Flagstaff charts zoning reforms targeting 8,000 housing units, carbon neutrality by 2032

All right, welcome and good morning everybody. I don't think Yeah. And I I Good morning everybody. Um, as we start with the welcome, I just want to remind everybody if you haven't done so, please scan the QR code on the screen and we just ask that you put in three words that you uh value about living in Flagstaff. Okay. All right. Thank you. All right. Well, welcome and good morning.

And for those of you that have not yet had the pleasure of meeting, um, I'm Michelle McNolte, the planning director and the interim community development director for the city of Flagstaff. And it's really great to see this amazing turnout today. And I want to take the opportunity to just first and foremost thank you all for being here and taking the time out of your very busy schedules to participate in this very important conversation.

The framework for today's event is based on over two and a half years of work by the land availability and suitability study and code analysis project or last cap project team and many of you who are in the room today. But really, our community has been talking about housing and carbon neutrality for much longer than that.

We are here because the community and council said they want this, which was made clear with the de declaration of the climate and housing emergencies and through the extensive public feedback and developing the carbon neutrality and 10-year housing plans. These plans have established bold visions for our community to reduce the current affordable housing need by half over the next 10 years and by the way that's by 2032 and to create a carbon neutral future.

The last cap project is focused on implementing the vision and the goals of these plans as well as the regional plan which reflects the values of our community. And it's not just the last cap project that's doing this, but all the code changes that city staff are doing um s such as the uh building code updates, engineering standard updates. And that's why you'll see so many staff in the room today is that everyone wants to hear this conversation to know what kind of changes need to be made.

And change is inherent and working through the change is messy. But we have to work through the messy details to achieve our goals. So today is a culmination of many conversations and the reason for today's format is so that we can have one larger conversation. We have a lot of perspectives in the room and there will be opposing viewpoints and we celebrate that. We want to hear from all of you and we ask that you all approach the day with curiosity.

Listen to other perspectives, ask questions to learn more and be open to considering a new possibility as we frame FlexF's future together. We do have a full agenda for the day and we have a keynote speaker Shane Phillips. He will be introduced shortly. You will hear from Shane about where we are as a community and why it's so important that we are having this conversation so we can make bold changes.

We also have facilitators from NAU Melissa Jurgens and um Fei Hung who will be here to help out. Um, and again, I just want to take a moment to thank you all for being here, giving us your time, sharing your knowledge and your perspective. And I want to make one last announcement. Um, as a thank you, the observatory is giving out passes to everybody who attended today. So, we'll be passing those out at the 3M break. Um, and you can either use those tonight or you can come back another day.

And if you we hope that you're here all day and that you're here at the 3pm break, but if you have to uh leave early, come see me and we'll get you your pass. And with that, Melissa and Feay are going to um start with some housekeeping before we get started. Good morning. Um, my name is Melissa Jurgensson and I'm a research associate with Economic Policy Institute. Um, and I am a Flagstaff community member for almost 29 years or almost 30 years.

Um, I moved to Flagstaff in 96 to pursue a master's in biology from NAU. Um, and I I never left. I'm originally from New Jersey and I studied in Rhode Island and lived in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania um before moving to Flagstaff, but Flagstaff is home. Um and Fe and I are excited for this opportunity. um regarding my um education background. Um so in addition to the biology degree, I also studied Spanish language and I'm studying now for a masters in biomimicry at ASU.

Um and so Feay and I have also done some recent studies that we think will be helpful for contributing uh or for facilitating um two with Cookanino County Workforce Development. um one with FUSD housing um project and then another one was with central um Arizona firefighters project on housing as well. So um we have a lot of data rattling around in our brains regarding um the conversation that is going to be h happening today.

So um but yes, we're here as researchers and facilitators and in a neutral um stance and and just here to help this journey um in gathering as much community feedback as possible on these two topics. A hi good morning. My name is Fei. Uh I'm um research associates with EPI Economic Policy Institute at NAU.

uh have a mixed background with geography, economics and planning and also in the past um about two decades I worked in environmental strategies uh consulted with uh real estate sectors, city governments, international organizations on urban issues and um and now my work is mainly uh in Cookanino County and Flagstaff. So I'm very happy today and also appreciative for the city to invite us to facilitate this event and also happy to see some of our clients are here.

Um uh about 10 years ago I came to the US.

I went to ASU to pursue my uh PhD in urban planning and when I was applying my supervisor suggest me please hide your three masters because North America people will over this as overc back then I didn't understand but um I moved to Flaxa five years ago and I finally understand what that means because I think the best learning is through working especially working with the community on those issues that's very those urgent issues facing those uh the communities.

So I see people when you what you value most it's climate and nature that's the first thing that draw me to come to flax but community and people are the biggest one and now I feel so connected and find my belonging here we we have done so much um in different fields we we've done the um as Marissa mentioned the firefighter recruitment and retention the wildfire the true cost of the flooding to um to the community the housing um even wine of tourism.

So everything is so closely related to the community. So we're really excited to to learn more through this and hear um what you all to to say about um the city's um project. So uh I'm going to introduce today um or Oh yeah, we have some housekeeping items. So, the bathroom is uh when you go out, turn left, turn left, and it's next to the elevators. Um, oh yeah, there's also water. Uh, so next I'll uh introduce Sarah Bar, the housing um director, the star of the day. Thank you. Good morning.

I'm so excited to see so many people in this room. I'm participating in a community conversation where we're we may have some difficult topics today, things where people don't agree. But what we wanted to start out with was a quick exercise that you saw change live as you typed your words in because these are the things we share as a community and these are the things we want people to keep central in their minds when we hit a bumpy part of today. Um talking about change is messy.

Um talking about change sometimes can be very uncomfortable. But when we get right back down to it, these are actually the things we as members of this community uh value. And I bet if we made the audience bigger, there are some very consistent things that stay on this page. And so I'm I'm keeping things short.

I know that we um were published for all day, but we figured if we pick up some time, no one's going to be like, "You promised I was here till 5." And so, um, it's my great pleasure to introduce, um, our keynote speaker today, who actually had I had the opportunity to spend some time with him yesterday, and it's always so validating one, to hear about housing in other areas, but refreshing to be reminded of ideas from other places, um, things that work, things that don't.

We took Shane on a tour of the community, all over the community yesterday. And so in his official introduction, uh Shane Phillips is a researcher, writer, and consultant committed to improving public understanding of housing markets and policy.

He manages the Randall Lewis Housing Initiative at the UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies and produces and hosts the UCLA Housing Voice podcast, a bi-weekly show that translates emerging emerging policy relevant research for a non-academic audience. And I'm going to pause right there and say I I have not partaken in the podcast. My podcast time is usually non workrelated. It's my de decompression time.

Um but speaking with folks who have this podcast makes things understandable um on big ideas down to where they are consumable by the average folks. Um, in his book, The Affordable City, he advocates for prioritizing supply, stability, and subsidies, a message he has shared on panels and keynote presentations across North America. He was actually in our community speaking at the economic forum um in the fall. I don't remember what month.

Shane earned his bachelor's degree in biochemistry from University of Washington and master's degrees in public administration and urban planning from USC. We're quite privileged to have him here with us today. um for his keynote and thank you for contributing. This will allow us to capture this image um so it can show up in the minutes of today etc. Thank you Sarah. Okay, appreciate that. I think I'm have this pretty far away. Well, it is very good to be back.

Um, I I guess I don't need to give much of my own introduction here. Uh, make sure this actually clicks the right way through. Okay, we're good. Hello everyone. My name is Shane Phillips as as uh Sarah shared. Um, we got my work at UCLA. We got uh my book, The Affordable City podcast. That's all covered in my copious free time. I uh sometimes get to do things like this with cities and local organizations around the country.

And as Sarah said, this is my second time in Flagstaff after speaking at NAU in November. And uh despite the limited amount of time I have spent here, Flagstaff has become very special to me actually because it was on my trip here last time that I proposed to my now fiance. Um so thank you or weren't here, who knows? Maybe never would have happened.

So, my expertise is in housing and land use policy and how different policies interact to either support or undermine our goals, whatever those might be. affordabil affordability and attainability are the goals that I tend to focus on most strongly in my day-to-day work.

But I think like many of you, I'm also very interested in the role of housing in our economic opportunities, how we get around, environmental sustainability, public health, and a whole lot else that housing really is at the center of. And part of what draws me to this work is is really how central housing really is to all of our lives and so many elements of our lives. It's it's hard to overstate.

Every single person is affected by how we plan our communities, the types of housing we allow or disallow, where and how much we allow. These decisions can raise or lower barriers to opportunity and they can create or foreclose opportunities entirely. To be to be clear, my my purpose here today is not to tell you which reforms to adopt. I'm not going to really talk a lot about specific policies. Um these are decisions that have to be made locally.

uh my goal is to help frame the discussion in some ways that hopefully make you feel a little more you know ideally motivated to act and also just more comfortable in and confident in whatever decisions you make. So in this talk there are really four main messages that I think you'll hear me kind of coming back to and I'll just give you them here at the start.

First, as I said, I am not here to tell you exactly what to do, but I do urge you to do something to act and to act enthusiastically and urgently. I'll be highlighting some of the risks of not tackling Flagstaff's housing challenges and climate challenges alongside them based on what I've seen at home and in other places across the country, as well as in the research literature. And I'll talk about some of the benefits if you get things right, too.

Second, change is inevitable and unavoidable, so you might as well embrace it. If you take no action in the coming months, you will not stop your community from changing. You will just surrender your ability to shape it. Our communities are constantly changing. As we all know, that's true. Even if the built environment is not changing at all, the question is not whether you want things to be different next year or next decade, because they will be.

The real question is whether you are happy with Flagstaff's trajectory, whether you can meet your housing and climate and other goals that you've committed to without some kind of change of course. My third message is to not let the perfect be the enemy of the good as much as possible. I can tell you from hard one experience that there are no silver bullets in this work. The worse the challenges, the more imperfect the solutions.

And with a typical home price approaching $700,000 in Flagstaff, your challenges are not small. Everyone wants the best for their community. And there is nothing wrong with that. I struggle, I think, as much as anyone with deciding when something is not ideal, but it is good enough. And asking more, demanding more might not be realistic. That's, you know, there's no right answer to that question. We all just have to struggle with it.

But when you're feeling uncomfortable or resistant today, as I'm sure we all will be at different times, I would encourage you to take a step back and remember what this is really all about. And again, that will be different for each of us. But I think, you know, some things that come to mind for me, it is about not having to pay half your income or more on rent. It is about making it possible for your neighbors to buy their first home or for yourself if you haven't been able to yet.

It's about having a place to raise your family and your kids to move out and start their own someday and having a livable climate where people's lives and homes are not constantly threatened by fire and other natural disasters. It's giving your neighbors real choices about how they want to live in Flagstaff. In policy conversations, it's very easy to lose sight of our goals and our values and get absorbed in the minutia. And to some extent, that is the purpose of today.

Uh, as someone who spends his life in the minutia of housing policy, I'm not here to criticize this. But it is not really why I think you're here ultimately. I think ultimately you're here for the people in your community and especially the people who will not enjoy the same opportunities that you did and whose lives will be worse off if nothing changes.

Fourth, you are here to address real challenges in your community, challenges that are shared by communities all over the country, but recognize that you are in a fortunate position. Housing affordability problems are not inevitable, but they are a signal and it's a signal that you've actually created something wonderful here in Flagstaff. It is natural that other people would want to be a part of it.

The fact that you've got this additional demand that you're struggling to keep up with means you have options, solutions that may not always be comfortable, but that we know actually do make a difference. And those are some of the things you're going to be discussing in these decision points later today.

If you can put yourself in the shoes of a resident of a rust belt city somewhere like Gary, Indiana or Buffalo, New York, where the the employment base has hollowed out and the population is less than half what it was at its historical peak. These are places that also have very real challenges. Problems of poverty and crime and disinvestment and more. And these are problems with no clear solution.

From a problem-solving perspective, what distinguishes places like Flagstaff from places like Buffalo is you have demand and demand can be harnessed. Harness harnessing it means making some changes in your community, but those changes are accompanied by some nice things. New shops, new hospitals, infrastructure, improved and expanded public services, new friends, employees, and neighbors. I'm not at all trying to make light of the challenges before you.

I just believe there's also joy and purpose in this work. In many other cities and regions across our country, people's time, people like you in these cities, their time is absorbed by staving off further decline, by keeping things from getting worse. Here in Flagstaff and where I live in LA, we are lucky enough to spend our time building something better and sharing our good fortune with others. And we shouldn't forget that.

Finally, uh this has kind of been stated a little bit, but I'm going to give my own version of the point of order. I just want to ask that you approach today's conversations uh and you know, to the extent possible any future conversations as well with an open mind and an open heart. Housing is deeply personal and sometimes people's words get ahead of their thoughts and or they don't appreciate how their statements are heard by others.

What when that happens and you're not sure what someone meant, assume the best intentions rather than the worst. In a city of nearly 80,000 people, you were the hundred who showed up here at 8 a.m. on a Friday the 13th, no less. Everyone is here because they care and I think we all deserve to be treated with decency and dignity on that grounds if nothing else.

So I want to start as though I haven't already started by sharing one of the things that motivates me personally uh to care about housing and that thing at least for this presentation because it's a long list is economic mobility. So something that has long set America apart America apart from many other older nations and from much of the rest of world history is that your fate is not tied to where you're born.

I I right at the top here have to add the caveat that this has not been true for black and indigenous people in particular throughout much of our history, but it is a principle that we have celebrated throughout our history and it's one that we have lived up to better at least over time, though never perfectly.

These very important exceptions aside, folks have always been welcome to stay where they're at, where they were born, where they grew up, but they are not obligated to that fate, as they have been in many places in history. And moving away to find new opportunities has been the ticket to a better life for literally tens of millions of Americans across many generations.

This was reflected in the fact that from the hundred years between 1880 and 1980, incomes in the poorer US states and the richer US states were converging decade after decade. Poorer states gained ground uh to the benefit of their residents and the nation as a whole. A lot of that convergence was driven by migration between the states with people from cities and states with limited opportunities moving to cities and states with better opportunities, higher more jobs, higher wages.

Whether you were a doctor or a teacher or a retail worker, more often than not, moving to a higher wage state left you financially better off in the long run. But around 1980 that convergence came to a halt and by the year 2000 it started running in reverse with the wealthiest states growing their wages more quickly than the poorer states and the gap started widening again.

A major reason behind this change is that people were no longer migrating from poor states to rich ones in the same numbers to find those better opportunities. And the reason behind that was housing. In their study on this change, Peter Ganong and Daniel Shog illustrate who and we actually had Peter Ganong to talk about this uh on one of our podcast episodes, but they they illustrate what happened across the country with uh lawyers and janitors as an example.

So throughout most of the 20th century, both lawyers and janitors earned significantly higher wages in the New York tri-state area than in the deep south. And you could, you know, pick two groups of of cities or states um anywhere in the country that kind of reflect these things. But New York and the Deep South were the ones they use. Housing costs were also higher in New York along with wages just as they are today.

But the wage boost was larger than the housing cost increase for people in both professions. So many people from both of those professions migrated to New York and the tri-state area. And generally speaking, they did better for themselves and their families as a result. Today, lawyers and janitors still earn more in New York than in deep south states like Alabama and Georgia. What has changed is housing costs, which have increased much more sharply in New York.

If you're a lawyer, the wage premium still means it is still large enough for you to for it to make financial sense for you to move to New York in many cases. But if you're But if you're a janitor, that is just no longer true. Compared to the deep south, the tri-state area offers a greater diversity of job opportunities with higher pay and better prospects for kids who grow up there. That's exactly what we want for people who are lower on the socio socioeconomic ladder.

It is the path for for again millions and millions of people to upward mobility. But today, for janitors who move to New York to ply their trade, despite the higher wages, after you pay for housing, you have less money left over for food, clothing, healthcare, education, entertainment, and everything else than you would in the deep south. And so, not many make the move anymore. If you live there now and work in a lower wage job or sector, then your household budget will improve if you leave.

And so, lots of people do.

uh the researchers Ganong and Shog they call this phenomenon skill sorting and it's it's not just limited to lawyers and janitors to be clear it's across the board people in high wage sectors are segregating themselves into different higher income higher opportunity metro areas from people in lowwage sectors people with the most education and human and social capital are m migrating to the places with the greatest opportunity unities for upward mobility and the people with the least the most need for upward mobility are being pushed out of them among the states the rich are getting richer as the poor get poorer and the same is happening at the metro area level as well.

The researchers found that in states with relatively less restrictive housing, and this is where housing really comes in um or the mechanism comes in in these states with relatively less restrictive housing and land use policies, the housing market work basically as it should, as it's intended to, which is as incomes rise and job numbers grow, these places build more housing to accommodate the increased demand.

In states with more restrictive policies, including virtually all of the highest income states in the nation, that relationship between income growth and housing supply just disappears. People wanted to move to many of these states over the past several decades to improve their lot in life, but we did not make room for them. California has arguably been the worst offender on this, and we're certainly the biggest. And that in a nutshell is how we ended up in the situation.

People used to move to places with higher wages and better opportunities, but most of those places started making it harder and harder and harder to build more homes. And so that avenue has been closed off to the people who need it the most. Squeezing the housing supply did not actually stop people from wanting to live in those places. So prices rose instead as the people who wanted to live in these areas ended up fighting over just too few available homes.

Low-wage workers could not any longer afford to move to these places and many of those already there could not afford to stay. So this happened in states like California and Massachusetts and New York and in big cities like LA and San Francisco and Boston, but also in smaller enclaves like Berkeley and Boulder and Aspen and Whitefish and Sedona and yes, Flagstaff as well.

So these charts show the number of housing units permitted per capita in some major metro areas over several decades just to give you an idea of the gaps that we're talking about. On the left we have a sample of very restrictive metro areas, Los Angeles, New York, and Boston. On the right are more permissive metro areas like Las Vegas, Phoenix, and Houston.

This is a a trend that has been going on for literally 40 plus years and it we didn't really start to feel the effects immediately but we are feeling them now. Low-wage people are being forced out of the places on the left and into the places on the right. And nothing against the places on the right but their prospects are worse for it. This isn't just something that happened.

It is a direct consequence given by these relatively affluent, relatively restrictive metro areas and states all over the country. What this story illustrates for me is that we don't get to choose whether our communities change, but we can choose how they change within a finite set of options. For decades, many communities have approached urban planning with the attitude that if you don't plan for growth, then more people won't show up and change could be delayed or it could be denied.

What they found instead is that demand for housing, which is really just people's desire to live in a place with appealing qualities, does not go away just because there are too few homes. The demand is still there, but without the relief valve of more homes, it has to find another outlet. And that outlet is essentially always price. It means that when people migrate for opportunity, whether whatever that means to them, they cannot do so without someone else leaving.

And if those someone else's don't want to leave, the decision is ultimately down to who can pay more. So it's in this way that a community that believes it is guarding itself against change ends up changing in much more fundamental ways. They preserve the built environment, what we often refer to as neighborhood character, but they lose many of the characters that made it a neighborhood in the first place.

My adopted my adopted home of Los Angeles, where I've lived for 12 years, is really a cautionary tale here. I know how people who live outside California feel about it. They are rarely shy about telling me. And at least when it comes to housing, I I really don't blame them. I don't hold it against people. If if I said the things if I said what uh people say to me about California about their states, I would be beaten. But we're used to it.

Uh I think you know maybe you've all been too polite to say it in the last few days uh with all the people I've met, but I'm sure there are some people in this room who are wondering why you have someone from Los Angeles of all places to talk about housing and climate. We are literally the homelessness and car capital of the world, at least by reputation. But if it is not already obvious, I'm not here to tell you how great LA is at these things or to suggest you follow in our footsteps.

Everywhere I go, I have the same slide. My message is quite the opposite. It is to not be like Los Angeles. Learn from our mistakes and don't follow us down the same path. It's important though that you understand what that path has actually been because most people I think have the wrong idea. People tend to think that we became so unaffordable and congested by just building tons of housing, especially denser housing and and really not knowing when to stop. And that's that's not quite right.

What we actually did is we built a lot of housing from around 1930 to 1990. And the vast majority of it was single family homes that just spread ever further outward to where we now have roughly 80 miles of unbroken development from Santa Monica to the San Bernardino forest. But LA was still relatively affordable up until the 80s or 90s.

The problems really started once we ran out of room to sprawl, both in terms of just land that was developable still and the distances people were willing to commute. How far away were they willing to live? But a point I want to emphasize about our development pattern up to this point around 1990 is that it was a compromise and it was a bad one. You had places that had already been developed decades earlier right in the middle of urban LA roughly in this red area here.

They didn't want to redevelop. Not unique in that respect uh to accommodate this growing demand. But the newly incorporating, you know, towns and cities at the at the fringe were were happy to do so. As long as this approach could keep producing housing, it at least kept kept homes decently affordable. Uh, but it did come at enormous environmental cost. And that cost was imposed as much on the people in central LA, far from the development, as it was on the edge.

The population in urban LA stayed relatively stable throughout this period, but a whole lot of those new people to the east were still commuting toward the beach where many of the jobs are and and especially many of the best jobs are. In a normal city, a better planned one anyway, we'd have shifted some of that growth into various nodes within urban LA, and used that density to justify new subways and better bus service and other more efficient ways of getting around.

In that world, growth would have given us new amenities and new transportation options that didn't require being stuck in traffic and spending many thousands of dollars on driving and gas and insurance every year. But that's not what we did. We spread everything out so that with a few exceptions, bus stops and train stations just don't serve many people. They're just not cost-effective investments.

At the metro area level, and this will probably surprise some folks in the room, LA is actually denser than New York. It's the densest metro area in the country. But transit works so much better in New York. Not because not only because they've invested a lot more in it, but because much more of its population is located in the region's core. particularly in Manhattan and Brooklyn. So, it's easy. They can really make the most of the investments that they do make into transit.

So, that's kind of the first point about the growth pattern up to the 1980s or 90s. It was bad and it was not just bad for some people, but good for others. It was really bad for just about everyone at the end of the day. The second point is about what came after we ran out of room to sprawl outward. So, as fate would have it, we uh didn't stop people didn't stop wanting to live in Los Angeles and move to Los Angeles once that land was all developed.

And so, we faced a decision about whether to change our policies in the 80s and 90s and start building up at higher densities some of the previously developed parts of the region and especially in that more urbanized area. And our answer was no thanks.

I I'm not going to take the time to go into it here, but in the city of LA itself, we actually went in the opposite direction uh in 1986 in particular where we cut in half the maximum density of residential and commercial properties uh in the multif family zones. And so the rest is mostly history and today we are reaping what we sowed. The median home price hovers just under a million dollars and this is in a city of 1.5 million homes.

That's more than 700,000 homes that cost a million dollars or more. This is more than double what the typical middle-ass family in the city can afford. We have the highest rate of overcrowded housing in the nation and quite famously torturous commutes and very few alternatives but to be stuck in those commutes. Businesses struggle to pay their employees a livable wage.

And a huge share of our budget goes towards solving housing instability and homelessness problems that we mostly created for ourselves. More than a billion dollars each year of our budget goes toward homelessness and affordable housing um out of 13 billion. It's a big city, 4 million people. But worst, we have utterly failed the nearly 50,000 people who have no place to call home every night in Los Angeles. one in every 85 residents, about four of whom die on our streets every day on average.

This was all done in the name of protecting our unique neighborhood character, the things that made LA special and that residents most loved and appreciated about living there. The the irony is that we could not have destroyed those things more effectively if we'd tried to. These shameful circumstances in our city, they are our community character at least as much as the palm trees and the bungalows.

I think going to change a tone here very abruptly, but uh I think we've all seen a toddler hugging a little pet, dog, or cat. You know what I'm talking about.

the the juxtaposition of that look of like pure just unadulterated innocent love ex you know by the child and the look of desperate fear on the face of the uh of the animal it's it's adorable uh after recording it for posterity like whoever took these did uh we tell our kids not to do it again and and the reason if I can make a bit of a strange metaphor is that loving something does not holding it so tightly that it can't breathe. We don't want our communities to look like this.

We allow the things that we love to exist and evolve separately from us because they're not here solely for our personal gratification and satisfaction. They're not museum pieces to satisfy our our sense of nostalgia. We learned that lesson early on when it comes to pets and other people, or at least we should, and most of us do. But I do think it's it's less widely appreciated when it comes to our cities and neighborhoods. But I think it's just as true.

Going to put up this placeholder so you don't have to keep looking at the giant pixelated cat. In LA, we made the mistake of believing that we could build this great place and freeze it in time and that no one else would ever want to be a part of that wonderful thing that we had built. We believed that a built environment was again more essential to the character of our neighborhoods than the neighbors themselves. And to put it very bluntly, we were wrong and we're living with the consequences.

What I always emphasize though is that from a housing policy perspective, LA is not that different from other communities across the country. If you look at our zoning code and you look at your zoning code, you will see a shocking number of similarities. We are very different. Don't mean to imply otherwise. It's clearly true. But what really distinguishes LA from most other places on this subject is that demand for housing hit us earlier and it hit us harder.

But our response is and was roughly the same as most other places. Many places are coming up on our tail for that reason whether they're 5 years behind us or 20. What's interesting about Flagstaff and different from what LA did and and Laudible is that you voluntarily closed off your growth boundary. I guess the federal government kind of did too, but you did not wait to exhaust all of the land.

You made the I think right choice from an environmental perspective to say enough is enough or to set some boundaries on when enough will be enough. But demand to live in Flagstaff is not going away. And so you do need an answer for where those people will live instead if you don't want your affordability crisis to grow worse and to grow worse faster. So I don't wish LA's housing problems on anyone.

And I can tell you from experience again that solving them will not be any easier if two or three years later nothing has really changed except that rents have gone up another 20 or 30%. So, normally my presentations are more centered on my book, The Affordable City. And the case I make in it for prioritizing supply, stability, and subsidy. But today, my focus, as you may be able to tell, is really on supply. And I have some reasons for that.

One is that supply is really the issue at the heart of the city's land availability study and its code analysis. not just you know the number of homes to be clear but also the types and options uh available to people in terms of price and location and size and so forth. Another reason is that of those three S's supply, stability and subsidy, supply is the thing that local governments have by far the most control over and can do the most in.

stabilizing policies are in many cases preempted by state law in Arizona for sure, but in many other states as well and that does limit how much the city on its own can do there. And then housing subsidies really they cost into the hundreds of thousands of dollars per unit and so it's mostly states and the federal government that can have the biggest impact there which is not to say that the city can't do anything.

The last reason is that of of the three S's, supply has the strongest nexus, I think, to climate and in many ways the most win-win benefits or or what you may call positive externalities. Now, I'm going to talk about two more sets of research studies that I think offer really important insights into this relationship between supply and affordability, and then I want to talk about some of the these climate and other benefits.

So first on the first set I just want to state clearly here that you know as a housing researcher there I qualify a lot of my statements there's a lot of you know uncertainty in research but there's almost nothing that I can say with more confidence that then that if you show me two cities with similar demand the one that builds more housing will be more affordable at the end of the day.

There's a a very common belief that building more homes attracts rich people and those rich people moving in is what drives up the price of housing. So in so in that way really building the housing is why prices go up. I absolutely understand why people jump to that conclusion. But the fact that it is understandable does not mean it's entirely correct. And there is a lot of and a growing amount of evidence that it is not.

The reality is that all over the country, most of the people who move into new housing are from the same metro area where that housing was built. Usually somewhere between 60 and 80%. And it's generally indistinguishable from the share who end up in older housing.

I think it's easy to imagine some reasons why that number might be lower in a smaller metro area like yours, but I don't think it's reasonable to expect that it would be so much lower that local residents don't make up a really meaningful share of these moves into newer homes. The call is usually coming from inside the house with these problems.

If new housing really was a magnet for people from all over the country, that would mean there are people out there searching on Zillow and Apartments.com looking for buildings with no real geographic preference whatsoever. Like they don't care if it's St. Louis or Seattle or Tampa or Flagstaff as long as it was built in the last three years. That's I don't think that's normal behavior. I don't think it's how most people find their homes, wealthy or otherwise.

What most of us actually do, what I did, uh, and what I think all of us should have the freedom to do is we get a job or a college acceptance offer or our family grows or shrinks or wants to be closer together or further apart or we decide we just want to live in a new city and then we look for housing in that place. Most of us do not limit our search to newly built housing and many don't even prefer it. Even if we do, we will usually settle for older housing if new homes aren't available.

