City Council - Regular Meeting

Folks, thank you for being here tonight at our Engage Durango Forum. If you're not seated, please go ahead and take a seat, unless you're staff and you're instructed to stand. Thanks for being here. I'm Brian Devine. I work for the City of Durango in the Prosperity Office. I'm the Housing Policy and Planning Administrator. I'll be one of the speakers tonight, and we'll go through all the formalities here in a moment. But as we do with every meeting with the city, we generally start with a land acknowledgement.

which I think Evan is preparing now.

This is a call to honor and respect indigenous sovereignty and self-determination. As residents and visitors of Durango, we're called upon to educate ourselves about the history and cultural heritage of the land that we inhabit. The city of Durango is situated on the ancestral homelands and territories of the Nitu, Ute, Hickory Apache, Pueblos of New Mexico, Hopi-Sinan, Hopi, and Diné Navajo nations. The original stewards of this land were forcibly removed and exposed to countless atrocities by the United States government, including repeatedly broken treaties, forced assimilation, the tragic legacy of Indian boarding schools, and the loss of ancestral homelands. We recognize lasting generational trauma exists within Native communities today. We affirm the continuing importance of ancestral sites to descendant communities as integral to the living cultural landscape. This acknowledgement only becomes meaningful when combined with accountable relationships and informed actions. May this serve as a step towards inclusion and reconciliation.

