Tracy City Council
October 24, 2023

So, what is the Housing Element? The Housing Element is part of the General Plan. It's one of the nine required elements of the General Plan.

In this little chart, we show what are the required elements. Your Housing Element can organize it differently, not by this particular title, but it has to include these topics. When we look at the Housing Elements, we need to look at the needs in the community, and not only the needs that you currently have, but also the projected needs in the future. We also need to look at your constraints and opportunities that you have in order to meet those needs. What is different about the Housing Element from the rest of your general plan is that it has a statutory deadline and for the City of Tracy within the San Joaquin County area, the deadline is December 31st, 2023. Housing Element is also very different from the rest of the General Plan in that other General Plan elements doesn't really have a longer horizon for planning, usually about 20 years, the Housing Element has to be updated every eight years. What is also different from the rest of the General Plan is that Housing Element has to be reviewed by an agency in order to afford compliance with status for Housing Element law.

The agency responsible for that is the State Department of Housing and Community Development.

When updating the Housing Element, it takes a very long process. What we've been, among Housing Element consultants and also people at the different COGs, we've been talking about how the state law has changed so significantly in the last few years. It's so, to the point that it no longer aligns with the timeline that they have designed in the past. So, that's why it gives us a very tight timeframe in updating the Housing Element. This process starts with the needs assessment, and then we look at the programs, policies, and actions that you can take in the next eight years in order to address your needs. The Housing Elements, once it becomes a draft to the public, needs to go through a very rigorous review, not only by your public, by the local community, but also by the state agency, and then you adopt the Housing Element and get certified by the state. Only the state certifies and adopts a Housing Element. They don't certify a draft Housing Element. And then once the Housing Element is certified, we move on to implementation. A lot of your programs are expected to be that you're going to take meaningful actions over the next eight years to address your needs. And throughout this whole process, outreach is also important. So, during the last few months, we've been working on the demographic, housing needs assessment, reviewing what you were able to accomplish over the last eight years, and we also looked at your constraints, governmental development standards, and all of that. So those background studies are generally in a draft form right now, but tonight we're going to focus on the difficult issue, how to meet the Regional Housing Needs Allocation. When we send the Housing Element to the state for review, what we ultimately want to achieve is something called finding of substantial compliance to state law. With that finding of compliance, it really means that when you have a Housing Element compliance, you're protected by state law. And if you don't have that compliance, you will not be eligible for some grant funding. If you need to City of Tracy – Special Concurrent City Council / Planning Commission Meeting Verbatim Transcription
March 22, 2023 – 5:00 p.m.

do rezoning to meet your Regional Housing Needs Allocation, you may need to do it in one year instead of three years at a time. And you can, if you have a Housing Element compliance with state law, that you can avoid like litigation and you can also avoid any kind of suspension from building permit issuance. You can also avoid something called Builder’s Remedy. And I'm going to go into a little bit more detail about what is Builder’s Remedy. But Builder’s Remedy is not, the term itself is not in the statute. It's more like a street term. It is really a finding that you cannot use to deny an affordable housing project. And that finding is like if you cannot use the fact that the project is not consistent with general planning and zoning to deny an affordable housing project. That's Builder’s Remedy. It's a finding that you're not able to use. So, this term Builder’s Remedy, I think, has surfaced recently. It's part of the Housing Accountability Act. It has been in the state law for over 30 years. It's been in place since the 1980s. It has never been used until the sixth cycle kind of surfaced. It's never been really challenged because it has never been used. What it is, is that when you don't have a Housing Element that is compliant with state law, then you cannot use that finding that the project is inconsistent with the local general plan and zoning to deny an affordable housing project. An affordable housing project is defined as one that has 20% of the units set aside, deed restricted as low-income use, or 100% of the project is deed restricted for moderate income households. So that is an affordable housing project and you cannot deny that project using that finding. So that is what the street termed Builder’s Remedy relates to. So Regional Housing Needs Allocation (RHNA), that is, again, like I mentioned before, is the most critical component of the state's review of the Housing Element. And it is a planning goal, it is not a production obligation; it is not yet a production obligation. I say not yet because the state has been changing state laws on housing related laws very frequently in the last few years. So, where the direction goes, we can't predict. But as of this time, the RHNA is still a planning goal, not a production obligation. What it means is that you must identify enough capacity within your jurisdiction that can accommodate potentially the Regional Housing Needs Allocation should the market call for it. But you don't function as a developer, you're not penalized if the units are not constructed. So, what the state uses is this whole idea about density as a proxy to feasibility for producing affordable housing, when it comes to identifying capacity. In a suburban county like San Joaquin County, the default density for feasible lower income is 20 units to the acre, unless your population is over 100,000 and then it bumps up to 30 units to the acre. Now you're at 95,000 right now, so just right below 100,000 that we should still be able to use the density of 20 units to the acre for feasible lower income housing. But as Dan will later mention to you, the lower the density the more acreage you need. So, it's a balance game that we need to kind of have your input and weighing in are there any areas that you can go a little higher, so then we don't have to use as many acreage. So that's something that we have to consider in the future. So, in order to meet the Regional Housing Needs Allocation, there's been some major changes to state law that makes the RHNA particularly challenging. Not City of Tracy – Special Concurrent City Council / Planning Commission Meeting Verbatim Transcription
March 22, 2023 – 5:00 p.m.

only is the RHNA is much larger, almost like two or three times larger than the fifth cycle, but what qualifies as a site is also subject to a higher standard today than five, eight years ago. AB 1397 was passed in 2017, and it strictly relates to looking at adequate sites. One key requirement is the sites cannot be too small, and it cannot be too large for lower income.

Essentially understanding that if you want to do an affordable housing project, a non-profit doesn't have the ability to buy a 20-acre site and build affordable housing. You don't want all of these affordable housing units or low-income housing units in a concentrated manner either. There are also higher standards of what is considered vacant. In the past, a parking lot is a vacant land. Today, under the new state law, it pretty much has to be dirt to be considered vacant land. And it does have some ramifications in terms of how much of your Regional Housing Needs Allocation, particularly the lower income, is fulfilled on vacant land versus non-vacant land, because presumably, it's more difficult to develop on non-vacant land versus vacant land. Again, if your site's inventory is made up of more non-vacant land, then you're subject to a higher standard of analysis and feasibility. And specifically, when we adopt the Housing Element, it needs to have, and we draft the Housing Element, we have to have substantial evidence that existing uses on the non-vacant sites would not impede redevelopment. And that's something, that's a threshold that we have to meet, and that is very difficult. And in fact, this particular requirement is what gets most of the jurisdiction in the urbanized areas stuck. In the SCAG region, Southern California Association of Government, their Housing Element was due back in October 2021, as of today, there's still just about half of the jurisdictions having Housing Element that's approved by the state. A lot of it due to the substantial evidence that existing uses would not impede redevelopment. Another part of the AB 1397 is by right approval of projects, it requires that if you're reusing sites that you have used in the fifth cycle to meet your RHNA, but nothing gets built, the sites continues to be available. But if you're reusing it, or if you have to do rezoning to meet your Regional Housing Needs Allocation, then those sites would be subject to by right approval if 20% of the project is set aside for lower income households. And so, that is state law. And either reuse or rezone sites are subject to by right approval if 20% of the projects are subject to lower income, are set aside for lower income use.

Then there is also an additional requirement under AB 1397 is replacement requirement. If you're using a site that currently is improved or developed with existing housing units, so if the units are either deed restricted for low-income use or they are occupied, even though it's not deed restricted, but if it's occupied by lower-income households, the developer, as a Condition of Approval, must replace those affordability units one to one and de-restrict those units before the project can be approved. Now that actually acts to some extent as a constraint to improving some of the older housing stock that maybe is expiring, is useful life, but this replacement housing requirement actually probably acts as a constraint because developers may not feel that as financially feasible. One more key change to the state law is the SB 166 relating to sites is something called no net loss. Now in the past when we do the City of Tracy – Special Concurrent City Council / Planning Commission Meeting Verbatim Transcription
March 22, 2023 – 5:00 p.m.

Housing Element, we do the site's inventory, it's a point in time accounting of how much site capacity you have. And then once you get your enough sites, you adopt your Housing Element, your obligation for identifying sites, is essentially done. But with SB 166 is that you have to continuously monitor the status of your site, the availability of your site, whether you continue to have the ability to meet your Regional Housing Needs Allocation. Then it's going to go into that a little bit further, but a lot of times when we have a site, for example, zoned for 20 units to the acre, and we said it's feasible for lower income based on density, according to state law, we can use it as a site to be, you know, for your lower income RHNA. But we all know the market's going to build, and the market is not going to voluntarily come up with affordable housing. And so may have, if you have inclusionary, you may have 10% or 15% of affordable units. If you don't have inclusionary, it may not have any affordable units. So, to the state, then you have lost capacity on that site. And so do you still have remaining capacity to make up the sites that you lost because you built a site that's feasible for low-income for a market rate housing? So now then, do you have enough sites to meet your remaining low-income RHNA? So, this accounting is continuously throughout the eight years of the Housing Element, very much unlike the past where it's a one-time accounting at the preparation of the Housing Element. So, because of the no net loss requirement, the state recommends that when you do your Regional Housing Needs Allocation, when you identify your capacity, your sites, you need to have a buffer. You need to be prepared that housing is not going to come back with 100% affordable voluntarily, or that developers can choose to build less than the maximum density, so you may lose some units here and there. And the state recommends a buffer of 15 to 30 percent. Now, that's not a requirement, it's a recommendation.

However, if you do not have any kind of buffer, the moment your site's capacity depletes as development occurs, then you're not allowed to approve the project unless you identify a replacement site, and you have to do it within six months. So, in order to avoid continuous rezoning when you run into a net loss situation, most jurisdictions do choose to have a buffer. But how much of a buffer that you're comfortable with, that's also a conversation that we would have with the Planning Commission and City Council.

So, what does not meeting RHNA means? Like I said, the Housing Element, that's the most critical component of the Housing Element.

Virtually no Housing Element is ever approved by the state without meeting the RHNA. So, you would not have a Housing Element that's deemed in substantial compliance. And if you have an integral component of the Housing Element as an integral component of the General Plan that is not complying with state law, then it really kind of renders the adequacy of the overall General Plan as well. What is also important is not providing sites for this cycle of the RHNA doesn't make the RHNA go away. It gets added to the next cycle of the Housing Element, so it's much more difficult. If you provide adequate sites this round, if it doesn't get built, you get to reuse your sites next time, but the RHNA is reset with the City of Tracy – Special Concurrent City Council / Planning Commission Meeting Verbatim Transcription
March 22, 2023 – 5:00 p.m.

next Housing Element cycle. If you don't provide adequate sites this time, even if there is no production, same way, but then what you owe is going to be added to the next one. So that the problem would just continue to snowball. It doesn't go away. So, with that, I'm going to pass it on to Dan, and he's going to talk about the progress of trying to come up with a strategy to meet the very large Regional Housing Needs Allocation that we're facing at this time.

Dan Wery: Great, good evening. I'm Dan Wery from Michael Baker. I'm teamed with Veronica on this. Some of my slides are going to be a little bit redundant so I'll go a little bit more quickly over those. Good evening, Council and Commissioners.

We heard RHNA a lot, that's Regional Housing Needs Allocation, and I just wanted to back up a little bit to the specific numbers for Tracy and where they came from. So, the state is determined, using a bunch of calculations and algorithms, we need approximately 2.2 million new homes over the next eight years. They take that number at the state level and they break that down to each region; each region gets its own allocation. And then within the region, every City and County gets their individual allocation. So, for San Joaquin County, the County's share of that 2.2 million is just over 52,000, almost 53,000 units. And the City of Tracy was allocated 8,800 units, almost 8,900. So again, that's what we call fair share. You'll hear that term quite a bit. But that all relates back to that Regional Housing Needs Allocation. So, every municipality in the state has got an allocation. The City of Tracy's share is 8,830 units. So, this slide is pretty much redundant with what Veronica was just going over, but it just includes these specific numbers. So, the city must always maintain enough capacity for the 8,830 units. If you don't, you need to replace those within six months. And again, you really don't want to rezone or find new sites, so we like to have that buffer.

Generally, we start with a working buffer of about 20%. If you're really confident on your sites, you can go a little bit lower, maybe to 15%. If you're not so confident, you might go with a higher buffer. But that's essentially what we were talking about just a few minutes ago. And just to kind of put it in context, where we are now, we're in the end of the fifth housing cycle that will end this year in December. And we'll start the new eight-year period on January 1st. This table just shows a comparison of where we currently are. The current RHNA is the fifth cycle Housing Element from 2015 through 2023. That was just under 5,000 units total. But a key here is that they're broken down by income levels. So, you see that there's four main income levels from very low to low to moderate and above moderate. And those numbers total up horizontally to the 5,000 units, roughly, for the fifth cycle. The hardest ones are the very low and low. Those are the most difficult ones to achieve because they're substantially below market rate and require subsidies and tax incentives and or additional densities to offset those costs. On the second row is our new RHNA that was just assigned. I think that just came out late last September. So, we really didn't know where we were until really October of last year. And we've just been getting started on this. So, now we know the numbers, we know our targets. So, you see that that number has grown substantially. If you look on the lower right corner overall, the difference between roughly 5,000 and almost 8,900 now is a 77% increase. That's substantial. More telling is when you look at that from left to right on that bottom row is the percent change. And this is just in the RHNA here. So, the lower City of Tracy – Special Concurrent City Council / Planning Commission Meeting Verbatim Transcription
March 22, 2023 – 5:00 p.m.

income, the very low, and the low income we call lower combined, has grown even more substantially than the overall RHNA. So, there's a 200% growth in the very low income units. You went from 980 to almost 3,000. And you went from 700 to almost 1,900 in the low income category. So, that's 167% growth. So, what that means is you need more land, you need more sites and or more density to accommodate and meet that RHNA requirement. And as Veronica mentioned, the proxy for affordability a step by the state in a suburban community like Tracy is a minimum of 20 dwelling units per acre. So that's kind of our target density. The higher you go, the less land you need. The lower you go, you have to have at least 20. But if you're at 20, you're going to need more and more land at that kind of moderately high density. So that's part of the challenge.

This table just kind of shows how those numbers kind of relate to the income categories. Tracy's median income is somewhere around 75 to 85,000 roughly, for San Joaquin County. These income categories are kind of targeted to that. It's not exactly perfect math every time, but you see the categories on that left column. The very low income is less than 50% of your area median income, which is really the San Joaquin County income. In this case, we use a four- person household. It varies depending on the household size. There's this long matrix that you can use to calculate that. But in this case, we're looking at households earning less than 37,000. And we need almost 3,000 units that would be affordable to households earning 37,000. And that just gets us to the RHNA. If we add a buffer to that, and again we're looking at a 20% buffer, that adds another roughly 600 units. So, we're looking at almost 3,600 units there. So, you kind of see how the math works here. The lower income is the next step up, that's households earning between 50 and 80% of the area median income. And you see the price range there, the income range, the number of units that the state has assigned, state and county. And then same thing for moderate income.

So moderate income brackets that area median income, it's 80% to 120%. And again, we need almost 1,200 units of those to meet our RHNA. If we add a 20% buffer, we need about 1,400 units. And then above moderate income, anything over 120% of median income. So again, that's going to be basically anything over $88,000 for a family of four, or a household of four. And those are basically market rate units. That's what the market generates. Those are the easiest ones to meet, and I can tell you already that we've already satisfied the RHNA for those over the next eight years. That's just out of normal housing production. So, we'll get into that a little bit. This is what Veronica and I mentioned earlier. earlier, the minimum density to qualify a site as adequate to meet the RHNA, and again for the very low and low, is a minimum of 20 dwelling units per acre. That's kind of a typical townhouse development, if you think about it. Townhouses, you can get up to 25, sometimes 30 dwelling units per acre, but 20-24 is pretty standard for just kind of a row home, two stories over a common garage. You see a lot of those. Moderate income is another one of our categories. There's no statutory number there. There's no proxy for that. But generally, if you're reaching 12 dwelling units per acre, that'll qualify. So, we have to plug all these into a big table, do a lot of math, we look at all the parcels in your city, and it gets quite involved. But this is just kind of basics and the foundation of the analysis that we have to do. So, this is kind of overall when we're looking at the site's inventory, we're looking at the city as a whole. And we look at the general plan, land use categories, we're looking for residentially zoned or designated lands. We also City of Tracy – Special Concurrent City Council / Planning Commission Meeting Verbatim Transcription
March 22, 2023 – 5:00 p.m.

look at the zoning as well. Look at them together. They should be very close to each other. So, we're looking for areas that permit and encourage residential development. And then we're looking at a number of different factors. So, there's some new state requirements, and then there's just practical issues that we have to defend all of these sites back to the state. So, again, unlike the other elements of your general plan, this one requires basically a third-party approval from the Department of Housing and Community Development, or HCD. So first we look for that realistic capacity. Do we just, on the basic math, do we have enough land that's suitable for development with the appropriate zoning that can meet our RHNA. As part of that, then we have to look at the size of the parcels. These are new requirements now. The state said, well, you know, there's kind of a sweet spot for affordable housing development. And generally, that's going to fall between a half-acre property and a ten-acre property. So, it's the Goldilocks, you know, it can't be too big or too small. So that cuts out a lot of properties. We can include other properties that are smaller than a half an acre or larger than 10 acres, but we need to go through additional justification for those and we need to explain those very specifically. And then like all development, we want to make sure there's adequate infrastructure to support that. So again, if we're looking at higher densities, you need to make sure in particular you've got adequate water and sewer or wastewater services and dry utilities. Generally, in the areas that are zoned for that, they're going to have those facilities in that capacity. But again, we need to show that. Then we look for developable land, and that can be a variety of things. So, primarily, we're looking to see are there constraints that really discount a particular property. And that can be a number of different things.

