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HomeMy WebLinkAbout5c_Additional Materials Received_VariousFrom:Julie Ault To:Tucker, Larry; Housing Element Update Advisory Committee; Campbell, Jim; bzbeda@newportbeachca.go Cc:Derek Ostensen Subject:Airport Area Opportunity Sites - Comment Letter -: 9.2.2020 Meeting Date:Tuesday, September 01, 2020 2:39:12 PM Attachments:Airport Area Opportunity Sites- Olen Properties Comment 9.1.20.pdf Airport Area Site Analysis REVISED.pdf [EXTERNAL EMAIL] DO NOT CLICK links or attachments unless you recognize the sender and know the content is safe. Please find attached Comment letter from Olen Properties Corp., owner of 4910 Birch Street, Newport Beach 92660 Julie A. Ault General Counsel Seven Corporate Plaza Newport Beach, CA 92660 949-719-7211 949-719-7210 (fax) jault@olenproperties.com www.olenproperties.com Housing Element Update Advisory Committee - September 2, 2020 Item No. V(c) Additional Materials Received 1 Housing Element Sites Strategy Seven Corporate Plaza ∙ Newport Beach, CA 92660 (949) 644-OLEN ∙ Fax (949) 719-720 www.olenproperties.com September 1, 2020 Sent via email to Chair Tucker at ltucker@newportbeachca.gov Larry Tucker, Chair and Committee Members Housing Element Update Advisory Committee City of Newport Beach 100 Civic Center Drive Newport Beach, CA 92660 RE: Airport Area Opportunity Sites Dear Chair Tucker and Committee Members: We’ve been closely watching the Housing Element Update Advisory Committee meetings and wanted to weigh in since many of the discussions for new housing revolve around the Airport Area Opportunity Site. As a long-time business owner in the Airport Area, we wanted to clarify our position and early concerns before the Committee gets too far along in its discussions, site selection analysis, and community outreach for the Housing Element Update. The following are some initial items for Committee consideration: 1. Lack of Amenities in Airport Area. The Airport Area is grossly deficient in grocery stores, park acreage, retail and other amenities that create a “livable community.” There is a risk that the Housing Element Update prioritizes mere residential density without requiring adequate amenities of the type described above. This must be avoided, as a dearth of amenities exacerbates impacts on adjacent businesses, increases traffic to other amenity-rich areas of Newport Beach, and represents a “missed opportunity” to create a vibrant residential community within the Airport Area. This could also counter regional and statewide efforts to reduce single occupancy vehicle trips because the lack of amenities forces new residents to drive to them. 2. Close Coordination with Existing Airport Area Business Owners is Needed. There are few existing residences in the Airport Area; however, there are hundreds of existing businesses – both property owners and office tenants. Prior to making conclusions about “appropriate residential sites,” the Committee and its consultants must make a substantive effort to meet with existing businesses. This has not yet occurred. Without such careful outreach and collaboration, existing businesses will likely oppose many residential projects, thereby wasting time and money for the City and community. This is not in the best interest of the Housing Element or the existing businesses. Now is the time for such coordination and collaboration. Housing Element Update Advisory Committee - September 2, 2020 Item No. V(c) Additional Materials Received 1 Housing Element Sites Strategy Seven Corporate Plaza ∙ Newport Beach, CA 92660 (949) 644-OLEN ∙ Fax (949) 719-720 www.olenproperties.com 3. Residential Sites Should be Spread More Widely Around the Airport Area. The prior Housing Sites Analysis and Inventory within the 2013 Housing Element clustered residential sites too narrowly. This created excessive impacts on certain pockets of business owners, rather than spreading out the impacts across a wider geographic area and thereby mitigating them. The Housing Element Update must expand its Residential Opportunities site selection. The entire Airport Area should likely be considered, as this would be a more logical and equitable distribution. The prior 2013 map was excessively weighted towards Koll Center and this problem must not be repeated in the updated map lest numerous existing Koll Center businesses actively oppose the Housing Element Update. See the attached map, which further explains our point. (See Attachment 1) Further, how will existing Integrated Conceptual Development Plans be handled within the constraints of the new Housing Element? Will they be followed, updated, or ignored? The City’s aim should be consistency across plans and policies. 