 the November 4th, 2020 study session of the Santa Cruz City Council. A few announcements and then we'll get started with our regular meeting. Today's meeting is being broadcast live on Community Television Channel 25 and streaming from the city's website, cityofsantacrews.com. All council members are participating in this meeting remotely and I want to thank Public Crescent and Jerome to view today's City Council meeting. If you wish to comment on an agenda item today, call in the beginning of the item you are wanting to comment on using the instructions on your screen. Please mute your television or streaming device once you call in and listen through your phone. Please note there's a delay in streaming, so if you continue to listen on your television or streaming device, you may miss your opportunity to speak. When it's time for public comment, please press star nine on your phone to raise your hand and when it's your time to speak during public comment, you'll hear an announcement that you've been unmuted and your timer will be set to two minutes. You may hang up once you finish commenting on your item and with that I'd like to ask the clerk to please call the roll. Thank you Mayor, Council Member Byers. Mayors will be late and Mayor coming. Instructions on your screen. Malora Management Analyst. Good afternoon. Let me bring this up here. I'll be presenting today with Tony Candati, our City Attorney. This presentation is on the State of California Housing Legislation updates from 2018 to 2020. There's a lot of legislation each year and a lot of it is fairly obscure and some of it's also not relevant to the City of Santa Cruz, so we're really focusing here on kind of the most important items that we'll see coming up in the future and we'll be using day to day. And so with that I'm going to provide some background to on this as well. In addition to the 2018 to 2020 changes that we'll focus on, there are some overarching policy changes in state legislation that that still work through a lot of this other work and some of these updates that we're going to present today refer back to some of these as well. And so the first one of those is the Housing Accountability Act, which has actually been around for almost 40 years, but was significantly changed in 2017 to really strengthen it. And the goal of this, the goal of the Housing Accountability Act was to meaningfully and affecting, meaningfully and affecting curbing the capability of local government to deny, reduce the density of or render infeasible housing development projects. So since then there have been a lot more state regulations that are that are playing into our local role in housing approval and denial. And the Housing Accountability Act also strengthened the housing elements role in requiring and monitoring housing development as well. Another one is the Densee Bonus Law, which has also been around a long time, but has since seen more recent changes. 2002 there were changes to make it more similar to what we know of today. And then in 2014 there was replacement requirements as well as a change from 30 years of affordability to 55 years of affordability required for the Densee Bonus units. And then in 2016 there was increase to the Densee Bonus for specialized populations and then there was more streamlining changes. And then SB 35 was also a streamlining measure done. And that's for cities if they're not meeting their arena housing allocation requirements. SB 2 was a bill that really paved the way for a lot of grand funding for housing development work. And we're currently using some of those SB 2 funds through a grant for the objective standards work, which will which we'll be presenting later. And then finally SB 743 was largely a change to CEQA and how traffic is measured, which really better supports infill housing development as one of its key aims. So with that I'm going to go into 2020 legislation. The first two are the first one is especially important. That's AB 2345 and that's the Densee Bonus increase. And the really the really key thing here is that prior to this the maximum Densee Bonus afforded to a market rate project was 35 percent. And that would now be increased to 50 percent under this under this. And that's that's if an applicant does provide additional an additional percentage of affordable units. So for instance previous Densee Bonus Law would have allowed a 35 percent Density Bonus. If the applicant is providing 11 percent to very low income unit on the project, whereas under this law there will now be if they provide 15 percent very low income units they could they could receive this 50 percent Densee Bonus increase. And then AB 3182 is a change to accessory dwelling units. And that's that was really a streamlining measure requiring cities to complete an application or act on a complete application within 60 days. Otherwise it would be being approved. The final two are actually ones that weren't in the staff report but we thought we would also want to highlight as well to you. And that's AB 1851 and that is allowing religious institutions that have housing development on their parking lots. The religious institution would or could receive a 50 percent parking reduction to make way for that development on their property. And then finally SB 288 was also passed this year and that was to make both bikes and transit projects such as bus lanes and bike lanes and bus rapid transit projects things like that. They would be exempt from CEQA. So with that I'm going to hand that over to Jess Miller who's analyst in housing to speak more on the other legislation from 2020. Thanks Matt. So AB 725 was a bill that the state mandated that well the