But are there steep slopes? Are there wetlands? Are there flood plains? Are there easements? Are road rights of way? And then we can get into use. Are there uses there, or past uses even, that might constrain the future use of a property for residential development? So, we look at near-term development opportunities. Is there owner-developer interest? That's really helpful. As we're going through this process, if you know there's developers or property owners that are interested in developing over the next eight years, particularly for the sites that we have to identify and show to the state, it's helpful if we can get an affirmation. It's not required, but it helps us prove to the state, yes, there is interest. That can happen on an individual site basis or just in general. If we show that there's interest in Tracy or even in the region for similar development that we're kind of keeping our eyes out and looking for examples. One of the tricks for this particular cycle is that everything needs to be fact-based, and it needs to be defensible, and it needs to be based on trends, demonstrable trends. Sometimes the trends are there, sometimes there's not great evidence. We might have a small sample size, for instance. But we're looking for examples of development that would be consistent with what we're proposing to meet your RHNA. So, if there's recent projects in Tracy or in the area at the right densities, then we can use that to substantiate that, yes, this is likely to happen. There's a market for it.

So, it's just another layer that we have to look at whether the properties themselves are vacant or non-vacant. If they're non-vacant, that's presumed to be a constraint on development. There's a use there already. So, what's the likelihood that that use is going to vacate that property and then allow development for residential development or high density residential in particular.

But sometimes we get property...so we look at whether, if it's not vacant, we look City of Tracy – Special Concurrent City Council / Planning Commission Meeting Verbatim Transcription
March 22, 2023 – 5:00 p.m.

to see if it's underutilized. And there's a number of different factors we look at. So sometimes you'll have a relatively small, maybe a single-family home on a 10- acre lot that's zoned for high density. That's a great site. It's got a lot of potential, because it's not using its potential under the zoning. So those are some of the things that we look for as we go through all the data that we have on the city. It can be a commercial site, and that can be in a zone that allows mixed use or residential as well. And again, if it's underutilized, it might be an old building in an old use, big parking lot, lots of land that could accommodate infill development.

You might have a mix of residential and commercial. Or possible redevelopment.

So those are things that we need to look at as well. The final category here is furthering fair housing. And as it says, the city must demonstrate that the sites further fair housing. What does that mean? There's two things we want to do. We want to avoid an over concentration of particularly the lower income households in certain areas. So, they want to see a distribution of that. And they particularly want to see a distribution in areas of the city that have the highest opportunity.

So highest chance for success. If somebody lives there, they're in an area that's going to have a good environment, it's going to have access to good economy or good job opportunities, good education. And they actually have a series of data and maps that you'll see in the draft that we go through that. We look at those factors individually, and then we looked at they have a composite of that. And they have an overall rating. It's kind of a relative rating within the county, and says, is this a high or low or medium opportunity area? And they want to see a distribution. Ideally, they'd want to see all the new units in the highest opportunity areas, but that's just not realistic. So, we look for a good, fair, even distribution and not a concentration. So, constraints on site capacity and site selection. I think I talked about these already, but one of the big ones that we look at is the land use and zoning. These are things that the city has control over, because the city sets the general plan designations and the overall densities and direction of growth. And then the zoning implements that. So, we look at those two carefully.

And we're looking at permitted densities, minimum and maximum. We're looking at, is there vacant land or suitably zoned land? Is there land available? And again, in those categories. Then we look at the particular development constraints. Parking setbacks, height, floor area ratio, things of that nature. And so we look at that to make sure that your general plan may say, you know, we're recommending an area for moderate or even high density residential, but your zoning sometimes might not allow you to actually get there if the numbers don't work out. So, we look kind of closely at those and identify if there's any constraints in that regard. As I mentioned, we're looking obviously at environmental constraints and maybe other legal constraints. So, one of the things that we get to do, and this is actually a really nice story for Tracy and many other cities over the last few years, is count those trends. And those trends can actually help us meet our RHNA. And one that's been really productive in the last few years is accessory dwelling units. The granny flats, the guest apartment, you know. A small unit, typically in your backyard over the garage, sometimes converting the garage, can be basically a unit in an existing home gets converted. So, it's got its own independent living. And here on the upper left, you see just the trend here. So, in 2018, the laws at the state changed and said, every city has to allow Accessory Dwelling Units. So, we saw some uptick on that. It was possible everywhere. Then it got kind of popular. You see 2019, it City of Tracy – Special Concurrent City Council / Planning Commission Meeting Verbatim Transcription
March 22, 2023 – 5:00 p.m.

grew to 18 units in Tracy. In 2020, it dropped to 10. What happened in 2020? Obviously, we had COVID, put a huge damper on everything. 2021 is starting to recover. We see that number effectively triple since 2020, pre-COVID. And then 2022, more than double between 2021 and 2022. 120 ADUs per year, accessory dwelling units. That's great. It's a really positive trend. That means we can count that average of 41, almost 42 units per year toward meeting your RHNA. And those units get to be distributed amongst the different income levels. And so, what that means is we get roughly 328 or 330 units that we'll be able to count toward our RHNA. And what's nice too is those tend to be distributed. And I talked about that distribution for fair housing. Those tend to be in the higher opportunity areas, the higher income areas where they're fitting in basically a single-family property, single family backyard or side yard or in the unit itself. So that's very helpful. And it's a very positive trend. So, you can see on the bottom table there, we just show how we are able to count that. So, we've got our RHNA at the top there, totaling 8,830 units. We get to count those accessory dwelling units. The distribution right now, we need to determine. This is a distribution that was established based on a study done by Cal Berkeley for the Bay Area, but we're seeing the same patterns in all the regions, which are that the majority of accessory dwelling units are rented to people of lower income and at rents that are affordable to people of lower income. So that's how we're able to get a distribution where 90% of the units are below market rate, if you will, or available to very low, low or moderate incomes. So that's really good. Those percentages may change because we don't have that study in San Joaquin County yet. It may happen, it may not happen. So, we're going to have to make an argument for that. So, there's a lot of factors that keep changing. But right now, that's good. It helps a lot. So, you see what happens. We have the RHNA and then we have the accessory dwelling units that are projected over the next eight years. And then we get a remaining RHNA. So, we're able to subtract those out. That's kind of the process we're going to do. I'll flip to this next one. It's a complicated table, that's why we put the row identifier on the left. This really wasn't set up for public presentation, but it helps. This will end up in the Housing Element where you've got more time to think and follow the numbers, but the basic idea is the same as what I just went through. The top row is your RHNA. Then we take out pending projects. Pending projects, anything that's been recently approved or is pending approval. You've got a constant supply. There's always something, typically, in your pipeline of development projects. We're able to count those over the next eight years. So, these are projects that right now you've got over 9,300 units that are pending or recently approved. And for those, if you look at that row B, and then you look at the income distributions, you see the actual income levels that were part of the approvals. So, you've got 23 that reserved and dedicated to very low, 23 to low income households, 70 for moderate, and then 9,200 for above moderate. So overall a great number, but not very much on those lower and moderate-income units. We need to make up a lot more. In row C you see those ADUs that we just talked about on the prior page. Those get deducted. And then row D, and this is very preliminary numbers, but row D is the potential RHNA sites, and that's why I have preliminary, because we're constantly adding, subtracting, and refining based on all the factors I've been talking about for 10 or 15 minutes. But as of publication of this, and I can tell you that number has already changed, but actually that's pretty current. We've got about 1,100 very City of Tracy – Special Concurrent City Council / Planning Commission Meeting Verbatim Transcription
March 22, 2023 – 5:00 p.m.

low-income potential units identified, roughly the same number of low-income units identified, 3,800 moderate and about 1,600 above moderate for about 7,700. That's good. You add that up to the pending, we're looking at a potential capacity on row E of about 17,000. So that E is our total capacity. Then we, row F is our unmet RHNA. What's left over from that RHNA? And you see that we've got the two left columns, very low and low, are still got some significant numbers in there. Roughly 1,700 in the very low, roughly 600 in the low. Those numbers will change, they'll continue to refine. Our goal is to get those below zero. You see in the moderate and the above moderate columns, we've got dashes in there. You've already exceeded your RHNA for the next eight years for those categories. We're kind of done. That's great. We really need to focus on those very low and low. Those are the ones that again need to be at a minimum of 20 dwelling units per acre. So, we're looking for land that's zoned to allow at least 20 dwelling units per acre, is available, is the right size, doesn't have these constraints, et cetera. So roughly, it's still a challenge. So, looking at that, we've got row G, we just add that 20% buffer that we want. So, we don't need to buffer on the RHNA that's already been met. So, we're really just looking at the unmet RHNA. But if we had a 20% buffer, we're looking at currently about 2,800 units of the lower income that need to be at 20 dwelling units per acre. That's our challenge currently. So, we're still working to find those. What it means is we've kind of got the low hanging fruit. We've got your existing zoning, your existing potential, we're pretty confident about that, we're probably going to need to rezone to get that extra 2,800 units. Depending on how you do the math and which buffer you look at, if we do some simple calculations, if we can rezone sites that aren't currently at allow 20 dwelling units per acre, let's say they allow 15 dwelling units per acre. And if we could increase that zone from 15 to 20, then they can count. And so, we need roughly combined about 167 acres to meet the RHNA, assuming that. If we have a 20% buffer, then we're closer to about 200 acres. So, it's a pretty big task. It's not impossible, but there's basically two ways to go. You can go up, you can increase your density with your existing zones to achieve that. Actually, you'd be surprised, and many people are surprised. A lot of people get hung up on a number. 24 is bigger than 20. It is, but when you look at the development type from the outside, they look very similar. You can go 20, 30, 40, and depending on how it's designed, they can look very similar, behave the same, be really nice developments. That's one way to go. It's probably going to be a combination. If you don't go higher density, then you need to add more land, rezone more land from lower density to higher density. So, you can work with your existing zones and or expand your zones to allow more areas that would go from, say, like an R2 would go to an R3 or an R4 zone. So that's what this is all about. And so, there's a pretty good challenge there. Again, just overall, this is kind of a summary. We look at the general plan and the zoning. We look at your recent pending projects. We're able to deduct those. We're able to deduct your ADUs. That gives us kind of that net unmet or remaining RHNA. We look at your vacant and underutilized sites and see what can satisfy that. And then we start to go, okay, we need more. Where are we going to go? We look at the commercial corridors in your downtown. Those are already your most intensive areas. It's where you've got services and employment and transit. So, you've got the infrastructure to support higher density. So those are usually the first places we look, as well as the other high-density zones. And then again, we look at that City of Tracy – Special Concurrent City Council / Planning Commission Meeting Verbatim Transcription
March 22, 2023 – 5:00 p.m.

AFFH or Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing. Making sure everybody has equal access and that when we do the new housing, it's in a place that's appropriate and suitable and people who are going to live there are going to have good opportunity to have successful lifestyles. So again, it falls into those maps. We talked about high opportunity areas. But overall, we're looking at rezoning. That can be increasing densities and or increasing the areas of those zones. And again, in the upper right here is just kind of a comparison of where we are or were. In the fifth cycle, the result was you had enough zoning, you had enough capacity, you were a little short. So, to meet that RHNA for the fifth cycle, almost eight years ago, you needed one site, about 31 acres, and that met your goals.

Now we've got to put a lot more evidence behind it, a lot more demonstration to the state. But we're looking at, as I mentioned on the prior slide, maybe 160 to 200 acres. We hope we can bring that down with some more math, but that's roughly where we are right now. We're getting closer. Those numbers, it's a very iterative process where we keep refining and refining and growing our confidence. So that's where that is. And I think, Veronica, were you gonna talk about the schedule? Remaining schedule? Okay, great. So happy to answer questions later.

VT: Hi. As I mentioned before, the timeline to produce the Housing Element hasn't changed.

The state law gives you 18 months to produce the Housing Element after the adoption of the regional housing, regional transportation plan. That hasn't changed. But the state has made a lot of changes to the requirements, particularly when it comes to public review. For example, HCD review of the draft Housing Element used to be 60 days, now it's 90 days. Now they add on to a 30-day public review before you can even submit the draft Housing Element, and then you need to do a 15-day response to comment after your 30-day, and then every time you resubmit a draft, it adds another 60 or 70 days to the time frame. The overall 18 months hasn't changed, but their requirements have continued to compound. And so that's why it's getting a lot of jurisdictions in a bind right now, because it's just almost impossible. But we are on the path of meeting the statutory deadline of December, end of December for you. As I also mentioned before, we've been doing a lot of the background analysis in the last few months. We have a lot of the technical parts of it done. The most difficult part, obviously, is the sites inventory and then teams been working hard to try to wriggle it down to the minimum that we need to do rezoning for because it is a hard decision. So, we are kicking off this to the public in terms of the Housing Element, but we do have other kind of community outreach that we are planning to do. We have designed a survey for online survey for residents to talk about housing needs and what their concerns are, and that will kick off hopefully after tonight. It's in English and Spanish. We line up stakeholders for interviews to understand their developers, non-profits, and what are the constraints that they feel as development within the city of Tracy, and what are the opportunities out there as well. We also have additional workshops that we are planning in the next couple of months. Also, on top of that, we are adding something called Balancing Act as an exercise for the residents to kind of weigh in their ideas about where new housing needs to be, should be provided.

Now we know we have to, then the difficult question is, “Where?” And so, we want to not only have like the Planning Commission, City Council way indefinitely you'll be working on the balancing act as well, but the residents would have the opportunity with setting that up right now. So, our intention is to get the Housing Element and the draft out by mid-May or so, and then it would do public review and Planning Commission and City City of Tracy – Special Concurrent City Council / Planning Commission Meeting Verbatim Transcription
March 22, 2023 – 5:00 p.m.

Council review of the draft housing alman during May or June, and then we will send it off to HCD for the mandatory 90-day review. Again, this is the one that it used to be 60 days, they just extended it. And so, we'll do that in July through September. And it would give us about a month to revise the Housing Element when we get the comments back from the state. And then we'll move on to adoption of the Housing Element in November and before the Planning Commission and City Council in December. We understand that, unfortunately, the Housing Element is due during holiday seasons. And that's going to be difficult too to accommodate public hearings during the holiday seasons, too. So that's the reason why the Planning Commission is in November and December, in early December for City Council because we're anticipating that we would not have the opportunity to have a public hearing later on during like mid- or late- December. So, we're trying to get it through sooner and meet the statutory deadline of the update by December 31st. So that's kind of like our best-case scenario. But again, the challenges are, it's high, and I also noted that in the SCAG region, the Housing Element was due a year and a half ago. As of now, only about half of the jurisdictions are compliant right now. The ABEC region, the Housing Element was due January 31st this year. Out of the 109 jurisdictions in ABEC, only 8 jurisdictions are certified right now. A lot of us are, it's just that difficult. I think added on top of that is that the state has to have the manpower to provide the review, to provide the technical assistance and all that, and they are certainly understaffed as well, so that added on top of that challenge. But again, our best proposal is to move on with these steps and with the goal of adopting the Housing Element before the statutory deadline. With that, I'll pass it on to Alan again. He has some topics to cover.

