LAKE COMO – The Lake Como Planning Board voted with four yes votes and four abstentions to approve the town’s fourth-round affordable-housing obligations on Monday and passed it to the borough council who endorsed the plans on Tuesday. The plan has a “realistic development potential” (RDP) of zero units after a vacant land adjustment performed by the town planner.
Planning board members Thomas Neff, Gretchen Schmidhausler, George Sigle as well as Chairman Joseph Cavaluzzi abstained from the vote to approve the plan. This followed discussion on the proposed development and improvement fee ordinance included in the proposal that would require improvement fees to be paid by developers, as well as resident homeowners, when redoing their homes.
Affordable housing obligations
The town’s initial prospective need calculated by the Department of Community Affairs (DCA) was 19 new units to be constructed. Planner Christine Bell discussed the vacant land adjustment and said the town is already “built out.”
“We found that the realistic development potential in Lake Como is zero,” Bell said. “Because Lake Como is fully built out, there’s no ability to provide any housing without redevelopment opportunities in the future. That kind of knocks that 19 number down to zero. You do need to provide some zoning to allow for the creation of affordable units if the opportunity arises, and we do that by proposing draft ordinances, a mandatory set-aside ordinance, which is kind of boilerplate across the board.”
The mandatory set-aside ordinance requires any developer who wants to build five or more units in a development in town to have 20% of units reserved as affordable. Bell also spoke on tweaking overlay zoning to allow for the creation of affordable units where possible in the general business district in town.
“We’re recommending just tweaking that ordinance section a little bit to require a mandatory set-aside of four affordable units if you’re going to use that mixed use overlay to create a residential unit,” Bell said.
Bell explained that through these ordinances and zoning, the required 25% of the initial DCA number of 19 units needing to be constructed leaves the borough with the potential to create five units in existing buildings, which meets the 25% requirement.
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