 Good evening. Thanks for joining us. We're just getting going. So we're going to allow some more people to join before we get started with our missing middle workshop tonight. Nice to see some generation housing representation here. Hi Ramon. Hi Cal. Hi Chair Weeks. It looks like we still have people popping on to join us. So if we want to give it just another minute or two. Sounds great. Thanks Michelle. Thanks for joining us everyone. We're just going to wait a little bit longer. Thanks for joining our missing middle workshop. Alright, I think we are probably good to get started when you are ready. Great. Well I will just kick it off for the start here. I just wanted to welcome everyone. Thank you for taking some time on this beautiful evening outside to join us for our missing middle workshop tonight. We're really excited to be able to present this to you and to be working on this project with the team that we have. And my name is Amy Lyle and I manage our long range planning team at the city of Santa Rosa. And I'll go ahead and introduce our project manager and senior planner Amy Nicholson. She'll be leading us through this workshop tonight and we'll be introducing our presenters for the evening. Amy and good evening everyone. Thank you so much for joining us. We're really excited to share with you what we've learned so far and hear from each of you a little bit later in today's workshop. Looks like we're still having a few people joining us but Tony if you could do a quick screen share and I just want to add I guess quickly. You have several other city staff members with us this evening. Michelle who's helping us run this zoom meeting and she does an awesome job so thank you Michelle and then we also have be trees and Connor from our planning division. And we have the optico team as well and they're the consultant that is working with us on this project. So maybe metallic and Tony and Cal if you could just do quick introductions of yourselves that would be great. Hi everyone my name is metallic angry. I'm, as Amy said that optical design and very excited to be working on this project. I'm a designer and planner, and again we, we really believe in missing middle so it was very exciting to try and see how best to enable that in Santa Rosa. So excited to present what we have for you and also to get your feedback today. Tony. Hi everyone. Thanks for having us today. I'm Tony Perez of octopus design and I'm assisting metallic and Cal on this team. I'm Kurtz. I'm a designer optico and just very excited to present to you all today and get your feedback. Great. Thank you. Really quick Amy, would it be okay if we have be trees confirm if we need translation services for tonight's meeting. Yes, thank you Michelle. I don't think we have Spanish speakers or people who require translation in the room. Perfect. Thank you so much. Thank you, Tony. Okay, so just this is a slide that shows the agenda for tonight's workshop. So, Tony and metallic from up to coast will be making the bulk of today's presentation. And once that presentation concludes, we will move into breakout rooms and we do have a few questions that we hope to hear from each of you on, and then we'll conclude the breakout room discussions with a question and answer session and wrap up this workshop so next slide please. So just some virtual housekeeping. Looks like everybody's muted. Thanks to those of you who have your video on it makes us feel a little bit more personable and really appreciate all of you joining us tonight. The presentation of this presentation portion will be about 30 to 35 minutes this evening. And then I mentioned the breakout rooms and wrapping up with a question and answer session. At the end when we go through question, the question segment, you're able to either enter your questions in the chat or you can use the raise hand feature. And just a reminder if we're not able to get to all the questions during our workshop tonight. I'll put my email address in the chat and we'll be sure to follow up with you afterwards. And just a reminder that we are recording this workshop. Next slide. Okay, so this is our participation agreement which tends to work really well we haven't had any issues but just a reminder to please be respectful of one another's opinions. No hateful violent or discriminatory language will be tolerated. And again we will follow up with any responses to questions that we are not able to address today. So just as a brief introduction. We have been working on this missing middle housing initiative for many months now and a lot of this work has really been the optico team. We're digging in and doing a lot of data analysis that as it relates to the city's current housing needs and looking really throughout the city for areas where missing middle housing could be successful. We really see this as an opportunity to increase the number of housing units within parts of the city that are walkable that already have infrastructure and that are outside of portions of the city that are more prone to environmental issues and also wildfire. We see missing middle housing as a gentle density solution to help the city to meet its housing needs, and it really helps to provide a variety of housing types that address the various members of our community. So again thank you for participating this evening and I will turn it over to Tony for the next few slides. Sorry I'm trying to unmute the button there. Good evening. I'm going to present to you the idea, the concept of missing middle housing in three chunks. What it is, where it works best, and the individual types that comprise missing middle housing. So what is it? You know the most basic way to say it, the quickest way to say it is how scale buildings with multiple units in walkable neighborhoods. And we'll talk about all these three aspects of it a little more throughout the presentation but you know it's very different from regular multifamily development that we've all been accustomed to over the last 50, 60 years. And in these three ways, so if it's two of these, it's good but it's not missing middle. If it's all three of these then it tends to be missing middle. And this type of development, you see it in the older areas of cities especially before the 1940s that's really when the shift happened away from it. And why is it missing? Basically, after 1940, after World War II, there was a big emphasis on producing single family houses or apartments in varying sizes and mid-rise and high-rise. And so for the better part of the last century, most of the choices were either at either end of the spectrum and more recently townhouses. But people that wanted something in between this that they used to have the option don't have it anymore. And so that's where missing middle really comes into play. And this question about how can we get more of it, it really depends on looking at your regulations and your comp plan policies. Everything that the city is doing to try and make it easy to happen, to put it on a level playing field, the same as