Alan Bell: Thank you very much, Veronica and Dan. This is a lot of information that we're providing. I just want to take this chance with both the City Council and Planning Commission convened to give just a very brief update on work that the City Council approved or directed a couple of years ago. In March of 2021, the City Council approved a contract with PlaceWorks, Inc. to work with us to help lead the City through some affordable housing or workforce affordable housing initiatives or tasks related to encouraging the production of housing in Tracy. So, with respect to that list, since then we have created six off-the-shelf Accessory Dwelling Unit plans that are on the city's website and approved. We designed them and we put them through the city's plan check process and so they're available for homeowners, contractors to use here in the City of Tracy. The City Council just over a year ago rezoned just over or just about five acres there were ten lots in about five acres from light industrial to medium density residential near the intersection of Evans and 3rd Street, just on the south side of the Bowtie area. And here in the months coming up, the Planning Commission is scheduled in April to consider updates to the Accessory Dwelling Unit Zoning Ordinance regulations, and then shortly thereafter we'll see a feasibility study for inclusionary zoning and a litany of other code amendments that are on that list. And so, the next two slides, these two images were published with the agenda for tonight's meeting, and they're available to see. And this is the entire list that was set up with PlaceWorks back then, back in March of 2021. So, there's no action requested of the City Council or the Planning Commission tonight. This meeting is intended to help set a foundation of the public understanding for our Housing Element Update and to emphasize that this is an important part of City policy that requires our diligent attention here for the past six months and for the next nine months and beyond as we pull this City of Tracy – Special Concurrent City Council / Planning Commission Meeting Verbatim Transcription
March 22, 2023 – 5:00 p.m.

together. In the months ahead, Veronica went through the schedule, but in the near term now we're going to see public participation in the next several months.

Veronica mentioned Balancing Act. That's a consultant that we've discovered in the last couple of months that has created a web based public interaction program where we can set it up available through the City's website to allow participants, property owners, developers, attorneys, citizens to interact with us on the website to identify locations in the town to help achieve the RHNA. So, the biggest focus now in the next few months will be identifying perhaps up to a couple hundred acres or so that we could rezone or change the development standards to provide for density to accommodate the lower income RHNA categories, the low and very low categories. We saw we might need a couple hundred acres or so of land to achieve that. Hopefully it won't be that bad. We've spent the last six months with Dan and his team on that, looking at the 30,000 plus parcels in town. We started out with a list of over 700 lots that were potential RHNA sites, and we're paring that down smaller and smaller. It has a spreadsheet that goes from here to the back door if you print it out of all these sites in Tracy that we're trying to find sites to identify the RHNA. Well, we're going to invite the public to participate in that. We want to with this Balancing Act effort. I bring that to your attention because it's something that we just discovered, and we think it's very effective other communities have found it very helpful and it'll is something that the City Council will potentially see on consent calendar the next month or two to help fund that.

We're looking to potentially juggle some of the budget that we have to pay for that to get them started, concurrently with the effort to get it funded as we get it on the Council's agenda. So, it's a decision that we'll make if we end up going through with Balancing Act or not, just to let you know that you'll see it on the consent calendar here in the next month or two. So, Mayor, thank you for this time. Like I said, no actions requested, but I'd like to turn the meeting over to you now, and happy to receive questions or if you look for clarification, please count on us to provide that. Nick, if you can end the slides that would be great. Thanks.

Mayor Young: Thank
you for that. I looked online just to see if I could do a search on ADU to find those six plans right there. But it was mentioned earlier that after tonight, as far as Veronica mentioned, the online survey will kick off afterwards. When will that (the online survey) be found for the public?

Alan
Bell: I think it's safe to say within the next week. That will start things off. It's a survey in a couple of languages. We will push out information on it on our social media outlets throughout the City, but available on our website. I think it's safe to estimate within the next week.

Mayor Young: Okay, that's fine. Just expectations is what we're looking for. So, it (the online survey) will be on the website, on the front page, somewhere that's easily accessible? Do we plan to have a tab that says Housing Element?

Ala
n Bell: Yes, it will be accessible. Scroll down, it will be somewhere on the front page of the City's website identifying what it's about and why we're looking for input and it'll help give the opportunity for us also to start the effort to identify what this Housing Element Update is about you know as people answer questions, we'll City of Tracy – Special Concurrent City Council / Planning Commission Meeting Verbatim Transcription
March 22, 2023 – 5:00 p.m.

learn also what we're all going through together, what all the cities in the state are going through, with this Housing Element Update.

Mayor Young: Thank you. I will, first, just make sure if we have any clarifying questions for either Veronica or Dan or Alan. Councilmember Arriola?

Councilmember Arriola: Thank y ou, Mayor. Thank you for the presentation. That was a lot to process, but it's nice to have it, and see it, and see the work that you've been doing. So yesterday I had asked a question related to, so we're currently working in the sixth cycle, but in the fifth cycle, my understanding was that we had not met some of the RHNA numbers, particularly for low income and very low income.

So, in one of the slides here, you stated the RHNA shortfall numbers would be carried over to the next cycle. So, can you confirm the numbers that you're showing us today, of taking that into consideration, in this Update?

VT
: S hortfall is entirely related to sites. So, let's say if your RHNA is 1,000 units, and you say your capacity is only for 800, and you don't do anything to address that shortfall, then the state would, one, you wouldn't have a certified Housing Element, but two, it doesn't just go away. The 200 units that you didn't accommodate from the perspective of having sites would be added to your next RHNA. If you provided 1,000-unit capacity and nothing gets built, that's not considered shortfall, and you don't have the obligation to carry that unbuilt units over.

Councilmember Arriola: So, does that obligation currently exist for the sixth cycle, or no?

VT
: The unbuilt units from the fifth cycle doesn't get carried over at all. It's the unzoned land that you don't have enough land that would get carryover, and we don't have that obligation. I believe we did rezone that 31-acre site.

Alan Bell: No, we only have it. We only have all the other lands.

VT: So, have we added that to the sixth cycle then? Then, if we have not, well, we have to do the analysis. Pardon me, I apologize for double checking on that one, my assumption was that 31-acres was zoned, but you say that it hasn't been zoned.

Ala
n Bell: That's correct. We can talk about that if you like.

Councilmember Arriola: I would like to hear about that.

Mayor Young: Okay, that was the only thing that was needed for last time, and for it to be available, do you have to actually zone it to really make it a reality?

Ala
n Bell: The property we're talking about is adjacent to the east of the Raley’s shopping center on the north side of Valpico Road and east of Tracy Boulevard. So, we've got the property, the real estate between Raley's and over to the industrial development. And there's kind of a fenced in five-acre area with equipment and heavy equipment that's stored there. It's that property. It's 31 acres and there's a City of Tracy – Special Concurrent City Council / Planning Commission Meeting Verbatim Transcription
March 22, 2023 – 5:00 p.m.

subdivision that was approved back in the 70’s creating a street called Mission Court. It's not on the ground, but it's on maps. It's the north-south running cul-de- sac perpendicular to Valpico Road going north from Valpico Road right at that location where we see that equipment storage yard. So, that's the property we're talking about. What we said to the state with the fifth cycle is: we'll rezone that from industrial to high-density residential, in order to meet the number of acres to accommodate the RHNA of the fifth cycle. The General Plan designation for that property has been changed from industrial to residential high and the zoning just needs to catch up to that. The zoning hasn't been changed yet. So, it is identified now on the list of sites that we are presenting for the sixth cycle. It's identified as a site that we need to accommodate the RHNA.

Councilmember Arriola: Sorry, so has that analysis been completed? Or I just want to make sure the numbers are accurate as we're moving forward.

That analysis hasn't been completed because you have to, even though that particular site hasn't been rezoned, you have also done other rezoning that changed to high density.

VT
: S o as long as the numbers worked out, it doesn't necessarily mean that you have to do that particular site. In this particular slide, that talks about some of the rezoning into high density residential that they can swap out, too. The other thing, too, if the General Plan has already been changed and it's just the zoning that needs to catch up, if we can get it done before the end of the year, then it doesn't get carried over to the next cycle.

Alan Bell: I think it's important also to give a little more context. Last time was different than this time. Fifth cycle RHNA was a much smaller number. The number of units to accommodate the low and very low number of units was much smaller. We didn't need... We had other sites available. We didn't have to exhaust all the vacant sites to accommodate the RHNA last time. We just had this 31-acres where the General Plan destination was already changed to residential high. We already talked about it. Your predecessors on the City Council prior to the fifth cycle had concluded, hey this is a reasonable multifamily site here adjacent to Raley's. And so, we characterized it, actually wrote in the Housing Element, the fifth cycle Housing Element, this is really a technical item, it's really a clean-up item to change the zoning. We offered it and put it down as a program of our fifth cycle Housing Element. And it's something that we worked on at time, we got it to Planning Commission hearing, the Planning Commission recommended approval back in late 2021 of that, you may recall in November of 2021, and through the administrative decision making and our processes, it just hasn't been approved by City Council. But it didn't become, it's on our list of programs for the fifth cycle and it hasn't been done yet. It wasn't rezoned. And now it is one of the potential sites for our sixth cycle. You know, for this draft that we're working on with Dan, Dan identified 200 acres. That table included information of the number of sites, the number of acres that have already been considered for potential RHNA sites.

This is a potential RHNA site of our sixth cycle. This 30 acres.

Councilmember Arriola: Okay, thank you. I just wanted to make sure that was taken into consideration given what we saw on the slide. Yes. Then my last question would be, so obviously, we, as a City, have Measure A in City of Tracy – Special Concurrent City Council / Planning Commission Meeting Verbatim Transcription
March 22, 2023 – 5:00 p.m.

place. My understanding is that there are exceptions for affordable housi
ng included in the language of it. So, I just want to confirm that we've conducted an analysis to see if there's anything we need to be looking out for as we go through this process specifically because of Measure A?

Ala
n Bell: Yeah, all residential construction, and all residential development in Tracy is subject to the provisions of Measure A and the Growth Management Ordinance.

Measure A, of course, is part of the Growth Management Ordinance. The Growth Management includes a provision that there are basically three maximum settings, the maximum number of residential units that can be constructed per year. It's either an annual average of 600 units per year, going back to January 2000, or if the running average is below 600, then we can construct up to 750, or we're allowed by Growth Management Ordinance to issue up to 750 building permits for new residential units in that year. Or thirdly, if we haven't yet met the RHNA, we can issue residential building permits for dwelling units that can go up to the RHNA in each of the four income categories. So we remember that there were 2,800 or 2,900 dwelling units worth of very low income in our RHNA for the 2023 through 2031 cycle. So, 2,800 dwelling units were very low income and numbers for low, moderate and above moderate. So, regardless of the Measure A 600 average or 750 max per year, we can issue 2,800 residential building permits for very low income units. The 600 and 750 notwithstanding, we can continue to issue building permits past the 600 and 750 to meet the RHNA and that's part of our GMO that that's built into the growth management ordinance.

Councilmember Arriola: Okay, thank you. I just wanted to make sure the analysis is done.

That's all I have, Mayor.

Mayor Young: Councilmember Evans, do you have any clarifying questions?

Councilmember Evans: Thank y
ou, Mayor. I've got a couple. This may be more for staff, but how do we plan to ensure community engagement and
awareness on the community survey?

Ala
n Bell: We'll take all the suggestions you have. So, our website, social media, and then we have a robust list of participants from the Chamber of Commerce to the downtown groups to business groups, affordable housing advocates, for-profit, non-profit developers, in town, and out of town. We have a list of maybe 80 or 90 who we sent notice of this meeting to. 80 or 90 people, parties. That's a start. To anybody and everybody who's shown interest in this, we've got 15 or so stakeholders who are among that group who will be conducting individual interviews with, either phone or Teams or in-person interviews to with more robust looking for more specific information. But that's among the ways that we tend to get the information out. If we think it will help, I remember years ago we take flyers and put them on grocery store, you know, the places where people bag their groceries. I don't know if that's en vogue so much anymore, but we won't prohibit that if we think that that will help.

City of Tracy – Special Concurrent City Council / Planning Commission Meeting Verbatim Transcription
March 22, 2023 – 5:00 p.m.

Councilmember Evans: No, I appreciate that. We do want to ensure that it's, you know, we're not excluding those that are on social media. And I assume that is gonna be an interactive, map-oriented survey?

Ala
n Bell: The survey is question and answer. It's online. People can give information back.

It's just that we ask, they give, and then we take it. There isn't back and forth.

Yeah, but there are some routes, if you answer a certain way to one question, then they’ll be a couple different choices.

Councilmember Evans: Ok
ay, my only other question, there were a lot of numbers, and I'm gonna go with the number 8,830 since that's the base number and then I know there's ADUs that were, you know, that are completed and others that are in progress. So I'm just gonna go with that number. But I'd like to nutshell, just to be sure, I have in my head what our goal is by the end of this year, I wanna be sure that I'm 100% clear on that and correct me where I'm wrong and I'll change the sentence but identification and state approval of sufficient property to allow for 8,830 very low to above moderate income housing units. Is that the goal to avoid Builder’s Remedy?

Ala
n Bell: That's a reasonable summary of one of the required components of the Housing Element, and the short answer is yes.

Councilmember Evans: And I know it's the broad definition, there are requirements within that, but okay. Very good. That's all my questions, thank you.

Mayor Pro Tem Davis: I
just wanted to know given that the deadline is coming up very quickly and there's a lot of work that has to happen within the next six months, by December 31st, has there been any appeals to the state advocating and lobbying for changing how the mandate is written more time, maybe not submission in December when as Ms. Tam said that you know that's the holiday time where not many people are available for hearings and public outreach so has there been any lobbying for that?

VT
: The state doesn't move that quickly and frankly I worked really, really hard with the Southern California Association of Governments to lobby for a bill to extend the timeline for SCAG region because they changed the law two weeks before Housing Element is due in the SCAG region to extend the public review requirement and all the zoning timeline and all of that. You just change it two weeks before our deadline. There's no way we can respond. And so, I worked really hard to have them do an extension, got about 30 jurisdictions to write letters to the state and all of that. Nothing. They weren't able to add it to a bill, but ultimately then they did, almost a year later, then they add a bill to give the cities one extra year to do the rezoning, and to meet the certification timeline in order to get three years to rezone. But it's a lot of effort, and it really requires jurisdictions to work together with your COG to really advocate for it. And with Southern California, we have 198 jurisdictions. It's still, we're the biggest sub-region in the state, and we weren't able to convince the state that we needed more time, and that's why, again, half of the cities are still stuck. In your region, San Joaquin Valley region has eight City of Tracy – Special Concurrent City Council / Planning Commission Meeting Verbatim Transcription
March 22, 2023 – 5:00 p.m.

counties, 78 jurisdictions, maybe together you can also do something, but I can say that it's very, very difficult. We tried and I was actively involved in that, and it was very disappointing that the legislators don't seem to understand the challenges that we face.

And just EIR alone, if you're doing that much rezoning, there's like the EIR takes about a year and a half or two years to do; how can you do all of that and do all the rezoning at the same time? It's just, I think, ultimately, there needs to be fixed bills in the next seventh cycle, they're already talking about the seventh cycle Housing Element. Like the seventh cycle Housing Element, 18 months deadline after the adoption of the RTP is unrealistic; you cannot get it done. And so, I think that's something that I would encourage city councils and all the electoral officials to work with your representative to really understand the challenges ahead. And there may be some opportunity to do something in your region, but I can just guarantee you it's going to be very difficult and not a very understanding legislature.

Mayor Pro Tem Davis: Okay, I had another question. Has there been anything put in place to ensure that low and very low housing projects are equally distributed throughout the city? Our city or all communities?

VT
: Dan may be able to answer that a little bit. But definitely what we do look at is trying to when we look at the location, we try to look at everywhere, like no stones unturned. And the other things that we also recommend is you may have a large site, and if there is a really large site, you don't want to put it all, just because it's 30 units to the acre, so we're going to put 1,000 units of low-income feasible there. We may have to break it down a little bit and do mixed income. The good thing is that you are starting the process of inclusionary that will guarantee you, if adopted, that would guarantee you some affordable housing in lower density and higher opportunity areas just based on the requirements.

Mayor Pro Tem Davis: Thank you. And then when developers have privately owned land or even private citizens have land and to build low or very low housing, how do we incentivize them, especially when in many cases it doesn't pencil out? How do we incentivize developers to build?

VT
: I think the incentive is in density. Definitely that is one thing to make it more feasible.

The other thing is financial subsidies that the city, if you're able to provide. For example, you may have, if you have inclusionary, you may ultimately generate some inclusionary in lieu fee. You may also be able to apply with a Housing Element, to apply to the state for funding to support affordable housing, or you can support the developers' effort to pursue funding at the state, providing matching funds. That's also very important. A lot of the competitive grants at the state level require local match, and that is something that developers are always looking for. I think one thing that we've seen some jurisdictions does is deferring, not necessarily waiving. If you have the financial capacity to do that waiving, building, planning, development, permit fees, and all that would be a big help for affordable units, however, some jurisdictions don't have that financial ability to just waive it. But my discussions with developers is even deferring it until building permit issuance is a great help, too. You still collect it, but you collect it at a later stage.

