From the San Francisco Business Times:
Battle brewing over
proposed Emeryville residential building moratorium
Feb 11, 2015, 2:38pm PST UPDATED: Feb 11,
2015, 3:53pm PST
Reporter- Roland Li
San Francisco Business Times
The Emeryville City Council plans to vote
Friday on a proposed moratorium on residential construction, a move that has
drawn criticism from public policy groups and developers and could lead to
legal challenges if it passes.
If at least four of the five Emeryville
council members vote to approve the ordinance, approvals for projects seeking
entitlements would be frozen for 45 days. The meeting will be held at 5 pm at
Emeryville's Civic Center, 1333 Park Ave.
The City Council would have an option to
extend the moratorium following another vote. It wasn't immediately clear if
the ordinance would also extend to projects that have already received building
permits. Multiple requests for comment to the city attorney, Michael Biddle,
weren't returned.
The moratorium is a sign that Emeryville,
a historically pro-development city, is being swept into a regional housing
debate in the face of severe
affordability issues that every city in the Bay Area is facing. A
moratorium on housing is unprecedented in the Bay Area, opponents said, though
residents in Foster City in San Mateo County recently called
for just such a move.
Jac
Asher, the Emeryville City Council member who
proposed the moratorium, said it would give the city more time to study housing
issues and develop policies. A draft of the ordinance is expected to be ready
Wednesday night, said Asher.
“Issues like family-friendly housing,
affordability, ownership have been concerns in our city for a long while. Time
and again these issues are talked about as priorities and designated as such in
our planning documents," said Asher.
"We need to ensure that our plans and goals are well-aligned with our
policy-making. The moratorium provides staff time to do an analysis and report
back to council."
Ruth Atkin,
the mayor of Emeryville, agreed, saying “there's a lot of frustration about the
rents going up and up. We've had some high-profile people being
displaced."
For example, Emeryville's poet laureate
had to move out of the city because of increasing rents, she said. Atkin said
that the city would like to see larger apartments for more families and also
support more for-sale units rather than apartments.
Atkin said three major projects would be
affected by the potential moratorium: redevelopment of the Sherwin Williams
factory site, AvalonBay's 6701
Shellmond St. and the Public Market
mixed-use project. The first two projects total 720 units and it's
unclear how many units might be included in the Public Market project.
For the rest of the story click HERE
this is the first time I've seen the name lennar connected with the sherwin williams project. kofi bonner, was redevelopment director for emeryville in 1988 and in 2004 became director of urban land for the lennar corporation. you can learn more of his accomplishments through wikipedia.org
ReplyDeleteThe reason we need a moratorium is because we do not have affordable or family, friendly housing, and we must address this problem. In July 2009 you could rent a two-bedroom, 1200 sq.ft apartment for $1,700, and in 2014 that same apartment cost $4,250 to rent. We have lost many active members of the community precisely because they cannot afford to live here. RSM
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