Housing Advisory Committee Meeting   5/21/2025

To support the presentation, you should have two handouts in front of you.

One is the staff memo that was presented at the commission meeting on April 21st, and then the other is a primer I've put together since then to kind of explain base value versus increment value.

But anyway, good afternoon HAC members.

And while I've attended all of your meetings in the last year, I haven't had the opportunity to address you.

I'm Alan Pure with the Office of Community Solutions.

Last month on April 21st, I gave a presentation, which I should pull up here, just share the screen, excuse me for a moment.

I gave a presentation to city council on the topic of creating an affordable housing tax abatement.

For the City of Charlottesville.

At that meeting, council expressed interest in the idea so that our office was charged with taking a deeper dive into this concept and bringing back ideas and a recommendation to council later this year about a tax abatement.

As part of that process, we're launching our community engagements with this presentation and discussion here with HAC.

And I know last month you all took a brief look at the memo that was presented.

But I know that most of your energy at that meeting was talking about the land bank ordinance.

And so we wanted to return and have a little bit more of a comprehensive discussion with you about the tax abatement.

The tax abatement in this program would be a reduction in the real estate tax to serve as a financial incentive to building affordable dwelling units or ADUs.

At this point, the staff is calling this COTAP.

the Charlottesville affordable housing tax abatement program, but that's simply because it's a name we came up with.

No one is wedded to that concept.

On this slide, you can see the core components that I'll be highlighting over the next few minutes as we talk about affordable housing tax abatement.

Why are we looking at a tax incentive for affordable housing?

Well, because the new zoning ordinance includes the 10%

ADU building requirement, and this creates a new financial constraint to the ongoing operating revenue of rental housing.

That constraint can be quantified as the difference in revenue between the market rate rents and the affordable rate rents for the required 10% ADUs.

And there's a concern that this financial constraint may be a material impediment

to rental housing construction.

So a tax abatement can potentially provide the necessary incentive to address this potential financial constraint.

What are the options, the tools that city government could use to address this constraint?

Well, there are grant programs, of course, like CAF and HOPS, and these programs, these grants could be increased, but grant funds, first of all, cannot be given to for-profit developers.

and grant funds come from current city revenue or obligate bonding capacity, basically committing current funds for ADUs that aren't delivered in the future.

And also current budget and bonding capacity may be needed for other city government priorities like education, public safety, et cetera.

On the other hand, a tax abatement program uses future real estate tax revenue that will come from the new added increment value of future developments.

Existing base revenue, the tax on the base property value, is not abated and that revenue continues to fully support and go into general fund for ongoing government services.

And so that's what's meant by base versus increment.

You protect base revenue that government services depend upon.

and you commit a portion of the added increment revenue for new priorities.

In this case, for affordable housing projects.

And this may be an optimal way to make funding for affordable housing more sustainable for city government going forward.

In particular, should the goal be to continue the current level of funding that I know was addressed in last month's affordable housing plan.

So let's look at an example to help explain base value versus increment value.

And I have this, for people in the room, I have this document in front of you that I put together.

Unfortunately, I can't put it up on the screen because of a lack of syncing up of the various city cloud programs.

But if you take a look at this chart, base value in the first column in existing property

that doesn't look like it's situated in Charlottesville, but it made for a nice picture.

So this existing home has a assessed value of $100,000 and kicks out $100 of tax revenue.

So a developer decides that they're going to build a certain number of units and create new housing.

So on the next picture, in the next column, we have that new housing project that now is valued at $250,000 and kicks out $250 of annual real estate tax.

So what we have here then is the base, which is the $100,000 value and the $100 tax.

and then the increment is the difference between the new development minus the base.

So the increment of this project is $150,000 of value and $150 of real estate tax.

So essentially what a tax abatement proposes to do is to dedicate some percentage of that increment, that new additional $150 of revenue in this example and invest that percentage in affordable housing.