The thing about new housing is it tends to be relatively expensive. So, if we're in the market for that, we can certainly afford the older stuff, too. And that's really why just refusing to build new homes ultimately exacerbates the problem. It doesn't change the fact that some subset of people wants to live in your city. the demand is there and people will move as they please. So that's that's one key point here.

The other one is that when we build housing, it has the effect of pulling people out of older, more affordable units into newer and better stock. This leads to vacancies in those older units, which creates slack in the market, and it helps stabilize the rents and home prices all throughout that market. When we don't build, that upward pull turns into a downward push. People with more resources crowd out those with fewer.

We see upper inome households push middle inome households into lower inome neighborhoods and the people already in those neighborhoods are pushed into overcrowded conditions or to other cities and towns or states or onto the street in the worst circumstances. We see this empirically, this chain in a new line of research that is literally just emerging in the last few years and wasn't possible with the existing data until then is something called migration chains or moving chains.

And this research follows the moves of tens of thousands of people over dozens of a dozen metro areas uh in the case of the US research. And again, because most of these most moves happen within a metro area, that means that when someone moves into new housing, they are leaving behind a vacant home somewhere not too far away.

And because most moves throughout people's lives are upward into something bigger or better, the homes they leave behind are almost always more affordable than the ones they're moving into. The same applies to whoever moves into that newly vacated unit. They're usually leaving behind something more affordable, too. So, to put some just illustrative numbers to this, imagine a new market rate home apartment opens up and rents for $2,000 a month. In many markets, that is quite expensive.

But household A recently got a promotion and can afford it, and so they move in and leave behind an apartment that no longer met their needs, which they were renting for $1,600 a month. A landlord touches up that unit, puts it back on the market. Household B moves in. Their new rent is 1,600, maybe 1,700, and they leave behind a $1,300 unit. This is the second link in the moving chain.

Jump ahead to the fifth move, and data shows that about half of the people moving as a part of this chain, as a result of this chain, as a result of that project that was b built in the first place, they earn below the city's median income. Almost a third have incomes in the bottom quintile, the bottom 20% of households. This is the chart on the right.

So when all is said and done, 100 new relatively expensive market rate units create vacancies in somewhere between 30 to 50 units of this much lower cost housing. Housing that's priced at levels you couldn't build without significant subsidies, tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars per unit.

This obviously directly benefits the people moving into those homes, but by limiting the power of landlords, their leverage on their side to raise rents, it also benefits the much larger pool of tenants who aren't moving, who stay put, and it does so at no cost to the public. I want to be clear, none of this is to say that market rate homes are a substitute for subsidized affordable housing. What it does show though is that the two are complimentary.

Market rate homes stabilize rents and prices and ensure a continuously improving housing stock. And they do so without subsidy, without expense. And by stabilizing prices, they also help make sure that the subsidies we do spend, the government funds we do spend go further, whether your city or state spends a lot or spends a little.

So the story I told about housing and economic mobility has analoges in transportation and education and public health and climate and and like I said everything else. It deeply influences every aspect of our lives and I just want to skim over I I I know I'm running out of time here um but I want to you know at least touch on some of these connections to uh other topics and some of the research literature that actually backs up these relationships.

So, you know, this is not nearly the whole story, but with climate, this is uh this uh pie chart on the right is from the carbon neutrality plan for Flagstaff. About 30% of emissions in the city are from uh transportation. 50% is from building energy. Um 20% of that is is residential buildings specifically.

And what we find in the research is that infill housing, building housing more compact, more centrally, closer to transit, etc., closer to just other people and the places people go every day, lowers emissions by reducing driving frequency and the distances people drive when they do. and increasing walking and transit use and other uh less uh emitting modes and smaller housing types which infill usually has often with shared walls as well but not always.

Um this further lowers emissions particularly from fewer construction materials and much lower costs for uh heating and cooling on transportation. Reduced driving is obviously good for the climate, but is also good for people's pocketbooks with people living in central neighborhoods spending significantly less of their income on transportation. And that's a little too dark to see.

Uh this law looks like the same color, but it is actually I think the uh the central part of Flagstaff here is around I think 12 to 15% of uh household income. And you get out into the further out areas and you're talking well over 20%. And this is a a finding this is consistent all over the country. People who live further out have to drive more and that costs them more. Of course it does.

Um with less driving projects that are built um in these urban more infill locations can often provide fewer parking spaces and still fully meet the needs of the residents. And that actually has shown has been shown to not just attract people with fewer cars, but fewer parking spaces actually causes people to own fewer cars and to drive less frequency.

It is a is a causal effect, which is a difficult thing to actually establish in research, but uh actually a colleague at UCLA uh determined that just a few years ago. That's another podcast episode. And since parking can be quite expensive to build, when we're talking above ground, it can be 20 $30,000 per space, if not more. If we're talking below ground, it's often $50,000 per space or more. Uh, as I understand it in Flagstaff, underground is basically impossible here.

So, if it were to happen, it would probably be even more than that. Um, but when you're able to build fewer parking spaces, that also means you can rent the place or sell the place for less. Sorry, these were not intended to be uh skipped ahead like that. For just a little more on budgets, I think there's a few ways to look at how a climate forward housing policy can make our budgets more resilient. The big one is costs to the public sector.

uh I've already talked about you know personal costs to some extent but you know these costs to the public sector are ultimately borne by the taxpayer in the form of infrastructure and services and uh what what you know data shows in different places is that even with pretty modestly higher overall densities and with infill projects you can very significantly reduce the amount of infrastructure required per person in terms of road miles in terms of the length of water and sewer pipes per person and so on, but also in the ability to have shorter response times for police and fire without having without having to build new stations.

Looking at health, in part because it enables people to drive less and walk more and driving is is one of the least healthy things we can do for ourselves if we're doing it a lot of hours a day uh or a week. Uh these more compact development patterns are associated with a variety of better health outcomes um as well as reduced injuries and deaths for motor vehicles. I didn't put a slide on here, but you know, I'm from Los Angeles. Lots of crazy stuff going on in my city this this year.

Um including right now, but in January, we had the two most destructive wildfires we'd ever experienced in our history. We lost about 16,000 structures, more importantly 30 lives. And that was I don't have anything written down here. I I I I don't know what to say other than we knew it was coming. We built in such a way where it was ultimately inevitable.

And even despite that, the the pressure to keep spreading outward rather than building inward where we know it is safer and it has all these other benefit other benefits, it remains a real challenge. And so, you know, I know these things are going to be debated all throughout today and and for far for long beyond that. Um, but I just want to I guess I just bring this up to make the point that this is not easy and I don't want to imply that it is.

But at the same time, it is in many ways life or death for people and the decisions you make really, really do matter. So, I'm coming up to a close here and I've been talking a lot about changing the kinds of housing that you allow and I haven't really given you much of an idea of what I'm talking about specifically. So, you know, more housing, more diverse, more centrally located, but what what could that look like? What should that look like?

So, I just want to go through some examples very quickly. My intent here is not to say that these are the types of housing you should allow, though I picked them because I think they mostly look nice or unique, and so I'm not discouraging it. Uh, but my goal is really just to show some of what's possible to highlight a wide range of options and uh both in in scale and style. And maybe you will like some, maybe you will hate some. It is fine either way.

The fact is a lot of old housing is quite ugly too and beauty is in the eye of the be the beholder. Some of the most beloved uh and established building types like bungalows were actually very despised when they were being constructed by the millions in the first half of the 20th century. So this is just how it goes sometimes. So let's just take a look. First, we just got a couple town homes next to a corner store with an apartment on top facing right up to the sidewalk.

And then on the right, we've got a two-story duplexes built over partially underground garages. This one here is an I think a nice uh looking three-story sixplex. And on the right is a part of a cottage cluster connected together by a shared garden. Next up, we've got a duplex that you'd probably never guess held two units if not for that extra door and a boxy boy that I'm into it. This slide is a couple backyard cottages um or accessory dwelling units. Many different names.

Modern style there on the left and a more traditional on the right. Here are a couple on the bigger side of Missing Middle, both in Seattle. And I was speaking in Santa Barbara and Washington DC the last uh few weeks and so I took some photos that capture some of their unique qualities uh of the housing there. So these two are in Santa Barbara and these are in DC as you can probably tell and so are these. So I really could go on with these forever.

there's uh some great resources out there, but I just hope that gives you some window into what's possible and maybe you even saw something that you liked. I think we can sometimes lose sight of what's possible um just based on what we see in our own lives every day. And the selection, I want to be clear, does not even scratch the surface of all the possibilities out there. I could I think I could easily make this five times longer without repeating any styles.

Um the the last thing I'll say about style and aesthetics is just to encourage folks to have an open mind. Um I traveled to Japan for the first time last year and again this year because it was that amazing. And my takeaway both times was that it is one of the most architecturally disorganized and architecturally beautiful places in the world. I think homogeneity is is overrated.

Tok Tokyo's design standards are very loose and the result is some of the most stunningly unique and beautiful buildings you could ever hope to see right next to some of the most stupendously ugly ones. I think the reality is that you probably could not get the former if you didn't allow the latter to happen sometimes. And the city in my eyes at least is is unquestionably better off for having both. If you don't like what's being built in your community right now, you're not alone.

I feel pretty similarly about the designs I see in Los Angeles. It's not enough that I would not want the homes to be built and for them to become homes for people, but I I do wish things were better. And I think if you want it to change, it's helpful to find some examples of what you would like to see instead and to ask your local developers through the city or otherwise what prevents them from building it.

I suspect that in many cases it is not necessarily the cost of designing these buildings differently, but it's any number of rules and standards that just make it flatly impossible. And if there are rules standing in the way of delivering homes that you would be excited to see in your community, then those may be rules worth changing. So among these photos, I showed everything from ADUs and duplexes to three and four-story apartment and condo buildings.

And if none of these options appeal to you, that is fine. Increasing housing diversity is about making sure everyone can find the home and location that works best for them, balancing their preferences with what they can actually afford. When I was 20 years old, a 350T micro unit in the middle of downtown might have been the most appealing choice to me given the alternative of living with roommates or finding an apartment in the suburbs.

Banning that option does not suddenly make it possible for me as that 20-year-old to afford a 600 foot unit in downtown. It just means that I'm going to have to go with my second best option. My life is worse off for that decision. Now that I'm twice that age, now that I'm 40, that micro unit is not right for me. I don't I don't want to live there. Uh I have more money. I go out less often. I live with another person. it doesn't make sense for me.

But the fact that I would not live there today does not mean it shouldn't exist. It's not for me and and that is okay. So, we've covered a lot here and I hope it's given folks some things to chew on to bring into your conversations as as we go through the day uh and you get to these decision points.

I think we may I know I've gone a long time, so we may have some time for questions in a second, but uh I'll also be around to answer questions one-on-one, small groups, out in the hall, whatever, for anyone's interested in kind of digging in further. I'll just end by restating something I said at the start, which is to encourage you for sure to tackle the challenges you uh are facing with a clear sense of what's at stake.

Don't forget who and what is at stake, but also to approach this with optimism and and positivity. The best places I visit are the ones where residents just exude a feeling that the best is yet to come. And that is something that much of California seems to have lost and it is really worth holding on to. Every place has its warts, but if you're struggling with affordability, it really does mean you've built a community that others want to share in and contribute to.

So, so embrace that and encourage your friends and your neighbors to do the same. I I don't think and I I suspect you don't either believe that our cities, they're not so fragile that they will be ruined by more people. People are what they are. They are their strength.

So if you love where you live today, I think the best way to show your appreciation is by ensuring its opportunities are not closed off to future generations as has unfortunately been occurring in in far too many places over the past 40 or 50 years. Let it change within limits and welcome more people just like it welcomed you. But thank you again for the invitation and and looking forward to chatting with you more throughout the day. Thanks. Oh, are we going to hand over? Come on up.

It helps with uh the recording, right? Yes. Yeah. Yeah, that's fine. I'll capitulate. I was curious on the slide that said new buildings pull people up. It showed like a a declination of price points as time went on, but we don't see that here in Flagstaff. What we see is the exact opposite. Could you speak to that a little bit? Yeah. So, I think there's there's two things. It's not to say that an individual unit will not get more expensive over time.

If nothing else, you know, even if it was keeping up with inflation, it would get more expensive. And of course, rents have mostly increased quite a bit faster than inflation. What it's saying is these units that are lower on the totem pole are actually opening up. And so, so that's sort of the the distinction that's being made here.

Um, the same researcher who did that moving chain research also showed that when new buildings open up, the buildings within about I think 500 feet or 200 meters or something like that on average lower by about 7% relative to other units that are further away from those new projects. Um, but I think one thing that you're probably seeing or or feeling here in Flagstaff is over the long run, this is, you know, I think what we're kind of hinting at is called filtering.

And it's just this idea that, you know, a unit built today is going to be pretty expensive because new things are expensive. Um, but over time as you build other new things, that thing that was new today is now kind of old and shabby. It's nothing special. And so it's going to be, you know, where it might have been renting to someone or sold to someone who's at the 80th 85th percentile for income when it's new might 30 40 years later be renting to someone who's at the, you know, median income.

Um, so that's kind of the long-term effect that happens. And this moving chain is the short-term mechanism. The issue is if you're a place that is not building much at all or just not building enough, that filtering doesn't actually function. It's not something that just happens naturally. You do actually have to keep having these newer units because otherwise the older ones are not actually, you know, meaningfully lower quality and therefore worthy of lower rents. Yeah.

As you might know, here in Flagstaff, and this might be true of LA, I'd like you to speak to this, or other cities you've looked at, there's the second home element, and most of those second homes are large and take up a lot of land use. And so, uh, that's of concern to me here in terms of build everything. Um, so I'd like you to speak to that.

and also the propensity and I imagine this is true in the LA area too of uh auh vacation rentals and homes becoming Airbnbs and I didn't see that in any of your statistics and it's certainly a statistic I'd like to see us consider when we're looking at these what what we're talking about. Yeah. Yeah. It is a a big issue and it varies a lot by sorry I do not need to be that close.

It varies a lot by community and it's probably a bigger issue in Los Angeles than the average place, but it's not a big issue really. Um, I think it is like unquestionably more of an issue in Flagstaff and in places like Flagstaff. And so, so I think there's there's kind of a couple points here. one, just as a baseline, it is important to acknowledge that demand is not infinite.

And so, not all of these homes are being bought by second home owners, vacation home owners, short-term rental uh people, and so there's still an effect, a positive effect from building these homes. But I don't think it should be dismissed. It is a real challenge though in Flagstaff because you're in Arizona. And again, Arizona is not unique in this regard, but many states, Arizona included, have restrictions on what you can do as a city to restrict or prohibit short-term rentals.

Um, very few places, nowhere I can actually think of has any kind of uh prohibition or even real penalty for like vacation homes.

Personally, I mean, in my book, I write that I think pretty much any city, even a city that doesn't really have short-term rental problems um yet, should have some kind of protections in place from the start so you don't develop a problem and then have a whole bunch of short-term rental owners who are now constituents lobbying you to not take away this thing that they've invested a bunch of money in and if you change the rules, they lose their investment.

like I can feel for those people, but long-term housing is just flatly more important. Um, it is more important to house people who live in the community year round than people who live part-time or are just visiting. Not to say that those don't matter, but there, you know, you have to prioritize. So, it's it's not something where I think in the near term there's a lot to be done. So, more housing still does help.

I think in the long run there is you know political action that can take place etc. And so you know pushing for changes to state law that actually allow you to kind of at least put some restrictions on short-term rentals I think might be entirely appropriate uh just not something that can happen immediately.

And then the last thing I'll say is I think when we get into this infill kind of housing as opposed to the larger, you know, like out in the the boonies kind of homes, I think these infill homes closer to the core are probably less likely to be the kind of homes people want to buy as a vacation home or probably even a short-term rental. And so that might be another reason kind of move in that direction.

behind the building more affordable homes and more homes, we have to look at how does the infrastructure, especially with water, how can that support the continued building. We here in Flagstaff have a finite uh what shall I call it? uh aquafer and even though it's very large, you know, we're beginning to see it go down based on data from the USGS.

So, how in your process can we begin to evaluate the carrying capacity of new homes within the carrying capacity of our aquifers and the natural world? I'm not going to pretend to be an expert on Flagstaff water, you know, sources or use or or Arizona's water policies overall. I can speak to more general facts about h water use. Um, one of which is that multif family housing uses dramatically less water because in many places more than half of water use is is for people's lawns.

And if you now have rather than one household with a large lawn and a single family home, you have four households and a much smaller lawn, um the overall water use may still increase, although that's not guaranteed, but it's not going to increase four-fold. It's probably not even going to increase twofold. Um just to to pull an example here, and I don't don't want to say this is all from densification, uh because it's not.

I think a lot of this comes down to different kinds of water efficiency measures as well. But uh Los Angeles added a million people from I think 1960 to 1990 some somewhere around there 70 to 90. And during that time our total water consumption in the city fell pretty significantly. And I'm not talking per capita consumption. Our total water consumption fell as we added a million people.

And so again, I'm not going to tell you exactly how that is achievable, but evidence seems to suggest that there are ways to to solve these problems. And again, this is a situation where moving toward more efficient housing typologies can actually support that goal if it's done done well. Oh, yeah. I thank you for sharing your research. Uh could you address the impact of jobs? Because you can build all you want, but if people can't support themselves, we end up in Flagstaff with a churning.

We've always had this. It's always been a problem. It wouldn't be nice if that would stop. Um but if we just build, but we don't have jobs that will allow people to support themselves. People come, they stay, they leave. Someone else moves in, they come, they stay for a little while, and they leave. So for me, I think that um all this discussion will be a lot more valuable if we talk about income and jobs at the same time. Thanks. Yeah, it's a great comment.

And um again, I'll kind of give some general comments and I think once we get into the later conversations, having someone from the city address kind of more specific plans would be helpful. Um, but I I think my what I will say about this is it's sort of a chicken or the egg problem where yes, you need jobs to support housing, but if you allow housing to continue becoming less and less affordable, employers don't want to operate here. Um, and even ones that are here want end up leaving.

This is, you know, this is something we've actually seen with some major employers in Los Angeles. Um Toyota several years ago was one where they just, you know, they don't want to pay their middle managers $150,000 um to have the same lifestyle that they could have in Texas on 80. And so people leave.

Um, so yeah, I I don't have the answer to you to this because this is a very, you know, city specific thing, but I do think you really want to think about these and and I think this is what you're saying. You want to think about these things together. Um, and you want to plan for housing, but you want, you know, an economic development plan and a jobs plan alongside that. And you can't really do one without the other. And thanks for the presentation.

Uh, in one of your slides you had um some examples of cost the cost associated with urban development versus suburban development.

I was wondering if you could bring that back up because I was looking at the agenda and there's there's a lot of uh agenda items that discuss uh density infield development and I think it'd be kind of a good primer for people to understand the benefits of infield development and uh how that affects the city's budget and you know going forward for long-term sustainability on the city's end. So good. Yeah. Um I mean I think some of these things are are pretty straightforward.

So you know if if you have to if it you have to run you know a mile extra um water and sewer and large and very expensive roads to new homes rather than you know in many cases using what's already there. maybe upgrading some some pipes and connections here and there, but mostly using the excess capacity that often exists in the street already. That's going to save money clearly.

Um, oftentimes actually what you end up seeing is not just infill is sort of using what's already there, but they are uh rebuilding or upgrading in a way that is sort of covering for deferred maintenance that the city probably should have done way back in the day. Not talking about Flagstaff specifically, but just generally. Um, so it becomes a way of actually fixing these problems that you might not have had funding to fix otherwise.

Um, you know, I I think school busing is is a pretty obvious one. I don't know how much that happens here, but longer distances cost more, of course.

and um you know, police and fire having to travel further and you know once you get far enough out having to either have really bad response times which is just worse service or have you know some kind of department location station um that's closer to those places so having to build more stations rather than just you know staffing up more of the ones you have those are all you know going to be costly and um I'm happy to share with the the city folks to to pass along There have been some other studies that have sort of compared the the relative costs in different cities in the US and Canada where things are pretty similar.

Um, and this is a pretty consistent finding where ultimately uh an creates essentially a surplus in the budget like every unit is creating a a general fund surplus year after year. and suburban housing, you know, it's going to vary. The further out it is and so forth, the more costly it will be, but it does tend to be a a deficit um that has to be made up for with kind of transfers from other tax sources. Um it's kind of all pulled together and then exported from the center out.

Uh that's just, you know, that's common. It's nothing unique, but I think those are things to to be aware of. I mean, this is if anyone's familiar with the the strong towns kind of brand and movement, this is a really big thing for them is just operating cities and creating or at least allowing development patterns that are more cost-effective um and provide better services is a priority. So, uh happy to share some of those resources after. Yeah. Hi, Shane. Good morning. Morning over here.

Um like didn't didn't see him moving. Uh, wonderful presentation. I personally learned a lot. I think it's going to be valuable moving forward as just an underlying way to think about things. Uh, I'm council member Austin on Flagstaff City Council and I don't have a question for you. Uh, it's more of a request for the group. Uh, please introduce yourself before you ask a question and make that the case throughout the day. Uh, I think first we had Council Member Anthony Garcia speak.

Um, then we had Marilyn Wiseman with uh FC Cubed, Friends of Flagstaff's Future. We also had uh Duffy um with a Midtown Land Trust uh talk to us. Who am I missing? Hunter uh is with the Downtown Business Alliance. He just spoke. Um and uh also Brian Bates with the Flagstaff Water Group. So I it there's so much talent and so much expertise in this room. I think we should show it off. Okay. So just be sure to introduce yourself before you speak.

And uh I was asked to also say that we have about time for about four more questions. Okay. Gear up. Oh, okay. Um my name is Keith Becker. Um been a citizen for 47 years. Um I am a commissioner on the commission for inclusion and adaptive living and I've also uh assisted in starting um a little group we call uh barrierfree flag staff. Um so my questions are um how can we plan for affordable housing for the disabled?

Um, I'm talking about also about uh people who can't use stairs, uh, parking not far from a home entrance, uh, those kind of things. How do we how can we get affordable housing for people like that? They can't go up the second floor. I saw some of your pictures there. They showed uh, town houses that had stairs. You know, how do you park near that if you're in a wheelchair? Mhm. I mean there's there's a lot of things that um uh the disability community has to face. Yeah.

And how do we get affordable housing because um believe like it or not aging often leads to accessibility issues. 100%. Yeah. Um yeah, great comment and agree with everything you said. Uh I mean there's kind of two elements to that question. So there's accessible housing and then there's affordable accessible housing. And you can have accessible housing that's not affordable and you can have some that is.

And the pathways to create those are not going to be the same necessarily because for the most part if you want it to also be affordable, subsidies are going to have to come in there somewhere.

And you know, as I understand it, if you're getting funding from the low low-inccome housing tax credit, which is the largest source of of affordable housing funding, you generally have to have uh some of the units be accessible for people, you know, with low vision or who are blind or have, you know, physical disabilities, use a wheelchair, etc. Um, this is again a case where I mean just a level set, existing housing, single family and otherwise, is mostly not accessible either.

Um, and so, you know, this is another reason we actually, it's actually important to create it in new housing because the stock of what we have is is very limited. Um, I don't know the exact number. I think it's four units. It might be five. Um, but once you cross that threshold, you actually are subject to some accessibility requirements that smaller projects are not. And it doesn't mean that every single unit has to be accessible.

You know, it doesn't make a lot of sense for like a six-unit, two-story building to have an elevator, for example. But the ground floor units do need to be accessible and they're, you know, they can be single level. And so I think that is one of the opportunities. So on the one hand, you know, this has to be a priority for the subsidy dollars you're investing. And if there's ways to find more of those subsidy dollars, that is a great thing to do.

And then on the other hand, just more broadly, I think encouraging these kinds of projects that by their very nature and, you know, federal regulation have to include accessible features. This is a little bit for the city folks here. Let's think about uh incorporating universal design into a lot of our our plan. Yeah. Especially outside in, you know, don't always have to have universal design on the inside because somebody can alter that if they need to.

Do you want to explain what universal design is? Do you want to explain what universal design is? Universal design is making something accessible to everybody that's universally available, universally accessible by everybody. What would be an example? Uh in a wheelchair or somebody who's 20 years old and has no problems. So like uh like a bathroom that has a is wide enough to have a turning radius for example for a wheelchair. Exactly. Yeah. Bathroom like that.

Thresholds, you know, no stairs to enter the building. Um you know those kind of things. Very simple things like that. Yeah. 100%. Thank you. Hello. Uh again, I I appreciate your presentation very much. My name is uh Rick Lopez. Uh I was born here in 1949. Um I was a past city councilman from 92 to 2000. Served on a whole variety of city commissions and councils uh committees. Uh and I'm currently the uh government affairs director for the Northern Arizona Association of Realtors.

One of the things that we have heard for the last 35 years that that I've been involved in city government is that new development does not pay for itself. Have you ever done any studies addressing that issue? I mean in in in California it certainly does. This is going to be very state dependent because some states have very low property taxes and property taxes are often like one of the main sources of of revenue generally, but especially from projects themselves.

Um I I don't know Arizona's property tax or other, you know, tax structure. Um I've seen plenty of analyses that it is a net surplus, but it really does depend on how these things are structured. And so I don't have the answer to that, but I do think that is, you know, important to know. And if it is true in Arizona that, you know, regardless of the development type, it's not paying for itself, then that sounds like a good reason to to work toward changing it.

Um because obviously just not building homes is not a solution to that problem. Um it will just cause different ones. Uh, but I think that's, you know, that's all I can really say without having very specific knowledge. I don't know if anyone's, you know, in the city or otherwise here has has heard of any of these studies here. Yeah.

Hi, my name is Zach Skelton and I'm with Flagstaff Strongtowns and uh I was just hoping you could uh talk about parking minimums just a little bit as well as uh mode switching away from cars, ways to encourage residents to mode switch. Thanks. Sure.

Um, so parking minimums are requirements that say, you know, if you, you know, for every apartment you build, you have to provide two parking spaces, let's say, or maybe it's one parking space, if it's a onebedroom and two if it's two bedrooms or more. Uh, if it's an office building, maybe it's five parking spaces per thousand square feet. If it's a bowling alley, maybe it's one parking space per thousand square feet. Who knows?

If it's a bar for some reason, it's one parking space per several hundred square feet because people driving to the bar and back is really what we want. Um, so these these requirements, their origin really is once cars started to proliferate, people, you know, there weren't a lot of parking spaces in the 30s, 40s, 50s, and people were just parking them all over the place. And it was sort of a way to internalize the cost of these cars.

So people would have to, you know, at least indirectly pay for them because it's increasing the cost of the building and it's going to be, you know, baked into the cost of the groceries you buy and the food from the restaurant and so forth. Um, that's all well and good. Uh but the you know one of many problems here is those requirements were set extremely arbitrarily and once a few cities set them they just kind of proliferated everywhere with no real basis.

It was just this city did that so we're going to do the same and study after study and this was really uh you know started by uh with the work of Donald Shupe who just recently passed away but he spent 30 years working on this and wrote an 800page book called the high cost of free parking um and and is really kind of the the godfather of all of this reform.

He really showed how these parking requirements that we think of as, you know, we're going to have free parking, we're paying for them in all these different ways. There's, as I said, it's very expensive to build this parking in many cases. And so that cost is going into your rent or your home price.

Um it is it takes up space and especially in Flagstaff when you can't build underground if you have a height limit and you have to build parking above ground every floor of parking is one less floor of housing and so it's a direct trade of housing for parking and you know I I know people love parking but Flagstaff does not have a parking crisis it has a housing crisis and so that's a really perverse outcome.

Um, this all kind of spreads things out where people have to then, you know, you have to make all that space for parking, which spreads out all the destinations, which makes getting around by other means longer and more expensive and and timeconuming. And so it encourages more driving. And so it's this kind of self-fulfilling uh cycle and and and vicious cycle. And you know what we found is that these requirements are actually often way beyond what is needed.

And it results in a lot of projects just not being built at all. Um, and the ones that are are often more expens. And so many cities, I think we're up to there's dozens of of entire cities that have completely gotten rid of these requirements because at the end of the day, developers do have a pretty good sense of how much parking their tenants, customers, whatever are going to need.

Um, and if they get it wrong, they lose money because parking is an amenity and they don't want to just not give people what they want and force them to park on the street uh all the time if that's not going to work because that's just a worse experience. And you know, the last thing I'll say here other than this is just spreading everywhere including at the state level in California and Washington and elsewhere. Um, a lot of this, you know, these are kind of academic conversations.

