Burlingame worries over housing on the Bayfront housing

The Burlingame City Council and Planning Commission, meeting April 29, in a joint session expressed that the laws will severely undermine the city’s ability to effectively plan its own new housing and undercut its environmental and safety goals.

Though nothing is being currently proposed, the laws will facilitate affordable housing development in commercially-zoned areas like the Burlingame Bayfront and largely require cities to implement objective design standards, removing the personalized planning process, city staff said.

Councilmembers expressed frustration that the state was continuing to remove local control from the city’s development process, citing its recent endeavors to meet its state-mandated housing requirements by building out housing in the North Rollins Road area.

“This commission and this council have responsibly and effectively developed new planning for new housing,” Vice Mayor Michael Brownrigg said. “What these laws do is completely undercut our ability to plan. We’re doing what’s supposed to be done, but we’re doing it the way we want to do it.”

Amidst the bevy of housing laws that local cities are required to take into consideration, two already-existing laws — Assembly Bill 2011 and Senate Bill 6, both passed in 2023 — encourage affordable housing development for low-income families in areas zoned as commercial. Developers can also apply density bonus laws, which waive zoning limitations, in those areas.

Burlingame should move to quickly develop its own set of objective design standards in previously non-residential areas like the Bayfront to retain as much control over development as possible, Community Development Director Neda Zayer said.

However, even when that’s complete, developers will be able to use the concessions they’ve earned from building affordable housing to waive certain city-specific standards of their choice, like tree requirements, heights and parking requirements.

“Truthfully, it’s a topic we wrestle with on a daily basis,” Zayer said. “Unfortunately, state density bonus law allows developers to decide what they’d like to waive.”

Councilmembers and planning commissioners agreed to move forward with an outline for a Bayfront specific plan regardless to put clear asks for developers in place. In addition, the school district should be alerted to the resource strain that such development could cause and be prepared to raise money for an entirely new school via impact fees, Councilmember Donna Colson warned.

She expressed frustration with the impact that new legislation would have on cities that have been successfully building new housing in their communities.

“This is just a little bit of penalizing everyone in the classroom because one kid was talking and it’s just not fair,” she said. “These are what I would call unfunded state mandates.”

Colson called for the City Council to write a letter voicing its concerns with the direction state housing policy is heading, also citing pending legislation, Senate Bill 79, that would apply streamlined housing production standards anywhere within transit areas. SB 79 just passed the Senate Local Government Committee and is next headed toward the Senate Appropriations Committee. The bill allows for housing development heights of four to seven stories near transit stops.

Safety and environmental justice planning

Councilmembers and planning commissioners also discussed top climate and environmental justice-related safety priorities — including flooding, wildfires and sea level rise and how those hazards might impact Burlingame’s underserved populations.

Some felt, however, that the solutions to those problems were increasingly at odds with the city’s housing development mandates. Concessions waivers could allow developers to bypass mandates for space between buildings — which mitigate fire concerns — or tree-planting requirements, which create a naturally cooling canopy in the face of increasingly hot weather, Commissioner Jennifer Pfaff said.

“I’m just finding a lot of conflicts,” she said. “You fix the one thing, maybe you’re not allowed to fix the other.”

Burlingame’s priority climate hazards include severe weather, flooding, extreme heat events, wildfire, groundwater and sea level rise, consultant Eli Krispi said. Populations most at risk and with the least capacity to recover from such events include older adults, low-resourced households and those with disabilities.

The extremely high cost of living in the Bay Area, which forces many families and individuals to live paycheck to paycheck, also poses a threat to climate resilience, Krispi said.

“Because of the high cost of housing, the income that is remaining to them after cost of housing, transport, utilities, that can be quite constrained, and limit their ability to prepare and recover from hazards,” he said.

The city will work with regional partners like OneShoreline, the county and neighboring cities to prepare a climate safety plan and vulnerability assessment to identify specific risks and potential solutions, Krispi said.

The city is also working on fleshing out its environmental justice policies. State data targeted three areas in Burlingame — Northwest Burlingame, East Burlingame and the El Camino Real Corridor — that contain underserved populations and are most impacted by factors like air pollution, groundwater contamination and low tree canopy, Krispi said.

“This is really all about addressing inequities, halting them and as best we can, reversing them,” he said. “It requires very robust engagement with the communities themselves.”

Councilmembers like Mayor Peter Stevenson expressed concern that the areas selected as environmental justice targets didn’t encompass the full scope of Burlingame’s most marginalized communities.

“I get the data from an environmental perspective ... because of sea level rise and proximity to the Bay or past industrial areas,” he said. “I don’t get that lens from the full scope of environmental justice in terms of the equity side.”

Creating geographic boundaries of this nature is an imperfect science, others, like Colson, said.

“They have to somehow draw a geographic boundary around them and by definition you are going to have to leave people out,” she said. “I think the important thing is to understand that they are not the only group of people that are vulnerable, they are just a higher concentration.”

Staff and consultants will continue to work on details for the environmental justice plan and it will likely be ready for adoption sometime next year.

holly@smdailyjournal.com

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