Flutterby™! : Overlay Plan

Public comment submitted in writing for tonight's City Council meeting:

We are writing to support moving forward with the overlay plan.

It is well established that housing responds to supply and demand: that even high end housing increases supply that helps make housing overall more affordable.

We can see that to enhance a vibrant, but sometimes struggling, downtown, we need more people walking around downtown.

In order to meet our climate goals, we need more density, so that people can get around without using automobiles, and can live with the lower carbon emissions, and ecological impact, of multi-family dwellings.

Petaluma is in a housing crisis. Our children leave. Our low wage workers commute in from elsewhere, and our homelessness rate is staggering. Allowing more housing to be built densely, around downtown, will help alleviate that housing crunch and bring more people into our downtown.

Much has been made of second-guessing the economics of the hotel, but even if the hotel fails, hotel to condo or rental conversions have happened very successfully in other cities. And if it succeeds, the hotel brings in high end tourist dollars which will help our downtown thrive. Along with the direct TOT revenue.

A few years ago we visited Philadelphia, and as buildings from the 1700s stand along side skyscrapers, it's clear that density and height take nothing away from historic buildings.

We would also urge the Council to not put too much stock in calls for more parking. Years of accumulated evidence clearly demonstrate that if we are going to thrive in the coming decades, we need to be moving away from automobiles as our mode of transportation. We do that by building dense neighborhoods that are attractive to walking and other active transportation modes, and that can support transit. And we don't do that by continuing to make developers subsidize automobile travel.