Housing Advisory Committee Meeting   9/15/2021

It appears to me that we have a quorum.

I am assuming that it does appear to me that LD is also entertaining, also joining us as a call-in person, not as a full participant, but welcome all.

I'm going to defer to Aaron.

I know he was sent an invite.

Okay, so

Let's sort of, by the way of housekeeping and opening notes, we do have our NDS director started on Monday, James Frias.

I did invite him to join us today by sending an email to, I think, Aaron and Sam, and to what I believed his new email would be.

But if he's here, great.

If not, we'll catch up with him soon.

It is, after all, I guess his second full day on the job.

Having said that, the agenda today is, as I said, a little on the light, but we're dealing with two ongoing matters and then general updates.

Having declared a quorum, I think we're ready to go here.

On the housekeeping side of things, Brenda and Erin have both noted this, as well as I have, that our subcommittee roster is now a bit of a mess, so I'm going to take it upon myself to clean that up a little bit.

and circulate that around and reaffirm who's serving on what subcommittees.

Some of that is, of course, subject to folks' choice, but the general rule has been everyone picks two, and some folks are obvious candidates for certain subcommittees or not.

But I'll get something circulated the next week or so to the group on that.

We have our minutes from our last full meeting.

Yeah, you're noted correctly in terms of attendance, but not in one reference.

It's just a representation of your plurality.

Oh, thank you.

I'll second.

Great, thank you.

Any discussion of that?

All in favor?

Anybody opposed?

Great.

That was quick.

I do know that we have at this point been joined by James Frias.

So I thought we might engage in a quick round of introductions.

And welcome to him.

So James, welcome.

Good to see you again.

Sam, there you go.

Hi.

This is the housing advisory committee I'm glad you're able to pop in and make it.

I know that you are busy drinking from a fire hose at the moment so I appreciate your, your fine carving out a little room for us.

Since you are here, some of the folks here you may have met briefly, but it's probably worthwhile to take a run through us and say hi.

I'll start with me.

We have met, but I'm Phil d'Oronzio.

I am the present chair of the HAC.

My appointment is as the banker representative for city council.

So that is me.

Sure, welcome to Charlottesville.

Great, Sunshine?

Sunshine Mathon at Piedmont Housing Alliance.

Roy Stoltenberg, Planning Commissioner working Renewable Energy Technology.

Okay.

Thank you.

Welcome.

Glad to have you in the position.

I am Chris Meyer, Executive Director of the Local Energy Alliance Program, a non-profit here that does energy efficiency.

work in low-income housing and market rates.

And so we have a couple of different programs that we implement on the city's behalf, but also on behalf of Dominion Utility and other utilities and foundations.

Cool.

Thank you.

Dan.

Dan Rosensweig, Habitat for Humanity of Greater Charlottesville.

Welcome, James.

Great.

Hi, I'm Jen Jacobs.

I'm with AHIP.

We do critical repairs and rehabs for families in Charlottesville and also Omaha County.

You're muted, sir.

Gary.

Sorry.

Hey, James.

Correct?

Hello, I'm Nancy Kidd.

I'm the director of the MACA Hope House Stanley Navigation Program.

Russell Ray with Region 10 CSB.

I'm the director of housing programming here at the agency.

Juan Diego Wade, City of Charlottesville School Board Julia Monteith, Associate University Planner, University of Virginia

Welcome, James.

And you'll see that we just sent you an invite to join us with Sam for a tour of grounds in October.

So we'll get to meet you in person at that point.

But welcome to our community.

Great.

Michael Cassano from the Johnson Village Neighborhood Association.

Anthony, where are you at?

Hey, I'm Anthony.

I'm the director for Thomas Jefferson Area Coalition for the Homeless.

That's what we're doing.

Yes.

Good to see you, buddy.

Just in time to snag the spotlight.

Perfect.

And then I think we've got several members of staff who you know here who can happily wave and wave.

And Brenda Kelly,

Alex, you were here.

There you are, Alex, Aaron and ATAC.

That's what I was getting.

That's why I listed you last.

So did I cover anybody?

Did I miss anybody?

Great.

Well, anyway, as most of them said, we're very glad to have you here.

We're taking up a couple of issues today, but happy to hear any introductory comments you may have to make.

Well, it's great to be here.

Thanks so much for the warm welcome from all of you.

This is a much bigger committee than I was anticipating, but looks like a lot of great work.

collectively being done.

So my name is James Fries.

Last name rhymes with lease.

So imagine that there's an E at the end.

That's how it goes.

And what am I on?

Day three.

And lots of great work happening here.

And I'm just eager to get involved in it.

The comprehensive plan is,

Frankly, an impressive body of work so far and looking forward to working with you guys, working with staff here and our team, Planning Commission and City Council to get this over the finish line.

And I'm eager to hear from you guys and what you guys see is the issues that I should be aware of or thinking about.

And I look forward to meeting as many of you as possible in person as soon as possible.

I don't know if you're looking for a background.

I can talk a little bit about where I'm coming from.

Before moving to Charlottesville, I was up in Massachusetts.

I've been in Massachusetts for 12 years working for a couple of different communities and the regional planning agency up there at different times.

Worked on a lot of housing issues, as you might imagine, in the Boston area.

and I've worked on a range of other issues as well.

So I can, I can bring a lot of different experience and ideas to the table.

Before I was in Massachusetts, I worked for the city of Hampton, Virginia for about five years.

And I'm originally from the DC area.

I went to school here, so I'm not entirely unfamiliar with Charlottesville.

I'd been around town before, and my parents had been living here for about 15 years.

