everyone. I am Carrie Thompson. I have the great privilege of being mayor here in Bloomington and I
like to try to get things started on time to respect the fact that you all are giving us your time today.
I am so thrilled that we are
at today because Hopewell has been a project that I think a lot of Bloomington has high hopes for, but
sort of hasn't known what to expect. And it certainly was a project that in the last administration
took on a big vision and built up a lot of ideas in the master plan. And frankly, when I took office,
I was wondering how we could fulfill a vision
that was held in that master plan with the fiscal responsibility that I also know that we needed to
have. And I am thrilled that we got to today. And I want to particularly thank our RDC. I know we have
a few members of the RDC here today. Thank you for staying with us and for leaning into how we could
make Hopewell truly work for our entire Bloomington community.
in a way that really leverages the kind of housing that we need for the kind of economic development
that we see moving forward in our community. I also want to just say a special thank you to David Hittle
and Anna Killian Hansen and Andrew Sybor, I don't know if you're in here, all of whom have been working
hard with their departments to get to a hopeful that really works for our community.
I ran on a platform of housing, and that is why I am here today. Housing has, since the moment I moved
to Bloomington and still today, housing has been a conundrum for Bloomington. We have been the least
affordable place to live in the state of Indiana. And my commitment when we were looking at Hopewell
is how do we make Hopewell
a community that really attracts the people that work in Bloomington in a way that they can afford to
live in Bloomington. Because we simply can't grow a local economy without the key components of housing.
Hopewell represents what can happen when a community truly decides to invest in itself.
When we take a site that once served one purpose as our hospital and turn it into a place that serves
many, we'll have homes of all shapes and sizes. We'll give you a preview of that in a few minutes. We
will have homes for every people, every stage of life. And particularly we want Hopewell to be a place
that really calls in the young professionals who many times cannot find a place to live in the city
of Bloomington.
There will be places where businesses can grow and of course we have an incredible park right in Hopewell
as well as two other parks adjacent to Hopewell which are designed for that community connection that
we all need. To take a hard look at our own processes through the Hopewell lens,
and make a test case for building more inclusively and a set of new standards for Bloomington. We are
really looking hard at Hopewell to make sure that we are
Figuring out the bumps in the road that happen when you're trying to develop a plat for a new neighborhood
all the way through permitting. It's my commitment during this term that we will get to a more streamlined
permitting process and we will have a predictable planning process so people know what they're getting
into when they decide to build in Bloomington because we want
this kind of housing in Bloomington. And we want our developers to know transparently what it will take
in order to build homes in Bloomington. The city obviously can build a framework to get housing built,
but it's the individuals and businesses in this room that will make it real. And one of the driving
forces behind how we are pivoting
Hopewell for our community is to turn Hopewell into a development that our local builders and developers
can invest in, can participate in, and can build for our local folks who are in need of housing.
And for those who are at the university now and will be graduating and we want to keep here, for those
who are coming to the businesses that we are growing at the trades district and beyond, we need houses
for those people and Hopewell is the place that we hope our local builders will be creating those homes.
Our work at the city, of course, is always about people first. Hopewell reflects input from residents,
from designers, and from developers. This is what leadership looks like when people listen. Hopewell
will embody our values of sustainability, inclusion, and connection, and we will do it in a way that
removes as much red tape as possible so we can get to the efficiency that our housing system really needs.
And we have been really privileged to be led through this stage of the process by Allie Quinlan Thurman,
who is online with us today. Allie leads the team at Flintlock Labs, who has developed the plans that
you'll see today and the proposals that we'll go over with you throughout the rest of the afternoon.
I'll turn it over to Allie.
Hi, everybody. Thank you very much for having us. We're really excited to run through the work that
we've been doing on Hopewell and really excited to get your feedback as well. We'll do a little bit
of an intro of the project and where we are so far, and then we'll have plenty of time for questions
and discussion at the end. We've been tagging this as a homes catalog, so housing options made easy
as a little bit of a background and an introduction for those of you that I haven't had the pleasure
to meet yet.
I'm based in Fayetteville, Arkansas. I'm a licensed architect and a licensed landscape architect. I
also am a small developer. We build this work in our own neighborhood as R&D and have been for about
10 years. I'm also a former planning commissioner here in my own hometown, which has given us a really
good broad view of how challenging housing can be to get on the ground.
We've been working through pre-approved plans programs as a solution for housing in a lot of communities
since 2017, our first program there. I love to echo the comments here too that this is really a people-first
approach, that this is not about real estate development as much as it is providing housing and community
for the people who will live here.
So our team is three small companies or a big team of small businesses. So Flintlock lab is our architecture,
landscape and building practice here in Fayetteville, Arkansas. The Incremental Development Alliance
is a national nonprofit that I'm a longtime faculty member of and have been serving as executive director
for a few years.
We'll be providing training and capacity building for locals to build these as part of the program.
We'll talk about that a little bit more in depth. Then Kronberg Urbanist and Architects is one of our
partner companies and other INCDA faculty member. Eric is also an architect, planner, and small developer
in Atlanta. We work really aligned and do a lot of these plans programs together because our catalogs
give really good breadth of size and approach within the programs.
So we've got a team here in Fayetteville. One thing that's been really interesting working through the
program here in Bloomington is how similar our cities are. So we're almost exactly the same population.
home of our state's largest university. We also have a lot of experience really struggling with knowing
how to balance the needs of the university and student housing with the needs of year-round residents
and converting those students into year-round residents at graduation. And so we've had a lot of geographic
similarities and code similarities too that we've really been enjoying the experience of working in
Bloomington.
Cronberg, as I mentioned, is based in Atlanta. They also bring a lot of planning and code support to
our team as that's really their specialty.
