Objective Zoning Standards

Local Control

The Objective Standards project was developed directly in response to changes in State law that took away some of the City's local control over development. This project provides Santa Cruzans with significantly more control over development outcomes than currently available. The Objective Standards create many new design standards and are more specific than most existing standards. Additionally, the proposed new zone districts set various building standards, such as heights, setbacks, and open space requirements, that the City can use to control development, where these standards either do not exist or State law currently overrides the City's standards. The Objective Standards project makes it possible for the City to require architectural features and building materials that reflect the existing mix of characteristics that give Santa Cruz its unique sense of place. This helps ensure that new buildings reflect community desires and create great places for future generations of Santa Cruz residents to live.

High Quality Building Design

The Objective Standards project proposes to require that new housing incorporate features that communicate quality and permanence. Durable, classic materials already found around the City are allowed: tile, brick, wood, stucco, glass, metal, plaster, stone, and living walls, and the standards require a mix of at least two materials on each building face. The standards limit the location of flat, panelized materials including cement board and metal panels to building faces that are not oriented toward a public street, where they will be less visible. The standards require articulation and architectural details like windowsills, balconies, awnings and decorative lighting, emphasize major intersections with specific standards for buildings at street corners, and require additional pedestrian-friendly design features for ground floors on major corridors. The standards also differentiate between standards for multifamily housing in residential districts versus housing built as part of mixed-use buildings or sites on existing commercial corridors, ensuring that the building designs are responsive to the neighborhood context.

Community Values

The Objective Standards work together with other regulations in each zone district to control new development in a way that will enhance the existing character of different types of neighborhoods. Exclusively residential development is subject to different standards than areas where mixed-use development (residential and commercial development together in one building or on one property) is planned. This differentiation between districts is part of the effort to maintain a distinctly Santa Cruz eclecticism as new housing is built over the coming decades. Reflecting this value is important because it was mentioned in so many of the City's community engagement events. Other community values like dark-sky lighting, seeking ways to keep more existing trees as new development occurs, providing height transitions to adjacent low-density neighborhoods, and creating new pedestrian connections through large development sites are also included in the Objective Standards based on community input.

Trees

Creating a walkable city through the Objective Standards project was a key community goal based on the comments received during public engagement. Walkable streets include wide and accessible sidewalks, commercial uses or public services at the ground floor, appropriate lighting, and a sense of safety and separation from traffic. Street trees are trees planted in the space within the sidewalk or between the sidewalk and a roadway. They are an important component in creating a physical and a psychological separation between pedestrians and vehicles, while also providing shade and softening the urban environment for pedestrians. The current requirements for trees vary substantially from one area to another, and not all the requirements can be considered sufficiently objective to apply to all potential development projects. The Parks and Recreation Department worked with Planning staff to propose a set of new standards as part of this project that will require that street trees are planted as part of new development in locations where higher intensity development is planned. The proposed standards are in their own section of the Municipal Code - 24.12.186 Street Trees.

Additionally, requirements for landscaping and planting have been added to the code to ensure that plants are incorporated into new development. The proposed standards also encourage keeping existing trees on sites with new housing by allowing the area under the canopy to count double toward the required open space areas, making site design more flexible and trees more likely to stay in place.

Improved Open Space Amenities

Based on feedback from the community focus groups and public hearing bodies, a specific list of open space amenities is included in the proposed Objective Standards project. New housing development will be required to include a minimum of three active or passive recreational features selected from an approved list that includes play equipment, picnic tables, community garden space, public art, and other amenities that will ensure that the open space can be used in a meaningful way by residents. Also, the standards incentivize providing private open space for each unit, based on feedback on the preferences of current residents of multifamily buildings in the City. The intention is to ensure that the people who live in new housing units over the coming decades have access to outdoor spaces that support a high quality of life.

Transparency

The Objective Standards project creates a high degree of transparency regarding what types of buildings can be built. The allowances for 4 and 5-story buildings are already written into our city's 2030 General Plan and are permitted under state law. The proposed rezonings as part of this project are consistent with what is already allowed. One of the primary motivators of this project has been to make sure that the community understands what can be built and that new building design criteria is required to help create a high-quality urban environment.

