In good RESHAP

Last week there was a Zoom presentation to the Chamber or hosted by the Chamber or something like that about the West Midway project. When I remembered the event was happening I totally missed it but, luckily, this is going to be on the Planning Board’s agenda for Monday so it’s here. There’s nothing granular yet about individual floor plans or buildings yet but you can see, in general, the shape of the project, Remember the development and approval of this project is key to getting the RESHAP program kickstarted because the market rate developers will be funding and building the infrastructure to make RESHAP a reality.

Here’s the most important bit about the affordable housing (affordable being subsidized in this case not “affordable” meaning what people think is affordable based on their person budgets):

Affordable Housing. The Alameda Point Settlement Agreement with Renewed Hope requires that the City ensure that 25% of all new housing at Alameda Point be deed restricted for very low-, low- and moderate-income households. Per the Settlement Agreement, the 25% is comprised of 10% at or below low-income units and 15% at or below moderate-income units.  The West Midway project and the RESHAP project together will satisfy this requirement as follows: the combined projects will provide 587 total new units (478 new units at West Midway and 109 new units at RESHAP), requiring 147 affordable units (59 new units at or below low-income and 88 new units at or below moderate-income). The RESHAP project will provide 107 new units at or below low-income, leaving a need for 40 new units at or below moderate-income. The West Midway project will include 40 units that will be deed restricted for sale to moderate-income households with household income between 80% and 120% of the area wide median income (AMI).  If the number of affordable new units on the RESHAP property exceeds 107, then the number of moderate income units on the West Midway property may decrease accordingly, ensuring that together this requirement is satisfied.

The Specific Plan requires that six percent of the units in a development be deed restricted to very low-income households, 10 percent be deed restricted to low-income households, and nine percent be deed restricted to moderate-income households. For the West Midway project, this requirement would yield 29 very low-income units, 48 low-income units, and 43 moderate-income units. As noted, the West Midway project will include 40 moderate-income units, and the RESHAP project will provide 107 new units at or below low-income. Of these 107 new units, at least 29 would be very low-income units and the remaining 78 would be at or below low-income, more than satisfying the need for 48 low-income and an additional 43 moderate-income units when combined with the 40 moderate-income units in the West Midway project.

Because West Midway is attached to the RESHAP project it’s going to exceed the higher inclusionary housing requirement at Alameda Point. Here’s the breakdown of how the units will be scattered throughout the site. It’s interesting that this development is bringing back the duplex (aka duet) because it’s a throw back to the only multifamily type development that was allowed by Alameda to be built in the heyday of A/26. And even though the RESHAP project is a lot larger than the 25% of needed affordable housing for the whole of the West Midway project, remember that a fair number of the RESHAP units will be replacement units for units that currently exist already at Alameda Point so those can’t be recounted for either the RHNA or for the inclusionary housing requirements.

Unusually, this project is asking for a waiver to *increase* the number of allowed parking spaces per unit. Typically this is the opposite because parking spaces are, well, expensive. Because the increase is so minimal (.07 spaces) it’s a gain of 33 parking spaces. I guess that’s important to this project but hopefully it doesn’t become a trend because those parking space costs in a range of $21K to $50K all which gets passed on to the buyer and then people scream about how expensive new housing is.

Anyway, City Staff has added in the report that streamlining and smoothing the way for this project, because it will get the RESHAP parcel on line, is the #1 priority per the Housing Element. I can’t see the Planning Board gumming up these works all too much, but once it gets to the City Council who knows.