Item A: Envision Eugene - Housing Mix and Industrial Lands

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%88%',1)28) To: Mayor Piercy and members of the Eugene City Council From: Eugene Planning Commission Date: September 21, 2011 Subject: Envision Eugene Pillar #2: Provide Affordable Housing for All Income Levels As you consider the manner in which the City will accommodate some 34,000 additional people who are expected to call Eugene home over the next 20 years, we encourage you to assure a sufficient supply of land for a broad range of housing types (both single family and multifamily), and provide the means to facilitate, not just mandate, higher density housing in appropriate areas. We offer the following to inform your decisions. We know you appreciate the input from thoughtful citizen volunteers, city staff and consultants who dedicated thousands of hours of their time reviewing data and literature relevant to demographic, climatic, environmental, energy and economic trends. These people include the members of the Community Resource Group, the Technical Resource Group, and the general public who offered comments at the community outreach sessions conducted by the Planning Department staff. The culmination of this effort acknowledges changes ahead for our community: an older, more ethnically diverse population with fewer people per household; warming atmospheric temperatures; volatility in the supply and price of fuel and power; and escalation in the cost of food production and housing construction. Certainly, these indicators of the future reinforce existing local policies directed toward compact urban growth, neighborhood character preservation and natural resource conservation policies that have been at the center of our local land use planning philosophy for decades. From the knowledge gained during the past several months, the picture that appears in our collective crystal ball encourages us to continue with current planning initiatives such as Infill Compatibility Standards, Opportunity Siting and higher density, mixed-use development along transit corridors all of which we anticipate will facilitate the efficient use of urbanizable land and achieve goals that sustain the quality of life we enjoy. During the Envision Eugene process, a considerable amount of discussion focused on how our land use planning policies can affect housing affordability to meet the expectations of people across a wide socio- economic spectrum. Housing cost exceeds the ability of many people to purchase a home, and consumes a significant proportion of household income for many others. On the other hand, the educational, cultural and recreational opportunities our City offers continue to be attractive to people who desire housing at both ends of the price spectrum. There is a general sense that duplexes, apartments and condominiums are more affordable than single family units. It is intuitive and supported by anecdotal examples to suggest that higher density, multifamily dwelling units are more affordable to rent or own; however, concrete evidence supporting this conclusion is lacking. Available empirical data for our community indicates that the cost of building new multifamily housing places these higher density units at the upper end of the scale for either rent or