No, the City is not upzoning any property at this time. The fact is that these sites are available to be developed today at the intensities allowed by the 2030 General Plan and have been in this situation since the state law shifted at the beginning of 2019.

At the City Council hearing in August, some members of the community expressed concerns and opposition to the level of development included in the rezonings proposed as part of the Objective Standards project. These community members were concerned that the new zone districts represented an increase of development potential for these sites and a significant change over the existing condition. This is a misunderstanding of the facts.

This project is not increasing development potential on any sites in the City. The project is making the City's Zoning Ordinance consistent with development potential that is already allowed under State law as of January 1, 2019.

Every piece of property in the City (and throughout the state of California) is regulated by at least two documents: the General Plan and the local Zoning Ordinance. In Santa Cruz, the 2030 General Plan and City zoning map have been out of sync since the adoption of the General Plan ten years ago. The 2030 General Plan includes a vision of focusing new development into specific areas of the City where transportation and jobs can be close to new housing. The goal is to reduce per capita greenhouse gas emissions while accommodating new residents and creating more options for housing.

With passage of AB 3194 (Daly), the Housing Crisis Act of 2019 and changes to the Housing Accountability Act (SB 330 and others), the discrepancy between the City's policies means that the development planned for by the General Plan must be allowed on a property even if that amount of development does not work with the existing Zoning.

State law requires that each jurisdiction's development allowances in place as of January 1, 2018, be allowed statewide and that local governments use only requirements that are fully objective and involve no individual judgement when determining how much housing can be built on a specific piece of property.

The City currently has many objective requirements in its Zoning Ordinance and General Plan that have long been part of the development review process. Where these objective requirements cannot "facilitate and accommodate" (CA Gov. Code Section 65589.5(f)(1)) the development allowed by the General Plan, they cannot be applied. In other words, a development proposal can ignore standards in the Zoning Ordinance that would prevent the amount of housing called for in the General Plan.

That means without objective design standards and zoning standards that fit, the City has little control over development outcomes. Developers currently have broad discretion in establishing how they will fit the maximum allowable number of units or square footage on a site, and the City has very little ability to influence how those spaces are constructed.

The below table compares current development allowances under the General Plan with that same property's development allowances under the proposed zone districts in the Objective Standards project.

*Floor Area Ratio (FAR) is a measure of building volume: a ratio of interior floor area to total parcel area. An FAR of 1 is a single-story building covering 100% of the area of a parcel, or a 2-story building covering half of the area of a parcel.

Local control is significantly increased if the Objective Standards project and its rezonings are approved. Developers have more say in setting standards for height, setbacks, transitions, and open space without the proposed zoning standards in place.

Some members of the community raised concerns that the amendment package was too complex and difficult to follow. Staff acknowledges that the proposed amendments are extensive. They represent two years of work with the community and decision-makers. The standards reflect the goals and direction heard throughout this project to create flexible standards that can be used to create variety in architecture. In the end, the proposed standards are more complex than standards in some cities and less complex than others.

The Objective Design Standards for Multifamily Housing are the heart of this project. These are the changes proposed in Municipal code section 24.12.185, and they are also available as a stand-alone document.(PDF, 2MB)

These standards express the values of the community determined through extensive outreach. Draft standards were developed following a community meeting, a survey with 800+ respondents, and six unique focus group events. Staff and consultants then walked the community through the draft standards in detail in November 2021 at a separate community meeting, Planning Commission Study Session, and City Council Study Session. Staff also held office hours at two different times to answer questions and support readers of the document as they worked their way through it. These site and building design standards have been available to the public since November of 2021, and many community members have submitted comments on them in the past 11 months.

Through this outreach, it was apparent to staff that the community strongly values a mix of architectural styles and setting a range of flexible options for developers. Achieving this community goal requires the standards to be more complex. For instance, several of the standards have multiple options to achieve compliance. This adds to the length of the standards but strongly supports flexibility and variety in the resulting built form.