And then InkDev is really all about helping local strengthen their own neighborhoods. InkDev is a national
nonprofit, as I mentioned, that is 10 years old this year. It's trained almost 10,000 small developers
nationally and in places like South Bend, one of the longest running places that they've been working.
The pre-approved plans program there in South Bend came out of a stress test that were done by InkDev.
And it really is an alliance of practitioners. It's very practicality-based and will provide capacity
building and really hands-on
training from everything from finance to construction detailing, supporting the developers of these
houses all the way from start to finish. We are a really diverse team and part of the reason that we
again want you to think about that is that this is how many specialties it takes to get even small simple
houses built in communities in the United States these days.
Building codes zoning codes processes finance there are a number of reasons that it's really hard to
do this kind of work and so you're not alone in struggling with housing struggling with housing that's
the right size in the right place at the right price point to be able to support people living the kind
of lives that they want to live.
This is really hard work and I want to reinforce that you guys are already really far ahead of most
communities that we work in, in a lot of the work that has been done. And as mentioned, we're still,
you know, we're still having to calibrate even with all of that good work and that is a sign of a successful
system in our experience. We've never worked someplace that didn't have new things that we needed to
take a look at and really looking at this as a practice.
of getting closer has been something that we found at least helps people feel better about, you know,
will never hit perfection.
Pre-approved plans programs are something that we've been working on for almost 10 years as a really
good framework for getting housing. While Hopewell is not a full pre-approved city-wide program, the
way that we might typically see one run, we are really approaching this as delivering fully pre-approved
buildings on platted lots with utility connections that are ready to go pull a permit for somebody.
We also have been calibrating the program to be able to be rolled into a citywide pre-approved program
in the future, which really means that we're trying to calibrate plan selections and dimensions to currently
plotted lot sizes and standards throughout the city.
One of the reasons we really took this approach from the beginning is that even if we build out Hopewell
exactly as drawn in our best case scenario, and we've got people moving in, and it is a full win for
this one site, we will not have solved the housing crisis. And so we really are trying to do what I
think is really a dual mandate here that we're really championing that is
building Hopewell out and also capacity building local so that we can build housing long term is calibrated
to Bloomington's need well past you know the full successful build out of Hopewell.
The use of stock plans or standardized plans that get repeated multiple times within neighborhoods has
a huge history in the United States. There are many places that have adopted pre-approved catalogs.
There are several in Indiana. It's been interesting too. We've done lots of Indiana work in the last
few years. We've worked on regional projects in Southern Indiana and Indiana Uplands. We've done developer
trainings in Indianapolis last year, and then we've got our long-term work in South Bend. We talked
about, we're also kicking off one of these programs in Fort Wayne coming
You guys are doing lots of work statewide.
Plants catalogs and Sears kit homes and, you know, pattern books as they were sometimes called really
were the way that most of our historic neighborhoods were built out. And so a lot of these catalogs
have a really good history and, you know, proven track record of being great ways that we can build
neighborhoods full of personality that are homes that people can really build out and customize through
time. But it can be a very efficient way to build out a neighborhood rather than feeling like every
home needs to be fully custom, fully designed for its own independent lot.
Pre-preplans programs as an approach have really taken off nationwide. They started with ADU plans as
an approach, especially the West Coast had several big state bills that were passed legalizing this
kind of program. But a number of cities nationally have adopted these and seen really good success in
starting to see redevelopment of types of housing that the market is not typically producing.
A couple of things that we're trying to do with this program, one of them is expedite development processes.
Often, this is a really great way that the city is functionally acting as a small developer, taking
a project through its own system and flagging friction points that the city can make a decision they
are feeling like is adding to the quality you're getting, sometimes is not adding to the quality you're
getting. It's really common to have a development process, stress test calibration that comes out of this.
We're also trying to reduce development costs. A lot of times that extra process, that extra time, that
extra complexity is raising the bar so that really only out-of-state developers with big legal teams
and lots of consultants can successfully develop within the system. Often that's reducing the lovability
of buildings that we're getting. It's also really giving you more of a standard product of housing rather
than something that's calibrated for your neighborhoods, your residents.
So shifting into a lower bar for entry with more clear standards, which can be achieved via a pre-approved
program, can help create local wealth, that these are being built by, owned by locals, and that you're
not exporting wealth out to out-of-town developers. It also helps develop better built outcomes. We're
not trying to zone for good architecture via really complicated zoning patterns and architectural design
controls that then need review boards. Instead, we're developing good built outcomes that the city's
selecting the architecture,
details from the beginning so that you know what you're getting. It also helps reintroduce a greater
variety of housing options, which I think is one of the most useful things kind of about this program.
A lot of builders can build what they're familiar with because that's a safer path to take and development
is a really risky business. We see that as a really rational decision, but often by reintroducing different
types of really desirable housing that aren't commonly being built, we can also get the
private market more familiar and comfortable with those and then start to see a broader range of housing
types be built. One of the things that we talk about the most in terms of those wider range of housing
types is who we're trying to house. One of the things, this is the most important, I think, set of data
that we present. We talk about it a lot.
Often when we start talking housing, people have an assumption, whether they realize it or not, we usually
do, that we're talking about this young family, 2.5 kids and a dog, really specific household type as
the most common owners of homes. That is not statistically where we sit in the United States
or in Bloomington. Our most common household type across the US and the local stats match the national
ones almost exactly.
The most common household type, almost half of households, are two people with no kids. Either that
is empty nesters, you know, your kids are only there for a little while, you have a long time as adults
with that house, couples who haven't had kids, or couples who haven't had kids yet. But almost half
of our households are two people sleeping in one bed at night.
The next most common household is one person living alone. That is the fastest growing household type.
