i'm going to get started we don't have microphone so if anyone needs us to speak up just let us know and we will try to project a little bit better for you my name is heather carrington i'm the community and economic development officer for the city of w and in that role i a service a staff liaison to the housing commission so on behalf of the housing commission i'd like to welcome you all and thank you for being here for housing policy discussion the housing commission over the past was stood up about a year ago and over the past year we've really been charged with looking at goals in alignment with the strategic vision for the city primarily we've been looking at ensuring that we continue to be an affordable city for housing so that we have a mix of high quality safe healthy housing for people and of in a variety of different formats over the past year we've looked at a lot of data and got a sense of what the current conditions are and as a result of that we've identified some of the gaps in the housing in our community and thus far the commission has recommended that we put in place a replacement ordinance for housing and also an affordable housing trust fund in the next thing that we're going to be considering at our next meeting which by the way they're all open to the public and they're held on the fourth monday of every month so please join us if you're interested will be looking at inclusionary zoning or i z at our next meeting so we thought it would be a good time to really take a moment to educate ourselves in the community about the ordinances that we're considering about the policies about the incentives that we could potentially be using and we pulled together a really whiz bang and panel of experts over here so we're lucky to have the panel that we have and we have i can just look over there not everyone can come out for an evening meeting we are live streaming this meeting so anyone can watch it from home it's being streamed now and it also is being recorded so it's available for people to watch later so i i think it's important to get a lot of questions on the table and have that information available for the community so people are interested who are watching at home please feel free to come into the next housing commission meeting and share your opinion with us that is going to be on monday the twenty second of october so i'm going to just briefly introduce the panelists that we had tonight we have michael monte from champlain housing trust ehrhardt mica who has to sit next to him apparently which was a problem  redstone the discussion site will be a targeted look at the policies and tools that the housing commission is considering it will follow a q and a format and with the panelists taking questions from the audience but to start off i'd like to have each panelist introduce yourself the organization that you represent and what you've been working on primarily with housing recently and i'm going to start down at the end with brian as father said i'm brian pine i'm the city counselor in ward three which is the western half of the old north and to go all the way down to king street and it covers the waterfront as well so it's a pretty pretty broad and diverse part of the city for currently i work at the vermont energy investment corporation with a focus on moving financial barriers to greater energy efficiency generally in affordable housing so it's a it's a position which brings my background in affordable housing from eighteen years a somewhat but both of policies in that in the programs of the city were my responsibility prior to that i worked as a director of lending at the group called the vermont community loan fund where i was on the financing side of affordable housing and  interestingly enough most of the work i did before sort of after college before having like a real job was political activism around the housing issue and so many of the ordinances i ended up having to implement were ordered says that i was involved in organizing and petitioning the city council to pass so it just so happened that i was that person who ended up being able to do that i'm talking rowing some housing program manager for the city those my current position is the housing program manager so i administer the housing trust fund as well as the inclusionary zoning ordinance for the city burlington and i dabble in the replacement housing ordinance as well in addition to those things i manage the affordable housing dollars for a new development that the city permitting gets i am michael monte i'm the chief trust right now is probably the largest nonprofit and the northwest from out research three counties about three thousand apartments six hundred plus shared equity homes a lending program counseling an education program and we do everything from homelessness to homeownership and in that range of activities right now we have one hundred thirty six apartments going up in two different locations which is a decent amount thanks to a state bond but we need state fund money just and we'll have a press conference tomorrow about that promoting and pushing for additional state phones that was able to happen because they're stable and we have we have been welcome to the city  corporation so these guys over for his ations that are also members of our statewide coalition follow the state budget follow housing policy on a statewide level fall a lot of different housing legislation having to do not just with  affordable housing though because housing is central and foundational branches out into domestic violence issues homelessness certainly mental health because everybody needs housing needs affordable housing say stable informal housing to succeed in their lives operated or managed by the champlain housing trust in the area and before that i actually worked for the city of new ski for many years i was started off as a housing rehab specialist for the city back in the early eighty's and eventually  development director so work for the ski for somewhere around eight or ten years rehab i think a couple hundred homes existing homes of local residents are both homeownership as well as as well as rental housing and it was also on the city council during the door that we're trying to figure out what to do with along with what used to be the peking duck houses know the millhouse residential complex we've got one ten west canal street where to encounter regional planning is based we've  got river house and river run down on your spare place and a new side of downtown we bought the when you ski block last year and renovating that building and a couple of other buildings on east allen street  got a big warehouse down on elm street and i'm sure i'm missing something what we love when you ski we've done a lot of work here and we hope to continue to do more and more work here i personally live in the north and in burlington and i feel very close to a new ski is a very similar community to where