On the Park Bench - CNU & AARP: Enabling Better Places through Zoning Reform

hi everyone we're just waiting for everyone to come in before we get started um leah can you make sure that we've hit the recorded button yeah you have so we're we're getting uh we're recording this just gonna give it a couple more minutes for people to come into the room so welcome everyone to the next edition of on the park bench we're really excited about today's lineup um on the park bench is a webinar series that we launched at the start of the pandemic to provide a platform for cnu members partners and allies to get together to discuss what are the emerging issues that we're facing during the pandemic what are the emerging issues facing new urbanism what are the emerging issues facing place making so we're really excited to to have this and we're really excited with the lineup that we have today to hear a little bit more about the work that cnu and aarp has been doing what's most interesting that we're going to hear about today is how aarp which is a major stakeholder in all of our work got started in this before we begin i wanted to plug the cnu's last virtual congress cnu29 design for change we dramatically dropped our registration rates this year um because we want to really blow up and blow up the attendance and and introduce new urbanism and the congress to new partners so please go ahead and register this is the deal of the year five days of programming all of your continuing education credits rock bottom prices and as we like to say this is our last virtual congress we're really excited about that um go ahead and register we have at least two more webinars scheduled um next week we're going to hear from mindy thompson full of love and kennedy smith about main street and how a cindy a city's heart connects us all um mindy was an amazing keynoter for our very first transportation and equity summit in 2014 so we are absolutely thrilled that she is coming back to cnu and then on tuesday march 23rd we're going to hear about that the columbus downtown development corporation and parks proving their worth this is an amazing project that has won a charter award so um feel free to go ahead and start the registration now and of course we'll be reminding you all as we move forward um today this is this is our lineup of speakers and and i'm just absolutely thrilled to uh introduce my longtime friend and collaborator danielle aragone danielle and i have been working together since 2000 so that's 21 years she looks exactly the same by the way so danielle is now the director of the livable communities at aarp and before that she served in leadership positions um at the u.s epa and at hud she's an amazing go-getter i try to learn as much as i can from danielle on a regular basis kelly stoddard poor is the associate state director at aarp and she joined the vermont team in 2013 she leads the livable community work for the state of vermont for aarp vermont and she establishes a vision and action step for vermont communities to meet the needs of its aging population and last but not least is fred buzo who's the associate state director for aarp california and fred has been recognized by elected and community leaders as a consummate highly respected professional with more than 25 years professional service and a leader who has worked closely with elected officials and government and community service agency to help accomplish their goals as kind of by way of background i wanted to talk to you a little bit about the joint document that we've just finished completing with aarp we're we're kind of at the end of a two-year effort it was it was a labor of love um but we worked together aarp and cnu to create this enabling better places a handbook for improved communities improved neighborhoods and this work comes out of the work that cnu and the state of michigan did on our neighborhood neighborhood centers and adjacent corridors our urban work in in air in michigan um those documents are available on our website but with aarp we wanted to take a a broader national view and how could what we learned in michigan be applied to all communities and so we really dove into looking at the reinventing spaces how small changes can make a big difference and diving into the physical elements of space and what are the small changes the coding changes that we can make that communities can make across the country that can make a big difference we really looked at adapting for the greatest impact of how what are the small changes we can make to our streetscapes to building forms and uses facades frontages and parking included and integrated throughout all of the work in the document is really recognizing the role that our codes and ordinances have played in creating kind of structural racism and so particularly in this document we highlighted those areas that need to change in our codes to create more equitable and inclusive communities so in that in the document more so than in the michigan document we looked at areas to for building support identifying the key players and identifying the right reforms nobody wants to see a document that is just sitting there or is available so with this document we'll really try to move through a process that helps communities engage um with the right players to move from ideas in a book to implementation so if you're more interested that's all i'm going to say about the document you can find it on our website or you can find it on aarp's website on aarp's website for you'll find a whole bunch of oodles of other tools for livable communities and i'll go ahead and and drop these um links in in the chat right now for everybody but with that i don't want to talk anymore i want to turn it over to danielle to have her tell a little bit more of the story of how aarp which is a national stakeholder got engaged in livable communities so danielle thanks so much lynn and thanks for that incredibly warm and generous introduction we're really happy to be here with you all today we recognize that congressman urbanism is the place where local leaders in community design and building and development live and resign and aggregate congregate here on the park bench so really happy to be a part of that conversation today i'm going to go ahead and share my screen as well and in the course of doing i do want to kind of touch base quickly on on the roots here so we certainly have a demographic charge um to to think about why we need to be playing a bigger role as a arp in communities but there's also kind of a cultural uh locus as well or origin as well i don't have a slide on this but our founder uh dr ethel percy andrus who formed arp more than 60 years ago actually was compelled to first organize retired teachers as it began in california she had been a teacher um big when she recognized that one of her former colleagues was living in a chicken coop and that was because she was her former colleague was unable to afford um adequate housing in in the course of her daily life and that really set off um what is uh what has been an incredible um sort of avalanche of advocacy and organization that dr andrews began and on behalf of retired persons now we are just arp we work on behalf of all uh older adults 50 plus and really we're working to create communities that benefit people of all ages so that origin of dr anders's um first identification of housing and community as such an incredible need really has blossomed into this very robust program that i'm really privileged to um contribute