houses and big apartment projects, that tends to be necessary to shift the way that you design, locate, regulate and develop homes. And you can see the middle of this diagram, that's the missing middle diagram that Dan Perlick put together almost 12 years ago now just to really drive home the point that this part of the spectrum of all housing choices used to occur in neighborhoods and about 1940 it stopped occurring. So digging into those types a little more, this is just to say that, again, you might call this multifamily development because there are multiple units in these buildings, but it's not multifamily development as you know it. It's buildings that are the size of small and large houses that fit on the size of lots that are in single-family neighborhoods. And they all require a little bit different lot width and lot depth, but basically they fit in neighborhoods. That's the biggest, one of the biggest characteristics. And all these numbers below are lot widths and lot depths and a lot area and all that. Just to say that you can't paint it with one brush, they're all different types and they have different roles in different parts of the neighborhood. The characteristics of the missing middle types. There's a lot that we could talk about, but these six really stand out. It's always a two-story building with occupied space in the attic under the roof, not a third story, but occupied attic space. There are always multiple units, two, and in some cases in the larger buildings, the more rare versions of it up to 19. The footprint, again, the size of a medium, a small to medium or large house, on-street parking counts toward the required parking. Again, because of the size of these buildings, they don't have a parking lot per se. They have parking on the side or in the rear. The driveways are the same size and location as driveways for houses. And then again, on-site parking usually is lower because of where these are located and we'll get into that. The other characteristic to really point out here is that if you have to apply a density term to missing middle, it's not low density and it's not high density. We call it medium density. And if you look at the pictures here on the right, one is a street view of an apartment building on the left and an aerial view of that same apartment building. It has 49 units in it and it mathematically calculates to 30 units per acre. You can see how big that building is. Three stories in the photo above longer than you can see in the photo. The other way is what we're going to talk about later tonight. A multiplex small has five units in it and the building is much smaller as you can see in its two stories, that missing middle approach. And it calculates to 29 to the acre. So mathematically, if you're using density as a lens, these are almost identical, but they're not identical in any other way except they're both housing. So it's this idea of lower perceived density and also that they have these numbers that are higher because they are on smaller lots and the math just works to have a higher number mathematically, but you can see that it's a much smaller building. These types also, some of them have shared spaces, not all of them do, but some of them do, like the cottage core or the courtyard buildings. They really create a strong sense of community. This garden is shared by all the units that front it and you can see their entries face it and people see each other. It's semi private, it's off the street, but it's shared and it's a nice way to come to your unit, your house. And also, these missing middle types, they're again, they're very similar in scale and form a single unit houses. That's the whole idea. And again, you know, I would love to say that we came up with this, you know, whole idea and concept. This is nearly 100 years old. We're just bringing it back to life. That's really what what our advocacy is about. We didn't invent it but we are bringing it to everyone's attention to to re enable again as it used to be a couple of examples across the country. This is from Omaha, Omaha, Nebraska area. Our office designed this. I think it is a 500 unit or so maybe 600 units new neighborhood for an apartment developer who said, I don't want to do apartments, the old apartment way anymore I want to do it missing middle way. And so this project is entirely duplexes four plexes seven plexes 10 plexes townhomes. There are no houses in this in this project it's all apartments, and he had a he had a criterion he said I want all the space to be leasable I don't want any lobbies like an apartment building I don't want any corridors that I can't lease and that I have to maintain I wonder all to be units and so the missing middle approach really spoke to him. And I think the shot that you see here is of one portion of it, and this project is easily half built by now. This is a project closer to us this is in Healdsburg, and it's a cottage court. There's a picture there on the left the site plan and some photographs. Some people call this a pocket neighborhood. It's, if you want to call it either one, they both work. It's, it's on a site, little under 1.4 acres, 12 cottages around these greens, and it's just it was just finished river house it's called. The missing middle housing work. This is a real real critical aspect of missing middle that this isn't, you know, we always want to make sure that this isn't a new way to build more housing out middle of nowhere. And we're not repose. We're not supposing that you are proposing that. But sometimes people hear how interesting this is and say, Oh, it's a great way to build out on that lettuce field. And this is actually going back to how we found this in older play older communities in older neighborhoods. This tends to occur in areas within short walking distance of amenities and what are those amenities. There are areas that have services food shopping or transit. Ideally, all of those in one place, but you could have one of those and it could be an amenity. Alternatively, maybe that you have parks or schools that are within short walking distance. And then when you start looking at your city like that, as metallic will talk later, it starts to really identify where this makes sense, and it could work best and where it doesn't. So three examples when I walk through very briefly, just to show you typical conditions typical situations where we recommend a similar fit. First one is in neighborhoods existing neighborhoods. Again, if you look at this, these are all detached buildings their house scale. And there's a neighborhood corridor on the top and more community wide corridor on the right here. And then just local streets. And I just identified a few sites here as examples of where these types could fit. And, and what I'm trying to show here by the different colors of the of the sites the way that they're, they have a little identification around them. Is that certain of these types work better on busy streets and other types work better on more quiet local streets. It's not a one