We strive to provide an engaged Durango forum that's accessible to all. If you need childcare or interpretation in Spanish, please see us at the back of the room. Please also help yourselves to snacks and sparkling waters at the back. Today's agenda is pretty simple. We have two speakers, of which I am one. We'll have about 15 to 20 minutes of presentation for you. We'll then take general questions for about 10 minutes. And I say general questions because With these presentations in particular, it may prompt questions that you have about a specific part of the city or a specific property or a specific project. We're going to ask that those afterwards when we break up into having staff around the different tables. But hopefully we can take some general questions about the presentation and the city's housing initiatives and ADUs for the first 10 minutes. And then we'll break apart. And as you can see, every department in the city is represented here tonight. So please come see us with questions about tonight's topic or other kinds of questions. And as I said, if something is prompted in your mind about a specific property or specific project, let's try to get those at the end of the night when we break up and we can give each of those questions a little more individual attention. After we have the presentations, we have this room for quite a while. So please feel free to come up and see us and get questions answered. As I said, my name is Brian, and I work in the city's Prosperity Office, which is labeled over there as Housing, Tourism, and Economic Opportunity. This is a newer office within the city that coordinates on these related issues. And I'm going to talk about some of the city's housing affordability initiatives for the first presentation tonight. You'll see this at the start of every city presentation. Everything we do with the city is downstream of our mission, vision, values, and strategic plan. City Council adopted a strategic plan that includes innovative housing and economic development. And that's what we're here to talk about tonight. So how do we innovate in the housing space? I think we all know that housing is a major challenge in Durango, perhaps the major challenge to a thriving community in Durango. We use a number of different strategies that appear on the slide. The one that probably gets the most attention out in the public is public-private partnerships. These are development projects where the city is an active partner in the project. where we're actually investing in the project in some way in exchange for substantial affordability in the development. We're actually not going to talk about that tonight because that's what gets the most attention. What we're interested in talking about are the first two that are up here. These are some of our policy tools to try to bring affordability into the community more generally as opposed to in specific projects. The first of these is called inclusionary zoning, which in the city we call fair share. And the second is expedited review of affordable projects, which we call fast track. And we'll talk about those and how they attempt to bring more affordable housing and more mixed income neighborhoods to the city in general. To talk about these, I need to introduce an unfortunate technical concept, which is called AMI or area median income. The short version of this is that AMI is a measure of household income that adjusts for where you live and for your household size. And this allows us to make comparisons across different regions, as well as across household types and household sizes. If you're at 100% AMI, that's the median income. So if you remember our high school math, the median means half of households earn more and half of households earn less than the median income household. And again, we adjust this for household sizes. What you see on the left is a description of a couple of ranges of AMIs. You'll find that every federal, state, local, and nonprofit organization uses a different definition of affordable and a different definition of workforce housing. So we end up talking a lot about the actual numbers here so that we can have a nice standard comparison. But you can see just a couple of examples for households of two-person households. For example, the top end of this range, 120%. AMI in La Plata County is about $106,000 a year, all the way down to what you see at 30% AMI there, $26,000 a year for a two-person household. Again, these would be adjusted by household size. These are just the kinds of households that we're talking about when we talk about trying to get housing that serves different AMIs. On the right, what you'll see is some information from our 2025 Housing Needs Assessment. The way that this analysis works is they look at the projected job growth for La Plata County over the next 10 years, the kinds of incomes and households that that will create, and then how much housing you need that serves those income ranges in order to not stifle job growth. One of the main causes of our current housing crisis is that housing production has not copped up with job growth in our county since 2012. So a lot has accelerated, of course, with the public health emergency. but our problems actually extend quite a bit farther back than that. As you can see, the county, and this holds true for the city as well, needs housing at all income levels over the next 10 years, including at the bottom there, over 150% AMI. Those would be sort of market rate homes. We need quite a bit of market rate or unsubsidized housing, as well as housing all the way down to that 30% AMI category and everything in between. So that's going to inform some of what we described tonight. As I said, I want to talk about some of our policy tools that aim to create mixed income communities. You can think of inclusionary zoning and expedited review as a carrot and a stick. We don't usually like to use those terms because there's nothing punitive about it. There's no punishment here. But it is true that inclusionary zoning represents a minimum standard that the city requires of most new developments in the city, most new residential and mixed use developments in the city. On the right, expedited review acts as an incentive to go well beyond those minimum requirements. So on the left, we're kind of talking about what we would require for most new developments. And on the right, an incentive for developers to provide quite a bit more affordability. The theory behind inclusionary zoning and our fast track program is that if you have a percentage of homes in a development that meet some affordability standard and others that don't have to meet that standard, you're spreading the cost of that development out and allowing the market to absorb a lot of those costs. And that means that the subsidy required from the city or the state or anybody else is significantly lower. So what we're talking about here is trying to create mixed income developments. The theory behind expedited review simply is that time is money. So for a developer, especially an affordable housing developer, the faster that they can have certainty over what they'll have to do to achieve a project translates into more affordable rents or more affordable sales prices at the back end. So one way that the city can incentivize these substantially affordable developments, as you'll see, it's actually half of the units meet an affordability standard, is we can get them through our review processes in an accelerated timeline. And specifically here, we're talking about a 90-day review. There's a couple of nuances and details there, but in general, we're talking about trying to review these affordable projects in 90 days. And in the city, unlike in a lot of places in Colorado, we're able to do that without cutting short any of the public comment periods, any public input, any city council and community development commission input. We have one city councilor and some commissioners here tonight. So this is a really strong incentive for developers that doesn't take any money out of the city budget, and it doesn't take any of the city's limited supply of public land. This is an incentive that doesn't rely on those, which are, of course, very scarce in Durango. So let's give a couple examples here. Again, we're going to start with the minimum requirement for most developments, fair share inclusionary zoning. And we give developers a couple of options. And the reason we do that is because we have all those needs up and down the income scale in our housing needs assessment. So just in general, for developers, there's going to be a deeply affordable option, which you see on the left. And an example would be about 10% of the homes being rented out, depending on what their characteristics are, how many bedrooms they have, $1,200 to $1,700 a month. In the middle, we have a moderate affordability option. The example there is homes that would be for sale for about $280,000 to $390,000. As many of you are aware, that is substantially below the sales price in the open market. And then on the right, in order to accommodate some of those incomes that are a little bit below what the market can provide, but maybe not appropriate for the city to subsidize in certain ways, We do allow for projects that are 100% of the units meeting this standard, about $420,000 to $590,000, again, depending on the bedroom count. So this is a way, again, for us to distribute affordable housing and workforce housing throughout the city in these mixed income projects, as opposed to only having them in the city's public-private partnerships, where you get this concentration of certain types of housing in certain areas. JUST FOR REFERENCE, THE OBVIOUS QUESTION HERE IS, IS THIS POLICY WORKING? WE HAD MAJOR UPDATES ADOPTED BY CITY COUNCIL TO THIS POLICY IN 2024. WE NOW HAVE OUR FIRST LARGE FAIR SHARE FOR SALE PROJECT GOING THROUGH DEVELOPMENT REVIEW RIGHT NOW. AND WE ALSO HAVE OUR FIRST INTERMEDIATE OWNERSHIP PROJECT, THE EXAMPLE ON THE RIGHT, GOING THROUGH DEVELOPMENT. BOTH GOT A RECOMMENDATION FROM COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT COMMISSION LAST NIGHT. SO THAT'S THE MINIMUM REQUIREMENT. What would we like to see and what are we willing to incentivize through those accelerated reviews? Well, it's going to be half of the homes in a development meeting that same affordability standard. So for rentals, that's half of the units or the homes meeting this affordable standard, again, depending on the number of bedrooms. And for these home ownership projects, half of the homes meeting those sales prices, again, depending on the bedrooms. And as you can see, that's a substantial amount of affordability. That's a lot of affordable homes to include in a development. So this is offering that really strong incentive, that 90-day incentive for the projects that really add a lot of affordability to our community all at once, again, with kind of more limited city financial subsidy. So the obvious question is, how are we doing compared to that housing needs assessment? And these are just a couple of graphs that we've drawn up. On the top left, we're talking about Total homes, as I said, we don't just need formally affordable housing in Durango. We also need market rate housing. We need a robust housing market in Durango. The housing needs assessment sort of through the formula that the state uses says we need about 2000 new homes in Durango over the next 10 years, again, just to keep up with the job growth. So that's a baseline. We're not legally required to build that many homes, but that's a baseline for us to meet the city's goals. And as you can see for total homes, Over a 10-year period, we're actually doing pretty well. So this is the next 10 years. This is 2025 to 2034, all of these charts. As you can see, we've got about 80% of the way there for total housing. Again, that's just a baseline. We'd like to exceed that. But 80% of the way there when it comes to total homes at some stage of development review. Obviously, it's harder to build the more affordable you get. Affordable rentals, we've actually done really well We're over half of the way to what the housing needs assessment suggests we need in the affordable rental. Again, we have time. We have several years to add more, but we're on track there. What's on track will be homeownership opportunities. I'm not going to say falling behind because it's a new category that we've just started focusing on as this intermediate ownership between these traditional homeownership programs and what the market provides. This was a real outcome of our housing needs assessment that we also need to be able to focus on these kinds of homeowners. And you can see we have our first project going through development review in the intermediate ownership category. That's all I have. I'll be turning this over to Jamie for the second half of the presentation. created some questions for you. Again, we'll take general questions and then we'll all be here to answer any specific questions that you have.

