Item No. 8 Supplemental Material For City of Sacramento Planning and Design Commission Agenda Packet

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1 Item No. 8 Supplemental Material For City of Sacramento Planning and Design Commission Agenda Packet For the Meeting of: March 8 th, 2018 Contact Information: Greg Sandlund, Senior Planner, Project Name: Central City Specific Plan Subject: and Correspondence received.

2 March 08, 2018 Commissioners, Please see forward request from Greg Sandlund Item No. 8: Greg, I have noticed and have a concern about the impact on daylight at street level by the high-rise buildings. The streets in Midtown have filtered sunlight onto the street through the tree canopy. The blocks with high-rises are in shadow 24 hours and always dark. The lack of daylight is stark and noticeable on L Street between 18 th & 19 th streets between the two midrise condominiums. The impact is becoming evident by the tower rising at 19 th & J streets. The tree canopy also disappears with the high-rise buildings. The large trees do not survive and the developers plant small ornamental trees along the perimeter of the buildings. The new midrise buildings should have setbacks conforming the adjacent residential buildings to allow for the space and growth of the larger trees that currently exist in the midtown area. The parking structure built at 21 st & Capitol is very intrusive with the structure hugging the sidewalk on both streets. Most older midrise buildings greater than two stories in midtown have setbacks for planting along the sidewalks. The office building across the street from the parking garage is an example. The parking structure dwarfs and hides the charming adjacent older structures such as Kupros. The parking structure does not add charm or interest to the village environment. The special permits granted for this type of development in the midtown area must stop. I believe these towers are suitable and welcomed in the downtown business corridor but not in Midtown. The planning commission is allowing developers to hopscotch development onto less expensive properties with existing low-rise buildings in Midtown. Their action to allow special permits to build high-rises in Midtown is inadvertently discouraging development of the vacant properties downtown. Regards, Don Tarnasky

3 Dear Chair Burke and Commission Members Re: Agenda Item 8, Central City Specific Plan I am unable to attend the Thursday March 8 th Commission meeting and am therefore submitting the following comments: I wish to acknowledge the extensive work that staff has put into the Specific Plan, including several meetings with interested community members. I am very glad to see the name change from Downtown Specific Plan to Central City Specific Plan a name that much better describes that area covered by the plan. I was pleased and relieved to see building step back requirements established between the R3A and C2 zones. Those step backs were much needed and are critical to protecting the integrity of Central City neighborhoods and historic districts. Additional C2 zone step back requirements are needed to address the following 2 issues: 1) A small number of parcels located in the Capitol Mansions Historic District and perhaps other historic districts along the JKL corridor are zoned RO rather than R3A. These parcels also need the C2 step back requirements. 2) There a some city landmarks and small portions of historic districts located within the C2 zone and they too need some form of step back requirement to create a reasonable distance between them and an 85 ft. tall building on the next parcel. The meticulously rehabbed old building where the Kypros restaurant is now located is a very unfortunate example of what it looks like when an historic building (I don t know if the Kypros building is designated as a city landmark, but it is of a scale typical of designated historic buildings) is put right next to a tall, massive building (the new parking garage on the north east corner of Capitol and 21st) with no step back. Until quite recently the public was under the impression that a 20 percent FAR deviation limit was going to be placed on buildings that were deamed to provide a community benefit'. Even the Draft EIR stated this. Then, at the last minute, we were told that no such limit would be placed and that the issue would be dealt with in the next General Plan update. This was extremely unfortunate. Failure to place a limit encourages land speculation that drives up land prices making it even more difficult to build affordable housing and has the potential to result in buildings wildly out of scale with everything around them. The General Plan update is apparently slated to begin this summer and could take months to complete. In the meantime, we badly need an interim FAR limit. There is still no definition of what constitutes a community benefit. The lack of definition creates the appearance of a planning process that is arbitrary and capricious and subject to favortism. This is unacceptable. Community benefit absolutely must be clearly defined. If the city is serious about getting more desperately needed affordable housing, then it needs to formally designate such housing as a community benefit and make it the only basis for an FAR deviation which, as stated above, must have a clearly defined limit. I am pleased that the plan encourages the adaptive reuse of historic buildings and reduces the minimum square footage for housing units in such buildings to 350 square feet. This reduction will make adaptive reuse projects easier and, hopefully, result in more affordable housing units. I would like to see incentives for adaptive reuse extended to non-historic buildings as well. Adaptive reuse can help create more affordable housing units and also commercial spaces that are likely to be more affordable than such spaces in new buildings. Small businesses are part of what makes the Central City plan area an interesting and desirable place to live and so it is important to both retain the ones we have and to attract new ones.

4 It is my understanding that the Interim Plan for infill in historic districts is moving forward providing guidelines for such development until each historic district has an approved individual plan. This is a very positive step. Among other things, the guidelines will result in alley infill projects that are somewhat smaller than some of the alley infill projects we have been seeing which should help affordability. The Specific Plan talks about the desire for 25 percent of new housing units to be affordable. A plan needs to be developed to help meet this goal. Smaller units, adaptive reuse and allowing an FAR deviation in exchange for affordable housing should all be part of this. Preservation Sacramento has submitted a detailed critique of the historic consultant s report that was part of the development of the Specific Plan along with suggestions for how to address its inadequacies. I strongly support Preservation Sacramento s comments. Preliminary surveys have identified potential historic districts within the Specific Plan area including certain blocks of Y Street, the Richmond Grove neighborhood, an extension of the Southside historic district and New Era Park neighborhood. The city needs to work with the community to find ways to complete historic district surveys so that we don t lose significant portions of the Central City s historic fabric. The draft of the Design Guidelines needs additional editing. There are places where parts of sentences appear to be missing or duplicative and unclear. Such editing should be complete before this document goes to City Council. In reading the various documents that are part of the staff report, I was pleased to see several references to the value of large decidous canopy trees. Over the past few years, far too many such trees have been removed, often to accommodate developers who don t consider them in project design or who want them out of the way to facilitate construction. Also, many trees that were removed for health reasons have not been replaced or have been replaced with smaller and more cylincrical trees. This is an issue of critical importance. Urban areas are notorious for heat island effect which will become an increasingly serious problem as temperatures continue to rise. Trees are an important way for cities to address heat island effect and get many other benefits as well (e.g. carbon absorption, cleaner air, less water run-off, longer life for asphalt and the paint on buildings, walkability). Thank-you for this opportunity to comment. Sincerely, Karen Jacques Long time Central City resident and activist

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