By Murtaza H. Baxamusa, Ph.D., AICP / San Diego UrbDeZine.
There is a building boom across California, but many communities have been historically left behind. Property tax increment has served as a planning and investment tool to provide public benefits such as affordable housing, good jobs and neighborhood amenities.
However, with the end of redevelopment, cash-poor cities across California are exploring innovative strategies to fund public benefits. One such strategy is to partner with developers for community benefits in exchange for planning and development rights.
The poster-child for the interaction between people and projects is South San Francisco, with the region having the most expensive rents in the nation, where a household needs to make $37 an hour wage to be able to afford a 2-bedroom apartment.
The city underwent a 2-year long planning process to develop the downtown area over 20 years within half-mile of the CalTrain station. They proposed several public plazas, 1,400 residential units and 800,000 square feet of commercial space with retail and services within walking distance. Residents were concerned about displacement, yet excited about the opportunities.
Community groups including labor, environmental, health, transportation, social justice, and housing organizations coalesced together to advocate on a common community benefits platform. As a result of their effort, the city council of South San Francisco adopted a specific plan earlier this year, which is one of the most innovative in the nation in creating a nexus between land-use and the socio-economic impacts of development. Here are examples of goals within the land-use element:
LU-1: Encourage the use of local workforce and local business sourcing for development in the plan area that generates quality construction and service jobs with career pathways, that provides job training opportunities for the local workforce, and that pays area standard wages for construction so that money in wages and materials used in the construction of these developments is invested in the local economy.
LU-7: Retain existing land use and density standards for residential neighborhoods outside of the Downtown core.
LU-8: Encourage a mix of housing types including ownership, rental, family, and senior housing, and also encourage provision of units accessible to persons with disabilities.
LU-9: Encourage the provision of affordable housing in the Specific Plan area, by working with non-profit housing developers to identify opportunity sites with high Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) competitiveness, and through inclusionary or in-lieu fee provisions.
LU-10: Support regional and local efforts to examine displacement of affordable housing and lower-income households and consider programs to address identified housing needs.
The downtown South Francisco plan is just the foundational statement of principles, and implementation of community benefits is key to its success. One example of implementation is the adoption of an incentive zoning program with a menu of public benefits.
An increase of density or floor area ratio (FAR) is approved through a discretionary process in exchange for community benefits such as a local hire program, public art, local streetscape improvements, green building beyond statutory requirements, transit subsidies, and funding for public spaces, public facilities, community meeting rooms, or amenities like child-care.
Other cities in California where active community benefits movements are underway include:
- Redwood City: The city council last month approved a framework for community benefits that include a mix of housing, parks, citywide facilities and quality jobs.
- Berkeley: The city council has launched a discussion this month on significant community benefits that are required by developers who hope to construct taller buildings downtown.
- Menlo Park: The city council is studying public benefits that must be provided in exchange for development rights over the base level.
- San Diego: Next week, advocates are pushing for community benefits standards for publicly subsidized projects that include affordable housing, local construction careers and living wages.
Public accountability for public resources seems common sense, but is often under attack. This is because a community benefits approach threatens the dominant paradigm in many cities: that of value-free growth (i.e. any development is good).
However, a conditional acceptance of growth is not anti-growth, but an affirmation of value-added growth (i.e. any development ought to be good). It expresses astute stewardship of public resources by an educated public that recognizes the economic trade-offs between growth and stagnation, externalization and internalization of costs and benefits, and rent-seeking landlords.
Another way to ensure that new development benefits the community is by recapturing (rather than “taking”) the additional property value created by public agencies that grant land-use entitlements in the planning process.
Nico Calavita has written extensively about “public benefits zoning”, with several case studies from the East Bay Area in California. It is quite similar to the “cap-and-trade” in carbon emissions, in that development entitlements are capped to build a market pressure for the additional density to be sold for the fair market value of that entitlement. The public agency may ask for public benefits such as affordable housing or public spaces in return for the property value-enhancing entitlements.
The city of Santa Monica was one of the first in the nation to integrate community benefits into their land-use and circulation plan. Similar measures are being proposed elsewhere in the nation, such as Seattle and Detroit.
However, the emergence of a “movement” for community benefits in California depends on empowerment of communities of interest. No amount of technocratic streamlining nor abstract advance-modeling, can substitute for real-time deliberation of development proposals. Nor can the short-term alliances on a deal-by-deal basis constitute a sustainable coalition.
Plans that have build-out projected over a decade should ideally have continuous engagement built into the community benefits program, with sufficient discretion and enforceability over large-scale projects. Only then will “community benefits” be the authentic expression of a social movement rather than a marketing slogan for the next developer.