Um, but what this really comes down to, and this was in a recent podcast interview on uh the Volts podcast with some folks responsible for the Washington bill, they really just focused on the actual human effects of these requirements.

And the example they use most often is this woman who wanted to start a daycare center in her community which was a childare desert and she could fit on the property I think 15 parking spaces but the city required 17 or 19 or something like that and those are the rules and so and she could not get around them and so she did not build the place she couldn't and so that city is worse off that community is worse off for those requirements.

They did not accomplish anything except to stop necessary, important child care from being built. I think we all recognize that if she had just been able to build the 15 parking spaces, they would have figured it out. It would have been fine. Maybe people would car like two of them. Uh it wouldn't take a lot.

But as long as you have those requirements in place and they're arbitrary and you can never know exactly what is going to be needed on any parcel, you're going to continue having those problems. And so that's why they're going away. And it does not mean that parking does not get built in the places that have eliminated parking requirements. Almost everything still includes parking.

It just often includes not quite as much as it used to because it was requiring more than was actually necessary and more than was ever actually being occupied at any given time. Thanks. Yeah. Hi, my name is David McIntyre. I'm the community investment director for the city. This circles back to um some questions. It's a different take on some of the questions we earlier and it focuses more on uh I think when people talk about what they're worried about for Flagstaff.

It's more that we'll become a Telluride than that we'll become an LA. And so, uh, knowing that some of the dynamics are different as a as a high amenity, um, high beauty mountain town constrained, uh, do you see with your analysis and with your modeling that some of the things work the same? Have you have you really looked at a tellide type of a community versus a larger urban one and and does the modeling show fairly similar?

your answers earlier made a ton of sense, but I'm just curious, do we see the math work the same way in terms of uh units opening up, creating that that mobility uh for the new new entry? There's there's not really that kind of resolution or granularity of study possible at at that scale.

You know, the reason a study like with the moving chains worked as it did is you could look at tens of thousands of people across large metro areas where, you know, the numbers were enough to really like have the statistical, you know, power and everything. Um, when you're getting down to cities with tens of thousands of people or less, that kind of thing is not possible.

And and as I said, I do think it's likely that the, you know, the percent of people who are coming from somewhere else is probably higher here. It's a small area. Um, and it does have kind of above and beyond unique charms as, you know, a sort of resort town sort, you know, in some ways. Um, and so, but again, I do think once you get to once you just kind of accept that, it doesn't really change you. It doesn't leave you with more options to accept that.

Um, and it doesn't mean that the options you do have are ineffective. It might take more. Um, you know, one thing I I don't know if this like means anything to people. This is not good from an environmental perspective. I want to be clear about that. And I do think there's good reason in the long run to try to kind of hem in short-term rentals especially, but also vacation homes. Um, I think the environmental case is probably stronger than than any other for doing so.

Uh just from a kind of self-interest perspective as a city, at least on the vacation home side, if someone is like owns this home but is rarely there, they're not using services, they're paying a bunch of taxes and they're not like adding to congestion and things like that. And so there is a a positive spin on this. It's not to say that it's a good thing.

Um, but I do think there's there's, you know, you can you can do things with those resources that are not being spent on the people who are actually not living here. Um, so yeah, I I wish there was that level of research, but I think we're a long way from from able to do to do that. Okay, great. Lucky me. Um, hi everybody. My name is Amy Walawinsky. I'm a 30-year Flagstaff resident and I currently serve as chair of the sustainability commission and um this has been a great presentation.

Thank you so much for delivering all this information to us so we can base our discussion today on research. Um, one thing I wanted to ask about is we've talked a lot about suburban versus urban and density and parking and one thing that I've heard a lot in conversations about um sustainable economic development is mixed use as well as that density. Can you talk a little bit about that? What you know about it, what the research says? Yeah.

So mixed use would be something like, you know, a three or four story apartment or condo building with retail, restaurants, a bank, whatever on the ground floor. And it's great. Um, like I I don't have a lot more to say about it. You think about some of the benefits of density of of infill. You know, having things closer together generally means you can walk to them, bike to them, take transit, um, or even just drive a shorter distance. These are all improvements.

Um, if you actually have the housing and a lot of the, you know, places people want to go day-to-day integrated together, that just brings them even closer together and and saves even more. I think one thing to be careful of, uh, maybe two things is oftent times the developers who build, you know, multif family housing don't really know what they're doing with commercial.

And so I think on the city side, it's important to have a clear idea of what you want and and some kind of knowledge, research, whatever about what is likely to work because what you can see is developers build these things, but then they can't lease them out. Um, and they maybe even know that they're not going to be able to lease them out from the get-go, but like it's the cost of doing business. And so it's just this this very wasteful thing.

You'd rather just have it be housing at that point if it's just going to be vacant. So I think making sure that the you know developers have clear guidance the city knows what it's looking for and that you know except maybe on corners and and very important corridors leaving the possibility open of still just doing a fully residential building cuz in many places there's not enough you know foot traffic and so forth to support on every block on every street retail.

you're just going to have a lot of empty space. And so, you know, leaving the door open to that and encouraging where it's really important, but also not trying to force it into places where it's probably not going to work. Thank you. Yeah. All right. Thank you everyone. And uh like I said, happy to chat after over the next seven hours or however long we'll be here. Thank you for the presentation. Thank you for all the amazing questions.

Now we take a break um until 10:30 and then after that we'll hear from the city about the land availability and the code analysis. Yeah. Yeah. Everything was the next That [Music] looks That looks better, doesn't it? That's right. Where is it? Amazing. [Music] That's right. [Music] Oh my goodness. Who you are? We have five minutes. Five minutes left in break. Five minutes. Yeah, it got [Music] We'll um we'll start to settle so we can get started again. [Music] Mary, Mary.

[Music] Thanks everybody. We're going to get started again. We got some feedback that the room is a little bit cool. So, uh, we're checking to see if we can warm it up a little. Oh, and yeah. Okay. Oh. Oh, wow. That's amazing. Um, so if you could have a seat and we'll get started with our next speaker. Thanks everybody. Okay, next we're going to hear direct from city staff.

I'm very pleased to introduce Michelle McNutley who will be walking us through um some of the history of the project and um what we can expect regarding some of the decision points that we'll move into after that. Thank you very much, Michelle. Well, Shane is definitely a tough act to follow. Um and definitely this is you know we we build this as a community conversation and we do promise that the rest of the afternoon will be a community conversation.

But before we start that, we do want to make sure that um everyone, even if you've heard the presentation on the land availability, suitability and code analysis project, um that you're all hearing again, that we're hearing it together um so that as we start the dialogue that we're kind of starting from the same place.

So again, um you know, kind of harboring back to to my welcoming words, the city's 10-year housing plan and the carbon neutrality plan really put forward some um bold vision and goals. And so this project is really focused on achieving those goals. And so the 10ear housing plan again is to reduce the affordable housing need in our community by half and by 2032.

And that's really through impacting at least 6,000 low to moderate income Flagstaff residents through a combination of you unit creation and subsidy provision. Just very similar to what Shane was just talking about. Um and then creating or preserving almost 8,000 housing units by 2031 with a minimum of those being um 10% of them being affordable. So again, it's increasing the supply um the the variety workforce and affordable um by local residents.

And then the carbon neutrality has three primary goals with the one being very bold of achieving carbon neutrality by 2030 through a 44% reduction in greenhouse emissions. And then preparing Flagstaff's communities, systems, and resources to be more resilient to climate climate change impacts. and then addressing climate change in a manner that prioritizes those most impacted and ensures the costs and benefits of climate adaptation and mitigation are equally um equitably distributed.

So the land um I'm just going to call it the last cap now that you're familiar with the words. Um this project started about two and a half years ago and the first two parts that were done was the land availability suitability study and then the first part of the CAP was a diagnostic report. So the the last part of this is really what land do we even have? How much land do we have available? Do we have enough for our residential needs? But also the other things that make a community.

We talked about economic development today. We need to have enough land for commercial and industrial uses. We also um saw a lot in the the word Wordle that we did this morning how much we value nature in our community and that's open space and our parks. Um so do we have enough land for all of that? um the code diagnostic, but really on that last but really focusing on the the how much we have for our residential development.

And then the first part of the code analysis is that diagnostic report that looked at every development code that touches a project. Um so building code, zoning code, fire code, engineering standards. It looked at our traffic impact analysis process as well as our other development review processes and our um housing and uh sustainable incentives that are already um in our code.

And that just looked at facts based are these codes that a development has to meet are they actually moving in the same direction and moving towards meeting the goals of our city. Um and then now that informed us to go into the code concepts to address those highest uh priority barriers. Those highest priest priority barriers that we're going to talk about are related to the zoning code, but that doesn't mean that's the only thing that the city is working on.

There are a lot of people throughout the city working on updating their codes. You've seen a lot of um recent changes to the engineering standards come through with our engineering group really incorporating the ATMP or the all trails master plan. You've also heard the building official announce that we're going to start looking at our building codes um and updating those and also evaluating um the green energy code.

Uh there is a lot that's happening and those are just to name a few and they're not work happening in silos. we are working together to work to move the needle and to move us in the direction of really achieving these goals. So Tiffany Antel, after I'm done talking about the the last part of this, she's going to go more into the code concepts before we get into that community dialogue about the different decision points.

And then this will move us after today or and after the code uh concepts are wrapped up, we'll move into the final code recommendations. And we'll talk more about that at the end of the day. But today, we really want to just make sure that we're having this conversation. If you look around the room, you're going to see some elected officials in here. Um, you're also going to see members of a lot of our boards and commissions.

They're not here to represent those boards and commissions or even the council, but they are here as community members, and they're also here to be informed so that when these things do come back to their boards and commissions, they can make informed decisions. And so this dialogue is important because it helps our elected officials provide us the direction that we need to keep this project moving forward.

I just want to harbor back to the survey that a lot of you completed today or before today's event and what are the housing needs in Flagstaff. So the question was who do you believe are most impacted by the lack of attainable and affordable housing in Flagstaff? What I love about this chart is that there's color on every line. Everybody is affected by our our housing crisis. Um, everyone at different income levels for different reasons.

Um, true, it's mostly those in the lowincome household, our first um first-time home buyers and our workforce. Without our workforce, what community do we have? So, it just goes to show the how important it is that we are bringing in that supply at every at every price point and for everyone. So, this will probably be one of the most boring conversations we're going to have today. I'll try to make it as lively as possible, but it is really just presenting the facts.

And sometimes you just have to call it what it is. So, I'm not afraid to do that. But it's really, you know, presenting the facts. And again, why did we do this? We have to understand what limited land we have left to to develop. You heard Shane say that, you know, one of the precipice for um LA's high housing costs was there was they ran out of room to spraw.

And so you spoiler alert when we the conclusion of the study is we have enough land as long as we are efficient with how we develop and as we move forward. Um so we wanted to find out what do we have left, what are the barriers to developing it and barriers are really defined by what we regulate um in our zoning code or other um other codes. And then it also provides the recommendation for right sizing our code amendments.

You heard again you heard Shane talk about with the parking um standards how one few cities adopted it and everybody followed suit. We don't want to just do what every city is doing because that's what you always see in the codes. We want to do what's right for Flagstaff in the context of where we live.

So, the land inventory and analysis looked at um it really went set out to identify 50 opportunity sites and I'll talk a little bit about how we got to those 50 and then doing a suitability analysis. What are the site constraints? Does it have steep slope that's not developable? Is it have does it have flood plane? Um what other constraints does it have that can't be developed? We also wanted to look at the infrastructure.

what's being served, what is not being served by roads, utilities, water, um sewer, electric, gas. And then all of this was is being looked at um to kind of create a regional cost reduction strategies. And then at the end um kind of a summary of our vacant residential land report. So the study area was much larger than just the city of Flagstaff. Um but we didn't go outside of the metrop plan metropolitan plan um organizations planning which is our transportation planning area.

Um so we looked at areas that included um outside of the urban growth boundary as well as some out in the county just to understand is there some um available land with opportunity neighboring us that we should consider. So again looking at appropriately zoned properties we inventoried vacant or underutilized sites and then from there um identifying the opportunity sites.

So those appropriate land use um categories were residential and then commercial, industrial and public because those three um commercial, industrial and public all have some allowance for residential. So, we kept those on the table to to evaluate. But with the public lands, it did exclude forest and public open space, schools, and um selected other uses and public owners based on city of Flagstaff input.

When we say vacant and underutilized, vacant is just that there's no improvement on the property. So, the full cash value would be zero. underutilized in each category is parcels with um the lowest 10% of improvement to um full cash value. Um so essentially if 10% if if the structure on the value or on the property was 10% the value of it was 10% or less of the property that's considered underutilized because that's when you start to see people start to reinvest in their properties.

And um so we considered that might be room for infill development. Um, if anybody's ever used the city's GIS, you won't be surprised that sometimes the GIS picks up weird little um, strips of land. So, we also had to do some removal of narrow strips aroundways and some other pieces of land to remove that.

And then again looking at those um environmental screenings, wetlands, stream buffers, slopes, um the hundred-year flood plane, and then really calculated from what's available, what is actually constrained by environmental constraints. One thing we did not look at was tree resources. So, under the city's resource protection overlay, there are also certain requirements for commercial development to retain um typically it's going to be retain 50% um of their tree resources on your site.

And because each site is so different and it's really hard to to do that from a GIS exercise, we didn't include that. So, some of the available land could be further constrained. But I think a lot of you know that we're also working on a code amendment to kind of help um help us understand what might be right code changes through a pilot program.

So we are working on ways to help keep the character of our community with those trees but also um help achieve the density we're we're asking of our developers. So overall here's the map. Um the light orange is the underutilized and the um orange p parcels are the vacant. Um across that whole study area we have about 10,500 uh billable acreage. So this is this is broken down by um land use.

And so again, kind of in those areas that allow residential development, we have about 8,100 uh acres left for residential development. And if you take that just in the study area, that goes down to about um 6,600 acres. For context, the city of Flagstaff is about 4200 um 42,000 acres. Um, so that's about a 20% of our land is available for for residential. Looking at all the zoning districts as a whole, and this is just looking at nonresidential.

Um, and we'll get into the residential ones and what are the biggest acreages we have. Um, is our largest land holding is public lands forest. That is a zoning district, PLF, that allows no residential development. The second is public open space with 3,300 um acres thousand acre or 100 acres. Um so that's that shows how much we value our open spaces but um and most of Arizona is this way. A lot of our land holdings are in private or public um holdings.

Um so we really have to work within what's available for our residential. So within our total acreage for residential um it's our rural residential and estate residential. Those are both zoning districts that allow one unit per acre. And then single family residential is next with just just under 4,000 acres. And real uh single family R1 allows about between two a minimum of two units per acre with a maximum of between five and six.

And that five and six is because it depends on if you're in the resource protection overlay or not. So just to give everyone um I'm going to go through a series of maps and this is just really for people to help people understand where the zoning districts are located. So this is a map of where all of our rural residential um zone lands are throughout the city limits. This is where our one R1 zoning is.

So, you can see it's kind of a little more centrally located, but still out in the um some of the outlier areas. This is that estate residential again, one unit um dwelling unit per acre. And then I'm going to go through kind of quickly, but this is high density residential. So, it's sped throughout the kind of more along our corridors and our town area, more of our core town. uh medium density residential. This is manufactured homes.

It doesn't have a minimum, but it has a maximum of 11 dwelling units per acre. R1N, which is single family neighborhood, and this is more of um southside and town site. So, this has a two minimum uh dwelling unit per acre and then minimum and then 14 max. And so that's our housing supply. Um, quickly when we look at what we have available for commercial land, we have about 400 um 400 acres of commercial land.

So what that tells us is we don't have a lot of commercial land to convert to residential. Same goes with our residential or sorry our industrial. um somewhat we have a nice supply of light industrial but we have a very darth of heavy industrial which has been somewhat problematic and in bringing in different um developments and different um companies.

Um, so I say that again because it's important to realize we understanding our land supply is really important because if we don't know how much land we have in those, we need to make sure we have enough to attract those businesses again. But it also shows us that we don't have a lot of land to convert to residential. So we have to do the best that we can with the residential that we have. Then the last one is this is the public's open space or public land. Um, I said public open space.

I didn't mean that. This is public land. So this is going to be more lands that might be under like state land trust, could be some city property. Um but this is different than that public open space that you cannot develop on. So a few large parcels. So we looked at all everything that was available and then we really kind of whittleled down of that what's really has an opportunity for development and again we talked about is it fully um undeveloped? Is it underutilized?

Is there is there infrastructure being put on near it? Is there development happening around it? A lot of times when areas start to see development, there's kind of like a chain reaction. It's like when someone cleans up their yard, then all of a sudden everybody's like, "Oh, I got to go out and mow cuz I got to keep up with the neighbors." You start to see that those kind of patterns happen with development as well. Um, and so we really wanted to identify those areas.

We also looked at is it ready for development? Does it have the zoning um that it needs to yield, you know, a high higher than probably one unit per acre or what that that land could really carry? Um does it have infrastructure to it? Does it have the correct road? Does it have a road serving it? If it does, is it the correct width? What would the infrastructure like water, sewer, uh look like to bring to it?

And so once we were able to put all that um the map to you're all looking at at your left is where throughout the city we have the various opportunity sites. And so really what we see coming online in the near future and then this is a a zoom in to the downtown area.

And why this is important is as we looked at what codes we really need to work on, we need to understand what's likely going to be coming up for development soon because that's going to be kind of our first priority is making sure that what's coming online that we're fixing any challenges to bringing those to to bringing us the best yield of housing in the in the best housing types.

So in general the characteristics um city actually has several parcels that are considered opportunity sites um 11 actually with almost 73 um acres and they're you know housing is doing a lot of projects. I'm not going to speak to that but if you have any questions about what they're doing with that you can speak to housing. Um state land trust probably though is the biggest land holding with over 2,000 acres. Um and then through just from a development standpoint, most of that is undeveloped.

Um with about 2,700 of those acres. So again, a lot of potential for for green field development, but there's also a lot of potential for infill development as well. Um, again, I'm going to have to point out that the largest lands um, within those, even within the opportunity sites, that still includes a lot of our rural residential. So, recognizing that that's one unit per acre. Um, and then kind of where our commercial opportunities are, we do have about 21 acres of that available.

And that's a good thing because that's where we get some of our higher density as well, our higher density housing. But overall, the majority of the land that we have left, it's going to need to have entitlement. That means it's going to have to probably go through the reszone process. Um, it's going to need to be subdivided. Um, it's missing infrastructure.

So, it's going to depend on probably bringing in, you know, if not bringing in a roadway, um, expanding roadways or improving them as well as bringing in infrastructure, which is a huge cost. and Shane kind of touched on that from the city side of what it cost to um maintain lands that are kind of in your more suburban areas. There's actually a cost to to bringing that too.

So it's important that we kind of get that yield right when we are talking about what's the right density that we're knowing that there's going to have to be infrastructure that the yield isn't that's high enough that it brings the right infrastructure but not so high that it triggers massive in infrastructure projects that could be so cost um prohibitive that the project just goes right back to its by right um zoning.

And then just in our downtown area, um when we really look at that, um infield development, we have a lot of aging infrastructure, we have flood plane, um and drainage issues. Everyone's familiar with the downtown mile project as well as the Rio to flag um which will hopefully hopefully relieve those areas of that barrier, but it it but it does exist today.

um proximity the railroad noise and that's more from different types of subsidies may um have a harder time achieving certain funding because of of the railroad noise. Um it doesn't mean it's totally off limits. It just makes it harder. And then access and parking, whether it's perceived or real, people are convinced there is no parking downtown.

Um and so that is um that can be a barrier to even um the community being acceptive of a project coming down there or also a developer, you know, choosing to come downtown because of the cost of providing that parking. And then um talking just about the John Wesley Pal area, you know, it has some drainage. There's a lot of topography out there. It has some drainage issues. It also has, you know, it's going to need some infrastructure being brought out to it.

and then it's zoned for for low density. So really that's just to give you a snapshot of kind of where our land is, what we have available and of what we have available, what are the challenges and I really wanted to just take a minute to get everybody remind everybody about that study because it's been about a year I think since we've really talked about it.

But as Tiffany goes into the code analysis um project, a lot of that really has that consideration of what do we have left and how do we, you know, we have to move fast. Um we're going to talk about that today. I mean, we have to move fast. We want to we want our codes to reflect our community's values. We don't want to go fast at the risk of our community character, but if we don't act and make changes, as we've talked about throughout the day, change is happening.

Um and so we want to make sure that it's the right change for our community. And with that, I I think we might have a I think I went quicker than I anticipated. So maybe a couple time for a few questions before Tiffany comes up and talks about the um the code analysis project. And I'm going to ask if you have any questions, please go to the microphones at the side. Going to repeat, council member Asen, please introduce yourself before you speak. Uh Mary Norton.

Um I do serve on planning and zoning and open space commissions. And I know Michelle, we've talked about this before, but I wanted to bring it up in this forum. Um as you said, things move fast and this picture in time of the last was prior to some of those state land parcels being sold. So I was wondering because those are large parcels um 400 500 acres.

Yes, their purchase they maybe don't have development applications in right now under current zoning, but they still have bought it with that base zoning of rural residential. How can we maybe adjust or at least acknowledge that there's like another thousand acres that are now kind of have moved up into another category?

So, um, they haven't changed into another category in the sense that they've, yes, they've gone from state land to to private holding, but they still have that same zoning and they would have that regardless of who owned it. Um, if anything, because now that it's in private ownership, I would say now it's in play. Um, and we're likely to see something happen with it.

Um, and I So, but to me that also means that I think your question is how do we maybe get more density than just the underlining zoning? Well, instead of having it still be acknowledged as public lands, it's now actually under private ownership. And that's what I meant by it's now under a different category. I mean, we can kind of add that acorage in to what we're needing to work with.

We could I I would and maybe it's good to talk offline because I want to understand the the value of doing that other than I think we could you know um because really it's just a matter of saying it was public it was in public ownership but now it's in private ownership but really what can be done with it is still the same. I guess I was concerned that as it as it moves into to private ownership, we have a little bit less control as it as it goes along down the line.

So, I just wanted to acknowledge that and see if there was a way to update um the acreage that we're looking at that is I think has influence. We can definitely update I think the the maps. I can talk to somebody's asking where the acreage is like the state land parcel that was by Woody Mountain that I think Robert's community is now the owner of 522 acres and the state land piece that's owned by Cemetery and the JW Bell corridor that's 405 acres.

So those are now where they were shown as public lands, they're actually now under private ownership. So, thank you. Hi, Michelle. Hi, Joe Galley, Chamber of Commerce. Um, can you go back a slide or two to industrial and commercial?

I guess my question is um I know that the uh land availability suitability study encompassed a uh region outside the city limits and I'm curious when you looked at the commercial and industrial pieces if you included Camp Navajo if that was included uh in that inside those borders there or not. We did not include Camp Navajo in the um in this analysis. Thanks. Thanks. Yeah. Hi, Chris Smelkkey, Flagstaff resident, also affordable housing developer.

Um, and it's great work with um identifying these sites um that could be opportunities for affordable housing. And I just curious to know if there's been any discussion for the city controlled sites of like looking at next steps from identifying, you know, what infrastructure from CIP planning can maybe, you know, get those closer to ready development. um as well as identifying funding of course to to help incentivize those to move forward. Thank you.

Um we there has been and the best person to speak to that is actually just sitting beside you Sarah Dar our housing director. Um thank you for the question. We do have city limit somewhat limited but city land assets closer. Okay. Um, we'll be presenting to city council on September 9th, reviewing those parcels, um, their pros and cons, making recommendations for use of several of them, um, and encouraging council discussion and feedback on such. So, mark your calendars.

September 9th, meeting starts at 3 p.m. It's going to be a great time. Um, so that discussion is coming in a in a more indepth way. Um, of course, we've had parcels used over time. Um, in the during my tenure here, there's been hundreds of units created on city-owned or previously city-owned parcels, and we hope to continue that trend. Thank you, Sarah. Hi, Marilyn Weissman. Um I just want to clarify I think what Mary's asking if we can go back to the uh picture that you had.

So um 39 that land there is going through the development process. And so the question I have you were saying you know we need to do this in a timely manner. Uh because what if like say parcel 43 goes up for auction. I agree with that. But I think we also have I think what Mary was saying, if I understood you, Mary, I don't want to put words in your mouth, is we have to acknowledge that there is a parcel that's many acres that's going through the redevelopment process now.

And what if any um uh impact in the timely fashion could we have on that? And if we can't have any impact and the only thing that can pre prevent it, um I don't if if there's nothing to prevent it, why is it up there? I guess I think that's what she's asking. I'd like you to speak to that because I don't know how many people here know this. Right. And and I want to first just say that this report is a snapshot in time.

Um and so it was done during a period where those were in the state the state uh trust land holdings. Um so I think that until I do still think that there is time to impact that. And I'm going to say something and I'm going to put it out there because I don't want to put you on the spot, but there's any developer that wants to speak to this I would encourage them to stand up and do so.

definitely not necessary, but um I do think there's a period for influence because I think that a lot of the people who have purchased those properties want to do better projects or different projects than just one unit per acre.

So I think that they are motivated to kind of see how are we changing our um our regional plan, how are we changing our code because I think that they're seeing that the things that we are changing actually are tools that are helping them bring projects that maybe aren't high density highrises that bring the density, but you know, for instance, the middle housing um bill that will be going forward pretty soon that really starts to allow a lot of different housing types to be allowed in the zoning districts without having to reszone.

I mean they might to reszone to very specific zoning districts. So for instance R1 um R1 which might be you know the lower density from 2 to six uh units which might be really reasonable to expect out in those areas um don't allow certain housing types. But as we change code and we allow more housing types that might encourage the reszone into those zoning districts. um they might not want to reszone into the high density.

So without something in the middle, they're going to just do a by development. So is that I think that's kind of the explanation that maybe helps get to can we still influence? I do believe we can still influence, but the part of the timing being kind of the essence is that if we don't move fast, they can only sit on these investments for so long. Um, and so if we don't change things and they have to to do something, they're going to do what they can by right.

And Tiffany, and I am going to say that you're going to be the last question because then we're going to move over to our other Tiffany um Antel. So it's actually Hillary from Hillary, sorry. Yeah, Hillary from Symmetry Companies. And I just wanted to introduce myself to everyone because uh we did take down the state land uh number 39.

Um, I don't want to go into specifics about um, you know, anything about uh, any proposed development, but if anyone wants to come talk to me after this, um, I'm definitely open to discussing the project. Thank you. All right, I'm going to turn it over to our zoning code manager, Tiffany Antel. Thank you so much uh Tiffany Antel as previously described. Uh it's so great to see so many familiar faces and also so many new faces.

I'm always open to making new friends and hearing new feedback and comments. So very excited. I did wake up today and tell myself today could be the best day of my life. I hope you all feel the same. Um I we are going to talk about really the purpose and goals of our code analysis project. Uh development codes are key tools for achieving housing and climate goals. Plans and our plans and policies definitely called for bold act bold and urgent action.

uh the longer it takes us to get these changes across the line, the more that we will see development cases come through using our our standard codes to date, which are really not achieving what our these bold goals really are. Uh our codes may prioritize other goals right now above housing and climate and our codes may have been written in different context and are now out of sync with today's economic and climate realities.

It doesn't mean that the codes we have today weren't thoughtful at the time. We just had a different level of understanding and a different set of conditions at the time those codes were adopted. I fall in line behind so many staff and am truly just grateful to be able to follow in their footsteps and continue to move the goals that they have clearly already started. Our code was a is a great start into where we can move into the future to really meet these goals and really excited.

So our first step was trying to understand what are the problems with our code where are the people that are using our codes on the regular basis struggling um to bring the things that we're looking for in our community across the line. And looking at that, of course, our residential zones come up as being problematic. Our density standards are fairly low.

Um, that is of great concern in and troubling in terms of trying to meet our uh goals in terms of overall housing supply as well as our sort of subsidized subsidized housing. In our commercial zones, uh we do allow a limited amount of residential uh uses to date. Those currently need to come in the form of a mixeduse development or then we limit them to requiring a conditional use permit.

Conditional use permit provides a greater level of uncertainty for developers when they have to go through that process. They've got to design the whole thing just to get to that final step to say maybe, maybe not. Um so that's a hard that's a hard process for a developer to go through with a higher level of uncertainty at the end. Our parking requirements absolutely did come out as being a barrier.

