Housing Advisory Committee Meeting   8/18/2021

So we don't quite have a quorum for decision making, but hopefully someone will make an appearance shortly.

So I believe if Nancy was here and we had nine on the call, we have already established a quorum.

OK.

Yeah, probably, other than general consensus stuff.

So having said that, if you all can turn your attention to the minutes from last July.

And Ridge did ping me to indicate that he was going to be tardy.

So.

I'd very much like any any assignment of tasks that we need to make we make them early to him before he shows up.

So anybody have anything on these?

Anyone have any comment on last of the minutes?

Discussion?

All right.

Any opposed?

So moved.

Moving on.

Yeah.

Okay.

As I indicated in my email blast out to you folks, this is, I hope, a fairly light meeting.

It's one more about organizational discussion, and there are a couple of housekeeping matters that probably work better a little further down into the agenda today, which I'll circle back to.

but essentially wanted to take a look at now that we have a basic implementation tool to start talking about implementation, what that means and how we move forward with that.

And we can, I guess, get to that in due course based on my conversations with Deputy City Manager Sanders and staff.

I can't think of anything off the top of my head.

Alex might want to give you an update on the consultant's work on the comp plan.

I know they went to a reported planning commission recently.

Good afternoon, everybody.

Greetings.

Yeah, the consultant provided update to the planning commission and at this point, the future land use plan, proposal rather, and the other chapters within the comp plan have been revised, you know, in accordance with public comments and feedback from council and

the Planning Commission.

There is a work session scheduled, you know, with the Planning Commission on the 31st of this month.

Subsequent after that work session, there will be a meeting with the Steering Committee and there might be some more changes based on the outcome of the meeting with the Planning Commission at the end of this month on the 31st.

and then a joint city council planning commission meeting will be scheduled in October at the regular planning commission meeting.

And then following that, then there will be a recommendation from the planning commission to the city council for consideration.

We are looking at completing all these before Christmas.

You know, hopefully Nance will get to take a shot, you know, on the adoption of the comprehensive plan sometime between November ending and Christmas.

Right.

Thank you, sir.

I know Deputy City Manager Sanders is working on that now.

But other than that, I don't have an update.

So we're now in a year without one basically.

Well, yeah, that actually may have some bearing on our conversation of the implementation plan in just a few as well.

Stacy is not here on matters of UVA housing.

Alice, are you prepared to speak to that?

I am, Phil.

Sure.

I'm happy to give an update on our affordable housing initiative.

It's just under a category of progress to date.

Our initiative kicked off publicly in late April, as many of you know, with the Zoom meeting that included University President Jim Ryan, Chief Operating Officer J.J. Davis, and project consultant Gina Merritt.

About 125 people attended the session, and the response was largely positive, with 90% of attendees supporting UVA's developing an affordable housing initiative on university property.

We have kicked off a listening tour with Gina with two goals to perform the development principles that will guide the developers work and understand where UVA's initiative can fit in and be complementary to existing efforts in the city and the county.

Our consultant Gina Merritt met with over 40 organizations and more than 60 people, including an in-person visit at the end of June and we're really grateful for all of those in the community who participated.

Some of the common themes we heard include the following.

This is not meant to be a comprehensive list, but that trust and transparency are critical.

We need to define who will be served by the housing.

And for example, what does affordable mean?

There may be funding gaps, even with low income housing tax credits, and we need to figure out what the university will do about that.

We don't have an answer just yet.

I know site selection has been a question.

So in parallel with all this work, the project consulting team has continued its due diligence on UVA and UVA Foundation owned land holdings in both the city and the county.

Our findings will be discussed internally and with the advisory group, and more information will be shared publicly this fall.

We really appreciate the community's patience

as we take the time to ensure internal consensus on the parcels.

Internal consensus will help us move forward with more clarity and efficiency.

With regard to our communications plan, we recognize that we need to let people know what we're doing on a more regular basis.