So over the last 15 years, I've been here at least once or twice a year.

And that's about it for background.

If anyone has any more questions for me now, happy to answer them.

Great.

So

So on our agenda today are two issues that the policy subcommittee has taken up and are still working on.

So we're sort of checking in and seeking input and giving

sort of giving some direction there.

And then we're also in general, we try to get an update from the other localities too.

If there is any, just sort of take the pulse on who's doing what and where.

I guess in terms of the city update, one of the, I guess our headline is we have hired an NDS director who is now on the job.

Welcome.

Do we have any,

Yeah, I think if somebody is trying to speak.

The floor is yours, Alex.

Oh, it's

He's going to give a, I think Sam, I'm sorry.

Got it.

All right, hopefully Alex is okay.

Yeah, we do have an update for you all.

Just this week, I have announced internally changes that we will be allocating some resources to our work in the housing space specifically but beyond that in addressing a variety of

issues that don't necessarily have a home.

We are now giving them a technical home.

We have had an office of housing under the city manager's office already formed, and at the moment had a housing coordinator positions, the only real staff person assigned to it.

Brenda being redevelopment manager has been in that space as well, but it hasn't been a fully coordinated function.

So the effort that I'm undertaking at this time,

and has now been communicated to all staff and has the council's acknowledgement of the plan forward is that we have retitled that office.

It's now going to be called the Office of Community Solutions.

It will reside in city space.

This space will be focused on our housing priorities, community redevelopment interests,

Our Federal Entitlements and Investments Coordination and Neighborhood Constituent Services.

So Alex is going to be serving as the interim director of this function for me to be able to work with putting more teeth to what that means, how that works, where we go.

And then Brenda and Aaron will be joining him in that space as the team that will be working on

This work for now, it's what they've been doing, but it's also to kind of define in a better way what each of them is up to, and then look for how do we go beyond that.

I have a variety of thoughts of where else we can go, but one of the key priorities that I've begun to communicate to council and staff is that we need to build our capacity to be able to address the affordable housing crisis that exists in our city.

We are not equipped internally to manage it effectively.

So this is putting us on the right course for that.

And we will be able to take our time and figure out over the next few budget cycles what I'll be asking for in the way of additional support so that we can add additional positions.

As I rolled it out to the team, I have commented on this being viewed at some point as the equivalent of a department.

so that we are robust enough to manage internally everything that we are doing externally.

So that's the announcement.

I'm excited about it.

I hope you all can find a way to join me in that space and see that we're trying to go in a different direction and get more going.

Thank you, sir.

Yeah, thanks, Chair, and Sam, I appreciate that overview of the changes that are being made, and they do sound like I think they're at the right direction when you need to go.

With the housing coordinator position that has been open, and this is my monthly ask, so is, I assume that still position is not going away, it's just getting, again, moved under this

New orientation of the staff.

Yeah, so we're not going to fill the position for now, because we're having to manage what we're doing with pulling individuals into this one space.

But the goal will be to figure out how soon we will go there and do that.

In the meantime, we're still going to be doing the work of the housing coordinator.

Can I ask a question, Mr.

Chair?

Absolutely, sir.

So, Sam, intriguing the idea, the sort of public nature of that space and the title Office of Community Solutions, do you see one of the functions of this department or of this place, space, department, whatever you want to call it, being a housing hub, sort of a one-stop shop for people who need housing solutions?

Because there have been

I'm not necessarily saying that we want to take over hub function.

I just want to make sure that the city has its hub in a place that everyone else knows where to plug in to get whatever access points that they need.

We're looking at creating a collaborative space that will allow us to work across departments.

that we have been able to really do a great job at just being honest.

The goal will be with additional changes that are coming with moving some folks around added space will be available to this team that will be available to help us do even more creative things in bringing groups and parties together to work with us and help inform whatever actions that were taken.

I'm not prepared to say that we're ready to be the hub for the city, but I'm interested in hearing more about what has been attempted in the past.

Great, thanks.

It's possible we can bring the conversation offline, so maybe Sunshine or I can kind of fill you in on the work that's been, that's gone on so far, hits and misses, a lot of misses,

a clear and present need in the community that we've heard time and again from community members that there's just there's kind of confusion in the marketplace.

People don't know where to turn to begin to navigate housing solutions.

And there have been some good efforts in the homeless services world.

The efforts have been there's been a coordinated entry program.

There hasn't been one across the entire housing space.

And so I think I can speak for others.

We'd like to help

Sorry, this is Sunshine.

Just to say that, Dan, there's actually some new information you don't have yet around the integration of that idea into the FOC in particular.

So I can follow up afterwards with you, Sam and Dan and others who are interested.

Great.

I think I'll just say that the response is what I'm looking

looking for us to figure it out.

Let's just figure out what things we need to further discuss and if we can come up with an idea that is not currently in my head because everything is in my head right now being perfectly honest with where we are.

I describe to this new team that I'm on a hamster wheel and I'm running by myself and I'm just making room for them to join me.

Thank you, sir.

So, uh, Brenda, I actually had an exchange with, uh, Dr. Pathia this morning, but didn't think to ask her.

Chair, uh, you would oblige her and I just have one more question or observation is not necessarily related to what Sam said.

I don't know if there are people, it sounds like they're done, but regarding a city update, if that's okay.

Uh, everybody, I participated in the planning commission meeting yesterday on the

the hearing that reviewed the 240 Stribbling application, which was gonna be 170 units.

I'll just say I was very disappointed in the lack of apparent coordination between the various city departments.

