Housing Advisory Committee Meeting   11/4/2020

Okay, so I'll go ahead and call the subcommittee meeting to order.

And the first thing I want to do is to announce to the public that we'd like to make these as participatory as possible.

Bear with us.

We're still trying to figure out how to do these subcommittee meetings via Zoom.

And so, please, we like participation.

We want to hear from you.

rather than having, I don't think we have the technical ability to just kind of make it open to just have people speak when they want to speak.

So periodically we'll be pausing and asking people to put their hands up so that Aaron can call on you so you can ask a question.

With that said, Ridge, is there anything else you want to go over before we jump into it?

Nope, let's just jump into it.

Thanks.

So our topic today, our purpose is to review the draft of the HR advisor's housing strategy.

I hope people have had a chance to have a look at that.

We did receive a number of comments.

Sunshine and Chris, I had your comments and so I was prepared to read them into the record.

But now that you're here, I'll refrain from that unless you have to disappear.

In which case I will.

So to let people know, we had an opportunity for subcommittee members to make comments.

I got comments back from three subcommittee members, two of whom are here, so we will let them speak for themselves.

I think our remit today is to look at this, and if possible, I don't know that we're going to be able to wordsmith live on Zoom, but to get some general notes.

regarding if we can come to some consensus around specific recommendations to the draft proposal that we can then send.

Erin, are we sending these directly to council?

Are we sending these to the consultants?

I am not sure.

I would suggest sending them directly to Alex and Missy, whatever comments you have.

Yeah, that's fine.

Okay, so most likely what will happen is that we'll take some notes.

We'll try to get consensus.

It'll take a few days to clean up the notes, put them in a presentable form, recirculate them among committee members, and then get them to staff.

11, 10.

Okay, so we have no time at all.

We have six days.

Well, right.

We'll just we'll do the best that we can.

It's a it's a detailed, long document.

And we'll do the best we can to comment as well as we can.

Before I get started on that though, I do want to note a couple things that are fairly obvious is that I think probably people are feeling a lot of different things today.

Tired, weary, perhaps excited, happy.

I want to put aside the politics of the day to focus on our solemn task, which is to review and make recommendations to make this draft housing policy the best it can be.

This is a really great opportunity.

I think we're all really deeply connected no matter what our political affiliations are by the intense desire to make this a more equitable community.

This global pandemic has absolutely shown the disproportionate impact of bad housing on low wealth families and I think we all want to reaffirm our right, our belief in housing as a basic human right.

to bring with them a special amount of grace today.

Forgive me for tripping over my words and forgive other folks for if they haven't had full attention for this, we're going to do the best that we can.

To that end, before we sort of jump in and give an overview of how we're going to do the meeting, I do want to give folks who did comment an opportunity to share their comments.

And I will read the comments from one committee member, Frank Stoner, who isn't here.

Yeah, actually, I want a point of clarification initially, because

When this meeting was scheduled, and correct me if my understanding is incorrect here, but when this meeting is scheduled, we had one document to review, which was essentially the overarching guidelines around the affordable housing plan.

And then two days ago, the draft affordable housing plan became public.

And so my initial comments were more focused on the previous documents.

And so I did just scrub through as best I could this morning through the draft affordable housing plan, which I do think clarifies a lot of the questions that I and I know others have had as well.

But I just wanna clarify for this meeting's purpose, is our focus on the draft affordable housing plan as it was released two days ago?

You're on mute, Phil.

Yeah.

So the draft was released last night, essentially, late yesterday afternoon.

So the timing of all of this is not exactly ideal.

I think we have the data in front of us.

We evaluate what we can and give the recommendations based on what we believe to be the target discussion on 1110 and roll with it.

I mean, I'm not really sure how fine a distinction we can make at this point.

And it may be that we just sort of, that a lot of the work of these recommendations is gonna be sort of a second round of notes and communication sent to the chairs so that they can sort of compose a synthesis.

And while I've got a piece of the floor, and if you want to sort of have me take another swing of it, Joe and or Aaron, S Lisa is knocking on the door trying to get in here.

And considering she sits on the steering committee, it would be great to have her.

So whatever buttons we need to push, could somebody do that?

Or S Lisa Herndon?

All right, housekeeping out of the way.

No, no, I think I could run with that.

We have the plan, it's been published.

It's a matter of public record at this point.

So my sense is that we should probably look at the plan, we should be focusing on the plan, not the presentation.

Sorry.

I think to the presentation, and I honestly haven't been through the plan, but it's unclear to me there's like 133 page PowerPoint, which was the plan or the or slash presentation and is the new draft or

Yeah, so I think I offered out some observations.

I'm just maybe a little bit confused.

I will offer those observations during our conversation.

OK, well, so I do then want to thank you, Chris.

I do want to read Frank Stoner, who's a member of the committee, his comments on the plan, not on the presentation.

and I quote he said inclusionary zoning and city funding needs to encourage small entrepreneurial businesses in appropriate locations that can be a step on the ladder out of poverty and help build generational wealth.

Number two, he said meaningful employment opportunities are not a direct policy objective of the housing plan, but they should acknowledge as a high priority for the city as part of the plan and fund it appropriately.

Without economic opportunity, affordable housing will become permanent housing for lower income residents and will never break the cycle of generational poverty.

With that said, the plan is multifaceted, multiple chapters.

What I thought we would do is go around among committee members and do a sort of speed round because there's no way that in an hour and a half, two hours, we're going to get to everything.

And I want to see if there's consensus around certain components of it that we want to spend time doing a deeper dive on.

So if anyone wants to start, feel free to raise your hand.

If not, I will call on people in a round robin fashion.

All right, Chris, please.

I had two general comments that I was unable to send beforehand and the one is the concept that doesn't seem to exist in this is that the supply and demand element that is not acknowledged is the cost of land or land itself, the availability of land and that

that didn't see anything that would address that specifically in terms of a land trust, land bank was mentioned, but land trusts were not as a solution.

And then the other piece that, speaking from a developer standpoint, is that one of the biggest issues in the cost of housing is carrying cost.

So if a developer buys the land for a million bucks,

if he can get it, he, she, if the entity can get it entitled within two months, carrying costs are negligible.

If it takes two years, carrying costs can be a significant addition that has to be passed on to the rents and the price of the housing, whatever.

So it pains me because all of these issues having to do with equity

with racial justice, all of these are huge.

So Chris, I hate to be a miser, but I wanna be sort of clear about what I'm trying to do here is just, this is sort of a speed round.

I should have said, I should have given people like 30 seconds, but what I flagged for two things, cost of land and carrying costs due to the time lag of entitlement.

That's good.

Okay.

So all we're trying to do is flag what are the topics that we want to talk about and then we'll take a deeper dive on the ones where there's consensus that we want to talk about.

So sorry to interrupt you, I wasn't clear about direction.

