 want to thank you so much for being here. My name is Rampton Zolles. I'm the Chair of Myerb and Essay, which is a friend of Downtown Commission. We help kind of gather information from the public, the downtown supporting public and kind of share that to our policy makers and give them some of the feedback based on proposed policies and initiatives. This is our first court talk of 2019. Obviously housing is a popular subject. So thank you all so much for being here. We have, of course, the pleasure of being here at Freetail Brewery, so I want to thank them for opening their doors to us. Please go ahead and take advantage of the beers and go ahead and get yourself comfortable. We have our speakers, Jim Bailey. Lauren Houston is going to be joining us in just a second here. I want to tell you kind of about what Myerb and Essay is about, what we focus on, and kind of what the format of the discussion is like for today. So we are focused on trying to make downtown a more vibrant, walkable downtown. We do that by engaging with the public, understanding, you know, bringing back that feedback to the policy makers and providing comments and feedback where we can. I'll ask the speakers to come and join me up here, if you don't mind. Jim, don't worry. So the commission is actually made of 10 members, and I don't know where you all are, but commissioners raise your hand. There you go. So these are all great people. Go ahead and give them a hand. They're helping out with the events that are going to happen. So these are all great people who get together, talk about downtown issues and then share them with our policy makers to try to bring about greater downtown. And so I want to thank Lauren Houston and Jim Bailey. I lost him. But tonight's discussion is going to focus on the future of downtown housing. There's been a lot of discussion of late in the past year and a half about downtown housing in general. And so what we want to focus on tonight is really not just housing for the sake of housing, but housing as a tool for downtown revitalization. And the city in downtown has been on a path for some time to create the kind of downtown that we all want to see. And so Laurie Houston and many of the city leaders have been working very hard to produce that kind of downtown that makes us economically competitive. And so we wanted to kind of have this talk to really focus on that, on housing as a tool for downtown revitalization. And of course, you can't talk about housing. You can't talk about downtown without talking about, you know, the other impact of that, both to downtown neighborhoods and housing in general. So we're honored to have Jim Bailey here with us. Jim is an architect with Alamo Architects. He's also most recently served at the Mayor's Housing Policy Task Force. I'll give him the opportunity to kind of describe that in a little bit. Laurie Houston is the Assistant City Manager with the City of San Antonio. She's also with some of the departments that she oversees all in one way or another touch downtown and impact downtown. So we're honored to have both of them here today. And so I want to real quick just kind of the way the discussion will happen this evening, you know, I kind of have my own questions that we'll kind of get into. We'll then at some, then where are my commissioners again? Okay. So the commissioners have index cards. If you have a question, you already know you kind of want to see answered. Just raise your hand. One of the commissioners will come around and give you an index card, fill it out, give it back to one of them, and they're going to kind of take them back there and kind of distill them into some top questions that we can be addressing. And if there's time at the back at the end, we'll also be just taking general audience questions as well. So other thing is acronyms. So if you've dealt with the government with municipal leadership at all or any of these programs, you know, there's a lot of acronyms here. So if you, if we mentioned one that we don't just define or describe, please just give me a blinking light or something like that. And then we'll, we'll discuss it. I thought about making it a drinking game, but you'd all be drunk in 10 minutes. So we won't do that. Thank you. So, so we're just going to go ahead and dive right in with it. So Lauren, you talk a lot about downtown housing and its impact in and around the neighborhood. And specifically though, I kind of want to take it back to talking about in 2010, the real side of looking at what kind of downtown we were able to see. And the feedback that I remember getting is, you know, we want a downtown that we, the residents can enjoy, not just that it's a tourist spot necessarily. And so how can, how is, let me back up. Let me say, why is downtown important? Why is downtown important, not just for the folks that live downtown, but just for the city as a whole? Why does it matter to make such a strong and successful downtown? Good evening. And thank you so much for including me into this panel. You know, it's a great question. And I really like to say that downtown represents the heart of any community. So every great city has a great downtown. So when you go to a final four or you're watching something on TV, what do you see? They end up showing that skyline of that downtown, whether you're in New York or in Seattle or Chicago. And now San Antonio, since we had the final four last year. But you really need a strong downtown because that represents prosperity. I mean, that's where most of the jobs are. That is where most of the arts and culture are in your community. Most of our museums are in the downtown and surrounding area. We are very lucky because we have a very strong tourist industry. And for the longest time, our downtown has been dominated by hotels and tourism. And that's wonderful. I mean, other cities would die to have that problem. What we found out, though, when we did the downtown framework plan that Romero referenced in 2012, was that we need to focus on how we grow that tourism base, but also how to grow that residential base. Because if you continue to have more tourists in your downtown, you're going to only have those types of tourist retail that you see. So if you go downtown, you can buy a coffee mug with the Casa Rio umbrellas on it, or you can buy a Coonskin cap. But you can't buy a pair of shoes or you can't buy diapers unless you go to the Walgreens. And so how do you change that retail mix? That's through providing residents, including residents of your downtown. And so, you know, we talked about, you know, what was our vision? It was about creating a downtown for tourists, for employees, and for residents. And we were missing that resident point. And that's why we started with that Housing First strategy. But, you know, the reason why you need an important downtown is because it represents prosperity. It also is downtown, that's where you have the most tax base, but you don't have as many services that are needed. And so your downtown ends up contributing to the overall city. And so for the tax dollars that all the commercial real estate buildings are downtown paying, that's also helped paying for the trash and street maintenance going on outside your downtown. Yeah, so I'll jump in. Thanks for having me. So the strategic framework plan that they both mentioned, my firm worked with HRNA to develop. After having observed the sort of downtown neighborhoods and downtown itself and the deadness that they've talked about in the sort of tourism focus, we knew it was time to do something. So we had all these historic neighborhoods, all these streetcar suburbs that are around downtown and part of that downtown ecosystem, the two are intervent. Excuse me guys, whoever, let these guys back here, make sure that doesn't happen again. That's very dangerous back there. There's a lot of things that people have heard themselves on. So you hear that? Nobody in the back. Thank you. Where was I? So put it closer to you. Yeah, there you go. So the neighborhoods around downtown have experienced this investment since white flight in the 1950s. And we all who had grown up around downtown and lived in these neighborhoods saw this. And so all the neighborhoods at the time, I think we're sort of on board with this idea that we need more investment, not just in downtown, but in the neighborhoods around downtown. And so merely we went off on our way to do it. And so in trying to accomplish this kind of vision for downtown, you already