Good evening. I'm Jamie Lopko. I am the city's community development director. I'm going to present some information about our accessory dwelling units. Given many of these presentations this year, just basic information here and there. This one is going to be a general overview of how the regulations of ADUs started, they progressed, and what they are now. It's going to be a general snapshot, and then we'll be available for anything more specific that you have after that. So let's start out and say, what is an ADU? It's a secondary residential dwelling unit on the same lot as a primary home. So you can call it a granny flat, in-law suite, backyard cottage. It has many names.

And it can be integrated into the house, like you see on the picture on the right.

It can be integrated into the house, whether it's attached to the back, in the basements, things of that nature, or it can be detached. It can be a wholly separate structure or something above a garage. And so, ADUs have really existed in the city since it started. Efficient way to provide housing options for family. You can care for your elder family members. You can bring kids home back home, which I've done at the moment. It's an opportunity to produce income for homeownership, and it can accommodate both our existing neighborhoods as well as new neighborhoods. And so the city began regulating EDUs in 2014, and we found that typically about one and a half percent of our housing stopped. So while the regulation started in 2014, that was only open to our EN1 and EN2 zones. Over the years, there's been many amendments made to those to add other zones.

And then we amended the parcel area limitations, parking, some of the design standards. We added what's called an Established Neighborhood Alternative Compliance, or ENAC.