to and and to speak to with my colleagues here from vermont and california so i mentioned our sort of origin story we also have this incredible demographic drive um to work in this space um largely driven by this statistic which i i repeat ad nauseam because to me it is the reason that local leaders need to change the way they're doing things we're very quickly approaching the day uh 2034 actually is the day in which we will for the first time ever be comprised as a country of people more than older than 65 uh more so than people under 18. so we are shifting from a predominantly younger crowd a demographic nation to a nation wherein the largest age group is is is 65 plus certainly larger than than 1818 below um we're in the middle of a of an upswing and the growth of 65 plus in the last decade we've seen that the the number of 65 plus have uh grown by more than a third just in the last decade alone and i guarantee you if you dig into these statistics in your communities or your states you'll find something very similar a number of states are already at that point where there are more people over 65 than there are under 18 for the first point ever or find that they are going to approach that date very very soon so this really is kind of a national um demographic trend that we're in the middle of and it causes us to ask the question causes me to ask the question are we ready for that are we ready for that day um and i think it's fair to say that when you look at the figures when you look at the statistics and how communities are working for people uh particularly 65 and above it's easy to conclude that we're not ready that we're not building the kind of communities that are going to be well suited um to that demographic feature certainly we see that in housing where we see a huge mismatch between the type of housing that we conventionally find in communities where 85 of our housing stock is two three four or more bedrooms and yet half of our households are one or two person households uh we see that the rent increase the rent burden on older adults um is increasing uh and that is of course uh in its most extreme situations leading to increases in homelessness among older adults as well when that housing cost burden becomes too too intense we know that the housing stock does not adequately provide for accessibility features there's a real shortage in homes that have basic features such as zero step entries or wider doorways when you think about parks and public spaces we know that older adults are not finding in parks the kind of amenities and services and features that they would like and that's evident in the fact that old adults don't use parks to the same degree that they represent of the population moreover we know that parks are not serving all people equally they certainly are not serving communities of color in the same way that they serve non-uh or more white communities um and communities of color parks are smaller they're more uh crowded and um particularly in places where there's a real lack of green space we know that that can contribute to um to environmental conditions that have a very deleterious effect for older adults particularly in in case of of heat waves when you think about transportation mobility similarly um the built environment is not particularly well suited to the needs of older adults in which um older adults typically outlive their ability to drive for anywhere from seven to ten years and when that day comes that they don't drive or choose not to drive oftentimes there are very few options available we know that our transit systems are we're already suffering now they're truly in crisis uh we know that bike and ped fatalities are on the rise and that older adults represent a disproportionate share of those in most states um all of the and many other factors there's a lot of other sort of concerns about transportation that that that are now in the mix because of copenhagen all of those conditions really roll up to the fact that um we we end up in situations where people are more isolated where they are more lonely and that that sense of prolonged isolation and loneliness contributes to very real health effects it's equivalent actually to smoking 15 cigarettes a day and we know that it has uh it contributes to an increased rate of dementia all of these are good reasons to really think differently about how we're building communities and that's where we at arp want to play a role where we want to be supportive we our goal is to support communities and local leaders like you all to think differently about your housing your transportation your public spaces and more so that we are creating places that work for people of all ages we do that in a few different ways that i'll try to walk through very quickly so we have ample time for for my colleagues here the first of which is is a framework for looking at communities this is called our arp network of age friendly states and communities it is a voluntary framework wherein localities or state governments can raise their hand and commit to a five-year process to become more age-friendly by mapping through what we call the eight domains of livability that begins with housing and transportation and public space but extends to other things such as community health employment and volunteerism um even how old adults are getting their information which we know is critically important these days uh as people are looking for clear clear information on vaccine just as one example this process is very much rooted in listening to the needs of older adults and building diverse coalitions that can come together to align around common interests such as improving the diversity of housing improving um the safety of pedestrians and cyclists improving park space that really benefits all so encourage you to learn more about that you can see if your community is in fact a member and if not maybe explore if that would be a value um a second way in which we i apologize one additional uh comment here on the age friendly communities what we have seen about our age friendly communities is that they've been very responsive to the challenges that have come before us in the last year um equity has been a challenge always but it really has sort of surged and i think awareness and prominence justifiably and we've seen our age-friendly communities in particular really put equity at the center of their work and put in place some very clear steps and actions whether that means targeting their efforts into communities that are underserved as borne out by the data or whether that means being intentional in making information and public engagement opportunities available in multiple languages in multiple forums um partnering with with trusted uh entities that represent diverse members of the community and similarly in kobe we've seen that since day one our age family communities have been able to pivot their work to ensure that older adults are getting what they need um both in terms of immediate needs in the response mode but now thinking about how we recover from coping 19 what is it that older adults are going to need to be doing differently so i encourage you to learn more about all of those um a second way in which we support communities is through funding um lynn mentioned at the top that we have some money available we actually do we're in the middle of our application window for our community challenge grant program and this is a a uh once a year opportunity we've now in our year five um in which we