<div>After almost a year of research and development, the city of College Station unanimously adopted the Housing Action Plan as part of their Comprehensive Plan, hoping to tackle an impending housing crisis.City staff at College Station created an existing conditions report to collect data on present housing conditions in the city. According to the report, middle housing options, including duplexes, condos and townhouses, were noticeably absent from College Station. The report also projected a housing supply shortage by 2030.The Housing Action Plan Steering Committee was created nearly one year ago to research and develop an action plan and consisted of 13 College Station citizens. During August’s City Council meeting, a drafted action plan was presented and the final version was approved during Thursday night’s meeting.According to the presentation, one of the major changes to the housing plan after suggested edits from the August meeting included the overall goals of the plan.<h2>People are also reading…</h2>“Goal 1 — Create and incentivize more housing units and more diverse housing types,” city staff said. “Goal 2 — Incentivize the production and preservation of housing that is affordable to current and future community members.”David Brower, community development analyst for College Station, gave a presentation about the changes and discussed how public opinion was taken into account.“There were four different surveys. We had four public meetings, and met twice with builders,” he said. “The plan takes a good hard look at seeing where increased density should be and where we can create more options for folks to have different types of housing.”As a part of the committee’s research, they gathered community feedback through three general housing surveys; a survey for anyone who lives or works in College Station, a survey for college students and a survey for businesses and organizations. According to a previous meeting, the general citizen survey received over 700 responses, the student survey had over 1,600 responses and the employer survey received over 50 responses. This feedback was taken into account when developing the housing action plan.Fred Dupriest, who had previously spoken at the council meeting in favor of enforcement of the no-more-than-four ordinance, added a few suggestions to the wording of the Housing Action Plan.“There’s the current wording on this action item and a suggested wording that I think might fix it is to simply say that we are supporting [Accessory Dwelling Unit] as long as the home is owner-occupied,” he said. “There may be better words, but I just see this as a fairly simple editorial change if there’s agreement on the principle.”Councilor Elizabeth Cunha said that the only council meeting she had missed in four years was the one where Brower first brought the housing plan to council, apologizing for doing so and also offering some comments.“On page 204, you talk about affordable housing, and you mentioned, just in brief, utilities,” she said. “I wish, because utilities are such an important part of affordable housing, that you would put one page just about how that affects it. I think we definitely could do some things differently on the city’s end, as far as utilities go, that may ease some of that affordable housing issue.”Cunha commended the work that was done on public engagement and said the questions were very well thought out.“The questions would start broad, ‘Do you agree with this?’ Then, ‘Are you willing to put it in your neighborhood?’” she said. “The plan is wonderful. I appreciate so much the work that you and the committee put into it. I enjoyed reading it and thinking about my own part in the solution. I hope other residents will look in the mirror when they’re looking for the solutions. The solutions lie with the people that live here. We are the solution.”The agenda item with the proposed modification from Dupriest was approved.</div>

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College Station adopts Housing Action Plan in response to anticipated housing crisis

After almost a year of research and development, the city of College Station unanimously adopted the Housing Action Plan as part of their Comprehensive Plan, hoping to tackle an impending housing crisis. City staff at College Station created an existing conditions report to collect data on present housing conditions in...