Planning Commission Meeting   11/10/2020

All right, ladies and gentlemen, I think we are ready to begin our deliberation.

So I call this meeting to order.

And we will begin with reports from the virtual dais.

Yeah, amazingly, I don't really have anything to report this time.

So I'll just look forward to the rest of the meeting.

Ms.

Russell?

Thank you.

Looking forward to it.

Ms.

So I have a report from the Fontaine Avenue Smart Scale Streetscape Steering Committee or Steering Committee Committee.

We met on 10-20.

And I don't, I

You know, I can give you a background if you like.

But I think the last that the Planning Commission saw this proposal for bike ped improvements on Fontaine was in December 2019.

Planning Commission voted to recommend approval of this project and noted its compliance with the comprehensive plan.

In January, the council accepted recommendations.

And basically, I think in these past months, they were at 30%.

Development of the plans and now it's at 60% design development.

So the conversation folks seeing this 60% for the first time, I believe.

One thing that I noted and was discussed is that the project is scaled back to within the city limits only, meaning it stopped short of the county stops at the county and therefore there's I think about 40 feet of

not bike lane, which we all noted was a bummer.

And Helen Wilson from UVA also voiced her concerns.

I guess I just would pose to the group, do we have any way to resolve or mitigate this or set aside funds in the future or work with the county, I suppose is what we need to do.

May I interrupt you just a minute?

We've got a joint meeting with the council, with Albemarle, that Ms.

Creasy and their folks are working on.

Maybe something you just want to mention is when we have a joint meeting, I think the joint meeting may be in January.

So just keep it in the back of your mind.

OK.

In December, there's a design public hearing planned.

So that obviously might happen before the city county meeting, but noted.

Just some other design, you know, elements were discussed, a retaining wall at mimosa and kind of talked about the aesthetics of that.

We talked about some parking being impacted in the Dirty Nellies area.

But generally, the impact to parking is not of concern, too.

It seems like people in the area.

And then finally, the plan does call for increasing overall tree canopy, so positive.

They are planning to purchase stormwater credits, offsetting stormwater requirements, which

Ms.

Yeah.

I'm hearing that they're, I'm just hearing what Liz is hearing here.

I don't know.

Yeah, the Stone Water Credit, the engineering firm, RK&K, you know, we work with the city,

in terms of addressing that particular requirement.

So that's what she was saying.

RK&K is the design engineer working with the city in terms of the design.

So they're recommended that we purchase credits?

Well, yeah, we can do it as part of the project.

The funding, it's in the project.

The funding is available so that can be purchased as part of the project.

If they can't,

Meet that requirement on site.

They were originally considering bioretention.

That's not working, given the site constraints.

Thanks.

So I think I've only had one meeting in the last month.

We had a TJPD meeting last Thursday evening.

So a bunch of financial reports.

The big interesting things are the Regional Housing Partnership is rolling out an affordable housing search tool.

So essentially a sort of Zillow or Craigslist-like website where rent-restricted affordable housing

in commercial to affordable housing will be listed.

So that will be rolling out in coming months and they'll be doing a bunch of outreach both to affordable housing developers to list their sites, their apartments on it and to potential tenants and users to market it.

Also, the rent relief program is continuing apace.

They got some more funding for that.

So anyone who needs rent relief should go to TJPDC.org and try to sign up there.

And there was a mention of a proposal from the executive director about a potential rename for TJPDC.

Both the TJ part and the PDC part are up for change and not much action.

Thank you for joining us today.

So those are the big updates in the last month.

We would have had a place meeting coming up on Thursday, but I believe it was not noticed.

Now that it's a staff designated committee and not a council committee, it doesn't technically need to, but, you know, admirably, the city is still planning on noticing those.

So that has been delayed until it can properly be noticed.

Reverend Eaton.

Good evening, everybody.

I do not have a report in the last month.

I wasn't able to make the meeting at the transportation district, so I do not have a report since our last meeting.

Ms.

Ms.

Dowell, you there?

Tania, there you go.

I'm sorry.

I was trying to unmute and turn my video off.

It's been a day.

Good evening, everyone.

Tonight I'll be giving a report from October 28th at 4 p.m.

The Red Street Task Force met.

One of the biggest issues that arose during the meeting was access and ease of access to downtown from the Red Street neighborhood.

Also, it was noted that a large percentage of the Red Street neighborhood residents are considered frontline workers, and that it would be nice to have programs and educations for residents in the area.

So trying to see if jobs are approaching the actual residents here to help them create economic sustainability.

and to see if we could use some funds from this task force to provide scholarships to residents to get skilled or trade certifications.

And Lee also let us know that they had some, not a lot, but they do have some resources for people who live in this neighborhood and want to get certifications or may need child care to help cover

watching their children while they are obtaining those certifications.

We also talked about increasing the number of speed limit signs, not necessarily putting in speed bumps or anything but just having it posted as a visual more often.

could be an idea to try to calm the traffic, to actually put benches at the bus stops.

So I know a couple of the bus stops have been moved in this area, but they do not have benches on them or they have benches where the old bus stop was.

So trying to get the seating matched with the transportation.

Once again, speed is in all bold letters.

A couple of things that we wanted to take into place before we move forward, and Erin is going to be reporting back to us, is how the Elliott Streetscape Plan, the SIA, the Old Ridge Street Plan, and the SmartScale Fifth Street Plan will be able to be tied in with the recommendations of the task force, so that way we're not duplicating efforts.

Yes, one last thing.

So one thing I took from actually the Planning Commission did this for the Cherry Avenue Quarter was I recommended that the task force walk the neighborhood.

So that way everybody could see exactly what angles they were talking about, how the cars are moving through the neighborhood.

So I believe we may have that coming up on Friday.

I need to check my email.

Good for you.

Thanks.

The Housing Advisory Committee met on October 21.

Just sort of a round-robin format, everybody talking about the main issues.

What struck me was a report that some landlords are potentially discriminating against rental applicants on the basis of income, asking for proof of income that they can afford, that they have three times as much income to afford their rent, which is,

What does the law say about that?

Yeah, that's, I'm not sure how things recently changed.

But having worked with Section 8 state, having worked with Section 8 vouchers in the past, when I worked with landlords who accepted Section 8 vouchers, the Section 8 voucher counted as income towards that

So when you said you need to have two times the rent or something like that, or three times the rent, depending, that Section 8 voucher counted towards that amount based on the amount that the Section 8 voucher was covering.

So if the voucher was covering $600 out of an $800 rent or something, then that would be $600 towards your gross monthly income.

I do not know if that's how landlords are doing it now or if they're just trying to really utilize this to get around this.

And I also know that credit has not been, from what I understand, credit is still something that people can demand a good credit check, which regretfully having, again, worked in a field with a lot of people who had Section 8 vouchers, a lot of times their credit was not the best.

And we had a lot of landlords who would discriminate that way.

I interrupted you.

No, that was important and helpful.

On the 28th of October, there was a meeting of the Barracks Streetscape Steering Committee talking about the aesthetics of retaining walls.

Lots of good options, very exciting, a lot of people had strong opinions.

Brick ended up being the favorite of the group.

Much to the dismay based on the feedback that I got from this commission.

Thank you all for your contributions.

There were some changes that I wasn't expecting.

There will be less space for bicycle and pedestrians than standard.

They had to get a special request from VDOT to squeeze that tighter.

And to get that special allowance, they had to eliminate the nice street lights that we saw, the vertical poles.

Those are gone.

And instead, there will be recessed lighting built into the

That wonderful retaining wall that will be lighting the walk and then into the street.

So what about the canopy?

They're still working on that.

There's also, they're finding that there are going to be some issues moving utilities, which will wipe out a lot of canopy that they weren't expecting.

I asked them if they have looked at burying the utilities, and they said, of course, but it's so expensive.

So it is probably not going to be possible with the budget.

Mr. Leandro.

Thank you, Chair Mitchell.

Over the last month I attended a Board of Architectural Review meeting on October 20th.

We had three certificates of appropriateness approved.

One was withdrawn just prior to the meeting.

We did a preliminary discussion of one project on Oakhurst Circle and we also had a preliminary presentation by the designers of the City-County Courts Project reviewing the kinds of future phasing and the anticipated BAR reviews that are going to be needed.

And then lastly, in support of the business activity in the city during the pandemic and the upcoming cold weather, BAR unanimously passed a motion approving outdoor tents in architectural design control districts for as long as the governor's state of emergency is in effect.

So we don't have to go through that individually for every tent.

I attended also a tree commission meeting on October 28th.

And the real action and highlight of that meeting was a presentation by Crystal Rittervolt, who's the city's environmental sustainability and facilities development manager.

She presented on the recently completed city green print

1.0 SART Charlottesville Green Infrastructure Guide.

It's a guide on the city's website that was put on just two months ago being worked on for many years and it has links to the green asset maps that provide searchable data

Green infrastructure encompasses the natural elements such as trees, rivers, and good soils, the building blocks of healthy communities, and the natural assets they support.

As the city develops in the future, constructing buildings, roads, and utilities, the value of Greenprint 1.0 is the data it provides on the city's existing natural systems so that they can be preserved, integrated, and even enhanced with the new development.

All developers and designers should be familiar with this document and go to the website.

Great information.

And the city did a fantastic job and Crystal's department did a wonderful job in getting it together and getting it persevering and getting it on our website.

Thank you.

So before I make this point in my report, I want to make certain we've all seen the announcement about the new India's tractor.

That's public, right?

OK, cool.

I had the honor of representing us in the process.

And the folks that were on my team included three developers, one past Planning Commission chair, and one counselor in me.

And we all came to unanimous consensus that Mr. Parag Agarwal was the right person for Charlottesville.

The slate was a great slate.

So we were picking from a great group of people.

But Parag was a guy that we unanimously endorsed.

And so he'll be on board soon.

So that's the one thing that I've been doing the last couple of months.

Ms.

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Just to let folks know, we had a little bit of a technical issue.

Mr. Rice was kicked off the system, but he is back online again.

And we have some co-hosts on the staff side in case that were to happen again.

It does appear that we are not live on channel 10.

We are live on all streaming aspects, but channel 10 was having some difficulties.

They are planning to rebroadcast that.

I don't know if Joe has any sort of updates.

I'm sure he can provide that to us, but I just wanted to let you all know

that why I was kind of back and forth on the phone in the background.

We were trying to make sure that that we were logistically in good shape.

So that's, that's one thing for this evening.

Also, you all received a notification from Clerk of Counsel

concerning the updates to the FOIA, the conflict of the FOIA and some other public records documents.

We are going to plan to have some time at a future meeting in the near future to go through those with you, not a page by page.

Ms.

Well, you know, so as part of you all's role, it's important that you do take a look at those materials.

When you went through your orientation, we gave you some very basic background on that.

But we feel like it will be helpful to provide some overview.

So we will be doing that.

But that doesn't mean that you can't look at the documents now.

and take a look and make sure that you understand the gist and then we'll provide some background on that to help you all out along the way and help ourselves as well because it's always good to have reminders of those things.

Yes, we've got a couple items this evening.

We have a full agenda for December, so we will continue to have full meetings.

We're working with the county on the joint work session with their planning commission, and we have that on the calendar right now for January 26th, the fourth Tuesday.

I already had you guys pencil that in, and we've got a meeting

with staffs next week to spend some time trying to organize that.

The topic will be housing.

And of course, we have a lot of housing activities going on in both communities.

And we want to frame that in a way that it'll allow both groups to have a good discussion about those activities and find ways that we can work together.

