The City and County should add incentives for creating below-market units, without removing other market-rate development rights. Currently, each jurisdiction offers several incentives but they are only available on a small subset of parcels, and developers/owners do not use them much. The proposal here is that greater incentives should be available, and in almost all zoning designations: commercial, mixed-use, high-opportunity, and residential. The degree and number of incentives offered should be greater for greater numbers of affordable units and for deeper levels of affordability. Incentives could be offered based on the number of affordable units in an otherwise market-rate project (“inclusionary units”).  

These incentives could be achieved through a new Affordable Housing Overlay (in Sonoma City), by modifying the existing Workforce Combining Zone (in Sonoma County), or through other, less obvious regulations buried in the zoning code of either jurisdiction.

These types of incentives should be offered:

• Waived impact fees and/or lower infrastructure costs, such as no cost for sewer and water connection or no impact fees on affordable units. The County has waived traffic and park fees for affordable units, for two years, as a test.

• By-right zoning & ministerial approvals to speed up permitting

• Density bonuses on top of those given by the state, offered in exchange for more units per acre and development/design standard concessions

• Waived/reduced parking requirements

• Tax abatements to reduce long-term costs

• Expedited approval process to exempt affordable projects from discretionary approvals

• “Welfare tax abatement” for for-sale projects, as well as for-rent projects, if the landowner is nonprofit or public 

Jurisdictions could consider a better measure of affordability than the conventional definition that a person should not pay more than 30% of their income (usually estimated from the Area Median Income of their location, according the US Census). The Terner Center’s Inclusive Affordability Measure is based on what people from across California could afford here. The Terner Center’s argument applies well to Sonoma Valley: that AMI is distorted because it “rel[ies] on the income of existing residents in an area (i.e., the few who can afford to live there)”.