Ole Avenue questions persist

Posted on February 15, 2021 by Betsey Buckheit

Ole Avenue is St. Olaf’s planned residence hall/townhome project:

Artist’s rendering of the view up St. Olaf Avenue (Image: St. Olaf)

This is an exciting project, mostly. New residence halls and townhomes will bring students back on campus, St. Olaf Avenue will be reinforced as the tree-lined entrance to the campus from downtown and the pretty, shady campus look and feel will extend further down The Hill. Older, increasingly dilapidated homes which have been used as the Honor Houses will be replaced with state of the art, purpose-built student housing. It’s a more people-scaled project than Olaf’s high rise dorms and much easier to integrate into the neighborhood. All good.

Less wonderfully, the City Council has had two frustrating discussions focused on irrelevant issues, but managing to steer clear of the big questions; now they are about to take action on February 16, 2020.

The Issue

This development, because it is at the edge of the campus zoning, requires a conditional use permit or CUP. Student residence halls are permitted in this area. If they were permitted “by right” St. Olaf could file their plans and city staff would sign off on it with no public review. Instead, they are permitted, but require an additional layer of public review to grant the conditional use permit because this use, in this zone, in this location is deemed to have the potential to create significant impact to the surrounding property and the community.

In short, there is not much discretion to deny the permit (because the use is permitted) if it meets the requirements of our zoning code, but there is the (golden) opportunity to impose conditions which limit the impact of the more intense use on the neighborhood and the community: “The benefits of the conditional use outweigh the potential negative effects to the surrounding area or community” in terms of such things as traffic, light, noise, and the overall character of the residential neighborhood.

The Condition

Back in November, the Planning Commission (I’m on it – this post is my opinion, not the position of the Commission as a whole) held the public hearing as required by state statute. We heard from staff, St. Olaf as the developer and from many concerned neighbors and members of the public.

I went to the Planning Commission meeting concerned about impacts to west-of-Lincoln neighbors from loading zones and security lighting; the huge amount of surface parking and the lighting, stormwater, and traffic it could create looked completely out of scale for the location. I was struck by how much space St. Olaf has devoted to storing cars compared to the spaces for people and the jaw-dropping mismatch between their lofty sustainability policies and what they have proposed.

Look at the footprint of the buildings for people compared to the space devoted to storing empty cars used occasionally.

To guide our discussion, commissioner Will Schroeer took a bottom-up approach and counted parking spaces, read the code and the policy documents, marshaled evidence about parking impacts and assembled a very thoughtful memo for the PC (which you should read). It confirmed there was already enough parking on campus and the new parking should be considered “excessive parking” (not allowed by our code) and approval should add the condition that new parking should be removed.

Based on his analysis and my own policy commitments to climate action and better streets, I voted to make what I believe is a very intentional, well-supported recommendation to Council to approve the CUP with the additional condition. The parking lots will encourage driving, add security lighting, increase stormwater runoff, and be an incompatible addition to the neighborhood.

The Planning Commission voted unanimously to recommend approval with the condition to remove new parking which has turned out to be a very challenging condition for the Council.

Process

CUPs should be pretty routine. Staff presents the Planning Commission recommendation to the Council along with the materials they prepared for the public hearing and a summary of the input from the community and commissioners. The Council then votes and they can factor in political issues and other priorities which the PC did not, but if they disagree they are required to send their reasoning to the PC in writing.

In January, City staff brought the CUP to the Council noting briefly that the Planning Commission unanimously approved the CUP with the condition of removing new parking, but moving on to the staff recommendation eliminating that condition with the justification that many of the stalls are “replacement” stalls from Honor House demolition and “insufficient accommodation is likely to result in more parking in adjacent neighborhoods.”

It is annoying that staff invited St. Olaf to the table to lobby for their plans, present new information, and revise parking stall numbers two times rather than (at least) fully presenting the Planning Commission recommendation and its policy and research justification.

It is disturbing that the Council discussion has focused on defining terms and counting spaces, rather than whether this project and the Planning Commission recommendation is in line with City policies (in which we have invested thousands of dollars, countless staff hours, and the expertise and labor of hundreds of community members) and addresses the impact to the community which is, after all, the purpose for the CUP. There is no number of spaces which is “enough” without balancing multiple interests.

All the focus on the number of spaces has resulted in stirring up a lot of dust so the Council cannot see their way through to a forward-looking, policy-based decision.

There is already enough parking

For campus development, parking is evaluated campus-wide, not on a per-building basis. The parking study St Olaf submitted states clearly that “the number of permitted parking stalls (excluding loading parking stalls) exceeds the required parking” stated in the Land Development Code. While no maximum is stated, the approval criteria does stipulate “an excessive number of parking spaces are not proposed” for project.