Oh God, a speed round for me?

So one is that the plan asserts that it is comprehensive, but it does not address the second element that is critical for affordable housing.

It's not just the cost of housing, but it's the amount of income that you have

to afford that housing.

And besides one throwaway sentence, there was no focus on economic opportunity and helping people earn more income.

So that's number one, I think it's a major deficit in the report.

Number two is, while I definitely support the focus on home ownership, and I would like to see a little bit more on the shared equity model of helping people build wealth.

OK, thank you.

I honestly don't know how to keep it short, but I will try.

So I agree that there is opportunity for more fleshing out of the shared equity models, whether it's community land trust or otherwise.

Chris, there is some reference, just as a clarification, on pages 112 through 114.

There's some reference to the CLT there.

Overall, I guess one, well, you want to keep it to a point, sorry.

I guess one piece is that the document does a good job of highlighting CRHA and public housing redevelopment, but does not once mention friendship court redevelopment.

And I think that's a gap.

I would like to get into a little bit on the proposed $10 million a year, because I think there are some nuances to that number that we wanna flesh out and make sure we're all clear on.

Thank you.

I'm sorry, I'm having some technical difficulties here.

My neighbor is putting on a new roof and it's affecting my internet.

It's crazy.

And my children are being homeschooled as well.

Just more focus on the home ownership aspect of it.

I have notes and I have to find them.

I want to dig more into that part of it.

Thank you, Lisa.

Chris, are there particular components you want us to dig into or focus our attention on?

Yeah, I was a little concerned when I saw a lot of new suggestions on regulations of landlords and rental properties, including

a cap on rentals or again, regulated rental prices and other things.

I did like though that they started talking about helping tenants engage in those processes and reducing resources to that.

I also, there was a previous comment and so I don't know where it's at or observation I think in the document about, I think building wealth but we don't want gentrification.

And so there was a bit of a conflict I thought potentially

there and wanted to potentially unpack that if people thought it was an issue.

Thank you, Chris.

A couple things and I'll try to bullet point them.

To begin with, circling back to Sunshine's comment on the 10 million a year and how we sort of manage that and implement that, I would suggest that that's an opportunity for us to plop that number into the IAT and see if we can synthesize that to get some more granular detail of how that gets and what the impacts might be.

Two is that on some of the implementation pieces that we take a dive into the recommendation and then how best to implement some of that has to do with one thing I noted had to do with the shared equity piece and some of the models that they use.

And the third is that there is a couple of pieces of low-hanging fruit.

The land bank, although it did run into trouble at its initial council meeting, we do have as low-hanging fruit, a land bank ordinance that is 98% done.

that could be represented to council pretty quickly and launched.

And then I've got some, a few thoughts about the nexus of implementation, policy and implementation, but that's, I mean, of course that's, once we've got a policy, that's 98% of the remaining work.

Thank you.

And last, I think the only other committee member who's on the call is John Sales.

John, can you hear me?

I can't see you.

Let me see if I can.

Sorry, I'm here and I'm like into like multiple different things at one time.

John, all we're looking for right now is we're going around to committee members asking if there's a particular issue or two that you want to flag for a deeper dive.

We're going to consolidate that.

And whenever there's consensus on what we're going to talk about, we're going to devote our time.

Okay.

And I believe that's all for the committee members except for me, and I would

I would second, there are two that have come up more than others.

So there's more conversation about home ownership slash shared equity.

So there were four votes for that.

I would add a fifth for that.

Land bank, cost of land, there were three.

I would add a fourth vote to that.

The other one getting a couple of different votes was looking specifically about funding and implementation in the IAT.

So those seem to be the ones where there's the most consensus on.

And I would think that if we could handle three or four, we will have done something.

I don't want to over summarize.

Did I miss anything?

Just one member of the audience has their hand raised.

Okay, this is Councillor Payne.

Hey, no, put me in the audience for some reason.

But I would just second the land trust and land bank as really important priorities.

It's probably deeper than we can get into today.

But I think the funding is also a really important question, especially in light of our budget challenges.

And

Given the election results in the Senate, I also think the likelihood of additional money from the federal government is probably a lot lower.

Thank you, Michael.

I appreciate that.

So again, I'm hearing consensus around three items, homeownership, shared equity, funding, and land.

Does that sort of summarize where I think we can probably dig into all three of those today?

Any objections to that before we jump in?

All right, Rich, do you have a preference for which one we should start with?

No.

OK, well, let's jump into the one that got well, the two got the most votes, land and homeownership wealth since it's at the.

literally at the top of my list.

Let's talk about home ownership, shared wealth, and I'll open the floor to anybody.

I think it was S Lisa, Phil, Sunshine, a few others talked about that.

Does anybody wanna sort of introduce their general ideas about that, things that they're concerned about, things that they like, things that specifically with regard to home ownership, we should include, exclude, change.

S Lisa, do you wanna start us off?

You're muted.

I cannot unmute her.

So I'll sort of do a super top line.

And that would be that I and I'm not really prepared to discuss this in detail, probably have to follow up with notes, but the mechanics of implementing that,

of the recommendations of the shared equity and the subsidies and the down payment assistance.

I think that's probably worth a run through and sharpening a little bit as to what our options really are there and how they work.

I'm not really prepared to give a sort of a detailed run on it though.

But the plan includes things like down payment assistance, how that's structured, who provides it, the sale of these properties under shared equity, and all of it seems to be

sort of a fairly closely tight pattern of buckshot, but I'd like to be able to sort of parse those a little bit in making specific recommendations on how that might or might not work.

And I don't have anything sort of, I'm not sure I'm able to give sort of a chapter inverse rundown with having just raced through the plan.

I mean, one way to slice this is to use the layout that's currently in the document and kind of go point by point or topic area by topic area.

And I would argue that if we're talking about

Homeownership and Land Trust and so forth.

The land bank is the first one that kind of comes up but we can skip that initially and then it moves into down payment assistance and shared equity on page 112.

If it would be helpful, I can provide a little bit of additional background on that portion since obviously Piedmont Housing is referenced there.

Sure, so I've shared page, can everyone see the shared screen?

Yes.

All right, so I've shared page 112 that you referred to.

Okay, so the long and short of it is that Piedmont Housing Alliance administers multiple down payment assistance funds.

One of them, the one that's referenced here is related to city funds that the city has allocated historically

We also administer funds that Albemarle County has done so for the Albemarle County region, similarly for Louisa County.

We also administer funds through the state.

And there are a couple of different programs, including direct down payment assistance, including buying down interest rates for the first mortgage.

We also have our own CDFI dollars, which we have utilized as well for down payment assistance.

And I just want to highlight the part, there is a challenge in, well, on the one hand, I think it's great that we have multiple different resources.