fund quick action projects that we really that we hope are helping communities to demonstrate something new and innovative so our goal here is to to be that sort of catalytic investor to help you make the case for why things need to change in a community in pursuit of longer term change that can mean things like colorful crosswalks to make the case to your local dot or a public works department about why there's value in slowing traffic and encouraging pedestrian activity it could mean things like colorful bike racks or things like public art or events like ciclovia events slow streets events or education around how to use transit or how to use bicycles once again it can be making the case through construction of temporary bike lanes as to why a more permanent solution would be appropriate for that community it can also mean activities that bring older adults to the table in terms of planning for their communities real community outreach and engagement opportunities um such as the kind we see here that happen to be in baltimore maryland um lots of really creative projects have come through this program in the last four years we've funded more than six million dollars worth of them almost by 600 grants total in every state in the union plus dc puerto rico and virgin islands and really encourage uh creative solutions to come in again um the deadline for that is april 14th so please do put your thinking caps on about that and um and consider applying a couple other tools um that we offer our livability index is is a mechanism in place where you can search by address by uh by zip code by community to find out how your community is doing at present it's a data driven index that combines about 60 different policies and metrics to articulate what are the strengths in a community and what are some areas that they need to work on um we also have a searchable map where you can find out whether your community is an age-friendly community or what other places like you might be in terms of population size or geography um it also lets you search past community grant locations and projects finally we also have a really robust website and which i encourage you to check out uh but also in particular we have a weekly newsletter that comes out just about every wednesday super easy to sign up just text livable to 50757 and this is a practitioner-focused newsletter that is your best way to learn about new resources new grant opportunities and the like it goes to about 110 000 practitioners now local leaders around the country highly encourage you to sign up one of the things that i'm most proud of that arp does is offer a robust library of resources free publications um to local leaders oftentimes these are ways to articulate the value of an approach um both for people on the ground but also to help local leaders take action um so we have publications on on everything from housing to to parks to transportation a few that i'll call out for you here we have some great resources on adus in particular i want to flag that um in addition to our guide the abcs of adus that you'll see here which really makes the case for why adus fit in communities and can benefit older adults i'm proud to say that we also just last month released a new model and state local adu code we had had one in place for about 20 years we just updated that and we're happy to re-release that so that's available as well you can find out more at arp.org adus but we also have other publications available such as things on placemaking pop-up demonstrations on how to evaluate parks to see whether they're sufficiently intergenerational or how they could be improved several publications related to housing in terms of making the case for more diverse housing stock and much more and of course as lynn mentioned uh one of the things that we're proud of very much so is is this new handbook that we've been able to do with cnu um i think one of the things that this does so well is it makes the case for all of the sort of interstitial codes and regulations that create a community it we it's not enough to just fix the housing in isolation or to just fix the street state in in isolation it's all those factors coming together and particularly the intersection between those points that come together in the forms of facades and building design and uses of of public spaces that really make a community livable and walkable and dynamic and inclusive or not um and so this guide is is a is a guidebook to help you in identifying um codes that can be brought to bear that are relatively um small scale in nature but big in impact and there's a there's a little bit of an easier link here to find the document than the one lynn shared um easy to remember aarp.org zoning so um please do check it out and again we're happy to make those um publications available to you for free in print upon request couple quick examples of how this works then i'm going to turn it over to my colleagues to tell you more about how they're seeing it unfold in their communities so in des moines iowa for example um des moines iowa has been a member of our h family network for several years early on in their work they identified a need for more compact walkable communities with housing that's affordable to mo that's more affordable than the typical single-family home would be as a result of that they've been able to apply for several community um several activities one of which is a community challenge grant to fund the construction of a model adu and really make the case for why diverse housing stock is needed um they've identified areas of under investment with a focus on 50 plus residents and helped to drive funding into those corridors as a result and they've looked at businesses and how businesses and their community can um can better serve the needs of older adults so uh more information there i'll there's the link which we'll make available after the um the presentation another one miami-dade county again a member of our age from the network for several years as well as several jurisdictions within the county they're focusing on among other things transportation and how can they improve pedestrian safety on on some of their more busy and dangerous roadways they are advocating for additional transit stops and improved quality of transit stops as evidenced by a grant publication grant that they received to install these age friendly benches at transit stops they know that for older adults standing in the heat waiting for a bus is not a solution it's not going to work and so by providing benches for people to rest again doesn't just help older adults they can improve the quality of the transit experience for for those residents finally columbus ohio another great age friendly leader been a member for several years now um looking into transportation specifically they've been able to achieve some really fantastic work in the last several years one of which was a safe routes to asian place study with their ohio d.o.t another one is this lifting villages program which connects existing villages which are membership-based neighborhood-based organizations that help people age in place with lift so that when a volunteer driver is not available through their village a lyft driver can be made available and that lyft driver has already been educated trained on what the needs of older adults are and moreover older adults who don't have smartphones can still access a lyft driver which has been a breakdown for many older adults so lots of good stories here to peruse