City Council Meeting

Eric ForemanstaffThis was added as part of the affordable dwelling unit ordinance back in 2020. And those affordable dwelling provisions include slightly reduced setbacks from what we call the general or standard setbacks. And the rationale is to provide some extra flexibility, but provide that flexibility without overly impacting the surrounding neighborhood. And as we talked about in May, these accessory dwelling unit amendments recommend setbacks really that correspond to those affordable dwelling provisions. And for the same reason, this is a way to balance that flexibility to give some preference to accessory dwelling units, but at the same time keeping the guardrails in place to reduce those negative effects on neighbors' properties.

So we did want to align it with the existing affordable dwelling unit setbacks. You know, the affordable dwelling unit setbacks were put in place, again, to give a little bit more flexibility to something that was considered desirable but to still maintain neighborhood character and maintain a decent amount of separation between one property and the other. Eight feet was considered to be appropriate with the affordable dwelling unit ordinance that achieves the same type of goal that we're looking at with accessory dwelling units.

There is an affordable dwelling unit ordinance. Folks aren't very familiar with it as it pertains to single-family houses because we haven't had anything like that since 2020 when it was approved. But the affordable dwelling ordinance that you all are more familiar with requiring a certain percentage of 6% of multifamily residences be affordable. There is an equivalent for detached homes as well. and just like the building standards were relaxed a bit for the affordable dwelling unit or affordable dwelling units in multifamily they were relaxed a little bit for single family as well and that was increasing the setbacks or decreasing the setbacks