The Bottom-Up Revolution
Norm sits down with Connor Legros, an undergrad student studying city planning and administration. Connor explains how he's creating a one-stop-shop for building backyard cottages in Flagstaff, Arizona. He shares how better guidance and streamlined approvals can support local housing and reduce the burden on city staff.
Transcript (Lightly edited for readability)
Hello and welcome to this episode of Bottom Up Shorts. I'm so glad that I have this privilege of being able to share each week individuals' stories of what they're experiencing in their communities and what it is that they are doing to be able to address the various needs. I love to be able to capture sort of the wide range of people that are in action in various stages in their careers, various situations within their community.
Today I'm joined by Connor Legros, rising voice within the world of community development and local planning, who is working on his bachelor's, is looking to complete that actually this December. So congratulations, Connor, on geography, environment, and society with a minor in public administration.
We connected with Connor because Edward Erfurt was doing an event or a series of events in Flagstaff, Arizona, and connected with Connor there because Connor has been working in the community there and helping to develop tools related to the rollout of backyard cottages, garage conversions, secondary suites—all of those types of things commonly referred to as ADUs. Though at Strong Towns, we sometimes say ADU sounds like something you pick up at maybe a dive bar, but it's actually just housing. It's homes for people. So that's a little part of our minor, gentle encouragement to the broader world of saying, "Let's talk about this in the way that we think about who is using this. This is a home, not sort of an abstract thing." Yet for all intents and purposes, we use the phrase ADU, and that won't be a challenge at all.
Out of that, what I wanted to ask Connor on to the podcast to talk about is, "Hey, what is it like to dive in and provide policy recommendations?" Do you want to describe the project that you're doing there?
Sure. So the project I was working on is called ADU Usage, and it's combating Flagstaff's housing crisis. Basically the whole plan was to create a tool, or a map, of where ADUs are in Flagstaff, to see where we can best try to create more ADUs for the neighborhoods.
During our research, when we were doing our mapping sections, we ended up creating a couple of recommendations. The first recommendation was to make a one-stop shop toolkit. Basically it would have Flagstaff's already pre-designed ADU list that was just created at the same time embedded in the website. You would click and drag an option onto your property that would be loaded in from the county map and your parcel, and it would determine what sort of things that you have to worry about on your property, the expenses, the incentives, and all the other costs.
That was the main thing that we got out of our project, because the main issue was that people didn't really see how far the timeline was. It was very complicated. You'd have to go to an architect. We wanted to simplify it as much as possible in order to make it easier for people to build an ADU. That's actually what ended up most people wanting in our interviews with folks around Flagstaff: a one-stop shop to make it very transparent about how long the process would take, how much it would cost, what sort of incentives.
We even incorporated affordable housing in there to see if maybe we can try to get property abatements as an incentive to get people to make their housing or ADU as affordable housing with the local group. Then plus there's a couple other things too. We decided to make expedited review as one of the main things too, besides the one-stop shop, in order to make ADUs approved within at least two weeks. We want to get people trained up as well in ADUs with the community development in order to encourage the process to go really quickly, in order to get ADUs on the ground and built out as fast as possible to meet the current need and not the future one.
Yeah, yeah. If that timeline can be shrunk and predictability can be introduced, then it becomes a lot more similar to the process of saying, "Oh, I think I have enough money. I'm going to go buy a car today," and not having it take—you know, before you finally get approval. These structures matter, but they also are, in one respect, non-consequential in terms of not introducing massive change within existing neighborhoods, which is why they should be some of the things that are the simplest to build.
I know in my community, you can get an approval and a permit in a heartbeat for a pool house, but if you want to put people in the house, that's a problem. You can have a shed, even a fairly palatial shed or shop for your equipment, but you won't be able to do that if you determine that actually it would also work for us to convert this and turn it into a space for people. I understand we want to be meeting building codes, but you've already ingrained that into the project as you've laid it out in terms of what is pre-approved and what is expected.
Then do you want to describe what is the status of sort of the pitch that you've put together, as well as what are you hoping to see?
