Housing and Planning Committee Meeting Transcript – 02/12/2019 Title: City of Austin Description: 24/7 Channel: 6 - COAUS Recorded On: 2/12/2019 6:00:00 AM Original Air Date: 2/12/2019 Transcript Generated by SnapStream ================================== [10:10:58 AM] >> Casar:good morning, everyone. I'm Greg Casar, the chairing of the housing and planning committee and I'm convening us this morning. It's February 12, 2019, 10:10 A.M. And we are in city council chambers at city hall. We have a quorum with our new vice chair, councilmember Ellis, our chair in spirit, councilmember Renteria, council members kitchen and harper-madison are sick today and as an advocate of sick time I'm glad they are still at home. We still have a pretty fool meeting. We're joined by councilmember pool, councilmember tovo, councilmember Flannigan and the mayor and I'd like to thank councilmember Flannigan and councilmember alter for your membership on the committee in times past past and of course you're always welcome back. So our first item on the agenda -- first just to lay out the meeting a little bit, we traditionally have our committee meetings for two hours. This one has a really big presentation. We might have lots of questions. So we have the room booked until 1:00 P.M. I don't intend to keep us here until 1:00 P.M. Unless we need to. But wi decided to book it for that long in case folks had that many questions but my goal is to still try to keep the meeting within two hours but most realistically understanding it might be two hours 15 or two hours 30. But, you know, if folks really have questions, we do have the room booked until 1:00, but I don't want to get in the way of anybody having food. So with that our first item of business is approval of the minutes. Item number 1 for our committee meeting back in December. Do I have a motion to approve the minutes? Moved by councilmember Renteria. Seconded by vice chair Ellis. Any objections? Okay. We'll pass that by acclamation and pass the approval of the minutes unanimously. Item number 2 is citizen [10:12:58 AM] communication. We have four Zens tk on items not on the agenda, so we'll call you up. First is Dave piper. Mr. Piper, welcome. You have three minutes. If Fred Lewis would come up to the other poked, yes, ma'am, we'll have you next, Mr. Lewis. >> Hi, Dave piper, president of the zilker neighborhood association. Couple of things, briefly. One was the housing projection for units needed in Austin, and the other is the 6-plex, 60% mfi. So on the housing projection, the number 135000 units has been bantied about, and that's for the five county metro area, according to director Guernsey, but that number keeps getting incorporated into Austin proper. So -- and the reason -- one of the reasons for that -- or couple of reasons was, you know, people want to live in Austin so they'll be driving here anyway and which that's not -- that can't be true, not all of them. A lot of people prefer suburban or rural living and they may drive sometimes to Austin, but it's not gonna be this 135,000, 5-county metro area, it doesn't all in my opinion need to go into Austin proper. For example, apple is putting in a thousand employee up in Williamson county, those people some of them will drive but most won't be driving everyday to Austin. And so we need an accurate count of that estimate, and some sort of distribution how that will fall. [10:14:58 AM] The six-plex, three units 60% mfi -- so I did a lot of rough calculations and I'm not a builder or a cpa, but I came up with a family of three at 60% mfi could afford a little less than a thousand a month rent according to federal guidelines. So if you pencil all this stuff out, the good thing about the six-plex thing is that you have the income distribution there, assuming you're not gonna mix big luxury within 60% mfi so you have a real idea of the income. And then based on the price of land, wherever it is, you should be able to calculate where these things will fall to get some reasonable return on that investment for land, property taxes, and the rent comes in. So I urge you to do that. And the way I was looking at it, I don't see them going into terrytown on dollars lots. It just doesn't pencil out. Where will they fall? Are they gonna land on the cheapest land in Austin? I don't know but that needs to be done. >> Casar: Thank you, Mr. Piper. And I'm happy to call on members, but since we're posted for citizen communication without your topic we really shouldn't deliberate too much on it but if you have some -- >> Flannigan: I don't have a question. Comment for my colleagues. Just to remind the community that the new apple campus is going in the city of Austin, so by definition every person working at that facility will be driving in the city of Austin. That's in district 6. Half of my district is Williamson county, as I often like to remind folks. Of course district 6 is incredibly suburban, maybe as a percentage of the district the most suburban. And I can speak to the many [10:17:00 AM] constituents I have that would live closer in were the housing accessible or affordable. >> Casar: Thank you. Thank you for your testimony and during the presentation when we're posted we can maybe talk more about our housing goal number, which my understanding is only a fragment of the metroplex need. Mr. Lewis. >> Good morning, everybody. As y'all know this topic is a daunting topic. And it's been very difficult for the city to address over the last 20 years. And I don't want to talk about the details of which policy is preferable to another. I wanted to talk about something up at about 30,000 feet, about structural and organizational ways of dealing with these problems. Basically what I wanted to make the point is there are really four problems we're addressing and they're very different problems, and they have very different tools that is making market-rate housing more affordable, dealing with low-income housing that the market will not provide, dealing with displacement, and then the homeless. And my point is simply that we have -- with so many different objectives and so few staff, such different tools that need to be used, we need to set up structures where there are either departments or sections or whatever they're called that are responsible for each of these four items so that there's responsibility and accountability. Dealing with displacement is a much different issue than dealing with low-income housing or market housing. And we want to have people that are dedicated to that particular problem, especially because they're so difficult, and that that's their sole focus. So that they will get it accomplished. Because some of these things are very difficult, they're very complicated and you're trying to deal with not very [10:19:02 AM] much resources. So I wanted y'all to think about how you do organizationally structure the city or neighborhood housing community development so these four different things can be accomplished? That's all I have. >> Casar: Thank you, Mr. Lewis. Cynthia Vasquez is up next and Monica you uzman on the other podium. >> Good morning, my name is Cynthia, I'm in district 3. I've been born ask raised in 78702 hanging by the skin of my teeth. I'm here today to kind of -- well, not to kind of, to remind y'all that I still desist. I had my child when I was 16. No matter how much I think I've prepared him to live his life, he's getting ready to graduate next year from etsa, he doesn't have a choice to come back to my neighborhood and live there. This down payment assistance program that we have with the city of Austin says you cannot exceed $260,000. There is no homes available in 78702 for $260,000. The house next door to me just sold for $500,000. I'd like to remind y'all that I do not want to sell my house, which I have been asked to do by my district rep during his campaign trail. The advice given to us is to sell your property or to rent your property and become an air b&b. That's not what I want. That's not what I want for my kids. I want them to have a choice. So when discussing the Austin strategic housing blueprint, I would like us to pay close attention to the accountability component. There's three points -- $3.2 million in the house trust fund. Who is going keep up with that? Where is that money gonna go [10:21:02 AM] and how are y'all gonna support people like me, who want to come and bring my children back into the neighborhoods where they want to live? Right now, they don't have a choice. So if we could develop a tracking system and an accountability committee to ensure that the housing distribution is equitable and that there should be more affordable housing in east Austin, if that's what the people want, it should not be determined by one person, my district rep, to say we don't want anymore affordable housing in east Austin, which is the position that he sits in. So, again, I'd like y'all to hold each other accountable and remember that we do need to track that money and there are people like me that do want to stay and I do want my children in two years to be able to come back and have a choice about where the heck they want to live in my neighborhood. Because right now it's not an option. That's all I have today. Thank you. >> Casar: Thank you for sharing. And as we go into the item today I think you'll see our goals by district and how we can change those, and there are, I think, high goals being set in areas of displacement. So we'll talk about that. Ms. Guzman. >> Yes, Monica Guzman, resident in district 4. My initial comments are as a member of the equity action team housing committee you. I'm gonna recap some points from a meeting we had last week. The committee's priorities are to establish a tracking system that the public can see, that shows the number of units created, where, and at what level of income restriction or affordability. Part of that they showed the affordable housing inventory. I tested it out for someone I know who has a half time position with a state agency. But still does not -- is not able to find a place to live. I ran the different filters three, four different ways and some of the option that's came up were condos. [10:23:03 AM] No one is gonna find a condo one bedroom for less than $600. It's not possible. Not in this city. So I think more information needs to go in there. Some realistic information, such as the vacancies, the true income restrictions and apartments, not condos, for people who are making less than $20,000 a year. We need separateccounting of local and federal funding for housing. We need to reallocate housing bond money to support more rental assistance and home repair. Three years ago, I was a temp at Austin code tied to a city pilot project. I was working with homeowners about the home repair. Now that I've seen in the past several months about the lack of accountability it makes me feel bad knowing that I was leading people into a path of possible despair and dismay. Luckily, I only had one homeowner that followed up on it and from what I know everything was good for her, but it is still distress to go know that the city does not have accountability or tracking in place when it comes to people's homes, where they live. Housing first is a priority for everybody, whether you're homeless or well to do. If you don't have a home, the rest of your life is probability gonna be chaos. You need a place for you and your fame. The other issue is holding slumlords like the tong family accountable. There's still not enough in place to hold them accountable, bring their properties up to code without being -- putting the tenants at risk of intimidation, of, you know, eviction or deportation or increasing the rent after you do the rehabs. So that's a lot on there. The last one is in the blueprint, it talks about maximizing public land for affordable housing. I think that's great. That's what's being looked at for the Home Depot cruise letter lot. I'm still very upset about the mckalla place. Thank you. >> Casar: Thank you, [10:25:04 AM] Ms. Guzman. Okay. That is all of our speakers for citizen communication unless I've missed someone. Okay. And we'll move on to item number 3. This was an item requested by councilmember kitchen, which is to amend our committee's schedule to add a meeting which will be a joint meeting of the housing committee and the transportation committee. That will be an important meeting, I think, as we coordinate the corridor bond expenditures alongside the $250 million housing bond expenditures, to best align those, and to recognize that as we make corridors safer and more efficient and a better place to live, that that can actually, you know -- 1971 desirability of an area, which is a great thing, we want to make our city a better place to live but that can have impact on housing prices and if we want those to be diverse corridors we need to coordinate those two things. So we need a motion to amend the 2019 housing and planning committee schedule in order to schedule that upcoming meeting. Is there a motion to do so? Vice chair Ellis makes the motion. Councilmember Renteria second it. Any objection? Without objection we'll amend the schedule. Councilmember pool. >> Pool: Could you -- I don't have that handout. >> Casar: The date? >> Pool: Maybe you can let us know. >> Pool: I'm happy to tell you the exact date but then I'd have to pull out my phone and slow down running the meeting. Something will text me what the date is so I don't screw it up. Here we go, Monday, March 11. >> Pool: Great. And that will be in this -- >> Casar: Two. In the boards and commissions. >> Pool: Do you think that will be something that the rest of the dais would want to attend? >> Casar: Yeah, absolutely. I believe councilmember kitchen or my office may have already actually posted that on to the message board but we will make sure to bump that. Folks are nodding. >> Pool: Two. Boards and commissions. [10:27:04 AM] Thank you so much. >> Casar: Okay. Item number 4 is nominations for members of the community development commission and as soon as we get done with that we will be on that last longer item. So there are two pieces of paper that I'm handing out attached. So if you'll hand these two together. They're not actually the same. One more for councilmember pool, if she can get it. Packet of two. And a packet of two. They're not the same. Will you hand both down? They're in sets of two. You can see that we really are doing this on the dais. [ Laughter ] Okay. So y'all will recall that the city recently restructured the way we nominate for the community development commission. In the past there were seats nominated by neighborhoods, and then seats appointed by the mayor. After we restructured that, the council passed an ordinance in consultation with our legal department, giving this committee three public sector nominations and one private sector nomination and giving the health and human services committee two public sector nomination and one private sector nomination, with the goal of not appointing the same people, overlapping, our two cheese. We didn't want health and human services to appoint the same people housing did because we have to appoint seven different people. We've conferred with vice chair Garza of the health committee and now chair harper-madison of the health committee to try to coordinate our nominations. We nominate today. They nominate tomorrow. So the goal was to keep the appointments of district 1, 2, 3, 4 as we have in the past on the last [10:29:06 AM] council, keep the mayor having an appointment, and then that leaves us with two private sector nominations. Texas housers and housing works, as we know, are both priority sector nonprofits that do important work in this area and we wanted to make sure that we did -- that we split those up. One committee appointing one and one committee appointing the other. Karen pop who currently serves on the community development commission has offered to continue to serve and be appointed by the health committee and Shavon who works at housing works would be nominated by this committee to I'm just laying all this out so you can see why the housing committee would appoint council member Renteria and myself so the committee would nominate if two members of the health