It may appear that we're not doing anything but I can assure you from our workload, that is not the case.

Some people,

have commented that UVA's affordable housing initiative is just an academic exercise and that we are not serious.

And I can tell you now that this is a priority for the university and we're committed as we've stated publicly that we're supporting development of 1,000 to 1,500 affordable units over the next decade.

As has been published, we'll do this by contributing land and partnering with a third-party developer.

So for more major milestones, we will issue news releases.

We need to find a way to let people know that things are happening along the way.

And we'd also appreciate this group's ideas on channels to share information a little more clearly.

We also post regular updates on our website, which is prescouncil, P-R-E-S-C-O-U-N-C-I-L dot president dot Virginia dot E-D-U

forward slash affordable hyphen housing.

I'm happy to share that in the chat.

I think that's pretty much the general updates.

I'm happy to share more specifics about North Fork and what the foundation is doing in particular, but that's our general update.

And we're really trying to get that message out to all the various groups around the city.

Thank you, ma'am.

Thank you very much, we appreciate that.

So, a couple of matters here.

Last week, we held a policy subcommittee meeting, which is a follow up on the request of the city treasurer about regarding a reopening

working and reauthorization and updated the ordinance surrounding a tax abatement for rehabilitation program that is operated out of the treasurer's office.

Ridge piloted that meeting and he's not here.

But on the record, that was a that was a terrific meeting and he did a terrific job coordinating that and standing that up.

And I will thank him when he makes his appearance.

He indicated he'd be a little tardy today.

and we are looking to engage in a rewrite of that ordinance based on the outgrowth of that conversation.

I've included the minutes of that meeting in the link for anyone who wants to sort of take a look at that and what we're doing.

That sort of harkens back to the work policy subcommittee was doing prior

to COVID where we would workshop a little policy projects and push them back out to the city staff and provide sort of a little more breadth on some expertise matters to speed things along.

So I'm very grateful for his help there and we're gonna work on that.

I mentioned that because the next agenda item we've got is the affordable housing plan implementation.

As you know, at our last meeting, we had a discussion of coming up with some sort of tracking tool to to frame how we would stand up the affordable housing plan.

Deputy City Manager Sam Sanders pushed out a template for comment and that and

Juan Diego Way, Joy Johnson, John Sales and I did comment on that.

We held a very, very brief work session to sort of follow up on our email round, Robin, there weren't many substantive changes.

And I can show you that tool, which is there if I can do this in a semi elegant manner and show it.

And then there we go.

And here we are.

So can everybody more or less see this?

Can I actually share?

Yes.

Yes.

And this is actually a fairly straightforward spreadsheet.

There's nothing terrifically, you know,

polished or even sexy about it.

And it's designed to be able to be linked to other things and expand out as it's built.

So and we sort of categorized things.

As you can see here, if I can get it to sweep over what it needs to.

But, you know, it sort of shows

the priority, the scale, what resources, how do we measure it, how do we implement it, the tasks and where we are with it.

And then we've sort of very roughly split them out into categories with the understanding that those are moving targets too, as is the sort of the substance of this document.

And the idea here is that this is a useful,

Base of Operations.

And as we build out and fill this out, it's going to produce the need for specific work product as we move forward.

So that's the tool as sort of originally configured, which leads us

to questions about what to do with it.

Phil, thank you.

This is the first I've seen and it looks like a really simple and good start.

My question is, how does this interact with the

What was it called?

The IAT Intervention Analysis Tool.

Excellent question.

Oh, I'm supposed to have an answer that question.

So I see these as being integrated to each other and being tied to one another.

I mean, I think this is more of a mechanical beast at the moment that it's designed to sort of show where we are and what we're doing on a very sort of mechanical stand up program level.

But yeah, I mean, I see that this that

and integration into the IAT and hot linking between the two of them in some sort of synthesis seems to be the best use.

I mean, seems to be an efficient use of both.

So I don't have an answer to that.