I think Sam, hopefully what you're talking about kind of reworking it, but we basically saw different departments working against each other in this meeting and bringing up different numbers and

questions about if the CIP numbers in the budget are legit or not, you know, it was a mess, just to put it bluntly.

And I know, I think, Councillor Payne, you saw that, Commissioner Soltenberg, you were there and aware of it, but if we're going to get housing done, you know, and again, I'm an advisory committee, I'm providing you some advice, but what we saw last night can't continue to happen regarding the lack of coordination between different city departments and just

Disregard for, I guess, each other's efforts.

Okay, thank you.

And if I could just one last comment on speaking to that and I'm sure James probably has a comment of his own, but I want you to appreciate the name change and the choice to use solutions.

Instead of a community development office, which would have been the traditional thing to do.

That's exactly the point that I agree with you that what we witnessed last night could have should have gone very differently.

And part of what we are already working on is ensuring that we don't repeat that over and over and over.

Collaboration is the key.

Yeah, I can really only just reiterate what Sam said.

My expectation is that we will be, that collaboration is how I approach these things.

And Sam and I have had conversations about kind of piecing together what happened over the last couple of days that led to last night and we are working on it.

I appreciate the recognition that it was not ideal and that Mr. Sam and Sam, also solutions, I hope is that's what the focus is on.

And I would say half the city departments were focused on that and other half didn't seem focused on that anyways.

That's the delivery at that point.

No, not at all.

As you pointed out, advisory committee, it's advice.

So I understand we don't have a substantive update from the county.

No, I don't think there are any updates on our part.

Thanks.

I mean, one thing I'd add for the county is that they have a pretty major public hearing going on tonight for the RST proposal for essentially it's a Lytec.

It's a private Lytec developer.

It'll be 75% affordable apartments and it's three or 32 units total.

And I think about 75 of those are market rates, stack townhomes and a couple regular townhounds at the end now.

And then all the apartment buildings, 75% of those apartments would be affordable.

at an average of 60% AMI.

Thank you.

All right.

So policy subcommittee had been tasked with a couple of items.

One was to follow up.

There are sort of two things that brew in here.

One,

One was to follow up on the tax abatement reauthorization and the ordinance that was presented us by the treasurer.

And we were looking to sort of sharpen that up and put an affordable housing lens on it.

And subcommittee met for that and Ridge will speak to that.

And then secondly, we have been tasked by Sam Sanders to present sort of a

30,000 foot priority list roughly broken out by fiscal fiscal year for the affordable housing plan.

This is a prelude to sort of getting a working group running for the nuts and bolts, but just sort of an order of battle.

And we had a meeting to start that process with the subcommittee.

And Dan led that discussion.

And we're we're going to sort of look for some general input and meet again on that.

but I'll speak more to those issues.

I am.

So I'll take it away.

So just to reorient everybody to this, so this was a topic of discussion that we had and I don't, you know, time is a blur to me these days.

I may have been back in May but this is a

an item that was brought to us by the city treasurer Jason Vandiver and the city assessor Jeff Davis about this statute that allows us to do partial exemptions for the rehabilitation or replacement of older residential units in the city.

And so we took some guidance from the HAC at that first meeting

We then had a policy subcommittee follow up in August to put together some ideas that we are now going to float past the full pack again.

The purpose of this discussion today is for you all to provide additional input into what we've come up with so far, as Phil said, to put a affordable housing lens on the tax abatement program.

So I'm going to run through that and

and show you a couple of slides that indicate where we are with it.

And please, I welcome your input.

There are specific questions that I have at the end of the presentation and then a couple of bracketed items as I go through that we wanna address as we go.

So let's jump right in.

So

Nothing like having a bunch of slides to really, you know, gin up your lunch hour.

So 58.1332 20 of the Virginia code, just to tell you remind you all what this ordinance does, or what the statute does, the governing body of any city may provide for the partial exemption from taxation of real estate, on which any structure 15 years or older has undergone substantial rehabilitation, renovation or replacement.

And

Unlike many statutes that are passed by the General Assembly, this one gives a fair amount of latitude to the localities to shape this as they want to meet the city's, in this case, the city's objectives.

So at the full HAC meeting and subsequently we talked about this affordable housing lens.

The amount of the tax exemption is an amount equal to the increase in assessed value following the substantial improvement

or an amount equal to the percentage of the increase in assessed value or an amount up to 50% of the cost of the rehabilitation, renovation or replacement.

So those are the parameters that we are permitted to work within.

They gave some permissive examples of what an ordinance could have.

They could establish criteria for determining what real estate qualifies.

It may require that buildings be older than 15 years.

It may establish square footage requirements for replacement structures.

and it may apply to multifamily residential units that have been replaced for multifamily use.

Those are just examples.

We're not limited to those, but just those, you know, kind of got our wheels turning.

So following the full HAC and subsequent policy subcommittee meetings, what we've focused on, the goal of the program would be to create incentives for affordable rentals and wealth creation for low income homeowners.

So that would be the goal of the partial exemption ordinance.

Following up on that, focusing in on who and what qualifies for the partial exemption from real estate taxes.

So we settled on as a working draft, the property must be 15 years old or older.

The renovation, rehabilitation or replacement must increase the value of the improvements by at least 15%.

So there's gotta be some increase in value

Those improvements could include additions to an existing residential structure.

They could include accessory dwelling units built on the property, and it could include multifamily property as well.

Finally, and this one is going to require a little bit of discussion, the exemption can last for, our placeholder was 15 years, which is the maximum amount allowed in the statute.

The current ordinance says the exemption can last for seven years.