Typically, anytime that people can afford to live alone, they do. That's a really fast growing demographic
in the United States. Those two household types combined are about 75 percent of households.
About three-quarters of households are one or two people living often in one bed at night.
As we start to think about the most common size and format of house, it becomes really clear very quickly
why housing is typically too large, too expensive, and too far apart to fit the majority of the households
that we actually need to be focusing on housing. This is also challenging for that minority of households
that have kids in them because we often end up with small households that have enough budget to buy
a larger house,
And they have no other option. While they might prefer a smaller house that might be a little bit lower
maintenance, might be less expensive, often they can stay in a big house, right? Empty nesters who don't
downsize because they have nowhere to go. And so they end up, you know, sort of taking up a house that
could be a great family house if we were providing a more diverse set of housing that's better suited
to those small households.
As you can see here, if we look at the flip of this, the size of our houses that we have right now,
about 62 percent of them have three or more bedrooms. When we talk about having lots of large houses,
but still feeling that crunch for young families, that's really what's going on. We've got smaller households
that are in larger homes than they need or want because we have provided very few small homes. One of
the reasons we're going to talk about there is lot size. Lot size requirements have a lot to do with
that across the United States.
One of the things that's really challenging, and you may be experiencing this and it may not feel housing
related but it is, as you were working through budget conversations.
The format that we have for a lot of our neighborhoods that we can only build single family houses and
they have to be on relatively large lots means that we have quite a bit of infrastructure and service
needs that are being provided by very few taxpayers in very few houses, right? In this situation, which
is sort of default normal under zoning in most of the United States, even if you start to make one of
those a duplex, you have very few units that are available and there's very little city available in
that house.
We talk about this as housing, that instead we want to focus getting both more ratepayers in on the
same amount of infrastructure so that city budgets are significantly better balanced, but we also want
to see this as a people first approach. This does work better financially, but it also starts to provide
housing choice. We can live in the same neighborhood for our entire life cycle. We have a wide range
of housing types, housing sizes, housing budgets,
that we can live within the place that we want to live, that's close to the coffee shop that we like,
that's walkable to work. We can live there with neighbors who also have a wide variety of choice within
their housing. As we start to talk through some of the changes we're going to be making, I want you
to think back to this graphic of if we don't have a wide variety of housing relatively close together.
We're both worse off for city budgets and we also have a number of people that end up pushed
to outer edges of town because that's the only place they can find a house. Bloomington is like many
places and I think more so than many places really seeing suffering from popularity and success. There's
a huge population growth within the city within the last 20 years and projected to continue to grow
significantly. As we think about the household size going down, remember how small our average household
sizes. This is one thing we want to think about too.
When in the year 2000, our population was significantly smaller than it is now, we also had a larger
average household size. That average household size is going down steadily every year, which means that
we need more total units
to house the same number of people as more and more people want to live alone. So we're really working
against two different challenges here. Population growth is definitely a challenge. We definitely need
more housing to house new residents that are moving in or staying after college. We also have to be
focusing on housing increasing numbers of individuals or couples living in homes.
One of the other things we really flagged here that's very specific about this program is the need to
be promoting home ownership. We've got a really high rental rate, which is often a sign that we don't
have a balanced set of housing, that we've got lots of rentals available, lots of people who own homes
but don't want to sell them. And we really need to be providing that pathway into home ownership part
of this program.
From a cost standpoint, we actually are at a somewhat unusual cost focus. One of the things that we
often have found in communities like Bloomington, who do have really successful professionals, is that
one of the challenges that we often see too is that when we aren't providing a wide range of price points,
we both need hyper affordable, very attainable price points. We do also need some nicer homes. One of
the things that we see happen sometimes is that we'll have naturally occurring, is what that's called,
naturally occurring existing homes that are relatively
affordable by virtue of being smaller and older, not fully improved. In communities that we're not providing
the full range of price points, we often also see wealthier professionals purchase small affordable
homes and then renovate them, add on, tear them down, build a large house, and we're losing that attainable
housing that we already have, which is very hard to recreate, partially because we're not providing
any higher-end housing. I also want to flag in your brains, we do need really attainable housing. There
are really good affordability
as part of this program, a couple of more expensive models that are great for professionals who are
kind of mid-career can also actually help save some of our existing attainable housing. So that diversity
of price point is also really important to match the diversity of incomes that we see in Bloomington.
As we look at the Hopewell Master Plan, we're here in blocks nine and 10.
and so sort of settling you in terms of what we're going to be looking at in this first section. We're
blocks nine and 10 down in the southwest corner. We'll run through a quick case study too of another
home catalog that is in process as an example of the calibrations that happen to solve the really specific
challenges of any community's individual housing. One of the things that we want to
Talk about again through the Southerland Choice is the wide variety of what we would call house scaled
buildings that we can get quite a variety of unit types and unit sizes that all play really nicely together.
Everything from small, missing middle apartment buildings down to really small micro units that hit
great affordability metrics.
So this is the rough selection of building types that you might see in a catalog that even you know
this this goes up to a 10 plex. It has there's a four plex six plex and 10 plex in this one, as well
as some little micro units right so the daffodil is a 16 by 22 studio unit that is built and sold for sale.
So a pretty wide range of unit types. And then another element that you're going to see tucked into
here is the need for kind of two things that we'll be talking through as part of this.
One of them is small lots. I mentioned lot size is partially what's driving our affordability issues
in a lot of the United States. If you think about a rough metric that lots of developers use is that
your land cost should be no more than 20% of the total sales value of your eventual house. If you're
gonna buy a lot, you can't really sell a house on it for less than, right, about 80%, you know, more
than that lot cost. So as we start to look at lot sizes, and this is a,
Case study that is done on Kronberg's work that this is an actual built for a nonprofit project in Atlanta
originally, but the numbers have been calibrated to Bloomington current year costs. So if we look at
our small, you know, three bedroom single family home on a normal size lot, we can get to decent AMI.