I am

I am somewhere between highly impaired and utterly useless when it comes to making Excel do what I want it to do.

But there are those here on this call who are much better versed at that.

But yeah, I see this as integrating with the IAT.

What is the status of the IAT?

Was that ever adopted apart from the HAC by any other formal body, the Planning Commission?

I can't remember whether it was actually even mentioned in the housing strategy.

Let me jump in there for a moment, if I may.

I don't think, as far as I know, it was never formally adopted in any forum.

However, during the early days of the consultant engagement around the development of the affordable housing plan,

The consultants reviewed it.

And my memory is that they said that they had sort of a typical version of a similar version of their own.

And there was gonna be some review and or fleshing out of the IAT kind of as part of the affordable housing plan format and adoption.

I don't know this as fact, my suspicion is that

their amount of available hours to do their work under their contract got consumed by other things and so it never got integrated.

Honey, you should ask.

So, um, I mean, in part based on my, the kind of brief conversations I've had, this tool, as we work through it, um, will provide that opportunity because the guideposts and timelines provided by the plan or for, um, as we know, are not going to come together that way.

no matter how well intentioned and no matter how close to accurate, the timeline is not really gonna be the timeline we end up with even if we start off with the best will in the world to essentially follow it.

So I think this tool has that capacity for as we make progress on certain parts of this to say, wait a minute, X really needs Y and Z to be connected to it.

or we need to think about Z instead of X because that makes more sense or that will work and this won't.

Phil, this is Chris.

I'll just say, you know, as a tool looks like it's got the things to me that needs to have around

Again, specificity around activities or actions that can be taken, people that are responsible for those so that it can be held accountable, allocations of money if that's needed, etc.

So kind of some short, medium, longer term, again, planning side of it.

All that makes sense to me, again, as mentioned, I think to be able to understand where things are at, how they might interact with each other, etc.

So

Thank you, sir.

And all of us who discussed this said this thing is subject to modification as we learn what we really need to have on it, because there are things that are going to show up.

But that's the nature of this process, surely.

Any other thoughts on this thing immediately before I turn our attention to what we do with it now?

So let me see if I got everything flat down.

All right.

So, okay.

So what I'm, based on this tool, based on our discussions at the last HAC meeting and based on my conversations with staff and Deputy City Manager Sanders, turning our attention to what we do with this tool and how we proceed and the HAC's interaction with the affordable housing plan brings us to this.

As Sam Sanders made clear, and as all of us understand, and as Chris has pointed out yet again, the plan does not have the human capital resources to move very rapidly at the moment.

We don't have a main housing person.

We are likely going to need other city resources beyond existing staff.

I presume that Jim Frias is going to hit the ground at a trot at least next month and will find his feet pretty quickly.

But still, it's going to take a certain amount of time for NDS under new leadership to crank up the engine.

Hi, Ridge.

So having said all of that, and speak of the devil, Greetings, Sam.

I was just about to, what do we do with this tool and how can we be helpful?

So based on those conversations, I would like to sort of propose that we leverage the expertise we have

and that we take a stab at looking closely at segments of this plan and what is necessary to stand them up and go about the business of filling out that worksheet.

And I think that we can be helpful as the hack to do that in working with staff in some sort of a broad way.

and there are a couple of ways to approach that but what I would suggest is I was sort of thinking of a, it's not exactly a subcommittee because I think it's important that we spread enough of this out to the entire hack to make this work.

But I would suggest that

And also, you know, if we call something the policy implementation subcommittee, that acronym doesn't really lend itself well to the newspaper.

But what I would suggest is sort of a working group

Some members of the HAC and staff to meet regularly, to look at each piece of this as we go, public meeting with the entire HAC participating one way or the other.

I mean, we're invited to participate, but with a core group that will sort of chop this up.

We can assign outfits and pieces of it between staff and HAC members who can take a deeper dive and provide some preliminary policy standup documents for the pieces of it.

and sort of workshop pieces of this affordable housing plan.

