Tucson for Everyone, representing 3,700 supporters of our vision for a more affordable city, is excited to voice our support for the proposed Missing Middle UDC Code Amendment and related amendments, and support rolling out these changes city wide as soon as possible.

Our support for the measure is based on:

• The close alignment of these changes to our group's central pillars which include housing stability, diverse housing options, and reductions to arbitrary barriers during permitting which slow down new housing projects.
• Our facilitation of community participation during the drafting of AZ HB2721, and signing onto the letter of support for the final version.

We are extending our support for a fast adoption across the city for the following reasons:

• The public input during outreach has found that these changes are desired across the city.
• We believe these changes move the city firmly in the direction its residents have voiced support for in the recent two-year long Plan Tucson 2025 process, and other feedback-gathering efforts like the Prosperity Initiative and the HAST.
• We expect the community's desire for measures which improve the affordability of housing and transportation will grow over the coming years alongside concerns over cost of living.
• Our group's experience from working groups and other community events informs us that residents become disengaged from civic participation when their input does not lead to action, and instead lead to slow implementation or further rounds of feedback.
• We believe that the these code changes will lead to slow change anyways, following in the same pattern as Tucson's ADU ordinance which resulted in only a few dozen completed projects within a four year timespan after legalization. The sooner and simpler the roll out is, the more effective these changes will be in addressing housing costs.

We believe these amendments make progress toward most major goals our community supports, namely:

• Land Use & Housing: Our City’s studies have identified an 8,000 home shortage as a root cause for housing cost issues, and projected that number will expand to 30,000 over 10 years. Barriers to building that housing include both the current 7,000 sq.ft. minimum lot size, which precludes the construction of townhomes on 1,500 sq.ft. lots, and parking minimums because covered parking spots contribute up to $35,000 to the cost of newly-built homes which are passed along to home buyers. Additionally, neighborhoods having diverse types of housing are vastly more resistant to displacement and gentrification from new construction.

• Climate, Water, and the Environment: Letting more housing to be built within our city rather than on surrounding land preserves that natural ecology. Allowing housing to be built near places of employment also reduces the largest source of pollution: transportation.

• Wellness & Transportation: Allowing neighborhoods compact enough to be traversed on foot, bike, and public transit, promote health and movement while producing negligible pollution compared to cars.

• History & Culture: Tucson's earliest and most historic neighborhoods are packed with mutliplex houses, which are often more accommodating and affordable to inter-generational households than more recent suburban homes. The type of housing this package legalizes have only been illegal to build in the last 50 years of Tucson's 250+ years of urban settlement.

• Equity: Tucson contains the few zip-codes in the USA where residents are more cost-burdened by transportation than housing, which is a sign that many working people are presented with a no-win deal between expensive-housing/affordable-transportation within the city, or affordable-housing/expensive-transportation on its fringes. Those burdened neighborhoods represent the populations pushed to the outskirts of the city by the legacy of racially-regressive policies like red-lining and urban renewal.

• Economy: By recognizing that between gas, maintenance, insurance, injuries, accelerated wear on roads, road-widening projects, and health issues caused by pollution, cars are the most expensive type of transportation to burden household and public budgets. The most prosperous cities in our country and the world are built on a foundation of multi-modal transportation and robust public transit, which is most viable in the denser neighborhoods currently illegal under our building code.

Finally, residents have consistently ranked responsiveness of local government in their top three priorities. We ask you to remember that despite government timelines being measured in the months or years, our lives are lived one day after another. Realistically, projects made legal by these amendments will take years to be completed. Delays in addressing the crisis of housing affordability today cascade into worse homelessness, cost of living, and quality of life tomorrow.