Murtaza H. Baxamusa, Ph.D., AICP is a certified planner, writer and thinker. He develops affordable housing for the San Diego Building Trades Family Housing Corporation, and teaches urban planning at the University of Southern California (USC). He has over 12 years’ experience in economic development and sustainable urban planning, and has previously worked for the USC Center for Economic Development as well as the Center on Policy Initiatives. He has doctoral and master’s degrees in Planning from USC, and a bachelor’s degree with honors from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur. He serves on several nonprofit boards, including Civic San Diego, the San Diego City-County Reinvestment Taskforce and the Middle Class Taxpayers Association. He received the Ruby Award for Outstanding Advocate from the San Diego Housing Federation in 2012, as well as the John Lyons Memorial Fellowship, an honor that was read into the Congressional Record of the 112th Congress. The City of San Diego proclaimed June 17, 2008 to be “Dr. Murtaza H. Baxamusa Day” in recognition of his contributions to the city. He is a home-owner in Bay Park, and lives with his wife and two daughters.
Originally posted at San Diego UrbDeZine. Re-posted with permission of the author.
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Any growth that doesn’t concentrate itself near public transit terminals is only adding to the environmental degradation and traffic congesting kind of growth that we presently have. San Diego should adopt smart growth as New York City’s Mayor de Blasio has to make sure that growth serves the housing and transportation needs of the poor and carless while at the same time getting cars off the road and providing for less tailpipe GHG emissions. Any other growth will just contribute to global warming and congested freeways.
“No amount of technocratic streamlining nor abstract advance-modeling, can substitute for real-time deliberation of development proposals.” Amen to that.
I’d bet that even the most educated city planner succumbs to the pressures from developers to “just get it done.” Real time today probably always is a matter of getting the loans paid off on time. In realistic terms, that means the artists and families are moved out from one place to another to another as the towers go into place overnight. In that circumstance the culture that’s delivered is usually comprised of burger joints with glass fronts.
With all due respect, a few thoughts for Murtaza Baxamusa:
Murtaza, I’m sure you aren’t too surprised by the limited response by readers to specifics in this piece of perfect Plannerese-speak. I’m not surprised. It’s just depressing, given your skills and ethics, to see this issue presented in this form, and to encounter the euphemistic land-use jargon and ideology that pins down nothing, defines nothing.
Peter M. Wolf, in “Land Use Abuse,” writes of the need to sequester jargon when it is inappropriate and dismaying:
“[I]t helps to speak well and to know precisely to whom you are speaking, … in terms that are relevant … to the particular audience being addressed. … Land use change impacts the physical world and the public realm.”
Yes, it does. And the terminologies and explicit descriptions of the physical and public effects of privatization, growth, increased density, and infill, through developer incentives, are always avoided in the public promotional Plannerese. People understand population growth, environmental stresses, and the drive of builders/investors/planners to practice their trades, to one degree or another. But they also understand the personal stress and frustration of living with noise and with lack of privacy, public transportation, parking, and control of their neighborhoods. They want to talk about those issues, directly. Plannerese makes eyes glaze over because it is recognizably PR and it buries the harsh realities in fine print.
However, if the readers of OBR and SDFP have the time, they can study, for example, the “incentive zoning program” of South San Francisco (your link). The exciting and glowing benefits of increased density w/developer-provided amenities are on page 8:
“public art, streetscape enhancements and public spaces, sustainable construction, transit subsidies or other similar benefits.” These are things a developer of an extra-dense infill project provides in lieu of respecting existing FAR, density,and parking regulations, among other things.
But is the developer required to pay for maintaining these public benefits? No. So who is? Note, these benefits are not really public; direct benefits of external amenities go mainly to the community in which they are added. (The switch in terminology, public vs. community, occurs in the first two paragraphs of your article). Just as the increased property tax revenue (the tax increment) from the new development is withheld from the city’s public General Fund, so is the burden of paying for the developer-provided amenities. This is basic privatization.
On pages 319 and 320 of South San Fran’s zoning incentive doc we learn real impacts. Page 319:
To address the effect of a developer providing zero parking, we get unbundled parking (renters pay landlords for a parking space), cash-out parking (employer option to provide less parking and to offer employees monthly cash to never drive to work), and required residential permits for property owners parking on streets adjacent to these “community benefit districts.”
Page 320:
“Require the establishment of a Community Benefit District (CBD).” These are property tax assessment districts, whereby every property owner in the developed area is assessed to pay for costs to maintain the developer amenities. The managers of the CBDs are private groups, usually nonprofits, as they are in San Diego (Civic San Diego’s partner, Downtown San Diego Partnership, manages one of these tax districts, the downtown PBID).
In short, your public telling of “how communities can benefit” needs to be explicit about the trade-offs, and admit to how they don’t benefit. Save the Plannerese jargon for some other venue.