mentioned it, is we adopted this housing first strategy. So why house? Why do we take that as strategy opposed to other alternatives? I do want to stress that it's housing first, but that doesn't mean housing only. But we wanted to prioritize housing because if you bring in housing in your downtown, you're bringing in that 24 seven resident, they are going to bring disposable income. That disposable income is going to help tip that retail market from touristy to more neighborhood serving. You change that neighborhood in your downtown and provide more services that support a neighborhood. Then you've created a space where employers want to go because their employees want to live there. And so we're seeing that quite a bit in our downtown area. I'm going to point to Pearl. Pearl, we focused on, you know, affordable, I'm sorry, we focus on the market rate housing there. The market rate housing help provide disposable income. We have a lot of restaurants there, but now we have the medical clinic that opened on the corner of Josephine Street and Broadway. You have a CVS going in there in the bottom of the mosaic apartments. So we're tipping that retail market to help support that neighborhood. Now we need to focus on a different type of product, which is what we did in the Siege of focusing in that area to make sure that we're incorporating affordable housing, because we do feel that we have a lot of market rate housing in that area. You're also seeing that pattern of development in the South Town. So the thought behind the housing first is to saturate your area with housing, which brings disposable income, which brings more retail, which helps bring the employees who want to live in your area and employers want to locate where their employees want to be. So a strong housing sub-market downtown means a stronger downtown ultimately. Now, so, you know, I'm an investor myself, so whenever I look at an opportunity, I ask, why is this opportunity here? Why has nobody else done this already? So when we look at downtown and we see that housing has not occurred in the past 20 or 30 years on any real meaningful scale to produce this kind of downtown, the question is, well, why? Why has it not already happened up to this point or up to the point we passed Siege of? But what were, why? Why not until now? Why not until then? Well, I think there are a number of factors at play. You know, first and foremost, we saw an abandonment of downtowns across the country and every major city in the country. We've over the course of the last 10 to 20 years seen a resurgence of interest in living in traditional neighborhood patterns with access to good and services through multimodal transportation options by walking, you know, by taking the bus, and an interest in, you know, not having a long commute. I think that that has been, you know, exacerbated in San Antonio in a sense by, I think, sort of the marketing that we've done about our neighborhoods. And again, I will say that we all were complicit neighborhoods and city government alike in trying to make this happen. I think that, you know, we're on the cusp right now in San Antonio of, you know, real change. We're starting to see, as Lori will probably tell you, the reason for kind of continuing on with the CCHIP policy and whatever form it takes for the fee waiver program is that, you know, we're seeing the tip of the iceberg in this sort of urbanization that most other major metropolitan areas are seeing. So I think now is a great time to have this conversation. I also think when you're talking about the downtown core, it has to do with land values. So our land values in downtown are all priced for a hotel project because hotels, they can turn every day. Our hotel market has 70% occupancy throughout the year, limited service hotels. If you're to build a limited service hotel and buy some dirt, you're going to be able to get a return. So that's why we need to subsidize market rate housing in the downtown because if we didn't, it would continue to be more hotels. Another reason why we had the opportunity really is because the river improvements project. When we extended the museum reach north, just that 1.2 miles from Lexington to Joseph Street, we created a major improvement. It was along all this vacant property and people started looking at San Antonio differently. You had a beautiful river that people could live on and that's when property started turning. As soon as you put a shovel on the ground and we announced that the river project was funded, property started turning hands and housing projects started working. Right at that point, land values were a little bit lower, but you couldn't get the rents that you needed to support those. Now we've increased the land values because we've done so many improvements in our downtown and we're getting some rents, but they're not enough to support the projects and that's why we need to continue to subsidize. But if you're to ask me know what changed, it really was we started believing in ourselves. We invested, we put money in the river. In 2007, there was $10 million in the bond program for downtown. 2012, after the SA 2020 effort where the community came together and said downtown's a priority, there was $93 million in the bond program for downtown. Fast forward, 2017, there's $165 million in downtown. So we've made tons of improvements. We started to believe in our downtown and we still are priced for a hotel market. And so until we get the rents to catch up to that, we're most likely going to continue to have to subsidize housing, whether it's market rate or affordable. But we finally understand that, you know, downtown is a place for residents. It's not just for tourists. We have 14,000 hotel rooms in downtown San Antonio. And if you're to ask me, you know, when is enough? It's going to be when we get 14,000 residential units in downtown and we have that one to one ratio. So in 2012, when we adopted the downtown framework plan and we adopted that housing first strategy, we looked at what needed to be done to help facilitate this housing. And it was, of course, incentives. But the biggest challenge is we couldn't put the incentive packages fast enough. But when we put them together, they all kind of looked the same. It was a tax rebate, a waiver of your city fees, a waiver of your sauce fees. And we were able to do just because of staff capacity, three to four times, three to four projects a year. Well, our consultant said, make that just an as a right package. You understand the market dynamics in your downtown and the areas surrounding it. And so go ahead and make it as a right where if you build two or more housing units, you automatically get this. That minimizes the risk of a developer and it helps us diversify who's developing in San Antonio. Prior to 2010, it was a lot of local developers who we love. I mean, Silver Ventures is great, Area Real Estate is great. But now, because of this as a right policy and minimizing this risk, we have different developers who are coming from Dallas, who are coming from Indiana, coming from New York. They're looking at San Antonio and they don't have to live here to understand how to maneuver through the politics to get and send us because they're immediately available. And so if you're going to build a housing project in a specific area, and we have today we have three levels of areas you can build. If you build in the downtown area, you would automatically get a 15 year tax rebate of 75% on the taxes you pay for that improvement. That other 25% that you're paying is going to go into a fund to help support affordable housing. You also will get a fee waiver on your city fees. And usually that's about 1% of your project cost. And then you'll get a SOS fee waiver of up to a million dollars. Now we've added something for just the downtown core projects. If you're building affordable housing in your project, for every affordable housing unit you've included in that project, you get a $10,000 infrastructure grant because we're learning that sometimes in downtown you need to build sidewalks. You want to underground your utilities or you need parking improvements. So we're providing a $10,000 grant that can go towards infrastructure and that's capped at $500,000. And then it goes down when you're in level two, which is the area surrounding downtown and then level three decreases as well. But that's as a right. And just based on, you know, we used to do three to four a year. In our first year we did 13. Since 