i live i'm here almost more frequently than i am downtown my personal time  job in vermont was working in development at housing vermont nonprofit partners with groups like champlain housing trust building affordable housing all over the state of vermont they do low income housing tax credit syndication as well which is a really complicated financial instrument that helps build most of the affordable housing that we see statewide so i come from the affordable housing world i understand that stuff pretty well  but also have the market rate for profit experience right thank you all i'd like to introduce a few people who are here tonight before we get started first of all this is robert malarky who is the chair of the palace of foreign here as well so thank you for being here all of you so this is going to i'm sorry hoodlums it's going to be a q and a so if there are questions in the audience please feel free to raise your hands and we will call on you and have the questions answered for you blair pm right i'm going to start with what i think are some basic things that we should cover in this kind of a conversation what are we talking about in the first place what is a replacement organise so i think probably i'm going to go city of burlington with that just because you have a replacement ordinance and if you could speak to that a little bit basically what does it do what does it do what's it there for or demolished that the the owner of the property essentially needs to make restitution to the housing trust fund which will help in the creation of a new affordable unit that's broadly speaking how it works in terms of the amount of that that actually is triggered by that it's a fairly calm calculation but and it's it's not something that we see a huge amount of in the city of atlanta and we see a couple of since i've been involved with that ordinance i think we've seen it three times and most of the most recent time that we saw the pain it was about twenty five thousand dollars so it's not anywhere close to being what it will take to create a new unit but it it does provide some important subsidy through the trust fund and i would just you know just had the ordinance was in response to the conversion of lots of buildings that were residential to nonresidents the use is somewhat demolition but more the conversion side and it was intended to really be a disincentive a little bit of a you know a little bit of a stick in the marketplace to say you know if you're going to remove housing we want to replace it and if you can't replace it we want we're going to require to pay the housing trust fund for someone else to replace it and it had a bit of a chilling effect which really was the intent on the council is pretty clear about that that the rip your nose was intended to really hold onto our had limited housing supply recognizing it's really difficult expensive and with limited land and all the challenges of building new we should retain as much housing as we have and not allow it to be lost even due to other market forces so it really does it wasn't intended to generate funding for housing but that is what ultimately is the penalty for it no  n so when you replace you organise to replace the ordinance just within the house or does it have to be affordable well i think since it goes to the housing trust fund under the ordinance and  fund has a priority for permanently affordable housing then i think the effect is that it goes but if you put your private owner who does the removal rip you need to replace it with actually unit that is affordable to household at sixty five percent of median so it does require you to get into providing affordable housing that you may not have been providing before and that's actually a requirement as it can't have been an affordable unit for the previous bank it's two years i'm losing track of the exact details it's for some pretty time it cannot have been in affordably unit and you could actually go to the burlington housing authority as an owner and say i'd like to make this a section eight apartment and that would qualify so that sort of one way to deal with part of the background for this was you know there were a lot of pressures in the in the eighty's from the institutions mainly the university of vermont and university of vermont was buying up property in the district that i wanted to prep resenting zidan property off the market it's not always affordable but it was residential and we had and still have an affordable housing problem in in burlington and so the offices and and by combining law firms and converted into law offices as well so the idea was to try and prevent some of that from happening and prevent and rhodesian of our already challenged housing stock we just stop talking just start talking yeah all right let me not so this is an incredibly important ordinance if there was a housing replacement ordinance in the city of south burlington or the city of essex right were that got torn down and replaced with very high end housing by the fairgrounds yes of those if this replacements was in those locations at this time there would be a net increase of new affordable well first of all those people might have when they were displaced might have had a place to go work i think there's probably other things that they haven't so that they're reaping the tearing down of the housing as well besides just one ordinance but that's kind of a critical ordinance when it comes to preserving some of the existing portable housing or the naturally affordable housing of existing right now and it's a it's something to consider i don't know when a ski has those pressures but certainly that is that has occurred in a couple of occasions in the last two or three years and there are that's a couple hundred  s a couple hundred portman's another example is all the housing that's been torn down around the airport itself for only ten had had a demolition replacement ordinance could very well been that the federal government might have been helping to pay into  city had to pay it to pay itself basing to the trust fund for that property and then flynn feeder got a credibility that had some apartments in it and they had to pay it and they were really pleased about that because of their sort of public purpose but it has to apply evenly so it's applied so so yeah i mean i think you know you've heard a lot about what burlington has dined and i think that the important thing with all of these kinds of ordinance considerations is there is no one size fits all you know what you have to do when you ski is look at what are the issues in when you ski and how do we craft ordinances and policies to address those issues so the first question with housing replacement is is is when you see losing houses are people tearing down houses and not replacing them are people taking houses and converting them into lawyers offices and dentists offices and things like that you may identify that