Zoning ordinance rewrite: Council focuses on 3 issues

City leaders plan to begin looking to developers, affordable housing advocates and planners to figure out how to increase the availability of affordable housing in Charlotte.

City Council members agreed at a meeting Monday that the challenge will be to gain cooperation from developers and to provide incentives for them to include housing affordable to people making 80 percent or less of the region’s mean income. State law prohibits municipalities from requiring developers to include affordable housing in their projects.

“Is there something out there in America that works?” asked Al Austin, who represents District 2, at the council’s work session Monday. “What, short of mandating, can we do?”

“We’ve got to think of other ways or we’re just going to have people living on the streets.”

The discussion occurred as the council heard its monthly update on the early stages of the city’s plan to rewrite its zoning ordinance. As with the two other issues addressed during the discussion – transportation and school capacity – the challenges being faced are related to the city’s growth coming out of the Great Recession.

At the council’s May workshop, Mike Davis, division manager at the city’s Department of Transportation, said the city is expected to add an average of 44 new residents per day, a 400,000 increase in population over the next 25 years.

As greater numbers of people show a preference for living near uptown, people who lived in neighborhoods that were once affordable are being priced out. Very little new construction, both in apartments and homes, is affordable to those making less than the median income.

Council members agreed to ask the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Coalition for Housing, a community board appointed by the city and county, to look into solutions and offer recommendations. District 3 Councilwoman LaWana Mayfield also said the council’s Housing and Neighborhood Development Committee, which she chairs, has been looking into a solution for six months and will bring recommendations to the council.

In 2013, the council adopted a policy that offered developers density bonuses in exchange for building mixed-income housing within several zoning designations. However, developers have not responded to the incentives.

District 7 Councilman Ed Driggs said he is “reluctant to go down the path of social engineering,” in which the inclusion of affordable housing is forced rather than voluntary, asking, “How do we get leadership from the city and the development community?”

The council recently has been encouraging the inclusion of affordable housing as developers seek rezonings for apartment buildings and single-family residences. But the planning staff and several council members said the effort has been piecemeal and late in the process.

Interim Planning Director Ed McKinney prefaced his presentation by saying the staff was ultimately looking for policy guidance from the council so that the planning staff communicate the city’s desires early and consistently to developers.

“We’re not doing that because we don’t have any direction or policy guidance to do that,” he said.

City Manager Ron Carlee, who is stepping down from his position later this month, told the council that “talking about affordable housing when a developer comes in for a rezoning is way too late.”

The expectations should be apparent “upstream,” he said, and should be obvious to developers “even when they’re looking at buying the land. A major gap in your policies right now is that there are no expectations…The greatest incentive you have is the rezoning itself. Rezonings are valuable.”

If a developer’s proposal is inconsistent with an area plan or seeks to increase density, “expectations could be put in place” that affordable housing be included in exchange for those exceptions, he said.

McKinney said that after receiving council members’ comments Monday, the staff would come back with recommendations, most likely at the council’s July workshop meeting.

McKinney also asked council members for input on whether the city should use its zoning ordinance in the future to ensure that adequate school and transportation capacity are available to support new developments.

Council members urged improved communications with Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools so that each body is aware of the other’s future plans and growth estimates.

“What sort of high-level philosophical discussions are taking place?” asked Driggs. “There are definite points of intersection that we don’t talk about.”

He said that many school district decisions on construction and student assignment relate to where development is or is not taking place, and vice versa.

Council members also said that CMS also needs to provide better information on whether schools are near or over capacity.

“That might cause us to just say no (to a proposed rezoning), because we don’t have enough money for our students.”

Mayor Jennifer Roberts said that such actions may inspire developers to contribute to a solution. “If that happens, does the private sector then say, ‘What can we do to improve it?’”

Regarding transportation, Davis said the transportation department has begun providing more detail in its assessments of the effect of a proposed rezoning on traffic.

“Six months ago, we were very basic in our contributions,” he said.

He said the department this year is working to identify infrastructure deficiencies and to create a comprehensive transportation plan to determine how to more efficiently improve traffic flow and transportation.

“Part of this experience for us in Charlotte is an evolution,” he said. Historically, he said, the answer to congestion has been to add more lanes and streets. Now, the city is focused on traffic management, which includes working with the community to reduce traffic during peak travel times with such solutions as flexible work hours or telecommuting; having a comprehensive parking strategy; encouraging compact development and a mixture of uses; and using “traffic calming” tools that are designed to do things such as improve safety and reduce traffic.