So, you know, your area median income, a person making the average amount of income within your town
percent AMI. So somebody making 130 percent AMI is someone who is slightly more successful making slightly
more than average. 130 for new construction is actually pretty good metrics. But one of the things that
we see here too is the down payments on these can be somewhat limiting. So we can and in this scheme
they could get to a decent affordability success rate with just a single small family house.
house as an infill. But as we start to see ADUs legalized in lots of communities, we can get down to
a really good affordability for the rental of that ADU. But look at how much the down payment of this
house has jumped. So we're at $25,000 that somebody needs in cash to be able to buy this house. In order
to buy an accessory dwelling unit, here's the challenge we found with accessory dwelling units. As somebody
who's written a lot of ADU codes and loves ADUs, the challenge is you're buying two houses
in a package of one. There are some people who can afford two houses, there are some people who cannot.
One of the things that we find really impressive is that if we let homeowners split that accessory dwelling
unit off and sell it separately, we can capture both via real affordability benefit of the small unit,
which is why it's so affordable for rental is because it's very small, and also we can lower down payment
rate. If we can build the ADU, great, we've got another unit, we're housing another resident,
an affordable rate, but it's pretty expensive for somebody to be able to buy, which means it's pretty
hard to resell. If we can split the lot once and build two more ADUs, we can get that down payment down
a little bit, but we're really still paying for both of those houses. And the down payment on these
is also really high. We need $50,000 to $70,000 in down payments, so limiting our number of buyers.
Although our house then price points, the price to own is pretty attainable. We see these affordability
rates keep coming down the more houses that we can build. But in our scenario four here where we've
allowed these units to all be built and then allowed them to each be split out onto their own lot, we
start to see down payments that are down in the 12 to $20,000 range and we're hitting a 70 to 120 percent AMI.
for homeownership. So homeownership is also really promoted anytime we can split very small houses out
on their own lots. They can be purchased with a regular mortgage from the bank downtown. So as we talk
about small lots, this has been one of the easiest ways we've found to sort of describe, there's the
two part that we're really working on, that monthly cost to own, but also your down payment approaches.
So the approach that we take with this is that we'll have
user-friendly catalog that is all the details of each home, the overall dimensions, overall price points
even, and then also full buildable construction documents that are fully pre-permitted through the city
office. Then there's also a program guide to help guide people through how they build, what is exactly,
who do they call next? Then this recommendations for the program is something else that we can talk
through a little bit.
that we find in code that is helpful to make updates to get better yield. One of the things that we
really wanna focus on is matching the historic character and scale of a lot of our neighborhoods. And
so we see lots of cottages, we see lots of small format plans, but we also see lots of opportunity for
some two story units that can really make good efficient use of the additional foundation costs that
we need anytime we're building on car store clay as we are in Bloomington and as we do at home.
So as we look through kind of this first round of proposals, we're proposing putting forward a real
mix of housing types and price points.
fully pre-approved home designs that will streamline permitting and reduce costs for builders. They'll
also reduce the unknowns for small developers, which, you know, unknown amount of time that it's going
to take to work through pre-development and get to groundbreaking can cause a lot of heartache for small
developers who don't have, you know, an enormous balance sheet behind them. That extra time is real
extra cost for them.
We really want to build this out as a local opportunity for local builders. And so we would not necessarily
envision that these would be built individually home by home by different builders, often on small sites,
that can be challenging. But the price points of these, the goal would be that people can easily take
on three to five, you know, if not built concurrently, then, you know, sort of lots together that they
can be strategizing and building with lots of support through the process.
We'll also be working through with RDC legal frameworks to support permanently affordable and market
rate homes. There is a challenge with some of these that the first time that we build a home, we often
can get to really good affordability metrics. Often then they're in such good locations, they're small
enough that we get really big bidding wars on those units for resale. And so we've seen several instances
without a legal framework of sort of affordability protections that the first home buyer gets a phenomenal
subsidy, gets a house,
well below the federal standard definitions of affordable. Then in a couple of years of living in it,
they can turn around and sell it for double what they paid for it, which is a great income piece for
them, not great for long-term affordability. We'll be working through a permanent legal structure that
the homes will be allowed to build equity in them. Each home buyer can build some equity in that house,
but also that we can control overall price points and resale long-term to maintain the benefit.
We'll have ongoing community outreach as well as developer training. We're starting now our engagement
with local developers and local lenders. Finance is also a big hang up that we often run into for these.
So they'll also be calibrated for local finance.
And here's where we are in the overall project. So we've really wrapped up our discovery phase, kind
of research, getting used to the real specifics of Bloomington and how this can be most impactful citywide.
We're working on our detailed land planning now with neighbors, partners, and city departments. We'll
then work through the plat and entitlement process to be able to hopefully pass a PUD on these two blocks.
The block eight, which the police department will go on, will be part of that PUD. There are eight and
nine or one block right now. So we'll plaque those together. And then we'll work through starting to
recruit developers and lenders as part of the feedback group, as well as assess interest of people who
may be interested in building these.
We'll have some city-wide trainings talking about incremental development and how that works both for
professionals and non-professionals. We find one of the things that's really important on these programs
is ecosystem training. Housing is not built in a vacuum. Our planners and our fire marshals and our
city officials and our lenders and our housing advocates are just as important to have onboard
and understanding and pulling in the same direction as the builders themselves.
So as we've worked through quite a bit of calibration into Bloomington itself, really trying to focus
again on being able to have this rollout into a full pre-approved program. One of the things that we
wanted to show and one of the kind of background of one of the biggest things that we'll be asking for
is looking at one thing that is really unique about Bloomington and the way that the lots are platted.