this isn't a problem when you ski and that maybe you don't need a housing replacement ordinance but you know i think the you know the sort of the economic theory here is supply and demand right we have a supply constrained housing market across the board and when you ski burlington all of to new county we have a supply constrained market so we don't want to have a situation it's easy to reduce our supply of housing and that's what housing replacement fundamentally is all about so you know probably i would guess it makes sense for when you ski to have some type of a housing replacement ordinance between two competing policy goals one was preserving the housing stock the other is that is the commercial neighborhood or commercial corridor that serves the whole north then we had to actually grapple with that in the end we decided that there was flexibility in that zone district and in any neighborhood mixed use district you can kind of you're not subject to on the ground level you're not subject to replacement because it was a viewed as a public good to have commercial active levels so i'm going to differ with erik just a little because i think he's mostly right but i think that there is an issue it's not just supply and demand it's also the supply the kind of housing that is getting there is being eliminated so i think that has to be something that taken so be taken into consideration if they tore down all the fancy houses on the hill in burlington there might be ok and they can replace him with them was anything and still be fine in terms of its economic impact upon people living in broome to if you did that then for a section of the  city over here that in this direction i want and you suddenly eliminated blocks of housing those people displaced and then you got a critical issue to pay attention to i think them to me it's the issue of the sort of the economic classes that are basically being impacted my experience with this has been that if you are redeveloping a site you know let's say you've got a single family home you're going to take it down you're going to build a four unit building in that instance the replacement orders doesn't really apply because you are creating housing on on the site and you're actually creating more housing than what was there and so forth and if you're tearing that house down and not replacing it with housing on that site you either pay into the fund in burlington or you have an option to create a replacement unit off site somewhere but if it's off say that has to be affordable i want you to know that if you take a building well if he has lots of these burlington does especially alert that where they were single family homes that have been turned into duplexes and try plexus if you take at least in burlington the interpretation has been that if you take a two or three unit building and turn it back into or turn it into a single family it's still residential in you so even though you're losing units the interpretation has been it's staying residential that's not a loss so that's an example of the flu yeah just opened like a four hour conversation they are unable to know there's nothing in the ordinance that allows a trust fund dollars to be used to assist those tenants although there is language in the ordinance that does provide some protections for ten allows i think specifically it's around notice requirements and and the reimbursement for some costs not clearly it doesn't it doesn't tackle the whole impact to the to the household but there is some yes there is some relocation costs that is even borne by the the person tearing down the unit not the trust fund if you use federal funds of any kind then there's a whole relocation uniform relocation act that requires you to provide notice provide assistance provided differential rights provide moving costs a whole range of things that is something that we want of doing quite a bit differently for different  to want to know what your anti displacement strategy is and work how to mitigate the impact of potential displacement whether it's temporary or permanent as a pro as a nonprofit developer we wind up work there's a portion of it because to help sustain some of the non profits that are provided for housing for instance home forever mark which does home sharing usually gets funding out of that could be some operating funds just basic caller on the spot but if you are a tenant and you get displaced in your low income and you would qualify but you don't have section eight they published send you to see mike in and see if he could help you in this here not now but that the mayor would have done  one you know on site because we have a fair amount of one subsidized housing that serves a lower more moderate income range you do need to be careful about how you go about tearing that down especially in a city like when we ski that has a lot of older the lack of dated housing stock in spite of you know the city's best efforts to make sure that it  maintains stays up to the standards that there's you know i remember from working with the housing stock when we see thousand stock is very old and a lot of it was not that great was not built bro great to begin with so i imagine that some of what you might be must be looking at is still development  potential tearing down of existing older older housing stock i think it's very important to look at the economics of the buildings you know where they're serving what what what population they're serving in and make sure that  you're going to serve at least that same number of folks at that same income strata with the housing that that replaces it initially when we discussed replacement ordinances we had put an inclusionary component into the replacement ordinance so it was a percentage a certain percentage had to be replaced with affordable if you were tearing down would you recommend going in that direction or having two separate ordinances to cover that  acknowledged that the that the that the i c ordinance can pose financial challenges to very small projects and so part of their recommendations involved making some modifications to the pain and option for that but yeah it's  trying to make an elegant solution that was one ordinance but just just specific inclusionary zoning ordinance and burlington but stepping back from that inclusionary zoning and kind of its purest form the the idea is to encourage or require mixed income in housing development and different communities have approached that in different ways and in some communities  there's more incentive based inclusionary zoning where it may not be required it may be an option but if you do it you get these benefits in other communities it's been you have to do it here's what you have to do and there may not be any incentives associated with it so it's you know it really starts with community conversation about what are we trying to achieve here burlington decided a long time ago that what they really were