2012 we've had 65 CCHIP agreements, which is the Center City Housing Incentive Policy. So we're able to do about 12 to 15 a year versus a three to four that we're able to negotiate with that developer. The question was posted anywhere and if you were to go to www.sanantonio.gov backslash, ccdo backslash, incentives and programs backslash, CCHIP, you'll get there. And I just happened to know that because I wrote that down today, so I'm not, that's not my sit-on. But I do think Ramira could probably provide that link to everybody as well. But it is online and if you were just to Google CCHIP, San Antonio, you'd find it. And so CCHIP was passed to be able to kind of fill that gap, right? Because the downtown sub market didn't really make sense even for market rate housing. And so with CCHIP in place, market rate housing can actually make sense downtown. So what has been the results of CCHIP today? What has been the success of it? And you kind of mentioned in terms of a number of units that you'd like to see, what kind of boundary would you say you'd like to see that in in terms of, you know, geography of downtown? And so when we set the goal in 2012 when the CCHIP policy was adopted, our goal was 7500 housing units by 2020. And our downtown boundary is very large. It's larger than most cities. But we're looking at everything within the interstate. And then Pearl area near Eastside, which is Sunset, St. Paul Square, and then near Westside, UTSA. So it's kind of within the interstate in those three areas. It's a 5.2 square mile area. We have about 6500 housing units that have come online that are under construction or in the planning stages. So we will meet our goal by 2020 of 7500. We had a stretch goal of 10,000. And keep in mind that we already had 3,300 units online when we set this goal. So we were to get 10,000 by 2020, adding that 3,300. We're about in line with that one-to-one ratio we want to see. Most of the projects we have seen are in the Southtown area and the Pearl area. And it's primarily along the river, which shows that if you build infrastructure and you're able to create a neighborhood, the projects will follow. So you'll see a lot of the CCHIP projects are along the museum reach, are along Broadway, are in the Southtown area of Pearl, primarily on Blue Star where the river was extended south as well. What market rate means and what affordable means within the definition parameters that we're discussing here? I don't know that everyone understands what that is because that's a little bit of... And I'll give that to Jim here so you can know what's up with that a little bit. But before I do that, I want to ask you also to comment on... So CCHIP has been a great success. And so then there was a moratorium placed on it. And you being on the Mayor's Housing Policy Task Force, can you speak to why that moratorium was placed and also describe the Housing Policy Task Force and what its charge is and what your role was on it? That's a big question. So let's tackle the sort of pause on the as-of-right. And it was just a pause on the as-of-right component of the fee waiver programs, the incentive policy, individual projects could still go get approval by council. So it was paused because there was a... And I'm hopeful I can go into a little more depth into this a little bit later. It was paused because there was this growing concern that perhaps we were having an impact on the surrounding neighborhoods and housing affordability. There was a concern people would read the Revard Report and see the latest article about the latest really high-end development that was being, quote, funded by city dollars. That's kind of not true in the sense that I think what Lori would tell you is that this is future revenue that wouldn't exist if we didn't incentivize these projects. That revenue only exists because the city participated in this process. However, I think the other issue, the underlying issue, is much more serious. And I'm happy to see that the revised CCHIP policy or the fee waiver policy, as it's called now, goes a long way toward addressing some of those concerns. So let me answer your question about housing affordability. So in San Antonio, the sort of median income for a family of four, that means half the families make more and half the families make less, is about, what is it, $55,000 these days lowering something like that. It's much higher for the San Antonio metro area at 63 or 64, but the metro area includes outliers like Burney and New Bromphills and so forth. So when we're talking about housing policy and we're talking about affordability, we're obviously concerned about things that are closer to home, making sure we have a clear picture of what that means. So when we define what's affordable, we generally have, we use this term AMI, right, area median income. And generally, people who make 30% of the area median income or less, we consider that really, truly affordable housing. That's sort of, we call that public housing. I mean, these are people that need a lot of help. 30% to 60% AMI, that's affordable housing. And just about everybody that lives around downtown San Antonio is sort of in the 30. 80 to 120, the term for that is kind of workforce housing. Those are your starting firefighters and police officers, its teachers and so on and so forth. Market rate housing. In San Antonio right now, I don't know what the latest, the average home sale price is like $220,000 as of the last report. And average rents are median rents or something like a buck 10 or a buck 15 a foot. So when we're talking about market rate downtown, we're talking about sale prices much higher than that because that's what the market will support. We're talking about sale prices multiples of that. And we're talking rents generally north of $2 a square foot. If you're talking about the central business district or tier one, it goes down a little bit in tier two, which is sort of Southtown and around the pearl. But what was the other part of it? So there's also a cap on rents for the downtown projects of 275 a foot. So when we're talking about market rate downtown, we're talking about some credit expense. The other question was the marriage housing policy task force, what was it? How is it germane to this conversation? It was a year long process. I look around the room, I see a number of people who participated in this process with us. It was a small task force, five member task force. Included me, Gene Dawson from Pape Dawson Engineers, Lord of this, Castro-Gromitas, former deputy undersecretary of HUD, Maria Mediozapal, former city council person, and Noah Garcia from Vantage Bank. We had free reign to study the problem and decide what to do about it. So the first thing we did is we went and rounded up a bunch of citizens and had a bunch of meetings. We, you know, we asked people what they were experiencing in their neighborhoods, you know, what was what was going on in their lives as it relates to housing affordability. We also hired a bunch of consultants. We worked with Nalcab National Association of Latino Community Asset Builders. We worked with LISC San Antonio and an economic and economic and planning systems out of Denver to do all of our data for us. So this is a very data driven process, both in both in terms of hard numbers that we're digging out and in terms of the stories and anecdotes that we were pulling out of the community. We formed a series of technical working groups to tackle various components of housing affordability and we developed in the end of a set of recommendations that council just recently adopted as the San Antonio Housing Policy Framework and it consists of a series of a couple of dozen action items, short, medium and long term and it consists of, I think in my opinion, probably most importantly, sort of the framework for a 10-year funding plan for dealing with affordable housing and that includes affordable housing downtown. So when CCHIP was being proposed or renewed rather and incidentally if you have questions make sure you write them down in the index card so that our commissioners can go around and get them from you that way we can include them here. But when CCHIP came up for renewal, one of the comments you made was about this displacement study and you tell us a little bit about what that is and what would be the expectations of that kind of study and what would that study tell us? Okay, so I don't know the answer to that, that's why we need this study I think. So we learned a lot over the