And so one place for us to pause right now and just get some feedback from the group is how long do we think the exemption should last?

Should a homeowner who engages in the substantial rehabilitation or replacement of improvements on their property who qualify as either

Low income homeowners or renting to low income tenants, how long should that partial tax exemption last?

And I open it up for just general discussion.

You don't have to give me a precise number, but just some feedback about whether we should go to the maximum amount of 15 years or do something less than that.

Yes, so we can put parameters around it, and as you'll see further down in our recommendations,

If you're renting to low income tenants, you've got to affirm that every year.

But 15 is the is the maximum allowable per state code?

Correct.

That is correct.

Yeah, so all I can give you is what the current tax exemption costs, which is very different than what we're doing now.

Oh, so I don't have that.

It obviously depends on the value of the improvements or the increase in the assessed value.

and I think we could work with Jason to pencil out some examples.

Yeah, so I guess not entirely by coincidence, I have done some business with more than one recipient of this program.

So in figuring out what I'm doing with their escrow account falls into that and how to explain how to track that.

In terms of a practical monthly amount, it's pretty significant.

It's a three figure monthly difference in some cases.

The net effect is, yeah, it can be more than 100 bucks a month.

or more in housing cost saved.

So it's not, but of course it depends.

And we, I believe that we can probably tease out some more of that numbers based on the data that the treasurer's office gave us, but that would require farting about with the Excel spreadsheet for a few minutes.

So, but we can get data on that.

Yes.

Yeah.

And that's not, I mean, if you're doing a substantial rehab of an older house, that's not an unreasonable number.

Thanks for that.

I don't want to belabor the point too much, but the only reason I asked primarily is to see whether or not there was value in considering it being at a tiered level.

So if you are doing, I don't know, I don't remember what the thresholds are to qualify as affordable.

I assume it's 80% AMI.

But if that's not the case, could you do seven years if you're doing below 80% AMI, but 15 years if you're below 60% AMI or something along those lines?

So based on the permissive nature of the statute, I think we can certainly create a tiered system, and then we just need to decide

what those tiers should be and then make our recommendations to city council accordingly.

And I think what Rory just did off the top of his head with a little bit of assistance from technology, we could easily create a table that says if you did a $50,000 improvement, you would save this amount if we have the exemption at this rate.

So we can definitely create a table that would give people an idea of what that benefit would look like.

I'll just have to retreat to my standard excuse, which is I'm a history major and math is not my strongest suit.

Let me sort of ask this as a procedural question or maybe an administrative question.

We can presumably put pretty permissive language in this ordinance that says,

that directs rulemaking on that particular point, right?

I mean, we don't have to exclimate everything down to the end of the period there necessarily.

Yeah.

True.

Okay.

Thanks.

So that's, go ahead.

Sorry, go ahead.

No, you go.

So to be clear, we're talking about a wholesale replacement of the existing ordinance, right?

So I'll get to the who and what qualifies here in just one second.

But yes, I've actually redlined the existing ordinance, but we're very much changing the direction of how the ordinance operates today.

and what we saw and what Jason and Jeff brought to our attention is there is this tool in the toolbox.

It wasn't necessarily designed to increase affordable housing.

It was probably designed to rehab older homes in a kind of a block by block process the way AHIP has done in the city.

But because the language in the statute is so broad, we saw it as a potential tool that we could put in the toolbox to increase affordable rentals and

the wealth creation for low-income homeowners.

And were you able to get data from them on how it has been used in the past?

Yep, so Jason Vandiver provided us an excellent spreadsheet.

I did not think to present it today, but we do have the data every year about where the existing ordinance has been used, if we want to dive back into that.

And after this meeting, my intention would be to take your suggestions, refine the draft that came out of the policy subcommittee,

So,

Depending on the timing of that, since we're going to be having a policy subcommittee and we're empowered to move forward, if we've got some consensus, it may make as much sense, depending on if not by the next HAC meeting or one of these policy subcommittee, to sort of polish the final draft in one of those.

and move it along, but with the encouragement from everywhere.

Yep.

We want as much consensus as we can get, but we don't want to get paralyzed by waiting another month either necessarily.

But I mean, that's all subject to.

But anyway, yes, sir.

Sorry.

The other thing I just want to make sure that we catch in the nuance, which I'm not sure how the language allows for this or not, but just thinking about the community land trust model, I would want to be sure that if let's say the community land trust acquires a home, does renovations on it, sells it to a low income qualifying home buyer, that that home buyer can still benefit from the from the tax reduction.

So we don't need to answer that now, Reg, and if we need to noodle in the legalese of that, we can.

Yeah, so as currently drafted, that purchaser would not qualify.

But that's just how we drafted it.

Duly noted.

As would I.

Okay, I'm going to keep on trucking.

Let's see.

And if somebody else could keep track of the chats, a little bit hard for me, because all I can see are my slides.

So just pipe up if there's something in the chat that I need to address as we go.

And and just to let you all know, I do not have 44 slides.

So don't worry.

All right.

So who what qualifies?

So

The policy subcommittee suggested, as we've already hinted at, that there be a landlord exemption that's designed to help increase, encourage wealth creation for low-income homeowners.

And these are the parameters of the landlord exemption.

I'm sorry, this is the landlord exemption.

This is creating affordable rentals.

You must rent the improved property to households making

X percent or less of the area median income.

That X could be tiered.

So it could be 80% and you have a shorter exemption period or a more limited exemption.

80% was the placeholder that I put in the draft I circulated, but there was no magic in that.

It was just something to put in the box.

