The Evolution of a Law

It all began in August 2013, when then city attorney Cheryl Roberts misinterpreted the Schedule of Bulk and Area Regulations for Residential Districts and declared that the city code required that apartments be a minimum of 1,500 square feet. It took almost a year for the Planning Board, the Zoning Board of Appeals, and the Common Council Legal Committee to accept the "plain language" interpretation of the regulation offered by former assistant city attorney Dan Tuczinski: the 1,500-square-foot minimum per dwelling unit pertained to the lot size not the apartment size. 

In the meantime, the Legal Committee got to like the idea of engineering residential development and decided they would craft a law dictating the minimum size for a studio apartment and the minimum size for a one-bedroom apartment: 350 square feet and 500 square feet respectively. The law was "laid on the aldermen's desks" on October 21, 2014, and it has been lying there ever since. Because it deals with zoning, the proposed law required a recommendation from the Hudson Planning Board and the Columbia County Planning Board, which has taken time, but now the Council is ready to move ahead. 

On Thursday, January 15, at 5:30 p.m. the Council is holding a public hearing on the proposed new law to amend the zoning ordinance. Next Tuesday, January 20, at the regular Common Council meeting, Council members will complete a Full Environmental Assessment Form, as required by law, because the zoning change affects 25 acres or more. On Tuesday, too, they will also vote on enacting the law. 

Although the public hearing isn't until Thursday, the proposed law has already drawn criticism. On his blog Hudson Urbanism, in a post entitled "How to make it more difficult for the poor to afford an apartment," architect and urban planner Matthew Frederick questions if there exists objective evidence that "people's health and well-being are compromised by living in apartments smaller than the proposed standards" and predicts that the proposed amendment "will threaten the well-being of some individuals on the lower rungs of the socio-economic ladder by increasing the cost of renting an entry-level apartment."

At last night's informal Common Council meeting, Stephen Dunn argued that establishing a minimum apartment size was unnecessary because the zoning code already requires that there be one parking space for each apartment, and therefore "no one can create a bunch of micro apartments." 

Dunn urged the Council to withdraw the distinction between a studio apartment and a one-bedroom apartment and simply set 350 square feet as a minimum size, regardless of configuration, and submitted a drawing to show that a "very functional one-bedroom apartment" could exist in 350 square feet.

Council president Don Moore defended the 500-square-foot minimum for one-bedroom apartments by saying, "It is what we consider an appropriate size."

The text of the proposed new law can be found here. The public hearing on the law is at 5:30 p.m. on Thursday, December 15. 
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