course of this last year through all of our research and just sort of paying attention to what's going on. We've seen property values around the downtown area and in the central business district increase and in some neighborhoods it's been substantial. Places like Dignity Hill, we've seen a thousand percent increase in property values in less than 10 years. That's good in some cases but it can also have some unintended consequences. We've seen land values in places like Lubaco go from $5 a square foot to $40 a square foot from $20 a square foot on Broadway to $150 a square foot. So we're seeing some pretty serious, some pretty serious cost increases. We've heard a lot of anecdotes from people who are saying they want to move back into the downtown area or they grew up in the neighborhood and they can't afford the rents. We're hearing from people saying I used to live downtown and I can't afford to live downtown anymore and by downtown I'm not just talking about the central business district. I'm talking about all the supporting neighborhoods including South Town and the Pearl. We're hearing stories of people who can't tap the equity in their homes. They're newfound wealth in these historically disinvested areas of San Antonio where their house is worth $30,000 and now it's worth $300,000 and they're on a fixed income. They can't afford the debt service to go out and tap that newfound wealth. Property taxes are going through the roof and we've got flippers prowling all the neighborhoods and paying $0.50 on the dollar for some of these houses. So I don't know whether we have widespread issues or not. We've got displacement cases. There's the so-forks. We've got mission trails so on and so forth. I don't know what the extent of the issue is but there's an awful lot of smoke here, right? And so what I'm hoping that this study will tell us is what has been the effect of and I don't think it's necessarily these policies. I think that these policies are perhaps saying San Antonio is open for business but this is a nationwide trend. It's happening everywhere in every city whether there are incentives or not but I'm hoping what this study will tell us is the extent of the problem so we're going to analyze it and we can determine what we need to do in terms of kind of preventative measures and we've outlined funding in the housing policy framework to deal with it and I'll get into more solutions. And so Lori with all this in mind the CCHIP came back with some revisions specifically to speak to some of these issues and concerns in the neighborhood that the neighborhood brought up and so there were some can you talk a little bit about what those some of those revisions were and what do you see the outlook for in terms of housing downtown kind of central business district considering I mean I don't know if it's considered a reduction in incentives for that for that particular sub market. So when we were working on revising the CCHIP we knew that there was a need for affordable housing in downtown so we looked at the mayor's housing policy task force report looked at those recommendations and tried to see where we can align the recommendations in the report into a new policy and one of the things that the policy wanted was it wanted a dedicated revenue stream for affordable housing. We don't have that right now other than the home and CDBG funding that we have or the actual general fund dollars that sometimes get programmed annually and so we did create a dedicated fund in the CCHIP for any project that is getting these incentives for every time you pay your taxes on that project the city will only rebate 75 percent of that tax payment back to you and the other 25 percent will go and do a fund to support affordable housing. Now that fund is going to be dedicated to projects meeting the 60 percent AMI or below need. We know through the housing task force report they did that the greatest need for housing is to meet that 30 to 60 percent AMI and so what we're doing is we're dedicating that fund to that 30 to 60 percent. So those are all CCHIP projects regardless of where you are. Now for the downtown area what we learned is you know the land prices are still too high and the market rates aren't there to be able to support those land prices and so we did not require there being an affordable component in the central business district. However we did provide you an increased incentive if you incorporated affordable housing in your project to try to provide that bonus. Now for the areas surrounding downtown which are Pearl, Southtown, the near east side, near west side we did a requirement of you must be above five stories which is you must be a steel and concrete structure or you must include 20 percent of affordability in your project of which 10 percent has to be at the 80 percent that workforce level and 10 percent needs to be at that 60 percent AMI which is what we're considering affordable housing and so it was you either go up which your construction costs go up quite a bit when you go to steel and concrete or you incorporate affordability and that's how we addressed you know some of the affordability needs in the CCHIP. What we learned though is you know when you're trying to build affordable housing in the downtown area or actually just throughout the city the CCHIP alone is not going to be the tool that's going to get you there. The CCHIP is going to be one of several tools that you need to layer on to make that project work and so we wanted to make it very clear that we still need market rate housing in the central business district. We are lacking that but we do want that affordability and so we required that 10 percent at 16, 10 percent 80 in the outside areas but we are going to be working with all the developers to see how we can layer on more incentives and provide them access to other tools so they can increase that affordability. So a great example of that is the Museum Reach Town Homes that is a project being done by Alamo Community Group. They are building 95 housing units of which 86 of them will be at or below 60 percent AMI and that's the target that we want and in fact that is one of the first CCHIP projects that we're doing as a result of this new policy. That project not only received CCHIP but it received housing tax credits from the state of Texas that provided an additional benefit it's going back to that layering. We have actually two other applications in right now that are providing actually I think total with the Alamo Group Museum Reach project we have 500 units through the new CCHIP project that are in process and about 40 percent of those are going to be at 60 percent AMI or below and they are all layering the tools so the CCHIP is working it's helping bring affordable housing and then every one of these projects is contributing to a fund. So we wanted to make sure that we were lining with the housing goals creating a dedicated revenue stream and also helping facilitate more development downtown. Other things that we've learned when we were going through this moratorium process is that there was a real concern about CCHIP projects encroaching on neighborhoods and a developer purchasing a single family home or two or three knocking them down and building a multi-family housing project and so in our policy if you were ever zoned single family within the past five years or you have to rezone from single family to something else you're not eligible for these incentives and so you would not get these as of right incentives so make sure that we're protecting those neighborhoods and so and that was something we heard loud and clear from the development community and for the neighborhoods as well. The other issue we heard was design. A lot of projects are going into neighborhoods where it was zoned appropriately and they didn't care about what the design looked like and so every project that gets incentives from the city of San Antonio must go through the design review and must go through the HDRC process to really hold them to a higher level of design and so we've made a lot of changes we've aligned them with the housing task force report we also listen to the neighborhoods to make sure that we are providing them the protections that they want. So you know I think you know folks might ask what would happen if we just stopped incentivizing market rate housing downtown? I don't know the answer to that I've done a lot of analysis working with Lori kind of through this you know every development deal is