FairFAR.org

We have updated the FAR and building coverage calculator to reflect the house size limit ordinance language that Boulder City Council has passed on second reading on 17 September 2009 and on thrid reading on 6 October 2009.  The ordinance will take effect on 4 January 2010.  For comparison purposes, the former versions are still available as the Staff Memo and Planning Board versions.

After the Council seemed to settle on a 35% building coverage and .50 FAR at Tuesday night’s meeting, several people have written to ask whether we will be posting an updated FAR calculator.  The answer is yes, but not until Council actually passes a reading on the ordinance, which would happen tonight.  While it seems unlikely to fail, strange votes are always possible–for example, a house-size limit proponent like Cowles could decide to vote against it in hopes of forcing a more restrictive set of numbers later.  And since it is a bit of work to tune the calculator, we’ll wait and see if they actually pass the revised numbers on second reading.

The first thing to note is that there are now a plethora of complex variations contained in the 70+ page 4 September 2009 staff memo that would interact with each other in even more complex ways, as well as a highly questionable “analysis” of how the proposed bulk plane ordinance would work on sloping lots.

Highlights:

• The staff recommendation has increased to a 35% building coverage and a .50 FAR.  The bulk planes remain unchanged, and would still force the mass of a home on a slope uphill (see our previous articles for illustrations).
• The report contains a number of alternative tradeoffs, including a small 240 sf exemption from the FAR for a one-car garage (but not for building coverage).
• There are two options for recommended starting points for Council to start redrafting the ordinance.  Option 1 uses the old numbers (30% and .45) as a starting point, while Option 2 uses the new staff recommended numbers.
• At the last Council meeting, Council asked for analysis of a building coverage/no-FAR/tighter bulk planes ordinance as proposed by Mayor Appelbaum.  There is an analysis in the last 20 pages of the staff memo.  However, we have discovered that the analysis that was performed by Winter and Company and staff may have failed to apply the proposed bulk plane ordinance correctly for sloped lots.  Hence, we still have no idea how well the Mayor’s alternative proposal would work.  Moreover, we don’t have a sound analysis of how the staff’s bulk plane ordinance would work on sloped lots either.

We would like to see council pursue further and more accurate information about how the bulk plane standards would interact with slope before taking any action.  We also strongly oppose the building coverage limit at 30%, and while 35% is a more reasonable number, we would suggest instead that council seek a different way to restrict the impact rear detached garages have on the effective building coverage after setbacks.  We would suggest that the current effective building coverage limits of just under 40% on a suburban 7000 sf lot and 42.5% on the old Boulder 6250 sf lots are just about right; the problems come in when–especially on the narrow old Boulder lots where alleys are common–rear detached garages occupy another 7 to 8% of the lot.

We have proposed two ideas to address this issue.  First, a rear yard setback of 25% instead of 25′ would increase the overall size of the rear yard on the narrow and deep (50′x125′) old Boulder lots, so a large two-car garage in the rear setback would cover around a third rather than nearly half of the rear yards.  Second, and alternatively, we could simply require those with detached rear garages to preserve that much open space within the primary building envelope on the lot–that is make detached garages count against the size of the building envelope that your main home must sit within, just as having an attached garage already does for suburban homes.

Lastly, we would like to point out that should council adopt a FAR of .50 or .45, as still seems likely, having a larger building coverage limit means that if first story construction is maximized, there will necessarily be a smaller second story and above.  In other words, if a home were to be built out to the limit of 35 or 40% on the first floor, the second floor would be limited to just 10 to 15 % of the size of the lot.

As we have repeatedly pointed out, most of the neighborhood compatibility concerns result from mass contained in the second story and above; the upper stories are what contribute most to perceived bulk and mass, generally require taller and looming walls, block neighborhood views, and decrease the neighbors’ rear yard privacy.  If instead Council persists in ratcheting down the building coverage limit, those problems will become worse, not better, as a result of an action that forces anyone expanding their home to build up and not out.

At the 18 August 2009 meeting Council asked staff to carefully examine the differences between no-FAR/building coverage/more bulk planes proposal and the planning board proposal, and the recommended staff proposal. But we have found what appears to be an error in how our highly paid consultants, Winter and Company, and city staff have applied their own proposed regulation. Look closely at the following diagram, which is from p. 69 of the 4 September 2009 staff memo to council on the proposed house size regulations.

The problem with this diagram is that the lower right hand leg of the building envelope is taller than the lower left hand leg of the building envelope, but the proposed bulk plane standards clearly state that they are to begin from 12′ above the side property line.  In other words: If a lot slopes from side-to-side, the ordinance as proposed clearly states that the bulk plane would begin lower on the lower side of the lot than the higher side.  This is exactly how we diagrammed the interaction of slope and bulk planes in our previous article Why the proposed ordinance doesn’t work.

The error here illustrates the gap between what the drafters of this ordinance think they are doing and what they are actually doing.  The proposed ordinance language will push the center of mass and bulk for homes upslope, causing them to lean uphill just as current homes now lean to the south under the bulk plane of the solar ordinance.  In fact, what their diagram illustrates is something closer to what FairFAR proposed as a revision to the bulk plane ordinance over a month ago–averaging the elevations across the side property lot lines.  We would actually like to see Council change the ordinance’s bulk plane measurement procedure to something that actually does do this, because centering the mass of the home on the lot using bulk planes would actually be helpful.

More importantly though, we have to wonder how profoundly this has affected the rest of the “analysis” done by Winter and Company and staff, and how it may have driven their conclusion that we should stick with their flawed two-dimensional proposals.  FairFAR would simply note that this just another illustration of the lack of objectivity in the process–had the Technical Advisory Group really been composed of geographically diverse and ideologically open-minded Boulder residents, we would have spotted this a long time ago.

We’ve notified the City staff of the issue and are awaiting a response.

FairFAR Note: We did not receive a response to this question before the 9/15 council meeting.  However, in examining the related “models” in the same scenario with a magnifying glass, we did see that it is possible that the problem results from unevenly distributed side setbacks (setback distances do not appear to be indicated in any of the diagrams).  This is a highly technical issue, but there is a strange odd arbitrariness about how one could choose to draw the building envelope as defined by the side yard bulk plane ordinance.  Because the side yard setbacks must total 15′ added together with a minimum of 5′ on either side, the building envelope intersects the bulk plane limit at varying heights (e.g. one side of the building envelope would be 17′ tall at a 5′ side setback, and 22′ at the other 10′ feet side setback, while if the side yard setbacks were assumed to be distributed equally as 7.5 feet each the bulk plane intersects the side setback at 19.5′ on each side).

We won’t know for sure whether this was an error or an unfortunate choice of example until we request and the city sends us the sketch up files used to draw those models.  So it is at least theoretically possible that the models were in fact correctly drawn–but in our judgment still unlikely, given what appears to be bulk planes which start at the same elevation despite trying to model a sloped lot condition.  At the very least, choosing a slope which essentially drops the same amount as the difference in height between the two sides of the building envelope provides a singularly unusual, “not-lopsided” case in an ordinance which would ordinarily result in lopsided building envelopes–and thus yields a very uninformative and misleading graphic.  In any case our point about the unintended consequence of the bulk plane ordinance on lots which slope from side to side remains unchanged–this ordinance will cause the mass of our city’s houses to lean to the uphill side of a lot, just our solar ordinance now causes the mass of our city’s houses to lean to the south side of a lot.