And so that even that it allows them to not have that liability of the fee amount on the City of Tracy – Special Concurrent City Council / Planning Commission Meeting Verbatim Transcription
March 22, 2023 – 5:00 p.m.

construction loan financing, but we'll be able to pay for it later. That deferral will be helpful.

Mayor Pro Tem Davis: And one l ast question. I heard Mr. Baker mention affirmative, I believe, fair housing, and he talked about underutilization and that sometimes you might find a small home on a ten-acre lot and you can rezone that for high density. My concern is how do we apply that type of technique but ensuring that we're not gentrifying certain areas within the community? For instance, people that live within the sphere, and there is just a small country home, because this was Ag land predominantly. How do we make sure that we're not gentrifying our community?

VT
: That is definitely one of the most difficult questions and things to do because there is the physical displacement and there is the economic displacement as things are becoming more expensive in the community. Now, a lot of communities are starting to think about things like TOPA and COPA. TOPA is Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act, and COPA is Community Opportunity to Purchase Act. And so, these are like if you're being displaced or if you, how do the displaced residents have the ability to have the first right of refusal to come back to the new development. Also, there is new state law that encourages local jurisdictions to look at anti-displacement preferences to set in your local policies. But that needs to be done very carefully because in the past, local preferences is identified as a fair housing issue because you're discriminating people who are from other communities or outside the region to move into your community or you're perpetuating some kind of existing conditions. So usually, local preferences in the past is being frowned upon by the state. And in fact, the recent Housing Element just completed for the City of Pasadena, the local preferences was the most difficult topic to overcome. However, there is new state law right now that allows cities to look at local preferences if it's enacted primarily as an anti-displacement strategy. So, when you create affordable housing through your subsidizing development or incentivizing through density bonus or inclusionary, however, tools that you have to create affordable housing, maybe there's a way to set some kind of preferences to people who were displaced as part of the project.

Councilmember Bedolla: I
just have a couple of questions. This is Councilmember Bedolla for the record. When we were going over slide number 14, it was mentioned when we received the RHNA numbers. I heard
September 2022, is that correct, from the Council of
Governments? I just want to kind of create a timeline in my head.

Ala
n Bell: The SJCOG board approved the RHNA numbers on September 22, 2022. They had a series of drafts starting in late 2021. We received draft methodologies.

First, they established a methodology of how that 59,000 units will be distributed throughout the cities and the county within the county. We started seeing a draft in December 2021. The numbers massage, and change, change in the summer of 2022, the board adopted a draft methodology. And then in September, and then there was an appeal period that followed that draft methodology and the SJCOG board adopted the RHNA numbers on September 22nd, 2022.

City of Tracy – Special Concurrent City Council / Planning Commission Meeting Verbatim Transcription
March 22, 2023 – 5:00 p.m.

Councilmember Bedolla: Okay, so we, our city probably got them sometime early October?

Ala
n Bell: That's correct.

Councilmember Bedolla: Okay, so we've had them for about, almost six months, five months, six months?

Ala
n Bell: Yes, that's correct.

Councilmember Bedolla: Alright, thank you. That's it, Mayor, thank you.

Mayor Young: Thank you. I'm gonna go on to the Planning Commission. We'll start with the Chair. Chair Hudson?

Chair Hudson: Thank y
ou. I thought that your presentation was very thorough and in-depth.

Some of the questions that the councilmembers have asked, in particular, Councilwoman Davis was asking about the numbers, do we have the ability to put any everything you explained about how to do it. Does that go into this document? Because as I understand this document is talking about how many houses low medium small where they're at where we're going to put them in the city but how do we execute this I mean as I have read the last Housing Element is very well done, but we haven't done any of it. So how do we actually execute it and put some teeth into what we say we're going to do and move down the road?

VT
: Well, two things. Definitely the market sometimes can be an issue because you don't function as a developer, but I think as a local jurisdiction. If this Housing Element, the goal is to facilitate production, in particular, affordable housing, then we need to put in more in there. What makes it also more real this time is that the state passed quite a few laws. One of them is AB 686, Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing, and as part of that, making sure that you provide housing opportunity of a variety of types, and also price range and locations, and a very rigorous set of meaningful actions that you're going to take over the next eight years. That's something that we haven't even talked about this time is another brand-new set of rules that you need to take meaningful actions to really implement your Housing Element. So, this Housing Element is going to be even more detailed and more specific than the one that you've seen in the past. And so that commits you, that's a specific commitment that you're gonna take, not just to encourage, to explore, to study, it's after you have explored something, after you study something, what is the follow-up action? What are you gonna do with the results of what you have studied? So, all these things are going to be more specified in the Housing Element than before. Now, the state also set up a brand-new division, the Housing and Community Development Department set up a brand-new division called the Housing Accountability Division that has 20-something positions in it, and I think including four positions that are attorneys. And so, they are going to, in the past, the state, you gotta adopt a Housing Element, you submit your annual report, they may look at it, they may not look at it.

There's not a lot of issue, there's not a lot of monitoring from the state, but that's going to change. They established this new division with the sole purpose to monitor your commitment, whether you are going to actually act on the actions that you said you were going to do. And they also created a new portal on their website to allow people to file a City of Tracy – Special Concurrent City Council / Planning Commission Meeting Verbatim Transcription
March 22, 2023 – 5:00 p.m.

complaint much more easier about jurisdictions that are not meeting their commitments.

So, I think that alone, one, the Housing Element being much more specific with actions and goals, and the monitoring from the state. The two things together, we're hoping that that would definitely come up with results, because if you don't, the state can decertify your Housing Element at any time if they feel like you're not acting in accordance with the Housing Element. They could, you can achieve the certification today and not get decertified in the future.

Chair Hudson: Are there gonna be real penalties for, again, we certify our element, but we do nothing? Or are there gonna be real penalties down the road?

VT
: I think, again, it's what they, when they monitor you, when they looked at you, have you done your good faith effort? Have you tried? Now, if you tried and tried and nothing happens, I think they're not going to find faults in you. And a good example would be the fourth cycle. They adopted the Housing Element, and then the economy tanked. Nobody was building anything. So, then the state cannot find any faults because you have no control over the economy. It was a recession. So that type of situation, you're not gonna have any fault. Now, if you say that you are gonna do something, but you haven't done anything about it, and you said you're gonna do something by 2025, they may come back and look at you. So where are you in this program? And they come back, well, we're a little delayed. You know, we'll get it done in 2026. Maybe they won't come back and do anything. But if you don't do anything at all, then that means that they have the ability to come back and say that you are not implementing your Housing Element according to your commitment and they can decertify. Decertifying your Housing Element means that you have an out of compliance Housing Element. Out of compliance Housing Element would have all the consequences that I presented before, that you would not be eligible for state funds, you would be at risk of litigation, in the event of a litigation, your building permit authority can be withheld. And one thing that I always want to emphasize is it's not just housing permit ability would be withheld, it's all building permit. I did have a client, their emergency shelter ordinance was out of compliance with state law and they were sued by two non-profits. The city was not able to issue any building permit for at least six months, if not a year, and including home improvement, the planning director had to go to court before the judge and ask for permission to issue a building permit for one home improvement because of health and safety reasons. So, it can go to that kind of severe penalty. And you can also potentially have a fine up to $10,000 per unit out of compliance on the RHNA for the first three months, I think up to $100,000. And then up to $300,000 for the next three months and up to $600,000 for, you know, continual non-compliance per month. And so, these are the consequences, but it hasn't actually happened too much yet, but the state did sue the City of Huntington Beach twice, one time on the fifth cycle Housing Element and now they just filed a lawsuit to the City of Huntington Beach, I think, a week so ago on their SB 9 Ordinance being out of compliance.

Chair Hudson: My
last question is for Alan, I believe. Some of the things that I've heard that Council was asking, you know, what can we do to incentivize and so on and so forth, which I somewhat agree with. So will we meet again to have a discussion to make sure that what's going to happen goes forward so that we can all agree that this is kind of what we're looking for in our Housing Element, whether or not we can even suggest tax incentives for City of Tracy – Special Concurrent City Council / Planning Commission Meeting Verbatim Transcription
March 22, 2023 – 5:00 p.m.

developers to go and look for developers, so on and so forth. Are we going to have another discussion, or is this pretty much it?

Ala
n Bell: Yeah, there will be more discussions. For implementation items such as, you remember we conducted a workshop last November on a draft ADU Ordinance with the Planning Commission. We sent out dozens and dozens of notices and two people showed up or something. We're complying with state law. Not a lot you can do to change. But that's an example of stuff that's coming to you. On April 12th, we're going to you with the ADU code. What we've pulled together and there are two new state laws that became effective in January of this year that we had to fold into the changes, and we'll go over that on April 12th. So, these implementation items, we're imagining that the inclusionary housing feasibility analysis is going to go to the Planning Commission first on its way to Council.

Each of these implementation items, each of these zoning code amendments, each of the rezonings will go to the Planning Commission on the way to the City Council. The draft Housing Element at least will be, when I say at least, the draft Housing Element that we produce, hopefully in the next three months or so, will go to the Planning Commission for review and discussion, consideration, including all of its programs, policies, and then at the end, the programs, the implementation plan of the Housing Element. That's going to go to the Planning Commission. And we may, I don't know yet, to the extent to which we're going to have additional public meetings with the Planning Commission or the City Council between now and then. We may, it's scoped to be included, but we'll see what kind of input we get. We may have additional policy input opportunities with the Commission only before the draft in May or June. Okay, thank you. Council, we heard you. Commissioner Boatye-Boateng, any questions?

Commissioner Boatye-Boat
eng: Thank you for the thorough presentation. Concerning the housing needs analysis that was done at the beginning of the process. I think that was on slide number 4.

Subsequent to that slide, there's a lot of emphasis on
compliance with state regulations, and I think that is, I agree that it's very essential that we come up with a
Housing Element that's compliant. I am interested in
getting a better understanding, maybe that will come later, on the scope of the housing needs analysis that was done.

Was it entirely with respect to compliance or there were some other elements that were explored? Were there any
conflicts, some things that we need to be aware of?

VT
: The needs assessment does have a very prescribed content. There are various topics that we have to talk about in the needs assessment, your demographics, and your changes in the last 8-10 years or so in terms of racial and ethnic distribution, your composition, household compositions of your demographics, the age of your households, your population, and then we look at also the housing market trends. What type of housing do you have right now? What's the proportion of owner versus renters? Different types of housing units. There is also a very big component of the Housing Element that we have to look at, it's called a special needs assessment. By law, there are groups in every community where the state consider to have more difficult time in City of Tracy – Special Concurrent City Council / Planning Commission Meeting Verbatim Transcription
March 22, 2023 – 5:00 p.m.

getting housing that's decent and affordable. And those are the elderly, disabled, homeless, farm workers, female head-of-households, and large households, households with five or more members. So, by law, we have to cover the special needs of these. So, we talk about how these groups have changed in your community, are we increasing or decreasing, and are the housing needs being met. And so, the Housing Element does, the needs assessment does, go through those topics that are pretty prescribed under state law. One thing I usually mention to people to challenge people to take a look at the government code, the general plan, Housing Element being part of the general plan, the general plan probably have about 40 pages of regulation. The Housing Element probably have about 300, if not more. The contents of the Housing Element is heavily regulated, but it doesn't stop us from going beyond that, but we also need to balance how much information is adequate information, sometimes too much, maybe it just makes the document, the Housing Element more or less readable, and we want it to be something that people read it and get useful information, so we balance that, but definitely meeting the requirements of the contents of the Housing Element.

Commissioner Atwal: Yeah,
thank you very much for the presentation, city staff and the consultant team. So, the question is, so you mentioned that 20 dwelling units per acre in slide number seven. That is based on the population of 95,000. So, is it the current population?

VT
: Yeah, when we looked up the 2021, 2022 population, you're at about 95,000, not quite 96,000. State law says in a suburban region, when the county population is less than two million, then the default density for lower income RHNA is 20 units to the acre, at least 20 units to the acre, unless the jurisdiction has a population that's over 100,000.

And so, you're still at the 95,000. But again, I think, and we're not quite sure where the sites and how the density is going to be distributed at this point, but you may be wise to have some that's at 30 units to the acre, because you're very close to the 100,000- population mark. And the higher the density, the less acreage that you're gonna need.

And visually, a lot of people would not be able to tell the difference between a 20-unit versus a 30-unit to the acre development. It's really in the design. If you have good objective design guidelines to really regulate the form of the building, a lot of times you would not be able to tell the difference anyway. And so, I do recommend that some of the sites that you're going to rezone, get it a little higher, just in case that you do push up to the 100,000-population mark, and also the fact that we do want to do smart growth.

We don't want to spread it out and become really just entirely on condominiums. And I think Dan mentioned, too, at 20 units to the acre, you're mostly going to get townhomes type of development. If you want the variety of housing types to meet the needs of an aging population, to meet the needs of singles, professionals, younger couples, you may want to do students, you may want to do some smaller units like apartments, and so that type of 20 units to the acre may not be adequate to facilitate that type of development.

And so again, it's a balance between what you're required to do, what you think would be desirable to the community, and that's also the reason why we are incorporating the Balancing Act as part of this exercise. So, to allow people to provide some kind of their preference. It doesn't mean that we're not going to use our professional judgment, but it also does give us some ideas about where people think opportunities lies.

Commissioner Atwal: So, as
we are building on this document and there will be more opportunities for you as per the tentative schedule, so will you be looking City of Tracy – Special Concurrent City Council / Planning Commission Meeting Verbatim Transcription
March 22, 2023 – 5:00 p.m.

at this again because of our deadline is December of this year to see what the tentative, because all the calculations in all most of the presented slides, they are at 20 dwelling units based on 95,000.

VT
: Yeah, we definitely will be. This is very tentative and we are basically saying if we go in to do 20 units to the acre. I think one of the slides that Dan also presented, also mentioned that at some sites, you're already at 25 units to the acre. Why not bump it up a little bit and get some units there and then also prepare you, I hate to say it, seventh cycle. And so, you don't need to rezone those sites again because by seventh cycle, you are going to be over 100,000. So, that's something that you may want to think about. But we are still working on the numbers and the 20 units to the acre is just to give you the idea that at least 20 units to the acre, if you just do the minimum 20 units to the acre, that's how much acreage you're looking for.

Commissioner Atwal: Sur
e, the other question is the slide number 15. It is the Regional Housing Needs Allocation breakdown. So, is it the current number and from where this number was gathered, was it some kind of a survey or how this analysis was done?

VT: A
re you talking about the city's Regional Housing Needs Allocation number?

Commissioner Atwal: The 2021 annual income.

VT: Oh, the income limits comes from the state. The state takes income survey from the HUD and establish income limits for each county. And that's the income limits that the state uses for Housing Element purposes and also for funding purposes, like what income level, how many persons per household you have, and whether you would qualify for some programs. For example, would you qualify for California's, there's like a California Housing Finance Agency does provide some first-time homebuyer assistance.

Would you qualify for that? And you need to look at which county you live in, how many people you have in your household, what's your total income, and if you're within the income limits that they consider to be eligible, then you're qualified. This is all done by the state.

Commissioner Atwal: So, it's not at the City level, it's at the County level?

VT: I
t's at the county level. Also, the idea is that you use the county income in a way that you allow for housing mobility, that you allow people from the county within the county of other county to move your community. So, if you only use local jurisdictions income, like if you're in Beverly Hills, then nobody in the low income would be able to qualify for low income in Beverly Hills, because their low income could be something that you and I would not ever dream to meet in our lifetime. So that's why the county level is used to facilitate mobility.

Commissioner Atwal: You k
now, the question is from the perspective of implementation. Yeah, on the slide, it looks good, all the numbers, but as you gave the example of a specific part or specific area, like Beverly Hills, so specifically in certain kind of area where we know that the income level is way too high, City of Tracy – Special Concurrent City Council / Planning Commission Meeting Verbatim Transcription
March 22, 2023 – 5:00 p.m.

how will those kinds of these numbers can be implemented? Because the cost of that production should be as per this numbers.

VT: U
nfortunately, we cannot change the income level. It's established by the state, and it's being used with minor adjustments by the federal government as well for the housing program. So, these are things that are officially adopted. So, we cannot adjust it, even though you may see that some neighborhoods, their incomes are higher. But that's exactly the idea that what Dan also talked about the affirmatively furthering fair housing where you want to put more lower income people in higher resource areas. One thing you can do is ADUs. ADUs is the ability to give the opportunity to somebody who is maybe lower income to live in a single-family neighborhood that they normally would not have the ability to do. If you encourage ADUs, which you are, you have a very healthy ADU trend right now, you're also doing the pre-approved plans, so presumably making it easier and cheaper for homeowners to do, but that's one way to encourage, to allow somebody who are low income the opportunity to stay in a higher resource area or to move into higher resource areas.