The base real estate tax continues to flow into general fund and support.

all of the existing city services as the city council appropriates every year.

And of course, if the abatement turns out to be something less than 100%, then that remaining percent of the increment real estate tax will also go into the general fund to continue to support city services other than affordable housing.

So that's one of the values of the idea of creating a tax abatement is your

Can I just interrupt for one second just to say this?

Yeah, please ask questions.

I want this to be more of a dialogue than me.

Yeah, and just to highlight, we pioneered this at Kindlewood phase one and are doing sort of Kindlewood phase two.

Great.

So we pay it on the front end, then it comes back, essentially.

And then the way we've leveraged that value is by getting a third-party loan, and they're taking that revenue that comes back as payment for the loan.

You can keep going and then we can know them.

I'll just say quickly.

construction, during the construction period, that is a different sort of financing structure that doesn't rely on that permanent source in the long run.

It only transitions when you get to permanent debt, and then that permanent debt then adds this as another source to fund that debt.

One of the nuances is that it comes after the first year of completion.

So there is about a year delay

and when the first property tax abatement payment comes in or the tax increment payment comes in.

So we have to, that has to be calculated for and accounted for in the process.

So not to get into the weeds on that, but I'm going to go into the weeds.

So would your lender treat the abatement rather than the rebatement?

The abatement, that's a rebate, the abatement.

The abatement, yes.

Or the beratement, I don't know.

A refund.

So they treat it as an income because you're getting more debts.

So essentially, so this has gone through iteration.

So in Kindlewood phase one, the iteration that we use there is we have a primary mortgage on the primary property.

The money that comes out of the tax increment is actually funding a loan that sits on top of that or below that, but by the same lending institution.

So the primary mortgage and that debt are two separate debt structures, even though they're interlinked.

But that's not how we're doing it in phase two, because that's more complicated.

And so what happened after phase one, then Richmond, which we were talking about before,

saw what we did and they created their own program which simplified and then Virginia Housing as the primary lender said do that instead at least in terms of a structure.

So the revenue is actually, but it's revenue that's coming in but it's calculated against the full price as a cost.

So we are still accounting in the operational pro forma.

Right.

So it's not an offset.

It is an income stream.

Yes.

All right.

I wonder if there's more.

There's a way to do that and call it a true offset.

In Kindlewood phase one, we did 100% of the increments, so similar to what was just live.

I can't remember what the amounts were specifically for phase one, but the base tax rate that existed there previously still applied.

And we're capturing 100% of the, but the way city council structured it at the time, there is also a cap on the total amount of tax increment payments.

I think we capped that at $6 million or something over a 30 year period, but it worked out given interest rates and everything else to cover the debt.

In phase two, it is less than 100%.

I don't remember where we landed in the ends negotiation, but it's like 50% or 60% or 70% of the increment, something like that.

but for 30 years.

Because that's the other factor is you can do an increment like, and there has been some negotiation between us and the EDA because the way that this has to work in Virginia has to be a relationship between the Economic Development Authority, the city itself, and the private developer.

And so the EDA has to play a role.

So the primary negotiation is with the EDA.

I lost my train of thought.

So one of the options that Chris Engel put in front of us, well, what about the idea of 100% increment for 12 years versus 50% increment for 30 years?

The challenge, like in order for it to be coterminous with the primary mortgage, we typically have to do the 30-year structure.

Well, Mr.

Chair, if I could note, one of your members just came in and has joined your meeting.

So your record can reflect that you now have another member there.

Thank you.

So yes, thank you, Sunshine.

You did cover a lot of things very thoroughly.

Clearly, you have a lot of experience, and it's good to know

to hear about the precedent of a very similar program that's already taking place in Charlottesville.

But kind of wrapping up that base versus increment discussion.

So two of the values of tax abatement is one, it's committing future revenue, not current revenue, which means it no longer is competing with the other priorities of city services.