committee that are districts 1 through 4. So all that being said, if there are questions, I'm happy to answer them. I know that may not have been as clear as I would have wanted to but we had to do it here in committee because I was talking to other members on the health committee which created a quorum so we had to discuss it here. If there are any questions, happy to talk about them. We can change these, of course. But I wanted to lay all that out. If there are no questions, we can make motions. Council member tovo? >> Tovo: Thank you. The language of some of these is different so it's not clear to me, council member Casar, whether you are going to serve yourself or you are going to nominate a representative. On some, it says who is appointed representative will represent and in other cases, it says the mayor. >> Casar: The new ordinance we passed has to have elected officials or their specific representative on it. My understanding legally is that [10:31:07 AM] we have to appoint these elected officials, we have to appoint, for example, council member Renteria or yourself or myself and in practice, each of us then would nominate a representative. >> Tovo: I remember that discussion. I guess looking at the one your committee is taking up today, it says that council member Renteria's appointed representative will represent the interests of district 4. It doesn't have that same language, it just says the mayor. >> Casar: Understood. >> Tovo: But from what we are talking about, it sounds like all of those are really designated representatives of those members of council. >> Casar: I think probably the most legally appropriate, two things, one, you have noticed that yes, those that are adjacent, because we receive monies that are supposed to help the city and the adjacent areas, it's important for us to note who is going to advocate for not just their community but also the etj that is adjacent to them so that's why you will see that next to council member Renteria, Harper madison and Garza's names but grammatically it might be most clear if we nominate council member Renteria for the language to say who will represent the interests or whose appointed representative will represent the interests. Frankly, it really is at our option as nominees to either attend ourselves. That's the intent for us, for it to really be us or a representative. Does that make sense? >> Tovo: Yes, I think so. The same is going to be true across the board. >> Casar: We will mention the same to chair Madison. So if there is no more questions, I would entertain a motion to adopt the resolution for the housing and planning committee with the better grammatical sense that council member tovo has pointed out saying that council member Renteria will represent the interests of both district 3 and the adjacent areas or his appointed representative will represent those interests. [10:33:08 AM] Is there a motion to do so? Moved by council member Renteria, seconded by vice chair Ellis. Without objection, we will adopt that. Thank you, guys. Sorry, I know it's a little complicated but it's the new rules. Okay. We are on to the last item. And on time. This is item number 5 which is a presentation and then discussion. What we'll have is the staff presentation which instead of two hours, will be 20 minutes, and then we have I think two folks here signed up to speak. We will take their comments after that, and then it won't be 11:00 A.M. By then so hopefully we can contain our questions within an hour, hour and a half. >> I think it's still morning. Good morning. Am I on? Okay. Good morning. Director of neighborhood housing and community development. Erica leak, our interim assistant director is here with me, plus an abundance of highly capable housing staff, to present to you the culmination of a lot of work on our part, which really is our work plan for the next one to two years and our implementation plan for the strategic housing blueprints. We are excited to be here today. Before we get too far into it, I wanted to recognize the housing staff that are here today that have spent months working on the information that's been -- that will be presented today and that's been distributed already, so for those folks, can they stand up? I'm serious. Mandy, Gina, Erica, Letitia, Fernando. Anybody else that I forgot? I just want to express my appreciation for this incredibly hard-working team that has really been -- oh, Angie. Smile and wave. That have been working tirelessly to pull all this information together for you [10:35:10 AM] guys today. So we are here today to present our implementation plan for the strategic housing blueprint. When the housing blueprint was adopted in April of 2017, there was direction given to us to go out and create a work plan on how we are going to take all of the strategies that were identified in there and actually turn it into something that affects policy and change in the housing department. That's why we're here today. We are going to also talk about some funding sources and resource needs. We have our draft council districts and corridor affordable housing goals that we're excited to share with you and that we will ultimately be asking for you to adopt as a full council. We are going to be talking about actions necessary to achieve these. Our next steps in some timelines and then you each have a copy of a briefing book that's in front of you that has much, much, much more detail than we're going to go over in this presentation. We're hoping at the end, we will be able to dig into any kind of level of detail that the committee or the committee's guests feel is helpful. So in -- we're here at the intersection of a number of things. We have got, for the first time, I have been with the city for 20 years and I'm very excited to be part of an organization where we have some strategic direction and I think it's a great thing for Austin. We have the adoption of our housing blueprint, we have this incredible opportunity with the passage of $250 million of affordable housing bonds, and we have the, on the horizon immediately, our fiscal year 2019-2023 consolidated plan for our federal funding, which basically is our application for how we are going to spend the next five years of entitlement dollars. And we have hundreds of displacement mitigation recommendations that have come from the community, from several different sources. [10:37:11 AM] And dozens of council resolutions. We spent the last three months kind of taking a step back and trying to see how we can incorporate all of these things into something that is a viable work plan that we can commit to performing with the resources that we will need to get to perform these actions, so that we are being very transparent with the community and being very transparent with you about what it is that we are hoping to accomplish with our housing dollars. So Austin strategic direction 2023 includes implementation of the highest potential impact actions that were identified in the housing blueprint. It speaks to reducing the number of households and businesses displaced from Austin due to unaffordability and to advancing the equity in the city's programs and policies to ensure affordable housing options exist throughout Austin. It also identifies the need to have a response to homelessness and address disparities preventing homelessness and to support housing stability. We have all seen this chart many, many times and will continue to see it probably for the next ten years. But it speaks to the need to create 160,000 affordable units over the next ten years that are affordable below 80% median family income. We also identified five community values in the strategic housing blueprint to prevent households from being priced out of Austin to foster equitable, integrated and diverse communities, to invest in housing for those most in need, to create new and affordable housing choices for all austinites in all parts of Austin and to help austinites reduce household costs. All of the strategies that were included in the strategic housing plan fit into those five community values. We feel like it's important to coordinate and undertake those strategies in a manner that allows us to have as high an [10:39:12 AM] impact across all of these values as we can. So since we adopted the blueprint, we have had a number of studies and community driven recommendations that have come forward, one being the uprooted study done by some folks at the university of Texas. We have -- we are in the process of updating for 2019 our analysis of impediments to fair housing choice. That's part of our requirements for our consolidated plan. With the mayor's task force on institutional racism and systemic inequities, we have the people's plan and recommendations that came forward from the anti-displacement gentrification task force. All of these entities brought forward what amounts to more than 600 different ways that we can crack the nut of displacement. We spent a great deal of time working with our innovation office to help us to lay out all of these recommendations and collapse them and rearrange them and organize them in a way that allows us to have some actionable things and we are excited to include those in our work plan for the next one to two years. We have had all of these different efforts are coming together to bring us to the blueprint implementation strategy and the affordable housing bond implementation strategy. We are in the process of conducting community engagement related to our consolidated plan and I will use this as my opportunity to plug, if you have any events you would like us to come to, we are more than happy to come and bring our message and our survey and talk to your constituents and we welcome that opportunity. Our goal is to bring all of this back and hopefully have some action by council in June of this year on both the consolidated plan and on the affordable housing goals by [10:41:13 AM] district and by mobility bond corridor. So that's kind of the timeline that we're working towards, with just having those actions that require council action to you on June 6th. Erica will take over for a little bit. >> Now we are getting into the specifics of what we have already accomplished related to implementing the strategic housing blueprint and also what our plans are for the next one to two years. Before I get into that, I would like to note that we will have resource needs to be able to implement these plans. So you have probably heard us say before that we have been tasked with really trying to accomplish some fairly major goals within the department through all of the initiatives that director has mentioned. The staffing that we have now is maybe, maybe barely sufficient for what we are doing now. If we are going to take on additional initiatives, we will need additional staff. So we will be working with the finance department to put those proposals into the fiscal year '19-20 budget proposal. Okay. In terms of what we have already been able to complete, as you know, we are very excited that the affordable housing bonds were approved and we have already included modifications to our housing development assistance scoring criteria to be able to align the bond funded programs with the blueprint, with the blueprint goals and we can get more into that. [10:43:15 AM] But with the passage of the bonds that allows us to be able to undertake strategic land banking for affordable housing. Weave already already strengthened the scoring criteria to make sure that the affordable housing is in the locations that council has signaled with the adoption of the blueprint -- the strategic housing blueprint, the scoring criteria also helps support an increased supply in multi-bedroom housing. We have changed the scoring criteria to make sure that people who have issues in terms of their history have better access to affordable housing that's available. We have -- we are supporting the community goal that new affordable housing be in high opportunity areas, that we have more deeply affordable units including those to support people who are exiting from homelessness, that we have more affordable housing for people with disabilities and that affordable housing is near healthful environments. Another area where we have already taken action is trying to seek legislative changes for the low income housing tax credits so that we as a city can leverage those housing tax credits to have them be in the places where council has signaled we want those developments. In addition, we have partnered over the past few years with affordable central Texas and they have established a strike fund to acquire and preserve market rate affordable housing, and they're up I believe into the thousands of units now. So we were instrumental in early conversations about that. It is now a private strike fund, butt's a very important part [10:45:18 AM] of the overall community goals to have affordable housing for people at all income levels. Okay. In terms of what we are hoping to accomplish in the next one to two years, assuming that staffing is available, though some -- not all of them require additional staff, so policy and procedure changes are things that we can undertake without additional staff, so those include improving internal controls for existing programs, that's just an ongoing emphasis on those internal controls to make sure that those programs are working as effectively as possible, and that we have transparency and clear oversight of those. We are asking the whole council in June to adopt geographic specific and mobility corridor affordable housing goals that will continue to guide policy. We are currently working on finalizing recommendations to help to try and improve incentive programs to produce as much affordable housing as possible, and so some of this, we are able to do now. Some of it may be wrapped into potential future land development code changes. Minimizing the displacement of core transit riders, that's being implemented through our housing development programs. Scoring criteria as well as through having mobility corridor program -- mobility corridor goals. Maximizing public property to build or include affordable housing, the affordable housing bonds included approximately $100 million to acquire property for affordable housing and we're already working to identify potential properties for that. [10:47:19 AM] And then the homestead preservation district tax increment reinvestment zone, council took action on that in the last few weeks, and to increase the tax increment on that from 10% to 20%, so we're obviously very supportive of that, and look forward to continuing to implement those tools. In terms of new and expanded programs and services, that will require additional staff, those include expanding the use of community land trusts and other forms of shared equity ownership, continuing to implement the city's fair housing action plan and making sure that we as a city are affirmatively furthering fair housing. We have already started working on creating an educational campaign to empower vulnerable families when buying or selling a home. That was previously called families not flippers, just as a reminder. We are working to develop a data base of affordable housing. We have a better online search tool that's in beta testing phase and we are trying to figure out how to get closer to realtime vacancy information which is the hardest kind of nut to crack there. Increased opportunities for households to reduce utility costs. We have some specific strategies there we will talk about later. We have a number of strategies aimed to help prevent the displacement of low and moderate income homeowners and renters, which those recommendations were identified through the many community reports that have come out in the last year or two. [10:49:20 AM] Same with additional policies to mitigate gentrification. We are continuing the effort to implement a tenant relocation assistance program and will continue to work on that. And then as director truelove mentioned, we really took a look at specific and in some cases, new recommendations that came out of the many displacement mitigation recommendations, and so we are highlighting 15 new displacement mitigation strategies, and