size fits all. There's a whole palette that you can choose from and how it's how to arrange them. And then looking at a neighborhood quarter, you might have a quarter that has housing fronting it. And some of the sites might be in need of redevelopment or the owners might want to be redeveloping them. Say an old gas station site that there's nothing there anymore missing middle could could work there on that kind of corridor. And so in these areas, the upper end of this palette of missing types really works nicely. And then the last example and you know what we're just showing you three but they're going to be 23 but we're just trying to boil it down to some we can talk about tonight. The other one I want to talk about is just the transformation of bigger corridors, where you see the number one there along that busy road that busy highway where the big shopping centers are. That's probably going to need to have more intense development and missing middle and certainly not going to have houses there. But you can see that in between that one and that three at the bottom of the screen where that's those are existing neighborhoods. That's where you could use missing middle as a transition between more intense buildings that might be let's say office buildings or commercial buildings or maybe just bigger apartments and the houses in between them you could use missing middle as a transition. So, let's talk about the types here in this third chunk of information I'm going to walk through briefly each of these types and just describe them generally and then you can look at the recording for all the information we have on the screen. You'll see on the right hand side of the screen we have the typical characteristics the lot with is first and then the depth so 75 feet wide by 150 that's that's how you can read that that information there and then the associated density with it. Again, it's important to know that the density that is calculated for each of these types is based on the lot size that it's on and not the zoning that's there or or the zoning that they're thinking about. This is just we measured what is there and put it on the slide. So the first one is duplex side by side. And you can see these two porches. Each are individual entries to a unit that is two stories tall and you can see it looks like one house so you look closer and there are two units side by side. And this is its cousin, the duplex stacked, which is one unit on top of the other and you can see the door over on the left. And by that you can see the number on the one column, then the other number to the right, and then the second door. And so there's a stair stair going up to the upper unit. And the, the, the beauty of the duplex stack is it fits on a narrower lot than its cousin the duplex side by side. And then we're moving up the scale of the pallet of miscellaneous types this is the cottage core. And as its name suggests, it's a garden or a courtyard surrounded by one story cottages that are detached. And often there's a two story cottage in the back of two units or three units in this case this one has three. This is the triplex or the foreplex again this is a house. It just happens to have four units in it. And I guess this is a great time to just stop and say that this is not, we are not advocating that houses get turned into dorms and cut up into every available space turned into a unit. And this is, this is talking about an approach that is, again, over 100 years old, and the units were designed from the outset as individual units with kitchenettes or shared kitchen in some cases. So I just want to make that make that clear. And then we jump up the scale now to a building with five or more units and this is a multiplex small or another term you might hear as a mansion apartment. This is one of my favorites and it's in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, in the neighborhood near there downtown. And when I first saw it I thought it was a house and then I look closer and I saw it and I went up and looked at it and there were five units in it. It's cousin is the multiplex large so this has anywhere between 10 and 18 or 19 units in it but you see that even in this case, it's still a two story building. Yeah, it has a basement you can see the window and and yeah the attic is occupied but that's the whole point is it's not a three story apartment building. It's a two story apartment building and the attic is occupied and still fits in with large houses in this neighborhood. And then the courtyard building. This one has eight units in it. It's a kind of arguments. It's a beautiful example of of just this missing middle scale, getting a little bigger now but it's still, that could be one big house, or it could be two units in this case it's a. And then the last type is this townhouse type, and we find two versions of it so here's the small, which is the two story missing middle type, and usually three or four, maybe, maybe five in a row. And it's cousin, which is not the missing middle. This is what we would call upper missing middle is three stories and a much bigger footprint than what we've been talking about but I just show it to contrast with with the rest of them. And then the last one in the in the palette here is this live work type that combines a couple of units on the upper floor with with ground floor workspace. You see there's a shop in the front and then an office of an attorney's office and Dennis office in the back. And then there's a lot to us by the Georgia Conservancy earlier this year. So a fresh type for us. And that is where I'll stop and turn it over to my colleague for mentality. Thanks Tony and I'll just a second as I kind of pivot to sharing my screen. Right so just confirming that you all can kind of see my screen movie I just one sec. Can you see the slide advanced sorry I just need to ask that because it's kind of spinning at my end. No it's not advancing. It's not advancing right so I'm just going to. Sorry, stop sharing and then share again one second please apologies for that. All right so can you kind of see. Let me go back a level can you kind of see the enabling missing middle and Santa Rosa slide. All right thank you yes we can see that. So for Zoom issues you would think that you know three years down the line all this would be in the past but clearly not so. Yeah so thank you. So just building upon what Tony discussed. I'm going to just kind of translate some of that into what our work has been specific to Santa Rosa. So our work for this included kind of three clear cut portions of work if that's how you want to break up our scope. The key to that was first of all understanding what is actually existing in Santa Rosa. And most of this was in the form of analysis, and this was done at a city wide scale. And this included studying what is currently there, you know, like what existing examples are there of missing middle Santa Rosa of analyzing the existing and allowed land use patterns lot sizes lot configurations and such. So understanding