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On Fri, Jul 20, 2018 at 10:56 PM, Kevin Burke , wrote: <br />Mayor Bain, <br />I'm a renter, I got engaged recently and I'm trying to save for a home. It's difficult to do this when the average <br />home is $1.4 million and we pay $36,000 per year in rent. I'm concerned about the high cost of housing and <br />the burden it places on renters and young people, and I am worried that this attempt to designate the <br />neighborhood as historic is a vehicle for residents of the neighborhood to fight change, more than it is concern <br />for the history of the neighborhood. <br />Downzoning in the US began as a practice to prevent minorities from moving into a neighborhood and keep <br />communities segregated. Neighborhoods which had a higher share of whites in a time of historical segregation <br />tend to still be whiter than the county average today. The ongoing effects of designating this area as historic, <br />whether or not deliberately intended, will be to maintain a housing shortage and housing types that are more <br />expensive by design. For more on this and related topics, please check out The Color of Law by Richard <br />Rothstein. It is a recently published, eye-opening, detailed historical account of the origins of policies to <br />segregate neighborhoods, including the role and history of zoning. <br />Signaling friendliness for downzoning will also encourage other single family home zones to similarly try to <br />preserve their communities in amber. This could increase upzoning pressure on other parts of the city, <br />especially if the state presses forward with plans to increase RHNA targets in the next cycle. There may come <br />a time when we would welcome duplexes and triplexes in single family neighorhoods, especially those <br />adjacent to transit, and downzoning hurts your flexibility there. <br />Perhaps as an alternative, you could consider designating a small number of structures as historic, instead <br />of the entire neighborhood. But I hope you will balance this concern against the decades -long underproduction <br />of new housing in San Mateo County, which has displaced many low-income families and put a home out of <br />reach of most. <br />Thanks, <br />Kevin <br />