And number two, the developer can monetize that abatement

Can I actually point out one other thing?

And this was just a discussion slash pain point debate within city council when it came to this discussion was if you, and this is when there was a different city council in place when we first were doing it in phase one.

So politically it was a little bit different, but anyway,

but one of the debates that was ongoing was, well, is it better to give $3 million upfront right now out of general funds, meaning that there's no, and so that there's no interest payment being covered in this process, and so it's a more quote unquote efficient use of resources, or, but that impacts the current budget and other, and it's compromised by other priorities or alternatively,

use it as this longer term investment that not all of it will go directly into the project.

A lot of it will go towards interest payments.

So it's a less efficient use of resources, but it doesn't compete with current priorities.

And so there is a real healthy debate around which is the right approach.

And anyway, so I'm just throwing that out there.

Correct, so the discussion has been had that this might be a more sustainable option in order to continue the level of city investments in affordable housing.

That's right.

So to provide sort of the legal background as Sunshine started where this, in 2022, the Virginia General Assembly approved and codified within the Industrial Development and Revenue Bond Act, which is why economic development authorities are involved in this.

They codified a provision to allow local governments working with EDAs to reimburse

a defined amount of real estate tax on the new incremental value of new affordable housing projects.

So the amount of reimbursement, so it's kind of an abatement at the front end with a refund on the back end.

So we're at this point calling it an abatement versus a, Richmond actually calls theirs a performance grant program.

We're trying to focus on the abatement side just in order

to distinguish it from the grant programs that we currently have in effect.

So the process will be an abatement calculation on the front end.

And then as Sunshine was saying, how it would work is as soon as the project is completed and the new assessed value is added and the first tax bill is received and paid, then the project would receive a refund from the economic,

working with the EDA and city finance in order to reimburse whatever percentage of that tax bill has been abated by the formula.

So it's done that way simply because that's where Virginia

code codified it and local governments are not allowed to abate taxes and so instead what they do is they charge it, they have an abatement formula to say it's going to be this much but in order to actually accrue that benefit you have to pay and get a refund.

So that's the reason why it is an abatement refund two-step process because the way Virginia sets up the law

So let me skip ahead because Sunshine just, we got covered all that.

So does everybody kind of understand that abatement refund concept?

And you understand the base and the increment value, so we're all on the same page.

So now where we are at this point in time is doing our due diligence.

We are going to be bringing out a consultant to help us do a thorough market analysis.

here in Charlottesville, first of all, so that we finally place again here.

So we're hoping to start an analysis in June with this consultant.

The goal being clearly, first of all, do a thorough market study of what are the current costs of construction and affordable housing.

Let's be able to distinguish between the costs of labor, building materials, financing.

and the 10% ADU requirements so that we know exactly what is costing what, and in particular being able to break out what is that ADU cost, because that is the impediment, the potential financial impediment that the whole program is intended to try to address.

So our goal of this study will be to clearly and objectively establish if we need an abatement program.

are the costs of construction so high that we do need to do something to incentivize development.

If so, quantify the need and help us devise a tax abatement formula that keeps the developer whole from the ADU requirement so that the program is effective in incentivizing housing construction.

And finally, this analysis may help guide consideration

of different bonus options like whether to target different abatement levels to different geographic areas of the city.

Perhaps a tax incentive should be higher where market rate rents are lower or an abatement should be higher where the market rate rents

And is it built in to have that assessment done on a regular basis since it's such a fluid

So in terms of those costs, at this point, we haven't crossed that bridge.

But that's an excellent question about how often we might want to update our numbers to make sure that we're truly addressing.

Bill?

So as we're presenting it here, if we're just meeting the 10%, the idea would be one of the options on the table is if you're meeting the 10% ADU requirement, if you're at 10 or more, or I suppose if you're meeting it anyway and you're at less than 10 units, the entire increment, the increment is for the gross improvements, affordable or otherwise.

