Planning Commission Regular Meeting/Work Session

Eric Formanstaffokay well Well, thank you very much. We have one work session tonight, and it's fortunate that it's just one, because it is somewhat detailed, somewhat involved. So tonight, we're talking about various policy considerations regarding potentially allowing detached accessory dwelling units, or ADUs. So the topic of ADUs, it's come up in a few contexts over the past year or so, and one One of the policy questions that's arisen in those discussions is whether to permit detached accessory dwelling units. So right now, accessory dwelling units are permitted in Fairfax City, though they must be attached or they must be part of a house. Expanding that to detached units, so essentially units that are in a house's backyard, so that's

Eric Formanstaffon ADUs in various amounts of detail. Back in February, we held a work session with City Council where we discussed accessory dwelling units, and we spent some time as well at that meeting talking about detached ADUs. And at the end of that meeting, Council asked staff to continue work on this topic and specifically to look at some of the details for detached ADUs, detached accessory dwelling units, and ask staff to report on, like it says here, how we would make that work in the city. And that's what we're focusing on tonight, focusing specifically on the details for detached ADUs. Should city policymakers, should the planning commission, should the city council have interest in moving forward on this issue?

Tonight, we're mostly talking about whether, again, to permit ADUs that are detached in addition to attached units. basically a small housing unit in another house's yard. Uh, now, now one, one random thing I'll, I'll point out now, since the slide is up at some point during this process, if we move along, we may end up calling these something else besides accessory dwelling units, besides ADUs. And the reason for that is to avoid any kind of confusion with another item in the zoning ordinance that has the same acronym of ADU, which is affordable dwelling unit. point that it's a bit confusing having two separate things with the same acronym we may end up changing this to another term but just to to give you the heads up the the name may change

but the concept would would stay the same now a few city documents mention adus from a policy standpoint so for example the citywide housing assessment one of that report's recommendations is like it says here, to expand permissions for accessory dwelling units. And the comprehensive plan, one of the housing actions in the plan, calls for the city to research changes to expand opportunities for accessory dwelling units. And this is a key clause right here, while ensuring that they do not negatively impact the surrounding neighborhood. And we'll get back to that clause, that phrase, a few more times, but that's an important piece from the comprehensive plan. Now, before we get into some of the details on things like height and measurements,

Now, detached ADUs, so like those from the last slide, so what that essentially means, again, is allowing property owners to construct ADU units really in the rear yard of a house. And once again, that brings us to that comprehensive plan language of ensuring that ADUs don't negatively impact the surrounding neighborhood. And this is really the big question for tonight. Should Fairfax City allow detached accessory dwelling units? And if city policymakers think no, then we would really keep our existing standards, so allowing ADUs only when they're part of another house. If yes, then we'd need to consider what standards would be most appropriate. And again, that's what city council had asked us to investigate a bit further by saying,

how could we make this work in the city? So that is really the crux of tonight's discussion. Now, like everything, there are pluses and minuses to accessory dwelling units. We could really make a presentation just on this topic. But this list here gives a basic overview. Just keep in mind there are some folks who would think that some of these pros are not pros, and there are people who think that some of these cons are not cons. But generally, on the pro side, ADUs, accessory dwelling units, are additional housing units. And if there's a policy of creating as many additional housing units as possible, that could be partially satisfied by accessory dwelling units because they are new housing units,

Now these last two on the right-hand side are interesting because these are things that sometimes folks don't think about. Detached accessory dwelling units are expensive to construct. So if you look at jurisdictions that allow detached ADUs, you tend to see them on properties of houses that are already expensive. So like it says here, detached ADUs can be kind of a luxury item for homeowners. that would really be applicable to everyone just on finances alone. And similarly, this bottom point here, rental ADUs is something that can further monetize the housing market. So similar in some ways to things like Airbnbs. So where housing shifts from being just shelter to being an income producing asset, and that obviously has benefits

and this ensures that those units are accessory to the main dwelling or smaller than the main dwelling, so an ADU currently has to stay under 35% of the total size of the house in square footage, and has to have a maximum of two bedrooms, again, to keep those units small, smaller than the main house. Now, in addition to these, there are some other operational standards for accessory dwelling units that are in our zoning ordinance. And some of them are listed here. So of particular note, there's a requirement that the property itself must be owner-occupied. So that means that the property's owner must live in either the house or in the ADU. Now, other standards here represent more operational items

from the city's perspective, so detailed things like what happens to ADU approvals when a property transfers and so on, and there's other standards in the ordinance. A lot of this stuff is necessary from a policy perspective, even though it's not terribly exciting to look at or to read about. But all of this leads us to be able to talk in detail about these detached accessory dwelling units, and we'll focus on potential standards, this is something that's currently not permitted, and potential standards again if city leaders wish to continue examining this as a policy. And a good start for discussing detached ADUs is to look at the standards that the city already has in place for what's called accessory structures, and accessory structures is the

from ADUs. So this was the case several years ago here in Fairfax City when our current attached ADU standards were written and that resulted in the see here. So this is actually in the zoning code. This is one of the standards for accessory dwelling units right now. And it says that for an accessory dwelling unit, no more than two vehicles utilized by residents of the ADU shall be allowed. Now, the way this is written, this is really challenging to enforce. There's no other way about it. Really not the best way to make a parking standard. But that's not saying that parking standards in general should be written off. So some jurisdictions do have requirements for ADU parking standards. And really, if parking management is a priority, so for the community or for policymakers,

so as in setting standards for what these structures should look like. and staff does not recommend design review for accessory dwelling units so the reason for that is now here in in Fairfax we have an architectural review board but the BAR does not review detached houses and having a design review for accessory dwelling units but not having that design review for the houses themselves or for additions or for other accessory structures is a bit inconsistent. The houses themselves are much more impactful from a community standpoint. So that would be a big inconsistency that we feel is a little bit tough to justify. Establishing design review for houses themselves would represent a very big policy shift

James Featherallowing accessory dwelling units certainly provides a different type of housing from our other multifamily but i also think of our other objectives of wanting to drive development and creating neighborhoods and community interactivity centers where we're looking for more density and it's probably a little bit more tolerable to the community in the multifamily large multifamily apartments, less impactful on communities. When the neighbors, I think, look at those two options, they might be a little bit more willing to support multifamily structures or larger multifamily structures, interactivity centers, and a lot of pop-up accessory dwelling units in communities, neighborhoods, which really provide a relatively small number of