Staff Report for the Planning Commission's January 24th meeting. This would reduce housing, parking and traffic impacts these students now have on the community. Development would be encouraged by revising standards for parking, landscaping and setbacks to make new housing more likely. Staff study has shown that new housing is not being built in this area south of campus because current development standards make it very difficult to build new housing at a market price that can be supported by student rents. The key change to development regulations would be to reduce the required on-site parking requirement for 1 space per student to space per student.
Current surveys show that actual market demand is about space per student.
A parking permit program would reserve those street spaces for neighborhood residents. Commuters would be directed to park on campus in remote lots, which would be served by shuttle buses funded by a modest increase in the annual parking permit. However, due to current parking. Setback and landscape regulations, recent housing projects have only averaged about half that density or about 22 units per acre. Revisions to these standards will allow development in the area to vary between 50-100 units to the acre.