We're not parsing down to percentage of this that's actually affordable.

It depends.

I mean, those are the questions we have to talk about.

We have a 20 unit building.

Two of the units are meeting the requirements.

Do we rebate for just the equivalent value of those two units or for all of the improvements?

And then, presumably, if we wanted to say, well, the 10 percent requirements are requirement, you get the rebate of X for that.

But if you're over it, presumably,

As you said in your previous slide, if you're at 15% or 20%, perhaps that is a greater percentage.

I mean, all of those are on the table, right?

Correct.

And that's, and now Phil is doing a great job into switching the next two pages of the presentation.

Let's say, you know, you get a 50% rebate on the equipment.

increment at 10%.

You know, we might say, but hey, if you go to 20%, we'll give you 80% rebate.

Yeah.

So yes, that is where we, once we have the due diligence completed with the consultant study and kind of have a basic framework, then we need to know.

Yeah, and what's really going on in Charlottesville, costs, submarkets, et cetera.

Then we also need to begin to address what are the policy options for structuring this.

And a first high level one would be, should the tax abatement simply be intended to close that gap of that 10% cost?

So do we want to say our job is to find out what that 10% cost is on this project, abate that amount, and we're good.

Second policy option could be, do we want to be a little bit more generous and say, you know, we really want to kickstart affordable housing, so we want to plug that 10% and maybe be a little bit more generous so that we make, we get things kickstarted.

That would be a second policy option that we need to consider.

And of course, policy option three, you always have to have the do nothing option.

Perhaps the study indicates that the ADU requirement is not sufficient enough that it's worth doing.

I know the city of Boston

came to that conclusion after they did their study.

They thought we don't need an abatement.

The impediments are about labor costs, financing costs, et cetera.

It's not about the ADUs.

So that would be another option.

Then drilling down a little bit more from that higher level framework, we need to look at things like eligibility requirements.

For example, in order to be eligible for a tax abatement, should 10% be sufficient?

Or should we say, you know,

to get in a vein that we want you to scratch a little higher.

So therefore, you need to build 15% ADUs or 20% ADUs.

So we need to look at those eligibility amounts.

By the way, the county government, Albemarle County actually has a tax abatement program where they limit it to 15% as long as their eligibility requirement is simply building the 20% required and you're eligible for a 15% tax abatement.

And the Richmond model, which we're going to drill down in a couple of minutes, is a little bit more elegant.

It's got a little bit more options and bonus options.

So another policy option would be how much is the maximum we're willing to abate?

The county says 15%.

Richmond actually will go as high as 100% if you dive into their bonuses.

Do we, where do we want to be in that sort of spectrum?

And then for how many years?

Sunshine gave us a little peek at the concept of 30 years being a standard amount, because that's usually the loan term of a loan and he's trying to monetize the abatement to his loan terms.

So Richmond has it 15 years at the front, and then you're eligible for a 15 year renewal.

Maybe it should be 99 years because that's the term of affordability.

And I would also, I would add that, you know, as a nonprofit, monetizing it and coterminous with the primary debt structure makes sense for us.

But I can also imagine that a for-profit entity, they actually would rather have more of that money up front than maybe they would want

10 years at 100% versus 30 years at 20%.

Even if the same equivalent value from the city's perspective, they actually may want that money up front.

So having that as another dial.

And the last dial, and I don't think I see it here, but I think is worth considering as a question,

is the number of units total in a project before, the threshold number before it triggers as an option.

So for example, right now we're talking about 10 units, 10 plus units, because that's where the ADU ordinance kicks in.

But what about a fourplex?

And one of them or two of them are affordable.

Is that a viable path in this context?

given the sort of procedural and transactional and legal elements that have to be put in place for each time.

And I would say that the current structure we've been using in Kindlewood phase two, the answer is absolutely not, because it's just too burdensome for such a small project.

Fill out these forms, verify this data, we're done.

