Residents concerned about manufactured homes being allowed in residential areas gave the Taylor City Council an earful during a discussion about reimagining the Envision Taylor Comprehensive Plan.
Officials countered that rising house prices and an increasing population mean other types of affordable housing must be allowed, including manufactured housing.
The outcry came during a special joint meeting Aug. 18 with the Planning & Zoning Commission to consider the next steps in the plan, which could include changes to zoning ordinances.
Realtor Debbie Kovar, a Taylor resident, said allowing more liberal zoning ordinances for manufactured homes would have an adverse impact on property taxes.
“The only thing I will say about manufactured housing is we are worried about our tax base,” Kovar said. “I have never seen a manufactured house increase in value. It does not appreciate. It only depreciates, and so with houses you know they have appreciated quite a bit lately.”
But city leaders quickly reassured residents that all proposals are still in the early stages of development, including hammering out a map of areas that might be affected.
“There is no action to be taken this evening,” said Mayor Brandt Rydell. “In fact, the reason we are having this workshop is to start to socialize these ideas. It’s not something we are springing on folks or acting on immediately.”
The idea is to streamline a variety of complicated zoning ordinances and focus on place types instead, indicated officials at the meeting including Matt Lewis, the president and founder of Simplecity Design.
His firm was awarded a contract in January to translate the five big ideas from the comprehensive plan—including preserving Taylor’s community character, offering a variety of housing types, promoting fiscal sustainability, supporting local businesses and making sure people of all income levels can afford housing— into concrete, proposed changes to development ordinances.
“We actually read your development ordinances that we would be rewriting to see how they would actually fit and to see where there were conflict points and also just to gather an understanding of the development tools you are using currently,” Lewis said. “And what we discovered is they don’t emulate anything that you have got on the ground and they are completely contradictory to the patterns that you are saying you would like.”
Assistant City Manager Tom Yantis frequently filled in an overview of what the proposed changes would look like, including areas for nature, known as P1, rural communities; P2, neighborhoods; P3 and so forth. However, a map of where these changes would take place was not yet ready, he said.
Yantis said this would allow more flexibility for how areas and structures are used, but still would have standards of development.
“Within each one of those place types, we are going to have standards that say that’s how that place gets constructed and these are the types of buildings that go in that place, and these are the types of streets that get built,” Yantis said.
Lewis said the actual usage of the buildings is frequently out of compliance with zoning laws, but more in keeping with a healthy community.
“These streets were managing horse and buggies doing U-turns in the streets … and now we are talking about autonomous vehicles and who knows what’s next,” Lewis said. “But the framework in your downtown has been valuable since the day it was built. These patterns have held their value in every city and in the country.”
Officials also touched on the proposal to change the zoning to allow manufactured housing in a wide variety of neighborhoods, including residential areas, rural areas and in neighborhoods with lots of one acre or greater.
Current zoning requires manufactured homes to be built in special districts for that type of housing.
“You see on Facebook that people are being priced out of housing, and what are we doing to help make sure people stay in Taylor,” said District 1 Councilman Gerald Anderson. “You can’t have it both ways. Either you make it affordable for people to have a place to stay, or we don’t do anything about it, and we don’t allow this type of manufactured housing in the neighborhood.”
Lewis spoke about a new type of manufacturehousing program called MH Advantage, made possible through the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, which features higher federal standards in construction, and structures that more closely resemble traditional houses than those regulated by Texas. “Manufactured housing has to be allowed,” said Dwayne Ariola, councilman at large. “The comprehensive plan asks for affordable housing, and this is affordable housing. But the infill you want to get more bang for the buck with the square footage because they are not making land anymore.”
However, Ariola said the correct path forward was not so simple. “It kind of contradicts,” Ariola said. “We are trying to infill lots to generate more revenue, but this is lower end, cheaper if you will.”
Yantis said the city still had a lot of options to honor the fiscalresponsibility aspect of the Comprehensive Plan through changing the code.