In a lot of neighborhoods, and this is a specific case study of a specific existing block, this is right
next to Rose Hill Cemetery there on Elm and Forth. You have many blocks, which this is really interesting,
we hadn't seen this before, that have side driveway alleys platted as well as platted rear unbuilt alleys.
With lots of unbuilt, what we would call a paper alley, it exists only on paper, it has never been built.
But we also have very deep lots.
relative to most similar-sized cities that were developed at similar times, there's very large lots.
One of the things that this is leading to is the feeling, I think for a lot of Bloomington residents,
that there is nowhere to infill. As you drive or walk down 3rd Street or 4th Street, there are no vacant
lots. You have a full built-out street of homes that you were seeing and short of removing homes, there's
no way to infill any additional area. One of the things that we're looking at though, and I have looked
at in several communities,
legalizing the ability to use that alley as legal street frontage that's something that is one of the
you know, probably the last five years, one of the most popular code changes that we're seeing.
can lead to the ability to infill our backyards, land that does not currently feel like it's developable
because it's not very visible from the street. But the lots in a lot of these neighborhoods are so deep
that they would be a typical urban, you know, depth lot and in town, in a town of about your size lot,
even with a small lot carved out in the back.
One of the things that we've seen be really beneficial in some communities for this is that you get
a whole second street frontage. You can double the number of units within your neighborhood block. It's
entirely voluntary because if you don't want anything built on your backyard, great, you don't have
to. But it does also allow for the creation of significantly more attainable housing while preserving
existing historic fabric on very little additional infrastructure maintenance costs for the city because
an alley as a frontage is much
cheaper to maintain than a full 60 foot right of way. One of the things that we also see as a real benefit
to this is that through a code change only, just legalizing alleys as frontage and then legalizing lot
splits. We understand there's lots of controls that will likely want to be put on that to make sure
that we don't have, again, out of town developers taking advantage of that. All achievable. One of the
things that we see as a huge benefit to this is additional land in your backyard that is not buildable,
doesn't really have any value to it. You can't sell it, you can't borrow on it, you couldn't fix up
your house with a home equity line of credit using that as value. The ability to split those lots out
though creates legal buildable lots, which have a value both for homeowners, they can stay in their
home, they don't have to downsize, they can pull some equity out of that by selling a rear lot to a
new resident, or they can borrow on the value of that lot as a home equity line of credit or refinance
to improve their own home.
They're rough numbers on these and we pulled general lot values in Bloomington to run these comps, but
just by that one legal code change.
allowing alleys as lot frontage. We can create 20 new lots in town in a new neighborhood, 20 new dwelling
units. These were all single-family cottages. We've also created almost a million dollars in lot value
only by allowing those to be legal lots. One of the things that we'll talk about a lot is alley frontage
and small lots throughout our code change recommendations. As we do some of these things, I think it's
helpful to return to, what are we trying to achieve?
One of the things that we really want to be able to achieve is the historic village the parts of town
that we we love the most right and we put on the postcard are often relatively dense relatively mixed
use some of sometimes that's office sometimes that is little shops.
but the ability to have everything that you need within walking or biking distance to your own neighborhood.
Here's an example of a neighborhood that Cronberg developed, self-developed. This is behind Eric's house
in Atlanta that has an alley as frontage. There are not sidewalks, but it's such a small street that
residents walk and play in that street. There's often kids on bikes there when I have been there visiting Eric.
Some some of the products that Eric and I have developed here really small houses ranging from 500 square
feet in the bottom left up to 2000 square feet one of our family houses that's tucked into the neighborhood
with that.
cute wraparound porch there on the north. Both of these incorporate alley frontage, you know, kind of
your front, the front of your lot, your front door facing an alley, sometimes where they're even facing
green spaces. So pocket neighborhoods or green space facing lots are another really useful component
that this legalizes and it means we can do cottage courts, pocket neighborhoods without needing a condo
association that the alley in the back is your frontage, although your front door might be facing a
park or a trail.
We talked a little bit about reintroducing housing types, but this is another of the kind of elements
that we used within our Massachusetts program recently to show the wide range of housing types that
we typically weren't seeing being produced by the market. With pre-approved plans, we can reintroduce
and really create some additional diversity within the program. What might this look like conceptually,
specifically in Hopewell?
We started out with this first concept plan as a point of discussion. One of the things that we've really
been working through is how wide street rights of way should be. What are those street sections? What
should those look like? And so this was our first element. And I want you guys to pay a little bit of
attention here to our yields at the bottom. So this is 118 units.
We've got a finished lot value that we've created from this again taking an average of lot values that
are for sale currently in Bloomington, assuming that these are a little cheaper because they're a little
smaller but that there's also a range of values within this.
We've got home prices within this initial plan from $175,000 up to 676. So the median price here is
about 290. So really hitting that young professional kind of price point that we're aiming for, the
mortgage payment on that is similar to renting an apartment, which is also often a good metric
of affordability for that.
for that kind of market segment. Flagging, you know, we did, we had not widened Fairview, which was
a little bit of a flag and we did have some multifamily mixed into the inner blocks.
We explored some alternatives and this is the yield impacts that can have seemingly minor changes. This
one widened fair views. This gives us a full 60-foot right of way. We minimize the number of lots that
faced onto an alley directly. These have an alley rear frontage, but a trail as their front face through
an old alley. There's a 12-foot alley easement. We're using that as a trail easement and then building
out a full alley that can be used for
fire access and utilities. So this dropped us to 84 homes. So it's about 30% less units. Our finished
lot value dropped about 30%. And our home prices, our average went up a little because we were losing
some of those smallest units and we lost kind of the multifamily units, which brought our price points
down a little, but we still maintain that, you know, 200,000 to 676 rough price point. The largest,
most expensive houses are our corner units where we've got some three bedroom family houses, you know,
they've got a play
room and a decent size laundry, the kind of home that you can easily, you know, purchase either with
kids or knowing that that's going to be important to you. And then we also have some really small studio
duplexes and really attainable units for single person households.