Commissioner Atwal: No,
thank you. Yeah, so that's a good way of implementing the policy. So then on slide number 19, it has the numbers for ADUs 98, 98, 98, 34. So from where this number came from?

VT: Thi
s comes from the city's building permit records. I assume that it's reported, I think last time you look at your Annual Progress Report for 2022. In that report, it also noted how many ADUs that you did.

Commissioner Atwal: So, does that mean in slide number 19, these ADUs have been built or these are under construction?

VT: Thes
e are building permits issued. The state asked us to use building permits issued, now sometimes building permits issues may not actually get built, so we have no control over that, but for the purpose of projecting how much we can qualify for RHNA, we are, we are asked by the state to use building permits issued. And I think one thing that, again, is important is to make sure that we do things to make it cheaper to build ADUs is because sometimes people apply for a permit and then they don't realize until they get the general contractor to bid on it, then they realize it is quite expensive. So, there may be incentives or ways that you can incentivize the construction of ADUs, as well. Some jurisdictions would provide some kind of subsidies if the owner agreed to de-restrict the units to make it affordable. Sometimes they would reduce the building permit fees.

Sometimes they would do other incentives as allowing it to be a little bigger so that it can accommodate families instead of just individuals. So, there are things that you can do to incentivize that. But certainly, I think the cost of construction of ADUs becomes a surprise to a lot of people; it is not cheap to build an ADU.

Commissioner Atwal: Yeah, no, that part is clear where it mentioned ADUs permits issued. So, the one in the row, in the below, where it says ADUs 98, 98, 98, 34. So, that equals to 328.

VT: No, that equals, that is to allow us to come up with a five-year average. For the purpose of doing, getting, projecting future ADUs for the RHNA purposes, we are only allowed to, City of Tracy – Special Concurrent City Council / Planning Commission Meeting Verbatim Transcription
March 22, 2023 – 5:00 p.m.

based on past trends, to project into the future. So, we use the five-year average and then project it into the future that over the eight years of the Housing Element plan cycle, we would get 328 units.

Commissioner Atwal: Got it. And can we just look at the other slide, the 20th? And the row B, can you just explain from where this number, and is it some potential number in future or what it is? The potential RHNA sites, primarily.

Dan W
ery: Yeah, potential RHNA sites, preliminary numbers. These are the ones that we've been working on when it went through all the criteria, the selection criteria. So, we filtered through the 30,000 plus parcels in the city and came up with, I forget how many we have now, it's well over, I think it was 200 roughly that we're looking at. And that's the current number that we have. We're hoping to find some more, and I know Alan and Bill have been working over the last week to add to that list. So, that number will change. It keeps getting refined. Sometimes it goes down. Hopefully it goes up more than it goes down. That's the current batch of sites that we've identified under the existing zoning. The next step is once we feel like that has settled, then we'll look for if we have to rezone, and we probably do to get that number, then we'll be targeting other areas. Where's the best place to increase existing densities throughout the city? So, we'll be looking at similar criteria, but also kind of more the general plan level, at the land use level, looking at appropriate zones and infrastructure and that's kind of a reference to that smart growth. Where would you best accommodate that? And usually, it's in your areas with transit, with employment, with services. Services can be schools and parks, as well, all sorts of services. So where is it easiest to accommodate that? And then to the other questions, we're also looking for that distribution as well. So, we don't want to put it all in one spot. So, lots of times they'll end up in certain corridors, these mixed-use corridors, which tend to be surrounded by higher density residential, but also have all those same factors.

Commissioner Atwal: I hav
e this last question for just understanding perspective. So as this is a collective effort from the consultant and the city staff and it's going to be till December of this year. So, what kinds of specific expertise or specific areas is the consultant focusing on?

Dan W
ery: The short answer is all of this and more. It's a complex process. We bring our experience from doing a lot of these same plans throughout, but we also bring our experience as professional planners. We don't only do Housing Elements.

We work for cities and developers. So, we work with cities to develop their general plans, their long-term plans, not just Housing Elements. We help them implement and develop their zoning, do all sorts of special studies for them. We also work with developers and help them navigate these processes and help them get approval. So, we kind of understand the big picture. So, we bring that experience to bear. And working with your excellent staff as well, they know these as well. It is a pretty comprehensive effort. It really requires a full range and full gamut of planning skills, which is, I always like to say, one of the broadest definitions of most inclusive professions. From environment to traffic and everything in between. It's a comprehensive effort.

City of Tracy – Special Concurrent City Council / Planning Commission Meeting Verbatim Transcription
March 22, 2023 – 5:00 p.m.

Commissioner Augustus: Everybody asked all my questions, so I have no other questions.

Mayor Young: Well, there's clarifying questions. I have some other questions that's mixed in with clarifying questions, but I'll wait till after we get public input and then I'll ask my questions. And then if anyone has anything else you wanna ask after you get the public input, then you're welcome to do that, as well. Okay, so at this time, can I just see by a show of hands about how many people would like to speak on this? Okay, so I just see three hands in the audience. All right, so what about on WebEx? How many do we have on WebEx?

Clerk: We have one on WebEx. No speaker cards.

PUBLIC COMMENT

D’Adrea Davie: Good evening. Thank you. So again, D’Adrea Davie with the NACP branch, which we do serve the San Joaquin County. I appreciate the presentation as well as the robust questions, especially the ones around the Assembly Bill 686. The City of Tracy definitely needs to have a conversation around creating affordable housing and housing affordability options. This conversation not only needs to happen for renters, but for residents who want to obtain homeownership. Just by looking at the pending projects, you can see that housing affordability has not been on the radar for the City of Tracy. ADUs and inclusionary housing for low to moderate income households is definitely an option that would be beneficial to the residents of Tracy, but not the only option. I will add that the City of Tracy is starting at a late point in the process. The tentative schedule is tight and only allows a short period of time to get community input before the draft of the Housing Element is due.

This raises concerns on having a robust update for the Housing Element. It's more than just checking a box and making sure you have the numbers. The community should have been involved since the beginning of the review of the land use last year, not just a survey being given to the community, but an in- person town hall meeting and or in-person meeting to include all minority community-based organizations and stakeholders. With the Housing Element, it's important for the Mayor, City Council, and Planning Commission to understand the importance of the implementation of Assembly Bill 686. Assembly Bill 686 mandates the implementation of the Affirmatively Further Fair Housing to create real housing choice rather than just prevent discrimination. AB 686 requires meaningful, frequent, and ongoing community participation and stakeholder engagement to include affirmatively furthering fair housing throughout the Housing Element Update. Accordingly, the California Department of Housing and Community Development expects local context and knowledge of fair housing issues to inform its jurisdiction strategies to implement the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing. So, AB 686 requires the city to take actions to overcome patterns of segregation, address disparities in housing needs, and access to the opportunity, and foster inclusive communities. So, the City of Tracy needs to put together a process for performing extensive community outreach to incorporate this local knowledge of fair housing issues, completing thorough data analysis City of Tracy – Special Concurrent City Council / Planning Commission Meeting Verbatim Transcription
March 22, 2023 – 5:00 p.m.

and the assessment of fair housing, and identifying primary contributing factors associated with fair housing issues. After completing the assess, the city of Tracy should identify goals, policies, and actions that directly address the contributing factors identified throughout the outreach and the assessment of the fair housing.

The policies and programs selected for the Housing Element must be explicitly linked back to the contributing factors and the fair housing issues identified in the assessment of the fair housing. And the Housing Element must include specific actions and associated timeframes for policy and program implementation that we did hear from the consultant. So, to fill the intent of the AB 686, the City of Stockton needs to focus more on the Affirmatively Further Fair Housing throughout the Housing Element and then not just be like a separate documentation because it's the central element to the Housing Element for this particular cycle of the Housing Element Update. So, the NACP branch would like to be notified of the meetings, community meetings that you all are having and to be engaged in the discussion in regards to the City of Tracy Housing Element.

And again, I just want to reiterate that the City just needs to thoroughly consider housing options that not only include renters, which is what I'm basically hearing in the presentation, but also potential homeowners that reside in your city to make sure that they, too, can afford to purchase homes. So, I yield my time.

Thank you.

Mary Mitracos: Good
evening, Council and staff. I'm Mary Mitracos. I live on Eaton Avenue in Tracy. And I want to say that I do pay attention to this kind of stuff, partly through my work. And I have found this to be extremely informative and exceedingly interesting. I am a property manager. I'm a licensed real estate broker. And these days, I do all of my property management here in the City of Tracy, and I work typically at the low end. I have typically duplexes, triplexes, smaller units, ones and two bedrooms, and a handful of houses.

So, I think more than most people, I see the need. I think that this is an extremely pressing issue. And I have a couple of questions. My first question is actually extremely basic. I wonder if the whole purpose of this is that if we were to provide an additional 8,800 housing units across these income levels, if that would solve all of our housing needs here in Tracy? I don't know. I mean, it's not going to take everybody off the street. It's not going to get everybody into an apartment. I'm just curious. I want to... I think that... I wonder if it would help. I know that what I see is a lot of unpermitted dwellings in the City of Tracy, and I wonder if there is some way that they might someday become legal, or if we might at least be able to count them towards our RHNA numbers. I'm talking about places that I see in Tracy, like for instance, you have one ADU permitted in your backyard of your house, but I know for a fact that there are two families living in it and that place was really designed to hold two families. So, it's not really out of the range. It should be legal, in my eyes. I also see places where people have built an ADU in their backyard and they have attic space that they have converted. and they are renting to people that I think shouldn't, but that's just my opinion, whatever.

Also, I see places around town where I know that there are trailers in people's backyards that I cannot really imagine anybody ever went through the permitting process? But perhaps they did, but I mean, can we count those? Would those be helpful? I also want to say that over the last four to five years City of Tracy – Special Concurrent City Council / Planning Commission Meeting Verbatim Transcription
March 22, 2023 – 5:00 p.m.

or six years, I've had three developers who have worked in this town tell me that this city should have put inclusionary zoning into practice 10 years ago.

We would be a lot better off. And I personally think it's not too late to start. I think we need to seriously consider inclusionary zoning at this part. And I think that when it comes, there is an issue that I have I'm not even gonna talk about right now because I think that we most likely will be in the end talking about rezoning and we'll discuss it at that time. I want to say thank you.

Thank you to the Council for doing this. Thank you to the Planning Commission for the work you do and thank you to staff. You guys, I've been watching Veronica Tam talk about this stuff here in the city of Tracy for over 20 years. She is magnificent! She has kept us out of so much trouble, out of so much hot water. The reason that we've come this far without getting into trouble is because of her. So, and our staff to our city staff. So, thank you.

Alice English: Good evening, Council, Commissioners and staff. Commissioner already covered that page, Item D, as far as the RHNA sites. But I am concerned, it was mentioned earlier by staff, that back in November 2021, cycle five went to Planning Commission, but never made it to our Council. And here we are. I think when it does come to Council, it should not be on the consent calendar. It should be public notice to everybody in Tracy. And I'm glad that this is coming about because we're talking about RHNA, and what we need to do. It's been talking on surprised it’s just coming now and I appreciate your question, Councilmember.

But the way when you asked about SJCOG, since September 2022 and now we're talking about it not like it was mentioned yesterday two months ago that SJCOG, so thank you for clarifying that. My concern is and it's always been public safety for me, and transportation and again Self-Tracy everything's going right now Self-Tracy we still doing the 55 and over we're just and this is why I spoke out yesterday about increasing our police. This is something that has to be done looking ahead We need to be proactive and not wait till this happens and then all we have to increase so this is why this should have been talked about last year. Because you guys are tasked with our budget. Where's our infrastructure in Valpico? That's a safety issue. It's been a safety issue. We should widen that road. If I'm not mistaken, I don't know where Mission Court is. I tried to Google it, and I couldn't find Mission Court. And we're talking about 31 acres off Valpico. That's a concern, because there's apartments already going on there. So, my whole thing here is we should just look at one thing we need to look at the whole structure and infrastructure. A public safety we don't even have a second firehouse yet. We have a whole one that's been over 30 years off of Schulte. What are we doing? This should have been addressed three years ago to Planning 2021 on cycle 5. So, somebody dropped the ball or somebody is not doing what they need to do in staff to brought this to our City Council a couple of years ago. So that's my main concern. I appreciate the caller. She asked a lot of questions, and she made a lot of opinions and questions that I also have. But my concern has always been public safety, our infrastructure. So, we need to take that accountable. We need to start moving forward and have some of these developers accountable for doing our roads and our infrastructure now. And that has not been happening here in Tracy. So, I appreciate the report. Veronica Tam, you touched a lot of what I was questioning. I want to look at this AB 686 and SB 9. I will be looking at that but please reach out to the public, not just City of Tracy – Special Concurrent City Council / Planning Commission Meeting Verbatim Transcription
March 22, 2023 – 5:00 p.m.

social media, like Councilmember Evans mentioned. Not everybody is on social media. So, it's something that's going to affect the whole city and not just one section. So, I appreciate that if you could get some notice. Paper hardly nobody reads the Tracy Press anymore. I just maybe put it in the water bill with two different languages or even three now. Let them know that way everybody gets a water bill once a month, right? I mean generally that's what I see. So, I appreciate if you're gonna reach out to the public, give them enough notice. My other suggestion is having one on a Saturday. People work. Right now, people are still coming in from work. This is why you see the audience the way it is. We need public input. Maybe have one on a Saturday. I know sports are coming up with soccer and baseball and all that, but there's still some parents that will probably make these meetings if you do one workshop on a Saturday and not just during the week. Thank you.

Cynthia Camacho: Good evening, Council, commissioners, staff. Cynthia Camacho. One of the things I want to make sure that when we do go into the low income and the very low-income renter apartments or homes that we do something that would be like subsidized homes, I mean subsidized. This way the apartments won't look like, oh those are the low-income apartments and then these are the other apartments. This way everybody's kind of commingled in with each other. And then if it's gonna go into the housing where the low income or the very low income could then do like a lottery to get a home, then I want to make sure that it actually does go to those individuals. We had a problem in the Bay Area that the individuals that were actually getting those homes that were set aside for the low income and the very low-income individuals to qualify for those homes were the ones that were not getting them. So now that we're going forward with this kind of program, I want to make sure that it's fair and it's really going to meet the need of those individuals that really and truly need it. Also, now that I have the commissioners and Council in front, I actually live on a street that's now going to have a developer come in and change the street, our street. And this, we're on the unincorporated side and then we are on the Elissagaray side. We're concerned not that they're going to be building homes there. We're concerned that originally when it was brought to us, it was going to be four large homes over 5,000 square feet home and they were only going to have a 22-foot road, 22- foot width road, meaning that there's not going to be any parking in their area. And they're not taking into consideration, and they already passed it, because then we had a second meeting, and then they were able to pass four lots. So now they just have approved four lots with that tiny little road. And so, we don't even know what's going to go in there now. So now I'm concerned that not only are we taking away our safety of the bulb of our court, but now is it zoned for what? Is it zoned for four houses? So, I wanted to make sure that maybe you can guide me on what we can do.

We did an appeal. So that's kind of where we are right now, but I'm not sure how everything was passed, and now I'm hearing about zoning, and I'm hearing about all this development, and I just want to make sure that everything was done right, especially how they got the approval of a 22- foot road. Thank you.

City of Tracy – Special Concurrent City Council / Planning Commission Meeting Verbatim Transcription
March 22, 2023 – 5:00 p.m.

Mayor Young: Thank you, and I saw three hands. Was there anyone else who wanted to speak on this item? Okay, if not, then, let's see here. Then we'll just go ahead and close out the public comments on this. Then we'll go ahead and bring it back for further discussion or further input by Council and Planning Commission. Go ahead, we'll start here.

Councilmember Bedolla: Thank you, Mayor. I just wanted to share my concerns that also align with what I heard from the public about the timeliness of when this was brought before our governing bodies. We all live in Tracy, most of us here live in Tracy and we can see the facts. The reality is that based on cost, demand, and supply we are together faced with a challenge in unprecedented times. But I believe that together with our varied perspectives we can come up with a compliant Housing Element. I had a couple of questions related to some things that have been mentioned in our affordable housing work plan for either staff or consultant, whoever feels confident enough to answer. How would a ballot measure that's, this is from our work plan, a ballot measure that's focused on, right now we have, you know, one RGA required for one dwelling unit, and we, there was talks about a ballot measure for one RGA for a building…how would that affect these numbers ?