what are existing community destinations what are current centers what are potential future centers, because that as Tony described is key to creating and enabling missing middle and making it successful, of having areas where people find, you know, and have natural tendency to walk just because there are enough amenities within an easy and an enjoyable walking distance. At the same time we also analyzed existing regulations to identify what are barriers to actually allowing missing middle in Santa Rosa. So this piece was kind of our analysis to do with kind of the physical and existing and regulatory conditions. Then in parallel to that we also carried out the financial feasibility of certain types. So for this what this meant was to select repeating patterns like what are the most typical lot sizes that we see in Santa Rosa. What is appropriate missing middle types that might work there, and then carrying out like a performer analysis to see what can or cannot pencil out under current market conditions. So the result of these two is to give us a good sense of what is appropriate for both for Santa Rosa context, it's existing physical conditions, and also what is likely to kind of pencil out and be financially viable. And that would feed into, you know, our actual work which is the end product of this entire project, which is a missing middle overlay zone in the form of an actual map, and accompanying standards that would help in actually implementing missing middle standards. So, this is basically an overview of our work. The last piece that I just mentioned which is the overlay zone work is something that is in progress, the analysis piece and the financial feasibility piece have been concluded. So I want to talk you through what have been our key findings to do with some of these tasks. So to begin with, as Tony pointed out in most places we find that it's not like a new concept that they're introducing, you know, look hard, and in most areas you know we can see examples of missing middle. So what you see on the screen are examples from Santa Rosa. These were all generously contributed to us by city staff, because most of this project was done during active covert and so we were not able to physically visit each and every street so the city staff was very helpful in actually going out and documenting a lot of these examples. So as you can see there is that there are enough examples existing in Santa Rosa of duplexes for flexes, and even a cottage court so some of the types that Tony just described, and these are examples from Santa Rosa neighborhoods themselves. Also, in terms of our mapping analysis, as I mentioned this was done at a citywide scale to understand what the current context is, what things are likely to change, and just to understand which areas are most suitable towards us focusing on for enabling missing middle. So, in terms of land use you know why do we study this because, as Tony described there are certain underlying conditions that need to be met for missing middle to be recommended and for missing middle to actually be successful. So typically we find that low density residential neighborhoods, they do not offer the right context, and why is this because, among other factors, a key factor is parking. There are areas which are highly dependent on parking and which need to be dependent on driving for most daily activities, you know, just adding on more units without kind of being able to find more space for parking just doesn't pan out. So typically these areas are not ideal for missing middle, there are exceptions in certain cases. Similarly, on the on the other end of the scale there are higher density environments such as those directly adjacent to transit stations transit nodes, and along busy areas where also missing middle may not work in most cases. And the reason for that is that these areas are better suited for higher density and higher intensity environments, such as larger buildings essentially like kind of more intense mixed use buildings. So even in these context missing middle will not work ideally. So what are we looking for we're looking for medium density residential zones mixed use zones but within walkable areas. So these are the areas that we honed in on on our study of the land use of the existing land use map in Santa Rosa. At the same time we were also looking at what the underlying zoning is. So, again, carrying through with what we just discussed, the lowest intensity residential zones such as the RR and the R1 zones are unlikely to support missing middle zones. So, again, we are focusing on the medium intensity residential zones, and these in Santa Rosa are the transit village, the TV, the R2 and the R3 zones, as well as the several mixed use zones that are there. And these have a lot of potential for missing middle housing. So, a note on plan developments, you know, or PDs, typically in our missing middle analysis and work we would tend to avoid these areas, simply because these are kind of, you know, examples of negotiated standards and you know, like very complicated regulatory conditions, and that makes it very challenging to roll them into like an overall, like set of zoning standards for missing middle. But in the case of Santa Rosa, some PDs may need to be considered. And the reason for this is that a very large part of the city is actually under PDs. So for that reason alone, we are considering PDs and some of the areas that we're recommending for missing middle. So in also assessing where the city wants to intensify and where potential growth areas may happen. We looked at both areas that have like good existing infrastructure, good access where we think further intensification is possible. And at the same time also areas that we should frankly stay away from. So there are certain areas which are environmentally constrained. So there are particular those which are within the, the buoy, you know, the, the by land urban interchange, the interface. So these are areas where ideally we would not want to see further intensification we don't want to add on housing in these areas. So these are again zones that we would shy away from been considering, you know, where missing middle housing may apply. A thing to note is that already the city has kind of set some priority growth areas as you can see with the blue boundary. These are kind of the priority development area or the PDA which spans existing primary corridors, and also along the transit station areas. So these would definitely be the parts of the city where we think missing middle would be successful. So I had also mentioned in the beginning that apart from looking at where the current land use situation is like what is currently allowed what may change how the city may grow. We also have to look at the physical, the existing physical pattern of lots like what are predominant lot widths and lot depths and lot configurations. And the reason for this is that the minimum lot sizes are intrinsically kind of tied in to the palette of missing middle types. So