Measure O Debate Heats Up
Healdsburg’s Measure O is a Pandora’s Box. Measure O may try to lure voters under the guise of affordable housing for the middle-class workforce, but the only thing it will guarantee is large-scale development in a town of less than 12,000 people.
Measure O takes off all the guardrails for multi-family housing construction. The current limit of 30 homes per year would become unlimited building in three areas of the city. The 16-units-per-acre limit would be raised to 65. The proposed construction in the downtown corridor alone is 852 units. When you include the train station area and the 88-acre riverfront south entry, there could be well over 2,000 units built.
Besides the environmental threat, Healdsburg’s infrastructure cannot handle this expansion. Residents were asked to reduce water consumption by 40% in the last drought. There are no mandates in the measure to assure affordable housing will be built. Ultra-luxury condos would be considered multi-family housing.
The City Council failed to deliver a feasible plan. Measure O puts Healdsburg residents at the mercy of the developers backing this measure. Please Vote No on O.
Dan Pizza
Healdsburg
The above letter was sent to several local papers including the Healdsburg Tribune. It appeared in print last week elsewhere, which led to the response below.
Beware! The opposition to Measure O has shown a penchant for absurd exaggeration. Witness their weird doomsday prophecies of runaway growth, often based on numbers taken completely out of context. It’s infuriating.
Measure O is designed to do one thing: Make a specific modification to our existing Growth Management Ordinance (GMO) so we can convert under-utilized places (that eyesore abandoned gas station anyone?) to multi-family, middle-class homes like townhouses and apartments. It affects less than 15% of our town. Importantly, existing residential neighborhoods and the area around the plaza are off-limits.
Virtually no homes of this type have been built in the decades since the GMO was enacted. The GMO is a primary driver for the proliferation of hotels and the high cost of housing here.
Measure O was crafted through numerous planning efforts, with tremendous community input and impassioned pleas from residents demanding that we diversify our housing stock. Just this week, the Council began work on zoning reforms to further encourage the affordability of new units. The commitment is real.
It’s unclear how many homes Measure O will create, but you won’t see a construction boom or “unchecked growth”—and you won’t see anything like the preposterous “2000 ultra-luxury units” recently trumpeted by Dan Pizza. But Measure O confidently sets the stage for us to create enough water-smart and climate-smart homes to meet our modest housing goals.
Greater housing equity is the outcome—which is part of why Corazon and the Sonoma County Democratic party (and many others) have endorsed it.
A Healdsburg where our friends and families aren’t priced out, and we have enough housing for all income levels. Measured, intentional and in tune with Healdsburg’s charm and diversity. I ask you to vote “Yes” on Measure O.
Chris Herrod
Healdsburg
Another View
Here’s a surprise: The proposed plan for the City Council to increase density limits in the Downtown Commercial district from 16 to 65 dwelling units per acre—together with Measure O if passed—would authorize 284 dwelling units in the short stretch of Center Street between North and Piper Streets.
This potential was created during the June 3 City Council meeting, when councilmembers unquestioningly embraced a last-minute proposal by Planning Commissioner Jonathan Pearlman to add the east side of Center Street to Measure O’s Healdsburg Avenue North exclusion zone, which at the time included only the west side. They seem not to have realized that adding the east side would authorize what city staff now says would be 64 additional dwelling units on top of 220 units that would be authorized for the west side.
Councilmember Herrod has written to me that if density standards were changed to authorize all those dwelling units, he thinks it “improbable” the city would allow such construction, which he claims is “something we can easily guard against.” But once it’s authorized, the city will be powerless to stop it. The Housing Accountability Act restricts the ability of cities to deny an application to build housing that complies with city standards. Any denial on the basis of density for a project that meets a 65-dwelling-units-per-acre standard would surely face a successful litigation challenge.
Now that Measure O will be on the November ballot, the only fix is for the city to abandon or substantially reduce this density boost—or for the voters to reject Measure O and send the City Council back to the drawing board.
The GMO should be amended somehow—and density limits increased accordingly—to encourage construction of affordable housing. But doing so in a manner that authorizes those 284 dwelling units is not a good way to achieve that goal.
Jon B. Eisenberg
Healdsburg
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@ Chris Herrod. I like the abandoned gas station. It reminds me of good times. The gas station attendant there would also say hello, fill up my tank, and clean the windshield. No idea why the property hasn’t been developed, but my guess is the fuel tanks are too expensive to remove due to government regulations.
Reguarding Measure O
Very recently the voters passed an antigrowth measure on the ballot which meant that the residents did not want to increase our town for more housing for out-of-towners. Now the city council and planning commission wants to do away with the will of the people. We already have the Mill District project for added (middle class) housing. I did not see any specifications for low income housing in measure O which would be the only justification for added growth of our TOWN. Respect the will of the people here!