I understand that I'm sort of very blithely inviting everybody to devote hours and hours of their lives to this.

And I don't wanna soft pedal that either.

So what I'm sort of envisioning is sharpening up the subcommittee process.

Hopefully we can get back to in-person meetings so that this can go more rapidly in the fall but that might be going sideways.

but have something like that.

So that would be Brenda, John Sales, Sam Sanders, Jim, once he gets here, his designate, at least on the hack side, I think Lyle obviously with his integration on the planning commission

Harkening back to our original sort of strategy committee members of that as well, maybe, I don't know, six or eight members of the hack.

That's sort of what I'm thinking about.

That's in conjunction with sharpening up our subcommittee structure, and I need to get a memo out to all of you on that.

There I'm at.

So that's my sort of pitch and thought.

Does anybody have any, and I'll sort of open that concept up to discussion.

Does that make sense to do?

Phil, I'll react first.

You know, one, I do think this sounds like city staff should own it in general, just because of it being a tool and the majority of, I think, the resources probably for things coming from the city budget.

So that makes sense to me in addition to an

I would say, for example, from LEAP, though, when we're on the rehab side, energy efficiency side, I know where all the money is, to a certain extent.

A lot of the money is not in the short and medium term.

And I'm happy to help, you know, work with someone from staff, whether it's Erin, Brenda, or the new housing coordinator, or somebody else to, again, review that and, you know, add in the necessary information about what we know about, you know, where it should be placed.

And I guess I can do that in an ad hoc manner.

I just need to know, you know, if is it a

Google Doc, or is it a, again, some other Microsoft sharing functionality?

I would question if we need a policy committee to dive into it.

I do think, to your point, though, once the document is complete, coming back and getting a reaction from the whole hacked and reviewing it and seeing where things, gaps might be or some things that might be I missed, it would be valuable.

Gotcha.

So let me sort of clarify, I'm proposing that this working group staff and HAC step in in heavy duty authorship of that filling out of that document.

that that is a collaborative effort between staff and the HAC to get this up and running.

Because right now we are dealing with a situation where we have a plan that is in general been adopted.

We do not have an organization of how to implement it.

We have sub-infidated policies that have not yet been written that need to be developed and then used by staff that is not yet there.

and if we are passive on that point, a lot of nothing can happen for months and months and my idea is let's get as much of a start on this in 2021 as we can so that when hopefully later in the year when we have the human capital we need, when we have the money starting flowing, that we are a leg up and we're at least halfway down the field on some of these things instead of starting from a standing start trying to figure out what next.

That's my thought.

Any further thoughts on this?

Does it make sense to anybody?

Am I crazy?

In a really general sense, boiled down, I don't know that we have many other options other than to jump in and support staff as our senior leadership team in the

City rebuilds the infrastructure in City Hall, adds people, adds staff on the housing side.

Hopefully, you know, at some point, they're in a better position to do that.

But I think I can speak for myself and maybe for some others that I'm willing to step up and help, however, Sam and

and the senior staff.

Yeah, I'll just say, you know, I think my understanding is, and Brenda and Aaron and Sam, sorry, nice to meet you also, whom have we met,

Budgeting is happening right now, right?

And initial budgets are putting together right now.

Sam, did I capture this reasonably well?

Hello, everyone.

Yes, Phil, you did.

I'll say yes, you captured it because being part

If I had to timeline this and staff handle it, we probably would not have it done by the end of the year.

Any other?

Thank you very much, sir.

Any other general thoughts on it?

Now, I know it's, again, I know that I've essentially called a hack meeting and said, hey, how many of y'all want to volunteer for a part time job?

but I think that for those of us who have parts of this where we are pretty deep in the nitty gritty details anyway, it's a good way to leverage our expertise at the moment.

So there's that.

So, well, if there,

isn't an objection to that as a sort of general way to proceed.

