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Journal North: Home | Sports | Opinion | Obits | Entertainment
Sunday, March 14, 2010
City Should Address Growing 'Bad Infill' Problem
By Karen Peterson
Of the Journal
A new two-story house in an unassuming Santa Fe neighborhood is built six feet from the back lot line and looms over the windows of the neighboring one-story home.
Across the street from one of old Santa Fe's most notable Pueblo Revival-style historic homes, a row of faux-Territorial condominiums backs on a parking lot big enough to serve a neighborhood strip mall.
On a quiet and once family-owned lane off Garcia St., in the heart of the historic district, five large houses clog a cul-de-sac space where once there were only two modest homes.
"It's infill gone wild," says Pete Garcia, who lives at the end of the lane off the street named for his family.
It's also "bad infill," says former city councilor Karen Heldmeyer, who has put together an informal tour of these and other properties she says are all allowed by city development rules, even in the notoriously rule-burdened historic district, and are eroding the city's neighborhoods.
"Infill" — filling up empty urban spaces, from vacant lots and the unused space between houses or commercial buildings to the space above buildings, where second (or third) stories can be added — is a big buzzword in Santa Fe. Infill is "green," advocates say, because it capitalizes on existing utility and water lines and other infrastructure. It's anti-sprawl.
It dovetails with another city planning buzzword, "new urbanism." Translation: high-density residential development, often with related commercial establishments mixed in, designed to promote "walkability" (yet another buzzword) and foster a sense of community.
Put them together and you might get second- and third-story apartments atop strip malls, as has been proposed for Santa Fe's "downtown" mall, De Vargas Center. You also get three or four two-story condominium units shoved onto the vest-pocket-sized, single-home lots that characterize Santa Fe's oldest neighborhoods, or two- and even three-story, multi-unit condos looming over the backyards of single-story homes in slightly newer parts of town.
Part of the problem, Heldmeyer says, is that Santa Fe has very liberal rules about building an "accessory dwelling" — a casita or guest house — on a lot with a primary residence. Virtually anyone can do that, so long as the property owner lives in one or the other of the two dwellings. But that rule, says Heldmeyer, "is never enforced" by the city.
"There used to be limits on the size of the accessory dwelling, too, but those also have been removed," she said.
As a result, people can build a big, new second house, which in older neighborhoods is often larger than the original principal dwelling. That's what happened on Young St., in the city's "Triangle District" east of Second St., where the huge and newly built "accessory dwelling" at the back of the lot looms over its Jay St. neighbor.
The Jay Street homeowner, says Heldmeyer, has virtually abandoned his yard and stopped using his rear bedrooms because the floor-to-ceiling windows on the Young Street "accessory dwelling" overlook them.
The other problem is condo-ization of multidwelling properties. If owners don't have a large enough lot to split so they can sell off either the accessory or the main dwelling as a separate piece of property, they can instead turn the two houses into a condominium development. That enables them to sell off the second unit as if they had, in fact split the property into two.
That's more or less what happened to Pete Garcia's quiet neighborhood off Garcia St. "It's horrible," says Garcia.
"I've got very good neighbors," he's quick to say about the newcomers who have bought the three new houses and the two revamped old ones now on what were once his aunts' three lots. "It's just that it destroyed the peacefulness and the openness."
When his family elected to sell off their property on the little lane, Garcia said, on one aunt's property to the west, the buyers built one new large home, and across the street, where another aunt lived and also owned a vacant lot, they built two more.
That's five homes where once there were only two, and Garcia said an additional house could still be built on the already crowded cul-de-sac. Parking, planned under the condo rules with one space per unit, is already completely inadequate, he added. "People buy, then they realize there's no parking."
If one of the homeowners or a short-term visitor in the one licensed vacation rental has a party, the situation is nothing short of chaotic.
City planning and land use director Matt O'Reilly agrees condominium conversions are a big part of the "bad infill" problem, and for exactly the reasons Heldmeyer and Garcia cite.
"There's nothing wrong with condos," O'Reilly said. "But the problem comes about when a condo is created between a primary residence and an accessory dwelling when the underlying lot is not sufficiently large under the zoning rules to accommodate two primary dwellings."
The problem is complicated by the fact that condominiums aren't regulated by cities but by the state, O'Reilly said. "If the law required someone to come to the city for approval (for a condominium development), we could put a stop to it. But they don't even have to check with the city — they record their condo declarations with the county clerk."
O'Reilly calls the condo problem "the biggest thing the city needs to address" in terms of land use and planning. But, he said, it requires a change in state law, not just in the city's ordinances.
As for the problem of high-density zoning, O'Reilly says, neighborhoods can ask for changes, and he cites the recent downzoning of parts of Juanita St. as one example. Developers anxious to capitalize on the old neighborhood's proximity to the Railyard built a couple of multistory condominiums that residents felt were inappropriate. They complained, and the city was asked to study the "built density" — how many structures the neighborhood actually had, as opposed to how many the zoning actually permitted. Land use officials found that the built density was substantially lower than the high-density zoning in place, and the City Council approved a change.
The neighborhood's zoning now reflects the neighborhood's present single-family-home character, which was how residents indicated they wanted it to stay, O'Reilly said.
The city has also lowered height limits in most residential areas, he said, down from three stories to two. Twenty-four feet — two stories — "is the standard height limit everywhere except in high-density residential and ridgetop zoning areas," O'Reilly said.
Heldmeyer is less optimistic about residents' ability to limit what kind of new development goes in their areas. The city's land-use code is currently being revised, she said, but discussion of the density problem "has been very low key."
And apart from the Juanita St. rezoning, she also says, there haven't been many successful efforts to get neighborhoods rezoned to reflect their built densities.
"Some councilors have tried," said Heldmeyer. "But they've all been ignored."
What it boils down to, says Heldmeyer, is "who the city is going to accommodate. The residents? Or the real estate speculators?"
Garcia has a pretty good idea how that's going to turn out. The high-density transformation of his quiet lane, he said, "has been very good from the standpoint of updating the structures" and property values.
"They're modern, they're beautiful homes, and it would be very difficult for people like myself to even attempt that," he said. And without the current cap on property tax valuations for long-term residents, recently declared unconstitutional, Garcia says, "I couldn't afford to live here."
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