So I believe those are the only

Notations that I have.

We are still continuing to function as a department.

We have our new director coming.

We are in the process of working towards a new building official.

Our building official retired in August.

We also an ADA coordinator.

We're in a recruitment process for that.

We anticipate we have no guidance on where we'll be over the next few months.

So we're continuing on this path.

We have a avenue for every application to make it through our system.

So any process that we were doing before the pandemic, we are doing

though in a different way, but we are getting those things done.

And as you all can see from our anticipated agendas, we are having a good number of items come forward.

Very good.

Thank you.

So Mr. Rice, we are now ready for matters to be presented by the public that are not on the formal agenda.

So public, this is your opportunity to chat with the commission about anything that we do that will affect you that is not on the agenda.

And the only thing that's on the agenda tonight is the Nassau Street rezoning.

Thank you, Chair, and I'd like to welcome our registered attendees.

If anyone would like to address the commission during this time, please click the raise hand icon.

Or if you're joining us by phone, press star nine.

We'll call on you in the order of hands raised.

And once we enable your audio, please unmute your mic.

Mr. Chair, one also notation.

The consultants actually asked me about this before and I should have mentioned, sorry, mentioned it.

The commission will want to determine whether they want to have comments from the public following the affordable housing discussion.

I see from our attendees, we have a few folks that I assume are interested in that issue, but they may have some other thoughts to provide after that session.

If there are no objections from the rest of the Commission, I think that would be something we ought to do.

Any objections to input?

Okay, looks like we're cool with that.

Mr. Wright, anyone like to speak?

Okay, and I can't see my clock because I don't have my glasses on, but how many minutes do we have before six o'clock?

Four minutes.

Oh, you know, Missy, Miss Chrissy, I always forget that part.

Thank you.

Thank you.

No worries.

So, minutes.

Yes, Mr. Stolzenberg noted a change to page five of the minutes, which is 37 of the PDF.

And it's the correct spelling of the organization that Ms.

Thomas was talking about during the discussion.

Okay.

Second.

All right.

Ms.

All right.

Thank you for reminding me.

And you always do.

Um, how many minutes?

I'm just letting you know that there's some mumblings coming across.

I talk to myself all the time.

And pretty much everyone knows it.

So I'm cool with it.

Thank you.

Believe me.

So, Madam Vice Mayor, I only see two counselors so far.

Everyone was planning on being here.

Oh, you can't hear it, but my hand puppet was singing the whole time.

Soprano, there we are.

Wonderful, sweet.

Handful, demanding, but wonderful.

Only she's teething.

So dude ain't getting no sleep.

No, no, no, none of that.

No, and it turned out they've pulled Highlands teething tablets off the market, which were like, awesome.

Just because they're poisonous?

I don't know.

Tara Mitchell, you have three of us.

Cool.

Why don't we go ahead and begin.

And we've got one public hearing item.

And that is a rezoning application.

The rezoning application is ZM20-00004.

The property is located at 817 Nassau Street,

and it is a rezoning application taking us from R1S, which is a residential small lot to R2, which is residential to family.

And it's approximately a 1.1 acre lot that fronts on NASA.

Yes, Chair.

So Matt Alfie, planner with neighborhood development services,

Commission, City Council.

Tonight, you're holding a public hearing for a rezoning there at 817 Nassau Street from R1S to R2.

Justin Schimp is representing the owner, Pollitt Management Services, which owns the property.

And this request, there is no proffers or development plan.

and you've probably seen in the report there's a comparison of the R1S zoning district to the R2.

One of the interesting things out of this is you can get a single-family attached or a two-family dwelling.

The number of units you would get out of this through a rezoning is going to be similar to what you would get in an R1S because of accessory dwellings.

There's really not much more on that.

I can answer questions.

You'll need to hold a public hearing.

We've not had any public on this reach out except one citizen reached out in support, but there has not been any emails or phone calls outside of that that I've received.

The applicant did hold their community engagement meeting.

No one showed up to that.

But with that, like I said, I'm here to answer questions.

So we'll open it up to questions for Ms.

Delphi.

Does the applicant want to present or is he just here to field questions?

There's no presentation from the applicant, but the applicant is here to answer questions.

Open it up for questions to the applicant.

So we do have a process for that.

It involves mailing

Now you can hold a Zoom meeting or on a different platform.

But to do a community engagement meeting as we did prior to COVID, now you're required to mail the application or not, excuse me, not the application, the explanation of what you're doing when you're holding the meeting, a self-addressed envelope to mail comments back in case you can't attend the meeting to within all residents

So not property owners, but all residents within 500 feet.

And the applicant did do that.

It was held on, when was that meeting held?

July 20th, excuse me, on September 23rd, the applicant held the community meeting on Zoom at 6.30.

I don't have that number in front of me.

I believe it was... I do not, but I'm sure Kelsey will because she does a lot of the

work and all these applications.

I'm sorry, I was trying to pull up the city provided a spreadsheet.

I recall it being several hundred, all the ones that we've mailed out with the city COVID process have been several hundred.

I just wanted kind of an approximate.

I didn't need an exact number.

Any other questions?

Any other questions from council?

Question for the applicant?

Wonderful.

Why?

Why, though?

Steph's big criticism is that there's not a reason for this.

I don't see a reason either.

Why?

I mean, you could do the little accessory unit.

trick on this or somebody has it, then it has to be owner occupied.

There's restrictions to size of the unit based on, you know, the primary dwelling unit.

So the R2 gets, you know, two full family units on the property instead of one.

And that's just better, in our opinion.

Good question.

I think most likely it'll be a combined two family dwelling.

I do have a question for staff in relation to the community meeting, not that one exactly happened this time, but we've seen on other, for the site plan review community meetings, they're all now posted on the city website so that the videos can be reviewed.

And I really liked that.

When you do a community meeting, how it was set up with the rezoning and the special use, it put the onus on the applicant.

So this was back in the, especially pre-COVID, they would hold a meeting so that the community was there.

And so really before they even kind of started going through the process, they would have this community engagement meeting.

So the site plan conference meetings, the meetings you're seeing online,

That's the city's responsibility.

So when you actually submit a site plan, you're in the process.

Gotcha.

That makes sense.

Anything else?

Right.

With that, Mr. Rice, we're going to open it up to public comment.

Anyone like would like to speak during the public hearing, please click the raise hand icon or

press star nine if you're joining us by phone.

I move to recommend approval of this application to rezone the subject property from R1-S to R2 on the basis that the proposal would service the interests of the general public and good zoning practice.

Moved and properly seconded.

Ms.

Sure.

Ms.

Dow?

Aye.

Ms.

Russell.

Aye.

Looks like the application is recommended for approval.

We are going now to segue into the work session.

And that work session will be moderated by Jenny and Latoya.

Before I do that, I would ask that council stick around a couple of minutes after the work session.

We would like to have a conversation with you guys, with council.

And that conversation will be led by Mr. Stolzenberg, regarding what we're going to do with the potential garage that's right across the street from the breakfast center and the city hall annex.

We'd like to have just chat with you about what we might do with that and just

Give you some food for thought and maybe get some direction from you and maybe staff on what we do with that garage.

We do appreciate that we've deliberated this before when we went through the capital budget discussions about a year ago.

But we'd like to just chat a little bit more and we'll keep it brief regarding that.

So please, if you don't mind, stick around for we have 15 minutes or so after that.

Great.

Thank you very much.

Thanks, everyone, for having us.

I'll ask Mr. Rice to pull up the slides.

You all saw in your packet there was a link to the draft affordable housing plan.

We do have slides that are sort of a streamlined version to walk us through.

We do also have the full plan available if we want to pull up any of that to speak to questions.

But first,

I want to note, since these slides were not included in the packet, you can go to SevillePlansTogether.com under Documents and Materials under Planning Commission.

You can find these slides.

Tonight, we'll first provide a brief overview of the materials that are available right now related to Seville Plans Together.

We are in a community engagement period, so we'll talk a bit about that.

And then we'll proceed into the bulk of our conversation, which is focused on the draft affordable housing plan.

And with the draft affordable housing plan, we do, we'll be walking through that in pieces and we'll stop at certain points to have open up for discussion.

But obviously, please feel free to stop us if you have points of clarification or discussion in between there.

Please go to the next slide.

As always, I always want to do a really quick overview of what we're talking about.

SEVA plans together is the name of a process we're working to

update the city's comprehensive plan.

And as part of that update to the comprehensive plan we've drafted the affordable housing plan, which will feed into the comprehensive plan.

And so we'll be talking about that today.

Once the comprehensive plan revision is complete, we will be revising the zoning ordinance to ensure that it reflects these goals and strategies that we're putting into the comprehensive plan, as well as any other needed updates.

If you want any more background information about the process, you can find that on SeavillePlansTogether.com.

Next slide, please.

So as I mentioned, right now we are in a public engagement phase.

We want everyone in the community to hopefully understand what's going on.

So I wanna go over that briefly here.

Two things, we have the draft affordable housing plan is out for comments.

It's on the website.

I'll show that link in just a second.

that'll be the focus of our discussion.

We've also put out draft initial comprehensive plan revisions that includes guiding principles which are overarching priorities for the entire comprehensive plan as well as some vision statements which are sort of priorities for each of those topic specific chapters in transportation, housing, etc.

So those are all available for review.

I want to note

Especially for the comprehensive plan, this is really the first starting point for revisions.

We want to get some community input on these statements before we move forward into saying what are the goals beneath these statements and what are the strategies to reach those goals?

We want to make sure we have some conversation about that first.

All right, if you go to the next slide, I mentioned we've got all of this information on

the website you see here at seavilleplanstogether.com forward slash virtual dash meeting.

So you can see the link here.

You also see on the screen an example of what the site looks like on desktop or mobile.

There's sort of three important sections here.

Engagement summary, that leads you to a summary of what we heard in May and June from all the community input we did, the survey, et cetera.

That input really fed into the draft affordable housing plan and the draft comprehensive plan revision so it's important that we walk through that so everyone knows what we heard.

I also want to note at the bottom of this page, what you're seeing here is the sort of homepage for the virtual meeting.

At the bottom of this page, there's a list of all the events and opportunities, including this event, everything that's going on between now and early December.

We're asking for comments back by December 2nd.

And between now and then, there are several opportunities for folks to tune in and learn more or just get tuned into the process.

If you go to the next slide, you can see examples of everything we're up to.

As with our first round of engagement from May and June, we have a series of events coming up to both share information and also gather input.

We have four webinars, two for the draft affordable housing plan and two for the draft comprehensive plan revisions, recognizing that it would be a lot to have all of that in one session.

So the dates are, you can see there, the housing plan first webinars tomorrow evening.

We also added at this phase some drop-in office hours, which will be a time for people to stop by in the virtual environment or on the phone and just ask some questions and give their comments.

And that's building on a concept we originally envisioned in a non-COVID universe to have conversations at cafes and whatnot in the neighborhoods.

And so not wanting to gather everyone together in person, we're suggesting this as an alternative

And so there is a toll-free number people can use to call in.

So we're hoping we look forward to those discussions there.

There's also a survey.

Again, it's certainly not the only way people can give their input, but sometimes that's what people prefer.

And so there was a survey available.

As noted on the website, people can also send comments via our comment form or directly to our email address, which is engage at seavilleplanstogether.com.

Or you can also use the toll-free phone line, which is shown here.

You can call in and listen to a brief message in English or Spanish and leave your comments.

Lastly, it's not shown on here, but we have been distributing flyers with all this information and will continue to do so.

