement is occurring we've had the largest shift of low-income african-americans moving out being you know way out toward the edge and so unless we do something then we'll get more in fact downtown portland people say wow it's really white and i said go to the suburbs you'll see a lot more diversity so it's a huge challenge it's not not unique you know a lot of cities in california doing this so i can only give a partial answer i can tell you this if your school catchment area district is all low-income people no amount of money will fix the education it's just impossible so you want to have a mixed-income community i think that is healthy and necessary for democracy and that will be expressed in i think civic engagement and in schools go ahead i thank you for your presentation my name is craig zimmerman my question has to do with transportation and is in is directly also related to walkability and biking in 2015 a tom-tom travel index rated portland as the number 10 congested city in america on par with washington dc and the portland bureau of transportation projected 260 000 residents by 2035 your slide mentioned a quarter million what was left out and this goes to my question was that they also predict a half a million more daily solo trips of vehicles by that time and i'm really concerned what would the impact be in the area of transportation and what that would mean for being able to walk and bike thank you uh first let me talk about the data that talks about congestion so this is the way it's calculated your travel time versus posted speed is is what determines the delay not the actual travel time so if you're on a road that's supposed to be 60 miles an hour free travel and you're traveling at 30 miles an hour then that's 30 minutes of delay if you change it doesn't matter how long it is right so the trips are shorter in portland because it's more compact so we actually have shorter or average travel times compared to other places so you're going through traffic and the traffic has gotten pretty bad you're going through traffic for 30 minutes and it's slow that shows up as a higher level of congestion as opposed to someone driving the exact same amount of time and covering the twice the distance right to me that's a nonsensical bit of data it's based you know all you have to do to eliminate the congestion say the speed limits now 30 now they're traveling at the maximum speed right so i i don't buy those congestion ratings i think they're silly the second point is congestion is a price for some things but the question is what do you get out of it and you know what's the trade off you can't make all the travel free and with no congestion i mean there wouldn't be any community left so the answer is we have to redesign the communities to make a lot less trips necessary and to bring things closer together um one of the problems with being a successful place is congestion and places that are popular are congested and people accept it i you know i don't have to deal with this because i bike my commute is often the best part of the day right and i get to go over a beautiful bridge and i get a lot of fresh air even if it's pouring rain you know so when i'm in congestion i hate it with a passion because i'm not used to it but it's not like you can just fix that and there's a price to fixing at a very real price in the community and out of the taxpayers so i think we are going to have a problem and we do see people resettling and we see people choosing not to drive and making locational decisions to avoid getting on that freeway now that said my partner has a commute in the morning gets up at 4 30 now and it's pretty bad but the the answer is there's nothing you know we can make better use of what we have i guess one other thing i'd say and it came about in a comment during a some work i was doing in Lake Tahoe as they said 75 percent of the cars are empty 75 percent of the space inside the cars are empty right so we actually have a lot of travel with a lot of a lot of opportunity for better use and i think we will see some of that in coming years through ride hailing and ride sharing services but for a lot of communities i think they ought to have a goal of having congestion we'll go over here with the question i find myself living in old north davis an area that's ready for densification and i find myself a part of a empty nester household and i thought well i i would like to have a granny flat in my backyard so i went off to clayton homes the the biggest seller of modular homes and i said i would like a little 325 square foot unit for my backyard and they said we only sell real housing our smallest unit is 850 square feet uh we're not all in portland anymore are we a little bit of history i'm trying to remember the name of the big um development outside los angeles that was the analog to levittown what's called lake liquid yeah well the size of those homes by the way were you know 750 up to about 1100 square feet and those would have two or three generations and people with kids in it no one thought that was living in poverty people come to our house which is 1945 house you saw and said oh it's so charming for a small house and i think there's two of us i don't like vacuuming right so um and i think increasingly young people are saying why do we we i don't want to be burdened by debt i want other things out of life than home payments so i think you're seeing a lot of creativity about design i've actually been in a house about 320 square feet in a project in our neighborhood that actually didn't care for but it was done by a national home builder so it was very impressive and seem experimenting but it was a 360 square foot studio i was quite impressed i said this is quite a nice unit it was pretty cheap so i think we'll see more of that experimentation i would encourage you to look at sacramento there's a facebook page sacramento tiny houses if you haven't looked at that there's not a lot of going on there but what is going on is kind of interesting and you see what's out there and what people are thinking about in terms of construction i think we're going to go to our last question of the evening oh sorry mike i can i just just very briefly to denise's comment with accessory dwelling units in davis we've actually come quite a quite a ways just in the last few years with the from the regulatory review side where a unit as as one the dentist describes 325 square feet or roughly whether it's a component of the house or whether it's in the in the yard if if space allows is a is basically a staff level over the counter review and then obtaining building permits the city of santa cruz has taken an interesting next step beyond that which is actually the city worked with a group of local architects and came in and actually pre-designed and pre-plan checked for building permits a variety of different accessory unit designs so that someone someone is interested they come in they know it's already approved it's already been through the building permit review process and they can basically get over the counter go to go to work on an accessory unit that is there's been some interest in in the possibility of looking at something like out here and taking taking davis to that next step too yeah thanks we'll go to last question time okay i want an honor my name is tot edelman i live in a green meadows where it's pretty difficult to shop by foot and so i kind of feel bad for the people who even further away in the wild horse and i think also where the cycling model share is probably a half or a third of what it should be for this year based on goal set a few years ago so anyway while we have the statistics about the really great a portland parking requirement policies which had a you know quite low compared to davis could somebody frosty from the city staff or like an official actually well that's on our mind those percentages from like 0.2 to 0.3 or so maybe somebody could find it what are actually the the requirements in davis right now i can tell you pretty quick the the requirements that we have for the most part on the books in our zoning have been there since the 80s they fundamentally haven't changed they've been reviewed in and reconsidered on a project by project basis and i will tell you that for example a one bedroom or studio unit in our zoning code requires one parking space an accessory unit up until recently required and one an additional parking space in addition to the home so we two bedroom apartment requires it's one and a half spaces equivalent per per unit and it kind of goes up from there so it's it's very parking intensive generally speaking on more recent projects of larger scale mission residences which is the 14 units of stack flat condos under construction currently on b street has partial underground parking and it's just a touch over a space a unit and those are two bedroom units projects like looking at west village so going on to uc davis campus for a moment they're parking at a ratio of about 0.6 spaces unit after double up mic after right after doubling up on on the rooms and then projects like sterling the sterling apartment proposal which is currently undergoing a review process is about 0.6 0.65 i believe is about the ratio we're seeing and that's those are ratios that developers seem to have a comfort with and it seems like where they they landed when they've ratcheted back up in portland so it's always about it's finding that that sweet spot of you know in requiring minimum parking and and how much is is too much versus you know too little and what is the market going to going to demand well i think we should give a round of applause to robert and for the panelists thank you thanks a lot again for coming and have a good evening