history of the state has mandated that all cities, towns and counties have enough plans for housing needs of California residents at multiple income levels. So that's very low which is generally 50 percent AMI below which is between 50 and 80 percent moderate 80 to 120 and then above moderate so anything over 120. So we have to provide housing at all those different levels. And so the way the state tracks our accomplishments is through our housing element and regional housing needs allocation which you may have also heard called BRINA. So the state determines how many units are needed and at what levels and then they they get doled out to the different jurisdictions. So what AB 725 does is it requires 20 percent of the above moderate housing needs to be on parcel zones between four and 100 units per acre and roughly that's almost all the parcels in the city. So we know we're going to meet that requirement from the state and this is really the state was trying to encourage more medium density projects instead of smaller like fewer unit projects. They want to see more medium density and then we have AB 3308 which is kind of part of the teacher housing after 2016 that was passed to facilitate the acquisition construction rehabilitation and preservation of affordable housing for teachers and school employees. So this bill continues to affirm the state's support of building affordable housing for teachers and school district employees and it's going to be on school district land so they own the land already and it'll allow those district projects to be funded with low income housing tax credit so that's the money from could be from the state or from the federal government and generally you can't have preferences for tenants with that kind of funding but this bill will actually allow school district projects to have that preference to give preference to teachers and their school district employees and it'll it'll make sure that they can maintain eligibility for the federal tax credit. And Tony good afternoon council members. I'm going to cover two bills 187 FBA 872 relates to property insurance and what this bill does is it streamlines the process for making residential insurance claims for victims of disasters such as wildfires. It also expands the definition of additional living expenses that must be paid to homeowners for losses incurred in a state of emergency to include not just for homes damaged or destroyed but also additional living expenses for homes that are rendered uninhabitable due to such circumstances as the loss of access to water or power or building rendered temporarily uninhabitable due to smoke damage or that sort of thing. Upon submission of a claim by a homeowner it requires an advanced payment of no less than four months for costs such as housing furniture rental furniture rental and transportation. It also mandates an advanced payment of no less than 25 percent of a policy limit for lost content without submission of an inventory form and it makes insurers give homeowners a 60 day grace period for payment of premiums on property insurance after an emergency. For property owners who elect to use the proceeds from a destroyed residence to construct a residence on another location a different piece of property it bars insurance companies from deducting the land value of the relocated site from payments for those who build on new lot so in other words if your if the proceeds of your policy would provide enough funds to acquire a replacement property and construct that would prohibit insurance companies from deducting the cost of acquiring property. Turning to AB 3088 this deals mostly with with protections for residential tenants. It prevents residential tenants from facing eviction for failure to pay rent from March 1st 2020 to August 31st 2020 to avoid eviction beyond August 31st tenants must pay at least at least 25 percent of rent payments from September 1st of 2020 to January 31st of 2021. To receive protection from eviction the tenants have to file a statement attesting to the fact that they are enduring a pandemic related hardship and tenants that make more than $100,000 or more than 130 percent of the area's median income can be required to submit additional documentation proving their hardship. Miss payments from the period of March 1st 2020 to January 31st 2021 are converted into consumer debt which is recoverable by landlords and small claims court to the extent that the amount of outstanding rent would exceed the jurisdiction of the small claims court it would also increase the that jurisdiction to cover the full amount owed and it preempts local ordinances relating to eviction protections that were modified or extended after August 19th 2020 so this and this includes ordinances regulating deferred payment plans does not cover commercial evictions as you recall an executive order authorized by the city council initially in April and reauthorized in June was extended recently by an executive order of Governor Newsom to I believe the end of February. There's also provision in AB 3088 that extends protections for landlords although it's it's not as I guess impactful as the protections for tenants it extends the protections set forth in the existing homeowners bill of rights to small landlords which means those owning residential property with up to four dwelling units just like a residential property owner or homeowner it requires mortgage servicers to contact borrowers before pursuing foreclosure proceedings in order to provide potential forbearance options it also prohibits dual tracking what's called dual tracking where a servicer initiates foreclosure proceedings while considering loan