The Standards themselves begin with a statement of purpose and some definitions, and then cover the following aspects of Site and Building Design:

1. Maximum Building Length
2. Walkability
3. New Public Connections (aka. sidewalks, alleys, and pathways)
4. Public Frontages
5. Parking Location and Screening
6. Landscape and Buffering
7. Useable Open Space
8. Neighborhood Transitions
9. Roof Form
10. Building Modulation
11. Corridor Frontage
12. Ground Floor Design
13. Architectural Detail
14. Building Materials
15. Lighting

In addition to the design standards, this project also includes sections from the Public Works and Parks Departments relating to topics including requirements for sidewalks, street trees, road improvements, and undergrounding utility cables. These sections were added to the project a bit over a year ago based on community comment and concerns during the review of the City's first approval process under Senate Bill 35 (SB35) for the application at 831 Water Street. That project review process showed that many of the City's regulations for street improvements were not written in such a way that they could be applied effectively to projects that are limited to only using objective development standards (as is the case with SB35 applications), so staff began working through those existing regulations to propose standards that would provide more certainty for future projects.

Through community outreach, staff also heard just how important trees and landscaping are to Santa Cruz and that they should be maintained and enhanced with new development. Based on this feedback, Planning staff invited Parks and Recreation staff to collaborate on creating new standards to help ensure the City's urban forest stays healthy and diverse. Through that work, street tree requirements that will apply to most new multifamily development were developed and included in the proposed standards.

Adding these Public Works and Parks and Recreation standards has lengthened the proposed amendments, but staff believes this process offers a way to address other development components that the community values such as sidewalk standards, roadway improvement triggers, street tree requirements, lighting standards, and extensions to the City's fiber optic communication network.

One of the most prevalent concerns raised at the prior hearing relates to a proposed change in public hearing requirements. The change was intended to streamline review for proposals that meet all of the local zoning regulations, including every one of the new Objective Standards that are being proposed. Staff and the Planning Commission recommended this streamlined approach to provide an incentive for projects to fully conform to the standards that have been developed through our community engagement process and because fully conforming projects must be approved under state law requirements.

Also, the proposed streamlining process is the same process that has been used for residential development in the multifamily R-L (Multiple Residence Low Rise) and R-M (Multiple Residence Medium Rise) zones for more than 30 years, as well as certain commercial development in some of the City's commercial zone districts. Under the streamlining proposal, public hearings would be reserved for situations where a project was proposing to vary in some way from any of the existing or proposed development requirements.

That said, most projects likely will not qualify for the streamlining based on other permits needed or allowances requested (like a density bonus) so, making a change to require a public hearing on fully conforming projects will likely not affect most development. For this reason, staff will be bringing alternatives to the City Council to consider using either a streamlined process or requiring a public hearing for conforming development.

Under any proposal, the City's current community outreach policies, including neighborhood notice and the community meeting requirement, the environmental review requirement, and the right to appeal, will all remain in place. These outreach requirements are the part of the development review process that allows the community to work directly with staff and a developer to adjust a project and influence a design early in the process, when changes are easier to accommodate. The City believes these processes are working well, and staff is not proposing to make any changes to them.

Given that the amendments do not increase already studied and allowed development intensity evaluated as part of the General Plan Environmental Impact Report (EIR), no further environmental review is required pursuant to Section 15183 of the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) Guidelines.

Regarding the amendments relating to fences, accessory structures, and children's play equipment, the proposed amendments do not change the level of impact these structures would have on the natural environment. Due to their small size; temporary, ancillary nature; and/or the fact that they do not effect the intensity of the primary residential use, such structures will not create a significant environmental impact. Section 15303(e) of the CEQA Guidelines states that accessory structures are categorically exempt from CEQA review. Minor amendments to the Zoning Ordinance related to the location, size, and physical characteristics of such accessory structures are also exempt from CEQA under Section 15061(b)(3), the "common sense" exemption, which states that CEQA applies only to projects which have the potential for causing a significant effect on the environment.

Some community members raised concerns about one specific standard included with the new regulations for sidewalk installation, and those concerns misunderstand the application of the standard. The section reads as follows:

Municipal Code Section 15.20.060(d)

…

All Other Roadways

Unless specified in an Area Plan, sidewalk widths along all other roadways for all new multi-family and mixed use residential with 3 or more residential units or any commercial development shall be a minimum of 8 feet.

Commenters were concerned that requiring an 8-foot sidewalk on their single-family residential roadways would require the elimination of trees, landscaping, and existing parking. Note that the proposed standard above does not apply in single-family zone districts.

