Charlottesville Redevelopment and Housing Authority Work Session   7/9/2026

The lady next to me is always like, I'm wearing four shirts today, look, my layers.

I don't understand why it's so hard.

I'm gonna go like 58.

Not actually, but I wouldn't mind if it was 58 degrees.

Fine, are you okay?

I'm running on weekend.

Here we go.

We can do it.

Exactly.

You're good.

Correct.

Here.

Commissioner Williams?

Here.

Commissioner Rosenblith?

Here.

Commissioner Payne?

Austin?

OK, we'll take a moment of silence.

Oh, I get so loud.

Please.

Okay, I will turn it over now to John for a minimum rent discussion.

John, Mr.

So everyone should have a small presentation.

This is more going to be a discussion for the board.

This came up right after we passed our budget and I promise that we will

come back and talk about it.

And I actually hope that we could, you all give me direction today to move forward in a direction that we would then post to begin the comment period.

We would look to make the changes before the year, before the budget.

As you go through the presentation, you'll understand why.

So minimum rents, so how is rent determined?

Residents, when applying for the programs, have the ability to select two different methods for determining rent.

It can be income-based or it can be a flat rent.

A majority of our families do income-based.

And so under income-based, there are still some categories that

really helped us determine what is the total tenant payment rent.

So HUD regulations specify the formula for calculating the total tenant payment for a tenant family.

The TTP is the highest of the following amount to run it to the nearest dollar.

So it can either be 30% of the family's monthly adjusted income, 10% of the family's monthly gross income,

which is then divided by 12 for annual income, welfare rent which is not eligible in Virginia, and a minimum rent which can be set by the housing authority anywhere from between $0 and $50.

The CRHA has the authority to suspend and exempt families from minimum rent when a financial hardship exists.

And HUD has regulations for what they consider a financial hardship.

So the financial impact of making a decision, so right now we currently have 55 families that are currently paying the minimum rent or being charged the minimum rent.

That equates to about $23,100 annually.

Sorry.

Why?

Why is it $35?

It was $25 when I first got here.

HUD made a fuss because the housing authority was in shortfall status.

And so they said, well, you need money.

You're not even charging the max.

You can charge a minimum rents.

You need to raise your rents.

No.

Just because?

And HUD made us increase it.

Yeah.

Sorry, I wasn't trying to jump to the punchline, but I was just trying to understand why it was ever $35.

Yeah.

Yeah, so HUD wanted us to go up to that 50.

We were at 25, and so going to 50 from 25 was doubling it.

And so that really wasn't an option on the table.

The conversation at that time was to do slight increases in the future.

But if you notice,

Okay.

Sorry.

So HUD determines our operating subsidy based upon the number of units we have occupied.

If you are not evicting as many folks, those units stay occupied, so your operating subsidy is higher.

Savings.

So reducing the minimum rent is likely to yield a savings in maintenance and legal services due to a lower number of evictions.

On average, it costs $9,000 to turn a unit.

but in some cases last year we paid upwards of $16,000 to turn a vacant unit after a family has moved out.

On average, it takes approximately four to six weeks to turn a complete unit.

And then there's additional time, a month or two, to release that unit.

West Haven, it will definitely take that full two months, but a site like South First Street doesn't take as long.

But some of the violence that has happened at South First Street has made it so it's a little bit harder to lease even the newer units.

On average we spend more than $1,000 per family to go through the court process and so if you're looking at those two numbers at minimum we're going to spend $10,000 when we elect to evict a family.

And so our eviction statistics from last year, CRHA filed 46 unlawful detainers between January 1st and December 31st.

44 of those unlawful detainers were due to nonpayment of rent.

Two were due to noncompliance and these were violent issues on the sites.

Both of the families that were noncompliance were minimum rent payers.

Of the 44 unlawful detainers that were filed for non-payment of rent, only 21 were actually fully processed.

Two of those 21 were families that were minimum renters.

So in total, four families were evicted that were minimum renters.

If you just saved those two, you would have saved the $20,000 that you are projecting to lose by not charging a minimum rent at all.

In total, CRHA fully processed 23 evictions.

In total, four of them were minimum rent families.

So it's costing us a lot of money to process evictions.

There is language in our ACUP now that states that a hardship could exist when folks are paying minimum rent.

Go ahead.

Maybe I should know this, so I apologize if I don't.