modifications with the borrower and finally where a small landlord is denied a forbearance the act requires the mortgage servicer to provide a written explanation of the decision as to why and these anti foreclosure protections for small landlords are in effect until January 1st of 2023 that covers AB 3088 so we're going to move on to legislation for 2019 and the first one being this group of bills for accessory dwelling units and these were actually and these were all brought to council in December of 2019 for approval and and items under this bill included things like removing parking requirements and parking replacement requirements and removing lot coverage requirements as well as increasing the square footage allowed for ad use and then another ad you bill from 2019 was ab 670 which provided more allowance for ad use in homeowners associations to so that they weren't prevented from being built in HOA developments and then AB 1100 was was a change to how parking is counted for ABA electric vehicle charging and so an ABA space that has an electric vehicle charging setup is counted as two spaces towards the parking count and the largest of the items on this slide is AB 1763 which is a density bonus increased for affordable projects and that's a those are projects that are 100% affordable and under this bill they're allowed to receive up to an 80% density bonus so that's 30% higher than what's now allowed at 50% in addition to that if these projects that are complying with AB 1763 if they're located within a half mile of a major transit stop then they're also able to receive a three-story height increased or 33 feet for that project to make that to make that feasible and finally an especially large piece of legislation is SB 330 and there are several components to this the first one being application processing and this this was really to prevent cities from continuing to move the bar on applicants and and adding new requirements to an application as they went through the process so so this really to SB 330 really requires cities to have an upfront list of the requirements for an applicant and and sticking to those through the review and in not adding additional requirements as the project moves forward so as seen as you know some some kind of streamlining it also created a public meeting cap so once project once a project is deemed complete and there can be no more than five public meetings on that project and this this excludes CEQA but but otherwise that would that would stay at five and then it also did things such as like no down zoning no moratoriums or or no new growth control provisions so SB 330 does not allow that anymore and then it's also provided direction on not on cities not being able to enforce subjective design standards and really putting forward that cities could only use objective design criteria for reviewing projects and that's an important reason why the city is taking steps in creating those subjective design standards to conform to the SB 330 requirements and then finally there there is replacement housing provisions and before these were really only required for density bonus projects and now they're required for all for all housing projects and this is replacement of affordable housing and and really during this analysis and in looking more deeply into density bonus and replacement housing you know we really work through our understanding of these items and and staff now thinks there may even be a case where this wasn't applied properly recently as far as replacement housing goes so that's definitely something we're looking into and and and working towards understanding better and ameliorating so with that I'll pass that back over to Jess. So AB 101 as I'm sure you recall from the staff report had a lot of information in fact this bill had 57 major provisions pertaining to the 2019 Budget Act so for anyone who wants to go in depth I highly recommend visiting the California Legislature webpage leginfo.legislature.ca.gov to go really deep on this but some of the highlights that were mentioned in the staff report are housing element compliance so there's a bit of a stick and a carrot element here so there are remedies available to the state for jurisdictions that aren't meeting their housing element requirements but then there's also incentives and even designations of the pro housing jurisdiction for those that are meeting certain criteria and have an approved housing element. There's also some information and some rules and definitions about low barrier navigation centers so the state actually provides a definition of what that is and it allows development by right in certain areas and it also provides deadlines for development so what the city would be required to do in terms of responding to an application or pre-application. There's some cleanup about SB 35 related to calculations determining streamlining approval process and how they're just waste sites and then there were quite a few funding programs and changes and updates so there were two new programs that were given one-time grant funding to address homelessness and planning activities. There were some changes to two existing programs which is farm worker housing grant and housing first parolee program and then there were some new funding allocated to four existing housing programs CalHome, local housing trust fund, low-income housing tax credits and the mixed income program so some of these will be familiar to you because we applied for CalHome earlier this year and we didn't get that first round of funding but we've applied again just a few weeks ago and then we're hoping to hear back early next year and we're still hoping to hear