Essentials to Communicate

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This model is fundametally different from current "standard" apartment complexes, so there are some things you will need to communicate to folks in the course of trying to get approval to build it.

There are two really critical details that they need to understand:
  1. In order to resolve some issues and make it mixed income, it uses a different metric: Primary residence status versus pied-a-terre or "vacation home." Tying access to affordable housing to income entrenches the problem and this avoids that and gives residents flexibility.
  2. It separates parking costs from rent on the residential unit so people without cars are not forced to carry those parking costs. The people paying those costs are the ones with cars and the owner is not penalized because excess parking becomes commercially available parking-for-a-fee. This helps resolves the issue with parking minimums strangling historic walkable downtowns.
The parking minimums post (linked above) is about the small town of Aberdeen, Washington (pop: ~17,000). Here is a community profile just a few pages long for more context: Downtown Aberdeen.

This project was designed to solve a host of problems in a blighted historic walkable downtown of a small town. If that is YOUR locale in a nutshell and you want to approve this:
  • Read through your zoning codes. You may well need to approve it under some "exception" rule and you likely have some.
  • Come up with the justification you need to approve it and put it in writing.