again, those fall into a few different buckets. So the policy procedure changes including having a preference policy to prioritize new city subsidized affordable units for income qualified households who are either matched to the size of the unit and/or have ties to the city. We have been working with legal on that. Increasing communities of color participation in nhcd's housing investment recommendations. That's something we are already doing in collaboration with city of Austin's equity action team. Some members of which you have heard from this morning. Also, we have also been working with law to ensure that there are robust tenant protections for rental properties that include city financial support and as I mentioned already under way is our recommendations to streamline and expand programs to serve renters specifically at or below 60% median family income. In terms of new programs and outreach, we will be undertaking [10:51:21 AM] a contract to do outreach to communities of color for our affordable housing to make sure that we're doing a better job of connecting the people who need affordable housing with the affordable housing that we have. We had streamlining the application process for affordable units. We already have a software development company under contract that's working on that with us. And then we will be working very closely with the innovation offices I-team to develop and prototype neighborhood-based outreach to better connect communities, especially gentrifying areas with various services and programs that already exist within the city. And so we are looking forward to that collaboration. Then finally, in terms of new and expanded services, that again came out of the displacement mitigation recommendations, those include modifying and expanding home repair programs in gentrifying areas and the new bonds that were passed will help us to be able to do that. Support tenant organizing and engagement for legal assistance. We are proposing to fund that through a contract, provide tenant relocation assistance and emergency rental assistance. Again, we are planning to fund that through a contract. Land banking and gentrifying areas, we will be able to do that through general obligation bonds, incentivizing the creation of deeply affordable units. We are looking at potentially being able to leverage perhaps both general obligation and housing trust funds to [10:53:21 AM] incentivize those deeply affordable units. Being able to better track affordable properties that are at risk of losing their affordability periods. This is something that we think is a great idea and we will need additional staff to be able to do that. Supporting capacity building for community development corporations. This is to make sure that those community development corporations have the skills to be able to create more affordable housing. And then increasing fair housing enforcement and education through the implementation of our analysis of impediments to fair housing. So those are -- that's kind of the summary of the various programs and policies. In terms of code recommendations, there are a number that we will continue to advocateor. If land development code changes come forward. Those include allowing homeowners to rent a portion of their houses as a separate housing unit, allowing the development of smaller houses on smaller lots, linking housing choices with transportation choices, and changing density bonus programs to increase the number of affordable units created. >> So as Erica mentioned, we have a number of items that we have on our plate, and we recognize that the city is in a somewhat precarious position with revenue caps and that -- so we -- when we think about what we can do and how we would want to be able to do it in the most effective and the most efficient way, in a way that is aligned with best practice, in a way that strengthens our internal controls so we can ensure that [10:55:22 AM] we have success and can stand the test of audits, there will be positions that we will be discussing with city manager's office and with the budget office to help facilitate that. I'm not sure where we are going to end up and what's going to get included in the budget as we move forward, but there's a lot that we think as a city, we should be doing. Those are the recommendations that Erica just presented. If we end up at a point through the 2020 budget process that we're not able to get additional staffing, then we are going to be facing a challenge of trying to figure out what we can do or what we should stop doing if we want to do the things that we're recommending right now. The housing department is largely at capacity with staff, with the workload that we have currently, and it's a challenge to us that we want to ensure that we have, you know, good processes and procedures and good controls and that we're doing everything to the highest level of quality, and a lot of what we do is staff-intensive so that's going to be a recurring theme that you are going to hear, and that we look forward to working with the city manager's office and with the budget office as we move forward through the budget process. Didn't talk about this slide. There are a number of recommendations that were both in the strategic housing blueprint and in the displacement mitigation reports that are really outside of neighborhood housing and community development zone of control. There are things we can influence that we think are important to do, but they are not things that we have the ability to really steer the ship on. So we have collaboration under way with the interdepartmental housing and transit and jobs action team which includes housing, planning and zoning, transportation, economic development, the program office in capital metro, then additional collaboration is under way with the equity office, government relations, office of real estate services, again, economic development, transportation corridor programming, innovation and ctm [10:57:26 AM] to help advance and to try to encourage that the priorities that we identified or that we think have the most impact to the affordability issues that we are facing in Austin. We are working with those groups and we are working to leverage the partnerships through our shared sd23 economic opportunity and affordability strategic outcome group and the performance measures that are contained therein. So we have in our work plan, we have a number of rutions. We have received dozens over the last, you know, two, three, four years related to direction to the housing department, and so the ones that are under way or are still in our estimation haven't been completed through the council item update report system or through the process that we worked through to implement items that have come from council are addressed up here. Largely they are either included in the work plan as something that comes from the strategic housing blueprint or in collaboration with the displacement mitigation measures that are coming forward, or there are a couple that are still in legal review and I think those have had memos that have come out from the department in the not-distant past. So this is more information for council or for the committee to digest as we move forward, but I wanted to highlight that it's there. So we are working with the finance department to develop a funding plan for the next budget cycle that will first of all, provide additional housing trust fund appropriations for affordable housing, and that will provide additional funding to monitor Austin's affordable housing investments, including exploring the creation of a multi-family property tax exemption zone. This is an outcome from an item from council that we communicated back to council [10:59:27 AM] back a number of months ago. So those are a couple of things that are under way in preparation for the next year. We are also continuing to have conversations with the finance department about the use of tax increment financing for affordable housing. We are using the housing trust we're using what we have available to form more short-term displacement measures. We'll go into that in the coming slides, and some recommendations on how we think we can change how we fund the housing trust fund in the future. I wanted to take an opportunity, since I was here, to make sure that the committee and the council have aood understanding of our funding portfolio. It is much greater than what we all think about. We have -- going through this process and this exercise with staff was actually quite eye-opening for us, to make sure we had it all in place. And our goal is to ensure that we have recommendation insist place and strategies for how we're going to deploy all these different funding sources. So we have U.S. Department of housing and urban development entitlement funds in the form of community development block grants and our home partnership funds. Our local funding sources include the housing trust fund, a transfer from general fund resources into the trust fund, the housing assistance fund, the general fund, our general obligation bonds, and then the tax increment reinvestment zone, which is -- will have items coming to you to formally create the board and the actions that will be necessary to deploy those funds in the coming months. We have a number of different fee contributions that help to fund activities in the department. They include density bonus programs, development agreements, planned unit developments, and municipal utility districts. [11:01:29 AM] And recognizing that we have funding from a diverse -- from diverse sources with different requirements, we want to make sure that we're using single -- we want to, when possible, use single funding sources for each program or investment. This allows us to streamline how we do things and ensure that we're meeting all of the requirements that might be associated with those funding sources, such as the requirements that come with utilization of federal funds. We find that if we can streamline and single-source those, then it makes it easier for monitoring in the long-term on those projects. And we want to make sure that we're leveraging funds and maximizing returns on investment. We want to make sure we're responsive to funding restrictions and requirements. When we set up a number of -- if we went into the details on -- which is in your backup, on the number of different density programs, what we're finding is that a lot of them are passed with different sets of restrictions from council. So this one can only be used here, this one can only be used over on that, and we want to make sure that we're very cognizant of that, and that we're taking every opportunity we can to make use of those funds when we have them available. When projects come up that meet the requirements for each of those different funding sources. We have significant grant administration requirements with our federal government funds. And those investments are going to be determined by our consolidated plan outreach and what ultimately gets decided by the city council. We've had the same -- relatively speaking, the same set of programs and investments for our federal funds for the last 15-20 years, and Austin is in a very different place than we were 15 to 20 years ago. And so I think that what we're seeing with respect to feedback from the community so far is pretty different than how we've been spending our dollars. And so I think it's going to lead to an interesting [11:03:30 AM] conversation when we prepare our consolidated plan forunco cil consideration. As far as our local funds, the housing trust fund is one of our -- turns out, after a lot of analysis, probably our most flexible source of funds that we can use. It can be used for displacement mitigation activities, for homelessness, for property and miscellaneous needs, not -- that can't be funded through other sources. Our federal funds have very tight requirements for the level of income that can be served, for example. As to our bond funds. And so our housing trust fund is really our most flexible funding source. Our general obligation bonds are, of course, defined by the requirements as is the tax increment reinvestment zone. And our fee contributions, those we're going to deploy through existing programs or by tract. They're going to be defined by restrictions. We find that there's -- we need to make sure that we're recognizing the need to use those when opportunities arise. If we have a project that's -- could either be funded through general obligation bonds, or we could use fee contributions, and our course of action is going to be to use those fee contributions so that we have the general obligation bonds that can be used by other projects that might not be in that area. And we need to spend funds in a timely fashion. That's an underlying theme and it's of great importance to us in the housing department. When we're looking at the housing trust fund, the current house trust fund amount is determined through a time intensive process of calculating the property taxes on formerly publicly owned land. There was -- when we were talking to our friends in the finance department, we were reminded of a presentation that was given 2013 from the financial services department to council which recommended changing the strategy to, instead, set aside a specific amount per year for the housing trust fund, rather than going through the calculation process. [11:05:31 AM] I think that this is something that we're going to recommend, that we would consider, that allows us to of a little bit more predictability. We could have a multiyear goal, we could say we want to get to X dollars in X number of years, and that would allow staff to really be able to program the dollars and anticipate what's coming. We were fortunate to receive a couple million dollars more in the housing trust fund this current year, but not knowing if that's going to that -- going to happen in future years hinders our ability to employ those dollars. If we could come up with even a graduated scale that would allow us a little bit more assurances, we could program multiyear things out of the housing trust fund and be able to better use those dollars. Specifically for the 2018-2019 current allocations, our recommendation is that we spend at least half on mitigation measures. These funds have already been allocated and unspent funds will roll over into future budgets. We would recommend that we spend -- Austin housing finance corporation owns a number of properties and we're in the process of getting those properties ready for development through a competitive process, but there is always going to be predevelopment type activities that need to occur on property and maintenance. We have to mow the property. We have to take care of it. And we recommend the housing trust fund be the source of funds for that until or future funds -- or a future funding source can be develop. We don't want to spend our bond dollars on develment activity for -- we would rather spend housing trust fund. We want to -- again, recognizing that housing trust fund is our more flexible source of funding, our most flexible source of funding, this is the only way that we could fund any development of housing up to higher mfi levels. [11:07:32 AM] Currently the housing trust fund can actually be spent on housing up to 115% mfi. We don't anticipate that will happen very often. For example, if we buy property with our bond dollars, we can't develop it for more than, you know, the 50 to 80% mfi, so we wouldn't even be able to use housing trust fund for that, but we have had scenarios in the past where there's been a desire to contribute to something that would be funding -- funded at a higher mfi, and the housing trust fund would be the source of funds for that. Then we have a couple of contracts that we have that -- that we have been funding out of the housing trust fund and we recommend continuing to fund those. And those are specifically contracts to - - to further the cause on homelessness, folks -- people experiencing homelessness in Austin. So the specific use of the trust fund, again, in our efforts to be really transparent with you and with the community, this is what we propose using our housing