Um we there was a great conversation about the issues with parking and how it provides that additional cost to housing. I mean these days it does start to feel like people will need to start choosing between housing themselves or owning a car. Um, and so if you want to house yourselves, it doesn't feel like the option should be you have to pay to have a space to park a vehicle.

If if if you can't even afford to have that vehicle and the house or the housing itself, our high occupancy housing standards came up as a barrier.

Um I don't I'm not sure how all familiar you are with our zoning code but our zoning code does have sort of the conventional uklitian zoning which is uses are separated into residential industrial and commercial zones but we also have what's called a formbbased code and that form-based code is trying to really focus on more the function and form of the building rather than the land use itself.

So, if you think about what you love in downtown Flagstaff, you'll see a ton of residential homes that have been converted to commercial use. Um, and vice versa, you'll see commercial buildings that have been converted to residential use. So, um, sorry, that just I'm just going to wait for that to go. Um so when we talk about um the formbbased code we again are really looking at what that building types are instead of the actual land use itself.

When we developed that formbbased code it did really focus on traditional neighborhood design. It very much lowered our parking standards. And the first couple of projects that came out in terms of the formbbased code were one not exactly what I think everybody had anticipated. Um they did dramatically reduce parking and there were some concerns over the way. So it's not to say that we've never dipped our toe into the idea of reducing parking standards. We certainly have.

In response to that, we came out with high occupancy housing standards. And the big issue that we're seeing in some of our housing market is because our density standards are so low and it is so expensive to build here that when we build multifamily housing, we tend to create giant units. These are five bedroomedroom, five bath units and 200 of them in one project. Um those types of units don't serve the greater community. We're not getting the variety.

I say in frag flag staff we're really good at going small or really good at going big and we miss the complete in between in the middle. So those high occupancy housing standards while they help sort of offset a lot of the concerns that we were seeing in some of our student housing projects. They also did a lot of damage to our formbbased code and the formbbased code is not functioning in the way that it did.

um formbbased code thinks of density in a totally different way and I hope at the end of the day you all think of density in a different way as well. Our zoning map amendment process, we know we're tough. We hear it all of the time. We're tough. It's tough to get a zoning map amendment proc or a zoning map amendment or reasonzoning case across the line. I don't know of any planner working in any jurisdiction who's ever been told that was the best fastest thing resoning I ever had. Ever.

It doesn't really exist. And I'm sure even if we make the process perfect, um, we're still going to get that feedback. But we know that we need to make that zoning map amendment process better. We need to be able for developers to feel comfortable reszoning properties so that we can get as a community what we need from them. And if pro if developers of large land are reluctant to come in and handle those zoning cases or liable to get a density of housing we don't want or need.

Uh subdivision procedures. Good news. We've already taken care of this. Um so I don't want you to think that while this project is going on that we're not making progress in any of these places, but we have made substantial progress. the state um adopted legislation that made it a possibility for us to do subdivisions administratively. We jumped ahead and jumped on that. Now the the legislature is making it a requirement for most municipalities.

So people are starting to look to us to see how did we go about it and how did we do it. Our street width and design standards um are part of the conversation today. I won't talk too much about it because we're going to talk about it a lot more later. Winter parking as well. Uh, additionally, our resource protection overlay. The one thing that development codes often do is they layer requirement upon requirement upon requirement upon requirement.

And all of those requirements together make it quite difficult to achieve what the zoning code is actually trying to achieve. We recognize it. We appreciate it. We also understand the reason why those codes were adopted in the first place. And we want to move forward in a way where we um are more proactive. We move these codes forward in a way where we can do both. Uh our affordable housing incentives, we don't offer enough to really make these incentives hit the mark for developers.

I will tell you we have been very successful in our multifamily um in multifamily. We have obtained um subsidized units. We struggle in the home ownership realm. Our sustainable building incentives are the same. You know, we are not giving a big enough bang for the buck of what we want to achieve. Uh also, street connectivity. Uh the way we manage our transportation impacts, uh whether right now we do not use transportation impact fees, we go through the TIA process. It becomes a negotiation.

It's that those are the most fun times for me personally. Um, and uh, lastly, the idea of transportation demand management for TIA. And what are we talking about? We're talking about not just focusing our traffic impact analysis on vehicles and how vehicles moves. Um, that there are other offsets in our transportation network so that a developer is not trying to pave the way to improve our entire transportation network for just vehicles.

We want to look at it in terms of transit and other modes of transportation. In this process, we know that it is also very important to look at our community in terms of what are how were we changing our codes and how are we impacting households that are vulnerable to displacement because I think the number one thing I get asked every time I have a code amendment coming forward and and Michelle I think knows this question or you you I think maybe ask me this question a lot.

What are the unintended consequences? Um, and I said, "Well, if I knew, then they wouldn't be." But, um, so we are trying to be as thoughtful, um, in our considerations for how we change our zoning codes to understand who is vulnerable in our community and how can we, um, make displacement, lower the displacement risk. Uh, so we did look at this as part of this process.

Um, you know, and it's not going to be surprising to anybody, but the the neighborhoods that are more susceptible to displacement are those with zoning districts that allow greater density. Uh, the zoning districts um that you see there in the lighter yellow. Um, those are our lower density zones. We tend to make the single family detached home the supreme allbeing. um and we want to protect it from anything else.

Um so this idea of zoning that single family homes are are the the top and best and you are only a good standing member of this community if you live in a single family detached home is is no longer it is by the wayside. The these are the days of old. Um you know so how do we go about equalizing what we allow across all zones? This will be an important part of of these discussions as we move forward. Oops. I don't know what I did. Okay. Um, just please hold.

I shouldn't be able to touch anything that's electronic ever. Oh, and remember this from this morning. It was good. Oh, that was the best. That was great. There was a lot of photos. Oh, and then there's all of Michelle's presentation. Please hold. It's okay. Everything's fine. Today can still be the best day of my life. All right. So, where are we in this process? After we got through the code diagnostics, there was a bit more than we could eat all in one bite, right?

So, you you you eat that elephant one bite at a time. Uh this code concepts report focused on these core features. um these being the ones that we believe that can move the needle the furthest the farthest the fastest. Um so we are looking at how do we incorporate more of sustainability standards and incentives into our code.

Looking at our resource protection overlay um I will note that we're not going to talk a lot about the resource protection overlay that we are in the process of adopting a pilot program for forest resources. If you want to talk about that, happy to talk about it online, but we're making some separate progress in that area already right now. Uh we are going to look at we're going to talk about reduced street widths potentially and our work winter parking ordinance and snow removal.

Uh we're also going to be talking about these core features that are found in our zoning code. These are the tools that we use every day to approve a development case or to say, "Nope, you got to fix this and come back." And those include our use regulations, what type of what types of land use are we allowing, and those housing types by zoning district.

um our densities, whether or not we choose to use floor area ratio, our minimum parking requirements, our affordable housing incentives, our sustainable building incentives, um as well as the potential of using a menu of sustainable development standards. And we are on to decision points. Are we ready to start this or Okay. Um, before I start talking about the decision points, I would really love it if the project team would stand up.

Um, so this is the core group of people that I get the privilege to work for and today I get to speak for. So, as we move forward in this conversation, I want you to know that this is the core group of people that we work together as a team to um to get to what we're going to present to you today. So, I would love it if all of you would just like pop into the microphone and just say name and um Good morning. My name is Paul Mood. I'm the city engineer.

Hi folks, Jenny Neman, climate action section director. Hello, I'm Jennifer Michaelelsson, housing planning manager. Good morning everyone. Justina Costa, assistant housing director. Good morning again. Sarah Dar, housing director. Michelle McNelte, planning director and interimm community development director. Genevie Pere, resilience analyst in sustainability. And then I'm going to be Nicole Antonopoulos, sustainability director. she can't be here today.

So, I'll just mention she's also part of the team. Thank you. So, thank you all amazing team. We're going to start talking. We're we're going to get into the meat of this discussion. So, to this is the part of the day where you're going to be able to give us some there's going to be interaction. We're going to talk about these decision points we're trying to get across. I don't know, it's surprising maybe some of you have seen some of these questions that we're asking today.

I don't know if you've know this, but we've talked about this a lot. And by a lot, I mean a lot. So, we have been to lots of places. We have been to lots of commissions. We have been to lots of organizations. We have talked to people individually. Um, and we're so excited today to kind of share with you what the feed how we've condensed the feedback we've received today.

Now, what we're going to share with you is not a set in stone place, but we want to reflect back to you generally what we've heard. Um, now every person's individual comment may not be completely uh addressed in these individual recommendations. Fear not, we're still open to the conversation. That's what this is about. But we wanted to give you a starting point. All of this stuff is really kind of boring and kind of complicated.

And so we want to be able to provide you the sort of starting off point in terms of how we think as staff we could move forward and address these um decision points. With that the first decision points up, we're going to be talking about density. Where and how should we increase density? Should by density increases be limited to areas where people tend to drive less? and do we want to increase density allowances for only affordable h housing projects or all housing?

So, first let's talk about what density is. I always make the assumption that everybody think knows what I'm talking about. Um, and that may not always be the case. It's really hard to visualize density. People write books about it. Uh, density really is what the number of dwelling units are per acre. So, here's a good example. You have one house per acre. then you have six units per acre and 18 and so on and so on.

Um, so let's talk about what that looks like for Flagstaff because I always hear people talk about middle housing. Um, and middle housing in Los Angeles and middle housing in Portland is not necessarily middle housing in Flagstaff to date. It doesn't mean that we can't get there, but middle housing means a lot of different things to different people. So what does density look like in Flagstaff?

For us, um, detached single family, which is a lot of what we do, is in that range of two to six dwelling units per acre. I will say for the most part, uh, a lot of our residential single family detached is about two units an acre, bordering on three. Um, to get to four, it's a push, and to get to six, it's really hard. Um, so you can see here, that's the bulk of what we do within this range. Uh, in terms of middle housing for us, that's really town houses, duplexes, triplexes, and forplexes.

Uh, town houses are really what you're going to see on that lower end of six. Uh, the duplexes, triplexes, and forplexes are what you're going to see on that higher end of 14. Uh, in terms of multif family apartments, uh, 10 to 29 units an acre. For a long time, 29 units has really been the the high-end cap of residential development, which is still again fairly low.

The important thing to think about in density, and this is going to transition to the a decision point in the future, is is that density looks at the dwelling unit versus per acre, but it doesn't take into account how big that dwelling unit is. It doesn't consider is that a one-bedroom dwelling unit or is that a five- bedroomedroom dwelling unit. code treats it the same, but clearly they have different um impacts to the community and they serve different populations.

Um so it does not take into account what the size of that unit is. And lastly, what we consider to be mixed use or high occupancy housing. So, previously the only ways uh to really go above 29 units per acre in Flagstaff was to do it as part of a mixeduse development or to do it as part of a form-based code development or one of our transct zones.

Um when we adopted high occupancy housing standards, we basically required anything that goes above 29 units an acre to require conditional use permit. So, we have not seen projects go above 29 units an acre since we've done that. The only projects we've had come in for the conditional use permit have been single family homes. These tend to be high-end luxury homes that have more than five bathrooms. They trigger high occupancy housing.

They come in for the conditional use permit and then we move on. But nobody has pursued a conditional use permit. So we've really in this community since we adopted the high occupancy housing standards, I believe in 23, we've stopped that high-end level density. So, we took a step backward from where from when we adopted this zoning code in 2013, which was really progressive. So, um I want to talk about the other city feedback we've gotten.

Um because while we have this core team that is really focused with housing and sustainability and planning, there are so many other uh divisions in our city that provide so many great services and have a different aspect and are trying to also achieve very important goals on their own that are separate from the goals that we've outlined here today.

So, um, in terms I just want to be able to make sure that we're representing th that feedback that we've received in terms from those other divisions, which includes from fire. Um, that the challenges of denser and taller redevelopment um, can be increased emergency call volume. Existing infrastructure and equipment are likely undersized for the new heights or use. taller building responses.

Our taller buildings present more complex emergency response operations and would impact staffing levels and then access requirements. Our economic vitality uh group encourages us to um focus on both ownership and rental residential building types. Public works um they would look match increased demand for services with staff and equipment. As density increases, there will be greater demand for services.

Um, they're already experiencing challenge in meeting needs, and increasing density would heighten that. Uh, for parks, wreck, open space, and events. Greater density can be an opportunity to introduce more park space into our neighborhoods. There's an opportunity to pres preserve high valuable pockets of nature and build more complete neighborhoods.

If done with park space in mind, it can provide more residents the chance to be in nature, helping more residents have 10-minute access to parks or natural areas. Terms of water, greater density aligns with water conservation goals. I think we had this conversation to this morning. Um may be more cost effective to upsize water sewer infrastructure where it already is rather than extend system outward. However, it is cheaper to install larger pipes with new development rather than upsize later.

Here is our project team's proposal and this is largely based on professional staff judgment as well as a combination of the feedback and comments we've received to date. What we would recommend in terms of these specific direct questions is where and how should we increase density? And the answer really is across all zones except for the rural residential and estate residential and the residential single family neighborhood. And I'll give you the an I'll I'll give you the why.

The why on this is rural residential and estate residential. While they're oneacre minimum, if we up those zones, we're just creating a new R1 zone, which is that that zoning district that we see that's 2 to six units an acre. We'll just be recreating that. These are really more holding zones meant to be reszoned to the densities we want to achieve in our in our community. doesn't have to be that way. That's just the recommendation that's here before you today.

Um, you know, certainly things can be changed, but handinhand with this is changing the resoning process, making it an easier um uh process to go through or looking at um going out and proactively reszoning the areas that we want to achieve the densities we're looking for uh to achieve these very high goals. The R1N is a very special zoning district. You saw it earlier in Michelle's presentation. This falls primarily over our historic zones.

It already has uh one of the higher density um allowances. It m it basically has the density of the medium density residential zone. Um so its density level is already high enough for what it is and what it's meant to be. Um and so for that we would recommend keeping it the same. We would recommend calibrating the increases for each zone to improve the viability of middle housing in all zones.

I will call out that R1N is that perfect example of where middle housing already exists and what we'd like to replicate throughout our community. Should by right density increases be limited to areas where people tend to drive less? No. density should be increased in all areas, but focus the highest density development along permanent transit network um both current and projected.

We get into a little bit of a chicken and egg problem where transit's not going to go where density it doesn't exist and density sometimes needs to go so that transit can come later. So let's not lose out on the good for the perfect and accept that um transit will need to sometimes fall behind the density. Do we want to increase density allowance or do want to increase density allowances for only affordable housing projects or all housing projects?

Uh the team came back with increase density for all housing but also improve the effectiveness of density bonuses for affordable housing as well. We are within a state that doesn't allow us to require or mandate affordable housing. These affordable housing projects are still very important in our community and we do want to continue to keep these incentives while increasing density overall.

And with that, I'm going to hand over now to our facilitators to have a little bit more of this conversation. Thank you, Tiffany. Um, okay. So, I'm going to review our decision makingaking methodology and our reporting and then FA will review the ground rules and then we'll get started. So, regarding the methodology, here's how it'll go. Um, Tiffany is available to help to provide context on each of the different decision points.

Um and then we as facilitators will facilitate um asking the questions um to elicit the input that is needed in order for decisions to be made on these points. Fay and I will take turns making uh facilitating and noting. So I'll start with the first decision point and FE will note and then she'll facilitate the second point decision point and I'll note. Um and so our our purpose is to gather the community feedback.

Um and that will be compiled with the pre community survey that went out um into a report um at that that will happen at you know um probably next week. Um but at the end of the day today between Fe and I's noting we'll tr we'll do our best to provide a synthesis of what we've heard today.

Um but know that a full report is coming with um you know the comments in in addition to um the survey that was taken before each decision point you will see the community the pre community survey that um that results.

So as you can see we have some pretty we have some agreement around the um that we know you know coming into this day we know that there is some agreement around increasing density um okay I think that will go okay we'll stick with the questions um so that is the okay we have a parking lot note and we have a save for later note. Um, and so those will be a part of the day if we need to move on um, so that the the thought isn't lost. Um, okay.

So, I'll turn it over to Fay for ground rules and then we'll get started. Thank you, Melissa. So, uh, for the ground rules, uh, we have two microphones. So the same as uh during the the keynote speaking session um you uh please line up on each side to share your feedback and please introduce yourself. Uh and then for the uh feedback please limit it to two minutes. Um so uh we can have as many people as possible to to give us the feedback.

Um and if possible, please build on another one's uh comment to try and create a discussion environment rather than just one individual uh report out. Um but these are fine too. So we want to have a conversation but try to also comment on one another. Um and also since our priority is to hear uh from as many people as possible, please feel free to share your thoughts. Uh we are here as a neutral role. We don't have any bias.

So any thoughts that you have please share and it's a now it's a great opportunity to share um and please have respectful and open-minded conversation. Okay. Now um I'll turn to back to Melissa to start to facilitate the first decision decision point. Was this one combined with um are these two combined? Are is this a part of the density conversation as well? Okay. So that this so we have two pre community conversation survey results here. Do you support increasing the housing supply?

We have strongly agree disagree and a few it neither. And then regarding support enhancing the current affordable housing incentive policy with additional regulatory and or financial incentives, we see um a little more in the category of agree neither agree or disagree and some that disagree and strongly disagree. Um so that's what we have coming in. These are the questions that Tiffany had asked. And let me just see where we Okay. So, I think we should maybe Okay.

I do you think we should include um the points that Tiffany made as we or should we have just the questions up? So, um Melissa, what we're really hoping that people will probably provide feedback on is so we've asked these questions in the past. Yeah. We've received a lot of different feedback um in a lot of different forums and through our different division uh section interviews. So we've staff the project team has prepared kind of what we think how to answer the questions.

And so what we're asking for everybody to comment on ask questions about is have we gotten it right and kind of we're starting to drill down the answers. Let us know if you kind of agree with where we're going if you don't agree more information that you might need. anything to help council um have that information that they need to make recommendations in August. Thank you. Wonderful. Thank you so much, Michelle. So, okay. So, that makes sense.

We have the thinking that Tiffany presented to us around each of these questions. So, the questions are three. Please feel free to answer one of them uh to pick any one of them or to, you know, address all of them. Again, we you'll have about 2 minutes and we'll be keeping time. There's 30 minutes for each discussion point. Um, okay. So, where and how should we increase density? Should by density increases be limited to areas where people tend to drive less?

And do we want to increase density allowances for only affordable housing projects or for all housing development? Um, okay. So, there was a question. What do you mean by drive less? Um, I'm going to turn that to Tiffany microphone right here. Um, so, you know, originally we had tried to identify areas of low VMT. Um, and our mapping didn't come out great great in terms of what that looked like or we didn't really feel like it was truly representative.

But the idea is in terms of limiting the high so the what the project management team has come back with is focusing those highest density projects things that you see like the jack like Fremont station the standard or even the smaller projects in between that aren't student housing that are um still of higher density wanting to see those along corridors that serve multiple modes of transportation transit bicycles pedestrians as well as vehicles.

So they have the full gamut and um focusing the highest level of density along those corridors and planning for it accordingly. This may mean that we have to create overlay zones. It may mean that we would reszone corridors um or specifically come up with transit oriented design standards. And just one thing I'll add really quickly.

Um in addition to everything that Tiffany said about the offerings of those services, um the city's travel data shows that in fact, yes, folks that live in the core of the city, folks that live in our higher density areas are driving less um significantly less actually. So it it sort of just follows that. Do we want to do more of that? The floor is open. Hi again, Mary Norton. Um, Tiffany, this probably might be for you to explain.

I had some concern about not being able to increase the density in the rural residential, estate residential since those are the areas that we do want to have some influence over. Could you explain um how the planned residential development a PRD affects that in these in in that issue because we see a lot of developments come through without a resoning under a PRD. Um is that to our advantage or to our disadvantage to not address um that and these zones? Sure.

So the plan residential development is really a tool to allow clustering. it. What it does is it allows you to take your density if it's one unit per acre. Um, but you don't have to create the oneacre lots. You can create much smaller lots. You could create 6,000 square foot lots or 10,000 square foot lots, but the remainder of your property is set aside as open space.

These types of things work really well when you've got a site that's got a lot of environmental constraints like slopes and forest and those types of things, things you're really trying to preserve. In a lot of ways lately, we've used it as a tool to preserve land for more density in the future. Um, by not losing out when maybe a developer wants to not go through the resoning, they need development to move along.

Um, it it has also served that function as sort of a way to um not end up with oneacre lots which at the end of the day will not ultimately serve the needs of this community. But plan residential development may not be necessary as we look towards trueing up our codes in terms of density and lot sizes overall.

Um but right now we do have a tool to allow uh these rural residential zone properties to develop under the PRD which again allows that cluster allows them to create smaller lots and set aside more land as open space. My name is Celia Barretts. My question actually is for Tiffany.

Tiffany, can you help me understand the relationship between this process and these specific questions and the regional plan growth illustration map and the land use categories that are being discussed because I was under the impression that the the regional plan comes first and then the code changes. as far as density as an example would follow. So they are consistent with the land use categories in the land use the land the land use growth illustration map. Yes, thank you so much.

Um so yes, we are looking to partner with the regional plan to ensure that the densities called out in the regional plan will be um implemented through these density changes. Um you know we're we we're partners in everything we do. So uh clearly um regional planning staff is looking at what is being projected in the last and cap project to understand and how to set what those densities would be.

Um and I get to watch that eagle watchful eye to make sure that we could implement our zoning code in such a way because we do have to be in conformance with our regional plan. My name is Charity Lee. I represent Capstone Homes and um we're one of the largest land holders in Flagstaff. We do have um a number of acres that are zoned rural residential.

So I'm curious um when you have a comment on here about recalc calibrating the um zoning code um density minimums, what are you looking at as far as a minimum for the rural residential zone? So there's no minimum for the rural residential zone. Now, there's a maximum of one unit per acre and that's the proposal right now in the code analysis um document is that we don't change the density for rural residential. If we were to change that, we would just turn it into the R1 zone.

Do you have a timing on when that would be when we would be changing the densities to the R1 zone you mentioned? Oh, so I mean I think the the point of rural residential is we would hope to see those properties reszoned in the future either by the election of the developer or potentially through um a larger planning process. Good morning. Bryce Dodie. I'm the real estate manager for the city of Flagstaff.

I had I just wanted to talk a little bit more about why we're accepting rural residential and estate residential. just kind of walk us through the pros and cons of that because I know there was some um comments earlier about these large tracks are already being taken down. If we want more density, they'll have to go through our resoning process. We know that needs to change. It seems like it could just be easier just to allow increased density on them. Sure.

Uh so rural, like I said, rural residential and estate residential are really that one acre. They tend to be in areas and I will tell you honestly rural residential we've always looked at it as a holding zone. Um there is actually an old definition in the code that even sort of refers to it as a holding zone as areas that were we intended to see reszoned in accordance with the regional plan.

So RR and ER don't typically meet any of the land use classifications within our regional plan which is our general plan. So when you think about the the the zones that we have, we have rural residential, we have estate residential, we have residential single family, then we jump to medium density and then high density.

As we're talking about changing the densities, for example, this particular document recommends on the low end to change R1, which is residential single family, from a maximum of six to a maximum of 10. If we do that and we move that mark, where would we likely move R? Well, we're going to likely move RR to six, which is where we were before. So, we will end up in exactly where we are, not getting the density we're looking for.

Um, because we will take what is the most available land supply and still keep it at that lower density of six units an acre, which I agree is better than one. But if we will lose that enticement to see folks reszone properties even higher or to consider mixed projects or to have that analysis done in terms of our regional plan. Can you hear me? Okay. Duffy Westimer. Um I just want to make a couple of comments.

one, not all R1 areas are the same and that that needs to be taken into consideration because zoning is really complicated, especially when places develop over time. So, if you look at the World War II production housing along Route 66 in East Flag, it's very different than continental. So, things need to be adjusted for context.

Um, and then the other thing I'd like to comment on about the density allowances for affordable housing, uh, I think that we need to look at temporary affordable housing and permanent affordable housing. Those are two different things and that needs to be taken into consideration. Thanks, Rick Lopez.

Again, just to follow up on what Dusty just said, I think we need to have a a a clear definition and distinction between by what we mean by affordable housing because affordable housing for rentals uh is one thing. That same term for home ownership is very different. Uh, and when we live in a community where the average sale price of a home inside the city limits of Flagstaff was in excess of $900,000, I don't think that's affordable under any definition you can probably come up with.

So, I think we need to really distinguish between rental and home ownership when we're talking about affordable or maybe attainable housing. Righty. Um, I'm David Haywood. I am a real estate developer among many other things. Um, I think you asked us a question, right? So, I'm gonna try and answer your question. Um, which puts me in the uncomfortable position as a as a real estate developer. I spend most of my time uh disagreeing with the planning stuff.

So, this is awkward that I have to say yes um to everything that you've suggested. Um I think this is the right direction um uh for for for the community um in answering you know the question that you've you've put put in front of us. I think it keeps things uh relatively simple. Um I think it recognizes um the you know the specific issues that we have in Flagstaff.

Um uh and I think at the end of the day, you know, as Michelle pointed out at the beginning, you guys have spent two and a half years um working on this. Um that's, you know, what a thousand times more than most of us have. So, if this is your advice, I I think we should follow it. Thank you. Hello, beautiful people.

My name is Gracie Martinez and I'm a city management intern at the city of Flagstaff, but I also serve as vice president of civic affairs at NAU ASNAU and that's NA student government. I wanted to just bring a different perspective up in this conversation and I thought this was the best time to do it. um relating to affordable housing here in Flagstaff. I was probably the reason why there's a little s sliver on the student housing being the vulnerable population.

But I just wanted to share my experience within housing. I was in student housing my freshman year and then as I went into my sophomore year at NAU, they were admitting too many freshmen. there wasn't really any student housing available on campus and then housing off of campus was just way too expensive for me and I'm originally from Paige Arizona. So in my head I was like okay well I can't afford anything.

No one can help me but I really still want an education and I still want to find my place here. So what I did was I went to Paige Arizona and I traveled once a week up here to go to one class per week and then all the rest of my classes were online. So, I made a commitment to travel up to Paige once a week to obtain my education. And I know other students don't have this opportunity to maybe have a car to travel like that. So, when that problem presents itself, that causes them to drop out.

And that's a really important part part of this conversation is we're having these students come up and wanting to be the change they want to see and wanting to have an influence on this community in a positive way, but they simply don't have the ability to stay here and get an education. So, I just wanted to bring that perspective to the table because it's really important and thank you so much for having this conversation today. Thank you. Thank you. Hi, this is um Hi, I'm Christine Shehy.

I'm on the um planning and zoning commission. I've been a planner in land development in both the private and public sector for 45 years in Arizona. And I do want to commend staff for looking at these issues because when you do development, it's a high risk business. And as far as the first question, I think we're heading in the right direction by um allowing increasing density in these zones.

I think we could push it a little further because if you think about some of the zoning cases, you still by statute are subject to um referendums um and three/arter votes through legal protests. So I if you're starting off with by right allowing certain densities, it's going to make the glide path a lot smoother to get to where you want.

I can see where the staff is struggling by putting those caps, but I think we should maybe have a little broader discussion on maybe making it a little bit easier. Hi, Charity Lee again with Capstone Homes. Um, I just wanted to circle back to the rural residential. Um, so if I misunderstood something, please jump in. But from what I'm understanding, you're not proposing a density increase on rural residential. But if you were, and you would go up to the next level, which would be R1, correct?

And I can tell you, I think that is a mistake to not do that with a rural residential. Um, for example, we have 325 acres in Juniper Point. if and and I'll tell you one of the things is is we don't like to go through reszones because they are very time consuming, extremely expensive and um if we have to go forward with a reszone um a lot of consideration is is there's a lot of consideration behind that before we even proceed.

If we were to just develop our 325 acres by right, we just get 325 units. But if we can increase the density to at least the R1, we're looking at over 1,900 units for the city of Flagstaff. So to bring those densities to and that's at a minimum. Um but to bring that to the city of Flagstaff when you're looking at a housing shortage is huge.

And so one of the things we are considering on a portion of that land is to resume uh reszone 95 acres of the 325 to bring multifamily and to look at um higher density product which would be about a thousand units. But on the southern portion, see Juniper Point is um biseected. We call it north and south and it's bisected by the wash and that's um uh so when we're looking at the south side and we're not considering necessarily a reszone on that and by right we'd only have 200 units.