different everyone has a different financing structure and I think the answer is with the current sort of fee waiver policy incentive policy you know some deals will happen okay like if we didn't have it some deals will happen some will be marginal and some won't happen the same as the case with the policy in place right I mean there's some that just that just aren't gonna make the cut. I think you know there's some things that I think are really successful about what what Lori has done with this with this latest policy and one of one of which is around this notion of one of the things that was reaffirmed reaffirmed during our housing policy task force work is that affordability is not just defined as spending no more than 30% of your income on housing HUD defines it as housing plus transportation equals no more than 45% of your your annual income right so San Antonians spend 21% of their income on transportation on average it's because we're a commuter city we're a car city we don't have a robust functioning multimodal transportation system and we are sprawled out all over hither and yon right so you know one of the things that we hope for with with downtown and not just downtown and so let's let's be clear I mean downtown doesn't drive the city it's important but it doesn't drive the city we can't fit two million people downtown we can't fit all the jobs for two million people downtown but we have the essay tomorrow comprehensive plan and this this is a robust road map that identifies 13 regional centers throughout San Antonio that we want to dense up and it links them all with robust transportation corridors this is all in alignment with the via 2040 plan right so earned is that San Antonians a lot of San Antonians can't afford a car especially downtown and in these regional centers where the jobs are you know where we have legions of low paid service workers you know people who are earning $20,000 a year you know $25,000 a year $30,000 a year they they need to live close to where they work a perfect example you mentioned Alamo community group is their Kalpashoe building right downtown I think it's 63 units something like that of those and and it's affordable it's I think it's up to 60% AM I'm not sure but of those 63 units the families that are that are living in there I think at last count there was somewhere between 10 and 12 total automobiles right that's because those people walk to work because they live close to where they work and they cannot afford a car right so this is my housing affordability downtown and in the regional centers and a longer transportation corridors is absolutely critical so I support the sort of tier three which is a later addition to the the the waiver policy because what it says is once we go through the master planning process the SA tomorrow physical planning process for each of these regional centers and transportation corridors and so forth those incentives will then apply to those regional centers and transportation corridors and and I think that's important for a number of reasons we can't build all the housing downtown but we need a lot more affordable housing downtown we need a lot more affordable housing in medical center we need a lot more affordable housing at airport at Brooks at Port San Antonio and everywhere else where where our jobs are so I think that's a damn good piece of policy and I want to add that thank you for bringing up it was level three that went to all the regional centers we when we looked at the report we saw there was a need of about 10 000 multifamily housing units which the majority would be that 60 percent in a minor below they all can't fit downtown and so where do we want them to go we want them to go where the community said they needed to go through the SA tomorrow regional center process which is putting them in the areas near the medical center where there are jobs at Brooks at the port and so we feel very comfortable moving forward I mean that the sea chip will help us layer on those tools to get you know at least a thousand of that 60 percent AMI in the downtown area but they'll be spread out throughout this other 12 regional centers so Lori I guess my first thought when I saw this kind of expansion of the policy which is great but what about resources for this you know are we always just spreading the peanut butter too thin to be able to cover all of this you know is there an anticipated increase particularly like when we talk about like saws impact view waivers which tend to be a huge hit on projects kind of what is the strategy there and trying to make sure that we have the appropriate amount of resources for this expanded plan now when we changed it to all levels the only tool that changed really for affordable housing is that tax rebate because if you're an affordable housing project you would have already qualified for the city fee waivers under the city fee waiver program and so it wasn't a new tool that was being made available to these other projects so now the resource is actually the taxes that developer pays as a result of the improvement of the project so as long as they're paying their taxes we're going to rebate them that 75 percent and the city and saws fee waivers those are allocated annually I think we get about two and a half million for the city fee waivers and about three million annually from saws the center city development operations department and in our housing and neighborhood services department we try to be creative when there are projects that maybe we don't have enough saws fee waivers we'll work with the tourist unit to be able to compensate them for those fee waivers but right now nothing has changed because the prior fee waiver policy provided affordable housing projects access to those same tools with the exception of the tax rebate so we've gotten some questions I kind of follow the same theme and I'm going to direct this to you Jim but in terms of and this this is a little bit beyond the scope of you know central business district downtown and kind of what my urban SA focus is on but it's part and parcel to the discussion you kind of have any kind of change without some kind of unintended consequence so when you're talking about all of this this progress which is great you know you can help it you know consider displacements as you've discussed and so what are some of the conversations that are happening in terms of different potential solutions and strategies to kind of at least mitigate some of the the impact we don't want to stop progress but we want to see what we can do to mitigate the unintended consequences correct okay so yeah I mean as you might imagine through the housing policy framework discussion this was this was a major component of what we looked into and it's a big complicated problem we don't have any hard data on the magnitude of the problem yet as I as I said earlier we need to do the study so that we understand the magnitude of the task at hand you know what we looked at through the housing policy framework was sort of macro level solutions there there are some policies that are underway right now so I think first and foremost is a displacement mitigation it's called displacement mitigation and prevention but it's really a displacement mitigation policy that the city san Antonio neighborhood and housing services department is working on there's been a series of public meetings over the course of the last few months to determine what this looks like this is one of the key recommendations of our report and what this is is it's an emergency policy it's for dealing with rapid rehousing you know counseling it's for dealing with people who are being displaced because we failed to prevent that displacement in in the first place and I would like to salute that only because so though who's the director of neighborhood and housing services she's doing a phenomenal job her and as a Kamal who are who are running that public process right now so so that's the first step second yeah we need to look closely at at displacement prevention in a housing policy framework says we need to spend about a billion dollars over the course of the next 10 years to maintain the status quo in san Antonio in other words to keep the affordability the impending affordability crisis from getting worse and that's your various sources and the idea is that there's going to be a three to five to one leverage with public private and philanthropic funds for a total of four and a half to five billion dollars of that approximately 