We're hoping to see a lot more ADUs being built, obviously, but we also want to make sure that housing is—and rent is lowered a lot, because affordable housing is a struggle in Flagstaff. So we wanted to see some sort of alternatives, besides just having a full apartment and a separate house, in order to create some more of those middle housing needs that we need to address, especially up there within the vast amount of college students and other groups that we need to cater to that aren't already established, ingrained in the community, that kind of need the flexibility of an ADU or a carriage house or some other alternative where they can easily move in and out when they need to.
So what is the current status? Is it just the draft document, or has it been picked up by a planning department? What's sort of the work—because it's out of a school project, is that right?
Yes, it's a capstone project for my bachelor's.
Got it. Yeah, with three other folks?
Yeah, yeah.
Awesome. Well, I'd love to hear more, because you've had experience as an intern in Yuma and continued to work in Flagstaff and within the county as well. I do want to share just a little bit about your own background and being a student and being ready to graduate and sort of what your life path has looked like and then what you hope going forward.
Sure. So first in high school, I was a community planning intern. I worked for a whole year during my senior year of high school, just sitting in the pre-development meetings to see what sort of development was coming to Yuma, Arizona. From there I learned about how GIS is used to map the infrastructure of pipes and the regulations of all sorts of things. But it also helped me kind of understand why there's some barriers in this community for it being technically a friendly business community to bring in more investment.
From there, when I went to NAU in Flagstaff, I interned at an architecture firm back during the summer here in Yuma, and that also helped me introduce some more topics of why there's some things that we need to address with building codes and regulations and so on. Then the most recent one was in economic development and neighborhood services back here in Yuma again, and it was just to understand how a whole neighborhood can be helped out with certain programs federally. But there are some sort of gaps where we wouldn't have any sort of local infrastructure built out to help out with social groups or helping community members understand what sort of programs exist besides the city government getting involved. So it's something important to understand on that level.
But in terms of my project, it was focused on the Flagstaff area because it has an acute housing shortage with rent being extremely expensive. One ADU that we found on Zillow ended up being over $1,900 a month for less than 600 square feet. So if you can imagine the sort of aspect of regular homes or other ADUs in the area, it was exceptionally terrible pricing. That's just because we have a very unique problem with the Grand Canyon being so close by and all the other tourist destinations like Sedona and other cities, where Flagstaff has become a tourist hub, a college town, and a very traveled spot, where ADUs become very attractive to become Airbnbs.
That's what's happened to a lot of Flagstaff housing: Airbnb has almost taken over large sections of the housing market, which makes everything else even more expensive than it is already. So besides that, it's just—it's gone ridiculous up there. But we hope to try to get our project out there. I haven't heard any updates about my research being used, but I've sent it to the planning director in Flagstaff. I've sent it to Edward Erfurt, just trying to get the message out there that even if Flagstaff doesn't want to use some of the recommendations that we have, someone else in the country, or even Canada or the world, might see some value and actually try implementing some of our ideas of a one-stop shop, the expedited review, training people to be specifically an ADU planning—permitting fee waivers and property tax abatements and all that jazz—just to try to encourage ADU development in their town in the future.
Yeah, and did you identify some of the barriers that say the departments face as they try to say, "You know, this sounds good, but we feel like we just can't get to that point"? What would be some of those common barriers and maybe some responses?
I would say the most common barrier that is obvious is that you need to develop a whole website for this tool. I believe that would be the highest barrier: to develop that to be sort of independent of a community planning website. I'm assuming it also requires some sort of consulting in order to develop that, because we don't have web designers in community development or planners. So I would assume that's the most common barrier, most simple one.
But on that level, I would hope that a city would kind of see the value in this sort of project or toolkit, where you wouldn't have to babysit potential owners of ADUs through the whole process and have the website kind of dictate that process for you and kind of explain that to them on the jump, without people having to come to you first in order to understand the whole process individually.
So some things I would hope for cities to do is to kind of just see what's possible first and evaluate whether or not this website would be useful, and maybe even try to get a previous year's record of how much ADUs have been built in their town to see if it's worth developing a website that is separate and makes a toolkit like this, to make sure that you're getting the most bang out of your buck, especially nowadays with funding having issues in many cities and a lot more cost cutting than normal. So yeah, ADU Usage has a lot of this stuff, and I can share that with you too, to post online as well.