And then the next is that the rent can be no more than 30% of household income, including utilities.

And that's in brackets because that is a constantly shifting number that may be difficult to track.

But I did just pull the definition of affordable housing from elsewhere in the Virginia code so that we would be tracking where else that appears in the code.

and I believe those are the only two requirements.

Oh, the tenant household income and rent amount must be verified each year.

And that goes back to this question that Dan asked at the top of the hour about, and that as Lisa Herndon raised when we had our policy subcommittee is making sure that there's accountability and that it's actually achieving its goal.

And so you would, the tenant household income would be, and rent amount would have to be verified each year.

So I will pause there and open up the floor to further discussion about what percentage of AMI the tenant would have to have in order for the landlord to get this exemption.

And secondly, to open up the discussion about whether

including utilities should be part of the verification that you are renting and charging a rent that is affordable when the landlord goes to verify that they are qualified for this exemption.

I have a question, Ridge.

Yeah.

Is the purpose of this program to give incentive to the investors locally

because to me, the numbers, I haven't put out my calculator yet, but the savings on the tax abatement of about a hundred, few hundred dollars a month really doesn't probably incentivize most investors to tackle this program, given the market rents would be substantially higher than what an affordable housing rent would be.

So the investor's still losing money.

At least that's quick, quick numbers.

But again, if the point is to incentivize

So this is just a tool in the toolbox that is trying to acknowledge and provide some relief.

If a landlord does provide affordable rentals following a major improvement, it is likely not going to be the decision about whether you charge market rates or not.

Or it could be also a homeowner who is upgrading their home and wants to keep the

Yeah, and of course, just to sort of jump in on one piece of that is is that that's the rent of course is rent charged directly to the tenant.

I mean, we were talking about the siloing of programs and policy here a lot.

So I'm going to hate myself for saying this, because this is opposite of what I usually say.

I agree with, not the part that I agree with Gary, that's obviously what I usually say, but I actually, in this case, $100 is not a substantial amount.

It's not gonna, as I agree then with RIDS, it's not gonna incentivize someone to do this, but it might help somebody or encourage somebody who's already renting affordably to upgrade their unit.

So having said that, I would think that typically I wanna push the incentives down

as much as possible so that most all city policies are encouraging people to build or rent at 30% or below or 50% or below.

In this case, given only the marginal savings, I hate myself for saying this because I'm usually not an 80% guy, but I think we'd probably want to put in the ordinance 80% of very median income.

so that it can be combined with other tools.

And then the other thing in terms of staff and the ability to track this and monitor it, make it as simple as possible.

So when you're now throwing in utilities, if staff has to now track utilities,

Again, usually most policies I'm in favor of the satisfaction of the affordable housing requirement being by the AMI of the recipient, but this may be one of those things worth price.

You can only rent a certain bedroom unit at a certain price and see what happens.

Now I duck as everybody throws things at the screen, but again, this is

For a more robust program, so housing fund money, etc., I think it ought to be based on the AMI of the recipient.

And it can be things like that reporting requirements, including utilities make sense.

But in this case, because the savings is only marginal, I think we want this thing to get used.

Yeah, just to agree with Dan on the utilities piece, chasing landlords, chasing tenants for average utility bills and then providing that information.

But that just sounds to me like sending this program is a ticket to the boneyard.

So there is a proxy, though, which is and this is this is somewhat, somewhat commonly used, which is instead of having to go through the process of verifying utility bills, instead of

it being 30% of your income is 25% of your income.

And that just gives a little bit of room for utility costs to be accounted for.

So that's one response to that.

The other thing I'll just throw out there is data points, just so we're thinking here, an 80% AMI household family of three at, and I'm gonna use 30% for a moment, at 30% of your income

theoretically can manage about 1650 in rent.

So I have one more question.

Is the landlord going to be responsible for tracking these metrics?

I assume that they will be, like the 30% of household income every year, I guess annually, the landlord.

You know, landlords, especially with property managers, most of the local property managers here in Charlottesville, I mean, they collect rent and they handle maintenance calls, but if you're asking them to track these other metrics, that could be very tricky and almost be a burden to the program.

And then your mom and pop landlords, again, they're mainly collecting the rent and handling maintenance repairs.

I think having to track these annually and get this information accurately from the tenants

I have a question.

I see a bunch of hands raised.

Who's speaking?

Go ahead.

It's Mike Asano.

So this arbitrary $100 of savings per month, would that be under the assumption that there's $129,000 increase in value from said renovation?

Yes.

Got it.

I didn't see who's hand was showing up first, so I'm just gonna go as I see him on the screen.

Yeah, thanks.

I'd agree on 80% AMI.

That's a lot of the program cutoffs we use for our income age qualifying, whether utility programs or other programs with the city.

So it seems to, again, like Dan said, we'd be able to

Braid, as we say, and combine a lot of programs potentially to help folks.

I will, I sort of think this is the last time, I would highly suggest we don't have a rent limit cap on it.

Basically, again, I think Gary mentioned some of these things, just not really tracking that.

I would say we try to track utility data, and this is what we do, and it's very hard to try to get people to get bills out of Dominion or Charlottesville Gas is not that bad, but definitely not utilities.

I don't think you're going to have many landlords participate in something where you're going to have to figure out and calculate income and then again have it capped.

It's just, to me, if someone wants to pay more than 30% too, they should be allowed to pay more than 30% and if they don't feel like the department's got value or the house has got value, they should be allowed to do that.

Finally,

Sorry.

Yeah, I would get away with verifying the income every year.

If the tenant was able to make more money, and then we would take it away, you know, obviously, then I could kick the tenant out.