St. Olaf’s report goes on to describe how the college also has made efforts to “decrease students’ reliance on personal vehicles, reducing the need for long-term on-campus student parking capacity.” This suggests fewer spaces may be needed in the future, rather than more or the same amount (parking needs are also usually overestimated).

The recommendation which I believed was to remove the new paved parking lots (and could have been quickly clarified by the Planning Commission members at their last meeting) has been translated into a recommendation to remove “new” but not “replacement” parking spaces. This has triggered a new counting game asking which spaces are “new” and which are “replacement” and other number games which invite the Council to get deep into details, rather than helping them thoughtfully consider the long-term impacts to the community.

So, there is enough parking. It may not be what St. Olaf planned, it may not always be as convenient to each person as they want it to be, and, as always, removing parking spaces makes otherwise rational people batshit crazy. But there is enough.

My vote at to recommend approval with the condition that new parking be removed was meant to condition approval on removing the two large new slabs of pavement.

The proposed parking violates the LDC, Comprehensive Plan and other policies

Regardless of the number of spaces, the concentration of parking at the neighborhood edge of the campus is difficult to reconcile with the requirements for compatibility with the existing historic neighborhood, strategic goal to improve transit, stated goals to reduce carbon emissions, plans to improve car sharing (and bike and scooter sharing in the Climate Action Plan), improve bike and walk connections, enhance the small town character, and mitigate climate impact.

The development patterns of land can dictate transportation and building density, creating barriers and opportunities for where people live and how they travel. More compact land use with adequate options for non-motorized travel or transit can help reduce emissions from transportation. Conversely, low-density land use patterns that are designed for the movement of vehicles will create an auto-centric community that results in higher emissions.
Climate Action Plan

The residential part of Ole Avenue is a fine example of what the City has said it wants – compact development, creating lovely streetscapes, and enhancing the interface with the St. Olaf campus which is one of the jewels of Northfield. The kind of land development pattern which can reduce emissions and mitigate stormwater issues.

The large parking lots are an example of what the City has said it does not want: The suburban parking layout is hidden from campus, but will strongly impact the surrounding neighborhood in ways which the City has said repeatedly it does not want because of their climate, human, and visual impacts. It is the kind of pattern designed for movement of vehicles.

Further, an increasing amount of research backs up Northfield’s planning by showing that abundant, cheap (to use) parking means people drive more, that reducing parking and making driving less convenient helps people drive less, and that there are multiple ways to manage parking demand to be able to build less of it. There is an increasing wave of cities eliminating all parking minimum requirements (including new DOT Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s South Bend, IN). I know members of the Planning Commission besides me stay current on these developments and I believe we are trying to guide Northfield to a more sustainable future based on best practices.

Mixed messages: Focus on the renewable energy or easy car culture? Image: St. Olaf College

Important policy and practical questions the Council could ask

There are many questions I wish Council had asked and/or staff had considered rather than counting parking spaces as if there was a right number.

How should we balance convenience against community impact? Much has been made of ensuring students have easy access to their cars for their internships, student teaching, and jobs. Yet that convenience for a few will be purchased by encouraging more traffic in the neighborhood, more climate impact, more lighting, and less green space; is this acceptable? This balancing act applies for every street project Northfield builds where parking is proposed to be removed.

How are taxpayers’ interests being protected in the planning of this development? So far, the discussion has continued to center around the perceived need for convenient parking for students. But the CUP is intended to assess the impact to the community. The spillover effects of increased vehicle use (and lighting and stormwater) in the St. Olaf Avenue/Lincoln Street area will be felt by Northfield taxpayers who pay for the streets, parks, climate action programs, and transit. For development away from this campus/community interface (along Highway 19 or by Skoglund or near North Avenue), taxpayer interests are very small. How are you assessing the community impact — especially to taxpayers — as required by the CUP criteria rather than the student impact?

Will the parking help us carry out our policy goals? For only one example, the Strategic Plan calls for improving transit. Accomplishing this requires not just putting buses on the road, but making transit efficient. If driving is prioritized, will transit be impacted? I believe the Council’s job is to stay on a policy level, not a detail level; it is staff’s job to help them do this. Every project should be viewed through the lenses of Northfield policies focused by the Strategic Plan; how does this one stack up?