It has, you know, things like the phone number to call in for these events or how to register.

We've also been looking for opportunities for some sort of COVID safe pop-up events.

We know we do want to be out in the community.

We know not everyone is going to go to a website and look at this.

And so, for example, Latoya and I were

Around Charlottesville this weekend, we had a couple of different events stopping and interacting with folks.

And so we're going to continue to look for opportunities there.

And I'm happy to know we do have a couple of peer engagers on board and we're working with them.

These are folks from the community who are really passionate about community engagement and making sure people can be involved.

And so we've started to work with them and we look forward to that partnership.

If you go to the next slide, this is my last slide.

I just want to note we have also scheduled a steering committee meeting.

It's a busy month in many ways.

Steering committee meeting on November 23rd, 4 to 530.

We have posted a link to register, as you can see right on that page here.

So just wanted to make sure everyone was aware of that.

But with that, I will go ahead and pass it off to Sarah Kirk and Philip Cash with HRNA Advisors.

They'll be walking through the draft affordable housing plan for discussion.

And as you mentioned, Latoya and I are here to make sure we're moving through the entire thing.

So we will have some time for discussion, but we will try to keep us moving as well.

So thank you again for having us.

If you go to the next slide, we can get started with that.

Jenny, thank you for the introduction.

And I'm glad to hear that you're going to be poking us to keep moving if we get bogged down at any point.

That's always helpful and necessary.

So we're going to be talking through our draft plan with you all today.

This is the first time we're talking in a public venue about the draft plan, so we're pretty excited about this.

A lot of work went into putting this draft together.

It reflects feedback from countless parties within Charlottesville.

We think we've done a good job of reconciling those different viewpoints, but also recognize it's a draft, and as you put things in writing, you get more feedback and you have more conversations.

Already getting some of that written feedback and going to try to address some of that that's coming in the past few days during a presentation, but expect to get a lot more and looking forward to the conversation here to refine and improve.

We also acknowledge that it's a relatively long document, not as long as some of the housing plans we do.

But it's a relatively long, dense document.

And so we're going to try to break it into pieces, but have set up, as Jenny started talking about, a lot of additional time for conversations and are going to be available for one-on-one conversations as appropriate if there are particular topics folks need and want to get into.

With that, let me hand it over to Sarah Kirk, the project manager.

Great.

And we can go on to the next slide, I think.

So as Jenny has said and as Philip has said, the Affordable Housing Plan, we've put out a draft earlier this month.

It's been a pretty, an effort ongoing for the last 11 months under the umbrella of CFO plans together.

Some of the work that we've done already has included building on the past housing needs assessment to really understand the work that's already been done in Charlottesville,

engaging with the steering committee as well as other local groups to understand priority issues around housing as well as goals.

Participating in the public engagement for SEVO plans together and then really evaluating the tools that are part of the recommendations for their feasibility and potential impacts in Charlottesville.

Next slide.

As of right now, we're in the midst of a one month public review and comment period.

So as Philip said, we're welcoming comments.

We've already gotten some input in writing from groups in Charlottesville, but both through the engagement work that Jenny outlined and through written comments that can be provided by email or through the website.

We are incorporating feedback through December 2nd.

Based on that feedback, we'll be revising the plan

and submitting it for endorsement in early 2021.

Next slide.

I'm sorry, how are you all tracking the recommendations that come in and whether you all implement them in the plan?

So how we're planning to approach this has been similar to a tradition.

This is not a HUD regulated plan, but we are intent was to follow general HUD rules.

So we'll actually take all the comments and all the comments will be attached as an appendix to the document so that it's transparent with what we responded to.

Does that feel like an appropriate approach?

This isn't federally regulated, so we have a great deal of flexibility on how we approach it.

Yeah, absolutely.

As I was saying, our goal for today is to provide an overview of the plan as well as the key initiatives and ideas that

are within the plan.

And we're going to go through that and sort of hold discussion.

And then what we'd like to do is talk through the recommendations and at that point we're going to go through section by section the recommendations and allow for discussion as needed.

And then talk a little bit about next steps.

Next slide.

Great.

Next slide.

So

A lot of people have seen this before.

We've shown this to a lot of people.

This has been sort of how we've been talking about the core ideas of the plan since earlier over the summer, I believe, or late spring.

But the recommendations in the plan are informed by three guiding principles.

These aren't really goals, but they're lenses and types of consideration that we brought into each of the recommendations.

And you can see in the plan that we've thought about how each recommendation aligns with these guiding principles.

Those are racial equity.

So we wanna make sure that we're making recommendations about how, not only how these tools or recommendations can be implemented, but how they can be implemented in a way that is intentional about overcoming historic inequities.

Regional collaboration, so identifying areas where we're making recommendations for the city, but where the city also has an opportunity to partner within the region to advance its goals.

more broadly, and a comprehensive approach.

So making sure that we're thinking about a broad variety of types of tools and types of housing options that the city can and should be supporting.

Next slide.

There are five key sections.

Keep going.

There's five chapters of the plan.

The first two are about implementation needs, and the other three are about tools.

That's a little bit backwards from how we would usually do it, but what we found is that Charlottesville has already considered and has in place a lot of the tools that we were talking about, and so whereas we've made recommendations about how Charlottesville could approach, tweak, design, and approach to implement those various tools,

where we found the real need for focus was on how those tools get implemented.

And that's specifically around funding and governance.

So we've put those two up front.

Next slide.

And really building on that, there are like 22 something tools recommended within the plan.

So there's a lot of recommendations.

We've really captured a lot of the different ideas that people have been talking about in Charlottesville and thought about how to move them forward in alignment with those guiding principles.

But really the core big ideas of the plan are these three major initiatives.

And we think that together those three initiatives form a really strong commitment to equitable and affordable housing in Charlottesville.

So those are funding dedicating $10 million annually to affordable housing.

And we'll talk a bit more about that

in the next section.

Governance, and when we say that, what we mean is really building inclusive governance throughout Charlottesville's affordable housing infrastructure.

That's the city, that's the public organizations that advise on the use of public funds and public priorities.

And that's also the leadership of nonprofit partners.

And we think that those two,

Governance that is inclusive across all of those different groups is really crucial to ensure that Charlottesville's affordable housing work is meeting that racial equity goal and including diverse voices.

So we'll talk a bit more about that as well.

And the third one is adopting progressive and inclusionary zoning reforms.

We know that's something that the city's already spent a lot of time talking about, and it's going to be done in part through the rest of the Seabel Plants Together effort.

But I wanted to call out that those three things together

So quick question about the funding piece.

In a comprehensive plan, I think it's pretty unusual.

For an affordable housing plan, it's much more common.

But even in an affordable housing plan, you don't always do it.

So for an affordable housing plan, you might talk about a particular bond.

So there's a bond issuance, Raleigh, North Carolina bond issuance for $80 million.

You might plan and talk about how you're going to spend the bond issuance.

Really, we're talking about here is more of a plan that goes with your housing trust fund.

Not uncommon for a housing plan to do this, but not 100, about 50-50 on your housing plans to do this.

Comprehensive plans, I think there's unusual, the approach Charlottesville is taking here with a comprehensive plan that also has a housing plan component to it.

Yeah.

As we move forward, you may just want to kind of coach us as to how we blend this into the comp plan, because the planning commission is like focused on getting the comp plan out.

And when I get out of my depth, Jenny is going to save me.

But that sounds like a very, if we can't implement, then we didn't succeed.

I think we can go to the next slide.

As we've said, there's a lot of recommendations and a lot of detail in the full draft plan.

which is now available and we encourage everybody to take some time to look through it and provide us comments.

But for each housing tool we talk about both how the tool is used currently or how it relates to needs that have previously been identified in Charlottesville.

We provide

greater detail about recommended changes or approaches to implementing the recommendation.

We talk about the potential impacts of implementing the recommended changes.

For each tool, we provide some considerations, as I said earlier, to ensure that they align with the guiding principles.

And we talk about the implementation needs, including a potential time frame for implementation and the lead and partners who will be able to help advance that.

The final program design and annual budget priorities will be set by the city in coordination with both the HAC and a new committee that we're recommending be formed to govern the CAF funds.

So those particular implementation needs may change based on the priorities that those bodies set, but we've tried to provide

our best understanding of where the priorities might be and how the city should go about making those changes.

Next slide.

Yeah, you can go ahead.

Can I go back a slide?

Sorry.

That's an overview of really what we're going through here.

So we're going to go through each of these five chapters.

We're going to talk about these at a higher level before we start to get into the first one we're really going to get into is going to be about funding.

Is there any high level questions or comments?

I heard the comment about how this connects to the comp plan.

I think that's something we can keep coming back to.

And I hear the comment about making sure we're showing all public comment and full transparency there.

Perfectly set for the next slides.

Thank you so much.

You're welcome.

All right, let's go.

So implementation needs.

So at the highest level, what we've proposed in here is dedicating $10 million over the next 10 years.

And when we look at the programs and the level of impact we're talking about, we think that gets you to around 4,000 households.

benefited.

Now, not necessarily 4,000 units built, but around 4,000 households.

We made this commitment for a couple of reasons and structured this way for a couple of reasons.

One, there is significant need in Charlottesville for affordable housing.

I think you have the previous study on the level of need.

I think that makes a pretty compelling case, everything in our analysis to support that case.

And there's a need for consistent funding, both so that we're addressing this as a challenge that's with us,

for a long term so that we need ongoing funding to address it.

And you need funding so that you can build out the capacity in your partners and capacity in your local government to actually execute it.

So we did not recommend a bond approach where you go once with a large amount of capital, but actually recommended an ongoing funding approach.

Then we made recommendations about the level of funding.

And we really try to reflect these both on the priorities we heard from the community and where we heard the housing gap at.

So we made a recommendation that 40% of the funding go to extremely low income households, households under 30% of area median income, I think around $22,000 a year.

40% of the funding go to households at 60% of area median income, I think around $45,000 a year.

and 20% be able to serve our households up to 80% of AMI or around $60,000 a year.

Sorry, it's too many percentages and AMIs and got tripping myself up there, but generally we made real recommendations on the targeting.

And then we made some recommendations about transparency, really about publishing the metrics that are gonna be used to measure the impacts and the level of the costs and the,

So you're going to go into exactly where this money is going to go, right?

No, we did not recommend a detailed budget by program.

Yes, let me answer that question.

So the 4,000 households is not necessarily 4,000 new units of housing.

And it's entire, so I want to be clear on that, but let's, let's just say it was for the sake of the conversation moving forward.

Then we looked at for other programs, what's the ability of different programs to absorb, like actually implement and do them.

So we're talking about the public housing.

Well, you know, the redevelopment of the public housing units would actually potentially be included in those 4,000 units.

Those are existing sites where there's already land.

So we looked at, when we looked at that program, we looked at that.

We looked at, you know,

Again, I'll talk about multifamily, low-income housing, tax credit development.

We've looked at some of the development you had, some of the parcels that are available in the community, and what's the potential to absorb it.

And this is part of where we talk a lot about

Regionality and what's the ability to do some of this development in the urban ring.

We don't make that a requirement, but we do certainly make that a recommendation about there's ability to do it.

So yes, we have looked at the ability of the different programs to absorb and actually be feasible to execute it.

I can't, you know, it would be a stretch for us me to say that we've identified sites for

All of this development.

So we certainly have not gone to that level of granularity.

Did I answer your question or did I talk around it?

No, it was helpful.

I have a question on the bucket sizes.

That's sort of the housing needs assessment in my head always.