Each of them has their own particular requirements, limitations, opportunities, based on the jurisdiction that created those funds.

So in the city of Charlottesville, even though what you're seeing there is accurate with regards to the city funds that have been deployed, we have utilized other funding sources within the city limits for also for down payment assistance, but that's not reflected here in the data because we're talking about specifically subsidy provided by the city.

So I just want to provide that as a little bit of a backdrop.

I agree with the recommendation that one of the biggest challenges in the city, and we've seen a decrease in the number of down payment assistance loans we have been able to deploy in the city over the last few years.

And that is largely driven by the increased cost of housing.

And even with down payment assistance, the ability of lower income households to purchase is just farther and farther out of reach without additional subsidy at play.

I agree with the recommendation that the cap go up to 20%.

I agree with the recommendation that it's a 0% loan because in your, are you moving to the next slide?

So you'll, yeah, on the recommendations, it's page 113, they recommend 20%, up to allowable 20% towards the down payment assistance.

Loans should be 0% with no payments.

The other recommendations also make sense to me all the way through.

So I flagged a couple of things to talk about.

That's the specifics about down payment assistance and a specific suggestion that the loan should be 0%.

I guess the one lingering question in their recommendations, if you look down on page 114, you'll see that they have a funding need of 60,000 per household.

So, you know, historically, we have had, well, we still have what's called a revolving fund.

So if somebody does sell their home who originally got down payment assistance,

Those funds theoretically come back into the fund which we then redeploy to a new homeowner.

But because the increased cost of housing, the higher value of the loans we've been putting out there, we have not seen funds come back.

So there is need for additional funding to really be able to utilize this program in the future.

Thanks.

Anybody else who commented who wanted to talk about homeownership?

If I may, I've got a question for Sunshine on this, but also in general.

And this harkens back to something we took a stab at for an employee down payment assistance program.

This $60,000 per household, if we want to crank those numbers, even if we're allocating $10 million a year, that's going to start taking a bite out of that number pretty quickly if we are successful.

And the more successful we get, the more we're going to be robbing some Peters to pay some Pauls on this.

And it occurs to me that

I cannot think of a reason offhand where we might not want to incorporate into one of these entities a self-insured, self-funding mortgage insurance plan so that we can go get the financing and offer very cheap

extremely cheap sort of self insurance on mortgage insurance as a as a public entity where we can be pretty flexible with that and the

The securitized mortgage market will accept it.

And that's a very cheap, relatively cheap way to use somebody else's money, provided that we have a premium structure that is helpful to the borrower or down payment.

And we can do that either through a single premium plan or very discounted monthlies.

in partnership with one of the big players.

We had looked at that for the down payment assistance.

I don't, can't think of a reason why that doesn't work.

And it might allow for smaller down payment system and then a very cheap mortgage insurance, which would eventually go away with equity and solve, you know, anyway, something to throw into the mix.

So Esalisa, are you back with us?

I want to respond to one thing that Phil started at the beginning, which is he's absolutely right that the more successful we are in terms of deploying those funds and supporting affordable home ownership, the more it costs because it's a certain amount per unit per house.

But at the same time, this ties in a little bit to the idea of community land trust or other subsidized housing models.

where if there is additional, if there is subsidy that can be brought to bear at the front cost of those housing units, the need for a high amount of down payment assistance loan drops.

So if we can utilize state housing trust fund dollars, federal home loan bank dollars to subsidize the housing in the first place, the need for down payment assistance reduces.

Ridge, you also talked about wealth building and equity.

So I'm very interested in shared equity models and going beyond just down payment assistance to kind of a second mortgage type assistance, which could be employer funded.

And I think there's a lot of opportunity there.

It's done in other parts of the country and it could be done here.

So more employer assisted housing.

My overall focus on home ownership is in terms of wealth building and

you know, the enormous racial wealth gap is explained at least in part by the lack of access to home ownership of people of color.

And the Pew Charitable Trust says that the racial wealth gap is 13 times greater for white families than black families.

But at the heart, at the start of the racial wealth gap is the racial income gap.

And we talk about the need for more subsidy

The need for subsidy reduces if the income of the home buyer increases.

And so I just continue to assert that we need to simultaneously be working with people, moving them up the income ladder if we are going to move them up the home ownership and housing ladder.

And I just think it's a big gap in this report.

But the last thing I'll say about shared equity is on page 44 of the plan,

They talk about liens on properties that get assistance.

which is a fairly standard tool that is used which is you help people buy a home that is affordable and then you put a lien on it so that it can always remain affordable but what that does is it eliminates the ability for that home buyer to get the benefit of the wealth that is created from that home if there's a lien or a restriction on the amount of the sale price

and so I want to see a home ownership program that allows people to benefit from the upside of property values increasing because that's how wealth is generated and there's a tension but there's a lot there are a lot of studies that say that you're better off focusing on on the second mortgage

filling the gap of affordability rather than placing a limit on the value of the property that is purchased with government funds.

I would strongly agree with that.

Those were some of the notes that I had written down.

Obviously, homeownership is something that I think about a lot in my day job.

But I want to sort of echo and strengthen perhaps a couple of things that Ridge said.

One is this equity is written all over this document.

but I think it's only very loosely the idea of home equity being equity.

It's just a very loose and not strong enough in the document.

And so, I mean, I would like to see the document be a little bit more clear about home equity and the racial wealth gap in Charlottesville

Now, as that's impacted by policy, I find that this is very, very prescriptive about home ownership models.

And I'm with Ridge, I strongly object to full stop the down payment assistance being an unforgivable loan.

that is collateralized or backed by a lien because as Ridge says, you're not allowing a family to take advantage of that wealth.

They can't take a loan against something that has to lien on it.

And over time, they're investing in that home and they're not essentially getting any of that value.

So perhaps that language needs to be softened, that there are affordability provisions that last a certain amount of time or if there is a

Deferred loan, it is forgivable over a period of time or there's some other way to skin the CAT.

But I see this being home ownership, the only prescriptions in this document are home ownership light.

And if the problem that we're trying to address, and I think the study doesn't or the draft

strategy does a good job saying we're trying to address hundreds of years of racism and in access to wealth among people of color in our community we need to take those we need to soften those guardrails

The other thing too is I'm looking on page 43 that I have up on the screen and it implies that the only people who we should be targeting home ownership to are people above 40% of area median income and I strongly object to that.

We serve people at 25% and below or 25% above area median income.

We actually bring people into the program to Ridge's point at 15% of area median income and then we work with them to get their incomes up

to 25 to 30%.

The average

AMI of people in our program is 32%.

And if we're really trying to use the housing strategy to address bigger socio-economic inequities, we have to push those subsidies down and we have to give people at lower incomes opportunities to earn wealth, or we're just repeating the same cycles.

So I would strongly urge that chart on 43 to be changed.

