October 23, 2025

Dear Mayor Jorgensen and Town Councilors,

Thank you for taking on this important process of updating our Land Development Regulations. ShelterJH board member Whitney Oppenhuizen shared comments during the workshop on October 20, and we wanted to provide them in writing as well.

We urge you to use this opportunity to incentivize what our community truly needs—homes, especially deed-restricted ones—and to disincentivize what we don’t need: excessive, rampant, and unmitigated commercial and luxury development that worsens our housing shortage. ShelterJH supports the right kind of growth that allows local residents, working people, families, and seniors to continue living locally. We need to ensure that the people already here have stable, attainable homes.

Even before the recent development moratorium, there has been strong community support for proactive updates that align our LDRs with our community’s priorities and Comprehensive Plan goals. Some actions to consider include:

• Parking updates
  • Removing parking minimums to free up space and reduce costs for developers and occupants while furthering our climate and transportation goals.
  • Allowing developers to decouple rent and parking space costs to offer maximum flexibility for occupants and reduce single occupancy car dependency.
  • Implementing paid parking and investing in alternative transit to manage demand and foster meaningful transportation options.
• Accessory Residential Unit (ARU) updates
  • Creating an ARU handbook with pre-approved designs to streamline applications and permitting for locals who want to add small, attainable units.
  • Allowing mobile homes as ARUs, creating flexible, lower-cost housing options that can be built quickly.
• Updating housing mitigation rates to reflect current construction costs, so development meaningfully contributes to the housing for which it creates demand.
• Revising the 2-for-1 tool to make sure the community benefits proportionally to developers while protecting the tool from state overreach.
• Continuing to strengthen short-term rental regulations and investing in enforcement and public education regarding new regulations, ensuring that homes serve residents first.
• Eliminating the legacy housing credit, which no longer reflects today’s housing realities.

Each of these ideas supports Comprehensive Plan goals to protect the ecosystem and house at least 65% of our workforce locally. We want to address the housing crisis and there are tools to do it. This LDR update is a critical opportunity to align our policies with our shared values and make it easier to build homes local workers can actually afford.

Thank you for your time, your leadership, and your continued commitment to housing locals locally.