4. The Concept of “Underutilized Parking” Must be Carefully Analyzed in a Fact-Based Manner with Real-time Inputs. Many Airport Area Residential Opportunity Sites would convert what is deemed by the City as “underutilized parking.” Clear, science-based analysis (i.e. credible parking studies) should be used to determine if certain parking areas are truly “underutilized” or if that is in fact not the case. For example, several of our businesses in the Airport Area experience regular parking inadequacies under current parking allowances – yet new proposed residential projects would reduce parking allowances even further, increasing parking problems in an unsustainable manner. Further, any analysis done during the pandemic may not yield an accurate result as many employees may be working from home. A touch base with the business owners would provide the most accurate data. 5. New Residential Areas Should Not Conflict with Existing Covenants, Conditions, and Restrictions. We remind you and the City that many sites, when approved for office and industrial development decades ago, had specific property rights granted to owners that run with the land contained in the Declaration of Covenants, Conditions, and Restrictions (CC&Rs) that outlined parking and other requirements. In some cases, these CC&Rs were approved by the City, which incorporates the City’s acknowledgement of these restrictions. New residential projects have the potential to conflict with significant existing legal rights as it relates to private restricted ingress, egress, common area access, and surface parking. Prior to identifying Residential Opportunity Sites, the City should carefully vet whether such sites would conflict with existing CC&Rs, as a failure to do so could amount to a taking of property rights without just compensation. This is another reason why early outreach to and collaboration with existing business owners is important. 6. New Residential Areas Should be Carefully Designed to be Compatible with Existing Businesses. A myriad of important factors should be considered, including view impacts, ingress/egress, residential versus business use conflicts, noise, glare, and other items. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been invested in creating the vibrant business district with thousands Housing Element Update Advisory Committee - September 2, 2020 Item No. V(c) Additional Materials Received 1 Housing Element Sites Strategy Seven Corporate Plaza ∙ Newport Beach, CA 92660 (949) 644-OLEN ∙ Fax (949) 719-720 www.olenproperties.com of employees working every day in the Airport Area. The livelihoods of a major employment base for the City is at stake if the City fails to carefully consider not just “where to put new residential” but also “how to do so in a way that is compatible with and complementary to existing businesses.” 7. Trip Generation. We’d like to understand how trip generation for proposed projects within Opportunity Areas will be reviewed for the Housing Element Update. And, more specifically, how the use of the new traffic metric (vehicle miles travelled, VMT) will play a role in the Environmental Impact Report for the Housing Element Update. Also, does the VMT analysis account for just the new residential uses or will it also add the in/out trips completed by the businesses and their employees? This is not a comprehensive list and we will continue to remain engaged as this process unfolds. Due to the fact that the Airport Area is shaping up to receive the brunt of the new housing allocation, we urge the Housing Element Update Committee to increase the amount of outreach and collaboration it conducts with existing Airport Area businesses. Please include us in your upcoming outreach efforts and we will work to inform our business neighbors when those opportunities present themselves. Sincerely, Julie Ault General Counsel cc: Housing Element Update Advisory Committee HEupdate@newportbeachca.gov Jim Campbell, Deputy Director jcampbell@newportbeachca.gov Ben Zbeda, Senior Planner bzdeba@newportbeachca.gov Attachments: 1 – Revised Housing Site Analysis and Inventory Map Housing Element Update Advisory Committee - September 2, 2020 Item No. V(c) Additional Materials Received 1 Housing Element Sites Strategy Housing Element Update Advisory Committee - September 2, 2020 Item No. V(c) Additional Materials Received 1 Housing Element Sites Strategy September 2, 2020, HEUAC Agenda Comments These comments on items on the Newport Beach Housing Element Update Advisory Committee agenda are submitted by: Jim Mosher ( jimmosher@yahoo.com ), 2210 Private Road, Newport Beach 92660 (949-548-6229) Item V.c. HOUSING ELEMENT SITES STRATEGY General Comments First, I wish to note this Attachment 3 has been posted in a PDF image-only format, not the machine-searchable one expected of open data. Second, this “Roadmap to Compliance” attachment appears intended to amplify and assign numbers to the same series of points raised in the paragraph from Nick Chen of Kimley-Horn at the top of page 5 of the draft minutes from July 15, 2020 (Item IV.a on the present agenda), in which he summarized the June 10, 2020 HCD Housing Element Site Inventory Guidebook. However, the graphic on the first page, it seems to me, creates an overly optimistic picture: it gives the impression that without the HEUAC doing anything the City has already accounted for 4,389 of the City’s 6th Cycle RHNA