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To: Mayor, City Councilors, City Manager, and Planning Staff From: Joyce Eaton Re: Affordability of housing in SW-SAZ Date: 09/20/2016 Re: Based on my testimony to City Council January 25, 2016 I spoke at two City Council forum on housing affordability in South Willamette Special Area Zone (SW- th SAZ), in the fall of 2015 and again on January 26, 2016. Also, out of the 27 houses on my block, I was able to talk to people at 23 houses. People at 20 of the houses signed the SW-SAZ petition for a refinement plan. This list included 7 people who were renters (from 7 different houses). It is not just the resident property owners that disapprove this plan. I was going to go to the apartment complex next, but then thankfully Mike Clark put forth his proposal, which started to put the brakes on SW-SAZ. So we could have gotten way more than the 600+ signed petitions asking for suspension of SW-SAZ and a refinement plan. If you looked at the city’s Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) for SW-SAZ in fall 2015 and spring 2016, the reason for SW-SAZ is not for increasing density (city planner Will Dowdy admitted during a Friendly Area Neighborhood meeting that there is already enough capacity within SW-SAZ to meet the 20-year goal; see the ** note below). The real reason is for adding high priced design standards (aka gentrification), but what they don’t say is that it will convert an affordable, reasonably priced housing area into a high priced subdivision. Since my testimony in early 2016, Mia Nelson of 1000 Friends of Oregon and others in WE CAN have repeatedly said that the residents that were speaking up were all property owners and not renters. No one heard from the renters. What amazes me with this sort of comment, is that renters are precisely the population that will be most likely to be displaced. So if renters truly knew what the SW-SAZ had proposed, they would be against it. For example, the apartment complex bordering on Willamette Street that goes down my street is very affordable. One of the deli workers at Capella Market lives there. I asked him how much he pays for rent, and he said it was $795 for a 2-bedroom apartment, what most places charge for a 1-bedroom apartment. Yet SW-SAZ would turn this affordable apartment into Mixed Use zone, with no requirement for residential units. What would most likely happen would this affordable apartment would be torn down – and then where would the Capella Market worker live? In the only new construction for apartment buidings, Parvin Place, that charges around $1300 for a 2-bedroom apartment? Not likely. The 2014 Redevelopment Capacity report explicitly states that they expect rents to go up at least 25% (ignoring the fact that the recent Parvin Place apartment complex on Willamette Street has rents 35% higher per square foot than other rentals in SW-SAZ). It will make the area unaffordable for a large segment of the existing population. ecent blurb from the city on the Single Family Option zone, it says the purpose is to provide In a r “smaller” and “entry-level” housing, so let’s look at that claim. In my fall 2015 testimony, I rattled off the prices and square footage of the prototype housing developments listed in the Redevelopment Capacity report. However, I made a mistake in the square