after was socio economic integration in the kinds of new housing projects that were that were being constructed if in burlington it it wasn't about incentivizing or encouraging supply across the board it was about socio economic integration and that's the conversation that's continued in the panel that your heart described that's what we kept coming back to was you know burlington decided a long time ago this wasn't about encouraging the creation of morehouse this was about maintaining socio economic integration other communities and have decided that their ordinances are all about other things so you know it really depends on what you want to do i have three things to say a little bit of that one one was that one of the things the i think it's called is the where the is the working group said that was that being integrated within each project wasn't as essential manilow as make sure each neighborhood was integrated so there was a little bit of a shift to the principally i think from burlington there was a lot of the affordable housing being developed throughout the old north and so you didn't really need to have every property be  conversations around what was a good idea is new orleans it was the ordinance which you adopt in your local community that because there were so many different opportunities and choices that you knew you could make there was often enough not necessarily a right answer there was often enough you could make a choice of this might be a little bit better this might be a little worse but you're making still policy choices at the local level and there was this all the ground solutions network that particular web site has a ton of resources around how to do that and i think your your your expertise here in new skin knows about the source and cite and go there the thirtieth the third thing is that burlington did try to incentives you know so you know greater density greater height greater or lower cost no need for parking requirements or less parking harmatz waivers or fees all those things with the bundle of benefits going to the developer to offset the cost of the developers expense to create affordable housing course what we discovered on the working group is that no developers not recoup in their cost and so they had to make it up some way in burlington it seemed that we found ourselves in a review of the ordinance failing to see how those things really made a difference over time and that there was other issues around zoning that had to be hay tension to done in order to create affordable housing if you rely simply on ordinances and zoning to create affordable housing in this we'll it will it will you fail and you'll get maybe some things out of it off but there's still so much more that could be done in terms of what what the specific one of the things that we thought initially would help at a gate the impact on private sector developers was a density bonus and that is one of the things that really has not turned out to be all that all that true it's kind of an unfulfilled promise because generally when a developer comes into the development review process if they are alike you know going in with like maximum density you gotta hide in the neighborhood opposition and so there's you know some developers you know choose one strategy they come into my that's knowing that they're probably going to have to come you know back off of it others come in and sort of back off of the maximum density that they can develop at  right supposedly by rights under the the ordinance and sort of come up with a strategy of you know backing away from that in the hopes that they won't have as much neighborhood opposition but invariably no matter what number you choose you like up with neighborhood opposition of one kind or another so you're kind of damned if you do damned if you don't so that was an unfulfilled promise of of inclusionary zoning we always felt that you know if we gave the when we created your needs if we gave the developer a density bonus that that would help allow them to you know they'd get more units to spread their fixed costs over and that would help mitigate the impact of the internal subsidy that might mightn't to happen for the you know for the more affordable units the other making sure that when there is development that there is that kind of economic integration and the hope was that this would be done without necessarily having to draw on other public resources that there have always been scarce and get scarcer and scarcer as time goes on when you talk about federal resources or even even state misses and so ideally the the ideal goal is to be able to create something that would promote fulfill their requirements by partnering with organizations like champlain house and trust work at the square corporation and they then do bring in public resources and as a result usually achieve a much higher property into in a residential zone into residential property so that kind of that extra incentive that they got and they got just about the max you can get the maximum but they got a considerable amount and that made it work for them e and for the nonprofit and ideal world they also pay for all the infrastructure and then they say here's your site and the nonprofit then goes about assembling a less expensive on a per unit basis perhaps is the idea because the private developer has acquired the site and essentially gotten it ready for development and that is a new way of centrally a way of complying with the ordinance that was never envisioned in the ordinance was created and you know i would say it's controversial but there are some who say was that plus we see we throw in other kinds of fancy bells and whistles important things like serving people or homeless as well as serving people perhaps in the midst of violence victims and a range of other things so we take the ordinance i think eric can serve people and it's not i but there you go we do a whole we do a whole pile of other things so you know it's it's it's been controversial but you say well those were just what those units would have been created anyway which is absolutely true however they would have been created in terms other folks are challenged by higher housing conference i heard i believe it was someone from housing vermont say that doing fewer units at a deeper subsidy would be prefer of all for some of our development partners with inclusionary zoning is that the case and what would that be so fewer units and deeper subsidy for home ownership i think is what has been said affordable housing is you know lower lower rents or lower home prices but somewhere it has to be subsidized right and it's either subsidized with public money tax credits which are you know in a roundabout way a redeployment of private money and you know for a public purpose or private developer like me has to figure out how to internally subsidize it by somehow trying to make more money on the other stuff so the