The term "multifamily" in this section of the municipal code means three equivalent attached units. Duplexes, ADUs, Jr. ADUs, and lot splits or development under SB9 will not trigger this requirement. Further, regulations for tree removal include accommodations for maintaining existing trees when new sidewalks are required, so long as the finished product complies with the Americans with Disabilities Act. Where tree removals may ultimately be allowed as part of a multi-family development, the City has standard measures applicable to any heritage tree removals that require replacement trees (or proposed in-lieu payments that would go towards planting and maintaining trees) to mitigate potential impacts.

Wide sidewalks are an essential feature of walkable neighborhoods that meet the needs of residents with all types of physical abilities, and the proposal seeks to ensure they are available in these new neighborhoods as they are built. As individual parcels redevelop within an area, there will be transitions in sidewalk width between newly developed parcels and those with older buildings. Over time, more and more wider sidewalks will be available to the community.

To prepare for engagement events and activities, community members can use these "at-home" activities to warm up:

• Learn the Lingo. Review the Housing 101 Guide (English/Spanish) to familiarize yourself with the planning vocabulary.
• Miss the live equity event? Watch the recording (or review the slides) for "Designing a Santa Cruz for All: The Past and Future of Housing Policy" (English/Spanish). You can also contact Planner Sarah Neuse if you are part of a group that would like to hear a live version of the presentation with time for questions and answers.
• Reflect. What community values do think we should prioritize as we think about future development? Environmentalism, inclusivity, creativity, history? What would that look like?
• Visit your hometown. As you move through the City, think about how it feels to walk, bike, or drive through different neighborhoods. Think about things like how buildings meet sidewalks, the number of trees and where they are on the property, the kinds of land uses you find there, the way buildings are similar or different from one another. Here are some things to look for:
  • City Identity. What places feel distinctly "Santa Cruz-y"? What makes them feel that way?
  • Neighborhood Identity. What are the similarities and differences between your neighborhood and other neighborhoods in the City?
  • Building Details. Think about the shape of the buildings, how they are placed on the property, where the parking is located, what the siding and roof materials look like, where the entries are placed, and how they relate to the sidewalk.
    • Are there clear patterns, or do these elements all vary from building to building?
    • Are there some buildings, new or old, that don't seem to "fit in" with the rest of your neighborhood? If so, does that bother you, or does that add to the eclectic character of the area?
    • What are the features that make a building fit in or stand out as different?

• Take note of the features that contribute to your observations. We will be using them to define and measure the character of Santa Cruz, to be written into the standards for new housing.

• No Place Like Home, UC Santa Cruz. Community- and student-research project documenting the experiences and consequences of housing unaffordability in the City and County of Santa Cruz. Spanish translation available.
• The Color of Law, Richard Rothstein. Best-selling book on the history of policy-based housing segregation.
• Segregated by Design, Mark Lopez & Richard Rothstein. 20-minute short film summarizing key discussions from "The Color of Law."
• Single-Family Zoning Drives Exclusion, SPUR. 1-hour, filmed discussion on relationship between single-family housing and segregation in the San Francisco Bay Area.
• Single-Family Zoning in the San Francisco Bay Area, Othering & Belonging Institute. Report summarizing findings related to single-family zoning and economic and social opportunity in the San Francisco Bay Area. Though Santa Cruz County is outside the geographic scope of this report, the context here is similar.
• California's Housing Future: Challenges and Opportunities, Final Statewide Housing Assessment 2025, Department of Housing and Community Development. State-level summary of the current housing issues facing California, and specifically identifying the need for 1.8 million new housing units by 2025.

• City General Plan, City document that governs all development in the City and sets goals and a vision for the future of Santa Cruz.
• City Housing Element,(PDF, 4MB) A chapter of the City's General Plan, required by state law to be updated every seven years, that makes a plan for accommodating the allocated number of housing units assigned by the State.
• Santa Cruz Municipal Code, the local Zoning Ordinance is Title 24 of the Santa Cruz Municipal Code.
• City Council Legislative Update, Item #1 on 11/4/2020 City Council Agenda. Staff report from November 2020 reporting on the many state housing bills that have taken effect in the past three years.