If you could include the rural residential into the increased density then we could bring another 325 units. So total for Juniper Point could have about 1,400 units. So I'm asking you to consider that and include rural residential in this because that would make our my job a huge a lot less complicated because I wouldn't have to bring a reszone and we could start moving with construction right away. One of your goals is to bring housing um and increase the density within the next 10 years.

That's how you do it because if I have to go through a reszoning that's going to take 19 months just to get through the process that doesn't bring units to the um market quicker. Thank you. These are uh we have 7 minutes left for decision point one and then we will go into decision point two before lunch. Um yes we'll move to this side and we'll take so please. Uh hello. Can everyone hear me? Uh my name is Drew Stanley. I'm from the Arizona Students Association. I'm our NA campus organizer.

Um and my kind of question or comments was about the second point on there which is about you know density being limited in certain areas. And I I totally agree with that suggestion that it needs to be increased in all areas because, you know, for me at least, you know, one of the questions I get asked all the time, you know, from people when I'm talking to residents of Flagstaff is, do I plan to stay uh after college because I'm a junior at NA right now?

And the answer is always yes, if I can find like a place that I actually want to live and so especially that means public transportation for someone like me who doesn't want to go through the process of having a car. you know, I have a lot of family or I have a lot of people who, you know, I'm friends with or, you know, my fiance's brother, for example, um doesn't have a car and needs to have that public transportation access.

Um and so I feel like in places where people do drive, um uh more, you know, is or where people drive less is absolutely crucial uh for getting that public transportation involved. Um and I know that's kind of a little bit outside the scope of this conversation is about zoning obviously. Um, but one of our big things is, you know, accessibility for Mountain Line in particular. Uh, making sure that everyone can afford it. Um, so maybe making it a fair free process.

Um, you know, obviously increasing frequency and routes and all that kind of stuff is is so crucial. Um, and yeah, I I just I really hope that uh um you know, residences are built with public transportation in mind uh in the future. Thank you. Thank you. These are great. This is great feedback. Thank you. Thank you. Anthony Garcia, Flagstaff City Council. Again, speaking on my own valition today and here to tell my own story.

Um, so I have lived in Flagstaff my entire life as my family has for several generations. And um, I think some missing some context from this demographic, the one that I'm a part of and have been my whole life. I'm glad that finally it is not I'm not glad.

that it's double-edged sword that it's finally met um that affordability has finally met the middle class and affected them because now it's an issue that the city wants to deal with cuz when I was a kid growing up um it affected the low class and nobody seemed to care back then. So it's good that we're moving in the right direction for the right reasons.

But when we talk about density in our neighborhoods, uh much like to the point that I mentioned earlier how it was uh shown that density uh or that housing gets cheaper as time goes on. We're not seeing that now in Flagstaff. And also when we're building I live in the Sunnyside neighborhood. I hope I always live there. I have always been a renter. I will never own a house. That's not by choice. That's I wish I could own a house that had a backyard. That would be really cool.

If anybody has extra million bucks, I'm right here. Anyways, getting to the point of density. Density moving into the Sunnyside neighborhood is increasing rents. That's the bottom line. We have a wonderful one-bedroom and stu in single or what do you call that? Um where where you live in one room all together. What is that called? Studio. Studio. Yeah, studio and onebedroom housing project that's coming together. I'm pretty sure. Well, it's on Arrowhead and East Street right now.

very excited about that to come in because that'll increase the housing stock and that's really important, right?

Well, if those rents are more expensive than the onebedrooms and studios that are around there, it's just going to incentivize the people that want to put more dollars in their pockets to increase their rent because now it's okay because the development out the street that costed that much in this day and age to build, not out of greed, just out of economics, is now pushing the price of everything in that neighborhood.

And um I think it's a valid point, but I I also have concerns about it and and would like to have an answer within this plan on at what point will we start to see density make things more affordable for our working class? Because when we talk about people moving in or having to drive in to work, I work in an environment where uh most of our employees at a manufacturing outlet in town that that has about 100 employees or did it one time.

Um they they drive into work from Loop, from Winslow, from Williams, from further out than that. And um these are our our lowest uh they want to they want to work in Flagstaff, but they're getting paid too little to to really even survive. And I don't know how they're able to drive here every day to work. But if we're not looking at our lowest class folks or our workingclass individuals, then who are we really building houses for here? Thank you.

We um we received another 15 minutes for this topic because it's perhaps one of the mediest of the day. Um so we really encourage maximum participation. Please try to limit your comments to two minutes. And if you're thinking, oh, I want to speak, I want to speak, now's your chance. Um okay, so please to this side. Thank you, GMO Cortez. uh community members since 1984. Went to Cookanino, NAU. Uh moved away for a little bit, but glad to be back since 2000.

Uh I'm also one of your local civil engineers, so definitely I'm in the code all the time. Would love to talk to a lot of you. Uh, some of you have heard me on some soap box here and there, but um, Tiffany, I just want to make sure that either I'm not misinterpreting or others aren't misinterpreting the fact that it's not that we don't want to see rural residential and a state residential reszone. It's maybe just a like or a want to not reszone it just to R1.

You want to see a mixture, that's all. So, and it could include R1, but maybe some town homes and condos and everything else. So, I just want to make sure that I'm interpreting that correct and everybody hears that because when you read this up here, you kind of read as we do not want to reszone those. So, I just want to make sure that statement is clear. You have spoken to my soul, GMO. I'm done. Mic drop. Uh Nathan Smith, Flagstaff Strongtowns. Um tenure resident.

Uh I wanted to continue talking about rural and estate residential. Um just can you come a little closer to the microphone? Thank you. There we go. Yeah. Uh Flagstaff is a community at fire risk. Um, when I hear rural and estate residential, I think about the wildland and urban interface.

And I just wanted to make sure that as zoning conversations happen um about that portion of our community that fire risk is part of that conversation um that we're making sure that we reduce um the extent the wigglyness of the wildland interface um as we increase density in that area. I just want to follow up on that comment and let you know that I've officially been adopted into the fire department. They're going to make me a firefighter any day.

But um we work hand in hand and we are very aware of the issue and the problem and the concern and our fire department is very forward thinking. They're bothering us every day and it is with many thought towards that. Thank you. I was going to continue on the discussion of the rural residential and the R1. I mean certainly if if the default became R1, they can certainly reszone up from there to something higher density. So I I think there would still be that flexibility.

I mean what we're seeing and what the three years that I've spent on planning and zoning and the 35 years I spent in the development um industry with homebuilders is no, nobody wants to go through a resoning process. We don't see that many resonings um in these especially our green field spaces. So the higher density we can at least bump up at the base I think would be beneficial. They can certainly still reszone if they want a higher density than that.

Which leads me into just because we're increasing density doesn't mean we're going to get the product that we want. And how, and that might be a different discussion, but how do we get a product that is a smaller home with a smaller square footage that brings that cost and that affordability, that attainability down? Because if we have higher density, but we're still building 22,000 over 2,000 square feet in a unit that becomes very vertical, it the cost is still there.

Um, so wanted to bring up the issue of product choices and encouraging our developer partners to consider if the density increases, you get to build more units that you also consider smaller designed units. Thank you. My name is Michelle James, executive director of Friends of Flagstaff's Future. Um, Mary, you just stole a lot of what I was going to say.

Um I'm liking that we're looking at density in all areas, but we need to um think about that what's missing right now is our smaller homes, right, for the beginners and the middle class for the middle, you know, missing middle. So how do we it's great to allow density in all these places, but how do we get the product that we want? Um and Tiffany, we maybe will be talking about this when we talk about FAR um floor area ratio as a way to do that. Um, again, this is this is what's missing now.

People are building, you know, relatively small apartments and condos, but they cost half a million dollars. How do we get smaller homes that cost less? And um I was just at uh the Strongtowns National Gathering um this week and they talk a lot about uh working with the developers who who build in that size range and that smaller size range. So, not the not mere monte or something, but work with builders locally.

The city can can encourage that and actually do a lot to help those builders and encourage those builders to stay in Flagstaff and to build that missing middle, I'll use that housing, less expensive housing that we need. Um, and I think that's all I want to say. The um floor area ratio decision point is next. So, we have another opportunity to talk about density. Um, please. Hi, Hillary from Symmetry. Again, I just wanted to touch on the RR and ER density issue again.

Um, in our 405 acres that we're looking to develop. I know I didn't want to go into specifics, but we are looking at a robust, you know, mix of uses on several, you know, like 22 different parcels. Um, some of those will include, you know, town homes and condos. Um, some of them will include single family homes.

um if the single family parcels could move forward on those RR parcels with higher densities higher than one acre and we didn't have to go through the reszone process on those acres and we could get moving on those houses quicker and the city of Flagstaff could have houses on the ground easier without including those parcels in the reszone. we could have houses up a lot faster and we wouldn't have to include those in the reszone.

We know we're going to have to reszone the townhouse parcels and we're totally willing to do that and you know we're moving forward with those reszones. Um, but I'm just saying like on the larger parcels, if we don't have to move forward on those reszones, that would be super helpful. And I know Capstone has parcels like that that they would like to move forward on and the city of Flag Staff could have houses on the ground a lot sooner. Hello.

Uh, my name is Keith Becker and um I have it may be a topic, I don't know, but um my wife and I live in Sunnyside. We live in a trailer court, an old trailer, and our landlord's in his 90s. Won't be long before we're homeless, and we can't afford anything in this town. We have limited income, and I don't know if there's any such thing as affordable housing or affordable rent anymore.

Um, but that's something uh we really need to think about because we're probably not the only ones um that that are affected by this. Thank you. Yes, I think that this is going to come back up too. They Thank you. This is great. The um great to see people that haven't spoke yet spoken yet. So, yeah, we really encourage you to share your voice. Thank you so much. Um, and yeah, we have about um, well, I think about another 10 minutes on this topic, please. My name is Tom Pearson.

I'm with Flag Staff. First, wanted to follow up on the comment about fire danger in town. Uh there was a recent presentation by uh insurance uh experts to the county supervisors uh in which the comment was made that Flag Staff is in the 96th percentile nationwide for fire wildfire risk. Um a significant part of that risk is a result of our resource protection overlay which requires 50% of trees to remain on property.

The forest canopy in Flagstaff is extremely dense and that contributes to our wildfire risk and uh we this is one of these unintended consequences that was mentioned earlier. We really need to do something to reduce the density of trees in Flag Staff so that this risk is not as severe as it is. that has a direct cost or a direct effect on the cost of housing and rentals. We're paying higher insurance rates if we can get insurance. Thank you. Please.

Hello, my name is Devana Mclofflin with Housing Solutions of Northern Arizona. I have two questions. One has to do with the third question about in allowing density bonuses for affordable housing versus all housing. And I'm not sure what improving the effectiveness of density bonuses for affordable housing actually means and what that results in so that developers actually use whatever the heck that difference is to create affordable housing.

So I think the devil might be in the details there to see what effectiveness is and what the strategy is to see if it's then utilized. So that's a question. And then my other question has to do with increasing density maximums. I I support I think we need to do it across the city for all housing to in increase housing supply. My understanding is we're not hitting our maximums now. So I'm wondering if once again the devil's in the details.

If we go from six units per acre to 10 units per acre, but we can't get there because of all of these other requirements. Um this is the first domino to fall. Are we collectively supportive of higher density? But then I think the hard questions come when we have to figure out how we get that higher density.

And I'm guessing those will come next, but I just want to say out loud, even if we increase the density allowed in these zoning districts, I don't think we get them unless we make some additional harder choices. So, um, yay density. Um, but, um, I I just want to make sure we can get there. So, thank you. I So, we have this noted. I we know you asked a question.

Um, but I just want to point out too this mix of like fine details, questions, stories, um, the concerns of across different levels is really rich and just what we're looking for. So, um, this is going really well. Thank you. Yeah, I just want to say that, um, oh, I'm Ann Whitney. I've lived here for 35 years. So, even though I considered my house barely affordable at 125,000 35 years ago. Um, it's a good thing I bought it then because there's no way I could afford it now.

Um, but also back then my house stayed at the same value for like the first 15 years because there were still open lots available. Fox Lair was still being built on and that was the outlet to prevent the super increase in prices. So yeah, if we allow it to be easier to build here, that should decrease um the rise in prices. I don't know if it'll ever um decrease the price. Um, but also speaking to the fire danger, um, I live in Fox Glenn, which I picked because there were not pine trees.

I wanted deciduous trees because they don't burn so easily and they also don't create all the ice on the ground in the winter. Um, the sun gets through to melt the ice. So um I don't know if we want to make maybe move more toward deciduous trees in this town.

Um if we right now all the development is in the forested areas and there are some countries where they actually develop in the less agriculturally prime areas to to leave the desire the nice forests or the nice farmlands or whatever as what they wanted. So maybe we want to think about moving our town eastwise into the desert or something where fire hazard is less and I think we have the water supply even out there but uh anyway my really nice diversity of comments. Thank you.

I just wanted to uh introduce myself, Scott Roberts with Robert's Communities. We ended up uh purchasing the state land off of Woody Mountain. It's 521 acres. Um and we've had a great experience of working right now with the city staff. I just want to go on the record. Um we're going to do our very best to not go by right.

we're going to be I'm naive enough to think that we can actually reszone this property and I'm going to um hopefully prove a lot of naysayers wrong that we can accomplish it and I love all of the conversations that have gone uh through and I know it's a uh it's going to be a it's going to be a process but we're looking uh forward to it and we are we're desperately rooted for 55 years in creating attainable housing and we're planning on doing that with a mixed use mixed income um community.

I think one thing we'll have to think about with especially our property, but others is things that when you trigger a certain density, the off-site infrastructure that it's going to cost to be able to do that, sometimes it would cause you to not trigger um a certain density.

We obviously have a unique um situation where we have a um a bridge that we have to cross on Woody Mountain and that's going to be a costly regional plan and um could prevent us from getting the maximum density that I think would really impact the community and um I just look forward to hopefully if anyone else has got any creative solutions on that or in future conversations coming up with solutions.

But um we've really felt welcome here and we really look forward to working with all the staff and everybody else in the uh city to make this project a success. Thank you. Thank you. Um okay, so we have time for two more comments. Um we'll start over here and then one more here before we break. Well, mine is short. Duffy West Hammer again and um I'm hearing large acreage development being proposed and discussed.

I would like to invite and challenge those large property owners to offer to put in meaningful parks in those areas. You're talking about a lot of housing. We're talking about quality of life and all sorts of things. And much of the parks that have been created in Flex are because people donated that land to our community. And so I'd like to invite and challenge these guys to outdo each other to put in really great parks in these large tracks of land. Thank you. Q please.

[Music] My name is Louise Kusinger. I've been a resident here most of my life. I was born across across the river from um Waki on the Aaho reservation. And my problem is, yes, I'm blind, but um where we live, my neighborhood don't clean their yard. We clean ours, but what's the point? We've cleaned it, but when a a fire comes up, we're still going to get consumed.

So, um, is if there was some way we could get, um, high school kids or something that, you know, they're just temporary jobs that they can clean people, the alleyways, uh, cut down the elms that are coming up everywhere. I'm always tripping over them and I'm just concerned about I live in East Flag, but I worry about the whole town. I've seen the mountains burn down in in the 80s 78 and stuff and it it's it's heartbreaking. It has that that Mount Elden has become Mount Elden again.

Is still naked. So, and then people come in and leave their their um fires going and they leave their trash behind. I seen kids walking and even adults walking down the street and I will hit something and then I was what did I just hit? and you look closer like it's a piece of a bottle, empty bottle or something from the store that they ate some and then they just drop it to the ground. Um sometimes I take a bag with me and pick them up.

But and then I start thinking they might think I'm the bag lady on the road coming around if if they're thinking I wonder if she's found anything to eat in there. But that's that's my concern is that I live by the Cookanino High School and the surrounding the Cookanino High School. There's high grass and they go dormant and and they're standing there. They finish their blooming and we don't clean them up. Um, so what are we talking about?

Fire conditions, but nobody cares to to put their two cents and got bend over as part of exercise. area uh grocery bag, pick up some trash, and I noticed that the city has taken away a whole lot of trash can trash barrels. Now I have to bring bring it all the way home, put it in my trash barrel. I'm going to I'm sorry to interrupt you, but we are at the 12:15 mark. Um and we do have a really tight schedule today. So, thank you for your comments.

we can put those in the safer later bucket um and definitely keep it into consideration. Uh lunch is ready. So, we're going to change the agenda a little bit. We're going to um take a half hour for lunch, come back at 1:15. Um so, you get lunch early, but you have to come back early. 1:15 and then we're going to start with um decision point two. Okay, I'm lying. 12:45. 12:45 Good morning. I am allowed. [Music] Let me get Christmas. I was like, I rather be cute. comments.

Joe I love how there's always something else to consider, right? Yeah, that's good. [Music] Well, come visit anytime. We're in there now. opens on Monday. It's open to the public now. Thank you. Fantastic. The staff are very happy customers. So, our our contractor, they still had equipment because they were doing a few final things. So, we hope the public doesn't realize it's open because we've only had small trickles of customers this week.

what you said too open a little [Music] reach out to you to help us do an economic impact statement for construction and operations of that go to DC and say we want more Yes. Yeah. All right. Okay. [Music] Would you Imagine [Music] I like that one. Hello. [Applause] I can see. [Music] There's something there. Friday. I have registered. Hello. [Music] What's that? No, that's I think I'm just [Music] It's crazy. [Music] I don't know about summer. in the next Is it cold? something else.

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This is Oh, you already Awesome. We're gonna get back in two minutes. One minute. One minute. One minute. Okay, we'll get started in one minute. [Music] Perfect. [Music] coming. [Music] [Applause] Okay, I hope everyone had a good lunch. Uh we are now at 105. Uh let's get started for this afternoon session. If you need to get more food, grab more food and seats. Um since I I think it's it's very nice weather outside and the room is cold that give us a lot of energy.

So we are going to skip the post-launch energizer activity and we'll um start off with our decision point. Nobody can hear nobody can hear right now. Hello everybody. Welcome back from lunch. I'm going to ask that everybody sit down. Thank you. Hello. Good afternoon. Is this Oh, okay. Testing. Testing. Hi Hi, can you feel can hear better? Okay, good. Good. Welcome back. Hope you all had a good lunch and get energized from some the sun outside and also from this cold room. Keep your awake.

Uh we will start off the this afternoon with our decision point two. Uh before that uh I'll uh restate uh the ground rule of this 2 minutes feedback. This limit your feedback time to two minutes and our note taker will keep the time and if you are over two minutes and she'll get up and signal. So please respect each other's time and also we try to get as many feedback as as possible. Um and also we have a new uh rule that uh to get more efficient feedback we'll do a poll for each decision point.

uh we'll do uh I love it and I can live with it and I have concern about it and we welcome people from this different group to speak. Um so next I'll turn to Tiffany to uh talk about the context for this point too. The best topic after lunch is floor area ratio. Um, the hardest thing in the world to explain is what floor area ratio is. And I'm going to make an attempt. And if you still don't get it, don't feel bad because I don't think most people do.

Um, but the idea here is, do you support managing the intensity of residential land uses with floor area ratio caps? A long time a co long time ago, our code did have floor area ratios for all of the zoning districts. Currently um in residential zones we rely on what is lock coverage.

So I'm just going to try to explain what floor area ratio is and it is a regulatory tool that regulates development intensity by limiting the amount of usable floor space that can be built on a given lot or of land relative to the lot size. So what it's really regulating is the size of the building on the lot that it's going on, right? Whether that building is four stories tall or one story tall, it doesn't make you build up. It doesn't make you build low.

It just limits the overall size of the building that you can have. F has always been thought as a way to regulate density. Right? So, we talked about density earlier. We talked about the fact that we treat a onebedroom unit the same as we treat a five-bedroom unit. What adding floor area ratio has the potential to do is to um still allow the same amount of building or density, right? So, we increase the density numbers.

Now, we want you to hit, you know, you can go to 80 units an acre, but your floor area ratio is capped so that you have to as a developer think wisely how you're going to use the usable building area you have. So, let's let's think about this. On a 10,000 square foot parcel, if your floor area ratio is 0.5, that's a 5,000 foot building. Okay? Whether it's one story, two stories, four stories, it's a 5,000t building. That's all you can build. In that 5,000 foot building, you can have five units.

Well, if you take five uh uh if you take a 5,000t building divided by five units, that's a,000 square foot per unit. You are not putting a five- bedroomedroom apartment in a thousand square feet. So, as a developer, you have to think wisely about how you're going to well, maybe you could put a five bedroom, but maybe not a desirable one. The the point being is is that the floor area ratio encourages the range of units, right?

It makes you think more desiraably about or makes you think more about what those unit sizes could be. So, of the feedback we already heard, right, we want some entry-level homes. The idea is is that smaller homes can be entry-level homes. So, floor area ratio is one of those things that could be used. Tada. Oh, there's a couple of other feedback comments.

uh waterer felt that floor area ratio may lead to a smaller building footprint that takes up less lot area and could potentially increase water needs for landscaping. Public works if F leads to more space for landscaping on a lot. Um could that additional area be used for snow snow? Pros supportive of this tool to ensure that density can be used to preserve natural areas. And here's the proposal from the project team. Yes, add F caps, but calibrate them by zone.

Make sure that we're not preventing development as a whole, that we're not overly restricting density that we just allowed on the other end. But also evaluate how lot coverage and F might work in some zones. Maybe we get rid of lot coverage. Maybe we don't need lot coverage. Maybe we still do. We would need to work that out and vet it. Uh consider calibrating the floor area ratio and lot coverage differently for large and small parcels.

Um, the one unique thing that that I hope you saw in those re or those zoning maps earlier, especially when you look at medium density and highdensity residential is those zones specifically, they're on tiny parcels like 6,000 foot parcels, but they're also on big parcels where you see apartment complexes. So, people clearly don't build apartment complexes on a 6,000 foot lot. So, how that zoning category works for the large and the small lots is also really important.

and we want to make sure we think that through. Consider also how floor area ratio works in conjunction with that maximum bedroom density. So, we did build into the code a density requirement for bedrooms. Uh we do need to rethink that and recalibrate it as we change the density levels. Uh right now, if you do 29 units an acre, you're limited to 72.5 bedrooms an acre. What that equates to is 2 and a half bedrooms per unit for 29. That's 29 * 2 and a half gets you 72.5.

And that's where that comes up with because somehow we think that 2.5 is the right magical size of a unit. I don't know. Uh I don't know what a half of the bedroom is anyway. But that there's the end point of that. So I will hand this over and so interested in the conversation. Here is the feedback we got from the survey.

Uh the survey question is a little different but uh it's do you support managing the footprint of residential land uses with F and we can see that um the the biggest proportion of people said agree and the next is neither agree or disagree. Um but also there's a a more than 10% people responded with strongly disagree. Um so next is conversation time. Um so we are going to do our poll.

I'm I'm going to do one by one um to read read aloud the city's uh proposal and have people to raise your hand and after that we'll have people to come to the microphone and speak. Um so I'll start with the general question. Do you support managing the intensity of residential land uses with F caps? Um who people who love it, please raise your hand. Okay, we have a couple a few. Uh thank you from the city. Um okay, I can uh I can live with it right a fair amount. Uh I have concerns about it.

Oh, it's similar to I can live with it. Right. I hope those people who uh who didn't vote could uh come up and speak. What do you think? Um okay. So yes, add uh F caps and calibrate by zone. Love it. No one a couple. Uh I can live with it. Oh, there's more. Uh I have concerns about it. All right. Um, evaluate how lot coverage and f may work together in some zones. Um, love it. Nobody u visits very few and I I have concerns. Yeah, we we would love to hear your concerns uh later.

So, consider calibrating F and lot coverage differently for large and small parcels. Love it. Great. More people um uh I can live with it. P similar amount uh have concerns. Feels like it's quite equally distilled among those. Okay. The last one consider how F works in conjunction with maximum bedroom density per acre to very high density developments. Love it. Very few. and can leave visits, right? Um how concerns? Okay. Yeah, we can't wait to hear your feedback, especially your concerns.

Okay, let's uh start. Um please line up uh behind the two microphones and then we can start the feedback. Yeah, I when you're asking us questions about the far caps, it's even after your explanation, it is such a nebulous concept. I'm still not exactly sure I understand what you're asking.

And plus, even if I say, I like this in concept, I like that in concept, uh there's still so much width of interpretation there that um I hate to think that you're taking our initial impression as a final guidance. Thank you. That's definitely a valid response because I'm also uh trying to figure out all those different um what the really entire there's so many into it. So anything from any aspects are welcome. Thank you. Yes, I'm Brian Bates, a longtime resident of Flagstaff.

I think this needs to be put into the context of what the community character is. Is it uh you know single homes and uh neighborhoods that you're looking at this? Are you looking at it from the aspect of of you know apartment places? Are you looking at it from a rural perspective? I don't have enough of a I don't have a full context of how this concept of floor area ratio is applied to different community structures. Thank you.

I don't know if Tiffany want to chime in and see explain those what's the thoughts behind this proposal. Sure. Um so overall when uh we were having large mixeduse projects being developed the majority of the units within those mixeduse projects were five bedrooms five bathrooms and there was a lot of community conversation.

We developed a high occupancy housing plan and uh we came up with zoning code and the whole part of that zoning code is intended to get uh a distribution of units throughout a project especially when they're very high density. So that's one reason to consider F in those scenarios is for a developer then to be able to more um adapt their project based on how they see their the market to sell their product. Right? So what it's really trying to do is develop intensity.

Maybe you do 25% less units if you want all five bedrooms or if you want the full range of units, maybe you have a lot more studios and one bedrooms, right? So, we've gotten feedback that some of the multif family that we're developing doesn't have inclusive units for everyone in the community. So, that's one part of it. The second part of it is some of the feedback that we've gotten are that the new single family homes that we are getting in the market are too big.

That they are not entrylevel homes. They're not starter homes. How can we encourage So that the the the question has been posed to us. How can we encourage the development of smaller homes? Well, this is one of those tools that could be used to develop smaller homes. We certainly do not have to use F, but making lots smaller will not guarantee that homes are smaller. So, we've already within our code parameters allowed for smaller lots.

We allow lots all the way down to 1,800 square ft and we are still not achieving the smaller units that we've received the feedback that folks are looking for. So, F is one of those things. And yes, there does need to be a variety in the type of housing and that's why we say calibrate. Um, I don't know what the answer is on necessarily how to make sure that we can still allow the large luxury luxury homes that people also want as well as as well as still achieve the smaller um starter homes.

So, this is just one tool to make it sort of a requirement to try to achieve those to address that community concern. Otherwise, um you know, we're open to suggestions on how else you think that we might be able to require developers to provide smaller homes. Um because I think that I'm sorry, Mary Norton. Um I think this is perhaps one of our only mechanisms to influence product type.

I don't I don't know what the other options are, but I'm very interested in having some mechanism to influence product type. I'm not sure that I'm comfortable that this would replace the HOH. Um, so I'd want to know more about about that as as well. Um, that was all I had to say. Thank you. Thanks for that explanation, Tiffany.

I guess I'd like to understand um just as an example and if you could explain uh Prescidio now I was around when that was developed and it was touted to be small homes but what ended up there was large homes on tiny lots with no backyards and uh small setbacks. So I want to understand why that happened um and how far could affect that. And I'm still not understanding and I don't know if anybody else is having this problem the bedroom unit issue vers and how far it could affect that.

If you could try and and one thing I suggest in the future uh for the um density we had all sorts of pictures this you know project on this street is this density and oh okay now we can see what that is. I think it would help for the FAR for you to have and you can even take those pictures that are used for the density and say this is the far there, right? Unfortunately, it's a lot harder to calculate FAR when a developer hasn't calculated it already.

So, for me to go back and recal because it's not something we currently require. I had the same thought last night and I was like, how can I start pulling all of this information up and recalculating FAR on these parcels? It was it just wasn't anything I could do. Um, and here's the thing is is that the FAR doesn't tell you how somebody adjusted the inside of the building, right? In terms of like what you see on the outside. I I could show you a building and say that's a 3.0 far.

But it but what's inside of that building, right? It's it it's it's this it is it it I get it. is a totally nebulous little planner piece of tool, but it's in relation to that feedback that we've um received over sort of the size of the units because so I like I one of the things I'm just going to say this, one of the things that I had at one point posed to the consultant was what if we looked at density different, right?

So instead of saying um you like a one bed or that all bedroom units are the same or all size of units are the same density, right? They all count as one dwelling unit. You looked at a studio or one-bedroom apartment as half a unit. It's it's kind of the same principle. And maybe I'm over complicating at this point. So I'm gonna um it's just really impossible to show F as a whole. Even when you see it on a site plan, it's just very difficult to show what it is.