challenge with affordable housing the biggest challenge is money right there's only so much resource out there for affordable housing in our community the state of vermont only gets so much allocated federal tax credit every year we only have so much b h c b dollars home dollars g funds you know all the acronyms and sources that are out there for this stuff and c h t and cathedral square and all the partners that are around here are doing you know yeoman's work and a hell of a job using those resources as efficiently as possible to create as much housing as possible but there's only so much money to go around and there's only so much housing they can create you know this this is where you know my view of this may diverge a little bit from some of my friends here but you know housing fundamentally the affordability of housing and in our greater community comes down to supply and demand when there is insufficient supply like we have when we've had for forty years a one percent rental vacancy rate there is tremendous pressure on price and rents go up because we don't have enough supply to address the demand in the marketplace and the more layers of regulation we put on this system in whatever way the harder we make it to create new housing the more we're constraining that supply and the more brecht pressure we're putting on prices and indirectly pushing rents up even more and pushing home prices up more and there's a lot of new progressive thought a lot of stuff happening around the in the movement out west where people are starting to recognize that when we put layers on layers on layers through zoning ordinances and other mechanisms that make it harder to build housing i don't care what kind of housing harder to build housing we are making our communities less affordable so you know a lot of the things that you're talking about right now there are some great ideas in all of these types of ordinances but if we don't affordable housing as they possibly can so  i'm talking about housing or across the board when i you know honestly we're not when i you know i know you know i need to do just as in the back of the room has been developing some housing and when you ski as well when we build rental housing when it's one hundred percent market rate on rental housing specifically we are busting our butts to just try to make these things just barely work and when more layers and more requirements are put on top of it it's busted you know i've been figuring it out in burlington on a handful of projects where i've done the inclusionary internally i haven't had any public subsidy but you know i could lose my house on some of these projects and the margins on these things are reserved thin and you know it's not widely known but you know some of these things that i've done over the last five years the on the edge man and if if things go the wrong direction for me when my mortgages balloon in five years i could lose my house so there's a reason that and not a lot of developers have been to and what i've been doing in burlington is these numbers are frickin heart and when construction costs are going up and interest rates are going up like they are now it's even harder you know nate's looking at projects that he's having a really hard time making a pencil i mean i'm in the same boat and that's in when you ski where you don't currently have inclusionary requirements that will make it harder for me to do what i've been trying to do there's a lot of other things that we knew ski can do to retain existing affordable housing to encourage the creation of more affordable housing but don't make it harder to build housing and when you ski  struggle counterpoint just for fun but i cause i don't necessarily disagree with how difficult it is there's no doubt and i don't and i think it's actually pretty hard for the nonprofit world to figure out how to get through a development we write street co op forty units took us three three and a half years to try to figure out how to do that and grasping at resources in a lot of different places in different ways so the there but ultimately eric and i as owners and representing of owners have apartments that we have to rent that have a fixed cost and then after that if whatever whatever money we can charge above those fixed costs or go to mortgages and financing and other ways of doing things then and you know that becomes how we finance that because how we how do we how we move these these projects along and it's and it's the same or it's the same category and calculations that we have to make when we're sort of doing this eric has to go out and get regular bank financing and you know we get some fancy footwork e kind of fan financing and tax credits to make our rents affordable eric has the flexibility to go up and do other things as a flexibility go ahead and sell the units at some point and make a killing or lose a shirt neck contacts where for ever for the ball so you know we have we have different economics and different set of conditions that we have to face but ultimately the spread sheets ultimately look the same it's the fixed cost cost to develop it's how much money we have to we get from different sources investors equity from tax credits and how much we borrow and that becomes the same structure that's not much different so you know i think the question becomes this is where a challenger is a little bit and knowing eric really does a great job and really works really hard at it it's what is it that you can do in people the development to continue to take place and still sort of have some of these requirements so that when he doesn't simply flip and become just a place where it's just higher rents you really want to make sure that it's preserved and it's not displaced with and i think that's really the policy imperative right so you know  going to come in and see if you do this you have to give me that and i think that becomes the right way to at least to to think about the ordinance and in doing any of the way that we i would like to just to have that we keep talking about the cost of housing and in people pay their housing they pay their rent with their based on their income right they if you're incomes go up this is such an issue said think this is important to make this isn't just a housing problem it's an income and wage problem and i think it's we tend to as housing people we tend to just focus on the housing that we've had with respect to affordable housing in vermont in burlington have to do with the permanent affordability requirements that are attached to the affordable housing so for instance inclusionary zoning ordinance there's a whole the whole bunch of different ways that cities do this some i z ordinances have an initial period of affordability and i get calls every month from folks yeah so one from montana of a few a few weeks ago and they were saying that they had an i c program with home ownership and folks would buy this at a reduced