requirement of 4,832 dwelling units, leaving less than 500 to find new sites for. This is misleading, for as page 2 discloses, only 118 of the 2,014 units at signpost “A” are low or very low income, against a RHNA requirement of 2,380 in those categories. And the minutes from the HEUAC’s last meeting suggest there is an expectation that many if not all of even that 118 will not be part of the 6th Cycle count since they are likely to be completed before July 1, 2021.1 Moreover, adding 4,832 new units in a single RHNA cycle would be quite a step up from past status quo production. According to the data2 reported to the California Department of Finance, over the last decade the housing stock in Newport Beach has grown from 44,193 units on January 1, 2010, to 45,060 units on January 1, 2020, a recent growth rate of 86.7 units/year (at all income levels). If that rate continued over the 8.3 year 6th cycle projection period, the total production would be only 720 units. By either of these measures, it seems unrealistic to think the 4,832 unit mandate can be can be achieved with as little additional effort as the cover graphic of Attachment 3 implies. Meeting the requirement for 3,427 new units affordable to households with moderate income and below seems especially challenging. In addition, I would be curious to know how or if any of the pending bills from this year’s just- ended legislative session in Sacramento might affect the HEUAC effort. 1 The slide on page 2 of Attachment 3 gives the cut-off date as "June 31" - a date that doesn't exist on most calendars. 2 The E-5 Population and Housing Estimates. Housing Element Update Advisory Committee - September 2, 2020 Item No. V(c) Additional Materials Received 1 Housing Element Sites Strategy September 2, 2020, HEUAC Item V.c comments - Jim Mosher Page 2 of 2 As best I can tell it is not addressed in the present handout, but as to opportunity sites, at last year’s “Newport, Together” workshops, and possibly in some Council discussions, there have been questions about the City getting credit for bootlegged dwelling units and for people living aboard boats in the harbor. I think those are of marginal significance to the HEUAC’s effort, both because of the low numbers (at least for live-aboards) and because this would be a claim about the City’s existing housing stock being underestimated (which, in its small way resulted in the 1.34 million being assigned to SCAG and would be difficult to back out now), but HEUAC members may nonetheless be interested to know the Harbor Commission is currently struggling with updating the regulations regarding live-aboards in commercial marinas. As best anyone can tell, no permit is currently required to live aboard a boat in a marina at a slip not adjacent to residential land uses, so the numbers are unknown, but thought to be small. The Harbor Commission is considering limiting the number to a maximum of 15% of the number of slips, or possibly no limit at all. This compares to the existing cap on boats on off-shore moorings allowed, by permit, for living aboard. That maximum is somewhat arbitrarily set at 7% of the total number of off-shore moorings, which, with less than 800 off-shore moorings, translates to less than 56 legally-allowed households on them.3 The maximum number a 15% limit would allow in commercial marinas, and how that compares to the number living there now, is not clear. If an increase in live-aboards can be counted toward the 6th cycle RHNA quotas, the HEUAC might want to provide input to the Harbor Commission on this issue. Finally, although this item is about compliance with the 6th cycle RHNA, what do we expect to be the final state of our compliance with the 5th cycle RHNA? Does it continue to be true the City has failed to meet its assignment of 1 new unit in the moderate income category? If so, what are the consequences of that failure? Specific Comments on the Attachment 3 PDF Page 2: In the minutes of the July 15 meeting, “Chair Tucker advised that opportunity sites within the Coastal Zone are not under consideration presently.” Mariners Mile/Cannery Village are in the Coastal Zone, as is Banning Ranch. Pages 2-4: The “Roadmap” on page 1 assumes credit for up to 594 units in the preservation and conversion categories. What specific sub-categories are these expected to come from? Page 4: The “Roadmap” on page 1 assumes credit for approximately 1,000 new ADU’s. Which of the various formulas is this based on? In particular, what was the City’s ADU production from 2013 through 2018 (which we are allowed to multiply by five in arriving at a projection)? Pages 5-6: W hat is the expected shortfall that needs to be made up in each of the RHNA income categories? 3 Like many things in Newport Beach, the 7% seems to have been chosen in an effort to grandfather the number of households living on off-shore moorings at the time the permitting process was first instituted. Housing Element Update Advisory Committee - September 2, 2020 Item No. V(c) Additional Materials Received 1 Housing Element Sites Strategy