And I wanted to show, too, if this is helpful, as we're bringing through some of our code changes in
our PUD, this is our current by right. We want to call out really clearly, R4 is actually a great zone.
You guys have done great zoning work already. The TRO is a great zone. And here's our current yield
that we can do within the R4. And this is partially due to how deep our lots are in town. So this is
a larger lot than is required for minimum lot size. But because we've got a minimum lot width, we can't
actually use this backspace for anything because we don't have a street back
there's not really a way to put one in. So we end up with lots of extra space that isn't necessarily
buildable. But under current buy right development, we can fit 28 homes, right? So about three quarters
less than we're proposing doing with a couple of these code changes. So we thought this might be helpful
to also see just relative to the background of why we're trying to ask for some of these.
So we have plenty of time for questions. We can go back to any slides that we need to for discussion.
But I also would encourage you guys to reach out to us now or throughout the process. We'd love this
to be a really engaged and informed program. And so any feedback that you've got for us now or in the
future, any recommendations you have for us of builders, locals, sometimes general contractors who are
doing residential building can be scaled up to great small developers. We'd love those introductions.
So I will pass it to Anna to manage Q&A in the room.
We do not have a great way to mic you all for questions unless you come up to the podium and speak.
So people online, and we do have quite a number of them, can hear the questions. So can I just ask if
you have a question to ask if you come up to the microphone? Now is a great time to do that. Come on up, Bill.
Break the Ice. I'm Phil Stafford. And you were talking a lot about how many people are living alone
these days. And that's a significant demographic change. But much of that demographic change is driven
by the aging of our population. Significant amount of that. Something like a third of the population
in West Side neighborhoods west of the Beeline Trail, or 30% of those people are living alone.
Another 30% are people over the age of 50. And so what I was looking for in the presentation was some
reference to aging in place through universal design and other kinds of community supports that help
people accomplish that. But what I heard was a more transitory environment where people can build up
some quick equity and then resell their property, which seems to me would
be a detriment if we're trying to also build community with this neighborhood as well. I can hop in
and take some ownership of having explained that poorly. There is
an accessibility percentage that will be insured in a lot of these. One of the largest buyer groups
that we do see of these homes is seniors who are wanting to stay within their own neighborhood, have
lived in the neighborhood for the majority of their life, are in a larger house than they really want,
and would like to be able to downsize but stay within the neighborhood. I think it's likely a minimum
of between 30 and 40 percent of the units that will be fully adaptable for age and place wheelchair
accessibility. But there is also a real focus
within the program of the ability to have those units be very flexible to a wide range of ages, but
that seniors are a really important buyer group. So I apologize for not talking about that nearly enough.
Just to add on, because now seems like an opportune time, Ali, the population slide that was shown really
was where we aspired to be.
several years ago when the master plan was developed we were aspiring to have population growth that
hasn't happened actually perhaps because we don't have enough housing and we do want people to stay
in neighborhoods obviously and build that neighborhood connection and
What is happening now is people are staying in homes that are much larger than what they want to stay
in. They want to stay in the community, but they may not be able to maintain the home that they have
or may not want to. My family is a great example. We, at one time, had five kids at home. We only have
two now. And in three years, we'll have none. So we don't need the same size house. Hopefully,
in three years, we'll have none.
Um, and, and, but we'd love to stay obviously in Bloomington and, and close to the neighborhood we're
in now. And this, um, allows some movement in the market. And right now there isn't much. Come on up
for the next question. Let me also say that if you are online and you have a question, please drop it
in the chat or raise your hand. There were, um, two things that jumped out at me. Um,
regarding the obstacles to this kind of stuff besides zoning. And that's the fire marshal. Currently,
we have historic neighborhoods that we all love and we've protected that we are not allowed to build.
We have houses off eight-foot alleys currently in these neighborhoods. We're not allowed to do that
anymore. So the fire marshal is one obstacle for this regarding infill. How do we get past that is the question.
And then the second thing is also the fire marshal. And one of those slides you showed is stack the
duplex. You can't stack residences anymore without a full fire suppression system, riser, vault, post
indicator valve, which is outrageously expensive. Yet they're all over our community right now with
no fire suppression. So that's my question is how do we go back to the things we love and we're protecting
with all of these
onerous, egregious codes that really don't really amount to much when it comes to affordability. It
just drives up cost. That is an excellent question and something that we really struggle with in a lot
of different locations. And I'll give you the two part answer. Part one is everything that we propose
will be fully compliant with current fire codes. So we've got a 20 foot wide fire access route. The
alleys are built at 20 foot walk width.
for a fire truck, we've got a maximum of 150-foot fire hose pull to every unit. All of our eaves are
below 30 feet in height so that we don't need aerial access, the larger ladder trucks, which has a wider
requirement. And then we use a limited amount of attached dwellings. Townhouses are a better, you know,
townhouses are sort of the secret hack for fire code right now because the fire separation wall that
is horizontal between them.
The units are between two vertical walls. You don't have any horizontal separations. It's a cheaper
detail to build. It's much easier to get done. Lots of more residential contractors can achieve those
details. Townhouses really help us get the density that we're looking for with achievable fire separations.
I will say almost every state that we have done a pre-proof program in, we have ended up in
really attempting to and sometimes successfully making amendments to the state fire code. Depending
on your local representation, we've had successful bills in Tennessee, North Carolina, New Hampshire.