I would also add that the only three programs that are suggested as you know as stimulating down or home ownership among low-wealth people are DPA, owner-occupied rehab and single-family infill.

I think that misses out on a lot of opportunity things like land trusts like creation of land trusts

section eight homeowner, use of section eight vouchers for homeownership, or other kinds of land subsidies, other kinds of deeper subsidies.

So I think it really misses the mark on that.

Sorry, real quick.

Page 113, if I'm reading the DPA correctly, and shared equity ownership,

Is that where there are the specifics of the recommended changes?

That's how I understood.

My, again, review of the document is that's where that's at.

Just getting to the question on building wealth and equity, the second bullet point here says, all right, provide down payment assistance in the form of loans that are 0% interest, which I think is, again, aligned with what Rich and Danny just mentioned.

But it does say not forgive.

So again, I guess in my senses, a lien is placed on the house for that amount of let's say $50,000 in down payment assistance, right?

It's capturing some of them.

So if you imagine what a family puts into it via a first mortgage, they get back what they put in, when they sell the house, they get back what they put into it.

They also get the appreciation over and above the initial cost of the home.

If we're talking about DPA being $60,000 or $80,000 or $50,000 or $40,000 that's a big chunk of the value of the home that they never have access to and a family could own this home for 50 years and so I think what and in addition to that

So not to sound like a broken record on this point, but instead of providing down payment assistance with a lien in all cases, it might be much cheaper, much more flexible and to the homeowner's benefit to have a guarantee

Program that is essentially, for lack of a better term, mortgage insurance is paid for by the city.

So that's much cheaper.

The city can pay it or can subsidize it very heavily to the owner.

They get the benefit of all of the accumulation of the equity.

And the city or other funds are not popping out 60 grand a pop, it's more like

You know, $600 or $700 a year, which is a lot more sustainable.

You just have to be able to price it.

And one of the challenges is having the homeowner in a position that they can afford the full mortgage payment.

But, you know, it might work out net cheaper to say we're providing down payment assistance for 10% and guaranteeing the loan to the lender.

through either a guaranteed fee arrangement or a mortgage insurance premium arrangement.

So I think what we're circling around here is that there are a number of tools that aren't mentioned here, but the way this comes across is very specific.

This is the home ownership program where Phil is suggesting that perhaps just a guarantee on PMI could save a family 20% without having to encumber any of the equity in the home.

So my suggestion would be is that because we've got a couple of other issues to talk about that is that we make a suggestion that says, look, let's open up

Either let's make this more general that we need to come up with a suite of tools to aid in low income home ownership, or we actually come up with a bigger toolbox.

Because again, this is very restrictive.

Before we move on, I do think that the conversation right now is kind of layering multiple priorities and multiple analyses.

And I'm worried that it's easy to kind of lay them all together and conflate them.

And I think one of the ones, philosophically speaking, that I think we have not

Contended with, and I wanna push back a little bit on what Ridge and Dan have shared, is that of course, on the one hand, of course, access to wealth creation through home ownership, that's the quote unquote American dream.

Like that is the mechanism that white households in particular, but households in general have created wealth over time.

Not the counterpoint, but the other sort of simultaneous truth is that

We are also trying to balance on some level, I believe, and there's reference to it in the document, I think we would all agree that there is also this concern around gentrification and maintaining long-term affordability, particularly in existing neighborhoods.

And if the only model is a model where there is effectively an unconstrained opportunity to participate in the traditional home ownership market,

then it's true that for that particular family who purchases a home and potentially creates wealth, that that family ideally gets benefit out of that.

But from a holistic perspective, if our goal is also to ensure that we have neighborhoods that are multi-generational, multi-income and ensure price points of affordability and integrated throughout each neighborhood, simple unconstrained model doesn't

solve that issue where a model like a community land trust model where there is essentially permanent affordable home ownership opportunities embedded within neighborhoods begins to be one tool set to address that.

The other point that I wanna highlight is it's also easy to look at

The value that a single family can gain through home ownership pathway, but it's not as simple as the point of purchase.

If you look at the data over the last number of decades, every time there has been a major financial crisis,

Any of the gains in particular that black families have accrued through home ownership have been largely wiped out in each of the, you know, in the 2008 crisis, the impact on home ownership loss for communities of color was far higher and disproportionate compared to white families.

Just having access to the traditional market without some ways of preventing and mitigating those risks into the future

I think we have to be really careful about.

And I know it's a very nuanced conversation and I know that there's more dial-up this which we don't have time for now.

I don't disagree.

I don't see that as pushback.

I see that as actually reflecting where I think the conversation is going is that this prioritizes a permanent affordability model, but that there probably needs to be a spectrum.

where there's a continuum of wealth building opportunities and opportunities to invest in long-term affordability.

I came back when you were talking about increasing the tools for home ownership.

I definitely 100% believe that there are multiple

ways to create home ownership, especially looking at subsidies.

And I truly am against simply just having a great focus on redeveloping public housing.

I think that that is a model that truly needs to be rethought of.

And Sunshine talked about people of color being the most vulnerable during

troubling times such as during the Great Recession.

That also was greatly due to subprime loans.

There's a lot of variables that happened with that.

So you can work constructively to make sure that we're putting families in the proper loans and making sure we're setting them up for success.

Homeownership needs to be a greater priority than what it is right now in this draft.

as I would call it as this draft.

And if we're going to create equity, inclusion and diversity in all neighborhoods, then affordable housing along the lines of home ownership, we need to be more creative in how we can do it.

It is 100% possible.

We just need to broaden that toolkit and add more tools besides down payment assistance.

and in wanting to broaden that.

I hope my point is coming across crystal clear because I'm concerned that we have a mission, we have a statement saying how we want to make sure we have racial equity when the plan actually questions that.

It brings that to question for me.

What is the true factor?

People, our citizens need to believe in this plan because they're already walking into this with a disbelief based on the history of redlining within this community.

So we need to get it right this time.

And equity truly needs to be a part of it, not continuing plans because it's the cheapest way or it's the historical way.

Now people are in certain areas, historically African-American neighborhoods, because they were redlined that way.

So let's keep that in focus.

I hope I'm coming across clear that home ownership needs to be a larger part of this.

And I do have challenges with the land trust as well, because it, again, keeps certain individuals in certain neighborhoods.

Equity is gained and proper representation is gained throughout our community when families are not just set in one location simply because of the cost of a house.

We need to be more creative in our ideas about how those families have gotten there and how we can put them in different communities so they can have different views, different visions of how their life can be.

Get out of generational poverty.

We need to truly think about this.

Stop thinking about how we're gonna be best promoted in our certain positions and just dive into the larger goal and thinking outside the box.

Home ownership is a big issue and we need to create wealth within these families.

Thank you, Lisa.

I think

I think we're achieving something that's like consensus.