It all it does is set the maximum size of the the over what the building itself can be where lot coverage we have lot coverage standards. So, if you live in our R1 zone, which a lot of people do, you have a lot coverage of 35%. So, your building can only cover 35% of whatever that lot area is. But alls we care about is that first floor. It doesn't take into account every other floor of development.

So, you could still build a 6,000 square foot house easily and still only cover 35% of a very small lot. So, right. So, what F does is it comes in and says, so F is 0.5 for example on a 10,000 foot lot. The maximum size of structure you're going to build is 5,000 square ft. Whether that's one story, two stories, three stories, whatever, it's a 5,000t building. So, if you're on a 2500 foot lot and your F is.5, you're building a 1,200T home on that lot. That's that's what that tool does, right?

It says you can't go over um if how it changes a bedroom. It's so it's really about changing up the intensity of how right so the smaller the the unit is, the smaller the house is, the fewer people generally live in that unit.

So if you're if you're a developer and you have so a local developer approached me and said, "Look, if you treated one-bedroom units uh differently than five bedroomedroom units, like if I could have uh 10 more units of one-bedroom units than fivebedroom units, I would build my whole project as one-bedroom units because I would make a lot more money with one-bedroom units, but I'd need to double what I have to compensate what I can make in fivebedroom units, right?

So, a lot of people are trying to see what pencils out in terms of dollars. What we're trying to do is build in a tool. So, increase density. If you increase the density numbers, but you add in tools like F, we're not trying to basically make it so that we're doubling down on the intensity of that development. we still want to manage what the intensity of that development is in the community.

So if so under your current zoning, if you could have uh 10 units and you built them all as two and a halfbedroom units um but then all of the sudden we change that and you could have 20 units and you built them all as five bedroomedroom units. There's a different intensity with that project. So, it's just trying it's just one of the tools to try to offset that. Um, it it could offset bedroom densities. It could be used in conjunction with bedroom densities as well, but there you go.

And maybe it's not the right tool either, and that's okay, too. And I'm trying my best to explain F after lunch. Thank you, Tiffany. I feel I'm more confused than ever because I uh I heard that um we try to increase density but f we try to put a cap.

is counterintuitive like how do we increase density but also put a cap to limit the uh the area but I also understand we have this uh lot coverage ratio and we we want this um the area to be small but we don't want this building get too slim and very tall so that's just my understanding after this so please go ahead hi I'm Ann Whiti been in town 35 years it sounds like you're trying to decrease McMansions and increase the number of bedrooms.

So, why don't you incorporate um I don't Yeah, I still don't understand if they are so Well, why can't you use square footage of the house? Is that in residential terms? Is that how many square feet it takes on the ground or that includes floor area, right? So two floors would would account you'd be basically the doing the F, right? Yes. You're basically explaining F. Okay.

So if you instead of using F which everybody finds confusing, use square footage of the house and the number of bedrooms that are in there, which will determine how many people can live there. Now granted, you can have McMansions with 20 bedrooms. Um, you know, or it could be turned into, you know, a really large family, which would be effectively lowcost housing for a really large family or it could become a condo or um, you know, multif family housing. Who knows?

But um it's you want to count the number of bedrooms because that really determines how many people you can fit in there. So include that in the um equation somewhere. Thank you. Um just so you know that the square footage work it's it's meant to be a ratio that varies based on the it's a you know zoning craziness. It well it's meant to scale. So the the cap would scale based on the size of your parcel. So, the bigger your parcel, the bigger the building you could build.

The smaller your parcel, the smaller the building you could build. Yep. Perfect. Have a maximum building height. We don't regulate floors, so we just go with maximum building height. Some people like really tall ceilings and some people are okay with 8 foot. Hi, my name is Chris McKibben. I'm a land planner with Suave. Uh I think a simple explanation for F just so everybody's kind of on the same page.

If you have a site, doesn't matter really how big, but let's say you have a site that's 10,000 square feet just because it's easy numbers and you have an F of one. Okay, that means 100% coverage on the whole entire site. You can build a building that is 10,000 square feet of area. Okay, that same F of one could be a building that's two stories of 5,000 square feet, right? So, they both still add up to 10,000 square ft total.

Or you could build a a building that's four stories of 2,500 ft because the total building still adds up to 10,000 square feet on that 10,000 square foot lot. Okay. So, it's really a ratio of the area of the building in relation to the site. Does that sort of clarify it? There's some easy diagrams online if you look where like an F of 0.5 is a onestory building on half the site right 50%. or that same 0.5 ratio is uh what would it be a twostory building on a quarter of the site. Right?

So as you go up your space on the ground of the building becomes smaller but your space of the land becomes bigger because it's a ratio. As you go up you're kind of taking away floor area from ground. That maybe make a little bit more sense. Thank you for the explanation.

Um, so my name is Zach Skelton and uh we did a walking tour of Townsite last weekend and um it's interesting to hear the conversations about densities and mass and these kinds of things because Townsite there are certain parcels that are 29 dwelling units per acre not legal to be built today. They feel right in their context. they feel good as the building that they are.

And so I guess my question or thought as it relates to FAR is we can almost use FAR to manage the size of the building and allow our densities to be even higher potentially because the FAR addresses how a building feels because of its mass a little more rather than dwelling units per acre. Um, yeah. Uh, Duffy would love to take you on a Townsite tour, but there's awesome density in Townsite, but it doesn't feel like the standard.

It doesn't feel like the Jack because those units are smaller and they fit their context. And I I think that's what we're trying to address with the FAR a little, but tell me if I'm wrong. So, it's great feedback. Thank you. So, Duffy West timer again. And um yes, towns site R1N area is already full of a mix of single family, small single family mostly and duplexes and apartment complexes.

But you get to a point where you can change the whole character of everything if the proportions of each type um move too far in any one direction. So it would be nice if that could be addressed. Um, I would also love to have um, well, I'll say a so people understand a 35% lot coverage sounds like not most of the lot is coverage. 35% lock coverage feels like 80% is the way I describe it. It's a lot. So, don't be fooled by that. And with FAR, and I'm not advocating for one over another.

I'm just saying but with FAR there are things that are not included in the calculation of floor area ratio like elevator shafts and things parking some of these things are not included. So as a building gets bigger and things like an elevator shaft are added the building proportionally gets bigger. So nothing is perfect nothing is simple but there are a lot of devils in the detail.

And I would just hope that with all of this, the areas that are already built get extra attention because there are families that live there and either don't want to move or can't move. And it's better to bring more people in through affordable housing programs and include them than to tear down what's there and have non-resident owners um have apartment buildings that can raise the rent whenever they want.

So all these things are extremely complex, but I think uh as a community we should really watch out for the areas that are built. Many are already sort of smaller homes on smaller lots and we should work to make those more affordable for more people who actually live here. Thanks. Yeah, thank you. I I think you'll have the point to the key of the the issue. Do we have more feedback? Okay, let's move on to the the third point. Okay, we're on to number three. Okay.

Um, this decision point is around um the the menu of sustainability options. Um, okay. So, the questions are, do you support creating a menu of sustainable design options for developers to choose from? Um, and should a wider menu of transportation demand management or TDM strategies be included in this menu? And again, Tiffany will provide us the context around this decision point. Hi, it's me again. Here we go. Uh, do you support creating a menu of sustainable design standards?

The project team says yes. Uh, develop a simple, understandable menu that focuses on most impactful design features while providing flexibility for developers to choose what works best. Why menus work great is because there are certain things that the state has preempted us from requiring outright. So for example, we cannot require a building to be all electric um in but we can include it in a menu of options.

So if your development is required to meet certain sustainable items on a point value, you could still elect to pick the the all electric building. Um so the having a menu allows us to include that broader array of sustainability improvements that go a lot farther towards meeting those overall goals. I think one of the uh clearest comments we got in this regard was do not water down the intent of what you're trying to accomplish.

And that would be our goal here is to make sure that this goal menu of items provide the most meaningful for meeting our carbon neutrality goals. Next up is should a wider menu of TDM strategies be included? And yes, right now we did talk a little bit earlier about how in our traffic impact analyses, we don't take into account um other modes of transportation. TDM specifically would allow us to um have developments obtain points for providing TDM. Let me say what TDM is.

Transportation demand management. What is transportation demand management? It is basically a way of trying to offset people from driving. it is providing other features in a building. For example, an employer may offer showers um as part of their employee restroom um so that people can shower before they start their day. If they've ridden their bike or walked or ran or roller skated or electric um scootered on their way and sweated on their way to work, they can take that shower.

Sorry, that was long and fun. But there are a whole series of way, but you know, it includes creating bike racks. Bike racks that are kept free. I mean the wor if you own a bike you know if you have an expensive bike putting it out leaving it in the elements attached to a bike rack is probably the worst thing you can do for it. So providing bike facilities that are safe secure and also keep them free from the constraints of weather.

Um those are small little things that a developer can do and add to a development that fall within the the TDM strategies. Thank you, Tiffany. Um, yeah, it sounds like we're getting to more of um the climate um points of we because we're here today discussing housing and climate. Um so I think is is that correct that we're entering more climate zone or not necessarily? Okay, so all the same. Um okay, so this was these were the results of of the survey.

Um so we have you know a mix regarding um sustainability design standards for develop for developers to choose from. Okay. So the we have two questions here and um with our polling. Do you support creating a menu of sustainable design standards for the base zoning code to choose from? Love it. can live with it. Have concerns. Okay. Uh we had we Yeah, I think that everybody can see it kind of mirrored our um preole. Okay. So, should a wider menu of TDM strategies be included? Love it.

Can live with it. um have concerns. Okay, about the same. So we open now for comments. We have 20 minutes left in this conversation. Hello, Tom Pearson again. Um continuing on the theme unintended consequences. Um it was mentioned um all electric homes was one of the goals although it couldn't be mandated.

Uh one of the uh one of the unintended consequences especially in Flagstaff's climate is the result of uh being in an allectric home especially if you're you're elderly like me or you have medical issues uh and it's the middle of winter like not last winter but previous winters or we have deep snow on the ground, we have icy roads uh limited mobility to get out and about and we have a power outage, an extended power outage.

Well, a power outage with in an all-electric home means no light, no heat, no cooking, and how long can you go that way? Uh and you say, "Well, we're not going to have a long-term power outage. We're also moving towards uh more uh renewable power. And what do we know about how power outages and renewable power? Remember just weeks ago, Spain and the Iberian Peninsula had a complete meltdown of their electric grid. They just went over 50% uh of uh m of renewable power in that area.

Renewable power is variable and unreliable makes so as we go more and more and we are going more and more to renewable power our grid becomes more vulnerable. So uh there's one unintended consequence. We're coming up on two minutes. Okay. An extended power outage is a problem. The same applies to transportation. We want to motivate both uh multimmodal transportation and narrower streets. Same situation, ice, snow in the winter times.

That means has anybody done studies yet on what the increased accident rate is going to be when we have multimodal transportation uh issues? We have this discussion point coming up. Okay. Um so if it's okay if Thank you very much. Uh, please. My name is Mary Mezer. I'm a retired school administrator and a member of the sustainability commission. Um, I think what's missing in this description is the notion of requirement for the uh living up to a standard in the base zone.

And what I mean by that is if someone's coming in to get a uh permission to build something, what number of things do they have to choose from? What's the penalty if they don't choose something? it it there's not a lot of clarity about that and I think that's kind of throwing some people off about what the point is behind this. It isn't just that they have to have five things from it or that they won't get a they won't get zoned etc. Thank you. Thank you. Very good feedback.

Great to hear from people that we haven't heard from yet. We really encourage your participation. Hi, Kate Mley. I'm with Metro Plan. We do transportation planning here in town. Um I like both of these items. Um, I did I had the privilege of helping project manage the new downtown connection center uh that just opened this week and I will tell you we wanted to do many sustainable things and we did but having the menu or ability to choose what fit that site made a lot of sense.

I think in our dream world we would have done everything but some sites aren't good for solar other sites are. So it's so dependent upon your property what works. I think giving developers the choice to pick and choose or the ability to pick and choose makes a lot of sense. Um, additionally, I think on the TDM one, uh, I think tying this to also off-site improvements, right? We heard about off-site improvements before and the impact that those will have.

And if we allow credit for development for the things that they're doing to get people out of cars to reduce those um, off-site impacts makes a lot of sense. We'll help get projects done. Thank you. Great feedback. Thank you. I'm Brian Bates again. In 1987, I built a two-story solar hogan and it has functioned very well. It's powered almost entirely by solar panels. Uh just recently, my wife and I built a solar adobe home and uh we have a battery packs that can store uh all of our electricity.

we can go probably four maybe five days even with our uh ADU. What I'm getting at is that if properly uh planned, it is viable for someone to have a home that is sustainable, that is providing water, heat during the winter. And if you don't want to get batteries, then I hear that Tesla is having a sale on theirs and you can pick some up very easily. Thank you. Great discussion points. Thank you, Eric. Hi, uh, Eric Nielsen, Northern Arizona University.

Um, I just had, I guess, a question clarification on the bullet on the option should have the greatest impact on climate and the smallest impact on cost. Can you stand closer to the microphone? So the smallest um the greatest impact on climate and the smallest impact on cost. What is there extra points that are given for things that are related to energy versus lowflow faucets for water? Is that kind of the what that point is getting at? Thanks for the question.

Uh Jenny Neman, sustainability office. So we're not there in the details yet. I I'm going to be completely honest. Um, but what we want to know, what we we know what we want to do. We want to be high impact without significantly adding to cost, right? We want to think about both upfront cost and cost operate. Um, and so we're going to think about that, all of that. Um, but we're not really at those details quite yet into what exactly gets more points, what you can do, etc.

Can I follow up on that? Of course. Uh so I I think what's really important then if we're still getting into the details is thinking about um total cost of ownership, right? And we know, you know, the rent is high, but are the utilities high, right? And and that's a a huge factor for low-income people being able to pay their utility bills. So if our developers are developing highly energyefficient, low monthly utility cost type new buildings, that's really critical in affordability.

And if we ignore that both, you know, on the code, but then also on how we're trying to incentivize developers to do that, um, we might get some really great water smart buildings um, that still stick people with really big natural resource u or, uh, utility bills like gas um, and and electricity. So I I think how you define kind of that uh, smallest impact on costs.

Uh and I would also I don't know if the development community or the realer community but there are lots of places around the world where that disclosure just like what are your HOA fees that everybody has to disclose what are the monthly costs of owning or renting a place and that will let the market shift what developers do because if you ask a real estate agent in town most of them will not tell you will not have the information about what your monthly ly utility bills will be if you're renting or buying.

Um, and that could be 20, 30, 40% of the cost of ownership. So, I think that's a huge economic lever that we have. Thank you. Thank you. Anybody else on this disc? Wonderful. And again, especially if we haven't heard from you, we really encourage you to share. Would love to hear from you. Please. Yeah. I I maybe I just didn't hear the answer and I just wonder if Tiffany can address.

So there's a menu but there's no requirement that they pick anything from it and I don't understand the point system. And then the other question I had is this TDM strategies an appropriate place to talk about creating bus routed subdivisions that would encourage buses to be within so much distance from people's homes or is this not the appropriate place to discuss that? Try really quick.

So, um, the idea here is is that there would be a base standard requirement for sustainability features in all developments, right? We're we're trying to achieve our housing and carbon neutrality goals. That's what we're here for. The suggestion is is that, you know, do you support those sustainability items being required as there being a menu of options, right? We see that as the ability for a developer to choose. I think Kate Moley said it great, right? Not all sites are great for solar.

Um so maybe solar is not an option for you at that location. Um you know water manage um water reduction measures of course are always highly vetted. Uh high efficiency um high efficiency um what yeah everything um all the things. I'm not getting tired at all yet.

Um so yes, let's just leave it at yes these would be required um okay um and so that is the absolute goal so is to make it a base level requirement on the TDM strategies transit is absolutely um part of TDM but what a developer can do in some instances right so in some instances maybe if transit's not available maybe that developer is opting to work with our transit company to find out how transit can and will serve the property in some instances when they're already served.

Um maybe they're providing bus passes for residents as an incentive for people who live there as an offset on their rent. Um and you know instead of getting a parking space, you're getting a bus pass. Um there's lots of way that ways that TDM strategies can work and they're pretty much endless. you. We have seven minutes left on this topic. Ah, well, I like the suggestion about uh mandating uh utility bill disclosure.

Um, and along that line, I was wondering if your high density housing requires separate meters on each housing unit because otherwise people use up their water uh since they're not paying the bill. Thank you. Great comments. Hi, Hillary from Symmetry again. I guess it wasn't clear that this was a requirement when we voted. So, I loved it when it was like an option. Um, fully support like where we can incorporating some of these items where it's a requirement that becomes a little sticky.

um like the last slide, the F and then layering sustainability things onto every project, it just becomes harder and harder and harder to develop. Um and I think like Shane's presentation this morning, we want to make development and density easier. Um all of these things make it harder and more expensive for us to develop. Um so that's just something to consider. um that you're just putting a lot more um conditions on development and on the developers. You charity Lee Capstone Homes.

Um I will echo what Hillary just said, but I will add to it as well. Um first of all, some of your questions and the way you're asking them are ambiguous and they're not clear on what you're really asking. I think when you're asking a question, you need to be very specific on what you're trying to get out because um I do not think there should be more regulations.

I think there should be less regulations to allow more development in Flagstaff and that would also um result in excuse me more affordable housing. Thank you. Thank you. Great perspectives. Thank you. Yes, please. Yeah, Mary Norton. Um, having worked on the marketing of homes, specifically um, in more recent years, the high efficiency homes, I can tell you from my experience that it made no different to a to a buyer whether a home was energy efficient or not.

Um, they really are interested in that base purchase price. That's what makes it affordable. That's what makes it uh, what they have to qualify for. I think some of these items can be parsed out in different ways. I think the what to do with waste and waste particularly should be flat out in our code um as a as a standard. Um a lot of the uh newer homes, newer buildings just by the nature of the way the industry has moved, they are energy efficient already.

They're already using all of those elements and building materials and etc. So I think we need to look at what are we really missing right now? What do we need to get that bump toward those climate neutrality goals and focus on that instead of um perhaps making a large menu where it's already included in the way things are built or elements that could be put into the code elsewhere and should be a requirement such as what to do with your building waste and things like that. Hi, I'm Gail Jackson.

I'm the president of Eona. We do regional economic development in the region and um all this talk about requirements. This is what we hear from developers all the time when they go to the city for a project. They aren't clear on what's required and what is a request.

So I think getting very clear on what sustainability standards are required needs to be presented upfront and we've had a lot of discussion today about you know the type of housing we want to see and when we add things like this um which are all great we would all love it increases the cost of a home at the end of the day and what we need to look at is how can we get more homes on the market quicker and it's already 40% higher for building cost and to build in Flagstaff.

So when we look at all of these little things that feel really good and that we all want to participate in some way, I feel we should give that to the consumer and let the consumer decide what they would like to see and take that away from the developer and that kind of a requirement. So thank you. Um okay so we have two minutes to spare but I think we can move on to the next decision point but boy this feedback from such a diverse um from such different perspectives is really valuable.

So um thank you all for your contributions. Decision point number four parking. Parking everybody's favorite topic. So, do you support moving forward with parking reductions? Should parking be left to the developer or the market to decide or should there be standards? Should on street parking be addressed in conjunction with reduced parking standards?

So, I'm going to give you the feedback we've got from other divisions, which includes people will vote with their feet and will eventually choose to live where the amount of parking or residential density suits them. Here, here. uh water and fire reduction in available parking may lead to increased illegal parking.

Fire ensure adequate parking is maintained to meet needs of development, particularly in areas with high tourist and non-resident activity to reduce obstructions to emergency response. Economic vitality. Consider realistic parking needs of tourists visiting certain areas. Uh here's your project team's proposal. Yes, reduce but don't eliminate on-site parking requirements. Reduce base parking requirements to one to one and a half spaces per unit.

More dramatic on-site parking reductions may be appropriate for transit oriented development located near the permanent transit network. Explore future on-site parking reductions once we have a better understanding of the impacts of all of the code changes, including reducing minimum on-site parking requirements. parking reductions are consistent or so a lot of these parking reductions that we're talking about are already consistent with state law.

So there are two um pieces of legislation that have recently been passed. The ADU law, which um requires each city to basically allow um both any property that has a single family home to have at least a detached and an attached. That means everybody can have two. Uh, and in some places if you're on an acre, you could have three if you commit one to affordable housing. Um, three accessory dwelling units. Uh, but we are not able to require on parking for those ADUs.

So, those ADUs can now be built without an additional parking space. Previously, we were required one for the ADU. We only allowed one ADU. Now, you can have two. No additional parking spaces are required. Middle housing is the next piece of legislation that we will be um working through code and should be to council by the end of this year. Um which basically we will be allowing middle housing types um up to a forplex.

So that's forplex, triplex, duplex, townhouse um everywhere that a single family home is permitted. Uh again, we would only be able to require one parking space per unit in those developments. So that is substantially different than from what we require today. Um so the state is already stepping in with mandates for how we are managing parking today and so it might be a consideration it might help in the consideration on this topic. Thank you Tiffany.

So um I'm going to share with you the um pre survey result. So as we can see it's most people strongly agree and uh so now it's time to do a poll here. Um do you support moving forward with parking reduction? Uh yes reduce don't eliminate on-site parking requirements. Love it. Oh, I see like half the more than half the room. Love it. And we can live with it. I have concerns. I would love to hear from you uh from different perspectives.

Um please line up and uh behind the microphone and uh give us your comments. Sorry, I know you're all tired of hearing from me, but um Charity with Capstone Homes, I think you should let the developer and the development um dictate how many parking spaces they need because on some of the projects in downtown Flagstaff um we've talked about this earlier. Um there were commercial buildings, multi-use buildings that were developed and they can't get um commercial uses because there's no parking.

So, I think that ultimately the developer and the development should decide. It shouldn't be dictated. Thank you. Hi, Christine Shehy um planning and zoning commission. I think we also need to think about some unintended consequences particularly with the state statutes that are now require not allowing the city to require parking. I live in a single family neighborhood and people across the street with no HOA, people across the street have five cars parked in the front yard.

Now, even though we have an ordinance that it restricts front yard parking, it's not enforced. So, there, you know, there's some stuff going on in these neighborhoods. Plus people park talk about in the wintertime they have no place to park these extra cars for people that are living in the homes their kids. So they park on the during the winter and when the plows came I thought well they'll probably sight them because they had a plow around them for two years they've just plowed around them.

So, I think we have to think about we do have ordinances that require certain things. They're not enforced. And why would we re why would we start reducing parking in certain situations only to cause more problems. Thank you. That's great po point. And we we'll have the winter parking in in our next decision points. Hi Hillary from Symmetry again. I think you should go even further just I I think parking requirements are antiquated.

I think that they, you know, cause, you know, huge parking strips instead of density. I think that, you know, the space could be used for something way more consequential like parks and open space. Um, you could go further. I think you're limiting yourself. Um, I think the developers will put in as much parking as they need and I think it's a lot less than you think that it is. Thank you. Hi, my name is Keith Becker. Um, what are you going to put in a half of a space?

Doesn't that that doesn't make sense to me. Anyway, um uh to afford a home these days, you need two income earners. um both income earners um rarely can get their work schedules uh to work together. So, you know, you're usually having two vehicles, one for each income earner. And in order to be able to get to work and come home from work and all that, you need a place to park both vehicles. So, I can tell you none of well, none of my vehicles would fit in half a space. Thank you. Uh, hi.

My name is Zach Skelton with Strongtown's Flagstaff. Um, you know, I I personally love French fries. I think they're really good. But I know not everybody loves French fries. And uh, if we went to any restaurant and every time you went to that restaurant, they gave you French fries. Whether or not you want French fries, we'd be upset. And we'd also be paying for those French fries as part of that meal that we purchased.

So, I want everyone to think about f uh this parking requirements rule the same way that you think about French fries in that my partner and I, we have one car, we share a car, that's a choice that we make. You might have five cars, that's a choice that that person makes. Mandating parking spaces doesn't make parking free. And it also spreads our town out. We don't go to downtown because there's tons of free parking.

We go to downtown because there's beautiful community and places that we want to walk and bike and experience and run into people and eat outside. I would love to be talking about parking maximums and I think that should be on the table. We make fun of New Scottdale because New Scottdale is built to be car centric. Um, and that's the REI complex. We make fun of the standard. The way the standard is built is because it's car centric.

We make fun of how much everything costs and in no small part that's because of our parking minimums. So just because you have a car doesn't mean everyone who lives in Flagstaff has a car or that those people should be subsidizing your car. Again, you can have a car, but I don't want to be forced to have a car. Thanks. That's great an analogy. Thank you. Please. Um, Anthony Garcia, Flagstaff citizen, also council member.

Um, so I did some quick math with some averages that I found on Google and we would require 21,000 square ft of parking to park what is in this room right now. So, something that freaked me out when I finally figured it out was like, let's just pretend this is 300 feet. It's a parking space that's required outside of my house, right? Well, when I go to work, I'm going to need another 300 square feet to be available for my car there.

Then when I go to work at the city hall, I'm going to need 300 more square feet. And then I'm if I go to the store, I'm going to need three. So now I have a space that's actually bigger than the house that I can't afford to pay my rent in. That has to be provided for my vehicle for free. But it's not free. Somebody has to pay for it.

So, when we think about parking requirements, let's think about who's paying for it, how we're getting it paid for, and also um think about how we're transporting ourselves through life. I drove a fivep passenger vehicle here by myself to get to here today. Imagine if we would have all died shared or something. We would have needed a far less um of that free space to park our vehicles. That's great. Thank you, Stephie Westimer. Again, um I think a lot about parking cuz I live downtown.

I've been a resident of Townsite for 37 years and um it's a natural laboratory for an area that was built with minimal parking that is filled with vehicles. Many are illegally parked. So, I think we have to be realistic. Parking is legal. People like to drive. It's convenient. Sometimes if you're working multiple jobs, you can't ride the bus. It's just not doable unless you where you work is right on a bus. I mean, we have to be realistic about it. My husband and I have one car.

We rarely use it, but we are the exception to the rule. I ride a bike and walk everywhere. I walked up the hill today and 20 vehicles of probably the people in this room passed me and only one had two people in it. It's just the reality. So, I don't think you can control people by getting rid of parking. I don't think people will necessarily ride the bus. I think we just need to be extremely realistic about this because there are long-term implications beyond any one of us in this room. Thanks.

That's that's great. Yes. So, I ended up visiting uh Washington, Montana, and uh Utah this past week and we went and saw basically traditional neighborhoods. It's kind of a new way or a new urbanism where they ended up really fighting the idea of everyone getting in their cars. And they designed communities where the amenities, the basic amenities for the community were easy easier for you to walk or for you to ride your bike to.

So, I think, you know, that's one way we're going to be designing our community. I hope hopefully um city staff and city council and everybody sees that there is a different way to design master plan communities that can embrace and reduce the need for cars. Another thing maybe somebody wants to write this down if it's won a lot of awards.

It's a multif family project in um Tempe called Culasac and it's 700 apartment units and I believe they have less than 50 car parking and they require that the residents now they have again they have the they have the um the transit right there and everything else but there's some middle ground and and really creative things that are coming from really creative designers that are changing things and there's also opportunity ities. Obviously, there's Uber, there's Whimo.

There's a lot of new technologies and there's a lot of opportunities. Um, a community that I visited in um um in outside of Atlanta, Georgia, they had shared cars that literally were parked for people to use and they checked them out like rental cars that people just went and used. And most the people in that community don't have cars because they can just borrow one of the cars, right, as being a member of the community.

Obviously, there's a little cost to it, but there's a lot of new things coming out. And so designing things the way things used to be um I think is um pretty short-sighted. So some middle ground would be great. Thank you. Love your constructive suggestions. Um good afternoon. My name is Paul Mood. I'm the city engineer but want to speak as a resident. Um I live in a newer built subdivision in Flagstaff and of 38 homes in our subdivision, I believe we're up to 10 short-term rentals now.

Um, personally, the house next to me is advertised as sleeping 16. So, there are often multiple cars that show up to six. So, our neighborhood has cars parking across sidewalks, cars parking in front of people's driveways. Um, we do, you know, submit reports to the um the city online, but it's a it's an issue. Um, so just think about when when we do have short-term rentals, the amount of parking that that they need.