I think that sort of dovetails into how that would operate and the relationship to subcommittees as they are, because I can see that some of this is a working group that says, this is really something that Lyle and the land use people need to take a closer look at.

Here it is, boom.

Policy, look at that, you know.

You know, you see.

City Finance Office has to deal with all of this or whatever.

But that means sort of a tightening up of our subcommittee structure.

I'm hoping that if we can get back to in-person meetings, that will make things go more fluidly.

But I do see this as meeting every few weeks with the whole hack invited in.

And we sort of deal with it as it comes and hand out bits and pieces of it as it makes sense to do.

So for example, I'm going to dance, but I'm willing to take a crack at the rehab and again, energy efficiency component of it.

Exactly.

That's the purpose of this working group, right?

So the working group would sit down and figure out, okay, how do we chop this up?

Who gets what pieces?

How do we coordinate this?

How are we filling this out?

Who's going to be responsible for what in what order?

And then take it from there.

Okay.

Yeah.

Right.

I said I didn't know if we were able at this moment maybe to move a little bit quicker and identify the relevant staff or I could just work with existing staff that I have at the moment to get this moving.

That's just my point being, I don't know about Dan's side or Sunshine's side, but Chris, I think it needs to be a little bit more coordinated because back to Dan's point earlier around the IAT, that's a pretty interconnected document that yes, there are separate buckets and sections, but ultimately they all need to kind of interconnect and respond to each other.

And so I think actually, from my perspective,

and I generally agree with the way that Phil and Sam have talked about it.

I don't think we have to balance the existing staff capacity with the roles that we can play now to keep things moving.

I think fundamentally there's one more sort of big picture step process to figure out through this subcommittee or whatever it is to figure out how the IAT and this document play well together and support each other.

That sounds good to me.

We will be happy to shift things to your desk rapidly.

Any other thoughts on this at this point?

All right, well.

If we're going to form that thing, I'm volunteering the first hack member, I'm volunteering for membership on that as Lyle for the obvious reason that he's our planning commission.

and since he's not here, I'm gonna interpret his silence as acquiescence to that.

So congratulations, we've got our first hack member.

I will volunteer myself for that as well.

I don't know how many hack members this makes sense to do.

I mean, I think as many as who have the bandwidth to do it and can engage in it and make the time commitment to do it will do it.

Okay, I like that.

The other comment I would make is, and I don't know how this co-exists between Rory and Lyle, although Rory is not on the hack, did work heavily on revising the IAT and understands the underpinnings of it better than anyone else.

So I think, and maybe that's a second phase in terms of engaging Rory just to make sure that his expertise, Excel expertise doesn't get lost in the mix, but just wanted to highlight that.

Yes, sir.

All right.

So following up on Dan's suggestion, Sam, does that make sense?

Yeah, that works for me.

Oh, uh, I would think so.

My, my instinct is that this working group, once we stand it up is going to, is going to have John, Sam Sanders, uh, NDS, uh, uh, Jim over at NDS and, um, Brenda Kelly, uh, all as anchor members of that.

Anything else at this point that we can really dive into on this or we sort of have a consensus that that's our next step?

I would take that as the.

Nope.

Ridge, you missed, I don't know if your ears were burning, but you missed all the sweet and nice things I said about you in the running of that subcommittee meeting last week.

Wise man.

Wise man.

Okay.

Public.

I've been noting, I haven't seen anybody firing off flare guns, but any comments on this from

from the public.

And Rory, we just volunteered you for part of this prospect.

I see you're on as an attendee.

Yeah, happy to help any way I can.

Just let me know.

OK, any other matters that we need, any other business that we need to discuss at this point?

Anything that I've let slide by?

Record 49 minutes.

All right.

Anything else?

Anybody have a second?

Okay, excellent.

Any discussion?

All in favor?

Any opposed?

Hearing no opposition, we are now adjourned.

Thank you, Mr. Sanders.

I'll get in touch with you in the next week or so.

We'll try to have a sit down with Lyle.

All right, thanks.