again i want to turn it over to my colleagues now um fred and kelly and i think we're starting with fred who will tell the story of what's going good stuff that's happening in arp california fred hello everybody uh my name is fred buzo an associate state director from aarp california i'm based in san jose and yeah i'm going to share an experience that we had that started several years ago and that we're still going through actually an example of zoning reform so let me share my screen and then we'll get right to it let me know when you're able to see that yep it's here it's your friend there you go that's perfect okay great so so aarp policy on land use this is this is straight from our policy book at aarp so um you know we we think that you have to have proper uh land use planning uh in order to develop communities uh livable communities and age friendly cities which is what the program that uh danielle spoke of um so that that is our foundation that is our basis really for the for the work that that we're doing in regards to building out and working with local governments to build out these livable communities and age-friendly cities so then back in 2017 um which is when uh we started to ask ourselves well how can we do this right how can we convince cities or work with cities to build out these these uh age-friendly communities and so one thing is we we figured out that we needed to embed our these age-friendly policies within an urban planning agenda so specifically within the urban planning agenda of a city and um how do we do that well we have to partner with organizations outside of our aging network meaning we have to stop talking ourselves and stop talking to organizations like aarp who are only working on older adult issues so we had to talk to planners planning departments architects developers we also had to narrow the focus of the work we could not be all things to all people in order to affect zoning reform that was going to [Music] be impactful so we had to take advantage of what we call strategic opportunities in order to begin this work so a strategic opportunity 2017 um the mayor of san jose wrote a memo where he talks about reimagining underutilized business corridors and he provides specific examples of the business corridors within the city of san jose that he would like to see reimagined and you'll see that one of the highlight or the highlighted location in san jose or one of the business corridors is 13th street slash lunar park well in my prior work for the city of san jose i was very familiar with this area i knew the community so i knew what it was going to take in order to get the buy-in of the community so taking advantage of this memo that the mayor wrote and then my relationships with the community i thought well let's let's make this the focus of our work in regards to uh zoning reform and then the other thing too was that by by using the mayor's memo as the foundation for our work when you go to the community you can then say hey we did not choose this location right because sometimes when you go out to the community they're going to ask you that well who are you how did arp choose north 13th street well we didn't choose north 13th street the mayor wrote it in his memo this was adopted by the city council so it wasn't it wasn't us going into a community telling them oh this is what needs to be done this this was already happening and they just needed to be made made aware of it and feel you know as if they were working with us in order to to uh to do the best work possible here so what do we decide to do well i went out on a road show basically in the city of san jose and i went to neighborhood meetings i went to senior commission meetings business association meetings non-profit board meetings and so the idea was that we were going to convene we didn't know if it was going to be a charrette or if it was going to be just a series of design workshops but we we landed on a charrette and so but prior to the charette i had to go out to the community and talk to them about it because one no one knew what a charette was right they were like suret what are you talking about you know what is that and so i had to go out and explain you know sort of what a charette entailed and why again we were focusing on north 13th street again pointing to the mayor's memo and saying hey look this is happening already with or without our input wouldn't don't you want to have input into this process well of course the name communities want to have input so i wanted to give them a voice and work with them uh with the city in order to uh to get this work done so we convened a charette in 2018 one week april 30th through may 5th we brought in folks from cnu actually people like scott ball like matthew lambert ellen dunham jones and we were there for a week danielle participated as well and so it was great it was a great event uh we had uh folks from the community come in we had city planners involved we had people from the valley transit authority who is our our local transit agency within the county uh san jose state students who from their urban playing department so it was it was great i mean it was a great experience uh some great work was done and we landed on a few recommendations in regards to north 13th street so this is at the time of the charade well even currently this is still the current zoning designation within the general plan of san jose for north 13th street so mixed use commercial so it's funny when you go out to the community in the neighborhood and you talk to them about hey you know this is what's in the general plan they have no idea what's in the general plan right and so you talk to them about hey these are the allowable uses within your business corridor right now and you start talking about mid-rise office and they're like what are you talking about really because if you go out to north 13th street right now it it is like semi you know post-apocalyptic i mean it is in terrible shape very few new construction has taken place over the past you know 40 years and the one thing that has been built is like a one-story autozone with like a huge parking lot you know so though that you could point to that and say this is what your current uh land use designation within the general plan will get you is a bunch of one-story auto zones with parking lots people don't want that and i knew that you know because i had worked with that community before so i went out talked to them about their current land use designation but then this is what we recommended so we recommended you go from your mixed mixed-use commercial to your mixed-use neighborhood and the reason was really if you looked at how the neighborhood and how this business corridor had been had been built historically there was already a ton of housing there there were there was residential over retail that had been built like in the 1900s there was single family homes there are triplexes there are duplexes and yet the city was saying that they did not want to allow any residential development on that business corridor so it was like okay so you're not going to allow any new new residential development but yet 50 of the lots or almost 50 percent of the lots on this business business corridor had residential uses on them already so it just didn't make any sense to say hey we're just going to create an entire you know just an entire uh commercial corridor and just get rid of all the residential so the mixed use neighborhood uh designation fit the uh you know just the