not every type is going to work on every lot. So we want to be very mindful that when we are thinking about, you know, recommending missing middle types, these are kind of cross referenced in a way with what are existing lot conditions. So we carried out an analysis and tried to group existing lots, lot sizes and lot patterns within the city into these different categories based on lot widths. The reason for using lot widths in particular is that that's often a more critical criteria when we are trying to decide which missing middle type building type would work on which lot as compared to the lot depth. So both are important but lot width is typically a more important criteria to consider. On the basis of this study and the other preceding studies, it'll help us in in kind of taking the entire palette of missing middle types and actually figuring out which ones would be appropriate and which ones would fit physically and otherwise on existing We also talked a lot about the importance of access to amenities of trying to be within a walkable environment and also within like easy proximity to either existing or potential mixed use centers. So, with that in mind, we analyzed existing community destinations. As you can see on the key, these span a wide variety of destination types. These include employment hubs, they include popular open spaces, they include downtown which in itself is like a destination, and a variety of other areas. So this in other words gives us a sense of where the community is currently walking to or gravitating towards and also within the neighborhood scale, where are the educational institutions the parks and other such areas that can become you know future community hubs, or those could be kind of future walkable centers. So we found and this is fairly typical in most communities that there are three key types of walkable centers within Santa Rosa. We do have downtown obviously which is a city by destination, and it's got everything it's got retail dining options services and entertainment recreation, and as well as significant housing and office users. In addition to that we found neighborhood main streets. So these are again neighborhood level destinations for much of the same things like retail food users and services, and we find that these are the most typical types of centers that can encourage missing middle within neighborhoods or adjacent to neighborhoods. And also, at another sense of scale we have like smaller neighborhood nodes, which are kind of commercial or mixed use nodes that are at important street intersections or cross sections that can again serve the same function of providing services and amenities to the surrounding neighborhoods. So all these kind of parallel pieces of analysis in mind. It's almost like we had to overlay all this information to try and ascertain what are the potential areas for missing middle housing. So there were actually two sets of maps one with and without the plan developments here we are showing you the map that does include the PDs because, as I mentioned earlier, at times we don't include these, but in Santa Rosa's case we feel it does make sense to include PD simply because there's so many of them. So as you can see on this map, we looked at including existing R1 R2 R3 as well as mixed use zones, and this includes not just the existing walkable centers, but also the potential of these centers and also neighborhoods which may not be perfect for missing middle right now, but we are thinking of the future so within the next 5, 10, 15 years, these have all the potential to develop with that gentle intensification that we've been talking about of, of being able to support missing middle. So we call these neighborhoods missing middle ready, you know, which is like, let's just say not not the most technically savvy term but I think you get that you know we're looking at the future and trying to include areas which have that ready potential. So the blue outline in a nutshell basically highlights the areas where we think missing middle would work best within Santa Rosa, and this is on the basis of all the preceding analysis that I just walked you through. We also looked at the regulatory situation essentially in Santa Rosa we looked at the existing regulations within each of these zones that we were considering. And you can see in this matrix, the critical factors that we consider that in our experience we found to be key determinants as to whether missing middle is currently enabled or not is listed on the left. These are almost like questions that we ask when we look at the existing zone standards. And as you can see, it's like a red light green light situation for most of the zones as you can see, you know the conditions are fine for enabling missing middle for allowing missing middle. And there are certain things that we do need to work with and those are highlighted with red circles. You notice that for the plan development column, everything is a question mark and there are a few of those in other places as well. So basically indicates that the existing regulations are such that it's not very simple to answer this question. So you know it's, we just kind of need to approach it from a slightly different view, and in the case of PDs. Since the rules and regulations for each individual PD vary. So it's not possible for us to kind of analyze this at that scale, you know for every individual plan development. And this is something that we feel is important to include in our analysis so that's why we are including PDs as of now. And another critical piece because you know we didn't want to be thinking about, you know simply the spatial needs of different missing middle types, and of the existing context we also wanted to be realistic about what the current housing market is telling us. So we've teamed up with strategic economics over the team economists, and we carried out an actual financial feasibility analysis for some of the key building types that we felt would work for Santa Rosa. So as you can see, from this matrix we tested five missing middle prototypes and for all of them we kept the site area the same, in other words we considered a 6000 square foot lot, and we assumed the same parking which is a one parking space per unit. And we ran the numbers essentially like doing from a developer site performer analysis using the residential residual land you value method which is like the most kind of common methodology for trying to assess if there is enough potential in a site for a developer to purchase that lot to redevelop it and then to either have it out for rent or to sell it. So this is a very typical model for trying to assess whether a particular project is going to be financially feasible or not. So under current market conditions unfortunately none of the prototypes were completely feasible some were closer to feasibility than others, but, and we want to be transparent about this, but this does. This doesn't kind of mean that missing middle can never work in Santa Rosa in fact far