You put it much more clearly than I've stammered through.

as Lisa, but that's the idea that, and again, this maybe goes back to Sunshine's point that maybe the consensus is emerging that we see a limited toolbox suggested here that is a little bit skewed toward long-term affordability and investment in the unit.

And it really needs to talk about a continuum of home ownership

interventions or options that create a balanced portfolio of equity gain versus long-term affordability.

Is that in a really rough way sort of describe what we're talking about here?

I would just say you can't generate wealth if you're constraining wealth.

And I would just add, I don't,

I don't think this is in disagreement with anyone.

One of the ways I think about the land trust model is in shared equity is if we are expanding the amount of homeownership opportunities that exist through that tool, which I would think would be the case, individuals are still building wealth.

And I think of it as it's opening up wealth building to people who could otherwise only be renting if we weren't utilizing that tool.

In addition,

It's opening up the opportunity for wealth building for multiple generations of families.

So I think we're all, you know, and I certainly agree that's not the only tool we need to be using, but I do think the land trust model, I really do view it as a way for more people to create more wealth.

And would just add in, you know, that's sort of how I think about it is it's people who would otherwise only be renting now have access to home ownership and wealth building because of the land.

being taken out of the purchase price of the home.

It's not the only tool and how many families does it actually help in the long run?

I think there are similar lines.

My question is, when we talk about building wealth, does it require the increase in cost of housing and housing prices going up?

I mean this gets, it gets sticky fast because it's not, because ideally the impact you are having, and by you I mean the implementers of these policies and programs,

are going to change the model under which it functions, right?

So if you've got, there's the impact on home pricing and values and the overall economics, if you have 10 interventions is negligible.

If you have 1500,

then you're actually impact you're having a market impact and I think that there are other tools that they all sort of come together on that like soft density and the way and the land bank and land trust models that are going to have an impact there.

beyond just that individual family.

And I think, yeah, so there are two things to keep in mind.

Are you moving a household in one way or the other or providing that opportunity?

If yes, obviously the answer we want that to be is yes, but does it have that larger impact if we do it not once, not 10 times, but a thousand times?

I want to try to bring closure to this because there were three issues that people wanted to flag and we're halfway through our allotted time.

So I think that at the end, we'll make some assignments to get certain people to draft up some recommendations for each of these three that will circulate them.

So there'll be time to edit, to share opinions, that kind of thing before our final recommendation goes up.

I want to interrupt really quickly.

Oh, thanks, Erin.

Really quickly, Elaine, did you still want to speak to the task, or not the task force, the committee?

Yeah, we should move on.

Sorry, I can, it sounds like that would become a protracted conversation if I comment on the last topic.

Is there anybody else in the audience?

Okay, if not, we'll go ahead and move on to funding.

There were comments specific to the $10 million annual funding level.

There are comments about tying it to some sort of plan.

I think Sunshine, you talked a little bit about nuance.

So I'll open up the floor.

I think Sunshine and Phil, I can't remember the third person who brought up the funding question, but I'll open up the floor.

So I went through the plan section by section to look at the recommendations of the amount of dollars associated with each of the recommendations.

There are many that were x number of dollars per unit or had a question mark.

So I'm going to set those aside for the moment.

But if you start with the assumption that 10% of the proposed $10 million is for administrative costs,

which effectively is paying staff time to oversee this.

That's 1 million.

They have 2 million recommended for property tax relief, 900,000 assuming we maintain the same number of CSRAP city-based vouchers, that's $900,000 a year plus the recommending $1 million in emergency assistance a year.

So I wanna highlight that because of all the priorities that we're talking about

Of the 10 million, 5 million is already effectively spoken for in the recommendation.

1 million for admin, 2 million for property tax relief, 900,000, I'll round it off to a million for a moment, for CSRAP, and then 1 million for emergency assistance fund.

So that leaves 5 million a year for LIHTC leveraging CRHA redevelopment, preservation, down payment assistance, soft density

Incentive and rehab costs.

So I wanted to highlight that in particular because 10 million initially seems like a big number.

But what the consultants have done is essentially wrap in some things that we have not previously thought about under the umbrella of affordable housing, like property tax relief and put it all under one $10 million umbrella.

So I don't have- Do you have a page reference, Sunshine?

Actually, it's not a chart.

I had to go through the document page by page to pull those numbers together.

Gotcha.

So if you look, for example, let's go to, I will start with page 100, where you'll see at the bottom of that page for the subsidy, they're recommending

40,000 per unit.

Of course, the number of units is not defined.

So that's a question mark.

And then if you go down through the list of additional subsidy related impacts, public housing redevelopment, preservation fund, down payment assistance, et cetera, they list out their recommendation of funding needs for each one.

And so if you look, let's just go to property tax relief, which is Page

Page 121, you'll see that the recommendation is $2 million annually.

So I went through each of the, and I don't think I missed anything, I may have, but I went through each of them, including the administration piece, which is not highlighted here under subsidies, but is highlighted under governance instead, I believe.

The total 10 million has 5 million already pre-allocated

as I mentioned, administrative costs, property tax relief, CSRAP and emergency rental assistance.

And then the remaining 5 million can be utilized for all the other priorities.

Thank you.

I think that's a good starting point.

Let's see what else is on the table around funding.

So

to sort of piggyback on Sunshine without digging too deeply into that.

I mean, if this administrative cost, the preponderance of which is essentially expanded staff, I think there's a case to be made that that is operating budget for the city and let's stop calling that affordable housing funding.

or any part of that, and if we're gonna, that sounds like we're, that sounds to me like we're hiring four full-time equivalents, perhaps five, depending on how we split that, and if that's what we're doing, that's city, that's an operating budget item, not a funding for affordable housing, so we should be able to, if the number is 10 million, take that out, we're at 10 million.

So that would be my first, the,

Beyond that, again, how these are deployed in what proportion is gonna get pretty hairy pretty fast depending on what gets, what can get deployed in what order.

So, and I'm not sure I have a solution for that.

Okay.

Anybody else?

General comments about funding?

I'll add a couple of things.

So for example, on page 39, where it references targeting, it talks about targeting based on AMI.

And I think that's one approach, but throughout the document, there are references to the housing ladder of opportunity.

and I'm not quite sure that this by targeting a certain amount to people at 80% of AMI, people at 60%, people at 40.

I know the idea is that basically says if you're targeting somebody at 80% or below, that's home ownership.

If you're targeting somebody at 30% or below, that's public housing or deeply affordable rental housing or permanent supported housing.

And those, you know, those rules of thumb are mostly okay, but I don't think they're exactly right.

So, you know, 80, many LIHTC deals are 80% and below very median income.

Many homeownership deals are 25% of their median income.

So I would like to see

Dan, what you're saying is this AMI linkage, you're saying could end up being a stalking horse basically for if we're doing it at this level, this is about home ownership, if we're doing it about this other prong,

Yeah, I say you summed it up accurately.