We took through state bills in Oklahoma and Arkansas last year, which our first time through usually
doesn't work. We got our first ones in, we'll be reintroducing bills there. But advocacy for building
code changes is an absolutely critical component of affordable housing because exactly as you're saying,
Lots of the things that we love and know work and have had in our communities is phenomenal, high value,
high desirability housing for 100 years are not legal to build under current building code. We see a
huge cost to that literally and figuratively in successfully deploying housing in communities. If you're
interested in know a state senator, a state representative, we've got some really good model bills that
we'd love to help with.
Hi, Ali. My name is Eric Spoonmore. I'm with the Chamber of Commerce here in Bloomington. You had mentioned
that there was a mechanism, a legal mechanism, I think, that would prevent the potential for large capital
gains of people that might sell a house after two or three years when they first bought it. I'm curious
how that works, if there's other communities that are doing that. And then would that be legal to do
in Indiana, or is there special legislation that we would need to have in order
to make that happen. And then are there any tax implications, property tax revenue implications to that
as we're kind of on a market-based system here in Indiana, would that limit our ability to generate
the necessary tax revenue that we need to provide services? It's a really common mechanism that is becoming
mandatory in lots of communities for, I'll give some examples of,
A land trust is often the format that it takes, but you need an entity that is holding the protections.
Functionally, what is often happening
Whether it's via a land trust or whether it's via another mechanism or another holder of that is that
there's a deed restriction on the home that there's a right of first refusal that is held by an entity.
Sometimes it's the land trust. It could be the RDC. It could be the city. There's a right of first refusal
to purchase that home at a pre-agreed upon appreciation rate.
If we have a long-term homebuyer, this becomes not very important, but the protections are actually
there to prevent people from buying the house, sitting in it for a few years, selling it, and then the
house is doubled in price. The first right of refusal means that there's an annual pre-agreed
upon appreciation that you know that you will get when you're ready to sell your house. When you're
ready to sell your house, the holding entity of that protection
has a qualified list of home buyers that they can bring in to purchase the house. The house is typically
sold then below what the market rate might be. It's generally a capped rate. In some communities, it's
5 percent annually. There are communities that your annual housing appreciation is actually 30 percent.
A 10 or 15 percent cap is actually much
well below market rate, but still a great return. We're trying to balance that. Home buying, especially
really affordable units, is an important way that households are growing wealth, especially in our deeply
affordable units. Some equity growth is valuable. You don't want units doubling in value and now they're
not affordable anymore. It's really trying to balance the needs of the affordability metric and the
needs of the home buyer, but that has typically been a mechanism that's really popular and has worked
really well and been
maintainable. It also means that the structure of that deed restriction, it's the most popular way to
do it because if the entity that's holding that deed restriction is not able to exercise their first
right of refusal, the home can then be sold at market rate, which means that you don't really see the
same reduction in appraised value or assessed value that you would in more stringent, you know, if it's
a deed restricted that you can only sell that house to somebody with a specific income. There's a deed
restriction program right now in Colorado that's really unique that you have to, in order to inhabit
these houses that are being built under this program, you have to work a minimum of 30 hours a week
in the community and make a certain income. We do see some hit on tax value and assessed value of those
homes because they can't be sold at market rate. The deed restriction program has worked really well
in a lot of communities because they could be sold at market rate.
of a program but they could roll out of it at any time so they're typically not taxed at a lower value
than they would be otherwise. We don't see a lot of property tax negative impacts. One of the things
about the higher density too that we're really seeing is we actually see significantly higher tax revenue
from blocks that are developed at this kind of a density
While each person's property taxes stay relatively approachable because their house value is small,
you're buying a $200,000 house, your property tax rate is pretty attainable at that price point, but
you have so many more houses. In this one, we have four times the number of individual dwelling units.
Our overall assessed value that we're taxing on is significantly higher than neighborhoods that have
larger lots and fewer homes, but each
persons taxes are lower. And so it works out really well economically for both homeowners and the city
typically. We have a couple of questions online. Let's start first with Mark Fig. I love the idea of
changing codes to allow more use in existing neighborhoods. How would you handle very common private
restrictions?
I'm going to ask Mark too for clarification on private restrictions. I'm reading and interpreting that
as deed restrictions that already exist on the neighborhood. Some subdivisions have restrictions that
you can only build a house in a certain size or your lot has to be a certain size that can overrule the city.
a wide variety of what people mean from that though too, because there are some neighborhoods that have
restrictive covenants that have been struck down in court, you know, as being discriminatory or there's
a wide variety of what we might mean when we say private restrictions. So I'll also ask if possible
for a clarification in that. I'm just speaking about private restrictions against multiple units on
one lot and things of that nature that limit
the ideas that densify? Typically, if we are able to get legal lot frontage and you can legally split
a lot, then we can still be in compliance with those private restrictions because there is only one
dwelling unit per lot. You've just created an additional lot in the back. There are a lot of communities where
Both things can work. One of the other things that we see as being really important is that not every
neighborhood, not every set of neighbors, not every block is going to want to have infill in the back.
One of the big benefits of legalizing these things is that we're allowing people to do it if they want
to, there are no requirements to do so. Blocks that were neighborhoods that want to keep the same density,
keep the same look, can do so. Thank you.
Thank you. Okay, we'll go back to in-person and then online. Thanks so much. My name is Jen Pearl and
I'm with the Bloomington Economic Development Corporation. And thanks so much for the really
great presentation. It's exciting to see what's possible. My question is about opportunity zones or
any other federal programs or state programs that could be leveraged to help with affordability and
development in these areas.
