Gainesville in January: Starter homes, setting priorities, and downtown funding
Happy new year Gainesville! It's a new year with new priorities and challenges. Some long term projects are coming to a head, while we plan for what comes next in our city.
Happy new year Gainesville! It’s a new year and with it new challenges/opportunities. After a year dominted by interference in Tallahassee and budget cuts we’re looking forward to a year where we can finally start working on some real priorities within the city.
The majority of this commission is very new, just ending our first year in office, so we’re just starting to see some of the things we’ve been working on come to fruition. Of course, that could all be derailed by another year of budget cuts, but I’ll get to that below. Let’s start with some good news:
First, Some Good News
The Christmas Parade was a great success after a lot of hard work by city staff. New years was also a great time, with a phenomenal fireworks show at Bo Diddley followed by a set and countdown from everyones favorite Beatles cover band: The Shoddy Beatles.
The City has dual named 8th Avenue “Charles S. Chestnut III” after the loss of one of Gainesville’s great civil rights leaders, Charles Chestnut. We announced that we will be repaving N Main Street, which is probably our most dilapidated road in the City due to heavy use by GRU operations being on it. We will also be (finally!) redesigning and paving NE 9th Street, a very poorly designed and dangerous road in an otherwise walkable neighborhood of Gainesville.
In other news, UF is starting to get re-engaged in developing and utilizing the Innovation District, which started with big plans but has stalled in recent years.
And even though there was a sad rash of businesses that shutdown near the end of last year, there are a ton of new small businesses coming in. Gainesville (and District 4’s) writer-extraordinaire Lauren Groff is opening a bookstore on South Main Street next year. The Frenchman Food Truck is bringing their vegan soulfood to a brick and mortar store on South Main where Tamals used to be. Capones will soon be opening in the old If It Is location and If It Is will be opening soon in Grove Street.
Starter Homes Proposal Going to City Commission
On January 11th at 1:00 pm, the City Commission will be considering my proposal to lower the cost of single-family homes and incentivize more “starter homes” through changes to Gainesville’s single-family lot dimensions. I’ve written two big blog posts about this, “A Proposal for Sensible Lot Sizes in Gainesville” and “Gainesville’s New McMansion Zoning” which goes more into the details of the proposal. Essentially, it preserves single-family zoning but adopts the lot standards of “Residential Conservation” which is the zoning you see in the Pleasant Street neighborhood just north of downtown.
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I’ve spent a lot of time with community groups these past few months answering any and all questions people have about the proposal. I’ve met with various groups, tabled at a farmers market, and held two official city-sanctioned community meetings at Westside Park and the Martin Luther King Center. It’s been challenging and interesting and I’m glad I did it. I think every Commissioner should have to go through this kind of discussion before they make changes like these.
Since I brought this item up in February of last year the conversations around lot sizes has changed dramatically. Talking about lot dimension standards felt very in-the-weeds and bookish in early 2023. No other city was having conversations like these, and research on the topic was a bit dated and hard to find.
Fast forward one-year and the conversation has completely changed. Austin, Texas is making minimum lot size reform a centerpiece of their affordable housing plans. Dallas is following suit, as are tons of cities across the United States, from St. Paul, Minnesota to the entire state of Vermont.
That is largely thanks to a growing literature and consensus that minimum lot size rules are some of the most egregious regulations stopping more affordable single-family homes from being built. This comes from a new wealth of studies, most recently from Pew Charitable Trusts that found Houston’s reduction in minimum lot sizes increased homeownership options, created affordable owner-occupied housing, and did it without displacing low-income residents. Another study by the National Bureau of Economic Research in September found that large lot requirements increase the cost of housing, the size of homes, and the amount of space needed to build them.
I think my proposal is common-sense, middle ground reform that moves us toward a better reality for housing without putting at risk our neighborhoods in Gainesville. I’m joined by the Gainesville Alachua County Association of Realtors and the Alachua County Labor Coalition who have both come out in favor of the proposal, which I’m grateful for.
I’m hopeful it will pass on Thursday January 11th to direct staff to come back to us with final written language. If you think this is a good step in the right direction, or even if you’re opposed to it, consider sending an email to the City Commission at citycomm@CityofGainesville.org or come to the meeting on January 11th at 1:00 to speak in favor.
Planning budget cuts
Starting in January the city staff will begin the process of planning another round of major budget cuts in preparation for the GRU Authority reducing the funds transfer. WCJB ran a great story about it yesterday.
I wrote about this in-depth in “Why cutting the GRU funds transfer hurts everyone, even GRU” so I won’t get into the specifics. But I did want to update that it seems the GRU Authority will not be making this decision on January 3rd, as they originally planned, but will likely still be deciding this something in January.
According to the city manager’s memo staff will be doing analysis throughout January to be prepared for any major budget cuts. That is a very early start to budget discussions, but it’s necessary considering the depth and intensity this next round of cuts will be.
Priorities for 2024
On January 25th the Mayor has requested a Commission retreat, similar to what we did last year, to discuss our priorities for 2024. Last year was a tough year for the Commission and the City: we were completing an in depth and highly political audit from the State of Florida, GRU was being taken away by the Governor, and we were making the largest budget cuts in our city’s history.