You had mentioned in the

preliminary conversation earlier about tying funding to an overall plan like the IAT.

And I noticed, as you did, that the IAT didn't seem, I don't know, Sunshine, you read this thing through.

Did the IAT get mentioned in this at all?

Can you move to page 42?

Sure.

And one, before you know that, just one quick clarification.

You mentioned, Dan, that LIHTC can subsidize up to 80% AMI.

Under normal conditions, it's capped at 60%.

It can only do 80% if it counterbalances with 40% units or deeper affordability.

So there's a blend there.

In any case,

When I looked at this diagram, and if you look at the middle of the page, you'll see the reference to the allocation assumes that 10% of the funding is set aside for administrative costs, just to clarify where that references.

But if you look at this, they break out 1250 units, you know, 30% AMI, etc.

And they've talked about how it's 4100 units total.

When I saw this, my big question mark was how did they calculate this?

And then how does that relate to the IAT that was developed?

So I feel like that's a giant question mark over this slide is how they got to these numbers.

And how does the IAT play a role?

There is no, as far as I could tell, I did scrub through it this morning.

There is no direct reference to the IAT document in this document.

So there are a couple of issues on the floor and I'd love to weigh in to have other committee members weigh in.

So one is that $3 million of the $10 million has been set aside for administration and property tax relief.

both of which I'm not sure either of those things are any of the committee members find objectionable although maybe I'm over speaking but those were mixing potentially operational expenses forbearance of revenue

with capital funding.

I agree, Dan, that if you look at, if you stand back or get up to 60,000 feet and you say, you look at this and you say, how many, how many new

home ownership opportunities is this creating?

And then work your way down to the details.

And I just, I have trouble with a million dollars in administration.

It seems to me that that's excessive and should be any way possible, should be pushed into city operations.

And that the issue here is land.

Now, is this going to get more land

available to create affordability.

Sunshine, I'm sorry, you had your hand up and I talked- Well, I did two points of clarification.

A moment ago, Dan, you mentioned $3 million, i.e.

admin plus property tax relief being non-capital embedded within this plan.

It's actually $5 million is non-capital because when you include admin, property tax relief, CSRAP and emergency rental assistance, none of those are capital focused.

All of those are, they're all necessary.

They're all important.

There's no, I don't think anyone questions that.

Gotcha, okay.

No, thanks for the clarification.

That's right.

Yeah, I think we've always known that in rolling CSRAP into the housing fund and always been a little bit uncomfortable with that for a couple reasons.

One is it's really not a capital expense and comes out of the CIP.

But two is that it does potentially put families at risk because it's competing with capital needs as opposed to being an operational expense.

So I think that our report or our recommendation will

What about- Sorry, one last point.

Sorry, and I'll be quiet.

I'll just say that the point that Chris Murray was just bringing up around $1 million for admin, setting aside the dollar amount for a moment and where it comes from, I do wanna say that

Personally, and I suspect this is shared by others, that we need to have an increased staff capacity at the city level focused around affordable housing.

Yes, and I think we need to be crystal clear.

In our report, we need to be really clear about that, unless there's objection from other folks

I think the consultants laid it out pretty well that to administer the ambitions of the city right now, we're asking too much of the staff.

And if we're going to be layering on more programming, we're going to need even more staff.

No.

I just wanna make sure that we're not conflating non-capital with administrative because I think tenant-based choice assistance is an important part of the strategy for getting people into housing, not just capital projects.

And so I just don't wanna have administrative costs lumped in with CSRAP as if they're one thing and capital is something that's more desirable over here.

I think that it can be sort of self-correcting because if we're assumption is correct that this administrative cost is principally an expansion of staff in both bodies and capacity and material to support staff.

that that really is that is a permanent change to the budget and operating costs of the city and that really does go off once you've made the decision we're hiring full-time people for this purpose although that's a cost and an ongoing cost that isn't something that you revisit the way you do allocations of affordable housing programs they are hired stat they're they're on board and it really does once you've

made that decision, they're sort of out of the equation of how we are budgeting affordable housing dollars, I think.

And I think we just need to make that clear that that goes away.

Okay, so I see consensus emerging around this topic, and I hate to preempt it, but we only have 45 minutes left total.

I also want to make sure that there's plenty of room for audience comment.

And we have one whole other topic to cover, which is land.

Dan, this is Chris.

I don't, I mean, indulge me, sorry.

But I did, just the 10 million numbered, again, and there wasn't, it seems like it's benchmarks, and they mentioned in the plan that 10 million would be more than the average size city that, if I understand things, and it was Page, I think, 40, 41.

So I would say that that amount, total amount, whether it's capital and administrative, seems,

Again, we're already spending more than a comparable city at our size, seems about the right amount.

It also seems to be focused in that sense also leveraging external capital, which, you know, whether it be state, local, federal funds, or private funds, which I think is important.

I did wonder, and I would like to think, and maybe we talk about how we pay for this, is by increasing property taxes, which is listed as one of the many ways they do.

I don't know if our committee wants to come out and say, hey, we think property taxes should be raised.

Again, thinking about equity in this community and where a lot of the wealth is, which is in the land, and that's

One of the things that the city actually can tax again.

So my preference would be that we also think about, or I would suggest to the committee that we talk about raising property taxes, you know, and in comparison, then using the property tax relief at the same time.

So it is not negative of the impact on lower income folks, but then we are getting at and addressing some of those equity issues in this town and around wealth generation, which has benefited, you know, in specific communities.

It's a kind of legal way to do progressive taxation.

Well, I would just quickly, I know we have to move on, but I think it's really important to look at the actual dollar amounts raised by raising

different taxes and certain amounts, just because I think the property tax raises a lot of money than what it will have to do, especially when you consider that a large fraction of it that would be city revenue is going back into the rental relief program.

And so I just don't, it's definitely something that can make, get us closer there, but I don't think we should have any illusions that that alone is gonna, especially in the COVID world, get us

Michael, do you have preference for the taxes that would go in as recommendations that are better?

You know, I don't know.

I mean, I'm not saying it's better.

The meals tax raises a lot more revenue.

Obviously, the property tax, you can combine it with some of that property tax relief, which makes it a little bit more progressive.

But unfortunately, the state of Virginia really limits what we can do on progressive taxation.

So even there,

It's better than the other alternatives in terms of being more progressive, but we're still not at a point where you're able to evaluate it on the income of the family or homeowner.

There may be new opportunities.

I don't know how much revenue it will raise.

I think there's new opportunities now with General Assembly's legislation to do a tax on single-use plastics, which is a potential new revenue source.

Again, I don't know how much that would raise.

I mean, it does seem to me that this is a place where this draft is pretty robust.