And the bucket sizes there, just looking at rental homes, are different, partly because they're looking at different AMI slices.

I'm worried about what the blanket is covering and who isn't being covered.

What you say covers everyone under 30% AMI.

Who needs it?

I'm not sure I understand.

So every house, would this build an affordable housing unit for every household under 30% AMI?

Identified in the housing needs assessment.

So I guess the question, forgive me if you're going to answer this in a later slide, is where did you guys come up with this 40%, 40%, 20% framework?

Because looking at the rental affordability challenges on page 31 of the draft, of the extremely cost-burdened households, the majority of them

are certainly below 50% AMI.

And by the time you get into the 60-80, we've got essentially no or very few households that are extremely cost burdened.

So I think we would argue we are targeting the families with most need.

There's need at 80% AMI and below.

80% of them.

So it's not just rental housing we're trying to address here.

We're also trying to adjust access to home ownership.

And so it's really consideration of both home ownership and rental that led us to this distribution.

Can we go to the, does that answer the question?

I mean, I tell you the thing we'll get feedback that pushes for a different distribution and a different distribution can be done.

We think that you want to have

A mix of incomes and you know there is housing there is housing need up to 80% AMI.

We think, particularly your homeownership could should go from 80% and below so you know 50% AMI can still be part of your homeownership program is not when I say that I know we got a comment that that's implying that it shouldn't be, and I want to be really clear that.

We really mean the below comment.

But that's part of what we're looking at is trying to address some of the home ownership and access to wealth building issues and affordability challenges in Charlottesville as well.

And dedicating funding only to extremely low income rental doesn't give you room to address that public policy goal as well.

Now, there might be a decision that that's not a public policy goal Charlottesville wants to address.

but we got, you know, that's something we'll talk about a little bit more in the governance structure.

We got a lot of feedback and pushback to make sure that that was something that is included.

And we think that is a good policy to include it.

Sorry, I've got one more on this.

Gotcha.

So really just to lay out the racial mix for different income bands?

And I've got one more question on a different tack on this slide.

So $10 million as a number could mean a lot of different things in terms of how that figures out in the budget.

And I'm just a spectator in how council does budget stuff.

But it seems like there's very different constraints on cash funded expenditures versus bondable expenditures.

Is there a prediction or a designation of how much would go to which, either in the context of city funding constraints or in the context of needs?

So I think that the recommendation here is that the funding is flexible enough that it can move across regardless of program that's recommended.

So whether it goes into a physical asset or actually goes into rental assistance, non-physical asset, what we're recommending is the flexibility of the funding to do it.

Now, which pots the city actually finally ends up to draw from, we're not saying it should be from one particular pot versus another.

So let me challenge you on that then.

Is it $10 million in cash that the city is allocating per year?

So for example, if next fiscal year the city dropped $10 million on some project that was bondable, really we're only spending half a million dollars over 20 years plus an interest.

It ends up being $660,000 or so per year.

Next slide.

So when we started coming to the right, came with a recommendation of $10 million, we really put a focus on consistency and looking at what Charlottesville has been doing and the scale of needs.

We're trying to balance really two different sides here.

The first side is

What has Charlottesville been doing?

What can we see in Charlottesville's budget?

What potentially, what appears to be sustainable?

How does Charlottesville compare to peer organizations?

What's the ability to actually, that's one side.

Another is what's the ability to actually absorb the capital with the capacity and how much money has been being deployed in the market?

And then the scale of need and the level of challenge we have to hear and everyone that needs to be served.

What we came out with really was a recommendation of $10 million.

The last three years Charlottesville has been putting more money towards affordable housing, which is amazing and great.

We're recommending that averages around 8 million.

We're recommending really a slight increase in that level and a commitment to sustaining it going forward.

So we're recommending $9 million that would go out directly into programs and a million dollars or 10% of that total fund to be set aside for administrative expenses.

We've already gotten comments and feedback.

I think there's a very fair point or comment can be raised about whether the administrative costs should sit inside the $10 million or so and outside.

I think that there's, we include it in here.

We've gotten feedback that some folks don't think we should.

I think that's a fair comment, but we do think it's really important to invest in the administrative side of this.

Charlottesville is really taking on a lot of affordable housing programs much

much closer to a larger city and has to scale up both the capacity of its local government apparatus, as well as investing in the capacity and training of the nonprofit partners who are delivering.

So the $9 million is a capital commitment

in the $1 million is a operational commitment, yes.

I don't think everything in the $9 million would necessarily qualify for capital because some of it won't go into physical improvement.

Tax relief.

I'm just wondering practically as we think about this, how does it work from a budgeting perspective since council cannot

So the plan is a commitment, but it does not mean it can't be changed in the future.

Like a future council could decide to not follow this.

Somebody else could run on a platform to do not do this.

It's a democratic society, so people can still make, they can change what the government's doing.

But as long as community support remains for it, usually these things stay.

But it is a challenge all housing trust funds work on.

Generally, it's set up, yes, there could be administered, but usually for these programs, you're not covering, you're covering a set delivery fee with it.

So that's usually built into

So I think, I'm not being precise, so let me give you a good example.

So like, let's say you're doing the down payment assistance program.

You'd have a cost that you're doing for every, a cost to administer the down payment, so every grant you build in some administrative costs, that would be part of it.

That is intended to be in there, yes.

So Michael, you were about to make a point.

Oh, just that in terms of

Dedicating it across councils.

I know one of the difficulties, I can't remember if it's state law or the state constitution, but councils just legally can't bind future councils to expenditures.

So that's just one of the challenges there, which is a real risk is just how do you create mechanisms to ensure that any funding level is maintained?

But I think if we build this culture and the community who's voting for councils, understand this commitment, and no matter who they vote for, this should remain a commitment.

And hopefully we can speak to that some of the governance side.

Sustaining the commitment is one of the keys to success on any of these issues and frankly can lead to increases in these.

It can also go the other way.

I mean, I live in DC where we started at 30 million and we're at 130 million now, or I think 130 million last cycle.

I'm not sure what we are.

We're a much bigger city and we don't send any money to Richmond.

We get to keep all the money here.

So it makes it easier to do that kind of stuff.

I'll go on to the next slide, but recognize we have to come back to this.

We've gotten a little bit, we've talked about this income targeting.

I heard the feedback on, I heard a couple of different pieces of feedback.

One, are we missing the point about serving extremely low-income rental households and should be going deeper?

Two, just how does this line up actually with our racial priorities by income band?

And then I think those are the main two pieces of feedback I heard.

This is recorded, so if I miss something, I'll come back to it.

The other piece in the income targeting is really this community representation piece, which is we're looking for community representation in anyone who receives funding for this program.

So let's say it's a program administrator.

that, you know, what is their representation on their board or amongst their staff?

And when we say community representation, we mean both racial representation, but also, and we lay this out in more detail in the plan, how are the households who are beneficiaries and participating in the programs involved in the decision-making process for how these programs are designed and operated and implemented?

And we, you know, that's not been the approach historically in affordable housing, but if you are

As we look at best practices around the country and really emerging best practices folks are trying to reconcile with their goals and priorities and how this has been done historically, that is something we think is a really important recommendation.

I want to draw the nuance there because I don't want to conflate race and beneficiary.

We're making two separate but related recommendations there.

One about racial diversity and reflecting Charlottesville as a whole and the other about

I'll paint a picture with words.

It'll be great.

So this actually point isn't on the slide, but it is in the report.

Just the slide got crowded.

We also make a recommendation about pushing for maximum levels of affordability.

So on the rental side, that's a clear point.

We're talking about 99 years.

On homeownership, we're talking about repayment of funds, as opposed to turning things into grants.

And that's always what the right balance on homeownership is always a sticky conversation.

And we'll talk about that a little bit more in specific programs.

but we are pushing for maximum affordability and we think generally you all are in a good place to make that move.

Question on the 99 years.

We haven't done that because it's been cost prohibitive up to now.

Is it cost effective?

So I don't want to undermine or challenge anything that's happened previously because I wouldn't do the analysis on the deals but usually it's extremely cost effective because the time value of money,

When we're not doing work for local governments like yourself, we do work for developers.

The cost of affordability 30 years from now is very, very low, almost zero for me as a developer, because that's not how my financial model works.

So usually it's the best possible investment a local government can make.

There are exceptions to that, and sometimes it's a little more complicated and there's reasons you don't want to mess up financing.

You can make, like, there are plenty of places in the country that do 50 years and plenty of places that do 99, and it has no negative impact on their pricing.

And we say that pretty consistently, both when we work for the developers and for the local governments.

Like, local developers should actually be willing to give you longer affordability in exchange for other support pretty easily.

I'm sorry.

I spoke over here.

I did not mean to.

I said that we pushed that with PHA to expand there.

I mean, I would, yeah.

I know, not to get into, well, we're going to talk about public housing more, but talk about some now, like that is,

I think one of the core challenges of public housing redevelopment, our country has gone in a direction to bringing private financing into public housing, which on one side is great because it brings in additional funding.

On the other side is potentially privatizing your public housing and could be the worst thing ever.

So it could be a Trojan horse.

And so making sure you have permanent affordability and frankly,

Really understanding the agreement development agreement you're entering into and the governance structure of that development agreement is really important.

I don't believe anybody who you're working with is likely to be this type, but there are a number of affordable housing groups out there that structure these transactions so that they intentionally go into bankruptcy so that they can break the affordability restrictions.

That is not a myth.

That is a real thing.

Betsy DeVos's family actually is a major investor in those funds, ironically enough.

And we've run into them a lot in our work in Michigan and North Carolina.

Yeah, so just as a point of fact, Friendship Court is project-based rental assistance.

It's not under the Housing Authority.

But Mayor Walker, how did that end up with PHA?

You mean the 99 years?

You know, I'm here and learning through this process, but when we were working with Keith Woodard and the development downtown, that is the terms that they put on the parking garage.

So I thought, hey, let me explore this a little bit more and ask for them to include it there.

Yeah.

So that's where I learned that that is what is common.

Gotcha.

Can we go to the next, next slide?

So I think this is, so that's actually, we're transitioning over from government into governance now.

I apologize.

I think I accidentally deleted the transition slide.

So

I hear the comments on funding.

We're going to get into the governance now.

Sorry, previous slide, sorry.

We're bouncing around.

Slide 20.

I'll stop mumbling and being confusing.

My apologies.

So on the governance side, this actually gets into a comment, a little bit of the conversation we started to go through.

We're trying to give you the best plan possible and hear all the different needs and try to give you recommendations on it.

But the needs and priorities of the community are dynamic.

And you all have already asked, frankly, very good and weedy questions about exactly how some of this stuff gets implemented.

Mr. Stolzenberg's questions about exactly how we're applying the administrative costs are really important questions when it comes down to actually making the units and making sure we get 4,000 and not 3,000 units.

And so we wanted to make sure that we are putting just as much efforts into the governance structures.

We also recognize working in Charlottesville where you have a preponderance of governance structures compared to some of the other communities we work in.

And we want to make sure that those are working.

We also, frankly, as we saw our work, saw real differences in what the priorities were

for housing and want to make sure the governance structures are set up to have those conversations and I actually, I mentioned homeownership earlier and I'm flagging again because it was the clearest difference that line happened to line up along racial lines but there are other cleavage points, and that's on

When you talk to black respondents, Latinx respondents, home ownership ranked as a very high priority.

But when we got respondents on the white and Asian side, it was closer to 50-50.

Not that it wasn't a priority, but it was closer to 50-50.