Is parking on neighborhood streets a problem? Staff and St. Olaf have both threatened “but they’ll park in the neighborhood” if the parking is eliminated. Certainly, I know homeowners are rabidly protective of their curb space and will defend it against bike lanes, curb extensions, and other people parking there. But if a variety of measures are taken to help students get around without their own vehicle (now and into the future) as St. Olaf has already indicated they intend to do, will parking in the neighborhood be significant, will it be more than a temporary issue, and are there other ways to control parking near campus (neighborhood parking permits, for example, which ensure that parking is not free except for residents)?

What other alternatives besides big parking lots and no parking lots exist? It would have been possible for staff to make a principled recommendation which does include more parking, but still took the neighborhood, traffic, and climate impact seriously by requiring parking to be distributed in smaller lots around campus with only limited parking next to the dorms, placing parking with with easy access only to the Highway 19 vehicle-oriented campus entrance, and prioritizing Lincoln, Second Street, and St. Olaf Avenue as local, walkable, bikeable connections. Can you challenge staff to bring you better answers?

Can you approve the CUP without the parking lots and see if the sky actually falls? Trying to change our planning and building behavior is really hard and Northfield’s past development has worked to make driving and parking very easy. Our newer policies point us in the right direction, but still require political will to take the first step at the project level. Could you approve the CUP with additional conditions which would prevent building the parking now, but leave it possible to construct more later if it is actually needed when other mobility and access strategies are implemented, too?

The other large parking lots on the Olaf campus are well-insulated from the neighborhood and this map shows no other residence hall has a large amount of parking.

Bottom line

This project could be a model for green development and a golden opportunity for city/college collaboration. The City priorities for better transit, climate action, and more compact land use should spur the Council to see possibilities and ask “How can we help students get around Northfield?” and the College to look at its wind turbine and sustainability policies and say “We’ve said we do care about the climate, so let’s think with the city about future-looking solutions.”

“Enough” parking is a political question, not a counting problem or pure policy question. The Planning Commission looked at the numbers and made a recommendation which, I believe, reflects the policies of the City and best practices. There certainly is “enough” if Northfield and St. Olaf follow through on their climate action planning, shared mobility, better transit, and commitment to working with the neighborhood on maintaining a wonderful interface between campus and town. Your job is to weigh the political concerns and decide how much is enough.

ADUs: Reframing the discussion

Posted on April 9, 2019 by Betsey Buckheit

After what seemed like unanimity and a strong sense of purpose at the Planning Commission, the Council discussion about Accessory Dwelling Units has been dispiriting to watch thus far and the public comments even more so. Since the Council will have another go at ADUs today, Tuesday, April 9, 2019 at their worksession, I’d like to try and reframe issue – or at least the structure of the discussion – rather than repeat the same pattern.

At previous meetings, three Council members consistently talked about the policies supporting the ordinance to encourage more ADUs as one way to expand the housing supply and benefit the Northfield community as a whole.

Three Council members and Mayor just as consistently flag individual provisions in the ordinance as problematic and look to regulate ADUs more stringently to “protect the character of the neighborhood.”

What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate

I wouldn’t call these groups adversarial, but they are talking past each other and relying on different kinds of evidence.

Moving ahead

Northfield’s Strategic Plan looks to build A Community Where Everyone Can Afford to Live, Welcomes Everyone, and is Resilient and Sustainable

Each of these values statements, I’ll argue, requires Northfield to change how it does business, sometimes in painful ways because Northfield, like most places, has developed in a way which is exclusive, expensive, and unsustainable.

Exclusive: Building hundreds of acres of larger single-family homes has segregated the city by income and excluded lower income residents from large parts of the city. Cheaper housing and multifamily housing have been largely pushed to the very edges in the least connected places. Our families of color are farther from school, large parks, and shopping. Senior housing is removed from our other neighborhoods.

Race dot map: Yes, Northfield is segregated

Expensive: Requiring minimum lot sizes and large setbacks (revised somewhat in the most recent Land Development Code) and wide streets, as well as allowing developers to determine street layouts has dispersed and disconnected the city. As you well know, Northfield is working to assemble funding for the 246/Jefferson Parkway intersection reconstruction right now – an intersection which must accommodate much local traffic because other routes were truncated. Focusing on highway commercial development means more driving and more road miles to repair. As Urban3 demonstrated last year, this pattern generates less tax revenue.

Unsustainable: As Northfield drafts its climate action plan, we must think about the development pattern in climate terms, too, and how this pattern has required more driving, created more stormwater runoff, using more land, made providing transit service more difficult.

ADUs will not solve these problems for there is no single or easy solution for changing a decades long growth pattern. But allowing ADUs is a very small step toward changing our habits and, perhaps more importantly, gives Northfield a great opening to talk about what matters.

