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Home My WebLink About00 - City Council Planning Session - CorrespondenceCity Council Planning Session Agenda Item ll 1/30/21 Good day Mr. Mayor and Members of the City Council, My name is Charles Klobe. I will be interested to observe if the format today allows effective citizen participation. I am here to talk about the General Plan update and specifically the circulation and housing elements. First the General Plan update has been hijacked by Covid and my observation is that the circulation element is largely being advanced by a consultant and staff. As our new Mayor, I challenge Mr. Avery to refocus this effort with real citizen involvement. All we hear at the few Zoom meetings is how West Coast Highway must be widened through Mariners Mile. Adding traffic lanes, building bridges and removing pedestrian crosswalks to speed up traffic are not the answers that residents or local businesses are seeking. Another death surely due to excessive speed on West Coast Highway occurred just last week. The housing element has a council appointed committee that is solely focused on finding landowners who are willing to rezone their property for high density housing where 95% are market rate apartments and 5% are very low-income apartments. Tuesday's approval of the 4400 Von Karmen project proves this to be fact. Without government subsidy landowners can only make this work at this 5% ratio. Newport Beach residents do not want forty-eight thousand new apartments to meet the state mandate of twenty-four hundred low to very low-income units. Yet that is the strategy being advanced. This should be the biggest issue in Newport Beach. Unfortunately, everyone is focused on staying alive and getting their kids back to school. I understand. Page 1 of 2 Under previous laws the state is forcing cities to allow Accessory Dwelling Units, or ADU's, and Junior Accessory Dwelling units on nearly every residential property in Newport Beach. The laws that allow this have been in effect for only a few years. There is little track record but as Nancy Scarbrough stated they are taking off in many areas. The former Coronado apartments on Sherington Place and Irvine Avenue have 10 units permitted so far. I am not advocating for more ADU's but I believe they are inevitable in many neighborhoods. According to the state HCD ADU handbook dated September 2020 they are required to be considered to meet the RHNA allocation. Yet our staff rejects the notion of using them to meet the bulk if not all this mandate. Advantages of this approach include spreading the additional units all over the city, existing housing is already served by local services, residents and not outside developers will likely benefit from building these on their property and getting credit towards our RHNA mandate for something that will happen anyway. Staff has said that this approach will not work but I cannot find any documentation from HCD supporting that argument. Mayor Avery and City Council please direct staff to fully explore this approach. You may find some success following the current approach, but you will only comply by zoning for forty-eight thousand new apartments in Newport Beach. That will get the residents attention. Thank you for your service. Page 2 of 2 Agenda Item II January 30, 2021 Good Morning Mayor Avery and Members of the Council, My name is Nancy Scarbrough. I am speaking not as a SPON board member, but for myself today. While we are planning for 2021, 1 would like to talk about our General Plan Update and specifically about the Housing Element and our Regional Housing Needs Assessment, referred to as RHNA. We need to zone for approximately 4800 housing units, half of them need to be low or very low-income units. The HCD has issued guidelines for Accessory Dwelling Units (ADU's). The California State legislature has passed laws that allow nearly every homeowner in the City to build an ADU or convert a portion of their home to an JADU. Once homeowners realize that they can build or modify their existing residences to one of these, we will undoubtedly have many of them in our city. We probably have many "granny units" now, that aren't permitted that can fairly easily be permitted to become an ADU. It will be a source of income for the homeowner and provide low-income housing for our children and grandchildren and work force housing for those with limited incomes who work in our City. It may not be a popular trend with many Newport Beach resident's, but there is literally nothing any of us can do to prevent it. Even homeowner's associations in Newport Coast or other areas, will be unable to stop homeowners in their neighborhoods from building ADU's. HCD has issued a handbook that outlines what is required for an ADU to be considered to qualify for our RHNA allocation. It does not limit the number of ADU's that we can count in our Housing Element. I believe that we should maximize the number of ADU's that we include in our RHNA allocation. We are not going to be able to limit the 1 number of ADU's that can be built. It is a trend that is accelerating rapidly in cities throughout the state. According to an HCD seminar yesterday In 2019, California permitted 9,000 ADU's, in 2020 they permitted 15,000 ADU's and that was without publicity or outreach so many people were not aware that this was an available choice for them. With 35,000 residential units in Newport Beach, even if only 10 percent of the homes added an ADU over the next 8 years, we would have 3,500 ADU's, at a rate of 5% we would have 1750 ADU's. Whether we are happy about this or not, we are going to see a steep increase in the number of ADU's in our city. As long as that is the reality, we should capture all of the possible ADU's in our RHNA allocation. We can estimate high and monitor the rate of permits. We can adjust in a future year, which will allow us time to research and plan for the alternative... high density housing units. High-density developments, can only provide a low percentage of low- income units. If we zone for these high-density developments, we will be unable to reverse this zoning easily. I have heard developers say that if you zone for these high-density developments in Newport Beach, they will be built. And... they have at least 8 years for the economy to gain momentum to make this type of high-density development pencil out. If we zone for them, they will be built. I believe the residents of Newport Beach, when faced with the choice of zoning for 10's of thousands of housing units, would prefer to have 2400 ADU's, scattered throughout the city. It is a more "place based" strategy, for housing, which is what the State and HCD have said is their goal. Thank you for listening. Nancy Scarbrough Newport Beach resident From: Rieff, Kim Sent: Monday, February 01, 20217:22 AM To: Mulvey, Jennifer Subject: FW: West Newport Beach Sound Wall From: Suzanne Gignoux,Realtor <suzanne.gignoux@gmail.com> Sent: Saturday, January 30, 202111:47 AM To: Dept - City Council <CityCouncil@newportbeachca.gov>; Leung, Grace <gleung@newportbeachca.gov> Subject: West Newport Beach Sound Wall [EXTERNAL EMAIL] DO NOT CLICK links or attachments unless you recognize the sender and know the content is safe. Hello, I may have missed the opportunity to speak at your meeting this morning. I was on hold and the recording said the wait time was 24 minutes for about an hour. Many people enter our fine city from the north via Brookhurst St. and PCH. This entrance is looking shabby because the sound wall is etched and discolored due to its age. If an area looks neglected this could invite litter and vandalism. I understand that we already purchased the glass and have installed a number of panels around as needed. I would like to see the focus around our entrance and then carried towards the tennis court. West Newport Beach businesses and residents deserve to have a maintained entrance that is clean and pleasing. I thank you for your dedication and service to our beautiful City. "To enhance the quality of life by providing diverse opportunities in safe and well maintained facilities, open spaces and parks." KW mobile apo KW21)z3urn chooseOCrealtor.com California District 5 Vice President Women's Council of Realtors West Newport Beach Association