TO: Chair and Members of the Design Review Committee
THRU: Anna Pehoushek, Assistant Community Development Director
FROM: Robert Garcia, Senior Planner
1. Subject
title
Review of Objective Design Standards.
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2. Summary
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An amendment to Chapter 17.14 and 17.19 of the Orange Municipal Code to incorporate objective residential Design standards for certain multifamily housing projects to implement State Housing Law.
3. RECOMMENDED ACTION
recommendation
Provide feedback in the draft Objective Design Standards.
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5. Discussion and Background
As State Housing Law continues to evolve, multi-family housing projects with affordable components are required to be ministerially approved. Specific state laws include, but are not limited to, Senate Bill (SB) 35, that requires the availability of a streamlined ministerial approval process for developments in localities that have not yet made sufficient progress towards their allocation of the Regional Housing Need Assessment (RHNA) fair share. Assembly Bill (AB) 2162 requires that supportive housing be a use that is permitted by right in zones where multifamily and mixed-use development is permitted. SB 4 applies to faith-based institutions and non-profit colleges to build affordable, multi-family homes by streamlining the permitting process and overriding local zoning restrictions. AB 2011 allows for ministerial, by-right approval for affordable housing on commercially zoned lands, and also allows such approvals for mixed-income housing along commercial corridors, as long as the projects meet specified affordability, labor, and environmental criteria. Despite the ministerial approval requirement, state law does allow the City to apply adopted objective design standards (ODS) to a project before it can proceed to building permits.
The City’s Orange Municipal Code (OMC) has objective development standards but has very few ODS. The City regularly relies on subjective design guidelines and a discretionary design review process to determine the adequacy and contextual appropriateness of project design. This process can no longer be utilized for multi-family development applications with a qualifying affordable component. Hence, creation of ODS will enable the City to review qualifying multi-family housing development applications and retain ability to direct the design of new residential developments.
The ODS document contains a set of standards specific to multifamily and mixed-use projects in the City of Orange's Residential Multifamily zones (R-3 and R-4), Urban Mixed Use (UMU), Neighborhood Mixed Use (NMU), and Old Towne Mixed Use (OTMU-15, OTMU-15S, and OTMU-24) zones. The standards build upon the City's existing design standards and experiences reviewing recent mixed-use and multi-family projects. These standards will supplement the existing development standards. In the instance of a conflict between the standards in this document and those in the OMC, the ODS document shall prevail.
The ODS accomplish the following:
• Provide specific site planning standards regulating building orientation, site layout, site access, parking lots and courts, trash enclosures, etc.
• Provide standards specific to landscaping, open space requirements for common and private open space, site lighting, walls and fences, etc.
• Include building design standards such as, but not limited to, general building form, building height and massing, façade articulations, roof forms, doors and entryways, windows, etc.
• Include architectural standards for distinct styles which specify criteria in areas such as form and massing, roof, materials and colors, doors and windows, and decorative details.
Any housing development applications ineligible for ministerial processing would continue to require the City’s standard discretionary review process.
9. ADVISORY BOARD RECOMMENDATION
None.
10. PUBLIC NOTICE
No public notification is required for this report to the Design Review Committee.
11. ENVIRONMENTAL REVIEW
This action is exempt from the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) pursuant to State CEQA Guidelines Section 15378 (Common Sense Exemption) because it will not have a direct or reasonably foreseeable indirect physical change on the environment and is not a “project.” For this reason, no further CEQA documentation is required.
14. ATTACHMENTS
• Attachment 1 Objective Design Standards