25 percent is is earmarked for displacement prevention and that includes you know things like the under one roof program owner occupied rehab but it also includes some more robust recommendations we believe that the city of san Antonio needs to get more aggressive in identifying the issues and getting in front of them so uh now cap national association of latino community asset builders earlier this year finished up a study that was commissioned by the housing commission which was a which was a vulnerability analysis right and and what it showed was all of these neighborhoods around downtown and you know down down the river and near west side near east side near south side and some near you know near north side that were vulnerable um through a series of of of determinants or or indicators that they used so that was um the the neighborhoods that they determined that were were sort of most vulnerable matched up to a series of heat maps that were generated by um the bear appraisal district and michael amoskita that the chief appraiser looked at you know neighborhoods were where housing was increasing at a value or at a rate significantly higher than the background average 5 percent or whatever it is for bear county dovetailed exactly with the vulnerability analysis furthermore there's a series of of really detailed maps that a researcher from trinity university lily kasota has been working on the overlay other information demographic information you know and and what what we found really interesting in all of this was that these you know the the brightest pulsing red areas in these heat maps also happened to correlate with parts of town with lowest education attainment lowest income oldest housing stock um fewest number of caucasians so on and so forth right so more of this the smoking fire so what we said is the city of san Antonio needs to get active and they need to we need to identify the funding and we need to put it in place so that they can go look at these at at the existing affordability in neighborhoods both multi-family and single-family look at public private partnerships look at um creative ways to acquire these properties before and if they're substandard you know you know raise them and and build new high quality um but affordable market rate housing so this is i mean it's going to take a lot of money and it's going to take a lot of time but that's that's the real policy you know the discussion about c chip is is great um but c chip is a drop in the bucket next to what we need to provide any given affordable housing unit i mean it's literally you know the gap is just so much greater that it's not almost not worth talking about c chip as an affordable housing tool other than as one you know sort of tool in the toolbox so that's displacement prevention um the other thing we need to do is we need to build a lot more affordable housing we need to build more affordable housing in all of our regional centers and particularly downtown um and we've talked about how we can do that so there are another series of of things that we've talked about over over the last year or so about protecting legacy homeowners you know that was all that i was talking about there was primarily about renters so first we need to develop some tools to allow homeowners in these rapidly value legacy homeowners in these rapidly evaluating neighborhoods to tap into the equity in their homes and ram i know you're working on some some pretty creative ideas about you know building an accessory dwelling unit as a you know another income stream to allow people to pay the property taxes and stay in their homes creative things like that um as we all know the texas legislature is back in session and school finance reform and property tax reform are on the menu and they sound serious about it who knows how far it will go but it's the number one issue in the state of texas right now it's not just san Antonio um i know that representative Diego Bernal is intending to introduce legislation i think he's talking about doing it this session um protecting legacy homeowners and this is the gist of it is if you've lived in your home for x period of time and it's been your homestead for 10 years um you know a free a freeze on your property tax if your neighborhood is experiencing valuation at a rate significantly higher than the background average which many neighborhoods around downtown park another tool that's at our disposal right now is a turds for for legacy neighborhoods i mean we could lay the turds over any given neighborhood and funnel what's that uh tax increment reinvestment zone another word for it is tiff tax increment financing um and what that means is as as as properties increase in value in the future over time you're earmarking that that money that increased increment and putting it into a pool um to allow you to do projects like infrastructure projects downtown or in this case it could be new sidewalks for neighborhoods it could be street improvements we can do this right now is when we change the city charter which is another thing that we need to do to allow an affordable housing bond that will then also allow us to use that turds money to actually improve people's homes if we determine that that's in the public good so that's another thing to to keep our eye on um and finally my favorite i was having breakfast with my old friend Mike Casey the other day and he said jim well the issue is the appraisal district you know why don't we why don't we get the appraisal district to just if people can't pay their taxes just put a lien on their house but don't collect on that you know wait till it's time for that for that property to you know transfer to uh to an error or a successful successor and collect the property tax then and i thought you know what's that they used to do that but how do we institutionalize that so that it benefits these legacy homeowners or senior citizens or or folks who are on on a fixed income um so finally incremental growth all right so here's the big one you know there is this narrative and i don't mean to hug the microphone just real quick there is this narrative out there that the only way we're going to solve the housing affordability prices is to provide more housing that's true on a macro scale that's true right if you're looking at the city of san Antonio as a whole more supply keeps the prices down and you've got the trickle down effect of you know people trading up where that breaks down is at the micro economic level right where we're looking at particular neighborhoods or or regional centers or or what have you because there's another mechanic that kicks in and this is this is the investment mechanic right where and we're seeing this in some of the neighborhoods around downtown where where it's almost a feeding frenzy an investment feeding frenzy and it's and it's a market that's sort of unnaturally hot right i know this because i design a lot of market rate housing and i'm seeing you know buyers coming in and buying some of these townhouses that are investors or they're they're running it as an air bnb while they're waiting for the property to to valuate and then they're they're flipping it right so you know um one one of the emerging sort of theories out there about how we how we really deal with affordability is through our comprehensive plan and some of the policies that that lory has put in place for slowing down growth right spreading it out a little bit so that neighborhoods have time to adjust to these to these changes you know pulling these incentives into the central business district and pulling them out of the neighborhoods was one really good step incentivizing our transportation corridors and our regional centers is another good step because it it allows for investment to happen at a rate so much i want to someone submitted some questions here let me just go through one or two of them here one is uh these are kind of related but in terms of infrastructure and you've kind of touched on this in terms of transportation and how that is a component of overall you know housing costs but what is you know we know the streetcar died but in terms of the strategy connect assay all that what is the strategy in terms of leveraging that and other mobility options transit options to assist with that overall housing cost specifically as it relates to downtown this could be for both of you sure we'll both take a crack at it so there are a lot of initiatives that are underway right now via is a real bot