Analyzed for their tenant making more money.

Right?

So I would get rid of that qualification too.

Yeah, so I mean, I think a lot of the things you guys are talking about are generally like the set of policy problems that we need to approach with this whole suite of kind of rent regulated affordable housing that's called for in the affordable housing plan.

I note that on pages 94 through 96 of the affordable housing plan, the inclusionary zoning segment, it specifically does talk about tax abatements as a way of helping to make the inclusionary units pencil.

So to the extent that these units are going to be required as part of, I mean, at this point, it's still very unclear if we're going to do a sort of overlay where you get bonus units with inclusionary zoning and ideally in a way that actually pencils and someone will actually do.

But if they're going to be required, then those things are going to have to happen anyway, right?

Tracking and rent limits and whatever, or the program ought to be designed to not have those.

And then an abatement is kind of part of that tool set to make it work.

So, I mean, I think these are really broad policy problems that we need to be tackling like everywhere.

And we need to be doing it in the same way for all the different programs, or there's just gonna be a maze of different things where you're layering these things, these different programs, and every one of them has totally different requirements.

We need to set a specific set of requirements that we apply basically universally.

I mean, obviously you can turn dials

If they're, you know, fun numerical things, but we shouldn't be having drastically different paperwork burdens for different things.

And that's going to position city offices who are in charge of tracking this stuff to be able to do it consistently.

Because right now, city offices like are not that up to be tracking these things, even proffered units like at all, and every single one is different.

And it's a huge burden on, I know it's a burden on staff.

I'm assuming it's a burden on developers or they're trying to skirt their way out of it.

And I think we really need to be approaching it all as kind of one combined thing here.

The other thing I'd add is when we're talking about the overlay and making a pencil, we were talking about different requirements for the sensitive communities versus the, you know, really expensive places where it's hard to make anything pencil, right?

Thank you.

If I could just sort of piggyback a quick comment on that, which is that what you're speaking to there is also the implementation of the affordable housing plan, which is the other big project we're undertaking here on how to sort of plan that and get it organized.

And not to argue with your example, but the sensitive communities, there's also an owner occupancy piece of this that I think is coming up in the presentation.

Well, we want to at least spend a few minutes on part two.

Dan jumped off, so I'll sort of handle that.

Yeah, Sunshine, then Chris had a follow up, I think, and then we'll move on to the owner-occupied.

And you all will have chances to weigh in when I circulate a draft, and I do note

that we're making recommendations to city council and our recommendations don't have to be a track changes version of the ordinance with all of its specifics.

It could be something that's broader that says, here's a tax abatement, let's use the statute to do a tax abatement that encourages wealth creation for owner occupants and affordable rentals and whatever rules apply with other tools in the toolbox should apply to this.

So we could do it that way.

I think Chris actually just had his hand up from the previous comment.

So a couple of just quick responses.

One, I agree with simplicity and aligning programs in general.

Two, there is plenty about to Gary's point around the burden of doing the income verification on homeowners.

Frankly, no homeowner is or and frankly, most property managers are not positioned to know how to do that.

So there is plenty of precedent for efforts like this in other cities where either the city does it, but if the city doesn't have a staff, which we clearly know is true here, at least not yet, to contract out with a nonprofit like ourselves or like Newhill or like somebody who does this on a regular basis for their projects and they just become sort of the proxy entity to go through the verification.

So just that there's that.

And then the last piece I'll share, just to agree with Chris on one point in particular, which is we don't want this to be an artificial cap on people increasing their income and wealth.

So if it's being rented to a renter and they initially qualify and they don't move, then I think it should stay in place.

because that person has increased their income and that should just, you know, that's outside the control of the homeowner.

If somebody moves in that period of time and they have to re-rent, then that new person would have to be income qualifying.

Well, that's a good segue into the owner-occupied exemption.

There are just a couple of points here that I wanted to ask.

So the owner-occupied exemption, as it came out of the policy subcommittee, would be a household income that must be, again, X percent or less of the area median income.

So it's low-income, owner-occupied.

Must have owned the property for at least two years prior to applying for the exemption.

And I know there's gonna be some a little bit of discussion about that.

Oops, and that was it.

So if you are doing a substantial improvement to your home and your low income, the idea is that we want to allow you to continue to build wealth.

And one of the ways to do that is to is to reduce your property tax burden.

The

the idea of having owned the property prior to applying.

So this, yeah, let me sort of crank the way back machine because we'd like you, the calendar is something of a blur here, but so I think that discussion rose out of the idea to sort of push against the flipping.

Number two is that we would be looking at folks who were dealing with deferred maintenance issues anyway.

This is a preservation tool based on folks who already are in, particularly with what we're calling these sensitive areas.

that this is an established homeowner who is making these improvements to stay there.

And I think we also had a brief conversation about the usual carve-outs for inheriting the property, but still there would have to be the intention to occupy.

But that was sort of our general, it was an anti-gentrification attempt.

I guess I'm noodling on this idea and I get the intention, but I'm thinking about a situation where, and as Piedmont Housing Alliance when we're trying to deploy down payment assistance, we've confronted this issue many times, which is a home

that somebody can afford that can income qualify in the city that we can bring down payment assistance to bear but has major repair issues.

And frankly, that's essentially all we're seeing these days at the price points that we can deploy down payment assistance for.

Why wouldn't we allow somebody who wants to be a homeowner, who knows they have to do repairs in their property,

who is going to income qualify, why would we rent them from benefiting from this?