price that was affordable at the time five years later essentially that owner realized a huge windfall so that's not something because permanent affordability is one of the work is one of the requirements of burlington but that's a key issue no that's exactly right and i think you know eric's absolutely right it's about money and i've recently done a little bit of research about what the environment was in the one nine hundred eighty s around the creation  of burlington's housing agenda which included inclusionary zoning housing trust fund in the shared equity and all of the the environment was essentially one of scarce federal resources and all of these things were created because the city government believed at the time that we they had seen declining federal resources and we need to be essentially resilient and be able to produce new affordability as part of of c g shared equity program and so it all sort of ties together so i would in terms tip it's a long way of answering your question but i would encourage you to contemplate that as an anti gentrification anti displacements ation to preserve what was or was centrally the old north and then that was the focus the target neighborhood was to make sure that the lower income people who live in the only thing could stay there they were not couple years we've built a lot of housing truth is when you look at the reports the last few years show five hundred six hundred seven hundred nine hundred units coming on on not just being permanent but actually being shown that this will be  from about that big consumer a has just this has not really had not really budgeted much is as we all hoped and we're still thinking that maybe a little bit more will do that what i think is happening is that  may be true to them central is probably more people like it more people want to live there better the more they it's it's new it's well done you pay a little bit more but you have you know it's clean it's got good management it's it's great fixtures all the things that you get there both eric's and all the people who are developing new housing basically that those those units that market is strong i think in what's going on i think there's a bit of a fluffing sloughing out some of the units are not as good and there and those people are suffering a bit more in terms of how they can rent but it's not showing up in the vacancy rate just yet and as strong as it could be people may be moving may be living a little closer and better choices but that still has not yet the impact and from a percentage of affordable housing that we really need we didn't come close we just didn't come close next year we might do better but we just we still have a long way to go in terms of some part of that housing is being built so that only one of the key resources that is missing is more rental subsidies  michael and eric both talk a lot about capital subsidies to build but even you know with all the creativity and get our nonprofit developers either working alone or in partnership with a private for profit developer all the subsidies that they can bring to bear on a in a former housing unit the base rent is still at a level that is not affordable to the lowest income folks and so there you need a gap filler  and even a fifteen dollars an hour minimum wage won't necessarily if you have one wage earner in the family they're still going after a little way more than forty hours a week to have even affordable you know be affordable with that so what they need a section eight or state there are some state rental subsidies as well so that's another key resource to reach really the lowest affordability levels of the market a couple of other things i would just suggest  is we focused a lot of rental housing but you know given new skis balance of rental versus home ownership and you know risky being about the sixty percent rental range i think it's still around that perhaps that's what it was when i was working for the city thirty years ago so that hasn't changed much and i think one of the things that you really want to look at is the shared equity program that c h p has and get more folks into into stable home ownership and try and you know increase your share of homeowners because homeowners clearly provide you know longer term stability to two communities so i had that's one thing i would encourage you to look at and part and parcel that is looking at kind of a list of other list and eric may say this isn't as effective as we had hoped it would be but there is a there's there's an ordinance on the books and barely get around impact fee waivers for affordable housing and i think you should you should definitely look at that i know wouldn't ski challenging being one square mile without a lot of new develop a bleriot it's always had a tax base that's that's challenging so you may not be able to provide any breaks for affordable housing through impact  various through through legislation is you know made created basically designated areas that could be free of the duplicative often duplicative review of active fifteen and local development review and i hadn't really thought through how that meshes you know when we ski but if you haven't already taken advantage of those special development zones that the state has has made basically act two fifty three for four for resident for mixed use and mixed income development you should look at those because they will help or provide you know eliminate one extra step in the process  for for all of the person and another thing that people have looked at on a broad sense looked at it and it's you know been controversial and even with burlington so well staff planning department it may not be totally feasible to do but you know some of the rules of state level being a lot easier when to go through the most of the rigorous process you michael had to do that again and then even in the state level there's a whole bunch of stuff that they could be doing better so that's something outside of it but  just around i mean capital comes in the form of the range of things so it's reduced cost but also comes in potential land that might be available to do development for us you know this there's tech and this really is tax credits well but i you know i think i did once i think i did a calculation today talking about up in this congress it was if you it took everybody to one percent of the housing trust fund took the property tax id of the county and you said one percent more you know we we we just bought this door succumbs to keep it affordable for a while we we struggled to come up with four hundred eighty thousand dollars of basically interest only financing for a period of five or eight years for we fought for i mean as a board member here we fought for that to get every every kind of you know financing piece that was different than trade straight traditional finance and even the bank did something fancy for us to get there so it's not you know