City Council, April 22nd - MUHTIP for the old City Hall Site

At Council on Monday is an application for a MUHTIP property tax abatement on the project for the old City Hall site. On a site vacant for a half-century, this is an incentive for exactly the kind of project it is supposed to benefit.

Concept for the old City Hall site

In the application packet is an elevation view from the northeast corner of Chemeketa and High. Seeing something there will be so great, and even just the rendering itself is cheering. This corner has been such a hole in the urban fabric, a real void at what had been a genuine civic center. To see life there again, and right across from the Transit Center, will be wonderful.

via Postcard dealer Mary L. Martin

But also in the packet is a sobering analysis of the apartment market. I don't recall seeing one before, and the City might consider making them a requirement for public subsidy. It's good to know what the developer/investor side is thinking.

No evidence of our housing crisis from this angle

Reading it, you'd never know we have a housing crisis. From their standpoint we have a "market-wide occupancy rate [of] 94.5%, which is within the range of a well-balanced market." High rents and low vacancies are feature, not bug.

It says

we recommend a primary focus on single, working-age adults in mid- and upper-income backets at the site. In order to avoid competition with the Salem Center project [former Nordstrom site, I assume], we would target slightly more mature and affluent renters.

This is not exactly consistent with the Staff Report's analysis of "public benefit" on the tax abatement.

Staff Report on public benefits

Staff say "rental rates [would be] accessible to a broad range of mixed incomes."

"[S]ingle, working-age adults in mid- and upper-income backets" is a generous understanding of the word "broad" and "mixed."

Also, since we have eliminated parking requirements, maybe would should consider removing "development of surface parking lots" and "provision of parking spaces" as public benefits?

As the MUHTIP program currently exists, in general the project meets the requirements, but it also shows some ways the program might be refined.

The market analysis also provides some realism for the way we talk about our housing crisis and the developers we depend on for supplying new housing. Hopefully the Housing Production Strategy group will dig into materials like it.

• See the ongoing series at Sightline, "Housing Every Oregonian." They make the point that in order to lower the costs of building new housing, it will be necessary to stack multiple instances of shaving down the costs. Some might be incentives, but a single incentive like MUHTIP or a URA Grant is generally not enough to meet our need.

With the City having cut Library services and proposed to slash them even further, thankfully at least postponed by Mayor Hoy's proposal to use TOT funds, and with the School Distract planning for mass layoffs, the way we incent new housing with property tax breaks and URA funding is not a good look, but at the moment there are very limited tools. As long as we rely on developers to supply housing, they will want to make money at it, and will not supply more housing if the margins aren't there.

• Previously, "City Council, November 27th - A Project for the Old City Hall Site!" (2023)
  

Other Items

Somewhat related to the Housing Production Strategy project, Mayor Hoy is appointing Councilor Varney to the Scenario Planning Advisory Committee. In January he'd appointed  Councilors Stapleton and Philips, and Varney must be replacing one of them, who will not be on Council to see through that plan to completion. The Staff Report is silent on who is leaving the committee immediately.

There are two expenses related to crashes, and both erase the driver. In the Staff Report on a $195,000 crash settlement, the language mystifies the crash:

The matter involves a car accident involving a City of Salem Police vehicle [a police officer driving a City vehicle] and a vehicle in which Ms. Garza was a passenger and was injured in the accident. The City [employee] was likely at fault for causing the accident. [strikethrough added]

There's also $150,000 to repair damage from a crash in Library parking structure, and the Staff Report also obfuscates. 

a motor vehicle [a Library patron] ran over the curb stop and struck the concrete barrier, causing damage to the inside panel of the garage. Both Risk and Facilities staff then assessed the area for damage. It was determined that panel would need to be demolished and repaired due to the severity of the damage. [strikethrough added]

It will be interesting to see if Vision Zero reform has any effect on obfuscating language like this, both in erasing the driver and using accident rather than crash.

A grant application for a "Fish Passage Barrier Prioritization Study" will probably involve a lot of culverts and small bridges, ditched creeks near roadways, and even some road stormwater drainage. There may be opportunities for the City to leverage stream restoration for additional funding on some roadway capital projects. It also dovetails with the Goal 5 Riparian study (referenced separately in the Annual Report from the Planning Commission), which seems poised finally for a public phase.

Bids on the 2024 pavement rehabilitation projects in the bond went $660,000 over, and the City proposes to use "bond premium" funds to cover it. It will be interesting to see how much cost escalation overall there is on the bond projects.

The matter of Council callups is back, and the discussion remains dissatisfying. The set of decisions proposed to eliminate Council initiated review and citizen or developer initiated appeals at Council seems larger than it needs to be to satisfy limits on "those where Council has limited discretion under Oregon law to substantively change the lower decision." It doesn't seem surgical enough. 

For example, from the Staff Report

The City has no discretion at the site plan stage to outright deny a use that is “permitted” under the City Code, and conditions may only be imposed that further the application’s compliance with the applicable development standards or to mitigate for a requested deviation from the code standards.

But often appeals are not about deny/approve, but are instead about refining conditions of approval. A developer thinks a particular condition is burdensome, a neighbor thinks a different condition doesn't protect a creek enough. These may not be "substantive" changes to a lower decision, but they can meaningfully improve a project.

It will be interesting to read more comment on this from neighborhood advocates. Narrowing the scope of appeals and callups seems reasonable, as some appeals are in fact unreasonable NIMBYism, but the wholesale deletion of so many situations for any callup/appeal at all seems overbroad.

A couple other notes very briefly:

• The approval for 186 apartments at the old Southwick property on Orchard Heights. (Previously here.)
• There's the annual Earth Day proclamation. Maybe there will be more to say over the weekend.