It's basically an administrative variance that gives staff some flexibility on existing lots to allow people to build EDUs. Most of these changes were made to provide clarity and increase opportunities for ADUs. So let's talk about what the current regulations are. So right now, the current regulations are that the unit must be owner-occupied, meaning the owner of the property has to either live in the primary home or the ADU. There is a limit of one ADU on a parcel. We talked about the NAC opportunity. They may be eligible for that if you're in one of the established neighborhood zones. The maximum size for most ADUs is 550 square feet. There are a couple of exceptions to that. You still have to meet design standards like our setbacks, our height restrictions, floor area ratio, lot coverage. There is one additional off-treat parking space required, resulting in a total of three spaces required. There are exceptions to that to allow the use of on-treat parking under certain circumstances. Construction of the ADU may trigger public improvements to the property. Proposal with an ADU cannot be rented for short term as a vacation rental, which is defined as less than 30 days. Parsons developed with a duplex are not permitted to have an ADU. And lastly, all ADUs are approved administratively through a limited use permit with public notice done to the neighbors to make sure they're informed of that. So let's take a look at where ADUs are allowed. This is a table straight from our code that tells you the zoning districts where they're allowed. So you can see there are recent changes by council this year. They're allowed by right in all the zones, except where you'll see the detached ADU is not allowed in the EN4 through six zones. That's because they don't have an alley access or a rear access. They're really narrow parcels, and so it's hard to get emergency access back to those. So this is the map, same map as over here. If you want to take a look at a bigger version of it to give you a visual of where we're at, Our red dots are detached ADUs. Our blue dots are integrated ADUs. There are a total of 159 approved ADUs. 89 are attached. 70 are integrated. So we have 56% of our ADUs are detached. So that's the general overview that I wanted to present. I'll leave Brian and Mai's contact information up there if you want to get in touch with either one of us after the meeting. We have that available. At this point, we're going to go ahead and open it to questions for either Brian or myself about anything you've heard tonight. Try to keep them general related to the policies you've heard about. If it's something specific about a project or a property, we do have a lot of staff here to be able to answer those one-on-one with you.

So I'd be happy to answer your questions. Who wants to be first? No questions? Come on. All right. Go ahead. Has the city considered imposing fees for like a second, third, fourth residence, or I shouldn't say residence, house that people have in our area to help pay for vehicle housing? Do you know what I'm talking about? Somebody who has a second home, they use it maybe four months a year, and it just takes away from our housing stock. Or they have a fifth home, and they use it for one month a year, and it takes away from our housing stock. Has the city considered imposing any sort of fees on those buildings?

Sure, I can answer that. So I'll repeat the question, just in case anybody didn't hear in the back. And correct me if I don't summarize this correctly. But the question was, has the city ever considered imposing a fee on vacant properties, second homes, vacation homes that are not short-term rentals? that are not occupied full time and therefore take away from our full time housing stock? Is that a good summary of the question? Sounds good. Great. The answer is we've considered it and it is not legal under Colorado law. Every year in the state legislature, somebody introduces a bill to allow for a vacancy tax or vacancy fee. It's been defeated in the legislature every time it's been introduced. We haven't done a deep analysis of it because it's never been legal in Colorado, but we do hear that question a lot when we're out and about, and I'm sure your legislators do too.

How do you enforce the licensing of ADUs? In other words, do you go around the neighborhoods to figure out who actually has an ADU and who does not, and keep track of all the people and make sure they're paying the fee? I assume you have to pay some sort of fee in order to enable

The question is related to ADUs. How do we track those and try to collect fees from those? We do have a tracking program now in our open gun system to help us better track those. There are no regular fees. You don't need a business license to rent something long term. You have to have a business license to rent short term, which is not allowed for an ADU. So there's no business license requirement. The only ongoing requirement for the ADUs is for somebody every two years to fill out an owner occupancy affidavit and file it with the city to ensure that they're still occupying the property. Yes, sir.

I came in a little late, so I apologize if I missed this one. For the workforce development on the county, especially food stock that's being built for sale, are there any regulations limiting how much people sell for ?

Yeah, the question is, if you are buying a workforce home that's income restricted, are there limits on how you can resell that home so you can't just turn around and sell it for profit? The answer is yes. Every deed restriction, that's the term for controls on that kind of property. Every deed restriction is different, but in general, every, certainly every fair share inclusionary housing project and all of our workforce housing partnerships come with a deed restriction. And for sale, they're generally 30 to 40 years long. Occasionally even longer.

