Arcata speaks:  Home Ownership is of supreme importance

Table of Contents

Click on any entry to go immediately to that section.

See also:
City’s Open House “Engagement Report” is finally (almost) here

Editorials on Arcata1.com
The Brown Act

1. Home Ownership is listed 9 times as a topic of what people want.
2. Plus 7 more.  Add it all up, and there are 148 votes.
3. David Loya acknowledges there likely will be zero home-ownership opportunities in the Gateway area, and definitely no mechanism to require it.
4. All the results from this survey, with a video.

There were 58 topics that people typed in, with 16 of those topics related to “Home Ownership.” The total combined score of the “Home Ownership” topics is 148.

 

No other topic came even remotely close.

 

“Rooftop solar” has a combined score of 27, and “Expanded public transit” came in at 25.

As part of the August 16th, 2022, “Form Based Code Workshop,” an on-line survey was conducted for the 50 or so participants. There was talk of having the survey be open to people who were not able to be at the live meeting, but this hasn’t happened yet.

The results of this survey were included the agenda packet for the City Council / Planning Commission joint study session on August 23rd, 2022. That section of the packet is included here, below.

Unfortunately — and unpleasantly for people looking for some real data on the views of Arcatans — the mechanism for how the survey was done was not conducive to trustworthy results. For starters, since everyone was signed in as “Anonymous,” there was nothing to prevent a person from opening multiple browser tabs and signing in 6 or 10 times — and then having that one person answering each questions multiple times. And thus skewing the results.

As such, I do not regard the responses to Building Height being valid. Showing 75% of the participants wanting maximum height in each of the Gateway areas is, to me very suspicious — particularly when the same question at the January 21-22 Open House meeting yielded a response of 62 in favor of four stories, versus just 2 in favor of eight stories.

Regardless, here’s what the City Council and Planning Commission were presented with, on Pages 32-34 of their packets. During the survey, participants were asked “Is there anything you think is missing from the list that you believed should be considered as a top priority?”

When you scan the list of topics that the participants typed in, you can quickly see what is wrong about how this question of the survey is presented to the City Council and the Planning Commission.  The results should have been compiled, but instead are just listed. 

In that list, the phrase “Home Ownership” is right there in the #2 spot, with a score of 22 — meaning that 22 of the 48 participants who responded to this survey felt “Home Ownership” is important. But those same words are also in the #7 spot, with another score of 15.  Why are there two entries? Must be that the computer sees them differently.  “Home ownership!” with an exclamation point also has its own entry, with a score of 10. 

There’s more. “Ownership opportunities” is in the #11 spot, with a score of 12. “Homeownership opportunities” is surely the same thing, and that’s there also, in the #21 spot with a score of 10.  And “homeownership opportunities” (lower-case “h”) is listed too, shown separately from “Homeownership Opportunities” (with a capital “H”) and “Ownership opportunities” — even though they are all the same thing.

“Being able to buy a home” is there too, with a score of 9, as is “low‐interest loans for home ownership” and “First time homebuyer housing units” also with scores of 9 — surely “Being able to buy a home” is the same as Home Ownership. 

The point is that “home ownership” in a variety of different forms was typed in as a top priority seven different times — and people responded to each one by clicking on that topic to “like” it.

And what of this list?
Rent to own • habitat for humanity • Habitat for Humanity Land available • community land trusts • community villages • cooperative housing (shown twice)

These phrases are just different sub-sets of Home Ownership.

Here’s the list of all the topics that either say “Home Ownership” or have a phrase that is associated with Home Ownership. 

There are 9 topics specifically on Home Ownership, with a combined score of 96.

And there are 7 more topics on areas that definitely involve Home Ownership, with a combined score of 52.

In sum, there are 148 votes here.

Not included here is the topic “tiny homes” with a score of 2, but they represent Home Ownership in their way.

During the two minutes that this survey was shown in the presentation, each participant could type in as many topics as they wanted and could vote on as many topics that other people typed in.

“Expanded public transit” got a score of 25, total. “Rooftop Solar” in different iterations got a combined score of 27.

As you can see, no other topic came even remotely close to “Home Ownership.”

In sum, 16 topics of the 58 topics that people typed in, all related to “Home Ownership.”

The total score of 148 is so very much above the next-most-liked topic, Rooftop solar, with its combined score of 27.

What are we to make of this?

Do you think that it would be fair (or nice) to tell all these people that the chances of Home Ownership Opportunities in the developments constructed in the Gateway area may be something like 1% or 2% of all the apartments built?

Here’s Community Development Director David Loya, speaking at the June 28th, 2022, Planning Commission Meeting:

Planning Commissioner Scott Davies  (now Vice-Chair)    1:53:55 on the video

David, I have a question about making sure that there are home ownership opportunities. … How can we, or what is the mechanism by which we can also try to ensure that there’s a strong proportion of home ownership opportunities, whether it’s condos or penthouses, or whatever income range — versus rental?

Community Development Director David Loya    1:54:31 on the video

Yeah, that is something that I think we are being aspirational about. And this document, the nuts and bolts of how that would work is going to be left to our monitoring, I think. It’s possible that we, if we want that strongly enough that we actually make that a community amenity — that if you’re providing ownership opportunities within these mixed unit buildings — that will help to drive the market. The City can’t regulate and say you have to build ownership opportunities here. And I think if we did — I mean, there are a couple of developers who are very amenable to doing condo projects. But if you talk to the average Realtor on the street, when I met with the Humboldt Association of Realtors, they told me that there’s no way you’re going to get condominium projects.

The results of this survey were included the agenda packet for the City Council / Planning Commission joint study session on August 23rd, 2022. Here’s the section with the Home Ownership topic:

And here is the entire survey.  I consider the input on Building Heights to be invalid.  This is not because I disagree with the results, but because these results are so very clearly the opposite of what has been expressed by previous comments from many Arcatans over these past months.

Here is the section of the video of the presentation on Building Height.  When each page of the survey opens up, the results come in very quickly for the highest height or density.

At the upper right corner is a number in small type that indicates the number of people responding. When a survey question is opened up, it seems that 8 or 10 “people” will absolutely immediate cast votes for the greatest height.

For the 4-story question: 1:21:16 on the video.
Seconds into the polling there are 6 entries, all for the maximum – 100%.  Two seconds later there are 8 entries, and the “score” is 7 to 1– 92%. The next batch shows up as 12 entries, and the score is 10 to 2. Then comes 20 entries, with a score of 17 to 3 — 85%. By the end, there are 50 entries, with a score of 34 to 11, or 78%.

For the 8-story question: 1:22:30 on the video.
Within seconds there are 11 entries, all but 1 for the maximum — 91%.  A couple of seconds later there are 17 entries, and the “score” is 15 to 2– 88%. Then the 8-story response dips down, to 53% and then ended up at 56%. 

It’s not 56% of the participants want 8-stories and 16% want 6-stories, as the “results” seem to show — and as the City Council and Planning Commission are being told. That would be a run-away race — 56 to 16.  Rather it is 56% of the entries (because each participant is able to put in many entries) say 8 stories, and 44% of the entries say less than 8 stories.

The 7-story question yielded “results” of 53% in favor and 47% opposed.  The 6-story question yielded “results” of 63% in favor and 37% opposed. The 5-story question yielded “results” of 56% in favor and 44% opposed.

Contrast this with people’s entries at the January 21st-22nd Open House, which showed about 97% in favor of 4 stories or less.