to keep things at the twelve hundred dollars a month range which sounds me so expensive to some but actually is eighty percent of median income and the people who live in dorset comments are all fairly working  or working people the retail the nurses and other things like that to get that red you know we had we really had to struggle over the felt a little bit like eric to struggle to get to that place where we had all these different like kind of huge difference and and i think i'm pretty sure there's neighborhood development area designations that overlap to form basecoat corridors right so you've made the act to fifty process a little bit easier it was kind of mentioning that as a tool  that helps a lot you have a designated downtown you know that has made after fifty a little bit easier to deal with as well you know other things you could do you know i think  you know it it really is about money and so you know anything you can do incrementally when you ski it may not be a huge thing but if you know the little incremental things like saying we're not go essentially the fee structure that you're pay so if you're assuming that there is not this is nobody so far nobody has thought this is a great idea but i think it's a great if if if if eric has to pay for all these fees and you're expecting property taxes and you're going to get property taxes for the rest of its life with the first year let that be the fee structure make that sort of equivalent to the property taxes and then the next year you're going to get all the property taxes so you're putting it off for a year but  he now now that goes into an operating cost as opposed to a need to capitalize that from from a from a mortgage cost right you don't have to pay that as if they don't feel it's now an operating cost and he puts out of the first year of operating so that in their ordinance but there does there's a baseline a lot of communities have crafted in a way that makes it nearly impossible to actually do so so it's not really implemented like in burlington you know burlington says well like it can't be you know bigger than this and then it being too small sometimes oh and you have to provide as much parking as you would for a primary residence you can't go over the law coverage allowances you know so you have to if you're going to do it in when you actually want to work you have to create some you know remove the parking requirement for an eighty you allow it would be by right or store an easier path are allowed category of naturally occurring or would or after two or more do you think that they that in terms of solving many of affordable housing no one issue then he had been like yes with the with the baby you essentially be have some sort of affordability restrictions or is it just that the provision of more small units i think you know with with all things i think the easier and the less restrictions around  you can you can put the better it will be but the what i think about eighty use is you know it's potentially a source of affordable housing there are folks that might be inclined to build a small excess in structure in their backyard or next to their house or and it's relatively small in their rented a relatively affordable rate to somebody the other piece of it is i think there's a demographic of kind of the empty nester aging in place crowd where i've got this big old house my kids are gone i don't really need this big old house anymore but i really love my neighborhood i love the street i live on i want to stay here if i could build a little house in the backyard i could sell or rent out this big old house and i could live back there in a smaller do well and move them home and that frees up the big house for maybe a family or you  for a curves are there about seven you know i think the average density is actually more in the ten to twelve units per per acre range and you know that that speaks to michael's michael's point of you know if you question though which is has every in the or you know short term rentals been issue at all and when you ski i mean we're starting to hear a significant impact or you know some areas of the state with the loss of well eighty use for instance i mean eighty's are a great great way to you know make some extreme come in you know do an air b n b and i've heard you know some comments around incentivizing eighty use or well yeah but don't you know don't make more able to care be these you know make it so that it's an actual rental rental unit you know ski areas every towns that host urias are that are near that our code enforcement is looking at and certainly something that we're going to have to keep an eye on at the state level as well but we do have them i think probably it's not as many and not th premise you can't actually do it that's the proposal that will be coming forward so it's pretty heavy handed but it's basically trying to to really for person who are occupants of you have to live in the building it's a three hundred building you could make it  be a unit available through through your to rental but if you know you can't use it as an investment vehicle because right now if you look at real estate listings and when you ski in other towns it says ideal air b n b an ideal short term rental vestment so that's what they're  about i follow that with a question about compliance monitoring because that is something that came up i've read the evaluation of i c i'm barely ten and it's something that came up and i certainly in a city with the resources that when  is a big deal to make sure that we have the right compliance monitoring structure in place or the funding that we need to be able to purchase compliance monitoring elsewhere so can you speak a little bit to what would be required for compliance doing it and what i found is there's an incredible range of what folks are doing so it goes from city employees who maintain a waiting list and income qualified tenants and place them in specific units who annually income qualify them on an ongoing basis if their income rises above the t and what's the result of that in terms of what you end up with either and i mean that a lot of it i think has to do with certainly the resources of the municipality but also what is your appetite for compliance what is your anxiety level what sort of because the really this is a this is a trade off that value has to make between risk and and documenting compliance so essentially what the city of burlington has done is we have the property owners including the non profits to find out what sort of compliance they were reported with the understanding that there were there would be some folks who would have limited memory of  z what we found actually was pretty encouraging about ninety over ninety percent of the units that we did monitoring on were in compliance with i c and so the question for burlington is do does burlington have the appetite to to move to the next level where we are doing