On page 41, it gives, what, 10 different types of taxes and or fees that could be directed toward housing fund.

Well, yeah, I mean, they do.

They don't dive deep.

Right.

Gotcha.

Okay, so I think we've got more or less consensus around this, at least enough to draft something up.

Let's move on to the final topic that was flagged, and that's land.

So a number of people flagged that.

Chris, you did, Phil, I think you did.

I'm not sure, I think somebody else did as well.

At the highest level, they're not making any more land.

and so we are competing with the private developers for the same amount of land that's available.

So the city, if the city has any land available, that's, you know, throwing that into the pot in one way or another is an important element.

And a land trust or land bank arrangement where the,

It goes back to the down payment assistance and a lien on that.

That doesn't work, but land trust, where you're sharing the equity with the homeowner, I think is a compromise that has the most traction.

So a question to those who may have read this more closely than I did, and I am going to go back and take a thorough dive at it.

And this is a hobby horse I've gotten on before and around a bit, but we do have a substantial chunk of dirt that's a little damp.

In the city, by which I mean that it is located in the floodplain and there are means of constructing on that that are

that will ensure and ensure that you're not setting folks up to have their houses swept away.

But that is one piece of land that falls into larger land use is to say regulations for how we can build, what we can put on stilts in the floodplain and under what circumstances.

If not for residential housing, maybe for other uses to take pressure off land otherwise.

And I think a much greater detail of the soft density piece.

I mean, I think that's worth exploring a lot too.

Do you have specifics still?

Just that I'd like to see what the modeling on that looks like and what sort of comparisons we can make for, and I do think they cited a couple of case studies, which in my review this morning, I didn't read, but to take a, you know, what is the impact of soft density and in terms of the real costs?

You know, if we're talking about family housing,

Yeah, I mean, my perspective on that, Phil, is that this is pretty good about recommending allowances for soft density pretty much everywhere.

In a pretty dramatic way, what it doesn't do is talk about advantaging soft density for affordable housing much.

Yeah, that was my point.

It's a sort of buy-write allowance where my recommendation would be stronger, to be stronger in the language of

by right affordable soft density rather than simply by right soft density because they also made a point of debunking the idea that simply adding inventory is going to appreciably bring down costs.

Look at a place like Palo Alto where they just build four million dollar homes on a lot, on a small lot, and you don't get affordability there.

So I would strongly recommend that

We recommend that we add affordable between buy right and soft density.

I would like to echo a version of that.

Sorry, I have an echo here.

I would like to echo a version of that, in particular, in part, just recognizing experience in Austin where, similar to Charlottesville, there was massive growth, more so in Austin than here.

But still, the growth outpaces the development by a wide margin.

So there's no way to effectively catch up and balance the supply-demand equation on some level.

We can ideally make some long-term difference in terms of mitigating that and minimizing the impact of it to some extent, but we'll never catch up because of the landlock situation and the cachet of the city and people wanting to move here.

So on some level, we sort of have to look at this as an equation of both, you know, getting as much built as we can on some level, but at the other hand, we're just going to have to subsidize it on some level too.

And I would just like to expand our thinking on when we talk about subsidy, is subsidy, just to think about making housing more affordable subsidy could come from taxpayer dollars that are offsetting the increasing costs.

But subsidy could also come from

income gains from working people who now have more money to put into their housing.

And I just think it is a huge missed opportunity not to think about helping people move up the income ladder as part and parcel of a housing strategy.

And it isn't something that I would amend in the document that we have

It's something that I would say, and I'm not asking for more money.

I think there's just gotta be a recognition that there are two sides of the equation, the cost of the housing and the amount of money that somebody has to put toward their housing.

So I think what you're getting at is something, I've always sort of thought that there were two overlapping or overlaying mental models around housing.

One is the housing ladder.

And if you think about that, a housing ladder at one end is emergency transitional housing and the other is homeownership and market rate and everything, but all radiations in between.

But then there's a value chain.

that bolsters all of those things.

And that has to do with things like transportation and income and access to credit and whatnot.

And so I do think that this is more about the housing ladder than it is the value chain.

And so what do you think Ridge?

Yes.

And I think it goes to the very heart of the question, which is this affordable housing plan really does make it seem like low income-ness is a constant that must be worked around, rather than a variable that could be changed.

And it just is going to require a different way of thinking and

It has implications.

Anyway, I'll stop there.

But in the previous housing needs assessment, there was an explicit recognition that helping the citizens of our community climb up the income ladder was an integral part of addressing our affordable housing crisis.

Look, I've mentioned this before.

You go back to 1961 when the city of Charlottesville was organizing its housing redevelopment authority, its housing authority and trying to stand it up.

And the consultant, one of the consultants that was brought in for the organizational piece made an explicit statement.

Charlottesville, Virginia does not have a housing problem nearly so much as it has an income problem.

And just quickly on that, in terms of equity, the struggle of low-income-ness is not equally shared across our community when 54% of black families make less than $35,000 a year, while it's only 13% of white families.

So I'm going to suggest this.

So we're at an hour and a half.

I think a bunch of us were up all night last night or much of night last night.

I think we have some good notes.

And what I would like to do is offline cajole individuals to draft up sections of this recommendation.

I don't want to do it here publicly because I want to give people an opportunity to say no.

Frankly, I don't want to publicly shame folks.

So with y'all's permission, I'll do that.

And included, I think, this whole idea because it wasn't one of the topics that we recommended as one of the highest priority, but it's shown up in all of these, this idea of that Ridge was just speaking about the idea that low income-ness and low wealth should not be a permanent, you know, it's,

That's not what we're hoping is to create stasis around that and housing and income and the ability to climb the ladder are connected.

So I will be assigning or asking somebody to take on that.

I just want to make this one comment about public housing.

Public housing should be temporary.

It should never be generational.

It should never be something that we depend on to house families, especially families of color specifically, who seem to be more susceptible to just remaining in public housing, which is why for equity purposes, home ownership needs to be a bigger part of this.

And thinking outside the box, stop putting, for lack of a better way to say it, a master's tool to deconstruct the master's house.

So think outside the box.

This is hard work.

Nobody said it was gonna be easy and some people's feelings are gonna get hurt, but I am for equity, inclusion and diversity in home ownership.

And that may mean blowing up some of the systems that we currently have.

So Lisa,

I agree with all that.

Well, I mean, I would say this is my opinion.

I'm not representing anybody particular.

I'm just saying me.

There should be less emphasis on public housing, redeveloping public housing, and how can there be greater emphasis on

that ladder of opportunity.

It should be temporary.

If you're getting funds from the system, where is your strategy out of public housing into home ownership that truly builds that wealth gap, that truly gives families opportunities in home ownership?

It was done in the 30s.

It can be done now.

So be creative, use those subsidies in different ways.