And I can speculate on why that is.

I think that probably that has to do with different, frankly, lived experiences.

But we wanted to take ourselves out of a role of trying to arbitrate that

and more build a governance structure to try to have it because planners have a long history of thinking we know and writing a plan and we're trying to, we've read our own history and it's not great on this front.

So the key actions on the governance at the highest level are making sure there's an onboarding process and significant training.

Affordable housing is a complicated topic that we pepper with technical speak and acronyms to make it even more opaque and complicated.

So that you'll hire us as a consultant, but you know, there's training on that front.

We think it's really important We also just think that there's a cost for you to administer this and we want to make sure that that's supporting the governance and we want to make sure that this is actually all set up to monitor success and we say monitor success on the governance.

It's really making sure that we can see

We can see the progress on diverse participation.

We actually see, like, is there actually participation in the governance and decision-making process?

And we can see that.

And on the outcome and production, can we disaggregate?

Like, telling you that 100 units were built is one thing.

Telling you where those units were built within the city and who benefited from them is just an important part of the conversation and something the housing industry tends to say 100 units and stop.

Sarah, do you want to run through these?

I know I've run over into your slides.

So there are four key areas of recommendations that we're making around governance.

The first two are sort of external bodies.

to the City of the Hack and what we're recommending a new affordable housing fund committee.

And then the second two are more related to the city's own capacity and its processes.

Next slide.

The key recommendations that we're making for the HAC are to refocus the HAC around providing city council with recommendations about housing policy priorities.

And again, to separate the budget piece from the work that they're doing.

So it might be making recommendations about a potential zoning change, or we know that there's new state legislation enabling the city to adopt inclusionary zoning.

It might be about saying that the city needs to be doing more around home ownership.

or investigating, you know, Land Bank or other tools that have come up in conversation.

So that's a key piece of the sort of refocused pack and that's pretty well in line with work that they're already doing.

But in addition, making sure that they can champion in advance the implementation of the Affordable Housing Plan.

It is hard for the HAC and the Planning Commission to stay in line.

I spend a lot of time trying to do that.

Honestly, I think we've made things more complicated.

We made a recommendation that we would never normally do, which is another governing body.

We've made this with great hesitance, but we're talking about why we made it here a little bit.

I think part of that is about, and we don't address that well on the membership side.

And I think it's a good, I'm going to take it as a point of feedback, whether you intended it that way or not, which is maybe there needs to be cross seeding between the planning commission and the hack so that there's just more of a direct connection that may happen informally, but I think it's a good thing to call out.

We were thinking there is some overlap and interest there, and so part of that's through conversation.

So I don't have a perfect answer to that.

Yeah, I think on the on the next one that we're going to talk about, we've spent a lot of time thinking about how to bring the city into alignment with city staff into alignment with housing advocates on budget priorities, because that was an area that we had seen and heard about some tension.

So maybe that's something that we need to be talking about on the hack side as well.

One of the key reasons that we are

advocating for a second body is to avoid and reduce opportunities for conflicts of interest between the HAC.

And this is as much about a perception as the HAC has been pretty clear and

taken seriously the idea of avoiding conflict ventures, but certainly something we heard consistently that if nothing else, there's a perception there.

Also, we see this like the budget piece can swallow the entire hack, and we don't think the budgeting process should swallow that.

We think that's an important policy, but part of our goal on comprehensive is for you to be working on housing goal issues and solutions on the tenants rights and land use side as well.

So HAC still gets connection to the programmatic and funding side by recommending like pushing priorities like home ownership and the tools, but the budgeting conversation, the weedier conversation about budgeting and frankly the commerce, again I'm gonna come back to the point about how administrative costs are handled, gets handled in a separate conversation.

In some ways it's not that different from what the HAC

had moved towards with a subcommittee on this topic, but we think full separation is actually useful here.

But acknowledge we're recommending another body, which is something we don't normally do.

So the recommended CAF committee, as we're calling it, would be really charged with providing city council with recommendations about the budget and use of CAF funds, as well as making recommendations on scoring and selection criteria for recipients of those funds.

We're recommending a structure that provides equal weight to providers and advocates for affordable housing.

affordable housing residents for beneficiaries and city staff.

I would just say, I mean, I think given the size of our city and the number of providers that it could be a challenge

to have that without people having a conflict.

We think that that's a whole challenge.

And we wrote a draft conflict of interest policy because we thought it was such a challenge.

It's included in the plan that allows for

really makes two tiers of conflict.

So one role you're gonna be taking on here is allocating funding across the different programs.

And basically it lets you vote on the allocation of funding and cost programs, just not the program you are participating in.

So you could participate, but if you were running, you worked in a nonprofit that does down payment assistance, you wouldn't be able to vote on the allocation to that program.

And you wouldn't be able to participate in the conversation on scoring criteria or selection for anybody in that space, but you could participate in the rest of the conversation.

We definitely acknowledge this challenge of having experts and having the folks who are invested in this involved without having conflict or perception of conflict.

The policy we drafted is based on some work we've done in Pittsburgh.

And we laid it out because we want to get feedback on it.

It's worked pretty well there, but it is a real challenge.

You are absolutely right that you need continuity and expertise.

No, I mean, for all intents and purposes, the subcommittee of the HAC has tried to achieve that separation.

But I do think there is value in having a separate group that's not intertwined with the group that has the folks that are likely going to be receiving the benefit that are doing the policymaking and capacity beneficiaries.

So I see the logic.

Thank you.

So maybe I missed something there, but you said we already have a lot of governance structures and you typically would never recommend making a new governance structure.

So in other contexts, what do you do?

Well, in other places, usually a hack or something like a hack is more informal.

So I think the fact that it has been memorialized this way, I think we see it two ways.

Usually, there's not a formal something like a hack.

You have a housing trust fund gets created, and then you create a housing trust fund board.

And then the problem is we have the housing trust fund board encroaching into policy issues that maybe they shouldn't be encroached.

Or maybe they should, actually.

Some people have different views on that.

But we see encroachment the other direction.

It's relatively unusual.

I haven't encountered it.

Doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

It's a big world for it to go the other way.

That's our thinking is here.

We are certainly open to conversations about more elegant solutions and not creating additional bodies.

And I think the comment made that this is not that dissimilar, that what's already happening, but just a little more formalized, hopefully turns out to be a positive thing.

I'm trying to be clear that this is what we're recommending.

I think it's a good recommendation.

It doesn't feel as perfect and clean as we wanted to come up with, just to be honest.

The one other piece is that we thought in particular, and Sarah said this, a forum for city staff and the housing providers to be talking directly to each other on their recommendations before they get to elected officials.

Because ultimately, decisions all still rest on elected officials.

Elected officials ultimately all still make all the calls.

But a forum for that conversation to happen seemed really important.

Because we heard concerns and, frankly, some distrust on both sides.

You know, there's always going to be some tension between the administrator of a program and the person who actually operates it.

That's somewhat healthy.

But it seemed like there's room for improvement there and those relationships and this could be a forum to help make that happen.

That's our thinking very directly and more bluntly than I might normally say.

Great.

I think we can go to the next slide.

So the next recommendation is about empowering and increasing the capacity of city staff.

This recommendation is really about staffing the city's housing staff at a level that is equivalent or recognizes the scale of housing programming that's existing in Charlottesville.

So making sure that there are enough staff who are adequately resourced to administer all of the different programs that we're talking about.

We provide some information in the plan about

the level of staff that Charlottesville has relative to its funding and the level of staff that some other comparable cities have.

We provide some other recommendations, some of which are outlined here that would help to further increase staff capacity to be collaborators and supporters on affordable housing.

That includes assigning a staff person to be a liaison for affordable housing development.

I know the city already does this for, I think,

Historic Preservation, but making sure that there's somebody on city staff who can be the point person to kind of shepherd development through

We also talk a bit about, again, including city staff on the CAF Committee in order to encourage collaboration on funding priorities and providing clear communication about staff roles and city processes, as well as opportunities and pathways for community feedback to the city.

So a lot of different things there that are mostly around making sure that the city staff is adequately resourced to implement the various tools and recommendations of the plan.

Any questions on that one?

Okay, let's move on to the next slide then because this is really part of that same recommendation, but we felt it was important enough that we wanted to give it its own its own recommendation so as part of that work in increasing the capacity and support for the city staff.

We've talked about establishing clear, transparent, and competitive processes to award funds.

So this relates both to city staff and to the CAF committee, but is really about establishing a transparent RFP process for funds and competitively scoring projects using a standard underwriting process.

And we've provided some examples of types of scoring criteria that could be used

Frankly, it puts you in a place to evaluate, are we funding and supporting our goals?

The comment made earlier, 30% AMI,

We need to be primarily funding there.

If we end up at 40% without this kind of analysis and reporting, it's very hard to be sure of that.

Again, I'm going to pick on DC because I live here and I did an audit on the Housing Production Trust Fund.

And we ran Housing Production Trust Fund for 10 years without monitoring whether we were actually meeting our income targets.

We would not actually meet our income targets.

And so this process

It's a process.

It's less exciting than some of the other ones, but we think it's really important if there's a long-term commitment to affordability to have these in place, both because they make the programs more effective and sustaining public trust and transparency and making sure this is an ongoing commitment and that the public understands what they're getting for their investment and that it's much easier and clearer to communicate the public benefits that are being generated here.

So what are we talking about?

Are we talking about local funds?

Are we talking local and federal funds, like CDBG funds?

We're primarily talking about local funds, although that's a fair point that if you're doing this report, you might as well pull those same numbers information for federal funds.

I would say one of the challenges we've had is that when we think about how the city allocates all of its dollars to outside resources, like sources, that there has been inconsistency in just the process by which we evaluate those things.

So what are those criteria?

So that could be what like what Hosea was referencing, you know, within just the housing funding that might come either locally or non locally, as well as just some of our nonprofit funding requests, which comes from our Bibert Communities funds.

And so I've always really been interested as we've looked going through this process is that we come out of this

And this is way beyond just housing, but, you know, we have a Measurements and Solutions group that's working on basically putting targets in place.

And the other thing I didn't quite understand is what you meant by underwriting, scoring the underwriting.

What do you mean by that?

Scoring the underwriting?

Well, this really applies more to the development projects.

But really, are these financially feasible to what they propose to do?

Are we sure?

You're underwriting for two sides.

Sorry, my son wants to join us, our call.

I know I keep talking.

We're really underwriting for two sides here.

One is to make sure the deal is financially viable and we actually aren't going to have to put more funding in the road or we know how much funding.

The other is, did they leverage all of the private money that's reasonable to leverage?

I remember going to school on this.

I loved going to business school classes because their underwriting was so much easier.

All I had to do was figure out whether the deal would actually work.

Public sector underwriting is much harder because you have to figure out whether a deal works and did I get the most from my public money because I did not give too much.

I think the annual plan is a great idea because even the last development that we voted on I asked a question doing that about whether the previous units on Main Street that were supposed to be the affordable units that were approved for that development and

They didn't have, you know, people in them, which means that we voted on something and still why the market rate units are filled, the affordable units are not.

And I think an annual plan would help us

Are there any other questions on governance at this point?

I think we can move up one slide.

Great.

So we've talked to you only about implementation side.

We haven't actually talked about the tools, which is usually where we spend most of our conversation.

We're going to get into land use to start with.

I assume that given the composition of this group that there'll be an area where we spend a fair amount of time talking.

Yeah, sure.

And I think to the question earlier, land use is particularly where there is opportunity and a real direct connection between the housing plan and the comp plan.

