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After years of lagging behind other communities, the City Council will consider adopting incentives to encourage construction of more affordable housing.
 During Tuesday’s City Council meeting, council members will discuss adopting incentives that could allow builders to construct more affordable housing, such as the Village Apartments on Sixth Street, for seniors and other low-income groups. Glenn Moore/Tracy Press
To prompt developers to build more affordable housing, the City Council on Tuesday will discuss adopting state-led incentives that could allow builders to pack up to a third more apartments and condos into a given property than local zoning laws normally allow — on condition that the added units are cheap enough for poor and senior tenants.
If approved, the ordinance could make Tracy’s cityscape more urban than suburban within a decade or two by rewarding developers that build smaller yards, multiple-family units and taller buildings, city officials said.
"The overall philosophy of smart growth is that you do go denser. You do whatever you can do to keep from spreading," Councilwoman Evelyn Tolbert said.
She said that, as a past member of the League of California Cities, she pushed for years to get the state to amend density bonuses to encourage more low-income and senior housing.
"Sprawl is a no-no when you’re sprawling into farmland," she said. "And Tracy has farmland on the eastern, Banta side. So we’re looking at ways to prevent us from encroaching on fertile land. We’re going to build up instead of out."
Smart-growth proponents say the move is about 15 years too late, but it’s a step in the right direction.
"It’s like saying, ‘I finally got my driver’s license,’ when it was required in the first place. The city has been responsive to subdivision developers, but not to the needs of other people," said Celeste Garamendi of Tracy Region Alliance for a Quality Community, a group that has pushed the city to reform housing policies that favor market-rate developers. "This is nothing novel. Tracy will finally meet one small requirement that is standard in every other community. This just shows how slow the city is and how far behind we are at meeting this need."
According to San Joaquin County’s housing allocation requirements, which are updated every eight years, roughly half Tracy’s housing should be appropriate for moderate- to very low-income residents, but only about 30 percent of the housing stock meets that definition.
"The City Council just didn’t have any advocacy groups pushing them to change things," said Garamendi, who charged council members with pandering to developers. "But if they had nonprofit housing groups like they have in Sacramento and the Bay Area, the city could have been sued for not meeting legal standards."
Until recently, Tolbert said, Tracy had no need for affordable housing, because market-rate homes in town were affordable compared with their Bay Area counterparts.
"For people out of the area, Tracy homes were cheap — it was affordable housing," she said. "I don’t think a year’s gone by that the council hasn’t talked about affordable housing. The problem, and what we need, is more incentive for builders. We can cut fees and put builders on the fast track if they choose to build affordable housing. Density bonuses are a first step."
Already, builders have approached Tracy’s planning commission about including higher-density moderate- to low-income housing in near-future developments, without the incentives the city will discuss Tuesday.
"Developers voluntarily draw up plans to include lower-income units already," Tolbert said. "That shows that this is not a far-fetched plan — that people are already thinking about it."
Local developer Dale Cose, of Don A. Cose Inc., said he’s thrilled the city seems poised to adopt the incentive, though some stipulations might not sit well with most builders, he added.
In exchange for the density bonus, builders would be required to integrate affordable housing units within more expensive developments, but Cose said a lot of builders could be turned off by the idea of side-by-side low- and high-income housing.
"A lot of times, builders might want to separate the affordable housing and not put them in the middle of a pricier subdivision," he said.
Even with plans drawn up and the incentives with city planners’ stamp of approval, such affordable, condensed housing could take years to spring up, and the changes will be subtle at first.
Ultimately, Garamendi added, adopting the state requirements would someday make sure that people who work in Tracy can afford to live in town, too.
"Aside from all the touchy-feely talk about it being the right thing to do, there’s the practical objective," she said, "that the market is so top-heavy with high-end housing that as a city, we don’t meet the needs of our community. That’s a huge failing, and one the council has only given lip service to."
Developers shied away from building affordable housing in Tracy for many years because it was not economically feasible, Cose said. Nearly 70 percent of Tracy’s homes are owned by Bay Area professionals — people who could afford and were eager to buy at market rates. Developers were more than happy to meet that demand, even if it meant making affordable housing a lower priority.
"When your land costs so much money and it takes so many years to develop, and when the construction costs so much, you put all those totals together, and it ends up making more sense for builders to make market-rate housing," he said.
"But now the market rate has dropped," he added, "so it makes sense now to get more cheaper housing."
To engineer an affordable subdivision, developers buy tax credits farmed by nonprofits like Bay Area-based Eden Housing, which jumps through hoops for government agencies to get approval for senior homes and other low-income developments. Companies that need tax write-offs buy the collected credits and push for the affordable housing project to go through.
"Once they’ve got the go-ahead, then a developer can take them up on it, but the entire process is time-consuming and arduous," Cose said.
Another incentive that could boost the affordable market, Tolbert said, is for Tracy to institute "fast track" bonuses — an agreement with the city that if a developer plans to build moderate- to very low-income housing, the city will expedite permits and other requirements that could normally take years to complete.
Such bonuses are important to persuade developers to take on an affordable housing project, Cose said.
"Affordable housing is not free. The homebuyer next door to the moderate-rate affordable with the disposable income gets stuck with the burden to pay for the affordable home," he said. "The prices of the lower-income homes are already built into the market-rate ones nearby. So the developer fronts the cost at first, in hopes that a buyer will take it off their hands. But it’s a risk."
Also on the Tuesday council agenda:
• The city will discuss whether to recruit umpires from the Greater San Joaquin Softball Association for $26 to $62 a game next season.
• City engineers will suggest that the council approve paying consultants $30,000 to assess storm drains in Tracy’s downtown. The company, Storm Water Consulting Inc., was hired by the city in December for another $49,980 to examine drains in some of the city’s industrial zones.
• The city will talk about whether to use $73,500 from developers to hire consultants from Fehr & Peers Transportation Consultants of Walnut Creek for a traffic study.
• Based on a report in late 2007 that recommended the city hire three field supervisors and two maintenance workers for the city’s Public Works Department, the council will discuss whether to approve the new hires, among other suggestions made in the study.
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well as a young person growing up in that time from tracy I could not afford a home. It sucks that the market has to turn in order to bring affordable housing because the fact is people are open to it because sales are down.
"that the market is so top-heavy with high-end housing that as a city, we don’t meet the needs of our community.
now you realise, damn for me, to bad we did not just have your slow growth and affordable housing at the same time.....
Dont get me wrong I am really happy to see this and its about time. Gives me a warm feeling in my belly. this will help out our town as a whole. I think cose is a good guy seems to always be looking out for the little man.
ohhh by the way jen nice writing latly........