Looking back

In January 2018, the Planning Commission discussed Tiny Houses (here was my take), but City staff noted “The current feeling is that instead of introducing Tiny Houses into the mix, Northfield might be better served by modifying the existing ADU standards.”

So we did. Planning Commission members researched the policies and regulations which had been found to result in more ADUs being built in other cities and which regulations proved to be obstacles to development to avoid the problem hat “ADUs are legal but restricted to within an inch of their lives.” These are the big ones:

Off-street parking requirements
Requiring the property owner to occupy either the ADU or the primary dwelling
Size and lot coverage
Design or compatibility requirements

Why these are important

I’m can’t speak for all Planning Commission members, but I believed our charge was make ADUs easier to build because encouraging this housing type inches forward the Strategic Priorities for equity, housing, and climate action. The changes the Planning Commission recommended unanimously are intended to nudge the status quo in a different direction:

Parking: Removing the minimum parking requirement is part of questioning how much of Northfield’s valuable and limited land must be dedicated to cars (as Urban3 showed us recently) and removing parking minimums has not had adverse effects in other places. As well, other recent research shows a causal relation between zoning code parking requirements and increased in driving.

Parking should be added when there is a demonstrated need for it, but not required (for there are older non-drivers, people with disabilities, and those who choose not to drive). Plus, required parking adds to the cost of building the ADU and locating that space (plus access to it) makes it much harder to build ADUs on smaller lots.

Size: Current regulations allow an ADU up to 864 sf and 24’ high as a second story on a detached garage which ensured a one level (on the second floor) limited to the footprint of the car storage. The Planning Commission wanted to ensure small homes were not unduly penalized by requirements to limit ADUs to a size calculated as a small percentage of the primary dwelling, but some confusion resulted and can easily be fixed.

Lot coverage: The zoning code limits buildings to 30% of the lot. That means almost 2/3 of the property must remain unbuilt, a requirement which impacts smaller lots especially harshly. The rationale for this provision in the LDC was to prevent “monster homes” or the sort of tear-down problem some desirable Minneapolis neighborhoods face where smaller older homes are demolished to build much larger homes; this has not been an issue in Northfield.

The lot coverage requirement impacts more than ADUs, too. Building single level homes on smaller lots proves impossible; the Zoning Board of Appeals recently granted a variance to the lot coverage limit to allow new one-level construction in one of our newer subdivisions.

Lot coverage (Image: Planning Advisory Service report, “Illustrating the Zoning Ordinance” 1962

Neighborhood compatibility: The stated purpose of these standards in our code is “to protect the character of existing residential neighborhoods.” Maybe this looks like a harmless way to avoid really horrible design, but it is not. Rather, it is a strategy which looks to continue the ways zoning has been used to privilege some groups and some people. More bluntly, Trying to preserve the character of a neighborhood (even if it could be determined what the character is) is an attempt to prevent change and, perhaps, keep out people not like ourselves. Removing compatibility requirements was intended as a very small step toward considering the systemic bias in how we build.

More practically, asking for city staff to assess compatibility and character is hopelessly subjective and more objective requirements such as having the ADU match the materials or features of the primary dwelling means adding to costs by requiring more customization, perhaps more expensive materials, and preventing use of some modular products.

from Neighbors for More Neighbors an advocacy group working for abundant homes in Minneapolis. Talk to your friends about zoning!

Back to right now

Seeing the forest beyond the backyard trees

For the Council members focused on small regulations, consider I ask you to take a step back and ask some difficult questions implicit in the proposed ADU ordinance.

Strategic Priorities: Northfield has a real need for more housing, greater equity, and more sustainable development as you wisely identified based on real data. Please talk to your colleagues about the Planning Commission’s choices and their importance in taking a small step in a better direction.

Public input is not a referendum: You have been deluged with calls and emails about this issue, but public comments are not the same as votes on an issue. Many negative comments have two characteristics. First, they focus on some small negative impact for which they have no evidence that is will actually occur (and research from other areas indicates these problems will not occur). Second, the comments are made by the people who are already empowered and have access to housing and to government. Some of their fears are incredible (tar paper shacks and lean-tos) and others (parking and rental concerns) are related to enforcement of other ordinances.

Bottom line: ADUs are a very small step which will be built only as they are needed and wanted by property owners. Other cities have learned that problems (like parking) did not materialize and other smaller concerns can be dealt with in far less restrictive ways. Don’t make this “welcome” mat welcome in Northfield:

Looking at some trees in the forest

For the big picture people, the task is different. My experience on the Planning Commission and Council is that good policy is relatively easy to adopt, but also easy to ignore at the point of a project or other decision when people are telling you how much this ordinance will affect them right now. But the big picture is important – don’t give up on the big picture, but consider a few small fixes.