leader in in this space we've worked with them on several projects one of which was an economic analysis of you know the neary side and the robert thompson transit center they've done a similar one for their west side transit center for brooks you know looking at our transportation corridors particularly you know between downtown and the airport and between downtown and medical center and and utsa and they are going out and they are doing real planning you know talking about how we leverage through public private partnerships and reduce transportation costs leverage private development dollars to build in housing affordability so that's one of the things that i think is really exciting and i would really like to see more of via's work kind of come to the fore and and be sort of more codified in the this sort of thinking of san Antonio government and and the development community when i um when i add to that we have the 2040 plan the connect essay is working on and there's you know 2.8 billion dollars in need over the next 20 years but the more we can connect people to jobs where they live the better we can reduce you know their overall costs and they can afford housing and so so how do we connect it and it's very simple it sounds so simple so the level three area that we identified in the c-chip was about around those corridors those transportation corridors where are those major corridors that via is planning for for more transit so we can support housing along those corridors so someone doesn't need a car and they can walk to work and so it's it's not going to happen overnight it's going to be over the next 20 years and you know like jim i wish we could control the growth but we're going to have a million people here another million by 2040 and we need to be ready and so right now we do have the leadership in place um we have the connect essay being led by um hope and drotty um Henry Cisneros and jane makin and um we hope to do more planning we are working closely with dia as we plan these transportation corridors um not just in downtown but as we connect them to the medical center and these other regional centers one more question for you lory and then we're going to take some audience questions um but in terms of the overall outlook for housing downtown uh how do the opportunity zones play into that you know there's this and i'll let you describe kind of what that is um and opportunity zones and then also the the impending utsa expansion you know what does that mean for downtown housing so the opportunity zones or the new program that came out of this current administration and it differs your taxes on capital gains provided that you invest in these opportunities so the city of elite has want to say 28 zones um that've been designated um one of them is the downtown area one of them is in the the near west side and provided that you invest in that area you can um defer your taxes on the capital gains now there's still more rules coming out um we are working closely with all of our partners we haven't seen any opportunity zone project come out yet um but it's through 2026 i believe and so we're working between very closely close attention to this now what was your last question utsa so utsa um that will be another game changer for downtown i mean anytime that you can have backpacks in your downtown you're sending a signal this place is safe to live it's vibrant because you know somebody who's willing to let their child live down down um so it's it's a big thing to be able to have children and students in your downtown area now utsa is going to be growing they currently have a believe about 3500 students in their downtown over the next 10 years are going to be 15 000 students to downtown um the city of san antonio just the new town utsa we provided them at a fair market value two parts of the property um on the west side i'm sorry the south side of city hall on dola rosa the county is providing them their property and they're going to build their school of data science relocate their college of business and then build a national security collaboration center that is the first growth that will happen um the first phase of utsa expansion they have a phase two it's going to be going on the near west side on the other side of the interstate um and that will include housing and more student services that is probably in the three to five years away however because it's so close to those neighborhoods we have asked them to do the the neighborhood placement displacement study look to see how this could impact um those neighborhoods and so before utsa comes back to the city of san antonio we have made that a requirement of the request for funding is please don't expect any funding without us seeing that study and how we're going to mitigate any displacement in that area um but this is going to be huge for san antonio utsa with 15 000 students and faculty and staff that'll bring more jobs more retail and more housing in downtown and just sends another great sign or a prosperous city thank you so we're going to take about two or three questions before we uh break here uh see one here we'll go then yeah we have one mic for you to be really loud so talk to you i'm gonna start the question with a little quick anecdote um so those high areas you're talking about that are like extreme poverty with tall cars so i grew up in that area um i went to san antonio college but i graduated there on scholarship transferred to parts of this the new school in new york city on a scholarship graduated from there and then brought that kind of lifestyle that i had to use to survive and where i came from to new york city but what i found was that living there the life blood of the city to keep it from going into greater poverty was the train system it's like vital right so all i keep looking at when i think about san antonio which i've always looked at in my whole life of how does how can it grow up and be better how can we get a better reliable transportation system so that the people locked in their poverty areas can get around and it always comes back to the train thing i don't know if it's naive to think this but i feel like if you have a train um and you put the 2.8 billion or whatever is needed for that it might be more again um towards that first in addressing the um the protections for the low-income families maybe that that will that will get to solve two problems it'll get all the disposable income within the city into downtown plus what you're doing already building now and then it'll also protect and empower the poverty because it will keep it will give people options to go around the city to get more money and to get around clicker to get back home um and then it's more reliable if it's you know in new york city again you may maybe wait like 13 minutes to get on the train go somewhere um anywhere and across all the boroughs so um i feel like that's that's like that's where the investment should be on top of the incentive programs that exist and it sounds like a great plan ready the protections that are there um with the revised seatship plan but i think the train is like number one in solving both issues and increasing the income so that in the long term it's a long-term thing i know but i feel like that's the better long-term plan and then just trying to get 2.8 billion to address a little area you know because it solves two problems the train so is it under possibility is what are the what are the um obstacles in getting that because i feel like if you have the entire highway system aligned with the train above ground not underground because you can't do an aquifer um then that will supplement existing via uh transportation and the proof is that realistic or just a naive thing so um you know we keep we keep grappling with this issue of light rail in san Antonio um currently it's not on the table to my knowledge um perhaps somewhere down the road i think we're looking at trackless trains which are just really nice buses um on kind of fixed route with with greater service i encourage you to take a moment and go look at the via 2040 plan um their long range plan it's a very well thought out document um while it doesn't contain light rail it it very specifically lays out you know kind of how we're going to increase mobility options particularly to the historically underserved neighborhoods around downtown and hopefully um bring some of the investment and solve some of the problems that that that you just articulated uh questions you just