There’s too much fat in developer and service fees in Chico – let’s base developer fees on actual costs instead of “allocation”

Right now you will find hundreds of houses and apartments for rent in Chico, hundreds more for sale – there is no “housing shortage” in Chico. The real issue is affordability, not availability, and building more houses has never brought down the price.

So, I believe, people who tell you there is a housing shortage in Chico, 1) have land they are trying to sell 2) have a political agenda they are trying to realize 3) have drank the Kool Aid handed out by either 1 or 2.

It is a fact that building new housing on the edges of your town creates Blight. While “suburbanization” and “sprawl” have long been agreed upon as causing Blight of interior parts of a town, we blame the people who buy the housing instead of the city that permits it, and then devotes more funding to maintaining newer neighborhoods than older established neighborhoods. Why? Because as houses age, they don’t generate as much property taxes as new neighborhoods, end of story. It doesn’t seem to matter that those residents have been paying, and paying, and paying, the employees Downtown demand more and more revenue to pay their exorbitant salaries and benefits. Fees for development projects, or even a simple hook-up to sewer, are based not on what they actually cost, but on as many salaries as can be allocated into them as possible. Here’s just one post I made about the allocation process, as explained by a consultant who was paid for by the taxpayers.

So, I was interested when I read a letter to the ER about infill. We used to hear a lot about infill housing, but it seemed to have dried up. I never felt it was done right – a bunch of houses, shoe-horned into a flag lot in somebody’s back yard – parking problems, drainage problems, and then on trash day so many cans on the street it’s actually dangerous. Poorly done sewer hook-ups with no proper street repair. A sidewalk that extends across the entrance to the new developement and then drops off 6 inches into a pit. Infill can be done better, and done so that it is a benefit to the neighborhood instead of a detraction.

So I wrote a letter about it. Let me know what you think.

I’d also like to hear more about infill, but not because I believe there is a housing shortage. I believe that before we build out into cattle pastures and flood plains, we should fix older, decaying neighborhoods. While new neighborhoods spring up in orchards and pastures on the edge of town, historic neighborhoods suffer from pitted streets, flooding, no sidewalks, old power lines hanging in overgrown trees, and 20th century phone and internet service.

I don’t think we need to “streamline” the permits process, we need to hold infill developments up to the standards the surrounding neighborhood was built with. We need to maintain traditional parking requirements so we don’t have streets so crowded with cars that traffic (including pedestrians, bikes and safety vehicles) is constricted. We should not let ourselves be talked into sub-par housing based on a perceived housing shortage. We should build for the market, not political agendas or profiteering investors.

There are things the city could do to motivate the type of small infill projects that should rejuvenate our older neighborhoods and provide good housing. For starters, lower the fees for sewer/drain hook-ups, sidewalks, lot splits, ground work and other basic permits needed to ready a lot for development/sale to a developer. These fees are currently based on allocations for bureaucratic costs that have nothing to do with development.

We could do better.