historic uh development of the uh north 13th street commercial corridor so we make the recommendation these are the types of renderings that were drawn at the charade to show people look these are the kinds of things you could have on your corridor if zoning is is reformed if zoning is is modified now of course people loved it i mean look at them it looks great right and so even even when you got to the you know to the uh um you know to the to the renderings that had you know four stories people were okay with that because you could tell them look this is not going to be right next to you know a a single family home this is the way north 13th street works it it gets more dense as you as you move further uh west and so people people were fine with it you know they they really loved it and so we got the buy-in of the community so now we're in 2018 the mayor submits another memo and says yes you need to work with aarp on neighborhood business districts like north 13th street again emphasizing to the planning department you got to do this so let's work let's let's keep moving forward 2018 another year goes by right but you got to imagine look between 2018 2019 i'm still going out to the community i'm still going out to events and parks and showing people copies of the charrette report and saying hey you know this is still going let's still do this 2019 uh planning staff submits their memo on the scope of the general plan update thank goodness we're gonna have a general plan update residential uses in underutilized business corridors to allow the integration of housing it's in there we were like yes we got this right we got it in the scope of the general plan update now we got to go through the general plan update february 27th of 2020 the general plan task force recommends uh that um that there be essentially you know zoning reform to res to allow residential uses in places like and it lists some other areas in san jose but north 13th street is on there and so at this point in time what we have is this recommendation by the general flan uh general plan task force that provides recommendations to the city council all of this was supposed to be done last year but because of covet things were delayed and so now we it is scheduled to be heard at the city council in june of 2021 uh so in a few months so what i'm hoping is that you know we can i can come back and report that it was adopted and that the sony reform is going to take place officially but it's it's as you know it's long-term work uh it takes a you know it takes many people it takes great urban planners great architects but takes a political champion and we've had the support of the mayor and the city council member here and it takes people on the ground in the neighborhood and advocates and partner organizations to get it all done so hopefully it will be done um but you know cities move really slowly as you know and um sometimes you have to force them to move a little bit or nudge them as we'd like to say at a arp right danielle so but yeah i mean that that's all i have um i didn't put a link to the charette report on here i should have i can put it in the chat though and so that way you can download that on your own thank you and now i'll turn it over to kelly thank you fred thank you fred hi everyone i'm kelly stoddard poor with aarp vermont state office and i'm gonna just if you give me one second i'm just gonna pull up my okay pull up my slides here okay well thank you thank you to cnu for hosting this great um webinar and for inviting us to be able to participate and share a little bit about from the work that we've been doing and right up in the northeast corner um i'm going to talk about our partnerships and the work that has gone into updating vermont's zoning and land use regulations with the ultimate goal of creating more walkable age for friendly like many states vermont has many communities with outdated zoning that adds to our housing affordability problems here in vermont over the course of the last two years aarp vermont partnered up with our department of housing and community development the vermont association of realtors and the vermont housing and conservation board to leverage the national expertise of cnu to come to vermont to help us tackle our zoning problems through the project for code reform we work together to create a guide for small rural communities zoning for great neighborhoods aims to help communities in vermont address that mismatch between the housing that is actually available on the market and that type of housing that we need in our communities we need to be able to update our local land use regulations to be able to provide more housing choices for more monitors and cnu came and helped us out doing that so first i want to just share a little bit about the challenges and opportunities that vermont faces like the rest of the country we we are faced with housing affordability um issues as well in every county in vermont so it touches all corners of our state at least one out of every eight households spends more than half of their income on housing it's tremendous we are also saddled with a very old housing stock the majority of our housing has been built for able-bodied 35-year-olds in fact one in four houses in vermont was built before 1940. that's twice the national rate we also have a population that isn't growing but our households are the households sizes shared earlier almost 70 percent of vermont households have fewer than two people and a quarter of our of our households have single persons they're just one person which represents half the total number of one bedroom units that we even have available in our state so as a result many of our housing markets we have you know pockets that are bigger cities like our burlington and our montpelier brattleboro bennington and these are you know our biggest city in vermont is just 45 000 so everything's relative here um they struggle with being able to add more housing to the market itself but the majority of um communities in vermont are really struggling with how to be able how do you improve the quality and the accessibility of the homes that exist on the market now so many many people in vermont take two sort of narratives that um when we think about our future and the planning of our future we look some people will say we need to grow our recreational economy we need to attract more millennials to vermont and then others will talk about the aging of our population and that we're not for our aging population and both narratives are really to focus on both but right now vermont really isn't ready for success when we look at just our housing market but what we do know and the positive side is that people want livable walkable communities um and millennials alike there's growing desire to live jobs and services among all age groups people off a long commute for a smaller home and the last from the according to the national association of realtors the top three factors for influencing neighborhood choice um for our 2018 home buyers one was convenience to job two home affordability and three the quality of neighborhood so creating new units in vermont is really hard updating regulations is difficult many of our communities are small and we have a lot of municipalities that are under resourced um but the fundamental decisions really are happening on that very local level in vermont and we recognized along with our partners that municipalities need help we need to address regulatory [Music] barriers like cost and