The Woodstock Housing Oversight Task Force (HOTF) answered a variety of questions on proposed zoning changes in the town.
Its members explained the changes during a question-and-answer session Saturday, November 11. As town supervisor Bill McKenna told the audience, the proposals were derived from the comprehensive plan adopted in 2018.
“The two biggest things that came out of that were a great need for housing and a great desire to continue to protect our environment even more,” McKenna said. “On its face, that seems like a huge compromise there … just two opposite things. And I reached out to some of the brightest people I know in Woodstock and said, I need your help.”
The housing committee and Zoning Revision Committee (ZRC) were formed and got to work.
The HOTF spent two and a half years working with a planner, McKenna said.
“One of the things I just want to remind everybody is that we’re not ready to adopt this today, or tomorrow, ” he cautioned. “I don’t want it to languish forever, but we want to get it right or as right as we can. And that doesn’t mean necessarily a perfect document. But it means we’re going to listen to what everybody has to say. And I’m guessing over 100 changes have been made since we started this.”
Planning Board vice-chair Judith Kerman said the big problem was the lack of so-called middle housing.
“Like the little 1000-square-foot ranch houses. I live in one of those. They’re not being built any more,” she said.
What changes were made?
Among the proposed amendments to the subdivision code was requiring major subdivision to preserve half the land in conservation. Any division of land into five or more parcels is considered a major subdivision.
In any subdivision, 15 percent of all units must be affordable.
“The county asked us to make it ten percent. We made it 15 percent,” HOTF member Jeff Collins said.
The affordable units must be indistinguishable and integrated with the other housing. “We’ve seen plans, for example, Woodstock National. They put affordable housing in their plan, but it was off in a corner. That’s not what we want,” Collins said. “If someone builds affordable housing, it’s got to be part of the entire plan, and it’s got to be built at the same time.”
In other places, affordable housing was included but never built. In Woodstock, it will have to be done at the same time as everything else.
In the current code, each lot is subject to the size of the zone. If you divide 60 acres in the R-5 zone into a dozen lots, each lot has to be five acres in size.
“Under the new code, it’s not the size of it that counts. It’s the net acreage, and that acreage is the size of the land minus buffers, minus the wetlands. minus the streams minus steep slopes,” Collins explained. “So 60 acres of land minus things you cannot build on is the net acreage. Sixty acres will probably become maybe 50 acres or 45 acres. And that means you can only build nine or ten units.”
Under the current code, with a special use permit multifamily housing can be built in the R-5 zone down to the hamlet district with a special use permit.
“So that’s already in the code, but it has no standards,” HOTF co-chair Deborah DeWan said. “It has no environmental regulations associated with it. So what we wanted to do, in coming up with different housing types was to find ways to create housing, potentially that would have more than one unit in a building, but it would look like a single-family house,”
“One of the new things in this law is for everything that we that comes before us, we can specify what’s called the building envelope,” Kerman said. “That’s exactly where does it go on the land, including septic systems, including driveways, so that people can’t just go put it anywhere they want to.”
Under the current code, a duplex can be built anywhere in town. With the proposed changes, a triplex can be built in some areas — but one unit must be affordable.
If an owner wants to build a duplex, why don’t they add a third unit of the same scale and size? “We get an affordable unit in town we would not otherwise have had,” Collins said.
Under the present code, anyone can build a multifamily house of any size in any part of the R-5 zone or lower, The new code limits the number of units to eight, Collins said.
“We’re just identifying ways of making it. Focus on creating more affordable units that are environmentally sited. None of that right now is in the code,” DeWan added.
Protecting against overdevelopment
“Part of that is the requirement that new subdivisions be 50 percent devoted to conservation/ That’s going to restrict how much can be built in how much can be divided into,” Collins said. “Another one that we talked about is the size of the multifamily units has been restricted.”
The current code gives the planning board very little power, HOTF co-chair Kirk Ritchey said. “And so we’ve strengthened tremendously the ability for the planning board to evaluate and actually say no to projects. Under the under the revised code, using a various amount of tools, one of the issues that they also can do is they can order a water study a particular site based on the demand of that particular site. And they can also apply other studies such as traffic.”
Collins noted Woodstock had 6800 residents in 1980, and that number has reduced to 6200 in 2020. “So we have more people living here 43 years ago than we have living here now. So we supported more people living in this town than live here now,” Collins stated.
The Woodstock National proposal is legal under existing code, Collins said. Under the proposed changes, of the roughly 400 acres in the Town of Woodstock, 200 acres must go into permanent conservation easement. “That does not mean golf courses. That means it cannot be touched. Maybe they can put a path people can walk on, but that’s all they can do with that land,” Collins said.
He also noted the existing code includes no requirement for affordable housing.
What is affordable?
Any place in the code where affordable units are required must meet certain guidelines, not just what a developer calls “affordable.”
Affordable units for rental will be available to tenants whose income is up to 80 percent of the Ulster County area median income (AMI), which equals $49,200 for a single person up to $92,750 for a family of eight, according to 2021 federal data. For purchase, the income can be as high as 120 percent of AMI.
The maximum rent for a one-bedroom apartment for a single person can be no higher than 30 percent of the 80 percent AMI figure, or $49,200. The maximum rent for that person would be $14,760 per year or $1230 per month including utilities.
Can the town government build affordable housing?
“The answer is no. Under New York State law, a county, a city and a village can have a housing authority,” Collins said. “We can’t do it. We can partner with a nonprofit to do it. But that’s the only way that we can do it. Through the town, we can get grants to do it as a town, that we can help a nonprofit.”
The town board will reopen the public hearing on the zoning changes November 21 and likely again in December.
The entire proposed code including a summary of changes is available on the town website, woodstockny.org, by clicking on “Zoning Updates” in the list of links on the left side.
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