And so what we've done is provide recommendations and guidance about ways to think about land use reform, which again is one of those major initiatives.

The specifics of the how and where and how much will be decided through the plan update and the zoning code rewrite and Jenny can talk about that I think a little bit more later.

But when we talk about land use, we're talking about really using land use reform to increase access to opportunity or increase housing in areas that are served by transit or near employment centers.

to redress or reduce racial segregation, in particular, recognizing the historic role that land use and zoning have played in creating and sustaining racial segregation.

It's about increasing the housing supply and limiting, hopefully limiting the increase of home prices that can result from limited supply and supporting affordability without subsidy.

That said, without subsidy, you're really not going to decrease rent or meet the needs of the, of extremely low income households.

And there's also the potential to create unintended development pressures in areas susceptible to gentrification and displacement.

So again,

throughout, we've made recommendations to try to curb that.

We can go to the next slide.

We have provided detail on each of these recommendations and we can go into them in more detail.

But wanted to stop here just recognizing the limited time and the composition of this group and ask if there are tools that this group in particular wants to spend more time on.

I'd say just marquee issue.

We've gotten some pushback about whether buy right makes sense or if it should all be affordable only.

Yeah, sure.

Sure.

So when you say

By right, you really mean, so I just want to make sure I got the question right.

I think I understand it, but I'm going to repeat back.

Otherwise, I'll answer something else.

Affordable restricted.

Yeah, multifamily buy right, the way we've written it, is like really housing development period.

And you're saying why housing development period versus just the buy right should be for affordable only.

Is that what I heard you say?

Yes.

Gotcha.

So I think it's a yes and answer.

Yes, definitely for affordable housing.

And we try to lay this out in the front slide that Sarah just went through.

We do believe supply is part of the conversation we're talking about affordability.

Fundamentally, if you're not building enough housing, then you will have market pressure and that will make affordability worse.

But a supply solution or a supply solution has major limitations, which we tried to acknowledge on the previous slide.

Building more housing can slow the increase in rent and there's actually plenty of evidence of that happening, but it's not going to create affordability so we're making these recommendations because Charlottesville,

Charlottesville is a nice place to live.

And I know a lot of people who want to live there.

I don't expect that to change anytime soon.

And I don't think you all want that to change anytime soon, because without the change, you'd have to stop being a nice place to live.

So how does that desire get accommodated?

Because if it doesn't get accommodated, it gets accommodated by bidding up the price to be in Charlottesville, which is what has been happening, not just in Charlottesville, but desirable, admittedly rich neighborhoods all across our country.

And part of that is allowing for an increase in the supply of housing.

but there is a real tension and fortunately we have wonderful public bodies like yourself to help manage that tension between building up housing to accommodate that growth and destroying character of a neighborhood and creating gentrification pressure.

And so we, our previous slide is we are trying to be direct and sincere at the tension between those two things and recognize the limitation of supply.

The other thing that may not come across as well as it should in this shortened condensed version is

Charlottesville has a really important role to play.

This is the point more than any other where we think regionality and the urban ring are critical.

Charlottesville is an important part of the housing market, but it is not big enough by itself to shift the housing market with supply chains on its own.

And we say some of that.

That is clear in the report.

And if you read it, it's not as clear as it needs to be.

We believe it and we will say it more clearly.

We actually do

So Charlotte, we did an actual analysis for Charlotte, Portland, Seattle where they actually look at how much supply does it actually take to shift the curve and it's not small numbers and it almost never shifts the curve down.

It just means it levels it out.

So that's a very long answer that hopefully is getting to the question you're asking.

On the multifamily side,

to this affordability piece, allowing more multifamily development, we think really has to pair with the inclusionary zoning.

We don't think you can, it's hard.

You can have an inclusionary zoning without allowing more multifamily development, but we think it'll be much less effective.

And so, you know, on the multifamily side, we're talking about where you allow multifamily, making it, removing some of the barriers.

So why don't we just pull up that slide actually.

Sorry.

So these are the actions we're talking about.

We're recognizing that

There's a significant more nuance in what's going to actually happen and part of that, we're lucky that we get the punt to Code Studio and the more deep process you're having here, but we're really talking about restructuring your existing multi-family zoning so that

actual feasible development is by right where you've said multifamily can be allowed because right now you know it generally there's between setback requirements and actual lot usage restrictions and other issues you can't do it you still have to come in and get permission we started to talk about and look at the areas where like where the commercial

areas, and maybe even some of the single family areas that are suitable to allow more.

So both making it easier to do where it's supposed to be already permitted and identifying some different areas.

But doing that in a way, and we started again, we've tried out some conversations with Kochis to be honest and looking at this like, how do you do that and make sure it doesn't displace low income residents.

So

being very direct about that and drawing a map and saying, okay, this is an area that has lower price points and lower income.

And we're not going to up zone that area because we think the market pressure will lead to demolition and redevelopment and displacement.

And that's not what we're looking for.

But fundamentally we are recommending less discretion.

Set some criteria on the front end and less discretion on a project by process basis.

And that is like, that is a hard change to make

in practice to work well.

But that is the recommendation we're making.

And then this last point really gets to the point I hit earlier.

It has to be with the urban ring, at least.

And ideally, we can get even bigger than that.

Or we may miss the point, because there was a comment made earlier about, has anybody actually looked at developable parcels?

Not in as thoroughly as we might in some work, but certainly enough to know that the urban ring is going to be a bigger driver of this than you all are.

Phil, I've got one thought and a question.

Totally agree that the urban ring is where we're going to be able to most effectively address this problem.

We cannot do it just inside Charlottesville, so collaboration

is going to be very important.

So I'm hoping that you guys can beep up your chapter as it relates to what's happened in the urban ring and what we can do to collaborate with the county just outside of the city.

So that's the point.

The question is relating to this feedback that we got from the hack on your report.

And it's the,

They objected to bi-right soft density, and they wanted us to talk about bi-right affordable soft density.

So comment, then potential answer.

We received that.

We read through it.

We have not had the conversation with hack, so this is my interpretation.

And I might be mistaken, and we are

One, we appreciate you guys' written comments so quickly, because it lets us start to have more time for back and forth.

So I might be wrong.

But what I believe it's about is really allowing some of that soft density, but only in places where it exchange for affordability.

So there are examples where maybe you allow a triplex and up to three for soft density on a lot that don't have one, but one of them has to be affordable.

So it's kind of like an inclusionary zoning policy that would apply in your single family areas.

Thinking about those lines, I might be wrong.

Again, I'm going to restate that.

I might be wrong about what they intend to do.

That generally, unless you have significant subsidy nested with the zoning, the economics on that usually don't work because the affordable units don't

make enough money to pay for construction costs.

And even if you have two other market rate units, they're not enough to cross subsidize.

You usually have to get to around, well, I won't make a comment because I don't know for your market, but higher than four, you can get in a fourplex.

So I don't think that recommendation will work, but I might be misunderstanding what they're saying and want to have a conversation.

And maybe it's about nesting it with subsidy.

If we have enough money, it could be a great strategy.

I think they'll have a chance to chime in later and explain that to me because I'm confused.

I've got a question to follow up on that and on this slide.

So in a few places you guys talk about identifying single-family neighborhoods that might be suitable for soft density or, you know, for denser multi-family.

I just got to say it's not an accurate claim to say that any of our neighborhoods in the city are single family.

If you look at the built environment and just the fact that in the vast majority of the city until 1991, you could build at least a duplex.

Every neighborhood has some level of attached homes or duplexes and usually more.

That makes a lot of sense.

One, I think it's, I appreciate, I think it's a really important point that in the report that it begins this land use section with the acknowledgement that this will not

produce, bring rents down.

It may prevent rises, it won't bring them down.

It won't meet need at perhaps even 80% of AMI and below, certainly not 60, 30% and below, as well as that op zoning could potentially bring in or will bring in more outside investment and really that very street by street, the impact on displacement that could have.

I think those are just really important grounding realities.

but two comments is just I'm particularly interested with multifamily like what areas both in the city and in the urban ring as well as what specific changes can be made to try to, it seems to me one of our big problems is our zoning is incentivizing buy-write office space and in some cases hotels

which is having one not producing housing, two having I think the biggest effect in terms of creating demand for people to live in the city that wouldn't otherwise be there.

So what specific areas and specific changes can kind of flip that so we're not just seeing all this buy right class A office space that's popping up buy right, meaning meanwhile if anyone wants to do multi-family housing

They have to go through this long process and they're just going to say, screw it, I'm just going to build this bar right off the space.

And second, it seems like inclusionary zoning might square that circle of the conversation around affordable density in terms of

When we're developing that policy, I think that will address that concern as well as developing that policy will get us to the point where we're doing that market analysis of what's feasible in addition.

When are we going to need additional subsidy in order to bring down either the AMI levels or number of affordable units?

And so that inclusionary zoning seems like a particularly important piece for us to discuss if we're thinking about that.

Quick answers.

I don't know if those are questions so much, but I'm going to comment on them anyway.

Yes, I think that the IZ, like, allowing, connecting the IZ in the multifamily, we try to say that I think it's essential.

I think it, you can't make that same connection on the single family.

And so I think it's got to be framed in a different way.

I think the framing that was recommended to us is a good way to change that conversation.

And the fact that you're incentivizing something because you blocked or because multifamily is difficult that you don't really want to be incentivizing is a great conversation to be having.

We started with Code Studio really looking at neighborhoods and areas and having some conversations about it.

We're not getting in like the housing.

The housing plan we're writing won't specify neighborhood, but the portion of the comp plan.

And again, if Jenny will correct me if I get this too wrong.

We'll start to have those conversations.

So yes, we're getting into it.

Our piece of work doesn't get into as much, frankly, because Code Studio is much smarter about this stuff than we are.

But we are like

COSU has been all on our conversations.

We've been talking with them, and we'll stay involved and around for any conversations they have so that these things are not too disjointed conversations.

We have worked really hard, and RHI has done a really good job of keeping us, even when we want to go into our little corners and do our work separately, keeping us talking to each other.

So I don't have answers on locations yet, but we are talking about that, and that will be part of the next part of the conversation.

I just want to do a quick time check.

I'm not trying to stop the discussion.

We've got about 15 minutes left in our original 90 minute portion.

We'll move forward a little bit.

All right.

We can go to the next couple slides, I think.

Next one.

Next one.

There we go.

Great.

So we do provide recommendations on tenants' rights.

Tenants' rights are really about helping existing tenants to increase their housing stability and to find a better balance between the power and rights of landlords and their tenants.

They won't create any new affordable units, but they do help households to stay in housing.

They also have really limited potential in Charlottesville due to restrictive state laws.

Next slide.

That said, we've made some recommendations around ways that Charlottesville can meaningfully advance tenants' rights, either through avenues that are currently available legally to the city or through advocacy at the state level.

The two key ones that are really available to the city currently are related to any time that the city is putting funds into a development or to a deal.

or to a program.

So developments receiving city assistance, we talked a little bit already about the scoring criteria that the city should use to award funds, but I think it's part of that.

The city can put in requirements for enhanced tenants rights anytime that it's providing funding for affordable housing developments.

and right to counsel.

So if the city is able to provide funding for legal services for tenants facing eviction, it can then establish the citywide right to counsel to help tenants facing eviction to stay in their homes.

Any questions about tenants rights generally or should we move on to subsidy?

Great, let's go to the next slide then.

So we've made a number of recommendations about public subsidy.

Philip, I don't know if you want to talk about this.