have a real quick question about via why hasn't it not been addressed as via to run in the corner in the business district the buses 24 hours we talk about things at the restaurants that start five in the morning the hotels that go overnight the clubs and bars that end at 2 a.m when these places closed those employees don't get out till 3 34 in the morning and i don't understand why they stop at 12 especially in the surrounding areas now that whatever is happening is happening don't want to use the g word but there's those individuals cannot get in and out of downtown anymore to go to work so we talk about uh you know affordable housing in the downtown area but what about the people that do not care to work excuse me live in the downtown area just want to go to work we have anyone from via like i'd like to take a bullet but you know i i don't have an answer to that i really wish i did although i sure wouldn't it be nice if via also at free bus service i mean they already have the bus plans you would think just i think ultimately it's a resource problem which is you know more often than not that tends to be the answer to a lot of why don't we have x anything on this side work this side this side right here so i moved from austin a couple years ago and uh one of the things i didn't like about austin is that they really haven't preserved a lot of their historical buildings in the living space uh what is being done here and that's one of the things that i like about san antonio's there's so much historical architecture here and the mixing of modern with a historical what is being done what's in place for keeping that so we have a series of historic districts um around downtown san antonio not everything is under the jurisdiction of our historic design review commission um but downtown is the downtown design guidelines um we are and those are fairly fairly robust guidelines and it's a public review process for the neighborhoods that aren't currently um protected i guess is the word uh you would you would use we're having a community conversation right now and it's a partnership between uh the tier one neighborhood coalition which is you know sort of the 50 neighborhoods around downtown the san antonio conservation society the office of historic preservation and the san antonio chapter of the aia to talk about what we need to do to preserve the the physical form of neighborhoods you know what what what you know what makes good infill talking about the difference between density versus intensity you know or it's a number of people versus how much stuff is getting built on a site and i think the idea is that ultimately after we have this long robust community conversation we'll come to a consensus of sorts and hopefully we can eventually bake this into our development code initially it's going to be a set of guidelines that will be applied downtown and through the historic districts as a as a way to sort of kick the tires on the system and see how we like it see what's working what's not working um but before we um deploy it more widely and i think the other the other thing we're looking at right now is the office of historic preservation as just ira consultant to do a study of housing preservation and not historic preservation but preserve preservation of affordable housing stock as as as a as an economic engine and i'm really looking forward to seeing the results of that i want to add that you know we are at historic study we have such wonderful historic buildings and as we experience this fast-paced change that we're going to be having over the next 10 20 years i mean our challenge is going to be how do we continue to maintain that historic building stock how do we continue to maintain that small town field that people love about san antonio and how do we continue to be true to our cultural integrity and so those are the challenges that we're going to have as we go through this change and um as jim mentioned we have some wonderful codes in place that help us with that historic component but it needs to bleed into that that cultural component as well and that's going to be our challenge that we're going to be facing over the next 10 15 years because you ask people why do you love san antonio and i love san antonio because it's it's real it's authentic there there's culture here but how do we continue to keep that so you have more people who come here because of the same reasons so i'm going to ask our speakers to make some closing remarks here uh first i want to make my own um which is you know i've always been an avid supporter of downtown you know for me the having a successful downtown means that this is very selfish but that means my kids won't have to leave san antonio when they get older to find good jobs you know the the talent and the jobs can be here because they're attracted by a strong downtown and so this is why the issue of housing in a strong downtown is so important for our success as a city as a whole so for me you know making sure that when we are thinking about um housing not only what does what does growth and progress have to do you know its impact on neighborhoods and displacement and the g word um and how do you make sure that you're mitigating that but also let's not stop the progress let's not stop uh the growth that's happening because our city needs it as an economic engine going forward um jim i'll leave it to you for some closing remarks then more sure um so i i grew up in downtown san antonio um back in the early 70s um you know my dad and mom restored an old victorian on madison street my dad hand turned the spindles himself with a lathe and i kind of got in the way um the neighborhood was a lot different back then right and this is downtown we're in around downtown a lot of the old houses were chopped up into apartments after world war two um and when we moved into the neighborhood it was incredibly socioeconomically diverse i went to bonham elementary school um you know alongside all the kids from victoria courts and the school was i mean it was so brown i mean you would have thought my name was orale weddle you know so the neighborhood the neighborhoods changed you know i got this really rich experience like a sort of budo san antonio um i brought my children back back to the neighborhood and sent them to bonham but it was different and it's it's changed um we're experiencing that change in neighborhoods all around downtown and and all i can say is we're going to be a great city you know kind of whatever that means to each one of you and we're well we're well on our way but as we go on that journey together let's make sure we understand our roots and what matters to us and let's make sure that we remain a good city as we do it and i'm going to end on what i said earlier we are experiencing so much change and then we have transportation needs we need to diversify our transportation system we need to tackle the affordable housing issue that we're facing over the next couple years and we need to address income inequality in this community and the only way we're going to be able to do that is through having conversations like these we want you all to participate as we go through these regional center planning efforts help us plan for the city because if we're not prepared you know that we're going to the growth is going to um we're going to be overcome by that growth and we need to work together and we need to stay true to san Antonio i'm going to go back to we're authentic we have the culture and we have the historic stock and people love san atoni because we're that small city that small village in that big town we can't lose that and so only by working together and doing these regional center plans together and creating good policy which is on the city and the county can we do that and i'm so thrilled to see so many people here usually when we go to public meetings it's 10 to 15 so um thank you so much thank you Romero for inviting Jim and i thank both of you for being here and sharing your thoughts this evening i want to thank uh free tail brewery uh my other sponsor urban lazars uh and then also my urban essay will be holding these core talks periodically the next one will likely be in march and we want to know one of the talks we want to hear and discuss about downtown specifically go to our website and email us and contact us at my urban essay dot com uh fill out the no card and leave it at the front uh thank you all so much for being here tonight and have a safe drive home thank you