Um, it affects it affects the uh the the full-time residents in the neighborhoods. Thank you for feedback. Hi. Hi, I'm Devon with Housing Solutions again. Um, I think this is a great compromise moving in the right direction. uh when we talked about density before and increasing density and wanting more density and wanting more units, how do you get it? And you got to take something away.

And if a lot of your development space is used by parking, you don't achieve the densities that we said we wanted three topics ago. And so I think we got to move in this direction. And I recognize there's probably going to be some unintended or consequences or things we don't love about it, but I we we we got to do something to get to the densities. This isn't saying it's uh free-for-all and it's the wild west and there's no parking.

It's reducing the requirements, which I think is a step in the right direction to try and mitigate some of the harm that could come from no parking. Um so I I do support this and I think it's great. I also think it'll help with adaptive reuse. I know we've tried to and successfully have redone some housing and commercial areas and if we had to park that like a residential development, there's no way that would have been feasible.

And so when I think about redevelopment downtown or um um adaptive reuse strategies or how we get um residential and commercial zoning districts, which I think we absolutely have to do, parking is sometimes a barrier. And so if we can move towards reducing that barrier, I support it. So thank you. Thank you. Um uh Kyle Nichki with the Arizona Students Association. Um really support the elimination of parking reductions.

I think a lot of the issues folks are having with this is really with the um enforcement of parking. Like when you have your five houses, like it's it's your house is zoned already with the parking minimums in mind and you're still having these parking issues. So eliminating our um you know with zoning doesn't eliminate parking, just eliminates this barrier to yada yada yada. And and we see really good enforcement at NA of like parking like those kids get towed and booted all the time.

So I think that's the conversation that we focus on here. Hi everyone, Amy Walawinsky, NAU Sustainability Commission. I think that right now during this conversation would be a really appropriate time to remind everybody of one of the points that Shane made this morning. He said that research shows that parking um like not no no no parking requirements is causal to less vehicles less vehicle ownership.

So um I think we stand to gain a lot in a lot of the problems might you know solve themselves based on what research shows um in other cities that don't have parking requirements. Thank you. That's great feedback. Uh please hi I'm David McIntyre. community investment director for the city and part of community investment is parking management. So that's always a a pretty exciting program to get to run.

Um and I am really uh supportive of the idea of reducing parking requirements and and for all the great reasons that we've talked about. The reason I I think for me it's more of a reduce don't eliminate everywhere is because what we need to have is infrastructure to handle existing situations while behaviors change.

And I can tell you councils recently received an email from somebody who had called Park Flag because their landlord does not provide parking and they have nowhere to put their car because downtown we don't have a residential permit and because the winter ordinance doesn't allow them to leave their car on the street overnight and we don't have an easy answer for some situations in town and because town is at times we need we need to figure out how to make that transition and so I think there's a lot of places where elimination is probably appropriate.

That's a part of behavior change. But I think the reason for me that reducing not eliminating allows for us to look at what's the inventory and the infrastructure in place for that neighborhood and say, well, well, where do the hundreds of people that already live there go if if if more building happens and there's not these things in place because we do have a fair number of places that um don't have the parking required already. And and that's great, right?

because hopefully those people are going to be the people who want to bike and walk. But I can tell you my parking manager hears calls all the time about people that just moved into their place and found out that they don't have a place to park their car and are very upset. So, um it's just part of our our function and I just wanted to put that point out there. Thank you, Mary Norton.

Um, I just want to say I'm I'm I have trouble with dealing with these next three points, parking, street width, and winter, without taking into account them in tandem. Because if we eliminate or reduce drastically our parking red our parking and we reduce our street size and we allow for winter parking, we're going to create ourselves a real mess. um with no parking anywhere for anybody, no ability to remove snow, things like that.

So, I can't I'm gonna have a real hard time as I weigh in and vote on each of these. Um homes without garages or parking are actually perfect for short-term rentals and second homes. So, please take into account, we want to grow this community and make it welcoming and sustainable for families and that does require some parking and garages. So, I think we need to remember that.

Also, we we're an island here and we leave this island sometimes, which means we have cars and we travel to to Phoenix or other states. And so, I I don't think we're going to get away without having cars for many of the residents here. And um also, people come here. we've got tourism and we're going to need places for people to park when it's a commercial area or shopping, things like that. So, I just want to throw those unintended consequences out.

I am happy that we're not uh proposing to eliminate that. We're just reducing that makes me a little more comfortable, but just want to bring up those points. Thank you. So, Michelle James uh Friends of Flagstaff's future um have lots of things going on in my head. What I would say is that by reducing parking, we're not getting rid of parking. That's still going to happen, right? And I think people look at this and they get fearful that there won't be parking. There will be parking.

Um it's just not going to be uh mandated at at this point a max, right, or a minimum of one to one and a half spaces per unit. One thing that Sacramento did that I just learned about recently is they changed that word maximum to minimum. Only change in the code. Just switch it to minimum. So they have to uh so did I just did I say that right? Other way. It's the other way. Sorry. Sorry about that. Obviously it's in the afternoon.

So um so the max could be one to one and a half unit or parking spaces per unit.

Um the other thing is that there are a lot of concerns and and some of what David said I think is is relevant but I think those things can be dealt with by curb management with the whole concept of curb management that can be done without having parking minimums and you can still address a lot of those concerns so that people who um live in a neighborhood uh would get a residential permit or something to park on the street.

We got to remember we do have on on street parking and that's supposed to be used for people to park, right? I think we've all just gotten used to uh parking in driveways and garages, right? But we have the on street parking.

I was just in um Providence, Rhode Island, and they do this amazing thing where they've got this big protected bike lane and then they have cars parked in basically the middle of the street and then another lane next to that so that the the bike lane is protected by the cars that are parking there and it narrows everything down and everybody travels more slowly. So, I think there's a lot of things we could do without having to require one to one and a half spaces per unit. Thank you.

We have nine minutes left for this discussion point. Uh, I'm just confused a little bit and thought, so I'd bring it to your attention. My name is Mary Mezer. Doesn't the state law just completely take out that first section? The state law says you can't require more than one parking space per unit. also says that your the cities can't require parking spaces for ADUs. Is that doesn't that make everything else moot ahead of that? I'm not even sure why we're having this discussion.

Do I not get that state law? That's just that's just for the accessory dwelling unit. And then the other is in regards to middle housing but of all of the projects we I mean this is also something that would apply not just to residential but also to potentially commercial development as well industrial development. Um this is something we would probably consider fundamentally across the the gamut. But um yeah the state is starting to mandate what we require in terms of parking.

Hi, Hillary again. Um, I was just going to throw out there if you wanted to eliminate a parking requirement, you could allow the developer when they came in with a development plan to submit a parking plan so that you knew, you know, they weren't going to have no parking, but like what their proposal was. So, in case of the, you know, sorry, I forget your official title, but you're the parking guy. You knew that there wouldn't be no parking, but you know that there would be a plan in place.

Hey, parking guy. Foots girl wants to hang out with you. What about having the option of uh instead of just a blanket uh you know one to one and a half spaces per unit um offer them the option of charging the units for their parking space.

So if they have 15 spaces for 10 units and the first 10 or the first five by 10 units because they have two cars, that means that they only have five units left for the last five and u and the uh person leasing or selling the condo or whatever has to figure out how to make that work if they want to sell their condos. That's good. Good suggestions. Do we have more feedback? Okay, thank you for all your great uh comments. Let's move on to the next decision. Oh, I'm sorry.

Uh we still have yeah about five minutes for this. Hey everyone, my name is Cameron Carlson. Um I'm on the sustainability commission with Flagstaff. Uh but here my own personal capacity. Um and so my views don't represent my my views don't represent the the commission. Um, so I'm I've been mostly in support of a lot of things that have been proposed, but I don't think this one goes far enough as well along with what some of the representatives of the developers have said.

I think we need to have more of an open option um kind of parking uh kind of requirement. Um, and maybe even maximums. We have we have all these oversized parking lots at like, you know, Walmarts and and Targets and stuff and and they're just like it it takes that much more space for housing um for our community. You know, you have a say 150 square foot parking space. Well, bedrooms probably around that same size.

So, it's like every space we give towards parking, we're taking from housing for the community. We have a housing crisis, like uh Shane said, not a parking crisis. So, um, and a couple other thoughts is like this is the most multimodal town I've ever lived in. And it's been amazing to have the option to like bike and walk somewhere and that it feels like that we can actually make that choice.

And honestly, if parking was pricier or if there was less option to park, we would probably bike even more. So, it's like there's a lot of a lot of incentive to reduce um our our parking requirements even on the sustainability side as well. Like we have urban heat island problems with more asphalt. We have drainage and flooding problems with more asphalt.

Um it's I don't know parking it's such a mundane subject and there's so much to it and I think we need to be uh we need to have the courage to go even further on this topic. Thanks. Yeah. Thank you. I could I just I'm switching. Yeah, we still have three minutes for this decision point.

So I I I agree I think with the the comments and I am kind of interested in terms of the development community and the idea of like no requirements, you know, but could that create again another unintended consequence of, you know, you make more money off of the maybe the market wants the the living space, not the parking space. I just not sure how we get a socially optimal way not having any kind of minimum or maximum the way that you've got it.

But I think the intent of red reduction is really important. And just to build off the last comment, um if you haven't read the book um how parking paving paradise, how parking explains the world um which came out a couple years ago says the country US builds more threecar garages than one-bedroom apartments. More square footage is dedicated to parking each car than to housing each person. By some estimates, there are as many as six parking spaces for every car to what Anthony was saying.

Uh meaning that our national parking stock is never more than 17% occupied. So perception versus reality is real. And I think being strategic about this is really important to build a multimotal community and reduce the cost to developers of buildings who are not wasting space on parking spots. Thanks. Thank you. Oh, we have maybe one more. I'll be quick. Um, I don't don't want to blavorver the point, but I also support eliminating the parking minimums.

Um, because if there's demand for more parking, then people will put in more parking, but we'll only have the option to go without if it's legal. So, legalize not having parking. Okay, we still have Yeah. two minutes. Hi. Hi again. uh Hunter Abear with Downtown Business Alliance. So, um I've actually worked as a city planner before and I worked in the zoning department and I've reviewed tons of commercial plans uh for parking and landscaping and sorts of requirements.

And so, I've actually seen cases, well, I know we're mostly focusing on um residential units right now, but I've seen cases where um the developers build white boxes and they're not sure who the tenants are. So, we weren't really sure how to uh quantify how many parking spaces they would need. And so obviously a retail space is different from a restaurant space is different from a bar space. The calculations are all different.

So we've run into issues where uh you know we thought these four white block spaces were going to be retail. They ended up all being food service, right? So those are underparked and that was the requirement at the time. And so, um, it's just it's kind of a it's a hard thing to, uh, put a number on. And I think that the, uh, the private sector does a really good job of figuring out what they need. And at the end of the day, if they fail to provide enough parking, that's on them.

It's their real estate and it's expensive. And so having them require a lot of parking is a, you know, sometimes detrimental to their projects. And so if they want to take that risk, that's that's up to them. So, um, I'm definitely in favor of more of a parking maximum type approach.

and um you know reducing parking all across the board in our downtown for for new developments and that sort of thing because I've worked in several different downtowns and none of them have had any sort of parking regulations in the downtown. They're dense by nature and so um that the real estate is at a premium and so uh having that required to be parking creates a less dense downtown less walkable downtown less enjoyable. So a great point. Thank you. Okay, two more decision points to go.

Um, we're going to move on to number five and that is regarding reduced street widths. The question that this discussion will be around is do you support developing a strategy and outlining a process for creating a narrower local street design option? And um I will welcome Tiffany to provide us some context. Today could still be the best day of my life. Um I'm looking at you, fire chief. I'm just kidding.

Uh um I I do want to throw out there we do actually have some parking maximums, but what ups? Um, anyhoozles, uh, let's talk about reduced street widths. So, we've been talking about a lot of different things. Um, and reduced street widths can do a lot of really great things. They can slow traffic down. They And again, we're we're talking about residential streets. We're not talking about collectors or arterials.

Um, so we're talking about the streets we live on, the streets that we walk on every day. And reduced street sizes, we know, slow vehicles down. They make it more comfortable for bikes and pedestrians. They also make it more comfortable when you have children um on a a slow street. I happen to personally, since we're all sharing our personal I happen to live on a a very wide residential street, very very wide. Um, I have lived on that street for 21 years.

In the last year, I have new neighbors, six wonderful young men. I like to think that I'm just as young as them, and they're eventually going to invite me to a party at their house, but whatever. Um, exactly. Uh, so they definitely have six cars, not going to lie, they probably have more than six cars cuz they all have girlfriends. um they park on the street. It is a blessing.

It is an absolute blessing in my neighborhood because cars can't nail that road so fast anymore that it, you know, you're fearful going out of your driveway on your bicycle. So, um definitely there are definitely some good things to uh narrowing a street width. There are also some hardships um when narrowing a street width, right?

So, one of the more important things and one of the things I hope none of us ever have to experience is when an emergency vehicle approaches, you need that emergency vehicle to attend to you at your property. And in the worst case scenario, they can't get to you. Um, so that would be everybody's actual nightmare. So, we want to make sure that we balance the two. They're very important. Um, in that conversation is are we open to looking at smaller street widths? We know the benefits.

We also know the costs of it. Um, wider street widths also take up more space. If you take the time to look at the code um the code concepts report, then you'll see that it is possible to add density even in detach single family neighborhoods with smaller streets. Um, I will tell you that town homes are just the the starter home town homes are really just not feasible with the size of streets we currently have. So, our current street width standard is 57 ft wide.

What I have up on the screen is an alternative proposal. So, when you hear smaller street widths, I think people start to panic, right? There are always the people who are going to stand up and say 10 foot street is all we need. That's it. Um, and I and I hear it and I get there, but you know, there's definitely issues with just only 10 feet. I think here is a is a good starting point. We're talking about 54 feet, right? This is where we were about 6 years ago. It's a smaller reduction.

Um, this is a possibility. It still has the sidewalks. It still has the parkways. It has that 14oot travel lane and the parking on two sides.

it isn't the perfect scenario um for all what is not shown in this rightway is there's also uh what's it within that total rightway there's also a bench uh a bench on the back of the sidewalk um and usually that bench or that separation we have on the back of the sidewalk is included in the rideway uh in Timber Sky for example our engineering standard switched from 54 to 57 in the middle of that development we were able to save that existing design that we had by putting that bench in an easement.

Um, there are ways to solve the problem for both. So, but where is that comfortable level? Um, you know, I've already been surprised by the conversation we've had already on parking. I'm I'm surprised years ago it was it was much different than it is today. And I'm so happy and grateful to hear us come full circle. So, where are we now on the street with conversation?

Because you can drive around Flagstaff and you can drive on small streets and big streets and people have different levels of comfort. And yes, when people park on the street and the travel lane is much smaller, both cars can't always go by at the same time. You do have to stop and you and wait. And that is the point. That's the actual point of it is that you stop that you wait until it's clear for you to go and that might disrupt you in your movement for 30 seconds.

Um, so there are some uh there are some reasons. You know, there are people that want every street in front of their house to operate at the A level all day long, every day long. Um, and there's just not a reality to some of those things. So, what are we willing to do? This is an example of 54. In the code concepts report, it gives uh street sections for 48 and 42. We have street sections that are absolutely much smaller than that currently.

Um, but I know that there's other concerns that we need to be able to address. So, fire definitely code requires that 20 foot of unobstructed roadway. So, we need to get there. Um, we need to make sure that we have that for the fire department. So, where are the other gibs in those rightway sections? Uh what else? Um how else can we work to accommodate potentially having smaller streets to accommodate on street parking? Additional width is required. 26 to 32 feet.

32 feet plus allows for parking on both sides of the roadway. If a street includes a median, it must provide two unobstructed roadways, each 20 foot wide minimum to meet fire access requirements. And a street with no median can accommodate both directions of travel with a 60 with a single 20- foot unobstructed roadway without compromising emergency response or operations. Other feedback from public works okay with a 20- foot rideway if on street parking isn't included.

Concerns about reductions in residential street widths. Smaller roadways mean smaller equipment. It all has to fit. Trash cans, parking, snow storage, sidewalks. Um if a street is too narrow with on street parking then trash trucks can't get through plowing doesn't happen and only highway user uh her funds for street maintenance. Pay attention to funding sources and their limitations.

So oftent times when you would not meet city standards for street sections um you would accept that we would accept those as private streets and you the the developer or the homeowners association would be responsible for their maintenance here on out. Um, back in 2013, our zoning code changed and regardless if you want to do a public or private street, they need to meet um, our public street standards currently.

Uh there were I think instances where develop or homeowners associations were approaching the city to ask for maintenance of those roads because when we do do private roads um and they're smaller those are left to the maintenance of those homeowners association and over time that's an it's an additional cost to all of those homeowners to man manage and maintain. And we just talked about what the utility costs are. Imagine if you're also now maintaining uh the roadways as well.

Oh, I didn't mean to leave out pros. Pros, it is critical to think about parkways and how they are used for snow storage. And I think they're actually being a little polite here. Um because they they do some of the the toughest work in some of the tightest spaces. So if anybody knows um how tough snow storage is, it's our pros team. Uh so the project team support proposal is yes, we do support narrower street wits. We're also a group of planners housing and sustainability.

And of course, we're pro smaller streets, but you know, they reduce the car speeds and conflicts, provide more land for housing, and reduce the cost of development associated with building streets and losing land. At a minimum, we're proposing to reduce that current rideway at least 3 feet from 57 to 54. Hey, it's a start. Um, but maybe explore creative ways to reduce those street crosssections.

um potentially look at alternative street standards um as 48 or nar 48 feet or narrower for narrower for um attached single family. Um and we just need to be creative with how we preserve our also our historic downtown streets. We've struggled um getting in some development projects meet and meet still meeting the fire department aerial apparatus standards. So we definitely have um a very important downtown.

that's very important to our community character and so how can we keep those streets and still encourage new housing development within our downtown. Um, so this one we just don't have all of the answers yet. And um, but I guess the big question here is are you willing to at least explore the idea of it if if we could make all parties happy in the conversation? Thanks Tiffany. Um, you're doing great. Okay.

So, for the question at hand, do you support developing a strategy and outlining a process for creating a narrower local street design option? Love it. Um, okay. Thank you. And, um, can live with it. Great. Those are great um, great feedback and have concerns. Okay, great. Um, we need to hear from you with the concerns that you have. Um, okay. Because especially if you have concerns or if you're on the fence, um, we really encourage you to share.

Um, and again, just please if you haven't shared yet, and we're getting down to our last two decision points. So, I would say even if there's something that is maybe not necessarily related to the topic at hand that you haven't had a chance to speak yet, please, please, now's your chance. Um, okay. So this is what the pre- survey results demonstrate. This is really mixed the um narrower local street designs and we will now open for your comments. Yes.

My name is Billy Gilmore and I'm a local homeowner and have been a resident uh in Flagstaff area for several decades. Can you please speak into the microphone? Is this better? Yeah. Yes. Um, I've been a resident in Flagstaff for several decades and I'm a current homeowner in one of the newer developments that does have narrower streets and especially during snow uh season. I've noticed that it's extremely difficult for the snow plow to come into my neighborhood.

Unfortunately, we have people who don't always stay off the street during that time. But even just with trying to maintain two lanes of traffic, the snow plow has a very difficult time trying to maneuver within that space. Um my neighborhood is also on the west side, west Route 66 between um Woodlands Boulevard and Woody Mountain Road.

And even though this is not really a residential area, I would like to speak to the fact that smaller lanes in that area have really increase the amount of injury accidents that we have just within that um maybe two mile max of roadway. The lane changes are excessive going from two lanes in each direction with a median in the middle and um turns for um right turns off of the pavements. Uh it goes to two-way traffic with a double yellow line in the middle of the highway.

So, with so many lane changes and stripings, it's extremely confusing for drivers to maneuver where they're supposed to be to make a right turn, where they're supposed to be to make a left turn. And unfortunately, unfortunately, we had the suicide lanes put in the middle so that someone coming into that area can actually come into the middle of that 45 mph traffic area, stop and wait for traffic to clear, enter into the traffic flow. Um, thank you for those um specific examples. Yes.

So, it's it's extremely harrowing trying to come out of those neighborhoods or out of those commercial areas into flowing traffic. Um, and with the amount of increase in growth that's happening along Woody Mountain Road, both north and south of the interstate, timber sky, that's the two-minute limit. We're going to keep moving, but thank you so much. I do encourage the city to look at very closely reducing lane traffic. Thank you. Thank you. Please Duffy Westimer.

Um I know from experience with Aspen Burch and Cherry East West, those are very wide streets and in particular Cherry and it is a racetrack and it's horrible and it's dangerous for everybody who lives in the neighborhood. We have called the police so many times about all of this. It's really a problem. So wide streets do make traffic faster in my experience, but I feel grave concern if you're talking about parking on one side as a bicyclist.

Already people are parking the wrong direction against traffic and if there are a lot of cars, they cannot see and that puts everybody on a bike at risk because we're close to the cars and they'll pull out and they can't see us. So, I would urge you to not have parking on only one side, but you know, narrower, but so long as we can still have safe streets. Thanks. Thank you. Yes.

Just to kind of again Rick Lopez and just to kind of follow up on one of the previous speakers, the snow plowing issue can be an issue on the narrower streets. I've been in some subdivisions that have narrow streets and in the winter time when the plows have come through, the uh street is so narrow that you cannot uh stop and wait for somebody to get around you because there is no room for anybody to get around you.

And so you have two cars, one hoping that the other one will back up and back out so that you can get through. So, I think the narrower streets in the wintertime with with the snow plowing issue that has to really be considered because that can be a real a real challenge. Thank you for sharing. Please. Hi everyone. I'm Rebecca Sers. I am the city's parks, recreation, open space, and events director.

We like to have fun, but as uh Tiffany mentioned, we also plow some snow a little bit along with our public works uh co-workers. Um you've heard it a lot. Tiffany mentioned a lot of we share a lot of the same concerns with public works about narrower streets. Um we still need a place to put the snow. So, it's not only about getting equipment down the roads, it's about where to put the snow.

And what we struggle with, and I'll just I'll just be I wasn't going to mention this cuz my my city peeps already know cuz they hear this from me all the time, but the community might not. So, streets might come down and plow the street, right? Where do they put it? Onto our sidewalks, right? They never do that in your neighborhood, do they? But they don't have anywhere else to put it. So, that's where they put it. So, we as residents then have to shovel it off. And I hear this all the time.

I don't think I'm talking out of turn or anything that we haven't experienced. It's just something that we live with. However, the pros side comes in parks, wreck, open space, events. We are responsible for maintaining the hard surface foots, trails, and any sidewalks on city property. So, we we get it a little bit double, I would say. um where streets will come through then we have to come through and if we can't put it if we can't continue moving it over then that's a that's a struggle.

So that's where our comment about um just keeping in mind snow storage as we develop these properties if we can have parkways are awesome. That's a great reason for a parkway. Let's just keep that in the consideration as we're moving forward with these conversations. Thank you. Thank you. It's great to hear. I wasn't going to say this, but um these are the comments that we want to hear whatever you have on your mind. So um please we'd love to hear from you.

Um because I don't have a whole lot of information on this topic, maybe somebody else. Can you speak? Sorry. Yes. Into the microphone. Thank you. Um can we This might be a stupid question. Can we purchase smaller equipment um for fire service and um plowing and make the streets even narrower the great suggest it's uh refreshing to hear suggestions as well. So thank you for that comment. Do you have more? I hope I was just hoping somebody could Oh, okay. Yeah. Um Jenny, do you want to Oh, okay.

Wonderful. Good afternoon. I'm Mark Gaylord. I'm the fire chief and uh smaller equipment is uh certainly um something that we have achieved over the last couple decades. For instance, um the use of rescues or uh what you might view as an ambulance body vehicle for EMS trying to take um more appropriate types of apparatus to the call that uh is a bit more efficient. However, when it comes to structural firefighting and fire protection, um we we are an all-risk fire department.

And so that means that our firefighters are cross-trained to provide emergency medical services, uh structural firefighting, hazardous materials. They're all every one of them is a wildland firefighter. And so our trucks are about as efficient as they can be. And I will tell you they are smaller um than uh many municipal fire departments.

And also just kind of a it came up um probably about four years ago, city council members saw a uh a Bay Area, California fire department was uh um publicizing the uh purchase of a smaller fire apparatus for their um highdensity areas. Um, we were we took great interest in it and we did some research and what we found was that their new improved smaller apparatus was larger than what we use across every fire station in Flagstaff. So, it's it's somewhat um you know it's relative to the community.

Uh we have a very interesting fire protection risk in our community with respect to the uh wildland urban interface mission, the the medical mission that goes along with that. And now um and just since it's been discussed when we when we increase the density, we start taking the community and moving the community up into the air. Um that creates issues for us with respect to it takes more equipment, takes more staffing resources and it can absolutely be done.

But we are going to be hardressed to um become more efficient while the density and the fire protection risk changes to an increased risk in the community and so but we're always on the lookout always on the lookout. Thank you. This is great discussion. Thank you. Please uh Keith Becker again. Um anyway, uh you showed a uh up on the screen there was a 14t road with cars parked on both sides and we just heard how that may affect fire trucks.

Um but um also um when it snows, nobody seems to shovel their sidewalks and I have seen many many times people in wheelchairs, people in the motorized wheelchairs and so on and so forth in the street and narrower streets just makes that even more dangerous. Uh my wife is legally blind. We have a parking space or a bus stop less than a hundred yards away from our house.

And a couple years ago, she was homebound for almost five months because people didn't shovel and she had to walk in the street to get to that thing and I wouldn't let her. So, thank you for sharing. Please. Good afternoon. Bryce Dodie, real estate manager for the city. When we're talking about street widths, I think it's interesting or good thing to keep in perspective is that we're mostly talking about developments that don't exist yet.

Um, our existing infrastructure, that cake is kind of baked. Um, you know, it's very challenging or expensive to say, "All right, we don't need this much width on my street, which is very wide.

I would love if it was narrower, but then you're going to have to build sidewalk, you know, rebuild sidewalk to narrow it, which is just not going to be cost-ffective." Um so thinking about all these places that don't exist yet, I would encourage maximum flexibility um to try to provide solutions for those developers because it could be uh you know if they can find a way to get it get it done with 40 and then that might be the cost savings to go buy the smaller apparatus for the fire or something like that.

And so giving all these we're not talking in my head we're not talking about existing places. We're talking about all these places that don't exist yet and we should allow those to develop as flexibly as possible. Thank you, Hillilary. Hi, Hillary from Symmetry again. Um, speaking for developers, I guess um the smaller the better.

We already have a hard time meeting density with the um resource um overlay protection, which is great, but it is extremely hard to meet density with the large right ofway widths. Um, when you put that on top of a land plan, once you actually put houses on, it sucks away so much of your land with the huge rideways. And if you've seen our culdeacs, they're like helicopter pads. Um, so if we can narrow them down, um, smaller the better. Thank you, Charity. Lee Capstone Homes.

Um, Hillary actually just took what I was gonna say. I was going to talk about the culde-sacs and I appreciate and understand that um we need to be able to have our our fire trucks. They need to be able to to get out and easily. But if there's a way that we can look at that, that would be really good. And I also appreciated what um Bryce said as well about giving the flexibility to the developers. Thank you. Hi Kate Morley with Metro Plan again.

Um I just want to echo the narrow streets are important for our goals about um safety in the roadway. So really encourage that. I think the parkway is also an important element that there's an ADA aspect to that as well for keeping a sidewalk flat for um users in wheelchairs. So um just really encourage that and I would encourage us to try to be more creative than only reducing this by three feet.

I don't think that that's bringing the savings or ability to um do the things we want with housing with just the three key piece. So keep this is in the right direction and keep going. Thank you. We have four minutes left on this topic. I'm an again um yeah I like the the picture with the um you know narrow street and parking on either side. Um, I live on a street similar to that except that the sidewalks are really narrow, like three feet wide.

Um, and when I ride my uh three-wheel bike, I don't ride on the sidewalk. I have to ride in the street because the sidewalks tip and dip and um not always plowed and all that. But I was also thinking one of my pet peeves in the winter is when they plow the entire road into the side. So they clear the middle of the road, then they also clear the parking spots and all that snow goes in our driveways, which we then have to shovel out after it's been doubly compacted.