That's a great question. This section of Hopewell, we believe is in an opportunity zone. And so working
through finance with the developers of the program will be something that we're working through. An
opportunity zone fund is somewhat complex on a lot by lot element. So that's one of the things that
is in our developer lender feedback scope is to do some exploratory work on whether or not an opportunity
zone fund that is over the entire set of two blocks could be a great way to have people able
to invest in functionally a rolling construction equity loan that could then be used for multiple small
developers within the blocks. There are several creative financing piece. I know we've got John Zote
from CDFI Friendly on today. We'll be talking CDFI funding too, but there's quite a few creative financing
mechanisms that are going to be explored for this to figure out the best way to get these deployed.
Okay, we have another comment online from Richard Lewis, acknowledging that the Hopewell neighborhood
offer offers opportunities that the previously built older core neighborhoods may not fire safety alley with etc.
Is there a thought to adjusting the code just to hope well for starters as sort of a building lab and
then possibly spreading code changes outward from there that may better reflect the reality of the existing
right of ways in the older neighborhoods? Is it possible to adopt code changes just to a single area
like that? That's also a great question. And that is the way that we are currently planning to tackle
the code changes.
There are several other blocks in Hopewell that are under the TRO zoning type. And so we actually also
have two zoning types that are within the area. So this first set of blocks, it's blocks eight, nine,
and 10. Let me come back up to our lot map so we can see which ones those are. So eight, nine, and 10 will be
entitled under a PUD, so a planned unit development that will be a specific set of code overlay for
just these blocks. That will let us test and calibrate what we think the code changes need to be, but
then also get another round of testing those on the ground to see did we miss anything? Do we have something
that went too far? Let us really
rolled way, be able to calibrate and know that if there are wider zoning changes that are then incorporated
as part of a larger housing plan that citywide, that we've got a really good calibration and test of
how those work on the ground that people can go and see and touch before a larger code change that citywide
comes through. Do we have any more questions in council chambers?
Don Weiler local builder. This one comment. First, I do agree that build a lot for new homes at all
price points. It is an important the without that build a lot for homes at all price points, including
the higher value homes that will take over affordable homes that then are substantially improved and
then become unaffordable.
So I will support the comment that Ali made about that. Currently, ADUs in Bloomington are required
to have a deed restriction. There is a primary residence deed restriction, and also that the ADUs cannot
be sold separate from the primary residence. And in fact, I just read an article today that talked about
that specifically, and it referred to that as a poison pill.
for the development of 80 years. Um, so I guess the question really is, are those restrictions up for
consideration in the city of Bloomington? Thank you. I'll pass that answer to the mayor while she comes
up to the, uh, lecture and I'll weigh in 100% in support that, um, anytime we can sell that
80 you separately, man, does it help with the portability?
And we're looking at all ways to help affordability. And part of the reason that having owner occupancy
tied to an ADU and one of the strokes of brilliance about Ali's wisdom about the potential to divide
these deep lots is that if I want to build an ADU but don't have the cash outright to
to build that ADU, I have to remortgage my entire house to do that. With a lot split, you would be able
to get a separate mortgage just to, well, construction loan converted to a mortgage for that ADU and
provide a much more affordable rental product or potentially an owner-occupied smaller house.
on that ADU, so it'll be part of our conversation for future potential UDO changes. And I'll really
encourage too, while our next question comes up, everybody that has, especially our builders who are
in these codes all the time, who have those really smooth questions, we would love to hear from you.
With those, I'm gonna put our emails back up, because you guys are the experienced ones at this code,
and if you've got specific
problem areas, we'd love to know about it so we can take a look. Phil Stafford. I'm sorry. Was she done?
Yeah. Okay. Phil Stafford again. You make reference to blocks 2, 8, 9, and 10 recently, and I wondered
if you could clarify what this means for the old Bloomington convalescence structure, which has been
identified as a
possible police station for the city. I'm not fond of that idea, but I think there's some potential
for significant again senior housing and or intergenerational housing in that building with restoration.
So I'm just unclear whether that's in your plan or not.
I'd be happy to take that question. Currently, the Flintlock scope only includes blocks nine and 10.
Block eight was excluded from this particular project. However, due to the PUD requirement of having
at least five acres, we had to include it in all of Hopewell South's PUD consideration for right now.
The future use of that building has not been decided by the Redevelopment Commission as of yet, but
it is a hopeful site of a potential BPD station. Do we have any other questions in person or online?
There are great studies about lights and sirens for emergency vehicles. We still run lights and sirens
on all our calls, it seems like, because I live downtown and it's pretty loud. The police department
in the neighborhood lights and silence rules every time they go out. It's going to get interesting.
There are good studies saying that that doesn't really help. Have we looked at that? Are we considering
that as a city?
We are you know be part of our discussion about relocation of the police department. This is a obviously
a neighborhood that had a lot of lights and sirens because it used to be the hospital site. So home
to many ambulances. But we've we've done some workarounds even with the police station where it is now
where they delay turning on those lights and sirens. Other questions here or online.
I'm going to invite Allie to any closing comments you want to make and then I'll close us out. I'm excited
to work through this with everybody and hope to hear from you on feedback. I'd love for you guys to
stay engaged as we go and we are really hopeful that we'll be able to take a PUD through relatively
quickly and we look forward to comments and support on that. Thank you so much.
Thanks Ali and thanks for your team's work on this. This really is an exciting pivot in innovating on
housing for Bloomington and I'm really thrilled with where Ali and her team have led us in collaboration
with our city team and much input from folks here on the ground.
We will continue to get that input. And if you saw that timeline, you know that we're really hoping
to train developers and get this ready to go by June of next year. So that's our timeline. You can expect
to see more details as we know them. And we remain open to questions and comments even after the meeting.
Thanks so much for spending your time with us this afternoon.