April 13, 2005

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Palo Alto Online

Council turns down granny units

by Jocelyn Dong

Fears that granny units could forever change the character of Palo Alto neighborhoods led the City Council Monday night to shoot down a proposal to allow more second dwellings in the city. The vote frustrated two council members so much, they took their colleagues to task and later registered protest votes on an unrelated matter.

"I find what's going on this evening particularly troubling," said Council member Dena Mossar, who felt five years of work in support of affordable housing were being erased "with the stroke of a pen."

Vice Mayor Judy Kleinberg called her colleagues' decision-making process "unbelievably abrupt and superficial."

The zoning update would have allowed single-family property owners with 7,000-square-foot lots or larger to build 450-square-foot "second dwelling units" on their land. Thousands of property owners would have been eligible, but city staff estimated only eight per year would have built the cottages.

Supporters of the plan argued that it would increase Palo Alto's affordable housing, but opponents said it would add noise and traffic to single-family neighborhoods and decrease privacy.

In March, community members spoke to the council about the proposal, with those in support and those in opposition evenly split.

The debate Monday night centered around how greatly the granny units would change the character of neighborhoods.

Although city staff placed last-minute restrictions on the proposal to limit the number of second dwellings to 15 per year and guarantee an annual review of the program, council members still feared the program would have a negative effect.

They cited public comments that charged the city implicitly entered into a covenant with single-family property owners to preserve their neighborhoods' one-dwelling-per-acre standard.

Officials also questioned how effective the program would be in improving affordable housing, given the few units it would add.

"At the cost of the uncertainty ... it's not worth the value of the units," said Council member Bern Beecham.

They also questioned the need for adding granny units. Plenty of apartments are available, Council member LaDoris Cordell said.

"It isn't like (people are) being squeezed out and nobody can rent here," Cordell said. "I don't see the crisis."

Some even questioned whether the granny units would constitute affordable accommodations, given a real-estate agent's estimate that one would cost $135,000 to build. The proposal had no guidelines that guaranteed the units would be rented, and if so, that rents would be low enough for teachers, service workers and others with lower incomes.

"If this were truly about affordable housing, we would cloak (the units) in measures to make sure they were truly affordable," Council member Hillary Freeman said. She and Council member Yoriko Kishimoto also said that certain locations for cheaper housing, such as near the train station, would be more acceptable than having them scattered throughout Palo Alto's single-family neighborhoods.

But Mossar and Kleinberg charged the council's decision was reversing an established course and backing away from the city's commitment to affordable housing, which other council members denied.

"I think it's interesting to hear public sentiments against big houses and then to hear public sentiments about small houses," a disappointed Kleinberg said.

The vote not to add granny units was 5-4, with Mayor Jim Burch and Kishimoto joining Mossar and Kleinberg. The council later voted to allow lots of 8,100 square feet or more to add an attached unit of 450 square feet, an increase from the current allowance of 250 square feet. They also put restrictions on the process by which homeowners on small lots could add a second story to their houses.

Kleinberg and Mossar voted against each of the zoning decisions that followed the granny unit issue.

Sitting at the back of the chambers, resident Millie Nelson was a bit baffled by the evening's discussion.

"Can you make sense of any of what's going on tonight?" the older resident asked a reporter. Nelson had been interested in converting her stand-alone, 430-square-foot garage into a granny unit, which she could rent out for additional income or use in the future for a live-in caregiver or for family.

She disagreed with the council's decision, saying that her granny unit would not have eroded her block's ambience. Other neighbors, who rent out their homes, already cause more parking and noise disturbances than her unit would have, she said, disappointed.

In other matters, a proposed two-story home in Midtown received the council's go-ahead. Neighbors in apartment complexes bordering the home had complained that the second story would cause shadows and privacy concerns. Cordell, Freeman and Kishimoto voted against the housing plan.

The council also voted unanimously to launch an auto-dealership retention task force to find land that could host dealerships and give them better visibility to potential customers.

Senior Staff Writer Jocelyn Dong can be reached at jdong@paweekly.com.

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