from it. This just reflects current market conditions, but we are looking to enable this for the next 10 1520 years. So, with that in mind, we can proceed with our work in terms of the next steps for the project. So, in the beginning we talked a little bit about what the final outcome of this entire project is going to be in the study that we are undertaking. We have come up with a missing middle housing overlay zone that can be applied on the city on top of the city's zoning map. And within this there would be a specific missing middle zones with standards that are that just enable or a streamlined way of enabling missing middle zones in those zones. So, as you can see this is a draft regulating plan, and this and the other standards that I'll just be talking about our part of the administrative draft of the set of zoning standards that is being reviewed by the city right now, based on their feedback and also based on the feedback that we'll receive today. Some of that information will get updated and change and modified, and this would go towards the public review draft that would be out this summer for the community to give us feedback on. So, essentially, as you can see again the, you'll remember from a few slides back we looked at the potential areas for missing middle in Santa Rosa. So what you're seeing here within the colored polygons essentially is that same boundary. This is where we are looking at essentially two zones and these are kind of two flavors of missing middle in a way, and we're keeping this terminology very simple for right now is the neighborhood and the neighborhood medium. And there is like a variation, as you see called the open zone. So the open sub zone is pretty much similar in look and feel like in terms of build form and other physical characteristics to the base zone, but they at times allow additional additional uses or additional building frontage requirements and things like that, just to, you know, give a bit more flexibility to what is allowed in that particular zone. So diving a little bit deeper into what these two missing middle zones are just giving a very high level summary of these. They're not very different, both include how scale buildings is just that the range of buildings is slightly different between one and the other. The neighborhood small is talking about slightly smaller building footprints, slightly larger setbacks, and likes one story lesser than what is allowed in the neighborhood medium zone. The two are very similar. And in terms of the building types that are included, the palette for neighborhood small includes the house, the single family house, a duplex, a cottage court, a fourplex, a multiplex and a townhouse. Whereas the neighborhood medium includes a fourplex a multiplex a townhouse and a courtyard building. So just slightly differing shades of intensity, but ultimately both will include how scale buildings and in look and feel, you know, in form and in height. They are compatible with existing single family residential, you know neighborhoods, they would fit right in and may not even be visible in many cases. So, I also just wanted to touch very briefly about further steps like apart from this, the public review draft that I just mentioned that we're working on. We are also engaging with the city to carry out trainings university staff, specific to form based codes and missing middle housing and basically how to kind of go about implementing this and how to make the code most efficient for Santa Rosa. So what you see on the screen here are some of the key topics that we'll be discussing with city staff as we continue to define the public review draft that I mentioned. And in terms of upcoming tasks, apart from what I just mentioned that which are the missing middle housing code like the public review draft of that, and the training sessions. We'll also be having further outreach in the form of like a training workshop or several training sessions that will include local developers and architects from within Santa Rosa. So these are again meant to be like sessions in which we kind of explain what we have done, we have actual hands on working sessions, and in the process we also learn and improve upon, you know, the actual code and the standards based on the feedback that we get from, you know, local developers and from the community. In addition to that we'll obviously also be having hearings and meetings, and those will also be opportunities to hear from all of you. So that's what I had in terms of the presentation and Amy if you just want to kind of walk us through to the next steps. Thank you so much Mattali and Tony for that great presentation. And so I think now we're ready to go into some breakout rooms and discuss a few questions that we have prepared and just, we hope to hear your thoughts generally on, on what you have heard during today's presentation. And just, yeah, any other ideas that you have so I think Michelle can press a button and put us all into rooms and look forward to speaking with you. Okay rooms are opening now. If you would like to go ahead and join your breakout room. They'll have some questions and conversation for you to partake in. Okay, I'm not talking. I'll listen. Okay yeah I would still hop in and at least yeah hear what other people are saying. Okay. Okay. Can you send me back to my breakout room real quick. Sorry. I can't because they're closed. I was putting something in the chat and I press enter and I think it was at the same time that the option was to join the room. Oh, that's fine. So I think my group is rejoining but I just wanted to respond to because we were having a conversation and I was just giving a plug about our general plan update so I'll put that in the chat here as well. So there's a question about the Southeast Greenway, and that project is still moving forward so that plan was adopted, and that project we are working with Caltrans to acquire the property. So that is still moving forward it just on a very slow pace, because we do have to work with Caltrans who is the current owner of that property. But I am going to put our general plan information in the chat. So speaking about missing middle please also consider joining our conversations related to the general plan, which include a lot more than just missing middle housing but looking at a very broad brush of the city and housing circulation and all things included in that. Thanks everyone. I'm assuming most everyone's back now. Everyone's back. Okay, great. So what I'm going to do is share, and some of you may have looked at these in your breakout rooms but a link to a concept board, if that's okay. And then this, you can click guest, if you click on this link, and it'll allow you to zoom in a bit more on some of the maps that we have just if you want to want to dive in a bit more so just put that in the chat for you if you're curious. I hope that everyone had some interesting discussions. I know that that our room did. And perhaps now we can wrap up with just some questions. And so feel