trust fund balance on right now, and that would be a contract to connect low income austinites in gentrifying areas with services, contract for emergency rental assistance, a contract to support tenant organizing and engagement and provide legal and other assistance to tenants facing eviction or displacement, a contract to incentivize -- this would be subsidy to incentivize the creation of deeply affordable units so over and above what might be offered through the general obligation bonds, but basically to -- if you want to think about it, to buy down the level of affordability to get to the deeply affordable level that might not otherwise be there. We want to have a contract for capacity building, for community development corporations. One of the pieces of property that we own is called Doris drive, and it's just across from burnet middle school that we bought from Austin independent school district through their rfp process a year, year and a half ago. We're looking at developing that in-house rather than contracting it out because it is such a small parcel of [11:09:32 AM] land and we could get up to 10 units out there that will be a combination of ownership and rental. And so we would use housing trust fund to facilitate that construction. And then our homelessness contracts, for housing-related services for persons experiencing homelessness. So we talked out the need for staffing. For -- this is specifically to address bond implementation. This is a moving target. Even over the last 24 hours. There's -- in Austin, our policy is that we fund, if we're going to fund staff through general obligation bonds, that they're providing direct services on -- on the bond program or on projects that are happening with the bond. Our -- our projects or our bond dollars are used in a little bit of a different way; right? Because we're not necessarily constructing a new central library, as we've done in the past with bond dollars. But we're working with our partners in the community in providing financing. So we're working with the budget office to figure out how we can or if we can or what we should do to staff -- to fund staff out of the housing bond. We've done some research on what other jurisdictions that have housing bonds do that we just got that back this week, and a lot -- most of the other entities don't really fund staff through their housing bonds. And so we're going to be working with the budget office and with the city manager's office on how that -- how that's going to come to play. We think that what we initially anticipated as being perhaps five positions that were going to be funded out of the housing bond, probably won't be that. I'm not sure what it's going to be. There's, I believe, an item that's going to be coming forward the first council meeting in March on the housing bond, and if we're going to have a budget amendment to request staff, it probably won't come until [11:11:35 AM] a subsequent meeting past March 7th. It will probably be more like March 21st or into a I want to make sure that any decisions we make or any recommendations we make, we're on solid footing with how we're going to administer the bond dollars, and that's just still too fresh in our conversations with the budget office. But we recognize that we are almost quadrupling our funding, that we're trying to deploy, and the team that works the deploy these funds, they are small but they are mighty, and we're going to have to figure out how we're going to be able to handle this increased capacity, if not with charging to the housing bond. So that's still a work in progress. We have our draft council district affordable housing goals, and I'm going to find this page in my presentation because I cannot read because the numbers are cut off on the screen up there. This is what we anticipate having a great deal of conversation with, with the council about. And we can get into the%-úmethodology and we can talk%-úas much about this as the%-úcouncil would like.%-úbut we anticipate $15,000 --%-ú$15,000 -- 15000 units%-úcreated in high opportunity%-úareas, 15,000 units created%-úi N high frequency transit%-úand imagine Austin centers%-úand corridors, 15,000 units%-úin high displacement risk%-úareas and 15,000 affordable%- úhousing units, taking into%-úaccount the geographic%-údispersion of affordable%-úhousing and through that%-úanalysis is how we came up%-úwith the numbers that you%-úsee up on the screen.%- úand then we also came up%-úwith the draft corridor%-úaffordable housing goals for%-úthe corridors that were in%-úthe last mobility bond%-úelection.%-úso actions that are%-únecessary, moving forward,%-úone will be a resolution to%-úadopt the refined blueprint%-úgoals as [11:13:41 AM] called for in the%-úcouncil resolutions that%-úcame with the adoption of%-úthe strategic housing%- úblueprint.%-úand that specifically is why%-úyou see the affordable%-úhousing goals by district%-úand the affordable housing%-úgoals by corridor.%-úwe're also going to be %-úlooking for adoption of the%- úconsolidated plan for our%-úfederal funding, and then%-úthe potential funding for%-úadditional staff in bond%-úappropriations in the coming %-úmonths.%-úwith them be continuing our%-úengagement regarding the%-úpublic plan.%-úin March we have our joint%-úcommittee meeting for%-úmobility and housing and%-úplanning committee.%-úon April 11th, we have a%-úpublic hearing on th E draft%- úconsolidated plan.%-úand then on April 16th, we%-úwill have disc here%-úabout the draft consolidated%-úplan in the housing and%-úplanning committee.%-úin between, March and april,%- úwe'll be going to%-údevelopment commission,%-úzoning and platting,%-úconsideration of jessicaly%- úon the -- consideration of%-úgeographically specific%-úaffordable housing gold.%-úwe hope to be back on%-újune 6th at the full%-úcouncil to adopt the final%-úconsolidated plan and the%-úgoals, keeping in mind our%-úconsolidated plan is due to%-úthe federal government%-úaugust 15th.%-úso we built in time knowing%-úthat we would need to work%-úon programming dollars.%-úso even though it's not due%-úunt il August 15th, we're%-ústill seeking council%-úapproval in June.,, that's the end of our formal presentation. We have details in ur book and on screen, should we want to go into them, on our community and council engagement strategy. More details on -- on our [11:15:41 AM] displacement strategy, affordable housing bond strategy, specific information on acquisition and disposition of property, low-income housing tax credit strategy, our preservation strategy and criteria, legislative change, resources needed, and a whole bunch of stuff on appendices, including the existing conditions, requested item by resolution when we adopted the strategic housing blueprint. Our goal is really to make sure that for all the folks that spent so much time working on those 600-plus recommendations that went into those displacement reports, for lack of a better word, that we're really transparent about what happened to them. We're trying to make sure that if I was on the anti- displacement task force, and I recommended the one on page 15, what happened to the one on page 15, so we're trying to make sure folks can see what happened to the one on page 15. We also have a lot of detailed information on the resolutions that have been passed by council and should we need to access them, we have the resolutions regarding the implementation plan and general bond contract with the voters. So we have it all and we can talk about whatever the council would like to talk about. >> Casar: Thank you so much for that actually short overview -- >> It was a short overview. There are 6 no more slides we could go through if you want. >> Casar: So thank you for all of that. I'm going to take the two folks signed up to speak, then we'll come up to the dais to organize our questions the best we can. So we have Shoshana Krieger, and I believe Mr. Lewis, you also signed up on this, but you don't need to talk on this. Thank you for your earlier comments. I agree with all of them. >> Good morning, everyone. My name is Shoshana Krueger. I'm the project director of tenant action. We organize tenants around [11:17:42 AM] substandard and affordable housing issues here in Austin, largely with city support. I'm here today to talk about item 5, and specifically the fact on renters. As y'all know, we're a majority-renter city. 68% of African American households are renters. 65% of Latino household are renters. And 75% of households who make less than $50,000 a year in Austin are renters, which means that when we're talking about displacement, we have to emphasize renters. This emphasis is often lacking in housing policy documents which come from the city. This can be seen in the first draft of the strategic housing blueprint implementation plan where, in the section for preventing households from being priced out of Austin, renters were noticeably absent. If focus was almost entirely on homeowners and higher income austinites. This appears to have been corrected in the briefing book that we do have objective 1.4 now includes renters in preventing the displacement of low and moderate income austinites. So that is very good. And the displacement mitigation strategies, which appear in the briefing book do appear to emphasize renters more, so that's a good step forward. One area which we're sterned concerned about in terms of having an emphasis on renters is the implementation of the rhda guidelines which are going to impact the dispersement of bond money going towards rental housing. The section in the rhda guidelines has not been revised, actually it has been weakened since a previous version, which this means that renters -- that projects which are funded [11:19:43 AM] with rhda money could, in fact, lead to the displacement of renters and renters in those projects which are being substantially rehabilitated might not have a relocation protections or other anti-displacement protections, which means city money could actually result in the displacement of existing renters. So we would ask that before any city funding, any bond money is -- is allocated, that this be corrected so that we can make sure that the tenant protections are as robust as possible so that existing renters in Austin are allowed to remain in the city. Thank you. >> Casar: Thank you for your testimony and we will definitely ask about that. I think that your goals align with folks on the dais. >> Thank you. >> Casar: Okay. So it's up here to us. We have -- we had a really large set of topics covered in the overview. Ere were topics that were in the briefing book that we didn't even get to in the overview, just counting some of them off my head, it's development of coops, empowerment Zones, tracking of affordability periods, our preference policies, how we coordinate with the strike funds, criminal -- folks with criminal backgrounds being able to get into the housing that we develop, honestly and psh, there are guidelines, just a whole list of things that the staff are thinking about and working on, many of which are in response to community asks and to council resolutions. And I literally just said like the first seven things. So to frame all of that up, I do think that many of us campaigned and talked about how there needed to be a greater emphasis on affordable housing in this city and that we should have been emphasizing it more over the course of decades in order to have been in a better place now than we are, but came to, I do want to recognize how much work the staff has put into this, the staff has stood up. [11:21:44 AM] And I think that this year, and with this presentation, this year is going to be the most aggressive and comprehensive effort on affordable housing, I think, that this city has ever undertaken. And I really appreciate the fact that y'all have laid out your cards on the table through this briefing book of all the different ways that our staff are going to be thinking about this. So before we get into questions, which I have questions that will potentially even be, you know, asking very specific details about particular parts, before we get into that, I just want to recognize the bulk of the work and how important that is and how competitive and aggressive and bold, what the staff have put together is, I think, in response to community -- to community crying out for that, and so that our questions should be taken within that context. So if there are any general comments for the dais, we can take those, and then I do want them to just hear from the dais what topics it is that we want -- folks are interested in covering, so that way, maybe we break down our time on a topic by topic basis, rather than bumping from topic to topic. And members of the committee, harper-madison and kitchen who are both sick and hate not being here, have, prior to this, shot me an email with things that they want to cover. So I'll lay those out, so we can organize ourselves. We can carve out time and make sure we hit them all. >> Tovo: Mr. Chair, if I can say one thing I could have said along the way, when we lay out our work plan, this is not by any stretch of the imagination to say that we have done all the work, solved all the work, found all the answers, know exactly what we're doing with each element of this work plan. These are just things that we think we need to tackle. And there will be discussions along the way, there will be conversations with the community along the way, conversations with members of the dais. It's going to be a work in progress. These are just kind of -- this is the work plan that will allow us to create the individual work plans for [11:23:45 AM] all the different elements. So I just want to make sure that the community is very clear that we're not finished having conversations in general. This is just our way of kind of laying out the agenda, so to speak. >> Casar: Thank you. So I know that councilmember harper-madison and I'm sure others have questions about the district goal stuff, so we'll set some time aside to speak about that. Councilmember kitchen had questions as it relates to seniors, and I do, in particular, have a couple of questions as it relates to the tenant protections that were brought up, the rhda guidelines and wait list policy issues. I think those are examples of potential topics of discussion. Are there questions on the dais -- do you have topics? Councilmember pool. >> Pool: Thanks. I just had one quick question on the presentation, and then that request from the presentation. >> Casar: Great. So maybe we'll just have, if there are clarifying questions on the presentation, maybe we can bundle those together, and then what is the -- do you have a topic for the second request? >> Pool: It's just the Doris drive initiative. It's on page 24. It's in district 7. I just wanted my office to be kept posted on the initiative. >> Casar: Great. I hope that they would. >> Pool: Yeah. >> Casar: So we'll go back to the presentation here in a minute. That sounds like a topic. Councilmember Flannigan? >> Flannigan: Several slides that referenced focusing on areas that are gentrifying, so how do we strike a balance between focusing efforts in those areas and reaching the folks who already got gentrified who want to return. So if we're doing marketing, I mean, how are we not just marketing with people who have held on the longest, as opposed to the folks that really want to come back, and then the reverse of that on the land banking is the land is the most expensive in the gentrifying areas by definition so is that really -- how do we balance that, you know -- >> Casar: I think that that's a really important topic of discussion that we should have publicly around the tensions between [11:25:47 AM] spending our limited dollars on integration, setting up buffers for gentrification, and then who -- how it is that we're bringing folks back. So I think that is worthy of discussion because you all have thought a good bit about that in the book. Mayor. >> Mayor Adler: An additional topic, and I don't know that it needs to be discussed, but just to highlight in terms of the collaboration and the strategic direction, one thing I'd like for us to take a look at is university of Texas has 50,000 students. They house 7500 of them. I