Housing Advisory Committee Meeting   2/17/2021

You want to go next?

I'm president and CEO of Habitat for Humanity of Greater Charlottesville.

Juan Diego Wade is new and joining us.

So I'm looking forward to assisting however I can.

And welcome, Ridge.

And my focus on the hack is trying to help people boost their incomes to afford the housing that is available in our community.

Afternoon, Frank.

That's been a while, yeah.

that he was a little overbooked and I tend to blame him because he used language that you would expect from me in describing his calendar.

Yeah, so anyway.

Anthony?

Great.

We cannot hear you.

Thank you.

Right.

Michael.

Mike Cassano, I am a board member of the Johnston Village Neighborhood Association.

Hi, Jen.

Nice to see everybody.

S. Lisa, hi, there you are.

Are you going to say something else?

No, no, no, I was poking Chris Meyer.

Thanks.

Stephen, are you with us?

Steve Stokes with the Jefferson Area Board for Aging.

And then I believe, Erin, we have you from staff and are you there with us?

I'm the Grants Coordinator.

Good afternoon, Brenda.

Good afternoon, Brenda Kelly, Redevelopment Manager and also attempting to temporarily fill the Housing Program Coordinator position.

Welcome.

And

Then on my far right, which I know doesn't represent anything politically for you, sir, John Sales.

We are probably, I think, the largest affordable housing owner in the city of Charlottesville.

But I wanted to sort of turn it over to you to sort of make an introduction for yourself and then maybe we can have a bit of a chat.

I may not have answers today, but can certainly try to give you my feelings or thoughts.

Other than, you know, just the little stuff.

I apologize for stealing others' thunder, but I thought a little bit of historical perspective might be helpful.

Anyway, any other commentary on where we are and what we're doing and what we're looking forward to?

So I just throw that out as a potential effort that you may want to look into if you haven't already.

Maybe jurisdictionally independent, but we're terribly interdependent in every way in housing.

So we're starting those discussions now with staff.

Anyone else want to jump in here?

That's right.

And I really do appreciate the help of the PDC to create a regional snapshot of where families are and where the struggles are and how we might address them.

So if we can get incomes up, we start checking off more boxes than just the housing boxes.

The call, and we haven't had anybody for, Chair, for how long from UVA?

But you are correct.

Facilitating a more engaged relationship with UVA I think would be helpful, especially around housing.

Certainly I think that would be nice to bring it to the city as well, but that may also be one way to begin that relationship is through that because they have been very active with the regional housing partnership.

And they just sent out a press release saying that they're getting back to work on it because they got distracted by COVID after they initially sent out the press release last March.

Anyone else?

We've just reconstituted and restood up the pipelines and pathways working group, which is the one about working with the university to help people move up the income ladder with UVA and community partners so that these things are back underway.

So I'm on that housing advisory working group that is reconvening now.

Tada!

Hey Jen, has UVA appointed their representatives to that working group yet or are they still working on that as far as you know?

And then since you brought it up, I just can we have some money.

to and that we'll be able to pull people in to get this stood up and working and that we are going to get the right sort of we sort of senior management skills and the middle management skill set that we need to stand up and coordinate and get all of this moving and you know I have every confidence in you but I also know that you spend almost a third of your life asleep so there are certain you know there's only so much you can do.

We just don't have the luxury of being wrong and spending money that we don't have.

I don't see an easy path forward, but there's an imperative to make one anyway.

I'm just hoping we can have a little bit of leeway so we can try some new things and see what we can do with that, and maybe there will be some very positive outcomes out of these very trying times.

So those are my two suggestions about that.

And other areas are just as necessary, but they get lost in that vacuum.

So if there are any sort of final questions, queries, comments, yeah.

And again, I'm not sure if that's our own internal thing that we need to do, or if it's something we can do in conjunction, but wanted to name that.

I think you're right where the rest of us are.

I do have to run though.

We really appreciate you taking the time on your day number two here.

Bye bye.

initiative we had on was to get an update from the Planning Commission focused sort of on last week's session and Lyle wasn't able to make it but Rory agreed to parachute in with circles and arrows and charts and graphs or at least a cogent summary.

There was more about energy efficiency and how we can use the acquisition part of the plan to make energy efficiency improvements.

I think those are the big ones.

Does anyone have any questions or any more detail I can provide?

Rory, was there any follow up, and maybe this is less housing plan than it is comp plan update, but was there any follow up on the idea of middle density as being a specific tool for advantaging affordable housing as opposed to just creating middle density?

Thanks, Rory.

Anyway, so it's like, who would we talk to, to try to dig into those calculations and understand better at least?

Sorry, where are you seeing that?

I think it was slide.

That might be including, yeah, let me know which slide it is, but.

And it's specific to the CIP and.

It's older than that, but I think in the already have it covered slide, they're talking primarily about the tax relief we already do.

For example, if I was trying to do the math in my head and understand what they got, and obviously that doesn't all go to rehab, for example.

I'll ping them about that.

Thanks.

So, anything from the members of the public, if you want to raise your hand or otherwise ping.

Just real quick, I got an update on the short-term rental legislation.

I don't think I see anything.

Maybe Councillor Payne knows.

So at this time, I'm not aware of any additional work session among all of council that there would be, you know, perhaps there could be, but I'm not aware of any plans for that at the moment.

Gotcha, thanks.

Chris, you said you had an update?

So anyways, unfortunately that did not happen this General Assembly, but again, hopefully we'll be reintroduced next year or introduced next year.

I know we're running out of time on the clock,

So that's separate and not germane to this discussion, but I think it's something that, you know, may be worth thinking about, you know, over the long term.

I'm just saying is you mentioned needing a more progressive property tax, but to a certain extent, we already have that capability because we're using taxpayer money to subsidize people who meet

And so it's a positive thing, it is helping, but there are some really strong strict limits to how progressive we can get with it.

And I agree with Councillor Payne, we're kind of at it, those limits for what we can do there.

quite so quickly.

I certainly, you know, we certainly could hope that assessments stop rising, but there's certainly no evidence that that is going to happen.

We implement policies so that, you know, the middle of the housing market stops having such a shortage, right?

I'm just saying it's a tough reality we've got to face.

Michael, we don't pay you the big money though to tell us the tough reality.

I get paid in the joy of the job.

So any further comment here, any comments from the public?

And, you know, maybe HAC will play a role in trying to figure out how we can best use external funds to take advantage of that program given our own funding constraints.

And that's, I'll get off my soapbox at this point.

Anything else to come before this committee at this time?

What's our continued focus from this point?

You're using us, us who?

Hack.

And we'll entertain any and all motions.

A motion to adjourn the meeting.

Great, there's a motion to adjourn the meeting on the floor.

Seconded.

Take care now.

Bye.