Bill De
an: Good evening, thank you for the question. For the record, this is Bill Dean with Development Services. The short answer is that if you can do a lot more units with one RGA, the outcome will be there will be more units.

Councilmember Bedolla: Okay, okay. And recognizing the carve-outs in the Measure A for affordable, is there any more information to be shed there?

Bill De
an: Regarding the carve-outs for affordable units? So right now, the Growth Management Ordinance has a carve-out for affordable projects. In other words, if affordable project comes forward, it's 100% affordable. Those units, there's a 150 annually that are exceptions to the GMO to allow those to go forward. We haven't seen projects come forward and ask for those. Separately, there's the RHNA exemption that Alan explained earlier.

Councilmember Bedolla: Ok ay, all right. I think it was slide 13 or 14, row B, pending projects, what status are those pending projects in? Are they still like in a design phase? Are they tentative subdivision maps? Already have final subdivision maps and you know?
[O CTOBER 2023 RESIDENTIAL PIPELINE REPORT IS
ATTACHED, FOR REFERENCE.]

Bill Dean: Y eah, that's a great question. There's a lot of units there. There's a range of pending there. I don't have it in front of me with the 9,000 units.

Councilmember Bedolla: What would be the most complete? Like of all those categories, what would be the most complete?
City of Tracy – Special Concurrent City Council / Planning Commission Meeting Verbatim Transcription
March 22, 2023 – 5:00 p.m.

Bill Dean: Projects that are approved tentative map, awaiting going into the building permit cycle, for example.

Councilmember Bedolla: Okay, okay. So not necessarily final subdivision map?

Bill De
an: They could have final subdivision map, some of that's in there as well.

Councilmember Bedolla: Ok ay, okay. I think that was it for the questions. I appreciate it, thank you. Sure. I just wanted to make some comments and show my support for the process going forward, if there are
opportunities where we are looking more for the 30 dwelling units per acre as opposed to the 20, I think that would be beneficial in terms of long-term smart growth planning. Working with our local developers to see how we can help to just meet these goals together, whether it's in grants, funding from the state, or even using local matching funds, that was mentioned. And these are ideas that were brought forward by staff, the consultant, and some residents also. If there is an opportunity for a local preference as an anti-displacement measure, waiving or deferring fees at completion or at occupancy. And just two more suggestions. I'd like, from what I heard from the public, on using different multiple, sorry, multiple modes of outreach. Not just relying on the tech savvy resident, but also, I think analog is more of the common term, whether it's posting it on mailboxes, grocery stores, anything that we can do to expand our outreach. As well as a weekend workshop, I don't see that being a bad idea. That's all my comments for now. Thank you, Mayor.

May
or Young: Thank you. I'll continue with Council before I turn it over to the Planning Commission.

Mayor Pro Tem Dav is: Thank you, Mayor. Yeah, first of all, I just want to say it was an outstanding presentation. It really gave me more of an insight on how this Housing Element works and what work we have to do and what challenges we also face as a community getting this done, like many other communities throughout California. I guess my overall question is, what is the likelihood that we'll get this submitted on time? And if we do get it submitted on time, what happens if it gets kicked back? What's the worst-case scenario and the best-case scenario? I also would like a little bit more information about the one RGA, can you explain that? Like if we went to one RGA per unit, what does that look like if we considered that? I also would like to know if there are success stories that we can look to for similar size cities that made sure that some of our most vulnerable populations in our community, like our older areas in the City of Tracy, that they are not gentrified. I come from a large community, a large city, before I moved to Tracy, and that unfortunately became the story of my City of Tracy – Special Concurrent City Council / Planning Commission Meeting Verbatim Transcription
March 22, 2023 – 5:00 p.m.

city, where a lot of people were pushed out because of
gentrification. And even though it may be an unintended consequence, I do feel like this could happen here. And I would not like to see that happen, gentrification happen here in this community. So, I'd like to see what we can do, proactively. Also, I agree with my colleagues that we do need to figure out a way to work with developers to ensure that we're meeting the RHNA numbers for all income levels. But making sure it makes sense for the community. I don't have the answers as to how we do that.

Hopefully you all have some suggestions as the professionals, but I would not like to see us snowball by not making those numbers and having this become something on our shoulders, a burden for not just this Council, but future councils. So again, I'm pleased with the presentation. I thank you for all of the insight. And those are my questions. Thank you.

VT: I wouldn't be able to answer the RGA one building versus one unit because that's something that staff would be able to answer that. But in terms of the process of the Housing Element, it is a challenge. It's very time crunch. So, our definite goal is to submit a draft Housing Element to the state to initiate the 90-day review in July. And there's a little bit of regular room there because we allow for a month in October to make revisions. Now, HCD will have comments. It's codified in the state law that when you submit a draft Housing Element to the state, the state will issue a comment letter. Now, nobody gets through the Housing Element with no comments from the state. I've written probably more than 150 Housing Elements in my 20-something year career. I've only got one Housing Element, that got through the state, and everything looks fine. But that's during a very different time when state law was much simpler than today. So, we will get comments from the state. It's not considered like being rejected by the state. It's state law requires that they do comments on the Housing Element. And they always want to ask you to elaborate, to provide more, and maybe ask you to have stronger commitments. And, you know, we've seen all kinds of comments right now. So that's the reason we allow for one month to revise the comments and revise the Housing Element to address the comments and put it through the Planning Commission and City Council meetings. During those two months, there's still some opportunity to make further revisions, especially if you look at what we have done and the Planning Commission said, well, we don't think that it's far enough, or that if your Council feels that we don't think it's far enough, we can still make revisions during November and December. As long as we adopt the Housing Element, what we need to do in the Housing Element when you adopt the resolution is that we believe that we have substantially addressed the state's comments. And that's what we want to do. We want to achieve that and that we recommend the state to approve our Housing Element. Now once you adopt the Housing Element, they do not certify any Housing Element on the draft form. They only certify an adopted Housing Element. And after they receive the adopted Housing Element, they get another two months to look at it. If you look at all these two months, three months, and all that, there are not that many two months, three months in the 18- month process. And so, our goal is to get to a very good Housing Element by the time of the adoption, and that we think we have addressed the comments. We recommend the state to approve your Housing Element, let them take a look at it, and hopefully within the two months that they come back and say, okay, you're fine, your Housing Element is City of Tracy – Special Concurrent City Council / Planning Commission Meeting Verbatim Transcription
March 22, 2023 – 5:00 p.m.

now certified. Now, there is that likelihood that within that two-month period while they're looking at the Housing Element that we've considered out of compliance because they haven't made the determination yet. So that is the risk there, but there's very little we can do. Again, I'm citing like SCAG and ABAG because of the process that each jurisdiction takes. So, the state takes about two, three times looking at the Housing Element and they can come back and say, we want you to do one more thing. And just that one more thing, it's another two months to them. So, we want to do the best that we can. We've learned a lot from doing all these Housing Elements in the state right now that we've tried to avoid anything that are mind-fields, that we know that we can anticipate that and address those ahead of time. So, we want to give you the best shot of getting the Housing Element through as expeditiously as possible, but I don't think anybody can guarantee you that the state is going to come back with no comments. They will have comments, I can guarantee you. But our best shot is to get it adopted by the end of the year, continue to make revisions and throughout the whole process to fine tune the Housing Element and give us the best shot of having a certified Housing Element after we adopt it. But there is that potential out of compliance, like not yet compliant until they've certified it after the Housing Element's adopted. But, that's the best we can hope for. Yeah, but anyway.

Mayor Pro Tem Davis: So, t
he best case scenario is that you'll submit it, there will be no comments or minimal comments and we'll be certified, but the worst case scenario you mentioned, there is the risk of being out of compliance. Can you speak to the context, to worst case scenario in that context? What does that look like if we are out of compliance?

VT: I
f we are out of compliance for that duration of time, that is the – you're not going to get lawsuits or anything like that from, and the state is not going to sue you because you're actively working on the Housing Element. And you're not likely to get lawsuits from others because you're actively working on the Housing Element. And so, I think the worst-case scenario is what does deem as Builder’s Remedy, but again, Builder’s Remedy is not being able to use the finding to deny an affordable housing project.

Builder’s Remedy does not exempt the project from CEQA. Builder’s Remedy does not exempt the project from discretionary review. So, the project does have to go through still a lot of hurdles if there is one that's being submitted. But there is, during that time, you may have that risk.

Mayor Pro Tem Davis: Okay, and were you also gonna speak to success stories for cities of similar size, what we can do to prevent gentrification because this is a process we have to do, but some of the unintended consequences could become gentrification of certain areas in our community, so do you have any success stories of how that was avoided in cities of similar size?

VT: I
have jurisdictions that are around the 100,000 or 200,000 population, but they're a lot more urbanized than you are. For example, City of Berkeley, one of my clients there, I think they're at 160,000 or something like that. And Long Beach, very large jurisdiction, but Pasadena, about 200,000 population. They're very urbanized, but Pasadena is dealing with anti-displacement with the preference policy. They have something that's City of Tracy – Special Concurrent City Council / Planning Commission Meeting Verbatim Transcription
March 22, 2023 – 5:00 p.m.

very interesting, preference policy, and for example, they encourage if you're a senior person, you want to trade down your homes, but you want to, like your homes being, you occupy a large home, like a large lot, and you don't want to manage that. You want to move to a smaller unit. In Pasadena, that's very difficult. You can sell your old home and you wouldn't be able to buy another affordable unit. So, they have a preference policy to set aside their inclusionary units for seniors to if they sell a large home and they have priority to buy one of the affordable smaller units generated from their inclusionary policy. They also have a policy that if you can prove that you were displaced, you are displaced residents from Pasadena, their inclusionary units also have a policy to prioritize those who want to move back to Pasadena. So that's something that's interesting, but that's also the policy that took us a long time to convince the state that it's anti-displacement, not exclusionary.

Mayor Pro Tem Davis: Okay, is part of your purview helping us with challenges like that, just ensuring that we don't go down that path? Is that part of your purview, or was that like a separate contract you did with Pasadena to help them with that?

VT: That
is definitely something separate, because I can only... The Housing Element would... There's no way that we can come up with all these decisions and policies and actions in six months. But what we do right in the Housing Element is, what are the things that you're willing to consider and how you do your work plan, your affordable housing work plan. So, it's essentially extending your current affordable housing work plan to another few years and okay, in 2024, we're gonna do this, in 2025, we're gonna do this. And so, you do, you know, we do have to recognize that there are only that many nights that you can meet. There are only that many manpower that you can work on, different things in the Planning Department. And so, the Housing Element will set a plan of action, but I would not be able to actually resolve the issues as part of the Housing Element.

Mayor Pro Tem Davis: We can contract you separately if we needed to go down that path.

VT: L et's get the Housing Element certified first.

Councilmember Evans: Mayor, I've got to excuse myself in two minutes. I'm up against a hard stop. I've only got a couple comments, mind if I go next?

Mayor Young: Sure, but there was one more question that Mayor Pro Tem had. Oh, wait, you want to wait? The RGAs, the RGAs, if you make it quick, Mr. Dean. And then we'll go right to you.

Bill Dean: I'll make it quick. Basically, just the GMO is one of the more complicated areas that you can find in our, in the Title 10 of the Tracy Municipal Code. And I'll try to keep this brief. Essentially, generally speaking, if you're going to build a project in Tracy, you need to get one growth allotment for that build, for that structure, for example, single family home. If you have a 200-unit apartment complex, you're gonna need 200 RGAs, one for each unit. If you were to do some kind of an City of Tracy – Special Concurrent City Council / Planning Commission Meeting Verbatim Transcription
March 22, 2023 – 5:00 p.m.

initiative where you recalculated that, so say for example, to have one RGA for each of the seven or eight buildings that might comprise that apartment unit, well, you're there by creating additional opportunity for others to have access to those RGAs, which would result in more units. So, I wouldn't suggest that we get too into the details at this moment on what exactly an initiative might be the best tool for you. I think as we learn through this process on the Housing Element, I think we're all going to learn a little bit about what the challenges are, and then we can address which initiative tool might be best, because there might be other opportunities other examples perhaps it's a little different configuration of that the better suits the need. So, I think you should keep it on the table as we discuss it as we go through this and in the end hopefully the clarity on what best provision of the GMO you might want to amend.

Mayor Pro Tem Davis: Well, will that come back to Council that conversation.

Bill Dean: Absolutely. This is going to have to be Council-directed.

Mayor Pro Tem Davis: OK. Thank you very much. Councilmember Evans?

Councilmember Evans: Thank
you, Mayor. I'll make this pretty quick. Most of my questions have been answered by Council's questions, but great
presentation and I just want to share my colleagues' concerns about the timeline. So, I would say, you know, implore our Council and Planning Commission, we must stay focused on this issue until we do have the state approval and we must stay focused on that December 31st deadline in order to avoid Builder’s Remedy.

We've seen what happens in Tracy when our developers don't have guideposts, so let's keep that in mind and keep focused on it.

Chair Hudson mentioned putting teeth into this, and I think Mayor Pro Tem mentioned that, as well, and I agree. I'd like to see, I don't know if that's an ordinance or what needs to be incorporated in order to make sure we can actually enforce this and make it happen, but I'd like to see this come back with proposals for that.

Other than that, a great presentation very eye-opening and with that I will be excusing myself. Thank you.

Counc
ilmember Arriola: Again, thanks for everyone for doing the work on this I think for myself you know I grew up in a household here in Tracy that under these income categories would qualify as very low income and you know subsequently my parents lost the house that I grew up in here in the City. And so, for me housing has always been something very dear to my heart, and I understand that when we lose that housing and that the home aspect, you know how dehumanizing that can be for an individual and for a family. And it's a bit disappointing that, you know, be it cycle five and now the challenges we're facing in cycle six, that we haven't prioritized the needs of low income and very low income because I think we have this perception they look like unsheltered folks, but the reality is they look like people like me. And so, I think it's, I'm glad that City of Tracy – Special Concurrent City Council / Planning Commission Meeting Verbatim Transcription
March 22, 2023 – 5:00 p.m.

we're now being forced to address this. I'm very glad that we're doing t
his, and I would concur with my colleagues. You know, I'm very committed to ensuring that we get this Housing Element done. I know staff is, too, and I look forward to qualifying this Housing Element and getting it done but the question that I had is I've kind of heard a little bit from my colleagues related to this in coordination with an affordable housing work plan, so I know when I was new on Council I think it was when then former Mayor Rickman was here we had a discussion as a Council about affordable housing options and it was a work plan, I believe there was something like 23 policies to consider and we had selected somewhere around 17 for that to come back, and the problem is it never came back, and I recall one of them being inclusionary housing because I remember I advocated for it and it was not selected among the 17. So, staff, my concern is I know that we have certain bandwidth, and we need to get this accomplished, but these topics go so close hand-in-hand. Will there be an opportunity to review either the prior affordable housing work plan that we had discussed in 2019-2020, or can we redo those workshops this Council has an opportunity to address affordable housing policies can we do that in coordination, or what would the timeline look like for that?

Ala
n Bell: Councilmember Arriola yes, you're correct your memory's right. I'd have to verify the 23 and 17, but yes, the City Council worked on, the City Council talked about this at some length, decided to hire PlaceWorks, Inc. You might remember David Early standing here, and we had a series through that summer of 2019, had a series of workshops with the public, public meetings, and got lots of input, and there was a list of alternatives, recommendations, or I don't think we're recommending the alternatives, does the Council want to consider these? And the Council narrowed it down to a smaller number, a slightly smaller number than the initial one.

Bill Dean: So, here's what we've been working on as it relates to this Housing Element right now in some of the work related to the affordable housing work plan. We showed that in the last two slides of the presentation we had. I know it's a lot of information. There's a couple things we've done recently with the ADUs and the ADU workshop. We're bringing that awareness to the Planning Commission.

We're working right now on amending the parking standards, some of the zoning standards as it relates to setbacks and other density restrictions, parking. All of that work is being done contemporaneous to this effort right now. Some of it we're bringing forward. Things like the initiative, we've kind of grouped things into two buckets. There's sort of the low-hanging fruit, and then things are gonna be more complicated. You recall one of the things on that list is talking about priority areas for growth allotments, things like that, really big-ticket stuff. Our way to get through that work plan was to take the lower hanging fruit first, and then work on the things that are more complicated. And also, the things that we'd be learning about through this Housing Element that would provide some insight. For example, the initiative, that's the biggest one, probably the most complicated one.

City of Tracy – Special Concurrent City Council / Planning Commission Meeting Verbatim Transcription
March 22, 2023 – 5:00 p.m.