know that at the university of Texas, as it was at Texas A&M, a push to try and house more students and deal with that issue because as they -- the housing crisis is hitting the university of Texas and as students move further and further away, graduation rents increase and they lose the cohesiveness of the campus. I just wonder if we should have the university of Texas, given impact they have on housing, as one of our core collaborators, and I wonder if there's a strategy that could be built around the university of Texas. It may be that some of the most efficient changes we could make to affordable housing supply in this city would be to work with the university of Texas to do more housing. It might be cheaper for us to help the university of Texas do that than -- than some of the other partners we have in supplying housing supply in the city. I'd like to see that analyzed. >> Casar: And, mayor, would you -- I think that that request in the question is, would you like -- I'm trying to schedule our time. Would you like for me to schedule some minutes for us to discuss that here, or is that something that you feel like you want to take offline? >> Mayor Adler: I think I've fully discussed that here, and I apologize I'm going to have to leave here momentarily, so I appreciate that. >> Casar: We'll miss you. Thank you. Councilmember tovo. >> Tovo: Two topics I'd like [11:27:47 AM] to discuss in addition to those that have been mentioned are policy/procedure changes, with respect to slide 5, then the affordable housing trust fund proposed changes. >> Casar: Great. Are there others? Vice chair Ellis. >> Ellis: I just kind of wanted to reiterate, talking about bond money, I know there's discussion around new housing, versus repairs that might help tenants stay in homes that are falling out of our housing stock and open space. So I know there were a couple portions of that affordable housing bond that I wanted to kind of see how all of this was going to fit in to our goals for that bond money. >> Casar: Great. Okay. Thank you. So sort of a preservation versus new development question. >> Renteria: What I really wanted to learn is exactly, you know, you mentioned that you needed more staff members. I just wanted to find out, where do you need them and what kind of training are you giving your personnel that y'all do bring on. >> Casar: Councilmember Flannigan. >> Flannigan: So the other kind of thought, as we were going through the slides, was, when we have placed restrictions on our own dollars, based on how redirected them, but entirely within our own definition of rules, to what -- is that really a small part of the bigger question or is it a significant one? It's kind of a scale question. Separate from land code stuff, which is obviously a separate conversation, but really, when we're collecting dollars and the rules on those collections are our own rules, how much of that is really a problem, or is it really small in context of the larger issue. >> Casar: And as I tried -- >> Flannigan: It's worth thinking into. >> Casar: As I tried to organize the conversation, I believe that what you're raising mostly relates to the housing trust fund limitations because my understanding on the fees is [11:29:48 AM] that oftentimes, those have restrictions as they relate to states. We have the most flexibility to set our regulations as they relate to housing trust fund. Then I think next might be puds and muds, and when you're talking about fees -- maybe we should put this in our housing trust fund conversation and see if it expands before that I understand there's also policy changes as it readies to housing trust fund is funded and what rates, but sounds like that's all one topic. >> Tovo: Chair, if I might, I can think of one reimbursement example where, you know, with south central waterfront overlay, that affordable housing stays within that area. So my guess is that may be one of the kinds of programs they're talking about that have specific geographic requirements. So it is a little separate from the housing trust fund. >> Casar: Yeah, you're right. Okay. >> Flannigan: I would add to that, sometimes I hear this related to parkland dedication, I think, where you get the fee-in-lieu thing, but all these tiny little buckets, but you never get to spend them. And if you put them in those buckets for too many years, they become less valuable than if you just spent them somewhere -- so it's really just better understanding the scale of that as a problem, is kind of my question. >> Casar: Councilmember pool. >> Pool: And then I wanted to make sure that in the prioritizing of projects, that both of the rfp properties that are coming up this year, both the home Depot site and the Ryan drive/justin lane site are top priority for potential support from the bonds, for instance, the parks bonds, you know, could potentially be used on those sites, as well as affordable housing monies. And I just want to make sure that the Ryan drive property is part of the conversation. I've seen a couple of instances where the home Depot site has been mentioned along with another site. I don't remember if it was healthsouth or not, but Ryan drive has been on that priority list for quite some time, and it's real close, I think, to having the rfp [11:31:49 AM] come out this year. >> Casar: Great. Okay. So if we cover these topics, I've got them broken down into about ten topics, and if we want to get out by 12:45, then I'm going to try to keep us to some of the topics being three or four minutes so the longer ones can be seven or eight. Yes, councilmember. >> Pool: Can I ask the question, the clarifying question before we get into topics? >> Casar: Yeah. Let's go on -- there's a clarifying question on the presentation. >> Pool: It was on page 21, it was -- I think you were talking about there are items where past ordinances don't now align or there was a quirk that maybe wasn't there at the time but with passage of time or new initiatives, that quirk has surfaced, so there's a misalignment or issue on some of the ordinances and resolutions. So I just wanted to ask, would you bring those to us so that we can resolve them if or when you find that there are either gaps or conflicting elements of ordinances and resolutions that have been passed over time. >> Yes. I will bring those forward. Mostly where I see -- where I see that we're -- that we need to spend some time, I think, thinking -- thinking big thoughts is with respect to our federal dollars, in that we -- we have a consolidated plan that has been the same consolidated plan for the last three cycles of five-year blocks. And so that's one where I think we need to think about and whether we make changes in year one or year two or year four, we need to think about how we might want to -- how we can best utilize -- utilize our dollars there. And the other point where I think we might have some -- where I'm thinking of is it kind of gets more to where councilmember Flannigan was [11:33:50 AM] talking about with respect to how we -- I don't want to say hamstring because that's the wrong word, but where we set restrictions on what we can do with funding, and how that can tie our hands, moving forward. >> Pool: Yeah. And that's the area where I think I'm aligned with what councilmember Flannigan was saying earlier. If you find those, you should bring them to us so that we can resolve them rather than continuing to be hobbled, if indeed we are hobbled. >> Casar: Let's cover that topic now then since we're on it. Councilmember Flannigan, if I understand correctly, your question is just generally, of our funding, how much of it is sitting in small buckets that we're having trouble spending? >> Flannigan: Right. I'm thinking of debates we've had on different zoning cases where there were fees assigned, it's a great debate about if you collect a fee-in-lieu, do you make sure that housing gets built stays nearby the thing you got the fee from, but if the fee you collect is too small and you can't use it, then five years later you're going to get less than you would have gotten -- I mean, it's a scale question. If that's happening infrequently, I'm not necessarily wanting to spend a lot of time debating it. But if it's a significant scale of issue, where if we corrected some of that and had different -- better parameters, then we can actually get a hundred more units, 200 more units, then something may be worth digging more into. >> Casar: Scale of the problem. >> So I don't know that I can say that while we're standing here or sitting here -- >> Flannigan: Right. >> If it's worth addressing. I will say just in our details, we have about 10 different buckets that have been -- that exist because of different fee-in-lieu type scenarios or different density bonuses that get different funding sources. Some of them make sense and some of them are, you know, like downtown density bonus, fees collected from the developments within the cure combining district, restricted to permanent support of housing for the [11:35:50 AM] chronicallien homeless, chronically -- chronically homeless. That's one of them. Developments are stricted to rental or orthopedic housing -- housing within a half mile of each district. We have restrictions on how we can use them. I'm not saying that it's a scale that we need to address, it's something that we need to be cognizant of. When we make decisions. And then, like, for example the grove, to say that five-letter word, and it's -- we have restricted -- so we have promised annual funding -- or we have promised $13 million of future housing trust fund contributions to fund future housing development there, and so that limits us in what -- and that was -- and I think it's going to be an amazing development when we get in it place and the housing is going to be much needed, but as we're making decisions, we need to realize that if we want that affordable housing associated with that particular pud, we have to have $13 million in the future when they come and tell us that they're ready to put that housing on the ground. And so that's something that we're going to have to -- it may not be this year. In fact, it probably won't be this budget process because I think we would have -- I think the time frame for when they need to notify us is around now, for the next year, but in a future year, we're going to have to find that much money to be able to fund that. So we either need to start saving now for that in the future or. >> >> Riley: That one year, if we want to move forward -- will have or if we need to move forward, we're going to have to find the funds for that. We need to make sure that while we in the department are very aware of what the different restrictions are with funding, that may be coming in with fee-in-lieu, and what the different geographic boundaries are that we're dealing with if that's the case, we want to make sure [11:37:51 AM] when we can, that we continue to highlight the importance of those to council so that it doesn't -- we don't move too far from that -- from that memory so that we can make sure that we're prepared for that when it happens, so we don't lose the opportunity to get affordability there. >> Casar: Is it okay, in summary here, if there are things that are within our control, that you think we should change because we could get -- we could better align with the blueprint, you'll let us know what we should change? >> Yeah. We'll look and see if there are N any things, as we're calibrating density bonuses, we will bring that forward there. This is just an opportunity to highlight. >> Casar: Okay. Let's go to the housing trust fund. There's a presentation question. >> Tovo: Just a quick one. I'm sorry, I missed -- I heard a vote on district-based affordable housing goals in June but I missed when our proposed adoption timeline is for the draft -- for the implementation plan. >> So we are actually not recommending that council -- there's -- we're not recommending that we draft -- adopt the actual implementation plan. >> Tovo: Okay. >> And we're recommending that because we know that things change and we don't want to be hamstrung if we say we should do something and after going through all of the process, it turns out being slightly different and the adopted plan says that we're going to do something else, and then we're having to come back to council and change a plan. There's not a requirement with respect to the blueprint beyond the goals. And so that's what we're -- that's what we're recommending that we bring back for formal adoption, is the district-based goals and corridor-based goals. >> Tovo: So I wonder -- I'll have to think about that a little bit, and to the extent that -- and to what extent we might want to provide feedback about the [11:39:53 AM] prioritization, especially since budgeting will be a constraint. Budget will be a constraint. But one kind of general question I have is that I think it might be helpful if we set up a question and answer opportunity, a formal one online for the document. >> Sure. >> Tovo: I know I have probably a dozen questions already. Some of them really too microlevel to ask in this context, but some that might mirror others along the dais. So if that's something that you think is feasible, and you don't need to answer now, we can talk about after, but I'd just throw it out, that might be one way to kind of get that specific level information in a way that we feel our questions have been answered about the prioritization and the actual implementation on some of these. >> I think we can certainly accomplish that. I will see what that looks like, maybe see if I can borrow best practice from how we've handled budget Q and a and talk to them about how that's worked. >> Tovo: That's a great format. But I come it to reading it all. I haven't read all of this in detail. And you may have answered some of those questions. >> No, I understand totally. It's a lot of detail and we recognize that, which is -- but there's -- everything about all of the elements are -- everything is so interrelated that we wanted to -- instead of bringing things piecemeal, we wanted to bring things altogether to have a comprehensive conversation and get ourselves in a competitive kind of mind. >> Tovo: Well, thank you, and huge thanks for all this work. It's really tremendous and exciting. >> Casar: Great. Councilmember Renteria. Do you want to ask your staffing question, the housing trust fund next? >> Renteria: Thank you. I know that the workload, I guess, is increasing in your department, and I really would like to understand exactly what are you going to be needing? >> So, it -- that is something that -- that we've spent a lot of time thinking about and talking about. I've had numbers that have gone up as high as 30. I don't know that that's where I would land. That's something that I will get back to you on in [11:41:55 AM] writing and in consultation with the city manager's office. We have -- I have a very strong desire -- I've been at the housing department for a little more than two and a half years or right at two and a half years, and what I have recognized is that the amount of work that has been put onto this department over the last -- take your pick for how many years we would want to go back -- has been on just a very steep incline. And the fte count, if you look at where we're at now compared to where we were at 15 years ago, we have 15 less positions than we had 15 years ago. And with our bond dollars right now, we've quadrupled our budget just about. And some of that has to do with fluctuations in federal funding. Some has to do with -- you know, there's been some concern, the ftes that we've added over time have been added in the housing trust fund which we don't recommend adding ftes funded out of the housing trust, we would rather use that for supportive programming. We're at capacity with what we can charge as far as positions to our federal grants. And I recognize that our federal grants, while they're pretty secure because they're federal grants, our president has said he would like to defund home and cbg. So when you have half your department funded out of federal grants that are potentially looking at, you know, fluctuations of support, then that's -- you know, it's a thing that we have