Because otherwise, that's actually also a tool for anti-gentrification because that person is somebody by definition who income qualifies and is not looking to flip it, is looking to become a homeowner.

The alternative is that home sells to somebody who does flip it.

and the person who's trying to buy it at an affordable level.

Yeah, forward looking and say if you haven't been there for two years, you have to stay there for two years to pay it back.

Yes.

So as presented now, you have to continue to occupy it.

You only get it for as long as you occupy it.

But to Rory's earlier point about having consistency and also turning dials, this may be something where if you're going to not be someone who has been living there and says, oh, I can fix up my house now, but is it part of a purchase, that the requirements for the purchaser perhaps have a lower than 80

or perhaps has to be in conjunction with a DPA program or something else that shows that you're definitely pointed in that direction to sort of work around that to sort of address sunshine and the specifics of sunshine circumstances.

You know, one of the things we get with a lot of those is, of course.

There are wraparounds that you can do for home improvement.

You have to apply for them early, but there are wraparounds that you can utilize.

Go ahead.

That's all right.

Well, let's go with Joy first, Chris, and give her a chance to speak and then we'll go to you next.

So I have a question for you about the area median income

Well, some students and I were looking at it yesterday and it seemed like the area medium income is, or even for very low is extremely high.

How does, well, so if it's as high as I looked at it yesterday,

Yeah, and I think, Joy, that's exactly why this discussion, and we're not going to be able to conclude it today, about what percentage of AMI do you need to earn in order to qualify?

Is it 30% of AMI?

Is it 80% of AMI?

Something like that.

But even low and extremely low,

and very low and extremely low, those numbers were just high.

And I just want to make absolute, I think Ms. Hanson talked about, Herndon talked about it in another session, about the things that we are creating, it is really helping the people that it is designed to help.

And I'm just wondering, do we really need to look at the,

area median income.

That's just something that was bothersome when I looked at it yesterday.

There's a lot of people who probably will still not qualify for the help because of how high the area median income is.

Yeah, so you could make less than whatever the percentage is here.

You just can't make more than that in order to qualify.

So the very low income homeowner would qualify.

I think the question is, do we want wealthier homeowners to qualify as well?

And that's where you kind of have to draw that line and say, this is really designed and targeted to a certain group of owner occupants.

who really need the help on tax abatements, whatever other tools we can provide for them.

So I'll circulate a chart with an AMI table along with the follow-up to this just so that people can see, because obviously 30% AMI doesn't really mean anything unless you see, oh, that's a family of three with an income of X.

So I'll circulate that as well.

And I'm about out of time.

Yeah, I'll just say, I thought, again, regarding this, I don't think we need to worry about flipping, because if I understand the thing, the existing registration is if someone sells the property, the thing ends, right?

Correct.

I would get rid of the two-year, again, home ownership requirement.

And for some reason, what I was saying is we have kind of fluid population also between here and the county.

If someone's trying to move back in from the county, who was originally a resident,

We want to basically, I think, help out, again, the lower income folks in our, especially in our town, obviously, but get into these houses in the first place and requiring that they live in their years, I think is an undue hardship for them to be able to benefit from the program.

So I'm going to, thank you, Chris, I'm going to

There were a couple of questions that I had that we don't have time for, but I want to just raise them with you all, and then we'll address them.

I'll circulate a draft.

But the amount of the exemption, the greater of increased SS value or the 50% of the cost of the renovation, rehabilitation, and construction.

That wasn't a question.

That was just how the policy subcommittee said it should be as rich an incentive as it can be if it's targeted.

to low-income homeowners and low-income renters.

And then there were a number of questions that we don't have time to address here, but questions that did arise were if you build an accessory dwelling unit, would the owner of the property have to meet both the owner-occupied criteria and the rental criteria if that accessory dwelling unit is being rented to a low-income tenant?

So do they have to meet

both qualifications in order to get the partial tax exemption and just something to think about.

A couple other questions, would all units in an improved multifamily structure need to meet the rental criteria or just a percentage?

And if just a percentage, what's that percentage?

This is what you all have raised before.

Should a landlord continue to receive the exemption?

If a formerly low-income tenant exceeds the income threshold but the rent is still limited to 30% of their household income, what I've heard is that we don't want to impede people's income gains.

If they were low-income when they qualified, as long as they stay in the unit, that partial exemption would continue.

Should an owner continue to receive an exemption, if their income exceeds the income threshold after qualifying, and I think I heard the same thing, which is that once you qualify, you qualify.

and with the rentals, it's a yearly update.

But if that renter no longer qualifies, but they did when they got there, then they would be essentially grandfathered.

There was the question of the application fee.

There was talk in the policy subcommittee of getting rid of that application fee because there is money set aside in the affordable housing plan to cover these kind of administrative costs.

I think there was concern

on the part of the Assessor's Office that they have to do two assessments, both the before and the after, and send out assessment teams twice, and that costs.

And so just trying to figure out what is the right answer there.

And then, as always, as Lisa Herndon brings to our attention, what are the unintended consequences of proceeding down this route?

And let's make sure as we formulate our final recommendations to City Council that we've done our best to anticipate unintended consequences.

So that is what I've got.

I have enough that I think I could circulate some ideas for recommendations following this meeting.

And then Phil will just determine what the next step is, whether we have enough guidance for the policy subcommittee to make its own determination of what to recommend to city council or whether we need to come back again to the whole group or circulate to the whole group for comment.

and I'll leave it up to you to help guide us on that.

So thank you all for your input.

And I appreciate it.

So I'm just sort of thinking aloud in terms of timetables.