deeper dives into into the monitoring that we're doing how deeply we're going to go into it but it absolutely is something to consider when you're drafting your ordinance because it takes staff time i know that are under stand that says you will contact with housing trust and ask them what the rent should be and then they will certify that in fact the rents and the individuals renting will meet meets the standard that is  every request and requirements of us and so we have essentially two people who focus on compliance and is another for people who are dealing with applications and lent a hand to the clients issue only to housing and so we different set of eyes it's all it's not a deeper dive it's all independently imperator you know penalty of perjury both individual doing it as well as even a simple question of doing it you know i mean the owner and the tenant every year which is a which is a pretty serious i think level of sort of force me but our turnover this individual comes in and set the rents right and the individual income is correct and if you do yearly enforcement then you're really trying yourself  think a deep of a bunch of stuff and just to just to clarify turnover it's a little easier and somebody else comes in and you say the rent is right than individuals incomes correct and you move on correct me if i'm wrong but it's compliance at initial you what i'm recalling is that the housing finance agency was basically required to publish numbers every year that give private sector for profit owners that are you know using one of the remember the details of it it was done about a year you're going the twenty twenty seventeen session so absent champ a housing trust or municipality doing it a private sector developer is supposed to be able to go to a website and say these are the i'll tell you like my experience in working in when you ski versus working in burlington is is night and day and i know i'm not you know saying any of this to be critical of any of the folks that work for the city of burlington but my experience right in the way it feels to me going through the process in burlington i go in and i say i want to do x y and z and the response i get is oh here's a list man you've you got to do all this stuff i come in when you ski and i say i'd like to do x y and z the answer i get in when you ski is let's get everybody together and figure out how to get this done so i don't know that you know that that's not an ordinance thing so much it's just i don't know it's a cultural thing in maybe the size of when you ski you know it's a small community and you've got you know you can get you know three department heads together and when you ski and figure it out and you don't have the scale of bureaucracy that burlington has and that that's makes things quicker terms of sort of doing development we haven't done anything when you ski in a while so it's hard for me to be able to watch it i mean we do well in burlington but we have a lot more to pay attention to in burlington than we do difference between the ability to have big chunks of land that you could develop and being in a fairly crowded and compact community and when it's gears that i think it's just a little more but i also think that there's that are different and opportunities are different so i think that the physical constraints in burlington on the new ski are very simple here's what you're saying you know you're you're building on this now safe seat here hemmed in by your neighbors and you know your costs are higher because your scale is smaller and again you've you've got neighbors on every side that you have to keep happy in the middle of it you're not building in a field that you can really rise to something there was plenty of land makes street we had to buy me to tear down three buildings in order to get forty units up and we had to really bring in one property that we own we had to buy two other properties to bring it in to get the critical mass to get something like that done eric's got the same kind of thing result jamming and wants to get in a negative way because you're really putting a lot of development into a footprint you know even on king street we have the building that we own is on do these things they should be separate they should they because because they really address separate issues and i think it makes sense to fold them into zoning ordinance or development overnight so until now where they're part of the same document but  it's nature it's maybe naturally occurring affordable housing which tends to be it's doing it's actually decent property you might find that the property is not that decent and needs to be torn down but those families are might they be displaced in that case you really want i think the house replacing ordinance to be to trigger a few things to protect the families and i know it's all about protecting the families that are in that housing it it may not it may mean that you're going to build something else but it also is just simply what happens there what happens in that community  people those people and i think that's that's really you know that's really the moral issue as much as anything else it's it's you know it might be good to tear down you know i had no i had no we place an ordinance and some protection attendants however you might do it maybe the right thing to do in mobile home parks no you just simply can't sell a mobile or you have a process to go through where you're giving everybody you know notice there's an opportunity to purchase in the range of things i think in the kind of conversion ordinance also there's a whole range of notices and opportunities and maybe the kind of conversion ordinance is a better sort of look let us provide the parking and we think we need to and forget about the ordinance i mean the americans argued that needed in the downtown we sort of said the same thing is let's we're not going to have less parking than we need you know more parking there in making the what was required we took a big one and we created parking spaces where sixty six spaces it's big so it's also what the building needs just by chance i think and even then it's crowded at times you know it's not enough but it's like a disney thing you get you get a regular service ninety percent it's chaos and so we'll live with that but i think that's just by chance often enough that when you look at parking appointments you go come on that's crazy that's more about the basic nuts and bolts about of housing we have a housing want to learn housing one of two kind of introduction to how to for the housing and then there's also a couple workshops that are really you know take a deeper dive into the intersection between housing and health care which is really been an emerging field over the last five five or six years and then the second day we're especially looking for you know folks who are involved in this full level to think there's a number of workshops to their pitch