Yeah, I think the purpose and limitations are pretty straightforward here.

Like you're creating direct housing, you're providing direct assistance.

This is really the only way you're getting to

Those are the lowest levels of income.

And I say lowest levels of income on households at 35, $40,000 a year in many cases, like households that certainly have significant income, just not, the housing market's not serving them.

There are limitations to this, and mainly the limitations on subsidy are related to the fact that this is expensive, and there's a limited public funding to pay for it.

And it takes careful design and program execution to design it, but

I think those are generally straightforward.

I don't want to spend a lot of time talking about this, but happy to come back to it.

Really want to focus, I feel like we've talked about this a lot in the governance section.

Want to talk about the tools here because there's a lot of tools here and we're not going to probably do them justice if we don't spend a little more time.

So can we go to the next slide?

So we grouped the tools.

really based on the issue they're trying to address.

So these are the tools most directly related to rental affordability and either creating or preserving affordable housing.

Now land bank in truth could be used for home ownership as well.

So it's got more flexibility.

That's an imperfect grouping.

So I just acknowledge that before someone else points it out.

I'll point it out myself.

Low-income housing tax credit, you all are funding low-income housing.

The city is funding low-income housing tax credit.

Low-income housing tax credit is how most affordable housing in America is produced.

When I say most, I mean like 90% plus.

So it's the biggest tool.

Due development in Charlottesville, there's still a need for additional funding.

Gap funding to actually help close the deal.

That's not true everywhere, but it's true.

Charlottesville is a more expensive place to build.

So this is about making sure that there's gap funding.

So Charlottesville is going after and getting a regular pipeline of tax credit deals.

Charlottesville, and again, I think this is a regional urban ring county should be going after deals on an annual basis.

This should be a regular pipeline of production here.

And that's possible the way the state is allocating funding currently.

It has to be competitive.

It's not easy to do, but it is possible to have a significantly higher level of production.

Public housing redevelopment, we talked about some earlier, some of this earlier in the conversation.

Redeveloping and modernizing the public housing in Charlottesville and making sure that it remains an asset available to current and future generations is essential.

Public housing, while extremely expensive and at times I'm sure frustrating for everyone, is the best way to make sure there's housing that's affordable for households with extremely low incomes.

As expensive as it is, it is less expensive than any of the alternatives and

the alternative really is to allow homelessness and squalor and frankly is somewhat immoral.

There are certainly local governments that have pushed and tried to avoid public housing and tried to use the public housing redevelopment process to get rid of their public housing and Charlottesville thankfully has not decided to do that, decided to invest in it.

This is about making sure there's enough funding to make sure that public housing can be redeveloped.

This is one of the hardest parts for us in the whole plan.

because the Housing Redevelopment Authority is still in process and thinking through what its strategy is.

So we can't give exact numbers on the cost.

We can only look at projects and efforts in other places and deals that are currently moving forward and put forward a recommendation there.

The conservation.

Your comment earlier in the meeting about making sure that the financing for

housing is structured in a way where it isn't potentially bankrupt and lost.

I don't know how yours is being structured, and I don't have examples in the plan currently, but we can certainly give examples of housing

Public Housing Redevelopment that we think has been structured in a way that should protect the interest of the residents and affordable housing in perpetuity.

I mean, frankly, a lot of it comes down to who's, again, I don't know all the city's properties, like who owns the land?

Who owns the building?

Those are the two most fundamental questions.

And then if you just own the land, but not the building, how is your ground lease structured?

And that's been some other concern in the new development that's happening.

And that's why it kind of struck a chord when you made the statement.

So we will provide some examples.

And I'm happy to talk about this more specifically.

It shouldn't be such a buyer beware situation.

It should be clear.

And there should be a clear safe harbor.

And frankly, that is not the way HUD has structured it.

It's easy.

I think a lot of these programs were designed with good intent by folks trying to help save affordable housing.

But if you end up with a developer who's not a great partner, or frankly is a good partner now, but not a good partner 10 years from now or 15 years from now, they think there's real risk.

And yeah, it's something we struggle in other places.

But we will give some examples.

I'm happy to talk about it more.

The Preservation Fund is one of the few tools we're recommending that's not currently in existence.

And this is really about acquiring existing single family or multifamily housing and essentially taking it out of the market and that there's no, if you're buying, we give some examples of transactions on the multifamily side of this.

If you were buying an apartment building, you'd go and get debt, private, you know, a mortgage.

Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, FHA Mortgage for 70, 60, 70% of the property.

and then if you're a nonprofit developer, maybe you'd put in some money, but if you're a for-profit developer, you're generally putting in equity and that equity has a really high return requirement.

That's where most of the profit motive is actually going on because the debt payment is fixed.

The preservation fund basically is just designed to replace that equity with public money that doesn't have that profit motive.

So yes, rents might go up because that's what it takes to maintain the property, but rents are going up based on maintaining and sustaining the property.

Not on a profit motive.

So the concept is to take the property out of the market.

Preservation funds are becoming very popular, and lots of places are trying them.

They're the best thing you can do, we think, efficiency-wise, if you can't do rent regulation.

And you're in the state of Virginia, so you won't be doing rent regulation.

So it's definitely worth looking at.

That said, you have lots of other programs that are very effective.

And we will put this in as another tool, but not necessarily that it should jump in front of anything.

The land bank, I won't talk about this in great detail.

This is really more about having the legal, creating either a new legal entity or investing the legal authority in an existing entity to hold land and assemble properties and not have to pay property taxes on them.

This is something that Charlottesville has actually looked at carefully before and got derailed.

You actually anticipated my question and the answer may be quick and I think you may have answered it.

So I think the land bank can just be a legal entity to take the property and not pay taxes.

I think you could use it.

You have a lot of flexibility.

And that's why it's a little out of place here.

And I apologize for that.

You don't have to use it just for rental.

You could use this on a home ownership play where you're doing, if you do a similar property and then sell it, or you could do it on a home ownership play where you could even try.

And Sunshine actually talked about this several times to us.

And he said, he pointed out a model in Richmond

where they're really looking at doing a land trust approach, where the land trust owns the land and therefore doesn't have to pay the taxes, but there's still an opportunity for ownership and wealth building.

This is really more about reaching agreement about who should have this legal authority and how it should be controlled.

It's a legal authority that the state's given you and Charlottesville should use.

We just need frankly trust and agreement about where that authority is gonna rest.

We are not recommending a new entity unless for some reason we can't see that that's necessary.

Right.

I don't think we say that as clearly as we should in the report, but that is certainly our intent and we will say that more clearly.

Sorry to cut you off, but I just want to triple underline the importance of the Preservation Fund.

I know in your report it mentions there's 644 low-income housing tax credit properties in Charlottesville at risk of becoming market rate.

And I just think it's so important because if we're investing in interventions and 644 units are going away and becoming market rate, we may just really be treading water.

And I think that's really why going forward structuring our low-income housing tax credit

investments with 99 year lease in some cases shared equity is so important so that we're not making substantial investment in a 30 years time.

Appreciate and strongly agree that you know building new is great but if you don't preserve you're not making progress.

Homeownership, I want to spend time on this and this is the

And we're just starting to get public comment back.

But I want to acknowledge this is the area we've gotten the most comments on.

And really, we've tried to lay out in our plan how important we think home ownership is.

And I think the feedback is telling us that we've got to be even clearer on that, because there's certainly a perception that the plan is underselling that.

And so we're going to try to listen to that feedback and get clearer and tighter on this, making sure we're reflecting everything.

But home ownership, like,

In our analysis with the advisory committee, we laid out how homeownership has been a real challenge in Charlottesville, how homeownership rates have dropped for lower incomes, and how homeownership rates have dropped, particularly for black households, and the importance of homeownership, why homeownership is so critical, particularly if you have a racial equity lens on things.

But frankly, if you just have an economic equity lens on things, homeownership is the number one asset for most families.

It is the driver for economic mobility.

You don't have to like that that's the model in our country, but that is the current asset building model.

And so we do think it's immensely important.

And we lay out several programs in here that really these are all existing programs.

And we're talking about making modifications and adjustments.

We're talking about a down payment assistance program that we're increasing the level of funding and both the level of funding in terms of the number amount of money going into the program.

We're recommending a higher level.

and that the more funding go in per household.

Frankly, one of the biggest obstacles for your down payment assistance programs right now is it's not enough.

The market is so expensive that there's not enough money in the down payment assistance that lets households actually compete in Charlottesville.

And so if you actually want this to be a meaningful program, there's got to be more funding and the ability to layer it with other funding sources.

I won't get into that in too much detail.

Single-family infill development.

This is really about identifying opportunities for additional single-family development and making sure that they're affordable.

It could be paired with your ADU and some of the zoning recommendations we made.

Owner-occupied rehabilitation.

This is a program you already have.

We're recommending additional funding for it so it can be ramped up and higher levels of repair because actually somewhat to the similar point made about preservation is if you're trying to support low-income homeownership,

Great.

We're going to create down payment systems.

We're going to create new homeowners.

But owner-occupied rehabilitation is about two things.

One, making sure existing owners can stay in their place.

And two, really making sure their homes are repaired and maintained over time so that when it comes time to sell it, they're able to get the equity and the value from that home.

Because you can be in a neighborhood that's experiencing a lot of appreciation.

But if you're a home, you can't access the financing.

You can't maintain the home.

You end up selling to a cash seller, which means you get much less value and there's much less wealth building for you.

And so this is intended to address both of those.

So to do that, we need more money and we need to be comfortable spending more money per house.

And then the last is just an endorsement and recommendation to maintain an

Then your property tax relief program.

It has a real cost and there may be need for targeting revisions over time, but it also has a real benefit because it is reaching households that are at risk of facing displacement pressure, that have real concerning budget.

When you look at the data on owners, their cost burden, you can really see that.

I went through this quickly.

I'm happy to talk more about the home ownership programs.

And the rehabilitation assistance, are there clear recommendations there?

There are clear recommendations.

And we can try to find it in the full report.

but there are recommended actions.

That's fair, it's long and dense, but hopefully.

So yes, and basically we talk about, so the recommendations are fundamentally about one, increasing the level of assistance, two, making the assistance when you're doing a larger intervention,

making it a no-payment loan and not a grant.

And the idea there being that the money will recycle back so it can do more households and that by making a loan you can say when that house does come up for sale that another affordable homeowner gets the first bite at the apple.

and the price is somewhat reduced from it.

Does it require the homeowner to give up or do less to give up any value when the house is existing?

It should actually leave them a better financial place, but we did move it, make a recommendation to make it less of a grant.

And I'm sure we usually make that kind of recommendation.

We get feedback on it and there are legitimate public policy reasons to go both directions.

In brief, I would add with the property tax relief, I believe there are hard limits set by the state about both the amount of relief

as well as the assessed value of a property that can qualify that are real limits on the program.

So that may be something we wanna add to just cause eviction and rent control as an area for advocacy for the General Assembly to allow us to better target that program to reach a deeper need.

So we were going to follow up and ask more questions about that.

But I think we can add that it's like an anti-displacement property tax policy at the state level is something we can do.

Because that really is the approach you guys are taking here.

This is an anti-displacement conversation.

Next slide.

The tenant-based voucher and emergency.

So this is really the assistance for lowest income

on a household basis, so really those at risk of eviction or homelessness.

You have a tenant-based voucher program.

We make a couple of recommendations about adjustments and really about increasing level funding.

And in the emergency or rental assistance, Charlottesville, like most of the country, has been involved in standing up programs in response to COVID-19.