So at that time when that gets distributed out, if everyone could sort of, I mean, I don't find it bandwidth is

Bananas these days, but take a look at that and shoot to Ridge comments, critique, criticisms, compliments, and expansions for him to sort of mess with as quickly as he can so that if we meet two weeks from now to sort of make sense of it, we've got what we've got.

So, and I'll follow up with an email to the group on that.

I mean, again, I feel like a lot of these, a lot of those questions that were just listed are things that apply to other programs.

Things like right now, the policy for proper unit set or for required affordable units under 3412 says there's a three-year grace period for income goes up.

For rentals, for ownership, it's only when you buy.

Like these are all things that we need to stop like making different ones.

Or allow a previous overlay to

We need to come up with that because we're not going to always sync together because we are not always in those meetings.

So sometimes there needs to be an overlay priority.

Right, a ranking of them, and this trumps that, this trumps, sorry for the foul language, but

and sort of general principles.

I think it's a larger implementation issue.

And as we're doing sort of this wholesale implementation, which is a useful segue.

So we had a quick and dirty policy subcommittee meeting on Friday.

The purpose of this was at the request of Sam Sanders to take a very broad look

at the implementation of the affordable housing plan.

By way of background, this is a follow on to our prior meeting where we discussed the developing and implementation plan.

and as the first step of that or a preamble to that, he has asked for a rough cut from us on priorities based on the following buckets.

Bucket number one is looking at the affordable housing plan and the recommendations.

What can we actually start on or grab ahold of this calendar year?

What pieces of that are in the realm of the possible?

and are of a high enough priority to demand what are now very limited resources to deal with right now.

Bucket number two are things a little longer term, say by the end of the fiscal year next summer.

And bucket number three are the things after that.

And the things in making these recommendations are not just urgency, but also practicality, knowing what we know.

The idea behind this is that once we have a rough set, then to coordinate with staff to pare it down based on sort of the

internal view of what's doable with the resources available.

So what we're looking for now is to compile that list.

Dan made a start of that on Friday, but what we'd ask of the entire hack is to look at the implementation timeline at the beginning of the Affordable Housing Plan, look at the guts of those, and then

sort of put down a three bucket list.

It doesn't have to be everything that's there.

It's like, well, these are two or three things I know we can do immediately, or I would hope we can, and so that we can make a presentation there.

And that's sort of the homework for folks.

And I'll follow up with an email on that.

Again, if you could do that in the next week.

Again, looking towards a second policy subcommittee

And then we have a public meeting where having downloaded that stuff to Dan, we can sort of put together a basic set of recommendations so that the city can sort of start pointing themselves in the right direction.

Well, we're going to schedule it with more free time, more freeboard than we did the last one, which we got stomped by the holiday as well, plus trying to connect with folks.

I'm thinking roughly two weeks out, maybe a little more.

Yeah, because we have two high priority issues to talk about.

So it's good to allow for enough time.

Right.

So the idea for the deadline for this, let's say, would be all get this done by next Friday.

And I'll be a little bit of an ag.

on getting that to both Dan and Ridge, and I'll write up sort of a covering memo to go out for clarity purposes so that we can then meet the following week on it, but we've got some time to do it.

I mean, that's a little compressed, but at least that gives us some broad.

And then we're in October.

Yes, ma'am.

So that's what part two of the subcommittee report was there.

And that's that.

I'd like to take a moment here to see if we've got, if there's any public comment on either of these matters, and then we'll move on to see if we've got other business.

But if you could try raising, if you could raise your hand, if you were amongst the public, if there are any, or otherwise, poke.

Nancy, I see you, just give me a second.

There you are.

Thank you very much for the few minutes here to address the hack.

I am really enthused about this tax abatement plan.

It really seems like it's got some good teeth and really could be a program that could help those who most certainly need it.

But my real interest was hearing the conversation around

a homeless hub because it's something that I'm very passionate about and some of you heard me speak at another table a couple of weeks ago and you know I don't want to see it just become another door that somebody goes through that it actually becomes a door to

different types of housing services, whether that's navigation because we don't teach our young people how to talk to landlords.

We don't ask them, you know, give them courses on what to say and do to be successful when they're looking for housing as well as the financial aspect of it, because there's like six or seven, maybe more different types of programs that provide financial assistance and to create just another door, I think, you know, can be very

Frustrating, you know, for a lot of people.

So I'm really looking forward to how this moves along.

And also, you know, is it you know, do you really want to limit it to like city residents?

Because when I look when I look at communities that have a successful housing hub, they are, you know, doing it all.

And I think there are some people here on this table that have talked about a one stop shop.

and they have all those components in there and sometimes it may mean that certain agencies that have been doing something for years may have to consider how that then plays into a housing hub.

So thank you for letting me address the hack and I look forward to hearing more about all these issues as you proceed on.

Any other comments from the public?

Okay, I'm not seeing any unless I'm, all right.

I guess that brings us to other business.

Is there anything else we need to attend to at this moment?

I'm not hearing a clamoring from war.

All right, so I will get a covering memo out via the listserv regarding the two remits and the timetables, some stuff to Ridge, some stuff to Dan, who will look to schedule a policy subcommittee in quote two weeks, well ahead of the next HAC meeting and well after this one, which I guess is two weeks.

Just a please request to schedule at ASAP.

My schedule these days is hard to manage.

Oh, amen.

Okay.

Motion to adjourn.

Chris, your mic is low.

Chris seconded.

Oh, did it?

Nancy Carpenter, please connect with Chris, because whatever microphone you're using, he reads.

All right.

Any discussion?

All right.

All right.

Thanks, everybody.