free to type them in the chat or raise your hand and hopefully we can go through a few of them or general comments. I have a question. Are there any planners currently in the city of Santa Rosa they're able to push something like this forward. So we, we are continuing with this effort over the, the next year or so. So that our next steps really are to go to many of the city's planning board. So the design review board, the cultural heritage board, the planning commission to review a lot of the materials that we talked about this evening. And then to hear from them and then kind of the final step in the process would be bringing an ordinance forward to adopt these regulations to the planning commission and then finally the city council so we hope to be finishing up with that effort over the next eight or 10 months, I would say. Well, I would suggest what you really need to do is enroll a planner that's willing to stick their neck out for some of these laws that have already in place, because it's the planners that are actually going to be pushing it through the city. And without planner support, none of these projects are going to go anywhere. I, I appreciate that comment, and I will say that we have a fantastic team of planners on the call today. And this project is really just starting to get going and this is our first public workshop on this particular concept. And we've been really blessed because we've been able to hire off to coast which they are the experts in this field related to missing middle and we've seen their work take hold and other jurisdictions, and we are very excited about it. That being said, we are not the decision makers, and we do our best to put forward recommendations to the decision makers that based on community input, we feel works for the time and the place and the situation. And, but it is ultimately up to those decision makers so it would be great if you're able to attend those. Those meetings coming up we do have a couple scheduled in the next few months and voice your, your support or your comments on all things and continue to be aware of and and just in the process as it moves forward. Is there any other questions from the group. I don't have a question. I just want to make a general comment that I think this is fabulous. I'm really happy to see it moving forward. I, I, you know, the other Amy and I have spoken, and in the breakout room, you know I made a number of comments that I'm sure Amy made notes about and I'll bring them forward in the future but I really am very happy to see this I think the team of the city and others have done a really good job. So I just want to say thanks because I'm sure I'll be much more crabby as it moves forward about some things but generally speaking I'm really glad to see where you are now so thank you. Great. Thank you Sonya for your support and your comments. We appreciate crabbiness and non crabbiness we like all the comments because we want to make sure this really represents what the community wants and needs. Really quick Amy we have a couple comments in the chat. Crystal says, I would appreciate home ownership being a strong if not leading component of housing development within the missing middle housing framework. Both Caroline and Mary agree with that sentiment. Thank you so much Michelle and Cal plus one on that one as well. Yeah, and if I'm curious, because I brought this open our conversation, you know, to my knowledge the only prefab developer in the barrier that I'm intimately familiar with is factory OS and they're not quite at the scale where they can functionally do these smaller projects they can only really pencil out larger projects with their current funding streams. So it's noted here in your feasibility findings that there's, you know, they essentially suggested or indicated that it would be five to 10 years where we before we could see this essentially penciling out. Is that assuming that we're going to enter into some sort of like agreement with someone like factory LS are we going to try and lure someone to Sonoma County that can develop it here because obviously that will reduce the cost. Absolutely. Has there been any discussions around that. I'm going to see if anyone from the optico team wants to respond to that related to the, the economic piece, and the timeline on when we may be ready for this type of housing. As far as the, the, the construction industry. Yeah, so, you know, as we discussed the feasibility analysis looks at a certain point of time right so that is based on the current market. So now, I mean ideally what would need to change is that construction costs would need to normalize slightly land costs would need to go down slightly neither of which seem to be happening in the Bay Area, but at the same time if we have, because everyone agrees that it's abnormal and but at the same time it doesn't go down so we don't quite know. You know how that might play out. And another thing that a lot of people and Tony please feel free to chime in on this is that that we are all kind of watching closely is the role of kind of prefabrication in a lot of missing middle housing. There is a lot of modular construction in missing middle housing so not for each and every type, but that will also lead to efficiencies in just construction techniques, you know that that are employed. So that is definitely an industry that's really picking up, not so much so in the Bay Area yet but in in many other jurisdictions we're seeing that. And also, let's just say in kind of enabling a more developer friendly environment so to speak, in terms of missing middle. A lot of the steps that the city is taking right now. You know whether it's just kind of enshrining missing middle as part of the zoning code of just kind of streamlining the production of missing middle of kind of just making it a very like open and of this process. It will actually lead to developer certainty right like as we know no one wants to be the first person to take a risk, but as the underlying conditions improve, I think it'll also attract, you know, the developer community from also taking the plunge and we're seeing this happening in other parts of California, just not so much in the Bay Area just because you know it's a it's a very expensive place to build it. Tony if you want to kind of share anything else on that please. Tony is thinking that I really appreciated the economic study behind what you'll see on the website there, because a lot of times, we'll just hear it won't pencil the industry is not ready. But strategic economics really provided some really different concepts that we as government really have not employed. So looking at the potential for gap financing, even for single family owner, or, you know, someone who wants to do one type of missing middle project, not a developer, but also looking at the actual workforce and diving into helping the industry and providing more workforce to the construction industry. In the economic report they did say, as Natalia noted that we have, we at least