to consider. We're also recognizing that we've had a number of audits that haven't been the most favorable, that have shown that in the past there have been some problems with controls in the department, and it is every bit my intention to address those, and we have, but that is labor-intensive, and they're not -- it's not staff that can charge to a bond. It's not staff that can [11:43:56 AM] charge to a grant, necessarily. These are staff that need to work, you know, kind of at the general fund level, and we recognize that we have general fund concerns within the city of Austin. So there's a lot of different forces that are coming up against the department. It's not -- you know, we're looking at what we can deliver via contract. Right? And you'll see that in how we're recommending spent tour of the housing trust fund. But when we're talking about expending dollars, I need people to get that in place, and I'm looking at folks to manage those contracts and make sure we're getting what we say we're going to get out of them. So a lot of what we do is really more the overhead level than anything. And so that's -- it's a difficult one to fund, and it's one that we're going to try to figure out, but I don't have an answer today. >> Renteria: Okay. >> Other than if we get to the point, come the budget, and the recommendation from -- or the approved budget or the recommendation from the city manager, we're going to -- it doesn't include additional staffing, then we're going to have some difficult decisions to make about how we can try to address the concerns, and the things that we feel like we need to do, which is what's in our would, plan, versus what we can do with the staff that we have. So it's going to be some difficult conversations that we're going to have to have. >> Renteria: Thank you for that because that's really a concern for me because of what I'm hearing also out in -- by the public, that, you know, there's -- there's some gaps there, that are happening, and so I'm getting more concerned about do y'all have the personnel to meet all the requirement that we're putting on y'all guys. >> It's a concern for me, too. And that's why I want to make sure that we're not biting off more than we can chew, and when we talk about a work plan that almost every conversation that we have about our work plan [11:45:57 AM] comes with, there's a gap in capacity. And it's because we want to make sure that we're managing expectations. I wouldn't be doing my job as the director of this department to not put forward what I think the city needs to be doing to address the affordability issues and the displacement concerns that we have. And I will do what I can to work with our city manager and with the council to try to address the staffing needs that are going to come with that. And we'll work on that between now and June when we put the budget together. >> Renteria: Thank you. >> Casar: Thank you. And it's a good problem to have that we have such will to do stuff and so many ideas, and the money, that we just need to manage it. >> Yes. >> Casar: So my hope is for us to try to get through the housing trust fund question and the question as it relates to sort of open space, and how it interacts with bonds, to get through those questions quickly because I anticipate that the discussion -- the questions councilmember harper- madison had and councilmember Flannigan had might take us a little longer, and I want to get to those next. Councilmember pool? >> Pool: Do we have a question on that list for equitable distribution of the affordable units throughout the city? >> Casar: Yeah, that is definitely a part of this question when we look at the map. >> Pool: Great. I may have something to add onto that. >> Casar: Absolutely. Let's try to do housing trust fund quick and the open space question spic. Councilmember tovo, do you have particulars on sort of their recommendation as it relates to that? >> Tovo: I do. So, with concern -- so I'm going to think a little bit about the recommendation of changing the funding strategy. I heard some concerns about the predictability of those funds, and I'm trying to just get to the heart of what those are because the amount -- can you help me understand what that is? >> Yeah. Absolutely. >> Tovo: I mean, I understand the complexity of calculating it, but in terms of the predictability of funds coming in from that [11:47:58 AM] source, I would think it's extremely predictable because they will still be generating tax revenue. >> Yes. They will still be generating tax revenue, but it's a question of whether that will be directed into the housing trust fund. This current budget that we're in right now, the fiscal year '18-'19 budget, was the first year that the full amount of the housing trust fund was allocated, of what, I guess, the increment -- >> Tovo: Right. >> -- As it should have gone into the housing trust fund has gone into the housing trust fund, if that makes sense. >> Tovo: Yes. >> And that change was well-received and we were very excited -- excited about it, but the increment did not happen in a one-year period. My concern is that when we're looking at all of the pressures that are going to be happening to balance the budget, that one is not -- that one has been influx over the last couple of budgets. So it's -- you know, for us, if we really want to design programs that we want to continue to fund and to -- you know, to address, having that more solidified -- and it may not be able to get more solidified, but as we were talking to folks in the budget office, we were reminded that they had other ideas that we could do things differently if we chose to, to still get us to the -- a target amount for funding for the housing trust fund, be it, you know, 8 million, 10 million, 16 million, whatever the desired amount from council would be. And so we're just - - we recognize that the increase that we received last year, which was -- I want to say about two and a half million, that was one-time money, and there's no guarantee that that additional two and a half million would come back into the housing trust fund this coming year because it's all contingent on how we put the [11:50:00 AM] budget together, in general. So we might just -- it might be beneficial to to have a conversation at a higher level about how we fund that fund, or how we invest in that. >> Tovo: Thank you for explaining that I think what I'm going to think about a little bit is that if I'm remembering correctly, the sustainability fund used to be one source of income for the affordable housing trust fund, and that, too, was subject to budget considerations. And so, you know, I'm not sure that it gives it any more predictability, whether it's through one source or another, if that's seen as vulnerable, it may be removed. So that's just something I'll have to think about a little bit. But I appreciate that. And what I wouldn't want to do is set that at an amount lower than the taxes that would be generated otherwise. So, you know, where we might get several million more if we rely on the tax calculation rather than that standard two million or whatever it turns out to be. >> Yeah. >> Tovo: As a stable funding source. I guess the idea is that it would be baked into the city manager's budget year after year after year. So that does provide maybe a different level of predictability. But, again, I would be concerned that we're not getting as much E affordable housing trust fund as we might be the other way. >> Sure. Our concern is that we - - if we want to ever establish programs that would, you know, run, you know, like our down payment assistance program, like our home rehab loan program, if we want to establish programs out of the housing trust fund, it would be hard to do that and to really program those dollars and staff accordingly to be able to expend those dollars with the variations, without knowing, you know, that there's going to be some consistency in those dollars. And that's what we're trying to get to, is consistency. >> Tovo: So I have the following other questions, and I don't want to -- especially since I don't serve on this committee, I don't want to monopolize the time, but I'll just lay out [11:52:00 AM] the questions, then maybe we can see how much time we have for this particular topic. I'm interested to know what homelessness contracts are proposed to be paid for, if those are some of the existing ones that we're currently funding. I was surprised to see the recommendation that we pay for up to 115% mfi. I understand, though, from your comments that it might be very unusual circumstances, and I assume those would come to us for council discussion and approval. >> Uh-huh. >> Tovo: And then the tenant -- tenant -- oh, I forgot to turn the page, so I will have to leave some of these four outside this of - - for outside this conversation. We provided money for tenant organizing, engagement, and legal assistance. This is a nice increase, so I certainly would want to support that, but one of the things I'm trying to figure out is if we're also -- I just want to maximize our affordable housing trust fund and not necessarily use it to displace what our general fund dollars coming into support that. So I'd be interested in learning a little bit more about how we would capacity-build for community development corporations, whether that's direct allocations or more support services, and generally again, the homelessness contract. So if any of those are quick to answer, that's kind of the substance what I have at the moment on this. >> Casar: I think that we're not going to make it if we get too deep into those, and I do want to get to councilmember Ellis and councilmember pool's questions. But if we can figure out some way for those questions to be answered publicly, I'm interested in the answers as well. >> We'll figure out for some Q and a type thing. >> Mayor Adler: Sure. >> Casar: So let me -- yes, sir. >> Flannigan: Just for clarity sake, I'm not in favor of us prededicating tax dollars to certain sources at all anywhere, unrelated to the -- I'm more [11:54:01 AM] in line with what staff is bringing on this, but not because I don't want to fund at the appropriate level, but I think conceptually, I don't like us tying our hands in any way outside of the budget process, the budget process is where those decisions should be made, and that's all I wanted to add. >> Casar: Thank you. So let me see if I'm synthesizing councilmember pool and vice chair Ellis's questions, if not, please hop in, but there was a question generally about how the housing bond interfaces with the development, open space, and how it is that we're potentially utilizing both development on the housing bond and spending from the open space or parks bond, to make sure that Ryan drive or Home Depot or somewhere else, that we are getting -- that we're researching all of our tools to get both comfortable housing development and quality recreation and open space for the whole -- for the whole community, I think is just generally what I was hearing on that question. Does that make sense? >> So Home Depot and Ryan drive are moving forward through our economic development department. If any development or affordable housing were to go through there, we would -- we would consider that through our rental housing development assistance application process for the awarding of funds. So there's -- we're using our rhda, ohda process as kind of the gatekeeper for how we deploy the bulk of our bond funding. Not the land acquisition. But the -- but the leveraging funds. There was a question, councilmember Ellis, about home repair. We if you look at the way we have anticipated allocating our home repair funds, we expect -- I want to say that's about 18 million over the five years, and we're expecting that to be kind of an upward trajectory where [11:56:01 AM] we allow the folks that participate in that program, which are local nonprofits that are part of our affordable housing coalition, so they can ramp up and staff up accordingly to be able to help us deploy all those dollars over time. We have a lot of information that I think might be of interest to the council on our land acquisition criteria, which I know was some question that councilmember Flannigan asked about how we balance land cost and gentrification, in gentrifying areas, and we can talk through that in more detail if that's what the committee wants. There's a lot of different ways that that conversation can go. So I'm kind of looking for some direction here from -- >> Casar: Sure. It sounds to me what you're saying, there's some priority on the rfp process. I don't know whether we quite got to the heart of the matter of -- in some of these cases where there's going to be open space or green space developed alongside affordable housing, how it is that we are thinking about that. But -- and obviously, since these are going to be competitive processes, if somebody will pay for it for us, we don't have to pie for it. -- to pay for it, but I just wanted to give you guys a chance to sort of talk about park space or open space as it relates to being next to affordable housing development. Because I think that's part -- >> So I may bring up Medina up mandyas well, but our understanding, if there's a parcel the city of Austin wanted to purchase that could potentially have multiple uses, you know, not just for affordable housing, then we would have to identify multiple funding sources to be able to cover the different portions of the property that would have different uses. >> Casar: I see nodding heads. Does that seem to answer -- [11:58:02 AM] >> So specifically our affordable housing bonds need to be -- this is after a conversation with legal -- need to be used for acquisition of property we expect to be developed by affordable -- with affordable housing. If we -- if we purchase this five-acre tract forever and we determine at some point that there's going to be mixed use or some other, you know, non-affordable housing piece, then we would expect through the development that the affordable housing bond would get paid back for the piece that is not affordable housing. But we're going to be going into our acquisition with affordable housing in mind. And if we happen to have, you know, the ability to partner with others, then we definitely will. But our dollars are spent on affordable housing. >> Okay. Yeah. That helps because I know as we're talking about equity between districts and making sure we're all kind of stepping up in the affordable housing or senior housing areas, that there are some districts like mine that are more open to acquisition for green spaces and watershed protection lands where we could double up some of these efforts, since we don't really have those dense corridors out in southwest Austin so much. >> Caar: So the idea being that >> Casar: So the idea being if we were purchasing a five-acre parcel of land but one acre was needed for water protection purposes or one corner was where we really need open space, Baugh parking lot, for affordable housing, we could use multiple streams of funding to acquire that. >> That's correct. >> I teaspoon answers that. Great. So -- I hope that answers that. Great. So if we could pull up the map with district goals I think that's a good context that we could ask councilmember harper-madison's questions and councilmember Flannigan, your questions on how is it that we manage the price of land and gentrifying areas versus. >> Flannigan: Has not is a [12:00:03 PM] key on topic here as well. Councilmember Flannigan, if you want to start there, we can ask that and I can ask the questions that councilmember harper-madison has sent in to me. >> Flannigan: I recall a conversation we had last council meeting where we were fighting over who would get the most affordable housing and I think district 6 is in the lead. [Laughter]. So I'm really proud of that. >> Casar: You don't win yet. >> Flannigan: The game isn't over. I understand. It's very exciting to see the numbers up there. But T question is balancing these investments to -- if we were solely maximizing number of units, then we would put it where the land was cheaper where you could get more as opposed to our displacement of gentrification objectives. So how are