Strategic priorities: You already know about the real need for more housing, greater equity, and climate action. Keep helping your colleagues understand Northfield’s particular problems and why the Planning Commission’s choices make sense for helping Northfield become an even better place. Please call out how data-driven policy should not be undermined by individual fears.

Public input is not a referendum: See above. For me, the most disheartening feature of the Council discussion has been the disproportionate weight given to people like me – white, affluent, homeowners for whom government (and everything else) works very very well. It takes some serious rethinking to understand how much privilege is embedded in the zoning code and my hope is that the ADU conversation will start the difficult discussion about how we build a really more inclusive neighborhood character.

Bottom line: ADUs are a small step, but a big opening for talking about privilege, housing, and sustainability. After meaty discussion about the “why,” here are some ideas for small changes to address concerns:

Parking: consider how ON-street parking could help ADUs (and many homeowners and renters) by issuing neighborhood permits and changing winter parking rules for local streets. Alternatively, require one parking space, but make it easy to waive that requirement for an ADU where it is not needed.
Lot coverage: Adopt a larger percentage which will not preclude ADUs on smaller lots.
ADU size: Adopt a provision which is clear as to footprint or living space. For whatever number or percentage of the primary dwelling may be selected, make sure it does not inadvertently limit ADUs to only the largest lots. For height, consider specifying height for attached vs. detached units.
Enforcement: parking and the possibility of poor tenant behavior are not part of this ordinance. Look to nuisance, noise, and blight laws and how they can be enforced to address any problems which actually occur.
Rental code: The ADU ordinance cannot change the rental code, so more action is needed but, as with neighborhood character, this needs more discussion.

TL; DR

The Council needs to

talk together about how ADUs can advance their Strategic Policies for housing, equity, and climate action;
Have the painful conversation about neighborhood character and who is speaking about it and,
Then talk about what regulations are needed looking to other cities and real research, not just public opinion.

Back in the (Planning Commission) saddle again

Posted on February 4, 2018 by Betsey Buckheit

Back in the saddle again

I started blogging (at the suggestion/arm-twisting of civic blogmeister Griff Wigley) when I ran for mayor in 2004. I was the chair of the Planning Commission at the time and while I lost the election, I kept writing until I left the Commission in 2005. Blogging resumed and reached its peak during my 2009-2012 City Council term, but has languished since then with only intermittent burps of blogging. Now, I’ve returned to the Planning Commission, so let’s see if I can return to this too (despite some pronouncing the death of blogging).

For me, blogging was a chance to analyze and clarify issues for myself by writing about them and then (I hoped) provide a more nuanced, critical review of issues than presented in local “real” media (along with some bits of fun and other random stories). Over time, a couple of basic, guiding questions became clearer in my mind. I’m asking:

Who pays, who benefits? I was miffed, when Northfield was developing lots of single family housing and major public facilities (hospital, Middle School), why the cost to taxpayers over the long term was ignored, but the the cost to developers in the short term was the only cost considered. My concern was that the City was failing to recognize that government (at all levels) is a player in the market (by regulating what can be built, incentivizing/subsidizing certain types of projects, by its tax structure) and as a party to individual development deals like subdivisions, planned unit developments, etc. Why, as Northfield tried to develop policy and regulations which don’t unfairly burden business (in the short term), didn’t it also consider its own (that is, taxpayers’) interests in the long term for how places are connected, the amount of infrastructure to build and more. Add, more recently, I’ve been thinking about how our regulations privilege the folks who are already more privileged.

Why aren’t land use and transportation considered together? My very first Planning Commission meeting had the final plat for the hospital on the agenda. The hospital location was chosen because land was cheap (long term almost free lease from St. Olaf) and higher reimbursement rates in (metro) Dakota County. How people would get to the hospital was decided only afterward. For the Middle School, traffic considerations were brushed aside in favor of the beautiful building with lots of playing fields but which has proven unsafe and unpleasant to bike or walk to (and it will take millions to retrofit the 246/Jefferson Parkway intersection). Developers of residential subdivisions chose where street connections and parks would be located, but shouldn’t that be driven by public needs since they would be public facilities? Each decision isolated from the “how do you get there?” question spills over into how we can live our daily lives.

Optimism: These questions were considered pretty nutty in 2001. Since then, the number of cities, organizations, and planners taking these questions seriously and building more connected, more equitable, more sustainable (fiscally and environmentally) places has been growing quickly. Northfield has begun to gather momentum, too, and I look forward to 2018 and beyond.

Small town, Big picture

Betsey Buckheit

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