The other matter here might be, as you were saying about Kindlewood,

A New Hope was a dollar cap, which might make the making the determination of the term if you factor in some sort of total dollar cap and make the term sort of adjustable for that.

So there's lots of ways you could play with that to either satisfy a lender or a developer's return.

Say, well, you know, it's

It's a total of $5 million.

If you can figure out a way with the assessments to get all of that rebate in 15 years, great.

For a lesser amount, 30 if you're alone.

Some combination thereof.

Sounds like a case by case basis.

Well, you'll see in a moment when he brings up the Richmond spreadsheet, that spreadsheet doesn't contemplate some of the questions we're talking about, but I think you could put it in there and make a more sophisticated spreadsheet that would allow for some dial turning.

Right.

Right.

We need it to be formulaic.

We need it to be predictable.

We need it to be equitably applied.

And actually, Sunshine, your idea of graduating the amount of the payments either start at 100 percent, maybe back your way down, is something that I have already thought about.

It's the way we manage tax increment finance in Montana.

which was one of my experiences on this area.

And then in terms of the unit size, we also have that discussion as well.

So we pretty much have addressed all of those.

Yes?

Just a follow-up question for Sunshine.

I don't know.

I would want to see ultimately

If it can be automated, like we're talking about a spreadsheet formula that can be easily plugged in, that's one step in the process.

The other step in the process is how predictably

Can the sort of documents that the EDA has to generate and then CityCam, because it requires legal review and everything else, can those be templates that are generated once?

Right.

So we really don't have any additional legal costs or services with that expense, because I think it would be ideal to have it be workable.

So clearly there's a lot of things we need to contemplate.

The study will help us shake out the realities we've got looking at these kinds of options in terms of eligibility.

in terms of how rich do we want to make this benefit, how many years does it need to be, do we want to incentivize deeper affordability by making the abatement richer if you build at maybe 30 percent AMI or below or 30 to 50 etc.

So those are all the kind of policy options that we need to look at as well as other jurisdictions and what I put up in front of you now is

The Richmond Model.

They just launched it a year ago.

The whole concept was just approved by the legislature in 2022.

And Richmond rolled this out in I think late 2023.

And I don't know that they haven't had any projects yet.

The last time I checked, they hadn't had any.

But my goal will be to generate something like this that factors in all of those policy ideas that we just discussed.

And so, for example, let's see what a project would turn out to be abated at in Richmond.

So Sunshine Hobbit, if we play the game, we did.

Sure.

It's just you and me.

Let's talk about Cherry.

So that's 70,000 square feet of gross residential use.

Yeah.

How much?

And roughly 13,000.

non-residential.

So what this formula has done is they're basically backing out the non-residential use.

So the 83,000 square feet is the total project.

70,000 of that is residential.

So you're at 84% of that project is meeting the goals of the abatement building housing.

71 units total.

I'm just going to use the numbers we used before.

So what these are that I just put in are Sunshine's Project is 71 housing units.

40 are between 50 and 80 percent AMI.

and 31 are below 50%.

So what they're building in is they're building in a bonus.

By Sunshine Building deeper affordability units, he's going to get a bonus on his abatement.

So how we read this then is 44% of his units are at the deeper affordability.

100% of his units are affordable and that would mean that his tax abatement, they call it the performance grant percentage.

Again, for now we're calling it abatement to distinguish between the grant programs.

So that's his basic abatement percentage is 84.

But wait, there's more.

Because of this, 44% at the deeper affordability exceeds their 20% goal of deeper affordability.

They've now doubled this up to 100%.

So Cherry Avenue in Richmond would be getting a 100% abatement.

So on our example of the $150 of new increment tax that's due,

So let's play this game for a second.

If we were not involved, it were just 70 units and it was Woodard continuing forward just to see what that looks like.

So make that seven and make that zero.

And I'm just making numbers up here a little bit, but that would give... That would give them an 8% abatement.