we balancing those now? Or what is the staff's intent to try to balance those concerns? >> Casar: Right before you answer I want to note that councilmember harper-madison had the same question. So if you could just go over for us and the public to text actualize in this, -- text text Al ualize this and the goals and gentrification. >> Sure. I'm Jonathan thompsonco. I worked with the consultants that we contracted with to develop the blueprint implementation plan including setting those goals on the initial 60,000 indirect affordable housing units in the adopted blueprint. There were four different categories in which we kind of prioritized the units. The first is 15,000 of those 60,000 units would be in high opportunity areas and these are areas that have high measures of upward mobility and positive socioeconomic outcomes for existing residents in those areas. The second category is based on high frequency transit as well as imagine Austin centers and corridors. Those were pretty much synonymous when we overlap them. [12:02:03 PM] This is looking at getting units within the half mile of these areas and these corridors. To implement imagine Austin and offer deeper levels of affordability because of the location to the transit that's frequent. The next category is 15,000 units in areas that are at risk of displacement, high risk of displacement. These were defined in the UT gentrification study uprooted. So those these were areas where we would try to see those units. And then the last 15,000 units were taking into account where we already have existing affordable housing so this is that maximum geographic disbursion. So the those units would carry a higher percentage of these 15,000 units. So all of this is calculated graphically in using a mapping software to figure out what percentage of each council districts meets these cites and then -- criterias and then spreading the 60,000 units across the area in that way. >> Just to note the last time we had a conversation at the committee about this, there was some concern about taking out like the undevelopable land, and that has been removed from the equation through -- do you want to address that, Jonathan? >> Certainly. Anything like parks and open space has been removed to take into consideration the amount of developable area within these council districts. >> Flannigan: Yeah, that was basically going to be the thing that I asked. It might be also interesting to see the ratio for the -- of units by district based on the amount of land, developable land those districts have. You know, I can look at these numbers and kind of get excited about it. Other folks may feel differently and not understand why some numbers are and others are lower. Just the basics of the land and how it's so different. That would be good to have it presented for the public. >> Casar: Does that generally answer their main question? So I think you did answer two questions that [12:04:03 PM] councilmember harper-madison sent to me, which was talking about the science behind the distribution, which of course is art and science, and hard to do, so we appreciate you trying the best that you can. And that you split the 60,000 units into those four equal buckets. I do have a bit of a question around how much there is overlap between geographic disbursion and high opportunity areas and how much doubling up that really is. I'm going to say that out loud, but it's just considering that so much of the geographic disbursion has to do with high opportunity, are we really splitting it up into four equal buckets or are we in some ways really -- we obviously want to focus on both anti-gentrification and integration. I think that that's unanimously held across the council and the city and the department. To me it seems like it could be a little bit not focusing quite equally on them both when we have -- when geographic disbursion and high opportunity areas get 15,000 and so much of that is going to be the same. So I just want to put that out there and that's something that I think that councilmember harper- madison mentioned. Councilmember Flannigan. >> Flannigan: I would concur with kind of this as a question. I think the hard analysis that we're missing, it may not be possible to be fair to staff, so what is the amount of money required to implement this if I change these percentages? So if I moved more housing out into the edges then I could get it for cheaper because it's cheaper to get the land. If I moved more of those units into gentrifying areas, it would take more Mo because the land is more expensive. That as a balance may not be possible to get that, but I think that's the other half of the equation that we're going to struggle with. >> Casar: I do have one more follow-up on this point and then I'll call on you, councilmember pool, next, which is that councilmember harper-madison had the question that given the [12:06:05 PM] priorities of both mobility and affordability that the district minor incomes seemed small. And in my estimation, nine, five and four seemed small on the mobility number, and there's actually a breakdown document in the backup that y'all sent to us and I wish I could pull up the page for you, and I will perhaps during councilmember pool's question. But the breakdown for transportation -- >> I have that information for you. >> Is this the slide? >> Casar: Is that the -- sorry, hold on. So if you look at this slide, this is anecdotally, generally districts five, four and nine being sort of the north, south, central spine of the city, is where we have the most high frequency transit. I know I will get emails from my community that say they don't have high frequency transit, but in general -- if you look at the spine of the proposed project connect, that really is where we have the most pry frequency transit now. And seeing district 1 having 2.7 times more housing distribution because of that than district 4 or seeing district 5 being so much lower than district 2's, I just wonder what the math is to get us to this. And I could very well be wrong, but one of my observations is that the districts that are -- that might have longer corridors or longer roads or more space, be it district 1 or six or two, might be getting somewhat of a bump just because of the number of -- I don't know if y'all calculate it by lane miles or square acres or what, but it seems to be a bit skewed from districts that might be compact because they're more [12:08:05 PM] dense. So I just wanted to raise that question. >> The one thing I would say is the blueprint is a 10-year plan so we want to look at the numbers not just what we have today in terms of transit, but also where other transit investments are going to be made. So we coordinate very closely with capital metro and their connections 2025 plans to see where they're going to be putting high frequency transit. So we're already talking into account where they're aiming to put that high frequency transit in the calculations of these numbers. >> Casar: I guess my question is do we calculate high frequency transit based on lane miles of hig frequency transit, based on how many buses or how many folks -- how many folks overall live nearby it? Does it make sense if we used a geographic measure why that could actually skew ay from a people-centered metric and more on the particularities of the size of it. >> Yes, it's not based on ridership. In order to standardize all of these, they were used in purely a geographic metrics. There would be a buffer about a half mile around the route and that area would be calculated towards that council district. >> Casar: And I guess the challenge there would be that then if a route is really long because you're on the edge of a city and it's based on how much square mileage there is within a half mile of that -- I think the goal of this is to direct affordable housing development as much -- some of it more that we can towards transit and I think that this actually may sometimes in ways skew it towards places that -- of course the next six to eight years may not have as much as what our plans show. Councilmember Flannigan. Thanks everyone for your patience. >> Flannigan: Yeah. Around I think the hard part of what's combined in this metric is the centers versus corridors and high capacity. In district 6 I have two huge centers? Imagine Austin that will -- huge centers in imagine Austin that will maybe never be served by high frequency transit. It wouldn't qualify as high frequency transit, but I have acres of land in these [12:10:06 PM] centers that would fall fill still in this bucket because it's a center, but I have -- I'm the only district with no corridors and probably the only district that won't have any high capacity transit over the next 10 years, but yet I've still got -- district 6, I have to be careful about that. District 6 is assigned this 1300 units in this bucket even though it really only part of that metric qualifies but for the land area, which is where I got the -- district 6 is the largest by land area so it's also one of the complicating factors. >> Casar: Councilmember pool, did you have a question on this topic? >> Pool: Yeah, on the equitable distribution question further, what mechanism maybe would our housing staff recommend to us to ensure that goals aren't exceeded in some areas and not met in others over the 10-year time frame? I realize that some areas of town it would be easier to get some stuff on the ground, but that's also where the eequity plays in. >> Absolutely. And we've been thinking about that. So in terms of our scoring criteria for our rental housing development assistance program and ownership housing development assistance program, right now where there is still a need for units to meet particular goals, those -- the developments that provide units that meet those goals will be given additional points as part of the scoring criteria. However, if at some point, you know, we do an amazing job as a city and are able to meet specific goals in specific areas, that means we should be changing the scoring criteria for those programs to say, okay, you know, we've taken care of this area and now we need to focus in other areas. >> Pool: That's great. [12:12:07 PM] So the actual assessments will be living documents as well. >> Absolutely. >> Pool: That's great. And then just the last question on equity. Do you feel like we have good equity at the starting line for our corridors where the affordable units would be built? And I guess I am asking for your opinion on the corridor plan that was passed ago that's the basis of the imagine Austin. >> You're actually talking about where where the corridors are? >> Pool: Yes. That's where this is all predicated on, right? >> Right. So it's both imagine Austin centers and corridors as well as high frequency transit corridors. You know, it seemed like council was starting to have interesting conversations about that at the end of the codenext process and about whether there should potentially be additional corridors added to imagine Austin, and I think that is a great question. That I would recommend that council continue that discussion. >> Casar: And I think that in the end that discussion is one for us to have. It's a hard run to have. But at the end what this document is regardless of whether there are corridors there or not you have a geographically disbursion goal. >> Pool: Exactly. And inch the fact that this will continue to be a living document and the formula itself will be revisited on a regular basis is really going to mean the success of this will be more likely to get the equity where we need it, to get the distribution equitable is what I mean by that. >> Yes. [12:14:08 PM] And we do anticipate at some point we will need to revisit the goals. The living document that we're envisioning is just as much our rental housing assistance criteria, scoring guidelines and criteria there. That's going to be our way to advertise to the affordable housing developers where we want and what our interests are. So that's going to be our biggest ability to drive development where we wanted to drive it. >> Or try. The city has been trying for decades to drive development where we want it. >> I guess to add one more little bit of information to this. I a reminder that when we did an estimate of how much it would cost to create the affordable housing for which the goals are set in the blueprint, we estimated that between six billion with a B and 11 billion with a B, so continued to realize that these are very ambitious goals. And we will have to continue to work as a community to figure out additional ways that we can create these units. >> Casar: My last comment on this issue and then I'll make sure that I've asked all of councilmember harper-madison's questions, is that we've been working on this. You'll present this one more at housing committee and present it again. I think we're getting closer to getting us there. My -- I still have concerns about whether we are doubling up a little bit on that if we're trying to break it down evenly, 15 K, 15 K, 15 K, 15 K, then we might be doubling up a little bit on two of those. I take councilmember Flannigan's point about imagine Austin corridors and centers being part of this -- of what guides this. When we bundle that in next to transit and when the transit is measured by lane miles I don't know if we're actually getting to the goal of really trying to direct affordable housing units next to our transit [12:16:10 PM] investments because we know -- we already have a map from cap metro about really where the next six years or eight years of really big transit investments are planning to go and those are going to be fewer lane miles, but are going to carry a lot more people. And I'd rather put more affordable housing next to the best public transit that we have that carries the most people most reliably than a transit lane that is really far -- that is really far out in counting that extra. And then finally, as it relate to that transit, we'll have our joint planning and housing committee meeting, but some of those investments will necessarily create desirability and therefore hurt the affordability of housing and so again I think there's -- there needs to be a lot of forward thinking about how do we focus our affordable housing investments next to where we're planning transit and I just don't know if this formula gets us all the way there on that one. And the last thing I will mention is we can meet these goals through spending in the hcra guidelines but also through the affordable housing housing programs, and some places where our dollars will never get us there it will take so many dollars, that might be where we need to be setting -- where we're trying to hit this goal through this expensive part of town through some of our bonus units and we'll be spending dollars in places where we're not getting -- aren't gentrifying quite yet so we're not going to get bonus unit because if there's not stuff getting built. So figuring out where it is that we bifurcate spending versus incentive programs I think is an important part of this. Councilmember harper-madison's last question on this was how much are we going for in production versus preservation? That's one question she sent in that I had not asked. >> So I don't know that -- I don't know that we have an answer to production versus preservation. >> Casar: Is the answer though that of our 60,000 unit goal that is 60,000 [12:18:10 PM] produced and preserved? >> Correct. It's both. And this gets a little bit at how we're focusing staff and so we've certainly heard from council the desire to be able to work with partners, to preserve more of the existing low income housing tax credit properties that have expiring affordability periods and that is something that's in our short-term plan, but again we don't really have the staff capacity to do that at present. So we will have to figure out if we don't get additional staff, you know, what should we stop doing to be able to focus more in that area? I guess one other note I'd add there is that because of the low income housing tax credit programs, that is one of the -- one of the best ways for us to be able to leverage our bond funds, and in those cases, you know, we only end up