No, it won't because all the, so the only rent that's not income based is the minimum rent because minimum rent, if you have $0, $35 is your rent period.

If you have income, then that 30% is what's determined as your,

your rent.

You don't need to answer it now, but I'm sure it'll be a question.

It's just the nonpayment of rent.

So the ones that weren't minimum rent, of the 23 families that were evicted, $88,000 was the total amount that was owed.

The four families that were minimum rent, the total owed for those families was $1,245.

The two families that were evicted for noncompliance issues, one was three months behind, one was eight months behind, and the two

minimum renters that were just evicted for non-payment of rent.

Yeah.

I just think it's important for us to know that.

And one of those, if you look at the case, it looks like we filed on it with two months behind, but it wasn't because they were late in rent.

Yeah.

So I think that's helpful for us to be armed with that information.

You know, sometimes a narrative gets out there that's inaccurate, and so it's just helpful for us to know the story.

I don't know if I can motion.

Second.

Do you want to ask us all about?

You want to ask us, Maria?

OK. Commissioner Moss?

Agree.

All right, so we'll get this posted and get it posted on our website, get it sent out to our stakeholders.

45 days will be the coming period.

Our goal would be to, after it's passed by you guys, because they'll come back to you as an official policy, after it's passed, to then do

We'll have to do research for all of these families that are currently zero income families so they will actually be paying zero rent at that point.

This change will only be effective on the public housing program initially.

the voucher program has much larger ramifications and I'm still trying to flesh out what that looks like financially and so currently this will only go into effect on the public housing program if it gets deemed that hey there's money there on HCV side to absorb this as well that will come back to you as a proposal before the end of the fiscal year if it's deemed that it's not which it's likely that it's not because we have

113 priority based voucher units coming online at South First Street and 41 at Sixth Street and so we're going to be using up a lot of voucher capacity.

We won't have a lot of funding.

All of those units are going to request more than the average.

So we're currently averaging about 1100 bucks a month per voucher.

There won't be a unit at South First Street or Sixth Street that charges $1100 in rent.

The five bedrooms go for closer to like $3,000 and one bedroom goes for $1,500.

So between $1,500 and $3,000 per unit.

Okay.

Thank you.

I actually expect a little more conversation about the rent piece.

Sorry.

Michael's going to have some discussion.

So just to be clear, before this takes effect, we will have to vote on this again at the

A full board meeting?

Yes.

I guess we've already indicated our direction, but I did have a question of what, if any, tradeoffs are there for not having a minimum rent?

I know we've highlighted potential financial benefits and two families were evicted for nonpayment of rent or minimum rent, which obviously isn't most of the evictions, but it's still two families.

Of course there are.

There's always some negative, but the negative trade-off is what any resident can do right now.

Like if they lose their job,

they come in they come do a research their income their rent goes down and actually in that case we would put them in a hardship exemption so their rent would be zero anyway naturally so the the risk is housing authority not receiving that money in a larger amount of families doing it if that was happened HUD would have to respond because and at that point

but the operating subsidy would have to increase because we've had a reduction in what we're receiving from tenants.

That is the largest risk but I would say there's far more positives with this.

We have evicted families that have paid men on rent,

They can't live at CRHA.

They can't live anywhere else in the city of Charlottesville.

So we have to make sure that is not happening.

And if it is happening, it's happening because we've done everything we can and they cannot be successful in our family, in our community.

We have to protect our other families as well.

So.

No, I think this is the right decision.

Financially, I mean, we have spent a lot more on legal expenses.

We've spent a lot more on turning these units.

Like that $16,000, it's kind of sort of normal because we typically have to go in and replace a bunch of doors, flooring, cabinets, countertops.

And so

That could help us out a lot by itself.

When we file evictions, we're typically filing it for 15 or 20 people.

If five or 10 were removed because they were minimum renters, that's five or 10 less.

Resident Services can then focus on the larger balances, plus our staff can also focus on giving those folks the additional attention that they need.

So I think this is really a win-win, especially for the manpower that we do have.

I mean, Brigid knows, I mean she had four or five different communities, and so on average about half of our folks aren't paying rent.

and if we have 55 minimum rent payers, there's a decent amount of those folks not paying rent.

We just didn't file on them.

So if we did file on them, that would be additional costs.

Any additional questions, sir, for John?

Mr.

Sales?

Nobody's online either.

Okay, that concludes our agenda for today.

All in favor?

Yes.

All opposed?

Thank you.