That is going to be informed as we learn more. It's not something I would suggest, and the city managers, all of them, since then have agreed that's something we should do toward the latter end of the program not the beginning.

So, we've made some progress. It's definitely an active work plan at the Development Services Department working in collaboration with the Attorney's Office and also the City Manager's Office. It's an active work program.

Councilmember Arriola: Ok ay. Thank you for that update. I just think it would probably be important because we have a new Council. I think we've had two Councils since then. It would be beneficial to bring that back before this Council, have that discussion, because the policies that we have selected may have changed. And so, I think that as we're investing resources and going along this process, if we can do them contemporaneously, that would be my preference. But again, I am committed to making sure that we get the Housing Element done by the deadline, but if there's any ways that we can work on the policy elements for affordable housing, then I would absolutely be looking to do that.

Bill De
an: Yeah, we'll be bringing you some action items.

Mayor Young: Wel l, Mr. Dean, you can stay up here for now. It's your turn to stand instead of Mr. Bell. We'll give him a break for a moment. If he can answer questions. So, I have my broken answer to different sections, but one kind of picks up with affordable housing. And I know we've actually been talking about that in pieces since 2015. And so, to get all the way to here, but it's a lot of talking about it. I'll ask a side thing, and then I'll go to the one for here. Do we have a list of, or like a mapping, of where we have affordable housing now? It's just a resource that was asked to me the other day of a teacher, she wanted to know, do we know of affordable, I mean, how things are laid out right now, that's a side thing. [L

IST OF PUBLICLY ASSISTED HOUSING UNITS IS ATTACHED, FOR REFERENCE.]

Bill Dean: We know where projects that have deed restrictions are located throughout Tracy, some of those deed restrictions have sunsetted, but no, otherwise there's no affordability layer that we have access to, which, you know, who might call, what incomes might be in each house.

Mayor Young: I mean like across the street, like we have some, well,

Bill Dean: Yeah, that's a good example. We'll know that. We may know some things that, you know, deed restriction on a project up on Grant Line Road, for example, but driving through Edgewood or Fairhaven or any of the other subdivisions, you know, street by street, lot by lot, we wouldn't be able to tell you.

City of Tracy – Special Concurrent City Council / Planning Commission Meeting Verbatim Transcription
March 22, 2023 – 5:00 p.m.

Mayor Young: Al l right, thanks. So as far as the affordability, coming back, I did look through all the different meetings that and the different things that you changed in the parking downtown and all that kind of stuff. But as far as the low and the very low, and I know it was highlighted by Ms. Daly from the NAACP regarding renters and homeowners. I wanted to make sure that that made it to the list of comments that we're looking at. I don't know if I brought it up in another meeting, but I know like in Virginia where my daughter lives, and it's done by the County, but they have workforce housing for renters as well as for purchase to be able to buy your home. And so, I don't know if that's something we can work with our county or whatever. Yeah, I appreciate that.

Bill De
an: On our list is an inclusionary policy, and that's going to be brought, you know, we're working on that right now, again, with something we're going to run through the Attorney's Office here in the next several months and bring it back to Planning Commission and City Council for consideration. Once you have a program in place like that, for example, if that were to be put in place, then you'd be generating housing units, it'd be, we have a new housing department, for example, that would likely be assisting in understanding how you can programatize that, you know, what are the implementation metrics and measures and on the ground activities associated with managing a program that produces deed-restricted housing? Something we don't have today.

Mayor Young: So, on the inclusionary part, is that where the tools will be introduced, such as the RGAs and the permits? How we look at that? I know you said that's one tool.

I'm just wondering at what point, because it's been over multiple years that we've brought up this, the issue of RGAs, because as I was just at a CalCOG meeting in Southern California, and just really trying to, I was meeting with a lot of different, all the different cities in the region, and the discussion really became, one of the discussions was about inclusionary and how it runs off different developers, and, but at the same time, it was one of the cities, one of the representatives sitting by me who said that they have a lot of affordability, but they have a really hard time attracting market rate. So, there's different barriers in different industries for us. It's the affordability and how to do that. But inclusionary was talked about as a real challenge because it runs away a lot of, you know, developers, especially that will build market rate homes, and how we look at that.

And so, I believe that we really need to highlight that tool of the RGA and how that looks. If we are looking at doing a lot of high density, which we are, to be able to meet our RHNA numbers, it's going to be – I mean, even if it's 100% affordable, we know, okay, we have a lot of leeway for those builders. But if it's not, if it's 20% or if it's 10% or if it's 5%, there's much more restrictions and it's harder to get. So, I think it's going to be really important to look at that really closely, of how we utilize the RGAs for footprints versus each unit. As other cities, we know other cities do.

Bill De
an: I'm very much looking forward to that, very much.

Mayor Young: And is that in the schedule? I didn't see that.

City of Tracy – Special Concurrent City Council / Planning Commission Meeting Verbatim Transcription
March 22, 2023 – 5:00 p.m.

Bill Dean: That is, well it's not, we don't have a specific schedule identified there. I think on the last slide you'll see that the ballot initiative is identified as something that would be, something like in 2024. So again, we are gonna go through this process together, like I was mentioning to Mayor Pro Tem. I think it behooves us to understand what the best tool would be. If you're gonna do an initiative, let's understand what that would be. I think there's been a lot of talk about dropping the requirement for an RGA per unit to an RGA per building, which would have a net increase. There may be other tools we want to present to you. Plural. So, I think we I think it's coming up on staff to show you what our best thinking what some examples of initiatives could look like and what the effects of those would be as opposed to just bringing you that.

Mayor Young: Oka y so, I know there's different type of developers that build different things but that's right you know part of that one of the other things that was discussed in Long Beach was streamlining the process so that many of them, the challenges that buying land and having to hold on for years before people can build. It's just processes. I don't know at what point these things are considered. So then next I wanted to talk about the design standards. I know years ago, push for design standards, and we have that with our building. I don't know within that, that would be Planning Commission, that would be our purview, as far as design standards, just considering even the affordable units, because one of the things that was brought up at the CalCOG meeting as well is that some developers will come in and then you start putting all this super fancy amenities and having all these things, and then it becomes very expensive, again, to be able to rent. And so, on the swing and the pendulum to the other end, you know, gentrification, and at the same time on the other side of that is, you know, a poor-looking area where it looks like everybody over there don't have much. And so, I wanted to just, I don't know if we have design standards, if we have a section in there that where we can, where we're trying to attract affordable housing and units to where we have a minimum, some type of standard for that.

Bill De
an: I'm very encouraged by the question and the comment that you're talking about, what are the rules we have in place that are getting in the way of producing what it is we want to see as a community? So, this effort, this collective effort we're embarking on is going to be looking at a number of things, including that. Alan and I were talking just earlier today about the objective design standards that we want to bring forward as part of this housing implementation plan Council put in place in 2021. That's one of the items we need to bring back. So absolutely, that is on the list.

Mayor Young: Okay, and then also, I don't know where this fits in as far as the funding, because, well, part of it is funding on the back end and funding on the front end.

That's right. And so, the front end with the developers, but on the back end with the end users. And so, I know it was brought up, or maybe it was flipped around, whichever one, back end users once it’s built, subsidies, and things that goes in between, because Section 8 from years ago has been underfunded. So just looking into things like that. So, I know CalCOG is looking into things that they can help the regions with that as well. But I just wanted to make sure that I just wanted to just kind of just give a little update on that. That we, the group that I City of Tracy – Special Concurrent City Council / Planning Commission Meeting Verbatim Transcription
March 22, 2023 – 5:00 p.m.

was a part of, had given input that we wanted to really have CalCOG to help facilitate the conversations between the cities and the regions to be able to really understand the challenges that we have with infill and the RHNA and then coordinate communication with legislators to be able to help them understand our real true issues and one size of course with everything that we say even at CalCities, one size doesn't fit all. But as far as bringing discussions. Within these different entities to be able to help us along so I want to make sure that we're reaching out and we're looking into those entities as well to be able to help as we're moving forward.

Chair Hudson: Thank you. Commissioner Augustus, Commissioner Atwal, Commissioner Boatye-Boateng. The only thing I have to say is that I think this is a very, very important issue and I would like to implore as Councilman Evans said we need to focus on this could be only get a shot to get it right here, probably once, and the City of Tracy is going to live with this for the next ten years. So, my recommendation is you really if you don't know where you're going you need to look where you came from in the past. And I would recommend that everybody look at the last and read the last housing unit from 2015 to 2023 and see where this thing, you're going to be surprised. But take a look at that so when you're discussing and come to these meetings prepared and ready to move forward, that you're now not creating and not doing exactly the same thing wrong.

Because these people that did it in the past thought they were doing the things properly also. So that when we come forward and we move forward for the next 10 years, we have a good plan, we have a good element, a good Housing Element of what we wanted to do, we've addressed some problems, and we've added some teeth to it. And the last thing is, I agree that we do not want to have the housing, the affordable housing, that we do build in the future. We don't want to drive down the street and say, those are affordable housing. And we should be able to do that through design standards that comes through Planning and moving forward. And that will be our job to make sure that that doesn't happen.

And that's all I have. And I'll pass it back to you, Mayor.

Mayor Young: Thank you. And so, with that, that is, do you have, does staff have any questions or clarifications of any of us? Okay, thank you all for a great presentation, thank you for your time and efforts on this. And so now...

Councilmember Bedolla: May
or, may I just ask one quick question? I just wanted to confirm for clarification for myself and for the public. When was the last time that we had a preliminary version of the housing work plan brought before us? Was it June 2021? I'm testing my memory, but also staff's institutional memory. I just want a clarification because I heard otherwise.

Ala
n Bell: The PlaceWorks scope of work was approved on, it was March 2nd, or the first meeting in March of 2021 and that was specific. Yeah to the projects that were eligible to be funded by a couple of state grants that were available at the time so we chose among the plan that Councilmember Arriola referenced items that were eligible to be funded by those grants and got the you know Council approved the City of Tracy – Special Concurrent City Council / Planning Commission Meeting Verbatim Transcription
March 22, 2023 – 5:00 p.m.

scope for PlaceWorks and those are what we're going through right now specifically there are other items that are not part of the grant funding.

Councilmember Bedolla: Understood, understood. And then they were also incorporated into the June 2021 workshop, I believe. Because we had a Housing Workshop. It was, I remember all the developers being here.

Alan Bell: Yes, and at that time we also talked about inclusionary housing. There was a push for inclusionary in June 2021.

Councilmember Bedolla: I guess more what I'm trying to just make clear is that we have been thinking about these issues. It's just been, implementation's been the challenge.

Alan Bell: Yes, that's correct with those dates. We talked about that's what the push came for or the direction came for, hey, let's include inclusionary housing specifically.

That was not in part of the original list that was endorsed by council, but it became it in June of 2021.

Mayor Young: Thank you. So, Mr. Bell, I just want to clarify the next step: One week for online survey to be available on the website and then on social media. It was suggested that it may be put in the water bill, the utility bill, and the option to have a meeting on Saturday. So that came from the audience. I just want to make sure that that's noted. So, I want to know what the next steps are. I see the meetings are between March, which is now, we're almost done with March, and June. So, are these gonna be separate workshops? I'm assuming they still have to be scheduled. Just kind of want to know the next steps for the community and for the Council and the Planning.

Ala
n Bell: Well, specifically what we want, there's this survey that's gonna go out and broadly advertised. We are pursuing this Balancing Act software program. We're talking with them. We have an outline set up and we have prepared to do community workshops. We haven't scheduled any yet. It's something that we'll decide along the way based on the interview responses that we get and the nature of the response and the extent of responses that we get to this general public outreach. We will at least have hearings associated with the draft Housing Element. So, we're going to publish the draft Housing Element. It has to be available to the public for at least 30 days. During that time, we're going to ask the Planning Commission and then the City Council to review that draft Housing Element. So we don't have any specific workshop dates scheduled yet, but very likely they would occur with the Planning Commission that seems to be a forum that is comfortable for receiving input there because the agendas tend to be shorter and less time pressure, but this is something for us to decide as staff the best way to organize the public workshops and timing for them are they during regular Council or Commission meetings or weekends. So, nothing, no specific dates chosen at this time.

City of Tracy – Special Concurrent City Council / Planning Commission Meeting Verbatim Transcription
March 22, 2023 – 5:00 p.m.

Commissioner Arriola: I move to receive informational presentation regarding the City's Housing Element Update, Builder’s Remedy, and ongoing city initiatives to encourage housing production.

Mayor Pro Tem Davis: S econd.

Mayor Young: Was moved by Councilmember Arriola, seconded by Mayor Pro Tem Davis. Roll call.

Councilmember Arriola: Yes.

Mayor Pro Tem Davis: Yes.

Councilmember Bedolla: Yes.

Councilmember Evans:
(no response)
Mayor Young: Yes.

Commissioner Augustus: Yes.

Commissioner Atwal: Yes.

Commissioner Boakye-Boateng: Yes.

Vice Chair Orcutt: (no response)
Chair Hudson: Yes.

Name Application # Zoning Acres # of Units Location Developer/Builder Diaz Duplexes D19-0028 MDR 0.3 4 4th and C St. Javier Diaz Ellis Phase 2 TSM16-0003 ESP 106 356 Ellis Town Dr. Surland/Woodside Homes Ellis Phase 3 TSM18-0005 ESP 74 308 4260 Lammers Road The Surland Companies Tracy Hills Phase 1A
(includes revision to 7C)
TSM13-0005
TSM20-0001 THSP 367 1203 Tracy Hills Drive west of Corral Hollow Lennar, Shea, Meritage Tracy Hills Phase 1B
TSM18-0006
TSM18-0007
SPA19-0002
GPA19-0001
THSP 161 434 Tracy Hills Drive west of Phase 1A Lennar
Tracy Hills KT Project (Hillview)
GPA19-0003
SPA19-0004
SPA20-0008
TSM20-0002
THSP 36 214 Tracy Hills Drive east of Corral Hollow Lennar Valpico Glenbriar Apartments D19-0018 HDR 11.62 264 351 E. Valpico Road Gaurdian Capital Collin Avenue Duplexes D18-0015 HDR 0.4 10 178 Collin Avenue Abdul Chashmawala Tracy Village
TSM17-0003
A/P13-0002
GPA13-0005
SPA18-0001
- 135 594 SEC Valpico Rd. & Corral Hollow Rd. Toll Brothers Tracy Hills Phase 2
GPA21-0001
SPA21-0003
TSM20-0003
THSP 493 1,517 Tracy Hills south of I-580 Integral Communities Total 1384.32 4,904
Name Application # Zoning Acres # of Units Location Developer/Builder

APPROVED AND NOT YET UNDER CONSTRUCTION

CITY OF TRACY RESIDENTIAL DEVELOPMENT PIPELINE REPORT
Status as of October 2023

APPROVED AND UNDER CONSTRUCTION
W:\PLANNING\LISTS\Pipeline Reports\Residential Pipeline Reports\2023\Residential Pipeline Report - October 2023 10/17/2023 Referenced on Page 32 of Attachment B
East 8th Street Apartments
ZA17-0003
D16-0036 CBD 0.23 5 21, 25, & 29 E. 8th Street Frank Aufdermaur, Jr.

Byron Apartments D19-0010 MDR 5 60 2660 Byron Road Rashed Elham, Inc.

Rocking Horse TSM15-0001 PUD 59.1 226 Lammers Rd. north of Schulte Rd. Concentric Development Grp.

Larkspur Basin Lots TSM19-0003
D20-0005 LDR 1.89 14 DeBord Dr. and Cairo Ct . Bright Development Avenues TSM21-0001 ESP 95.83 480 12650 W. Valpico Rd. Surland Ellis RE Lots/Limited Use Area TSM21-0002 ESP 41.87 9 SE area of Ellis SP Surland Byron Road Duplexes D21-0035 MDR 0.89 6 3030 Byron Rd Schack & Company, Inc.

SANSUB Apartments D20-0021 MDR 0.76 9 2480 W. Byron Rd. Panchaksha Patel 4- Story Commercial &
Affordiable Apartments (The
Junction)
D22-0027 CBD 0.47 46 601 N. Central Ave CRP Affordable Housing Total 206.04 855
Name Application # Zoning Acres # of Units Location Developer/Builder Rocking Horse (Version 2)
TSM19-0006
ZA21-0002
R21-0001
PUD 59.1 226 Lammers Rd. north of Schulte Rd. Concentric Development Grp.