Okay, I see.

because they get no bonus.

So their bonus number down here is zero.

So they're building their minimum to actually, I think we require a round up.

So let's make that eight.

So they would build eight units of affordable out of a 71 unit project.

And what if zero and eight reverse?

Because you haven't hit the 20% threshold.

So that's their policy framework.

We would obviously impose our own policy goals and alignments that would kick out a different percentage based on that.

And so that's our goal going forward is to complete a market analysis, have these policy discussions, and ultimately build a model like this that will

And then of course... Can I pause for one second?

So I have to head out for a meeting with Sandesh Narmi and other folks.

They're not going to head out.

Who can chair at this point?

Who's the chair at this point?

I know we still have quorum.

Good one.

Nicole, you are now dubbed as chair.

or for this meeting in any case.

And one thing I wanted to point out, well, I'll send out by email afterwards.

There's a separate thing.

Yeah, that's fine.

Thank you all.

Thank you.

Their magic number is 20% of the 20% of the residential units.

Well, we don't have a bonus system at all.

What they're saying is if you get the minimum, you get your automatic, you get your performance grant performance if you're at

When was the program passed?

In Richmond?

Yeah.

2023.

So they have little output.

Yeah.

You can actually find, you can find this if you Google performance grant Richmond, you can find this spreadsheet.

They actually make a part of the application.

So if you're a developer,

You can plug in these numbers and play the game and say, how much abatement do I need to make a pencil?

And let me see how I can make this work.

And ways to change it, obviously, are the number of affordable units in the two different categories, 50 to 80 versus below 50.

You can also increase the amount of space that's going towards residential instead of commercial.

So again, I made more of a residential space and less of a commercial and it increased my abatement from 10% to 14%.

So our goal is to devise just this type of document when we get at the end.

And then the other piece that I would want to add to it, however, is to be able to also put in a column that shows how much your taxes are, you know, so that assuming you're going to contemplating developing a parcel,

Yes, put in the actual amounts.

Obviously, it's going to take a projection for what you project the post-construction value will be.

But if we can plug that in, then it will give the

We're on track to try to be going back to council

So one thing that occurs when you take and muddy these waters is the metrics used for assessing commercial space versus residential space and how you value that.

It's not necessarily linear.

Correct.

So that can muddy the water.

I mean, if you have, I mean, in either direction, right?

You could have really sexy class AAA commercial development there that

versus the residential that would be lower.

And you could skew these numbers or scheme them the other way, which is, oh, it's warehouse flex space.

It's, you know, with space heaters in it.

Therefore, you might be shooting yourself in the foot by having.

I mean, you can you can you don't need to drive that.

I mean, and I just think it's something to look at the larger metric because it might skew the real numbers you get at the end.

Right.

I don't think it's going to be much of an issue, though, because most of we don't

One thing that has come up is doing like an Airbnb, which would be considered commercial, like a hotel use.

So you're saying you do it as an in, not as an Airbnb, because we don't allow more than 180 days use of an Airbnb.

Okay, cool.

We have to call it a bed and breakfast.

Yeah, no.

Well, we said condo-tel.

All right.

Do you know what I'm trying to say?

I know what you're trying to say, yeah.

I think that we could get into the, but this is, again, I think there's going to be a lot of weed rummaging when we actually have data that we can actually start mapping.

Yeah, we'd be really excited to see it.

No, and frankly, a lot of it is going to be policy calls.

And in terms of, you know, how rich do we want to make this benefit?

Again, the number of years, the bonuses, et cetera.

The practicality of it, I mean, you know, one way to look at it, well, if this

from a developer's point of view is this needs to move my needle to actually incentivize me to do this.

And don't thoroughly quote me on that nobody's taken.

It's nice to be the- Yeah, it'd be interesting to know how many of these- There's Richmond for inclusionary zone.

What's the base?

That, it's outside my wheelhouse.