delay from our lengthy appeals process through the development review board process in towns the complexity of state and local permitting processes and parking at minimums so enabling better places a zoning guide for great neighborhoods which um i'm just going to hold up really quick um this is the one that is really that cnu helped us build um and create and this guidance really provides this model regulation to help support incremental process incremental zoning reform um that is really focused on being able to provide a wide variety of housing choices this work was also done in collaboration with our regional planning commissions we were able to select six communities in vermont to serve as case studies allowing us to focus on the practicality of how to zone for multi-unit or other flexible housing types first we tackled the types of regulatory barriers that were preventing homes from being built in vermont from the village level neighborhood level and downtowns as well and then we analyzed the local regulations as well and then finally finding regulations that would support the types of housing that we need in our communities and one of the best things we learned from cnu if you do nothing else do this the the biggest smallest um the biggest littlest change you can make in your community and i think that this is really important particularly for small communities where they could feel really overwhelmed with taking everything on around zoning reform and this incremental approach is it it is so important because it allows people to be able to take these small taking small adjustments to uh zoning reform and to be able to continue to achieve these age-friendly walkable communities that everybody wants so and you we tackle dimensional standards parking standards allowable uses street standards the opportunity around adus and our development review board process here in vermont so i'm going to talk really briefly about how we were able to apply this great work that cnu uh brought to us here in vermont and bringing all of our partners together as well and looking at the opportunity around accessory dwelling units um so back in 2019 um the aarp vermont state office surveyed the 45 plus in vermont boston number of question edu's and it was really refreshing to get such strong support from from small work early or larger um cities here in vermont around the support for um adu ordinances um so this this helped lead our work um specifically in burlington uh working with the mayor's office in burlington along with a couple of our partners from the business community and home share vermont to be able to update the local ordinance in burlington to make to enable more 80s to be able to be built there was just a strong desire for people to be able to build them and they were encountering a number of significant barriers that prevented them from building um the parking the parking minimum was a big one so what we were able to accomplish in burlington we were able to allow adus as an accessory to all single-family residential structures in any zoning district in the city of burlington we're able to streamline the permitting process which tended to be very time consuming and costly for homeowners and if used if the adu met all of the applicable requirements um they were then permitted by wright um without the requirement of going through the development review board process in um in burlington also eliminated the parking requirement so they were no longer required to have a parking space for the adu and if they were to provide a parking space there was more flexibility of how you could accommodate that on the lot remember there's we do have this really old housing stock and so a lot of uh driveways are long and narrow and previously they weren't allowed to be able to do the stacked parking um and then we simplified it and increased the max edu size as well which really helped a lot of the smaller homes on larger lots to be abused because it was previously capped um at 20 um of habitable space and then providing lot exemption that the coverage provided a lot coverage exemption use footprint to be exempt from the lot coverage minimums when storm water was managed properly we did keep the owner occupancy in place that was part of our state statute um and that that one um provided some great conversation community conversation but in in the end the community really wanted to keep um that piece in the ordinance and then some of the non-regulatory efforts that we um have done is providing we worked with homeshare vermont to provide a how-to guide for homeowners living in burlington to help them walk them through step by step through the construction of an edu and the permitting process and there's also technical assistance available as well for homeowners in burlington and then we work um with homeshare and the city as well to provide um maybe every four months we do a webinar uh um okay um homeowners how to build adus in the city of burlington so we're really excited to see all the track action that 80's is getting not just in burlington but in a lot of our other smaller communities as well so and that will conclude my presentation so i'm going to turn it back to lynn thank you so much thanks kelly danielle and fred really have appreciated hearing the back story of how aarp nationally is supporting hundreds of communities with millions of dollars to demonstrate um small changes in your community how you all are engaging at a big city like san jose all the way over to smaller rural vermont that's that's quite a that's that's quite a scope increasingly we've been finding at cnu what an incredible stakeholder aarp has been both at the national and at the state office for all of the work that we're doing and i can only imagine for all of cnu members having aarp as a partner in their projects could be equally as beneficial so danielle i'm going to throw the first question to you and to ask how can if a cnu member is doing some project in some state how can they bring aarp to the table to help you know move the conversation forward um yeah no that's a great question and i think that's exactly what we hope that flows out of this uh are being here today i've got a slide that shows a couple different ways in which you can get involved um the short of it is to figure out where which arp state office is available in your in your state so all of our state offices i will say california and vermont are among are more um deeply steeped in this work but there are 49 other states around sorry 40 51 other states around the country that um are working in this in this space as well including dc puerto rico virgin islands um but a few things that people can do one certainly apply for a community challenge grant and the reason that's important is because state offices are the first layer of review for those grant applications and ultimately that is how we are learning our state offices find new and great partners around the state um so craft an idea work with the municipality work the nonprofit send that up that's a great way to begin to make the get on the radar screen of your arp state office so that's one way it also has the potential of realizing some very real um investment uh in the project as well um two check out our map the the interactive map here to see what's happening in your community already so again the map that we've listed here includes our age friendly communities and our former challenge grant recipients so that's another great way of finding out where arp is showing