we score pretty well as far as streamlining housing and providing fee reductions, but we are in all ways related to housing have been trying over the years to make as many hurdles as possible, but still creating housing that that fits the neighborhood compatibility that we want for our community. So it's, it's been hard to decipher what more can we do to be able to facilitate more housing. So I thought this economic report was really one of the only times where they provided some really interesting different options that are not usually within our toolbox that we are going to be looking into. So just follow up question for you, but because this goes back to my kind of one of the previous things I noted. I'm just curious what we can do as a collective community, not just Santa Rosa but as a county to essentially lure some sort of company So yeah, some sort of a company that's willing to develop on site here locally produce these prefab materials, because I think there's a lot of opportunities for a commercial like project of that scale to be placed in the airport area. And there's a variety of places that we could, we could easily have an operation like that functionally, you know, work out, because that would reduce you know the cost related to travel. It would reduce you know having to source materials potentially from, you know, for other distances. There's just a variety of benefits and I'm wondering if we could. There's like an exclusive development agreement or something we could do that would incentivize someone to want to come here to want to set up shop. Not to mention all the jobs like we talked about bringing these large companies here to help you know spruce up, you know our job market to help support you know working families to help you know our housing right well. I can't think of anyone better in terms of like trying to bring you know a large developer than someone that's actually going to develop. So, I don't know if that's something you guys really discuss at any length or not but it'd be interesting to see if we could learn someone here. I mean, I think those are great comments cow, and I think that that could be another topic for a workshop to see if there's connections or things that we can ask of the community to help us as we work with developers or try to increase a workforce locally. That does tie end up tail with our economic development goals and not just city but other jurisdictions as well. And that does remind me I just wanted to give a plug that all of our jurisdictions in Sonoma County all the cities in the county are all working on a housing element at the same time. So there's going to be lots of opportunity for you all to review those programs and to comment on those as they move through the process through the rest of this year. So stay tuned to, we will be releasing our housing element, which is somewhat separate from this missing middle project, but that will be coming out in the next month, the next few weeks actually. And so programs, we are looking for innovative programs and things that we can create to help facilitate housing in the next few years. Ramon. Yes, I just wanted before we all go I wanted to shameless plug our webinar on Thursday generational housing if you can join we have a webinar on environmental housing justice. If that's something interest you please join us going to be 532 655. So come and join us, and we have. Yeah, that's it. Thank you. I think our very own pictures will be on that panel. Yes. I know that we're at time but there are some questions and comments that I would like to read through really quick in the chat box. So the first question is, is there any way to involve local smaller contractors and subs in these projects. Please help us get the word out, please connect us if you can. And, as Mataali noted in the presentation, we are educating ourselves on these new concepts but are hoping to educate our development community as well to make sure that we're creating tools that they're, they're ready for that we understand the new tools that we're creating for base code and a lot of this is rather new to our, our staff here the city and then to the development community so we really want to connect as many people and bring people into this process as possible. I have a comment from Catherine. Keep in mind allowing lot division to allow for fee simple ownership, say in town houses but also inside by side multi units. Also co op options, don't prevent with unnecessary restrictions also don't limit where it can be located so that as opportunities present themselves these types can move forward. As far as parking is provided you don't have to be in a strictly walkable situation. Let opportunity happen please. And then we have 12345 agrees with that comment. And Rue says this type of change is going to require flexibility to launch successfully. So if you more agrees with both of those comments. We have allow in our and our one as well although essential to be form based codes, cute and neighborhood friendly. Here's a suggestion idea box out of Oregon has great prefab designs. And bam core in Windsor produces panels made from bamboo. And I'll save the chat just for the participants just know that I'm saving the chat so your comments and suggestions we will, we will have a record of these. And then Sonya would like to know if we can provide a copy of the presentation. Yes, so I'll go ahead and post a copy of the presentation on the project web page so that's as our city.org slash missing middle housing. So we'll work on doing that tomorrow. Okay, and then it looks like we have a few other great suggestions that we can look at including Empire chapter of a IA for a lunch and learn would get the word out. And then could be a mm could be part of plan development to begin broadening the types. And, like I said I'll be saving the chat so that we'll have all of your comments and suggestions to reference. Thank you so much these are great suggestions, and we would love to do a lunch and learn with a IA so I'll try to reach out to that group as well Catherine if you're involved. And so Michelle you said we are at time I can't remember when you're supposed to end. We were scheduled to end at seven I believe so we're a little past time but we got awesome comments so much fun. Well, let's go ahead and close out. Thank you all so very much for joining us tonight and thank you to the optical team. And thank you to our city staff who stayed late tonight to help us with the breakout rooms and just Michelle who is our zoom guru always. I really appreciate all your time. Please stay tuned to the website and if you registered for this. We will continue to keep you up to date on this process. And so the next steps will be a similar presentation to a couple of our boards and commissions design review board cultural heritage board. So that will be an opportunity to vocalize your, your comments concerns support and and then continue to follow us through the process. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. Bye.