Is what's the context of the ADU issues, the challenges, not to mention the costs because you know when I reflected earlier part of the reason for us doing the due diligence with a consultant study

was when we learned that Boston decided to not do an abatement because they realized that the ADU requirement in their inclusionary zoning was not the obstacle.

We have to make sure that we find out what are the obstacles here.

Comparing us to Boston though, I'm sure Boston's labor costs are higher, material costs might be higher, so we've got to be careful when we're comparing ourselves to other jurisdictions to see what's going on in our area, what's our inclusionary zoning is unique to us, our land costs are unique to us, etc.

So that's why there's the importance of that

My instinct would say if you've got your 10% units and you're jumping in, you get a significant benefit automatically because it would seem because from what I've heard, particularly in the upmarket areas is, you know, my math just cannot math, says the developer.

for these affordable units without X.

There's gotta be an X, whatever it is.

So, all right.

I was a tax administrator and tax policy at the state level.

Good.

Are you looking for HAC to provide recommendations or thoughts on the policy levers?

At this point, it's an update and that's exactly where I wanted to close, Nicole.

You guys are just really good at this outline.

We all saw your slides beforehand.

What I would propose if it would be the committee's pleasure is that when we get the study completed,

We will come back and make a presentation to you of that and we can have a deeper discussion once we have a little bit more specific data and by then we will have fleshed out some specific policy options to consider like what would happen if we did this, what would it, you know,

creating kind of a document like this that includes the policy options that we've discussed.

So if it would be the committee's pleasure, we could come back in, perhaps it's your September meeting, pencil it in, hopefully we could meet that deadline, maybe push it to our committee.

So that would be the next step for us.

with you would be fall when we have more data, more information and we've had a chance to dive into.

And by then we should also, we're convening a staff work group to talk about the logistics of how to handle this efficiently.

Sunshine made the point of making sure that this is an efficient process from the developer's point of view.

So we're gonna start talking about it internally because there's a lot of moving parts.

We've got the assessor's office, the treasurer's office, the revenue office,

us, NDS, the EDA, et cetera.

Send out a doodle poll.

Yeah.

Right.

So they're supposed to be meeting like the end of June.

We're looking at June 26th, June 30th, something like that.

And I think the plan would be, it would be very similar to what we've done here and then hear their perspective.

And thank you to Brenda, who's in the back helping me take notes.

So that I can not have to walk and chew down at the same time.

And so she's taking down all the important points you folks have made so that we can work that in.

And so, yes, we're going to do the same presentation with Cadre in June.

All the dominoes fall in place.

We hope to be ready to send it to the city manager's office for all the things that they do, and perhaps by the end of the year, early first quarter of next year.

I'm curious because I feel like that's a really important question for the state.

Correct.

The data may show, like it did in Boston, that the impediment is all these other things that are unrelated because the worst tax abatement policy in the world is you abate taxes for a project that would have happened anyway.

That's the sweet spot is to try to find an abatement that is needed and that but for the abatement that project wouldn't have occurred because you don't want to abate something that would have occurred anyway and that you just

Yeah, I mean, I think the whole modeling thing is going to become very important as to what, does this really move the needle?

Right.

And what point do we want to be able to turn that dial so that it really moves the needle at the right point?

And the answer may be, whatever that point is, something the city can't do.

Well, maybe it doesn't matter.

Correct.

And again, all of that circles back to why we're making sure we do a detailed market analysis.

I know that there was one done during the inclusionary zoning.

discussion that helped inform the decision making.

But it was a different type of study and things have changed markedly since then.

We've got three of them that we're... We haven't picked yet.

No, we're looking for some bids, hopefully to know by the end of next week.

Yeah, no, that was awesome.

Yes, thank you.

We're without our normal chairs.

Okay, so I mean that's really it.

Sardex meeting is June 18th.

Unless anybody has anything else?

No?

Okay, let's do it.

Let's adjourn.

Thank you.