up in your community already and learning a little bit about what's been done and perhaps how to build on that prior prior work um another way is of course sign up for a newsletter that's a great way to find out what's happening um in our world it's easy to do that by texting livable to 507.57 i think one of the best ways you can get involved is just perusing our website and certainly making good use of our publications you know all our talk about adus and there's a question i think in the queue about how you know combating nimbyism you know a lot of the reason that we put together these publications is to is to put material in the hands of local practitioners and advocates to make the case for why these topics matter to older adults so when we're talking about adus we're talking about how they expressly meet the needs of older adults based on some research data that we've conducted wherein we know that you know of of the homeowners who don't currently have an adu a third of them would like to build one and why do they want to build one they want to build one for income for help or for have for companionship um so we make the case for that in in our adu guide as well as many of our other guides and that can be a real tool and a resource to you in your local work and then finally of course as i mentioned look at the arp state office in your state again real easy arp.org states and that will connect you with your local team um danielle as a small little follow follow on but you said something just now that i want you to amplify so in the work that we're that we're doing collaboratively with aarp um i've mentioned a couple times the big issue danielle that we're facing is about nimbyism and advocacy do you want us to put any any information on that and danielle's answer is i'm answering for you but you're going to tee up she was like oh no we got this we wrote the book on advocacy um and i think that that's really important so many of our members are in meetings where the nimbys are coming out and you're saying you can bring an entire huge organization to say no we want this so can you talk a little bit more about the and both you know fred and kelly as well the the advocacy that you all bring in the the loud voice of yes in my backyard yeah no i think i i don't want to over commit our states to that position and i won't say we have a policy book that we follow but our policy book is very uh inclusive of all the issues that we talk about here so each state director ultimately makes the decisions for their advocacy priorities so i'll let kelly and fred speak to that um from the state perspective but i will say in general we one of the other amazing tools we have is incredible volunteers so we really do between our print publications and between our our our our muscle memory on how to do advocacy and with our incredible volunteers we are able to mobilize people and make the case that um there is a different perspective to be considered and when you think about uh comprehensive zoning or when you think about increasing missing middle housing or when you think about bike and ped safety it's critical that you hear from older adults on that topic because these matters directly pertain to older adults and and older adults are can be very vocal in their wishes and so our goal is to really position older adults as a partner and part of the solution rather than just as opposition but kelly maybe you want to mention a little bit about the advocacy work that happened around the burlington adu yeah i would be happy to thanks daniela um i i think what is so important i think that what aarp is able to bring to the table is really the focus on community engagement and working with the community where they're at and bringing them along um and hearing from the community so we we we led a number of community community workshops leading up to our work around the ordinance on in burlington and we held you know a couple two-day like workshop styles um where we just invited homeowners to come out and talked about the possibility around adus um and really focusing on the opportunity that edu's provide to be able to age in place um and and also that they're an affordable option as well for folks um and then we did a lot of coffee hours as well in neighborhoods just setting up a number of coffee hours for people to come and chat with us working as danielle said too with our volunteers to help them as well lead some of these coffee hours and just really listening to the community is really important people want to be heard um and giving them a chance to be able to be heard and to work with them um along the process is great this this is about housing and i just want to make a quick plug because it's one of my favorite tools from arp is our walk audit and that is also a wonderful community engagement tool is to be able to bring community members out on a walk audit and be able to see see and experience that walk through their through their through through their lens um and to be able to make recommendations um from the walk on it is another wonderful way if you want to and things like that so kelly you're cutting in and out just just as a just as an fyi um danielle has a hard stop at about about 105 and there's one other question that i want to send danielle's way which is has aparp modeled any state enabling legislation that addresses livability issues including transportation walk walkability zoning etc yeah on this specifically i do want to draw people's attention to the to the model state edu code i mean i think that's possibly the the biggest um thing that we've been able to offer in this space recently um again we know that the model code right it's going to take some adjustment at the state level um but that the fact that we've articulated a model state code as well as a model local adu code i think can go a long way we hope it goes a long way to making it easier to put in place the right kind of regulations um i want to send a message out to jim jones you asked a question about adus and i want to make sure that you feel that um that has been that has been answered if not send me a text um bruce capps asks for those who have experience with adus what is the average cost of construction per square foot do you have any experience on that give me a second i can look it up all right all right then then we'll do move to a question for for kelly can you talk a little bit about the role of adus as a tool for addressing affordability particularly in rural communities i know that that was a really big issue that we addressed just not in burlington but burlington is the outlier for vermont so how talk a little bit about the adus and affordability in vermont okay hopefully i don't cut out am i cutting out again lynn you're good i'm good okay sorry internet in vermont can be a little can be a little patchy at times but um yeah the affordability piece is is important i think the permitting can be tricky in vermont um any way that we can you can streamline the permitting on a local level uh for small communities can really help ease the cost um and then just the the way that you can get creative with adus as well um bringing in a caregiver opening up your home to home share renting out your home um on a long-term basis there's lots of different ways that you can help be able to supplement that or we've seen a lot of adus where the the the adults will move into the adu and bring their adult children into the main house who are raising their kids um and and there's a lot of different