So Lisa, sorry if I'm, I completely agree with you that public housing should be temporary and I would- But it's not, it's generation.

I agree, but I think having an explosive statement, like you're saying that somewhere in this document, if it's not there already, it should be important, if I understand.

Okay, okay.

Did, but-

I think that that integrates the whole idea of an overall strategy that subsidized public housing has its place and the sort of argument that it should be as transitional as we can reasonably make it.

Having said that, if we're gonna talk about outside the box thinking, we need to have the tools to be able to do that, which is an awkward segue since we're supposed to be, since we wanted to talk about land use just a little bit,

that.

One of the recommendations they make about the land bank is that it's a three to five year lift.

And I would suggest that if we're going to make some movements fast, that we do that first.

And we have a land bank ordinance that's 95%, 98% written that's already been blessed by one council that we might as well dust it off and get it launched.

Because if we're gonna start subsidizing land purchases and looking at, for example,

Perhaps a trust arrangement of a large number of leasehold buildings, which is one way to get around our land cost problem for folks, which are tools that are basically available now.

We just have to create the environment for them.

That's something we need to stand up now, not later.

All right, so I'm gonna thank you.

I think we've made a lot of headway today.

Again, my plan is to maybe write up these notes, or at least as I have them, and then ask people to take on a portion of this.

We have to turn this around quickly.

We have until the 10th, and so, what's that, next Monday?

or next Tuesday.

So I'll probably be asking people to turn around a draft by the end of the week.

So we have a couple of days to circulate it and then get it out in formal form.

Before we move on to that, I want to open it up.

Yeah, there's one hand or two hands raised.

Hey, I hope that this comes out correctly because I have been up since four in the morning yesterday, pole watching and doing things and freaking out.

So forgive me if this

is, this is a public meeting.

This is a city kind of sanctioned meeting.

So I have to just address the comments about public housing and they're related to Ridge's comments.

I agree that this is a bigger problem and coming from an organization that tries to address the problem holistically, you know,

When I say holistically, I mean like the income ladder, right?

We regularly sue people for wage theft.

We regularly fight for a higher minimum wage.

And we're not, all of these problems are just not gonna be solved overnight and we cannot find a silver bullet.

The need for public housing is great and the reason is because the systems are so embedded in this country.

When I say systems, I mean like the wage issues, like the mass incarceration issues.

All of these things are linked to force people to stay in public housing.

Yes, I think most of the families that we work with do not want to be there intergenerationally.

But you know what?

It is a necessary haven for people at the same time so that they can work on those other issues.

like the education gap, like all of these issues that we're talking about.

I want to encourage us not to kind of jump for that silver bullet and kind of highlight what Sunshine said.

When you think about home ownership and how we got into the foreclosure crisis and what

one activist calls one of the greatest equity thefts of black home ownership in this country.

It wasn't just because of targeted predatory racist loans.

It was actually spawned by a George W. Bush very well intentioned effort to increase home ownership access.

And it opened the door for subprime mortgage loans.

It opened the door for securitization of mortgages.

And I just want to caution you all as a public body to be very careful about trying to find that silver bullet and abandoning tried and true places for funding like Friendship Court, like subsidized housing, Section 8 programs, the programs that have been

working even though they're terribly underfunded and sometimes don't work because of the underfunding.

And so I just wanna push back and say public and subsidized housing still has to be a core of what we move forward with and we need to be very careful with how we throw around home ownership like as a silver bullet.

Home ownership is super important but as someone who litigated those foreclosure cases

throughout that generation, like we just have to be careful.

Thank you Elaine, well said.

Appreciate it.

There is one more hand raised.

Mr. Kenneth Martin, you're on with the committee.

Yes.

I don't normally speak off the cuff, but I was very impressed with, and I have very poor vision, so I'm not sure what her name is, but it's S Lisa Herndon, I think.

Correct.

All right.

With her remarks, and it resonated with me about

It's particularly about subsidized low-income housing.

And I would like for you, while you deliberate, is to make sure that you are not making recommendations that will continue the segregation that we have had here since we've opened up.

and I was born here in 1948.

So I was here before public housing opened.

I was here before Friendship Court or Garrett Square or whatever it was opened.

And what I have noticed with Charlottesville in particular is that it feels extremely comfortable with all forms of segregation.

And I've said that in many places and I say it to you and I plan on saying it to again, to city council and others.

and that we have used housing for segregation.

So when I hear the word gentrification, I think about people using the word gentrification, not in this particular instance among this group, but historically is to say that we do not want us mixed income moving into certain neighborhoods and that

we are going to reserve those neighborhoods for certain income people, which is a reservation.

It sets up concentration camps.

It sets up ghettos and plantationism.

And right now what we are doing with as so-called redeveloping of our low income housing is that we are concentrating even a greater degree

of poverty in one area.

For example, we are tripling that at Garrett Square.

We are going to double it, more than double it on South First Street.

and Sixth Street goes from 25 units to 106 units is in the plan.

So although we are using the rhetoric of saying that we are providing housing for people, what we are doing is perpetuating the history of segregation here in Charlottesville.

I'm not interested in what goes on in Palo Alto or San Francisco or New York.

We need to address the situation here in the city of Charlottesville.

And I just wanted to say that Ms. Herndon's opinions resonated very well with mine.

Thank you, Mr. Martin.

We really appreciate your words.

If there's anyone else in the audience who would like to speak with the committee, feel free to raise your hand.

Okay, well, I'd like to thank Aaron and Joe, Brenda, Alex, all staffers for supporting this.

I know that it's

In your busy day, it's not easy to support a meeting like this, so very much appreciate that.

I want to thank committee members and members of the public who sat through this.

It was detailed.

I very much suggest to me the rationale for the HAC and for the subcommittees of the HAC to be able to take

detailed policy prescriptions and break them down, express different opinions, bring out some sparks that have to be brought out in the community.

And I would hope that as this, I don't know exactly, I don't have a window into the future of the process with this draft, but I would hope that

that this committee and the HAC in general would maybe have another opportunity or two to dive in or at least to meet with the consultants.

Appreciate that.

And so I promise you all that staffers that will have something by way of a recommendation that has been drafted and circulated among this group back to you by the it sounds like the 10th the deadline.

Is that right?

Maybe Alex.

There's a work session on the 10th to take a look at this draft by council.

So the idea is that we have this available at that time.

So that was my target.

And of course, subsequent to that work session, the HAC may have an opportunity to meet.

Well, I think before council, that would be fine.

Okay, great.

Thank you.

We'll endeavor to turn this around by end of business on Monday.

Does that work for you, Alex?

Yeah.

Great.

Okay, thanks, everybody.

Get some rest.

Take care of yourself today.

Go out, have a walk.

Be nice to your neighbors.

Thank you for joining us.

Take care.

Thanks, everybody.

Thank you, Rich.