And I would love it if they would just plow the middle of the road and use the parking spot for snow storage in the winter. It would uh save time. We I live on a oneb block long street, so they had four days to plow that time. Um we got the heavy snow, so basically didn't leave the house for four days. Um but if they had been able to get to our street sooner by not having to plow all the other streets fully, you know, once the sun comes out, the snow melts pretty quickly. Thank you.

And that brings us to our last our next and final decision point. Uh winter parking or winter uh yeah winter parking ordinances. Austin Alen Flagstaff City Council. Um this is actually kind of a good bridge um comment to make between these two topics. Uh, you know, I've spent most of the day listening and and trying not to opine too much. Uh, gathering in a lot of great data for some tough decisions down the road and just really appreciate everyone's participation.

Uh, but I thought I'd share this because I haven't really heard this expressed yet and I think it's a good it's it's worth saying. So, it's it's just sort of a thought I'm throwing out there for everyone to to to ruminate on. Um, no other comment besides that, but we're in a we're in a really special place today where we're um knocking heads and making decisions about the future of Flag Staff that are going to affect residents generations from now.

Uh, as has always been in the past, the decisions we make today are going to affect people who live in Flagstaff 20 years from now, 30 years from now, 50 years from now, 70 years from now. Um, and it's hard for our imagination to really think beyond that. And we don't know what the future holds, but we do know that it's going to be different.

And a lot of the conversation, a lot of the the the tension that I feel in the room seems to me, uh, there's a good analogy, at least in my mind, it's not as good as the French fry analogy. Um, but we're we're trying to go on a diet. I think we all agree. Um, we want to lose weight. We we want more density and now we're looking at all the ways uh that we have to lose weight. And we had a weight coach here this morning talking to us about all the things we can do.

And if and what we don't want to do is just one after the other dismiss every option be, you know, because we want to have our key cake and eat it too. Uh these are tough decisions and and and they're decision points. Um, so that's what this conversation is. It's it's a hard look at um we want to get on the scale and see that number change. Uh there are things we're going to have to do. We can't just ignore all of them.

Um, and then finally, I just wanted to say for uh this conversation and the next one, thinking 30, 40, 50 years out, there's a good possibility Flagstaff won't have snow anymore. And so, while we need to address that situation now, we also need to keep in mind that these decisions are for future generations, too. and what's the opportunity cost um when they're stuck with wide streets and uh a a juniper woodland um on into the future. Just a thought to add to the equation. Thank you.

That's really inspiring. Now we move to our last decision point. Do you support developing a strategy and outlining a process for replacing the current winter parking ordinance? With that, I'll turn to give the context. I really like French fries and because usually it's the only thing I can eat at a fast food restaurant. So I can't have the whole meal. The French fries are my meal. Uh so let's talk about winter parking ordinance. Um Uhhuh.

Many the public works feels that there are many pros and cons that might impact staffing and equipment needs. Uh could better forecasting tools help? Probably. Uh any change would require increased outreach and education? Um that would be huge obviously. And how do we match community expectations with reality and I think that's the big one.

Um, we at the city, we all work to serve the members of this community and we take it very seriously and uh, you know, so often we talk to members of the community and it's hard to achieve um, the high level of expectations that are out there, but we really do show up every day and try to do our very best. Um, with that in mind, um, uh, that I think this is the the big question as we look at the winter parking ordinance. Is this a possibility?

In terms of pros, they have echoed the need to have a conversation about community expectations. Um, pros, while public works does the big heavy lift, pros does all of the finepoint details. They actually do all the hard stuff. They take care of the foots trails. they do the work downtown. Um, very tough um, sites that they need to deal with.

In terms of fire, there are concerns with designating certain streets for snow removal, which could limit access, cause delays, or negatively impact public safety services in unplowed areas. Uh, there are no anticipated negative impacts from implementing alternative or odd even. um they see no anticipated negative impacts from limiting parking only during officially declared snow events.

So it sounds like fire is a little bit open to some alternative patterns, but maybe the no plowing um could potentially have some concerns there. So what did the project team say? Yes, we should be able to park on residential streets even during snow events. And and it what's I think interesting is as I've heard this conversation come up over time, I've actually heard a lot of people say people still park on the streets when there's a snow event.

And it it does happen and we do have to sort of assess and deal with it. Um you know, we currently can't park on our major arterials anyway, which is where snow plowing operations really truly are the most critical. uh any changes to the winter parking ordinance. We'll need to consider impacts to other city divisions staff time and capacity. It's really easy for me as a planner to say, "Yeah, let's do it.

Let's park on the street all year round." But I'm not the one that's up at 3:00 in the morning or midnight and out there plowing the streets. Um and I I don't think that the kudos are given to the people that do that work um quite as well or quite as often as they should be. So, um, we do need to change our expectations as a community around snow plowing, um, especially as Flagstaff grows and it gets warmer. It's really warm right now. Uh, and so I will hand it off. Thank you.

I I promise this is the last one. Thank you, Tiffany. Okay, this is from the survey results. Do you support developing a strategy and process for a more flexible winter parking ordinance? So we see there's more people agree than and strongly agree. So most people agree with with this proposal. Um so now um let's do the poll. Um do you support developing strategy and outlining a process for replacing the current winter parking ordinance? Um love it. Yes. Wow. Great.

So um I can live visit very few and uh concerns. Um all right so then we go one by one. Yes we should be able to parking. Okay. Okay. We'll go directly to and since we Okay. Sorry. Since we are short of time, we'll um finish this one by 3:20 and then we'll have a 15 minutes uh break and uh you are highly encouraged to stay since you already stay for so long and then after that we'll have our report out and feedback and the next step.

Uh so if I can FE um we're going to go ahead and just keep going. We have some other places that we can shorten the agenda, but we want to make sure that all the decision points are discussed and that we get the the discussion from everyone. Thank you. Okay. All right. Now we start the the feedback. Before I moved to Flagstaff, this is Maryland again.

Um, I lived in Chicago and this is the land where you shovel after the snowpaw goes through with 3 ft of snow, you shovel your car out and put a chair in the street so you have your space. I mean, it's I'm I was used to that. So, I was surprised to come to Flagstaff where your car had to be off the street. My feeling about this is it's nice. It It makes for them.

It makes it easier for the city, but I do feel like the street is the place where cars live and that if we're going to reduce the parking, especially for apartment complexes and commercial and other things, then we have to allow parking in the place where cars live, which is on the street. So, I am for changing our winter parking ordinance. My only concern is tied to the last discussion about the width of the street.

I would want that to be taken into consideration for the fire department, for emergency vehicles when that occurs that we have people parked on both side of the streets. We have to take that into account, but I support the idea of getting rid of the winter parking ordinance. Yeah, thank you. I see those uh the last two topics are very connected. So, if you have feedback on the last one and want to talk them together, please do so. Please. Yes. My name is David Spence.

I'm on the Flagstaff City Council and I'd like to echo the previous speaker that we need to take all three of these uh decision points in uh conjunction as they interact. If we have uh reduced parking minimums for our housing, that's going to increase uh parking demand on the streets. If we have narrower streets, we need to consider whether we have parking on one or both sides of the street and then uh consider the effects on uh snow uh accumulation as people have said.

I personally would like to look into all three of these as they interact with each other. And my goal as a city council member is to see that we have a um a set of parking ordinances and uh street designs that are consistent across the city and are easy for people to interpret. So, I'm going to push if if it's feasible for year round uh consistency. And I personally like the odd even sides of the street changing uh each month to coincide with whether it's an odd or an even month.

But I promise you that I'll look at or try to look at all the aspects of these how these three things uh interact with each other. Thank you. Please. Hi, my name is Keith Becker again. Um, anyway, um, I've been here for 47 years and I', this ordinance has been here as long as I can remember and it used to be enforced. And, um, now I see uh, plows in my neighborhood. I've got a couple of neighbors that just insist on parking in the street all the time.

And I've watched plows struggle to plow our street properly. And then there's a burn when the cars leave and then there's all this crap that's still in in the street side of it that makes it very difficult for anybody to drive down that street, much less go in two different directions. Um, so I think the ordinance is fine the way it is and we need to leave it. What we need to do is start to enforce it. That's that's where I have a problem is the enforcing of that is not happening. So thank you.

Thank you, Dave. Okay, I'm back. Duffy Westimer again. So, I live on the west side and there's a lot of pressure on the west side. If you don't live there, you really probably don't understand how much is on top of us. Um, but I will say in terms of the winter parking ordinance, when the snow comes, so does Phoenix. And they come to play in Thorp Park and there isn't enough parking there right now for just what goes on there now.

So they park on our streets and it has been an S show like you have could not imagine at times. So every it's nice to be consistent but we have to be realistic and that when Phoenix comes here to play at Thort Park or any from wherever um and they're parking on our streets if residents are parking there or employees are parking there or whoever is already parking on the streets where are all those tourists going to park? They're often very inconsiderate of the traffic.

They're often inconsiderate of the homeowners. And I just think that uh we really need to be realistic and listen to people who have the experience of living with this every day because not everywhere in Flagstaff is the same. Thanks. Thank you for feedback, please. Uh good afternoon. Mike Pensa, superintendent of the Flagstaff Unified School District and resident of Flagstaff for the last eight years. Prior to that, I lived in Mason City, Iowa for 21 years.

Um, and it seems like our winter ordinance could be more nimble. Um, right now I believe our ordinance is like a November 1 to April 1, no parking right on the street, something like that. And, uh, in Mason City, they were having this conversation like 12, 15 years ago.

their ordinance had been a every other like side of the street like uh these days of the week you could park on the odd number if your house was an odd number you could park on that side on I don't know Monday, Wednesdays, Fridays or whatever it was and then so it had been odd or even and so it was already had some flexibility that allowed street parking but allowed for the snow removal crews to get through and then about 12 years ago they had they decided that the ordinance wouldn't just be, you know, in place for the whole winter season, but that when they knew a weather event was coming, they would enact it.

And so, um um and you know, I I get the uh privilege to call off school, uh depending on our our weather, you know, snow day stuff and yeah, great. Uh, and I feel like here I have a lot and maybe it's the time and the weather forecasting, but we have a lot more notice.

It's more predictable like usually about a week before people are already asking me if I'm going to be cancelling school, you know, like and then, you know, so we're monitoring it 7 days, 5 days, two days before a lot of weather service coordination. I you know the day before all these weather calls. So we really know have a lot of advances when a snowstorm's coming here.

So I feel like we could turn that on a couple days before and it takes a lot of communication, a lot of teaching and I totally get that. But it seems like, you know, if Mason City, Iowa could do this 12 years ago, and I feel like it was less predictable and it seemed like we had more frequent smaller snow events where here we have less frequent but they're bigger that we could move a little more nimly with our winter ordinance. Thank you. Thank you for the case study. Uh, please next.

Hello, Dave McIntyre, the parking guy as previously described, which kind of like that. I'm going to roll with that. Yeah, I just switched it up a little bit. Um, and I guess what I want to say is my my comment earlier about, you know, you have to make sure that if we go to um removing parking requirements, you have to make sure there's some place to put the cars for the housing that already exists. In some ways, this is that answer.

as long as we can do it in a safe way that allows for emergency vehicles and trucks and all this stuff to get there. Having the right ofway be able to provide cars during the winter for the residential areas that currently um need to have parking provided answers some of that question for me. Uh because because it it really is the winter where those folks who get mad at us for not having a residential permit are are worried. Um so just throwing it out there.

It answers the question I was talking about earlier. And again, I just want to comment that if they decide to get rid of the winter parking ordinance that they still not allow RVs and camping trailers and all that to camp out on the street all winter long because they already do all summer long and it really obstructs the view at my corner anyway. really have to creep out into the street, see around the RV that's parked there. So, um, and having them there with snow right out.

Thank you for feedback. Well, notice. Next, please. Um, I forgot what I was going to say. The thing is that winter time for me is the loneliest time because a snow plow comes around, puts a burm on the sidewalk and in the driveway and he goes to work and I have and I do help him shovel the snow. I still do that and so long as I don't shovel it into his face. But that's that's the worst time for me. And I can't walk down the street to just to enjoy the birds, the snow, and all that.

I can't go to the store. I can't go out for my appointments. Now I have to call a taxi, which cost us money. So, I'm just I'm just thinking the snow plow people should know where the corner is and not fill it up with 8 ft of snow. You can't I can't climb it. The high school kids can. And they think that's fun. And like I said, we need more volunteers to shovel the snow around the corners and the sidewalks. Thank you. All right. I think we um we can move to our um break for 15 minutes.

That'll be a comeback. Thank you. Just real quick before real quick, um we are It is only going to be a 15-minute break, so please come back. Um and if you haven't been up there before, the third floor has a roof deck. That's really incredible. So go up there, come back, and then get a pastel. Thanks, That is awesome. Excellent. I sent Joanne these photos. So, like here's my neighbor. This is typical in front of my garage or my driveway. So that drives me insane. I want to figure it out.

My stepdad. All right, folks. We're going to start in about two minutes. Two minute warning. counc. So, I just think it's wake everybody up a little. Yeah. What? How'd you do that? Somebody texted me was past. I know we have a kid. It was fun. There he is. Where was it? All right, everybody. I'm going to ask um now that we've gotten you off of the rooftop, if you will start getting back to your seats. I'm ready. Or did you want to say this the community? I know. I was gonna You want to do it?

It's okay. Okay. All right, looks like we're headed back. Awesome. I'm I hope some of you got to go outside and warm up in the sunshine and look out over the observation deck. Um I I'm a housing program person. I'm not a planning nerd. Um I play well with the planning nerds. I can say a lot of the words in the right order, but when it comes right down to it, my passion is working with people. And when we were planning this conversation today, we had a lot of pieces of how's it going to go?

What are we going to do? We're inviting a lot of people into the same room with differing viewpoints to talk about sticky things in the community. How's it going to go? And we as a project team want to say thank you because today has gone incredibly well. It's been filled with respectful, meaningful decision discussions with some decision points. Michelle is going to share a synopsis of what we've gone through today. I think today went better than any of us envisioned.

And that's not because of us as staff. That's because of you as community. And so community was one of the biggest words we started this morning with values. And so, thank you for taking the time. Thank you for participating. And thank you for letting me be the touche housing nerd um before Michelle gets into the the synthesis of the day. And so, thank you.

We are um I I don't want to say pleasantly surprised because these are the expectations we have of our community, but we were thrilled with how the conversations happened. So, thank you. Well said. And I'd like to echo those the sentiments of thanks and also thank you for being curious. We asked that of you at the beginning of the day and you all delivered. So, thank you very much for that.

So, um, we thought this would be a big kind of a much bigger presentation because we thought there would be a lot of things that we kind of had to change gears on and say, "Okay, we didn't get it right." So, we're going to go, you know, a different direction here. But, um, I think part of our surprise and and and I think that's just a testament to this team and to the the magnitude of conversations that we've had is we heard a lot of consensus. So, um, that's incredible.

And so we're going to kind of go through the decision points and when I give the feedback back um back it's more in relation to um what we heard from the staff's proposal. And so when we talk about uh decision point one where and how should we uh increase density we heard let's go let's increase that density. We also heard that maybe we didn't do enough with our R1 and our ER uh rural residential and estate residential and so staff is going to go back.

We were kind of we've all been kind of noodling different ideas. We heard, you know, the question about do we just make that the new R1? Do we upzone? There are some other considerations that we want to think about. Um but we think that there are some really good opportunities there and some ways to um increase that density as well as still get some of the affordable housing.

So um we will do a little bit more work on that component but we did hear loud and clear um go forth with density and go forth everywhere. Um if I have misunderstood that raise your hands. Okay. and and Duffy. Thank you. And um I am going to remind people if you do get up to speak, go to the microphones, but I think if it's okay, you've all gotten up, especially you, Duffy. You've been up a lot today. So, um, did everybody hear uh what she said? Okay.

So, she um and also to make sure that the mic catches it for the recording. So, um some some areas already if you want to you love walking. Heck no. I am not a public speaker, but I care deeply about these things and I've observed a lot over the years. So, what I said was not all areas are the same. So, we have a lot of older neighborhoods with smaller houses and those in my I can't remember how I said it before.

What I would love to see is for the city to step up and get some of those houses and make them scattered site afford permanently affordable houses in our existing neighborhoods. That's what I do in the historic areas. If council member Garcia would like to live in the neighborhood where he grew up, why can't we do that and have our residents live in these scattered site permanently affordable houses? Because not all neighborhoods are the same.

A lot of the older neighborhoods in this town are smaller homes and they in my opinion keeping them affordable is the best option. It's the most sustainable. It's the most sensitive to the neighbors. It's just the best option to for housing options. So, thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Duffy. And you said that better than I could have repeated it for you. So, um Okay. So, we got our direction there. Um decision point two support for managing residential intensity using floor area ratio or FAR.

Um I think we heard loud and clear this is a very technical topic and we need to do our homework and being better able to present what we're talking about. So we have some homework to do um on our side. We'll be kind of coming out to the public. We have everybody's emails. Um so we might do it through email. We also will be talking about next steps in the next slides. will be going back to council on July 28th. August 28th. I'm looking is it August? August.

Um and so in the meantime before we get back there, we will start doing a little bit of homework on how to better present that information. Um the menu of so unless there was somebody that was really in love with FAR, I'm going to go forward to decision three. Um menu of efficiency and resilience design options.

So this one we saw an overwhelming support of of hands that we love it but when we heard some of the feedback when it about it being required there was a little bit of hesitation a little bit of nuance in those details. Um and so we want to provide some emphasis that the whole part of this exercise is not to add on we're not trying to add on regulations. This is really about taking a balanced approach.

Um and so when we talk about that menu of efficiency and resilience design options, we are talking about it in a way that yes it might be required but then what can we also remove from the requirements to balance that. So this is another area we feel like we have a little bit of homework to do to come back and better explain what that might look like, what those menu choices might be um and what the choices or the areas that you might that might be removed could look like.

So second point that we have our homework on decision point four parking reductions. We heard loud and clear that we were on the right path to reducing parking and again maybe aren't going far enough. Um, so we definitely know that our starting point that we um that we presented as the staff's recommendation, go forth with that and maybe don't be afraid to go further street with strategy. Um, that one was a little bit mixed.

We definitely heard that it's really dependent on kind of parking and how we can manage the um, winter parking ordinance. Um, so I think we another area where we need to look at alternatives for the winter parking um, and snow removal that accommodates um, keeping our sidewalks clear, accommodates our emergency vehicles. Um, and if we can do all those things, then there's maybe an appetite to narrow our streets.

But all in all, it has to be if we talk about these types of strategies, it has to be with all the other things in consideration, all the other things being um really that street maintenance. So, if we've missed something really big um that you heard today, please go up to the microphones and let me know. But we really feel like today's dialogue was unbelievable and that we were able to get through a lot of these decision points.

Um, and so I'm going to pause there and if anybody wants to say you really didn't hear this, please let us know. We want to make sure we heard it. Thank I I think that's a good summary, but I just want to say in regard to the rural residential, I guess what I don't want to see is more Ponderosa trails. I don't want to see our one that is not transit friendly.

And so I feel like I don't know if the developers in town and the developers that spoke today really understand I mean some of them might but not all of them really understand what we're trying to do here with we with our green spaces. We don't want what we have. We want to change that. And so my concern and I think other people here as well who are not developers are also concerned about that.

And um so I just want to make sure you heard that it we're all not for giving giving away zoning that is not the zoning we want. So I I just want to emphasize that because you seem to imply that there was consensus around that. No, thank you for that. Thanks. Um, is this on? It is. Okay. My name is Stefan Smer. I'm a retired professor from NAU and I serve on the board of directors of the Northern Arizona Climate Change Alliance.

And um, I think it's been a great discussion and I appreciate your summarization of everything. When it comes to the menu of energy efficiency and resilience design options, what I'm not hearing in any of this discussion really is the extremity of the climate crisis. Okay? By the time these things get impated the oceans now to a depth of 2,000 meters. The rate of warming of the rest of the earth, the atmosphere and earth's surfaces has increased.

In 2023, ocean sea surface temperatures average across the globe took a leap. Open space between the warmth in 2023 and the next warmest year, 2024. Same open space. So, we had two years in a row now. So all of these climate pressures are going to get much more extreme much more rapidly than anybody has been predicting. So I want you to consider that when you're talking about, you know, should these be strong um recommendations for the menu of energy efficiency and resilience design options.

How strong should that be? I think you got to keep the net zero by 2030 goal in mind. So far, the city have reached they passed that first in 2018. So far, we've gotten about 10% of the way there. We're just not doing it so far. So, we need to speed this up. We need to push these things further. And I hope that y'all can keep that vision in mind as you make your final decisions. Thank you for that reminder.

So Michelle, um I just wanted to re-emphasize and maybe expand a bit on what Marilyn said about the rural residential and rural estate zoning. Um, I wasn't really clear on what uh staff was taking away from that discussion and I was I'll be honest, I was a little confused about it and what it meant to increase density in those areas and to what level and I would like to have more discussion or more um information from staff about that before decisions are made to change that. Definitely.

And so, um, just really quickly to clarify, so what we were presenting is that we were looking at increasing density in all of our zoning districts. Um, and we had said except for RR and ER. And what we were hearing were people and I think the conversation did get confusing because um the the justification for not increasing the density is that you just essentially create another R1 and then you for some areas what where it would make sense to reszone into R1.

You're they won't they might not because they're getting the density that they would need and there's other things that you get with that R1 designation.

Um and but what we heard is that there's maybe an appetite for considering do looking at should we increase that and so then staff is kind of thinks well then do you get rid of those RR and ER um but we're also hearing I think to your point giving the zoning away and not giving the zoning away and so we need to kind of go back and say how can we do that how can we increase those zoning districts and not give that zoning away and still because everything that's RR wouldn't naturally just go to R1.

Some might get reasoned to medium density residential. So we don't want to do something that stops that from going even further. Um and so we just need to be very calculated. So I think does that that's how I'm understanding what you're saying and what we plan on going back and um kind of doing our homework on. Yes. Perfect. Okay, I got a thumbs up.

I'm I'm with the the um well I'm with staff in that all the solutions that came up today were impressive and I I like the summation of everything that happened here. But a thought occurred to me that if you know through real estate acquisitions and sales and development, if if we're going to continue to try to sell houses to second home owners and Airbnb providers, all of this is for not in my opinion. Thank you guys for all your work. Thank you again, Rick Lopez.

Uh I just want to uh emphasize uh something I think is very important to keep in mind as we're going through all of these discussions about density and uh climate efficiency and all the other kinds of things that we've been discussing is that housing is something that is obviously very very critical to the community for a lot of reasons.

But one of the things we have to keep in mind is that we can't just focus on one segment of the housing market because people need to have the opportunity to move from the lower price homes into the next price homes and into the next price homes and so on and so forth. So if we do things that focus on this segment and make this segment far more expensive to do, then the people at this segment can never move up to the next to the next point, you know, and and so that creates a problem.

And the the more that we create a housing price issue within the city limits of Flagstaff, the more we are going to continue to push people farther out into the outskirts.

I've already said this to a number of people, but you know, one of the unintended consequences of of our the last 40 years of our policy is we've literally created the largest urban sprawl area in the state of Arizona where we have people coming up here from Anthem, from the Verie Valley, from Winslow, from Williams, all driving into town multiple times a day and and most of them are not in gas in in electric vehicles.

So, it makes our carbon neutrality goals more difficult to reach if we don't bring housing into the city limits of Flagstaff. Thank you. And again, um I just want to say it's great that we've got so many developers here in this room that I've been hearing from because I really never gotten to hear their points of view. How many people are there developers?

I I actually think you raised your hand, but I think a lot of ours have actually left um they left at 3:00, but I will extend that because I I share your sentiments. It was great to have so many diverse um backgrounds in the room today, but it was really great for the developers to share their perspective, but for them to also hear so many varied perspectives of our community. Yeah.

And I just uh wanted to comment that this hasn't come up, but um we are a dark sky city and I know high density housing often entails lots of lighting for security and um you know, you just need to be careful. You if you're from the valley or whatever, you're not aware of the laws. I know that a lot of people plead ignorance. They just do the lighting and then say, "Oh, well, we've already spent the money. we don't want to have to fix it.

So, I just thought I'd take the opportunity to let people know. I mean, I bought into a subdivision that was done well before the lighting codes were implemented. And all the houses in the subdivision have these carriage lights that light like this. And the house numbers right there, you know, in the dark. So, you know, you light where it needs to be lit. and everyone else. Thank you. And our dark skies compliance teams, thanks you as well. Sorry, me again, Stephan.

Um, I just realized as I was sitting there that all the stuff I said earlier was the global picture and I should have mentioned a little bit more about Flagstaff. Um, so first of all, Mountain Line, thank you guys very much for the wonderful building you just completed, which is all electric. It means you can power that building with clean energy as soon as we get that clean energy in hand. Right. In any case, that should be the new building standard for the city.

There should not be any more buildings that are built with gas furnaces. We just cannot afford it. and Flagstaff. We just had the NA Economic Policy Institute put out a report that if we have an catastrophic wildfire in Flagstaff, it's going to cost us, little old Flagstaff, $2 billion, right? Fire damages, flooding damages, all the different stuff that comes from that. So, we're talking about serious threat to our community.

Um, if people and as the gentleman was saying, if people keep getting pushed further out, those people are going to be the first to get hit. My best friend, 20 years here in Flagstaff, just moved to Maine. He lived in Kacina. He was on the edge of the forest in a log home. He just couldn't deal with the fire risk. Okay, somebody bought that home. In any case, it's a very real thing for us here in Flagstaff and we need to start talking about it. We need to start planning for it.

We need to build a future where we're not contributing to the carbon footprint and hope that every other community in the world is having the same conversation. Thank you. Thank you. Um, I just wanted to echo the comment about getting developers in the room and a kudos to you, Michelle, and probably all the staff to make a comfortable environment that allowed them to come here and want to be here in this community discussion. I think that is like just top of the charts. So, congratulations.

And I think that was such a valuable discussion for them to be able to talk as well as hear what everybody had to say. Um, but what I really came up to say was um to call attention to the word bank that we created at the very beginning with that um exercise and a lot of those words were about nature and the pines and the peaks and the weather and the climate and all those things are open space and I'm wondering if we're going to be creating a menu of resilience options.

Maybe this is a little step away from that, but it still kind of falls into community resilience. Or if we're going to be upzzoning for free in a sense, a tradeoff, maybe we get some open space and parks and wildlife corridors out of this tradeoff. Um, so I just wanted to bring that back around because obviously those are all really important things to everybody here and everybody in this community.

Even though yes, we know we need housing and we have a climate crisis, how do we how do we do all things and is there room in some of these new discussions that came up today that would create room for that? Thank you for that suggestion. And I had to look out and make sure that Rebecca Sarah was still here. And I'm glad she is. And and that is definitely something as we look at, you know, those options for how we can incentivize those up zones. Point well taken. Thank you. All right.

Thank you everybody. They're not done yet. Um about 10 15 more minutes and Tiffany is going to go into the next steps. um and not just the next steps for this project, but the the long term and how we need you to not just make today a special event and to participate, but to to stay with us because we have a lot to do and and we need your help um with this momentum that we've just built. Thanks. I promise to go quick. All right, so we have done the tours.

We have communicated as much as we can the information we're looking for and getting the feedback. Uh we're going to be back before city council on August 26th. We're going to improve even more uh from today, but pay attention to October 26th. After this, we hope to give our consultant the final um direction on where we need these final code recommendations to come from. these code recommendations they're going to continue to refine.

We we will have refined the topic even more so from them for them. They will be able to go through and provide us even more data in support of the direction that we want to go. Um from there uh that's what I just said finalizing the feedback on the code concepts and decision points and then the code the consultant is going to create that final code recommendations from there. Um, we've get to write code. Um, and there's obviously a lot of code to write.

Um, I learned so much today from all of the people here. Uh, we don't as staff have all of the answers. We don't have all of the ideas. We need you and your input. I know that the zoning code is boring and uninspiring to most. It is the light of my life. Um, I don't expect you all to to have the same um desire, but if it moves you to, we would love your participation. We would love your help and assistance in drafting what these final code looks like.

The more the community puts into it, the better it's going to be in representing all of what we want and what we need. Um, so thank you all for all that you gave today. We learned a ton and I think even more better ideas than we had ever even imagined came out of this. They're all bubbling in our heads and we can't wait to come back and unveil them. Um, and I hope to see you in the future at any one of these numerous events.

But I would say the beginning of next year comes the real heavy dirty hard work. Um, be prepared and you're all invited to come along. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thanks for your time. And I thought it'd be 10 minutes, but she's an expert. So, thanks a lot for all your time today.