Two recent stories in the Trib served to put an exclamation point on the push I and some others are making to try to codify some parameters for public input on land use deliberations at the local government level (see May 9, 10,12 and subsequent blog posts).

Yalecrest neighborhood leader takes on U. profs over housing plan

Rezone for Avenues ‘cottages’ gets thumbs-up despite heavy neighborhood pushback

These stories just confirmed to me again the issues that exist with the policy and administrative proccedures in our local government land use processes.

The first story is more about the contentious “debate” between neighborhood residents and others over the city’s proposed affordable housing overlay, which could create incentives for new, denser housing construction such as fourplexes and backyard cottages in many of those areas.

It started with a flyer circulated online in advance of Thursday night’s talk, which took a negative view of the overlay and its potential impacts on neighborhoods long reserved for single-family homes. … The flyer asserted, among other things, the incentives to developers could “permanently change” those neighborhoods.

The entire effort has been subject to intense public opposition (see May 16 blog post), which has again been reflected by the second story about the Avenues cottages.

In the Avenues proposal, Ivory Homes, Utah’s largest homebuilder, has sought to convert 3.2 acres at approximately 675 North F Street from a long-standing foothills residential zone, requiring quarter-acre home lots at a minimum, to a special development zone, allowing lot sizes of less than half that span.  The project would consist of 19 single-family houses, including five that would be custom-built. At least 14 of the homes would have built-in accessory dwelling units, or ADUs.  Ivory has described the project as, among other things, an experimental demonstration of using denser construction with pre-built ADUs as a way to add more dwellings per acre for a city with a major affordable housing shortage.

According to city documents, the zoning change would effectively change the site from “very low density” to “low density.” With roughly 10 dwellings per acre, the property would be more densely built than surrounding blocks in the upper Avenues, but in keeping with or below per-acre densities on many of the neighborhood’s blocks south of Seventh Avenue, judging from city maps.

Yet few housing projects in recent years have drawn the organized opposition this one has.

Neighbors worry about additional traffic and street safety, parking problems, loss of green space, air pollution, wildfire dangers, compressed setbacks from surrounding homes and the notion that the project would be incompatible with the prevailing character of the Avenues, one of the city’s oldest and more affluent neighborhoods.

Nearly 60 residents testified Wednesday on the proposal, with only a handful in favor. Two organized community groups have also weighed in against Ivory’s plans.

“We understand the city’s housing shortage and are prepared to accept a reasonable increase in density on this lot,” said Peter Wright, with Preserve Our Avenues Zoning Coalition, which has sprung up to battle the rezone.

“However, what Ivory has proposed is not reasonable,” Wright said. “It’s not even close to reasonable.”

If you’ve read the stuff I’ve posted about this kind of opposition previously, you’ll see that this falls right in line with a pattern apparent all across the nation for many years now, something which many commenters say has had a big role in creating our current housing affordability crisis.  And the fact that this is so strong in the two wealthiest neighborhoods in Salt Lake City?  Well, here’s a recent statement in a story in a Bloomburg City Lab piece (Does the White House Need a ‘Zoning Czar’?):

Balancing America’s lopsided housing markets — where wealthy neighborhoods block new housing while poorer places shoulder churn and displacement — means rethinking the codes that allowed these patterns to take hold.

Be sure to attend conference sessions about the role and character of public input in land use processes at the upcoming APA Utah Annual Conferencee and also at ULUI’s Annual Utah Land Use Conference in October.