You actually might want to talk about the Homes Fund for the first time buyers. Everyone here may not know that program.

Thank you for the suggestion. Former counselor memory, the, the homes fund is here with us. They are our partner on for sale deed restriction management. Homebuyer education and homebuyer counseling and probably lots of other services that I've forgotten to memorize. So, and we're sharing Carol right up here from homes fund if anyone is interested in becoming a home buyer in one of these projects or just in Durango in general, they are our partner for all number of home ownership support activities, and they'll be hanging out with us at the Prosperity Office table afterwards. Yeah, Alex.

Or just a little more of that workforce housing or, like, where you're building homes and rentals, right?

What sort of agreement does the city have with those developers, like,

If it's just a fair share project, if there's no other state programs involved, then we partner with Housing Solutions for the Southwest to do things like income verification, rental verification, and sometimes these projects also have a requirement that you are employed in La Plata County. So it can also include employment verification. So in the same way that we partner with Homes Fund on for sale projects, we partner with Housing Solutions on for rent projects. Yeah, there are some projects where they're a property manager, full suite. There are others where they're really just performing those verification, pre-qualification kinds of services. It kind of depends on the project.

Jamie, you mentioned that there was part of the process to notify the neighbors. Yes. Is there an opportunity for neighbors to say, I don't want to have to hop in here?

Yes. Part of our process for limited use permit is we do mail letters to anyone within 300 feet of the parcel.

And once you receive that, it's basically your opportunity to solicit comments. And so you can either come in and talk with us, send us an email. any number of those. And as part of the approval process, we do consider the comments that we receive from the public.

And if we feel like it's something we can't approve, we won't approve it, or we can elevate it to the Community Development Commission to get their input as well.

Excuse me. I have a question since you have the slide up. How did the city determine the number of homes that they want under this fair share of development, whether it's three of 13, three of 25?

Yeah, so the question is, how do we come up with these percentages? And the answer is, as is often the case with the help of consultants, send a lot of data. So the goal for a program like this, as you can imagine, requiring developers to sell or rent homes for less than their worth, if it's not designed well, it's actually a net negative for the city. It actually stops development in a city if it's not calibrated really well. So essentially the consulting team and the city team at the time put together a bunch of different scenarios until they arrived at. This combination of these percentages and certain incentives that the city could give. that would result in a minimal loss for the developer. It's not a zero loss, it's a de minimis or minimal loss for the developer. I will say in my role, one thing that's really important is to keep up with its effects on development in the city, because if we get this wrong and people say, well, I'm just not going to build in Durango at all, I'm going to go somewhere else, then we've actually harmed the city's goals for a policy like this. It's quite normal in these kinds of policies to update them pretty regularly based on new cost data, new market data, and new income data, which we do about once a year. I think we're going to take one last question. Then again, we'll fan out to the different tables.

Yes, ma'am. FairShare used to collect money, fee and load, from developers. What happened to the money?

Great question. The question is fair share used to collect dollars from developers and not just units. It actually still does. There is also an option to pay a fee in lieu in the current program design. That money has gone into the city's housing innovation fund. That is our primary source of funding for the incentives in the fair share program as well as for our public-private partnerships. So that is translating into projects in development in a variety of different ways. All right.

We can get you microphones.

All right. So I wanted to share one last slide with you. The QR code on this slide is going to be a survey for how things went this evening to evaluate the session. And the one on the right is going to take you to our Engage Durango page, where you can find more information, housing initiatives. From a planning perspective, the only thing we'll have on there is our comprehensive plan.

We're in the process of rewriting that.

that's available for you i did want to share one more thing that if you're passionate about strengthening our community helping shape its future i encourage you to apply for one of our city boards and commissions your voice matters it's the meaningful way for you to have an impact and applications available on the city's website we do have two of our community development commissioners here if you'd like to speak to them about their experience and then i just want to thank everyone for attending we are going to just briefly go around the room to let everybody introduce themselves so you know Who they are and where to find them.