Retail Center and Apartments
(The Station)
GPA21-0003
SPA21-0005
R21-0003
Industrial 28.71 220 NEC S. Tracy Blvd. & Gandy Dancer
Dr. JTT Enterprises LP
Tracy Hills Phase 5
SPA21-0007
GPA21-0005
TSM22-0002
THSP 284 1390 Lammers Rd between the Delta
Mendota Canal & California Aqueduct Integral Communities Tracy Hills Phase 1C TSM22-0001 THSP 121 293
Lammers Rd. SE of California
Aqueduct
Lennar
Tracy Apartments D22-0023 MDR 0.81 11 2450 & 2460 Byron Rd. Tenacious AAK, Inc.

Byron Road TSM R22-0004
TSM22-0003 MDR 5 40 2660 W Byron Rd Schack & Company, Inc.

Mount Oso Townhomes
(Formerly known as 15 Duplexes,
2 Triplexes and 1 SFD)
D22-0029 MDR 3.38 37 SWC W. Mt Diablo Ave & S. C St Byrum Investment, LLC.

UNDER CITY REVIEW (NOT YET APPROVED)
W:\PLANNING\LISTS\Pipeline Reports\Residential Pipeline Reports\2023\Residential Pipeline Report - October 2023 10/17/2023 Golden Springs and Corbett Lane D22-0012 - 10.54 82 South side of I-205, at Golden Springs Drive Warmington Homes
Tracy Pavilion D22-0028 - 129.7 751 Lammers Rd, N of Grant Line MLC Holdings, Inc.

Tracy Senior Living D22-0043 MDR 1.94 81 301 West St Artifex West, Inc.

Westside Ranch TSM22-0005 PUD 71.6 415 SEC 11th Street and Lammers Rd South Parcel Investors, LLC Tracy Hills Apartments D23-0004
CUP23-0001
TH-Mixed
Use
Business
Park

14.6 375 Tracy Hills Specific Plan, Phase 1A
253-380-050
Tracy BPS, LLC/
MCE Partners
Tracy Hills Phase 2A HOA
Facility
D23-0009 THSP 3 2 Corner of Emery Street and White
Hart Ave
Lennar Homes
Total 733.18 3,923
Name Application # Zoning/GP
Designation Acres # of Units Location Developer/Builder Bright UR 5 170 886 11th Street & Lammers Road Bright
Bright/Castro PUD/UR 7 107 606 Josephine Drive & Tennis Lane Bright UR1 UR 1 780 2929 MacArthur Drive & Schulte Road Various Owners Tracy Hills (other future phases) THSP 647 2162 Corral Hollow Road & 580 Integral Communities / Others Gateway/Westside Specific Plan PUD 535 857 Lammers Road & 11th Street Various Owners I-205 Expansion Commercial/
Res Low 172 1748 Naglee and Larch Roads Various Owners
Larch Clover Commercial 442 1197 Larch/Clover Various Owners Rocha Res Low/
Medium 91 727 MacArthur Drive and Eastlake Rocha
Berg/Byron remainder MDR/GHC 56 411 Berg/Byron Roads Various Owners SWC Valpico and Corral Hollow Res Low 65 282 SWC Valpico and Corral Hollow Various Owners Total 3,065 11,805

ADDITIONAL CITY & SOI (SPHERE OF INFLUENCE) PROPERTIES
W:\PLANNING\LISTS\Pipeline Reports\Residential Pipeline Reports\2023\Residential Pipeline Report - October 2023 10/17/2023 Table II-43: Inventory of Assisted Units (Table II-43 from Draft Housing Element) Project Name
Total
Units
Assisted
Units
Unit
Size Type Funding Source(s)
Expiration of
Affordability
Tracy Garden
Apartments
2926 N Tracy Blvd.
88 87 87 1-br Seniors Low Income Housing
Tax Credit program; Project-
based Section 8
11/1/2064;
Section 8 expires
7/31/28
Tracy Village
Apartments
435 E 6th Street
72 71 24 1-br
32 2-br
15 3-br
Family Low Income Housing
Tax Credit program
9/9/2060
Chesapeake Bay
Apartments
2943 W Lowell Ave.
216 150 138 2-br
12 3-br
Family Low Income Housing
Tax Credit program
2031
Mountain View
Townhomes
377 W Mt. Diablo
Ave.
37 36 10 2-br
14 3-br
12 4-br
Family Redevelopment set-aside
funds; Low Income Housing
Tax Credit program
2054
Stone Pine
Meadows
229 W. Grant Line
Road
72 71 15 1-br
23 2-br
27 3-br
6 4-br
Family Redevelopment set-aside
funds; Low Income Housing
Tax Credit program;
HOME funds
2047
Tracy Place Senior
Apartments
902 12th Street
50 49 41 1-br
8 2-br
Seniors Redevelopment set-aside
funds; Low Income Housing
Tax Credit program
2063
Tracy Homes
West, 9th & 10th Streets
195 195 24 1-br
32 2-br
15 3-br
Family Housing Authority of the
County of San Joaquin
None
The Vela
Apartments
351 Valpico Road
264 70 1 br to
3 br units
Family City GMO Program –
Moderate-Income Units
2038
Total 729 729
Sources: City of Tracy, 2022
There are approximately 160 Housing Voucher (Section 8) households throughout Tracy and additional Housing Authority dwellings within the City.

Referenced on Page 39 of Attachment B
Attachment C

Draft Housing Element Comments Received to Date
and Proposed Responses
October 16, 2023

Comment 1: A parcel is incorrectly identified as a “Pending Project” in the proposed Westside Ranch (formerly Tracy Gateway) Specific Plan area. APN 209-250-42 is not a Pending Project site; but APN 209-250-50 is a Pending Project site. The Sites Inventory Map and the Sites Inventory List will be corrected to reflect this correction.

Comment 2: The City’s Mobility and Housing Department has provided edits and updates to portions of the Draft Housing Element (Chapter 1, pgs 5 and 6; Chapter 2, pg 35; and Chapter 3, pg 23). These corrections will be made to the Draft Housing Element.

Hansen Rd
Hansen R
d
Pr omo nt ory Pkw y
Ha
nse
n Rd
Ha
nsen Rd
Hood Way
Hopkin s R d
Promontory Pkw y
Hood Way
Hopkins Rd
W 11 th St
S
La
m
m
er
s R
d
S
Lammers R
d
W 11t h St
Cap
itol P
ark Dr
S
La
mme
rs Rd
S
Lam
me
rs Rd
F
0 0.1 0.2 0.30.05
Miles
Tracy Housing Element Update
Sites I
nventory
RHNA Opportunity Site
Income Category
Lower
Mixed
Moderate
Above Moderate
Pending Projects
RHNA Opportunit
y Sites
Rezone to HDR
Rezone to New MU1
Non RHNA Opportunit
y
Sites
Rezone to HDR
Attachment C -- Comment 1
Attachment C – Comment 2 (Chapter I)
City of Tracy
5 2023-2031 Housing Element

2. Housing Element Presentations, Workshops and Events

The City conducted the following study sessions and public hearings to discuss the Housing Element update:
• Public Workshops (May 23, 2023, May 27, 2023, and June 3, 2023): these workshops were held at the Tracy Transit Center to review Housing Element issues and concerns. • Study Session (March 22, 2023): Joint City Council and Planning Commission study session that included a detailed presentation of the requirements of the 6 th cycle Housing
Element Update, the RHNA requirements and the preliminary opportunity site selection strategy and results. Notification of the special concurrent meeting was done pursuant to Section 54956 of the Government Code of California.

3. Stakeholder Interviews

The City contacted over 30 individuals and groups including service providers, nonprofits, and other identified stakeholders to participate in focus group interview about the housing needs and issues in Tracy. Out of the 30 individuals and groups that were contacted, 17 individuals participated in the three focus group held: April 10, 2023 at 12:00 PM; April 17, 2023 at 12:00 PM, and one on April 19, 2023 at 12:00 PM. Stakeholders in the Housing Element Update process included developers, real estate brokers, property managers, city employees, and advocates for fair housing and homeless prevention, among others. A complete stakeholder list is included in Appendix A.

The stakeholders who participated discussed a variety of concerns. The italicized text outlines how this Housing Element addresses these concerns.
• Residential Growth Allotment (RGA) as a possible constraint to growth and the development review process;
The 2015 amendment to the Growth Management Ordinance (GMO) allows the City to issue building permits in excess of those allowed in order to meet the City’s RHNA. The Housing Element includes policies to continue to prioritize the allocation of RGAs to affordable housing projects as well as annually monitoring and evaluating the GMO for the impacts on the cost, supply and timing of housing.
• A lack of affordable housing options and how to incentivize senior and affordable development in the City;
On February 4, 2020, the City Council identified an action plan to address affordable/workforce housing. These actions include: allowing and encouraging a variety of housing types, considering including an inclusionary program, preparing a ballot initiative for voter consideration to amend the City’s GMO and increasing minimum density in medium density residential zones. • High development and impact fees;
The City has several policies in place to facilitate the development of affordable housing, including: increased priority under the GMO, decreased construction costs through reduced standards (i.e., reduced parking, etc.).
• Tracy does not have the capacity to support all of the City’s unsheltered residents who are experiencing homelessness, most of the social services and housing resources are located in Stockton; and
In May 2020, the City Council adopted the Homeless Strategic Plan (Strategic Plan.) In September 2020, the City Council gave direction to move fo rward with the development of p lans for the desi gn and

City of Tracy
2023-2031 Housing Element 6
construction of a temporary emergency housing facility. The si te is located on 4.8 acres at 370 W. Arbor Avenue. The 6,300 square -foot low -barrier navigation facility will accommodate people, pets, and possessions and is anticipated to provide night ly shelter for approximately 68 residents within a congregate sprung shelter. This Housing Element includes a program for Zoning Ordinance amendments to comply with most recent State laws related to homeless shelters and low barrier navigation centers Underground site work was completed in August 2022. This project has experienced significant delays in construction. Council directed the City to move on alternative housing options due to the delay in construc tion and ordered a declaration establishing an emergency shelter crisis (Resolution 2022 -121). This resolution also directed the City Manager to take immediate and emergency actions necessary to implement interim housing solutions for Tracy’s unsheltered population. These interim housing solutions provided a Phase 3 and Phase 4 of the Arbor Avenue site which allowed the City to procure goods and services to support additional units.

Phase 3 consists of 48 units within modular dormitory facilities and Phase 4 includes 38 container units that are currently in construction. Today, there are 48 beds in service at the Arbor Avenue site. In addition, the City has contracted a provider, one which provides the oversight of the shelter’s day to day operations.

Need for more education and outreach to inform residents of housing law and what affordable housing is, to shift the perceived stigma.

Several programs included in this Housing Element’s AFFH section address fair housing education and outreach throughout Tracy.

4. Online Housing Survey

A 15-question survey was posted on the City website on June 29, 2023 and has remained open to receive responses throughout the Housing Element update review process. The survey was posted in both English and Spanish and all responses were anonymous. Questions included the following: age of respondent, years lived in Tracy and tenure, housing affordability and maintenance. A total of 138 respondents were recorded for the survey. A complete survey and tallied responses are included in Appendix A. All respondents were asked to whether they “Strongly Agree,” “Somewhat Agree,” “Neither Agree nor Disagree,” “Somewhat Disagree,” or “Strongly Disagree” with statements. The top responses are shown below and the italicized text outlines how this Housing Element addresses these issues.

Attachment C – Comment 2 (Chapter II)
City of Tracy
35 2023-2031 Housing Element
• Develop action plans for engaging with people experiencing homelessness • Enact specific strategies for vulnerable subpopulations experiencing homelessness The
Strategic Plan includes objectives and a detailed implementation plan for each of these goals.

Some of the implementation measures focused on emergency, transitional and permanent housing options in the City. Preparation of the Strategic Plan included a variety of stakeholders.

A detailed list of available State resources was also included.

Ser
vices and facilities available to the homeless in and around Tracy are listed in Table 28.

Table 28: Homeless Services
Organization Services
Central Valley Low Income
Housing Corporation (Stockton)
Provides rent assistance and supportive services to homeless families and individuals, including case management, budgeting assistance/ counseling, education assistance, and job search preparation.

New Directions (Stockton)
Serves homeless individuals who have a history of substance abuse.

Program participants reside in dormitories and receive supportive services which include individual and group counseling.

Lutheran Social Services of
Northern California (Stockton)
Provides rent assistance and support services to homeless former foster youth with disabilities. Supportive services include case management, education assistance, child care, and transportation assistance.

Coalition of Tracy Citizens to
Assist the Homeless (CTCAH)
Operates Emerson House, a transitional shelter for homeless men.

Tracy Interfaith Ministries
Provides bagged groceries and clothing for homeless individuals, and works with the Salvation Army to provide one-night vouchers for Tracy motels.

McHenry House Tracy Family
Shelter
Provides shelter to homeless families and single women.

Tracy Interim Shelter Site Provides a low barrier shelter option to men, women, couples and pets.

Tracy Community Connections
Center
Provides intake and referral support for Tracy’s shelter. Provides a Navigation Center for Tracy residents in need of housing and resources.

In September 2020, the City Council gave direction to move forward with the de velopment of plans for the design and construction of a temporary emergency housing facility. The site is located on 4.8 acres at 370 W. Arbor Avenue. The 6,300 square-foot low-barrier navigation facility will accommodate people, pets, and possessions and is anticipated to provide shelter for approximately 68 residents within a congregate sprung shelter. Underground site work was completed in August 2022. This project has experienced significant delays in construction.

Council directed the City to move on alternative housing options due to the delay in construction and ordered a declaration establishing an emergency shelter crisis (Resolution 2022- 121). This resolution also directed the City Manager to take immediate and emergency actions necessary to implement interim housing solutions for Tracy’s unsheltered population. These interim housing solutions provided a Phase 3 and Phase 4 of the Arbor Avenue site which allowed the City to procure goods and services to support additional units. Phase 3 consists of 48 units within modular dormitory facilities and Phase 4 includes 38 container units that are currently in construction. Today, there are 48 beds in service at the Arbor Avenue site. In addition, the City has contracted with a provider, which provides the oversight of the shelter’s day to day operations.

Attachment C – Comment 2 (Chapter III)

City of Tracy
23 2023-2031 Housing Element

The City has over 20 acres of vacant land zoned MDC, MDR, and HDR. In addition, the City ’s residential sites inventory identifies 11 acres of vacant MDR and HDR land and 158 acres of land proposed to be rezoned HDR. Adequate capacity would be available to potentially accommodate emergency shelters for the unsheltered homeless in the City.

In May 2020, the City Council adopted the Homeless Strategic Plan (Strategic Plan). This Strategic Plan identified four primary goals:
• Increase housing options in Tracy
• Increase access to coordinated support services for people experiencing homelessness • Develop action plans for engaging with people experiencing homelessness • Enact specific strategies for vulnerable subpopulations experiencing homelessness

The Strategic Plan includes objectives and a detailed implementation plan for each of these goals.

Some of the implementation measures focused on emergency, transitional and permanent housing options in the City. Preparation of the Strategic Plan included a variety of stakeholders.

A detailed list of available State resources was also included. The City’s Homeless Advisory Committee, which is comprised of two seated City Council members, meets four times a year and helps to implement the Strategic Plan.

According to the Strategic Plan, there are 28 local service providers that make up the Tracy Community Homeless Task Force. The services offered include shelters; subsidized housing; community meals; food delivery to encampments; food pantries, markets, and produce; and hygiene programs.

In September 2020, the City Council gave direction to move forward with the development of plans for the design and construction of a temporary emergency housing facility. The site is located on 4.8 acres at 370 W. Arbor Avenue. The 6,300 square-foot low-barrier navigation facility will accommodate people, pets, and possessions and is anticipated to provide nightly shelter for approximately 68 residents within a congregate sprung shelter. Underground site work was completed in August 2022. This project has experienced significant delays in construction.

Council directed the City to move on alternative housing options due to the delay in construction and ordered a declaration establishing an emergency shelter crisis (Resolution 2022- 121). This resolution also directed the City Manager to take immediate and emergency actions necessary to implement interim housing solutions for Tracy’s unsheltered population.

While the City is working on the Low Barrier Navigation Center on Arbor Avenue, the Zoning Ordinance does not address this type of facility. AB 101 requires cities to allow a Low Barrier Navigation Center development by right in areas zoned for mixed uses and nonresidential zones permitting multifamily uses if it meets specified requirements. A “Low Barrier Navigation Center” is defined as “a Housing First, low -barrier, service-enriched shelter focused on moving people into permanent housing that provides temporary living facilities while case managers connect individuals experiencing homelessness to incom e, public benefits, health services, shelter, and housing.” Low Barrier shelters may include options such as allowing pets, permitting partners to share living space, and providing storage for residents’ possessions. AB 101 also sets a timeline for jurisdi ctions to act on applications for Low Barrier Navigation Center developments. The requirements of this bill are effective through the end of 2026, at which point they are repealed.