We're recommending that you look at how to make these funds and this support an ongoing permanent

effort.

The country as a whole had an eviction crisis because of COVID-19.

But households experience eviction crises all the time.

And their crises, while they're not the community's crises, aren't any less real or any less in need of assistance.

And you've actually stood up and created some of the infrastructure to actually run one of these programs.

So it should be easier, not easy, but easier to help make that a permanent thing.

I know I went through these quickly.

But that's all of the subsidy side.

And as Sarah said at the beginning, for each of these tools, we lay out a couple of different slides explaining the context, explaining the specific recommended actions, and talking about how each tool links back to those three guiding principles, regionality, racial equity, and comprehensiveness.

We think we've given a fair amount of detail, but look forward to, we know both some of you

on the panel and some of those who are listening as part of the general public work specifically on these tools.

And we look forward to very detailed conversations on some of those tools individually and acknowledge that we have not had that full level of depth here.

So as I said, as we said at the beginning, we're accepting public comments through December 2nd.

Based on those comments received, we're going to revise the plan and submit it for endorsement in early 2021.

Yeah, in general.

and we've outlined a bit on that virtual meeting page how we're envisioning that as well but the vision statement that's in the affordable housing plan has been used in the comprehensive plan vision statement for the housing chapter it's a piece of that but the housing chapter and the comprehensive plan goes beyond what's in the affordable housing plan but it's an important piece of that

The sort of policy recommendations that are in the affordable housing plan will be incorporated into the comprehensive plan as goals and strategies to reflect or to address that overall housing vision statement that's in the comprehensive plan.

In addition, these sort of strategic actions that are outlined in the affordable housing plan will be a piece of the implementation

Chapter of the Comprehensive Plan.

So those major recommendations, major action steps from the Affordable Housing Plan will be placed directly into the Comprehensive Plan.

The full document itself is not going to be the chapter, the housing chapter of the Comprehensive Plan, but it will be an important document that will be explicitly a piece of the Comprehensive Plan.

Yeah, I think that's all we have.

Great.

Yeah, thank you.

I can go one more.

So just a reminder for everyone, if you go to this website, you can see the engagement summary from May and June.

And that's important because what we heard then, as well as what we heard from planning commission meetings, from council, from our steering committee, all of that really fed into the affordable housing plan and the comprehensive plan pieces that we have drafted so far.

So please go to this website.

We'd love to get your comments.

For those of you on the meeting, as well as those of you listening, please send any written comments that you have.

We will be following up with a planning commission and city council by email.

We'd love to have any other comments written from you as well.

So I'd encourage everyone to check this out.

If you go to the next slide, you can see, sorry, I forgot this was in here.

It's just a reminder of the many events we have going on, including the draft affordable housing plan webinar, which is tomorrow, the first one at 6.30, and then there's one on the 17th as well.

And those are in addition to the comprehensive plan webinars.

You can find all this information on that virtual meeting page we showed on the previous slide.

Thank you.

Go to the next slide.

So this is our revised schedule, which is up on the website if you want to take a closer look.

We revised this in mid-October just to reflect, you know, we had

Delays earlier in the project due to slow start with COVID kicking off our engagement and then there was some other brief delays as well over the summer.

So we want to make sure that was all shown on the schedule.

Also shown on the schedule are a few important things.

So

We're showing here that the affordable housing plan, as Sarah noted, will be revising that as we get to the end of the year.

And the plan right now is to take that to city council for endorsement in January.

We'll be incorporating that then into the comprehensive plan, or we'll start to incorporate it in pieces into the comprehensive plan.

But in the meantime, in the comprehensive plan, we're also moving forward.

Once we've gotten input on the vision statements for the different chapters, we're going to be moving forward to make those revisions and then also revise the goals and strategies that are in the plan to speak to those vision statements.

We're working again from the draft chapters that are available there.

So we will be checking in.

We have a check in at the Planning Commission meeting on December 8th.

And at that point, I'd like to speak with you all about a few things.

One of them will be checking back in on the schedule, letting you know at a high level what we heard, what we think changes might be needed with what we're sharing now, and if we need to make any adjustments to the schedule, we'd want to check with you at that point.

And then we'd also like to talk about future land use map.

You know, as we talked, as we mentioned, yeah, it'll be, that's a really important piece of all this and it feeds in, the affordable housing plan recommendations feed into that.

And we want to talk about, you know, your process in the past, which we've already talked about with you quite a bit, but speaking with you about how we

move forward from that and how we want to incorporate that into the future land use map.

So that's something we'll be working on throughout December, but we want to have a discussion with you before we really get our hands in there.

So this is an ambitious schedule.

I don't think we're not trying to hide that.

But we think it's doable.

It just depends a bit on what comes out in the next month or so in terms of potential revisions or changes that might be needed to our current path forward.

Let's see.

So if you go to the next slide, it's just a reminder with our contact information.

Obviously, anyone, please feel free to reach out to us about any of this.

But that being said, I know we had a comment in the chat.

I don't know if we want to address that or

Sure.

So I'll just read it and then Philip and Sarah, I think it'd be good for you all to weigh on this too.

Well, actually Ms.

Russell, do you want to read it?

Yeah, yeah.

And I should have said it when we were in the land use section and I just was thinking about it more and more.

I just, you know, I just keep coming back to the concern that the, particularly the land use strategies, which are maybe the things I understand or can wrap my head around the best,

some of these strategies, ADUs by right multifamily and soft density, that unless there is an affordability requirement, they won't have, especially given the desirability and hot market of Charlottesville, they won't have that affordability effect unless they're paired with the requirement.

And then that's sort of like, well, how would we make that criteria?

So that just seems,

I think it is complicated and a challenge and you're accurate that new construct, like new development, even accessory dwelling units will not be affordable because the rents, both the rents don't support it and people are going to take to undertake the highest revenue they can.

The infill program we do talk about the ability to

actually take subsidy and put it in accessory dwelling units.

So I think there is some direct affordability.

A lot of the land use pieces though are going to be, with the exception of the inclusionary zoning on multifamily, the other land use pieces are primarily going to be about reducing the pressure on them in the market.

And again, we try to acknowledge, we think that's important, but we're trying to not overstate and make that sound like it's a magical solution because

It's not.

And the data is really clear and the analysis is really clear.

You look at Aussie markets that it can work and make a difference.

Ms.

So, and I apologize, I was having some technical issues today, but did, and if you checked this, then I apologize for reiterating or re-asking the question, but I was just wondering, did you guys see it feasible to come up with any recommendations to incentivize land, I mean, property owners to rent or continue renting to our lower income residents?

Like is there any incentive or any type of program to keep the units affordable for the actual landlords, like private landlords who are providing this housing?

I absolutely do.

Understand what you're saying.

Well, I think I do.

Let me repeat back and make sure I'm correct before I get so too confident there.

Thank you.

It's a good question.

The most direct and honest answer is no, we don't really have policies along those lines.

The preservation fund is probably the closest, but isn't really set up for them to stay the owner.

It's more set up for them to sell it to somebody else, knowing that it would stay affordable, but they'd get to sell it at a market rate.

So that's the short, direct, clear answer, longer, more convoluted answer.

We could look at tax abatement policy and loan programs.

That is something you could certainly do.

Yes, it could be done.

We could adjust the preservation program to really be set up more as almost a refinancing or financing tool for existing owners.

Or we could look at tax abatement policies or even how the land bank might fit into that.

But we haven't yet.

Thank you.

I think that would, I mean, if you have the time, I think that would be a positive road to go down.

Because like you said, especially with due development coming in, there goes the pressure with the taxes going up.

Why still keep this unit affordable when I can sell it, make money and be done with it?

And then someone else comes in and buys it, and that unit or those units are no longer affordable.

So I think if we are

really trying to make sure we increase or maintain our housing stock.

So Ms.

Creasy and Mr. Rice.

Forgive me for putting you guys on the spot, but I

I don't know how to do this.

Well, you all spoke in the beginning during the pre-meeting that you felt it would be good to hear from those who have something to say based on this.

We talked about whether matters of the public are at this point in time and it seemed

like this time would make more sense after folks had had the opportunity to listen to the presentation.

You may put some parameters on the timeframes just to keep things steady but noting that we're in a public comment period for this and the consultants are really hoping to get comments.

Whether written is wonderful because

So Mr. Rice, would you do two things?

Sifu wants to speak and then remind the public of the rules.

Absolutely.

If anybody in attendance would like to speak on this matter, please raise your hand.

We will call on you in the order of hands raised.

And if you are calling us, please press star nine.

We have two attendees with hands raised, Chair.

The first is Lakeisha Washington.

Miss Washington, welcome.

Hello commissioners and city council.

I'm here because I want to speak on the affordable home ownership opportunities for families in Charlottesville.

Just listening to the presentation, it made me think of growing up in a single parent home and my mom having to work three jobs just to pay bills and take care of me and my brother.

And even with that, we never really got to experience home ownership.

And now that I'm a mom, that has been a dream that I've always wanted for my daughter and myself.

But I refuse to work several jobs, just so that I can become a homeowner.

And so

With that, I thought of some of the feelings I remember experiencing when my mom had to work several jobs.

And I know that for me, I just felt abandoned as a child because my mom had to sacrifice being able to afford the cost of living in Charlottesville.

And that meant sacrificing her time spent with her children.

And I feel like families should not have to make those kinds of choices

and the only way that I am now able to even look at becoming a homeowner is because I've collaborated with Habitat and I'm working towards owning my first home.

And so, although I know that the affordable housing plan has many great aspects, I'm concerned that it doesn't go far enough to support people like me with the dream of owning a home.

I work at MACA

which is one of the organizations who sent the letter out today speaking to our hopes for a greater emphasis on home ownership opportunities, especially for people below 50% AMI.

And I really hope that you all will consider this moving forward.

Thank you, Lakeisha.

Thank you very much.

Hi, good evening planning commissioners and members of council and Mayor Walker.

Thank you so much to the consultants for this really, really thorough and inspiring presentation.

I was so glad to hear

what you've recommended and the process that you've been through, including hiring the peer outreach workers.

That sounds like a wonderful step forward, especially given the circumstances we're all working in.

And I just wanted to underscore a couple of thoughts about the tax relief and rent relief program.

Well, programs because there are multiple ways that the city looks to provide tax relief and rent relief.

Similar to what you said about home ownership, Mr. Cash, I think those two programs really need to go deeper to provide more assistance to prevent displacement.

I think one of the things you said was about the city becoming more comfortable spending more money per household and

I really believe that that is where we need to go in order to actually make those tools as impactful as they can be.

So thank you again.

And also congratulations to Ms.

Washington for working toward home ownership and doing all she's doing for her family.

And thanks for hearing me out.

Thank you, planning commissioners.

Neil Williamson with the Free Enterprise Forum.

I must say that having read the 133-page document and then sitting through this presentation, I am very impressed by the consultant team you've brought together.

That being said, I hope that we will use empirical evidence to judge these various policies that are being propagated.

We have grave concerns with what right now isn't legislatively enabled in Virginia rent control, but we also have concerns about the overall emphasis on inclusionary zoning.

We're aware that some localities have had it and have had very limited success.

We are very encouraged by the focus on increasing home ownership and increasing

positive rental units.

Both of these are admirable goals, and I'm hopeful that council, as well as the Planning Commission, can evaluate each of these various tools and see how they best address the objective set forward in the plan.

Thank you, Neil, very much.

If anybody else would like to address

Commissioner on this matter, please click the raise hand icon.