putting -- I think our average is approximately $40,000 per unit into properties with nine percent tax credits. If we're -- if we were to try to preserve a property that didn't have that tax credit leveraging, the price per unit to be able to preserve those units would likely be significantly higher. So that's -- that's part of the discussion. It's not an easy discussion. Itomething that we just have to -- we have to consider. >> And there is -- if you look in your briefing book [12:20:10 PM] for more information on our preservation strategy, it starts on page 101, 102 before tab a, so this is kind of a new focus that we would be interested should we get staffing that we would be interested in devoting attention to. Being more proactive on existing. >> The appendix B page 62 is where you see the breakdown by district by category. It's really very interesting. Page 62 of appendix B. And really that whole appendix is very interesting. As I was flipping through it just now seeing gaps in data, the school quality page ignores all of the Williamson county areas of my district, which are very high quality schools. But then you can go into other areas and see where maybe there's gaps on the other opposite side, like councilmember Casar, you're talking about where we're measuring equitably a transit line that goes way out over here versus one -- on the end it's probably -- good on this side, bad on that side all evens out in the end would be my guess, but it's very fascinating information to see it all broken down at this level. >> And the methodology that we've used and the details for coming up with the goals is here in appendix B. We took the feedback that we got from the first round of conversations, we've had this version out for a number of weeks or months for public comment. So we're -- we're open to more suggestions, but it is -- this is a difficult one to try to figure out. We're trying to really come up with objective ways to assign numerical values, and that's tough. >> Councilmember tovo. >> Tovo: Since we're talking about preservation, we passed a resolution talking about developing criteria for the acquisition of existing affordable [12:22:11 PM] housing and I know that the memo or the inner discussions, the criteria is going to be part -- is somewhere part of the blueprint implementation. I just wanted to get some guidance as to where that is. >> So Mandy is going to come up and here going to pull up some information on the acquisition strategy. >> Is this on. Mandy de mayo. Mandy de mayo, community development administrator. So when we started contemplating as you all know part of the 250 million affordable housing bond is $100 million roughly for land acquisition and we started looking at how we want to prioritize that land acquisition strategy. I should note in our 2013 bonds we did, Rosie mentioned, we did actually acquire two aid properties, [indiscernible] In district 7 and then Tannehill in district 1 as well. This is not the first time we have looked toward acquisition of other public partners property. Our strategy for land acquisition is broken down into much -- much more details are in the briefing book. Raw land for acquisition and future development of affordable housing as Rosie mentioned, primarily we will be focused oaffordable housing development, although there may be situations in which it may be appropriate for a mix of parkland, a mix of commercial development in which case we would be working with our friends in pard or economic development in those cases. We are also looking at preservation of market rate and expiring tax credits, which I think is what you wanted to focus on. >> Tovo: Right. In terms of what I'm looking for is the development of the criteria for number two so that as happens periodically, as we see in a complex in my district or someone else's district that we know is vulnerable to sale, do we have an existing [12:24:11 PM] matrix that -- >> We do -- >> That our staff can use to acquire that if it it seems appropriate. And I sensed it was somewhere here, but I just couldn't -- >> We actually have developed screening criteria in anticipation of land acquisition of the $100 million for land acquisition. It is really based on what we call our [indiscernible] Rental housing screening criteria. So there are a lot of these that will look familiar to you. High opportunity gentrifying areas, we're constantly balancing those areas. What is a gentrifying area. Access to amenities, mobility bond corridors, the new overlay we've been looking at and we're still trying to wrap our arms around what are this means is an opportunity zone, whether or not it is located, we do as y'all know, we do have some opportunity Zones sprinkled throughout the city of Austin. And whether or not that would be an opportunity for outside investment into a property. >> Tovo: Thank you very much. >> We are right now -- also we have mooped all of our affordable housingf our partners with tdhca, our state financing agency, hud properties, haca, the housing authority of Travis county and then our subsidized properties. So we have kind of consolidated all of that information and we are looking at all of the expiration periods of the affordability periods for those properties. So we're able to hone in on what is the -- what is anticipated to be expiring in the coming years. What we know is that we cannot wait until something is about to expire three months from now. Even a year from now, the deal time is two to three years so we can kind of assess the property for -- for whether or not we would be interested in working with partners to acquire this property. Course lining up all the partners to make this a reality. >> Tovo: Thank you. [12:26:12 PM] This is super helpful. I appreciate it. >> And that's all in written form in page 79 through I think 94. So -- of your briefing book. >> So this topic on this land area versus people served calculation issue, when we're thinking about conservation or on the units in high displacement areas, if you would look as we calculate how many units we're going to do and in which district, whether or not we're measuring again square miles of area in a census tract designated and up route rooted or are we talking about how many people? Because then there are -- again, district 1 is more spread out and so if we're calculating it by square miles we may not be actually calculating the number of people at risk of displacement compared to, say, a more downtown adjacent portion of district 3. So again, I'm just always trying to figure out are we doing it by people served or square mileage? And I do want to really emphasize again that if we look at some of the susceptible tracts we can get more bang for our buck and be thinking ahead of gentrification. And I know that can be challenging, but really looking at susceptible as opposed to sometimes late or continued loss may be the way for us to go. Okay. On topics that are left, I still had the hrda guidelines question as raised by Ms. Kreiger. Councilmember tovo, hi something about policy procedure as a topic that I had scribbled down, but maybe as we ask the hrac question we can know whether we covered that already. My two questions as it relates to the rental housing development assistance guidelines and rules are, one, are we planning on including spending any of this bond money in a way that would [12:28:13 PM] not include the tenant protections that we've been talking about? Be that including that in loan documents or hrda guidelines, where are we in that process? >> The short answer is no, the tenant protections will be incorporated. We have been working over the last year, and I appreciate Ms. Kreiger's comments. We've been working with a variety of stakeholders in trying to meet all the community needs with respect to the deployment of of our rental housing development sis sense funds. We anticipate that our first signed loans utilizing general obligation bonds will be this August, so August of 2019. When we launched our revised hrda scoring criteria, which again was the result of about a year of stakeholder process and revision incorporating a variety of different perspectives and inputs, we at the same time sent off to our law department the recommendation from a variety of stakeholders, including Basta, some revictimses and strengthening of tenant protection. Those recommendations also came from city council. Our law department is in the process of reviewing those and incorporating them. Our request was to incorporate them into the loan documents because that would make those requirements more enforceable rather than having them housed solely within our policy guidelines. We anticipate further conversations with various stakeholders in the month of March probably, and a review -- a comprehensive review of the loan documents around that had same time as well. So none of the loan documents will be executed without having those tenant protections embedded. >> Casar: So we will have them -- so our goal, which we'll hold ourselves to as having the tenant protections being enforced. >> That is correct. >> Casar: Great. Okay. My other question as it related to hdra is about scoring but I don't know if there's any other questions about that issue. [12:30:13 PM] So in our last committee meeting we had talked about whether we had started testing out what projects projects would score well and which wouldn't. If you had any other comments about that we can do it offline after this meeting. >> I will tell you our first application deadline under these new scoring criteria closed already. We had 13 applications and we're really in the process of going through those applications right now. Some from more familiar players, some are new players. We're really pulling all of that information together. Our staff, we have a cross televisional group that will be doing the underwriting for the -- and a comprehensive review of all of the applications and then of course those recommendations based on the scoring will go to our housing investment review committee, which is comprised of folks from affordable housing, and our affordable housing, real estate backgrounds, as well as two members of the community development commission. We are also working with the equity action team, housing working group on figuring out the best and most effective way to incorporate additional folks into that review process. So those would not come to you probably the earliest they would come to you for approval, whatever the recommendation is, would be April may time frame. >> Casar: Okay, thank you. Well, if we get this -- any last questions out in the next 10 minutes we'll have hit the two and a half hour goal. Any more questions? Councilmember tovo. >> Tovo: You asked and we had answered one of the questions I had with regard to the policy procedure changes noted on slide 13. I know there's been a lot of interest and a lot of support from council in the preference policy and we did get a memo yesterday, an attorney client memo and I've requested along with -- I believe with support of another councilmember an executive session at our very next council meeting so that we can talk about kind [12:32:14 PM] of the next step onhat. E I think that preference policy relates also to the waitlist issue that you've had in your presentation and moral that those potentially could be worked together I think would probably serve the most people in ways that if somebody has been displaced from our city that we could try to find ways to get them into affordable housing if somebody is a refugee fleeing violence that we can do our best, or somebody fleeing domestic violence, there are ways that we can make sure and have an executive session on it, but the best way that we can help those folks that are facing a variety of sometimes intersecting challenges would be to -- to me would be ideal to not create a waitlist process over here that isn't talking to our right to turn, right to stay preferences. >> Tovo: Sure and family size. So that we can meet our goals on that. >> Casar: There are families dealing with those intersecting oppressions. Anything else? The very last one was sent to me by councilmember kitchen, which which was just to speak to this issue in light of the age friendly action plan and our plan to support seniors. And with that then we'll wrap. >> Sure. Mandy de mayo again. I'm actually the spock for the age friendly action plan so I've been involved in some of those conversations and last Friday presented to want joint mayor's committee on people with disabilities and the commission on seniors about this issue. There were a lot of questions about our rental housing development assistance program and how we incentivize specifically housing for people with disabilities and for seniors. We do not have specific embedded within our scoring [12:34:15 PM] criteria, specific incentives, per se, for senior housing. We based our scoring criteria specifically on the strategic housing blueprint and the goals that were specifically called for in the housing blueprint, specifically transit. I think we're calling it multigenerational housing now, previously family friend friendly housing. Those were all developed into our criteria. What I have told the commission, though, is nothing in our scoring criteria precludes or inhibits senior housing. And in fact, several of our most high profile Roda projects are senior housing and I pointed to a development in the Mueller development. We currently have under construction nightingale, which is in the good night ranch pud and then one of our larger investments is the rbj redevelopment, all of which are senior housing and we certainly encourage and recognize that there's an enormous need and a growing need for senior housing. But we do not explicitly have something called out in our rodha guidelines for senior housing. >> Tovo: Any other questions? Thanks to everyone from community that watched online or came out here today. I think that it's left that we're thinking of how to steward the city's dollars wisely and how to take on the really big challenge that we face. I feel really confident in this council's sort of united purpose around making this year a year that we address affordable housing crisis head on in ways that we never have before and take the most aggressive and comprehensive approach on affordable housing that the city has ever seen. So thanks to the staff who are working on that alongside us. [12:36:16 PM] >> I know you're trying to wrap up, but we would like to ask a clarifying question. We've had a lot of conversation about goals. Is the housing committee asking us to make another run at producing the corridor and/or district based goals or are we just getting feedback. What -- we're going to go through the question and answer, figure out how to put that out there to do questions and answers, but especially in preparation -- I know councilmember kitchen is not here for the March 11th meeting with the mobility committee. We want to make sure that we're preparing appropriately. >> Casar: I feel comfortable if the committee here feels comfortable on just having allowed us to give some I want, there might be further input at the joint meeting. And if you want to bring that up to council so that you're tweaking things sort of listening to -- you're able to visit with councilmembers and tweak it after you've heard our input today and here input from that meeting, then that is -- that seems fine to me because I don't think we asked the councilmembers to be ready to vote on a specific recommendation today. And I think there was enough information today that you guys may choose to make modifications. >> Okay. We just wanted to make sure that we were clear on our marching orders. >> Yeah. I was interpreting it as more of where do we get these numbers from and how are they approached and maybe that's more just dialogue of us understanding the background and the decision- making process through it. >> Casar: Okay. The last item on our agenda is items to discuss at future meetings. We can always discuss this as a committee, but wanted to lay it out as an item in case there's anything of -- that you want to raise now. Okay. Then with that I will adjourn today's meeting. Thank you to everyone.