ways that you can make edu's work construction costs are high in vermont regardless so that's something that we are challenged with and i'm sure it's similar in california but when you compare a new build with an adu there's a huge difference and an adu can be very affordable option in that way but um i think tackle it you know and i know that portland also they've they've done um incentives and that's something that we're looking at exploring here of ways that we could provide more incentives for adus i think that's a great way to go yeah you know as i want to underscore this is a point that mallory batches has made that as you talk about the the real benefit for the aging population of adu's in world vermont we're actually seeing that dynamic play out in smaller communities um all communities acro across the united states that this is a real way to kind of provide not only affordable housing for new people coming in but uh increase the affordability for the folks living in the main house as you were saying in their adult children um i know in santa cruz for example you see homeowners moving into the adu and then renting it out to to to new families um i just lost a question danielle do you have your question about yeah i just put it in the uh i just put in the chat in our abc's of adu's guide which we did with eli spivak of orange spot in oregon and the average cost per square foot is about 100 between 150 on average the range 150 to 450 per square foot um that's just my quick calculation of the ones that we feature here and again very regionally based to kelly's point construction costs are going to very widely and those costs are coming down all the time too with more prefab construction as people know i think um fred how might you encourage cnu's audience many of which are urban designers or planning practitioners to leverage the partnership with aarp in the way that you are able to do for the 13th street project yeah i think it kind of it's kind of similar to the the questions we asked ourselves at aarp is what did we need to do we we needed to just reach out to folks outside of our organization people that we would think about not working with in the past same thing i would encourage you know cnu members reach out to aarp locally in your state if you have an uh an office in your city reach out to them reference all the things that danielle's talked about and that i've talked about that kelly's talked about and say hey can we do this here in our city and um i think uh you know i'd be surprised by you know by the response so final final question for the group uh we're trying to move these and and have them be a little bit more time what opportunities have you seen for making inroads and to turning the tide from uh no in my backyard to yes in my backyard right it's as you know both fred and kelly have have talked about this but it's of reforming you know if the issues were coming into these issues around affordable housing around adus around increased densities um so yes engaging aarp but can you talk a little bit more about the specific strategies of how you're changing it from no way to yes please i'll jump in and maybe start and partially because i want to amplify the value of of a longer-term policy framework or planning framework um as represented by our age friendly network i think one of the amazing things that we've been able to see through those three communities that i touched on very briefly is that when you um as a community when you commit to wanting to be a place that people can age well in where older adults aren't forced to leave because they can't afford to stay there or because they can't live the kind of lives they want to live there when a community commits to that future and then takes steps to to proactively achieve that that's a very different context for change than one that rigidly says we got to figure out we don't want change and i think what you see is a lot of opposition along the nimby comes from fear of change obviously but but when you're confronted with the reality that we as a country as a community are changing and that our needs aren't aren't addressing our our communities aren't addressing current needs well and they're certainly not going to address our future needs if we're on the same path once you create that kind of a forum for discussion and growth and evolution i think it invites a very different kind of tenor of conversation around change and and again to fred's point it's a table where diverse groups come together it's a table where the home builders and the realtors are sitting with the bicycle and pet advocates are sitting with the public works directors are sitting with the area agencies on aging and all together figuring out what is it that we need to do differently to better serve the needs of older adults again we start with that we know that a lot of the solutions ultimately benefit people of all ages and also that's really what we're trying to achieve here is places that are good for people of all ages yeah yeah and and lynn if i could if i could add something you know um this past year uh well starting in late 2019 and then all through 2020 a colleague of mine in from los angeles uh named rafi nazarians we went around the state we talked to developers planners elected officials equity groups housing advocates to ask them their opinion about uh what aarp could do to to assist with those kinds of issues because we we heard loud and clear that there was this perception true or not that older adults are nimbies they are the ones that show up at the city council meetings and are very vocal about housing you know developments or housing projects that are on the council's agenda so one of the things that came out of that is that we are going to create a volunteer core of sorts of local advocates who can speak in favor of housing and residential development at the local level we already have that to a certain extent at the state level so we have folks who can go into you know the into sacramento and and call and email and march the halls of the capital and that sort of thing but we need to do that at the local level so this is something brand new we just we just launched a report about a you know a month and a half ago uh but one one of our uh uh our recommendations one of our plans coming out of the report is to create this volunteer core at the local level so we're so sorry so sorry about that that's i totally understand that's hilarious so um uh kelly any final any final words before we before we close this out no thank you again lynn for the opportunity and i think fred and danielle answered that question wonderfully i couldn't hear the end of um fred's comment so i want to thank everybody for joining us i particularly want to thank our panelists kelly fred and danielle and mostly i want to thank aarp in general for being such an incredible partner not only to seeing you and our chapters and to our members but to the movement as a whole like having a partner like seeing you or like aarp moving together it just it really gives me hope that that we're turning that we're turning the tide so i want to remind everyone again to register for on the park bench next week we'll where we will hear from mindy love and kennedy smith and don't forget to register for the congress so um finally we will post the recording of this on cnu's website within 24 hours and aarp will cross promote it as well so thank you everyone for participating and thank you again to our panelists thank you thank you bye all bye