Then I want to pick up on something else that you shared, that as a high school student, you were going in just attending council meetings. Do you want to talk—why is there value in that? Kind of what's the character or the personality of an individual that enjoys that? But also, what were some of the unexpected fruits that you found from it?
So the main thing—I attended these meetings to gain some work experience. Especially since I already knew that I was going to be studying city planning in college, I figured that it'd be best to get some experience ahead of time, especially if I wanted to become a city planner in the future or some other specialized thing.
So it was important to attend council meetings because that's in Yuma where most of the rezonings of our general plan and some other aspects of the planning process occur, which is requiring council to approve. That's also where you can ask questions of planners, which usually are there about the specific projects, in order to see sort of what aspects that they're requiring, what sort of things. You can also talk to them after in person, instead of going to an email or asking for an interview or something like that. You can ask them right there.
But I would say the person that I would assume would be best is some sort of inquisitive mind where they can kind of get an idea of the complexity of how just regular development occurs. It's not as simple as just getting a permit fee or getting a permit, building the building, and that's it. There's a lot more of the process, and people don't realize—from starting just the basic napkin sketch, going to the architect, and going to the community planning, and going back to the architect, and all of the steps in between of going to every different utility company and all sorts of other stuff—there's a lot more obstacles in the way of development than we think.
Especially on smaller scale stuff like ADUs, where you have existing homes and you need to have the space in your backyard, or you need the space in your garage or so on. Even then, it's not a guarantee you're going to get it because of the certain requirements that are put in place, like parking requirements and so on, that add extra obstacles.
But I would start there: going to city council meetings, trying to talk to the community development department to ask general questions. I'm sure they're always happy to—it's just the nature of their business to interact with the community so often anyway. So if they have someone interested in the process, I'm sure they would love to talk to you about it.
Yeah, I think those are great tips. I'd love to just round up suggestions that people can adapt or adopt for themselves. But as we close, I want to always ask, what is it that gives you hope in the work that you're doing and sort of the hope for things as you look ahead?
Well, my main hope, I would say, is organizations like Strong Towns coming into cities and kind of showing people in towns that it doesn't have to be this way. Problems don't have to exist forever. Development doesn't need to stay the same way as it is. You can always change, and it's just not required that you have to stay your current trajectory of the city, whether that's good or bad. You can always make your community better. If it's already good, you can change the trajectory if it's bad. It's just not necessary to sort of be stuck in failure.
That's the main thing I've been happy to see with other people in my cohort as a master's student as well, that people are really excited to make that change and not be afraid to kind of challenge the existing things going on in our communities or government or so on. You can actually sort of enforce your kind of—even if your local community doesn't see the value in your work, some other community will. That's what I hope with this project will be, is that even if, let's say, my hometown of Yuma doesn't do it, or Flagstaff doesn't do it, that some other community will see that this is a really important idea and that this could be really successful if we implement it properly.
That's where my hope is: that even if it's not local, it will happen somewhere else. That's the importance of—even if it's not happening in your local town, that there's going to be change somewhere for your progress, your work, your hopes, maybe just realized somewhere else.
Yeah, and there will be others that take up the experiment and are willing to try it. Then the irony being, sometimes that the places that have most vociferously rejected it or sort of blockaded it turn around and be like, "Oh, we should do what they're doing." You're like, "Yeah, we could have been actually at the forefront of doing this."
So with that, Connor, it's been wonderful to have you on Bottom Up Shorts. Thank you for joining us today.
All right, thank you very much. Nice talking to you.
Yeah, really appreciate it. For folks that are listening, thank you for continuing to be part of the Bottom Up Shorts listener audience. We're so grateful for you. Continue to take note of the things in your community that, as Connor has pointed out, there are things happening that are the glimmers of that change that we definitely need to see in our communities. So with that, take care and take care of your places.
This episode was produced by Strong Towns, a nonprofit movement for building financially resilient communities. If what you heard today matters to you, deepen your connection by becoming a Strong Towns member at strongtowns.org/membership.