Regardless of that we still accomplished quite a bit, but it was a stressful and difficult year. This year our Commission is a little less green, we have had time to understand and articulate our priorities, so I’ll be curious what my fellow Commissioners are looking at for their priorities. Here are some of mine:
Creating stability in a city government that has just gone through tremendous upheaval
Filling and retaining vacant positions in the city
Passing reforms that will increase the amount of affordable starter homes in Gainesville
Doubling down on efforts to help small businesses in Gainesville
Making progress on my proposal to create more trails and greenspace along our creeks
Seeing progress on our “vision zero” goals and creating long-term plans to improve bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure on our streets
A renewed focus on downtown revitalization
Getting a roadmap and implementation for a park in south-west Gainesville
Implementing our zero waste ordinance
None of these things are particularly expensive, so even in a year of budget cuts we would still be able to do most of them, but they do require thoughtful implementation and dedicated staff.
Dedicated funding for Downtown
One key thing missing from downtown in recent years has been a lack of direct funding for downtown and a lack of staff dedicated to downtown improvement. It might seem like a sort of in-the-weeds issue, but having gone through decades of downtown revitalization recently, as I outlined in “The Fall of Downtown Gainesville”, one driving force was the decision to dedicate funds that would be spent solely on downtown, planned and implemented by people who got downtown.
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The mechanism for doing this was called “TIF” (Tax Increment Financing) funding through the “Community Redevelopment Agency” which allocated all increases in taxable money to downtown in order to revitalize it. As property values rose so did the TIF, which would then be reinvested in downtown.
As Ken McGurn, who was a driving force in revitalizing downtown in the 80’s and 90’s told Business in Greater Gainesville Magazine in 2016:
The assessed value of property in the area had stagnated 20 years ago – at $19 million, noted Ken McGurn, who, with his wife Linda, were early primary private downtown developers. Now it has risen to $152 million. “The return on the private and public money invested in downtown is incredible,” McGurn said. The renovation of downtown could never have happened without TIF, McGurn said.
But that downtown TIF funding dried up in 2019 when the Community Redevelopment Agency was reconfigured to be placed over a larger area, to ensure more money could be used in other areas that are more in need.
That’s good, there were areas that really didn’t need the continued investment, like College Park across from UF, but Downtown funding got lost in the shuffle. That loss of funding has meant stagnation from the City on a lot of downtown goals. We now have a very in-depth downtown Strategic Plan that is essentially gathering dust: a plan without funding or staff dedicated to implementing it.
As a result, other projects like the Streetery are sitting idle as the city figures out how best to move forward. Without funding and staff dedicated to figuring them out they’ll continue to move forward at a snail’s pace, if they move forward at all.
So January 18th the Community Redevelopment Agency will come to us with a plan to reallocate money from other CRA projects back into downtown1. That will also include creating an advisory board of downtown business owners to assist and advise with how to spend those funds to best help downtown grow and prosper.
It’s a change in direction, but one I think is seriously needed if we want our downtown to continue to grow and thrive.
Some Local Highlights
District 4 Business
Weecycle of Gainesville was a lifesaver for us when we had our daughter. As a family who tries to commit to zero waste principles we needed to get toys, clothes, and items for our daughter but hated buying things new that would outgrow her in a short time.
Weecycle essentially exists to make that process easier. It’s a store of all used children’s toys, clothes, shoes, strollers, equipment, anything you could want. The quality is always good and the prices are reasonable.
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Located in the shopping center on NW 23rd and NW 13th it’s a very large space that sells all kinds of things for kids of all ages. Check it out before buying new: you’d be surprised the quality and options you have buying used from Weecycle
Local Music Highlight
This month I don’t want to highlight a band, but a non-profit that does a lot for the local Gainesville scene: MusicGNV. They have a number of programs that help build the scene: grants for local artists to record, a showcase with the city at Bo Diddley Plaza for local music, a YouTube of local artist performances. They also release a quarterly playlist of local artist releases from the previous quarter:
MusicGNV just released this list from October to December of 2023. There is 2 hours and 45 minutes of music in this playlist, which just goes to show the enormous wealth of musical output coming from Gainesville. Remember, this is just profesionnally recorded music over a three-month period in a city of 140,000 people. It’s not just voluminous but incredibly diverse: a little bluegrass (Hard Luck Society), indie pop (ATRIA), indie rock (Trustfall), tons of hip-hop. They have this for every quarter going back to 2021.
I love that MusicGNV puts this together. One of the joys of living in Gainesville is hearing the newest sounds and ideas from an always-changing and incredibly fertile music scene, but it can be hard to keep up with. There’s just so much going on, so many different local music scenes in Gainesville. MusicGNV brings everything together once a quarter and it’s worth the time to listen through it to hear what’s coming out, maybe even find a new favorite local band to go see to support local music.
CRA funding and general fund funding are two different things, so the budget crisis talked about above doesn’t really impact how we allocate CRA funds.
As always, well-written, researched, and easy to understand. Thank you so much, Bryan!!