back on the local housing trust fund application that we submitted over the summer so hopefully we'll have some good news on that front once we get feedback from the state. So can I have you go? Thanks Matt. All right so this next slide there's um it first appearance it looks like maybe there might be some confusing information with 10% run increase and 5% so AB 110 pertains to all rentals in California and requires landlords to provide 90 days notice of rent increases above 10% to their tenants and AB 1482 um places an upper limit on rent increases for at 5% plus inflation measured through the CPI or 10 10% whichever is lower so there's actually some exceptions to this rule so 1482s there's some properties that are exempted from this requirement and that includes you know projects with deed or agreement restrictions from a government agency or um projects that have housing subsidies for affordable housing there's dormitories constructed and maintained for higher education or exempt housing that's already subject to rent or price control via public entity housing that's received a certificate of occupancy within the last 15 years and rentals not owned by a real estate investment trust or corporation and um it's important to keep in mind that that 1482 is actually going to sunset in 10 years so in 2030 and it doesn't actually preempt any local rent control laws or just cause ordinances it just it provides that protection for any properties that aren't exempt for that 10-year period and then the last one on this slide is uh SB 18 so this extends um there was a an expiration date on providing 90 days notice to tenants who reside in a residence that might be foreclosed upon so this um removes that expiration date which was originally December 31st 2019 and it's just um now it's it's in perpetuity so any tenant who resides in a residential property which is sold at foreclosure sale is entitled to 90 days notice about that and we have one more slide matt thanks um so SE 329 um this expands California's fair employment housing act definition of source of income to include lawful verifiable income paid to a housing owner or landlord on behalf of the tenant and this includes you know federal state or local public assistance most commonly known of or thought of as section eight vouchers that can also include bash vouchers and and all the other public assistance vouchers that we have here in Santa Cruz and this bill it does still allow landlords to reject tenancies for other lawful grounds but they cannot discriminate against the tenants because they are receiving a subsidy payment so on onto 2018 legislation uh the first one we have is AB 2162 which is support of housing by right and this was actually something brought to council fairly recently to discuss because this bill allows for a streamlined by right approval process for projects that are affordable that include supportive services and supportive housing units with them as well and this bill specifically targets projects that are 50 units or fewer but also allows city and jurisdiction to approve projects by right through this bill greater than 50 through a resolution which council recently passed for three specific projects and then AB 3194 is related to the housing accountability act and it really just strengthened the housing accounting billy act further by very clearly stating that objective standards in the general plan supersede objective standards or any standards in this hunting code so again it really just put forward the importance of the general plan and as well as you know consistency between the two and then we have a few more AB 2372 is a density bonus on what it really did was allow for a density bonus to instead of being taken from a number of units it could also be taken from floor area ratio of a project and then AB 2753 was a density bonus uh streamlining bill that really just made cleaned up a few items to make density bonus projects move faster through cities and then finally AB 2797 required conformancy or consistency between density bonus law in the California coastal act which the the city has already certified that consistency through previous amendments that we've worked on and then the last two bills here to wrap this up AB 1771 makes multiple changes to the requirements for meeting our arena targets and a lot of those changes were directed towards council of governments which is so the state will assign an area you know the number of units and the income levels they have to achieve and then they'll sign it to council of governments and the council of governments will then distribute that throughout their area their jurisdiction um so a lot of those rules don't directly impact the city but they kind of indirectly impact the city based on how the council of governments has to abide by those rules um some of the the statutory objectives were revised um so this this would be for all cities and jurisdictions statutory objectives were revised to include greenhouse gas reduction targets um balancing low wage jobs to housing units affordable to those low wage workers and then affirmatively furthering fair housing and there were some other changes as well and then SB 765 included some changes to the SB 35 and some of them were requiring recorded agreements for projects and you know having the detail of that affordability in there I believe this is also where they got the 55 years of affordability period for rentals and the 40 years for the ownership units we also got clarifications about streamlining parking standards were meant for automobile parking there were exemptions, secret exemptions for certain activities like local government owned land being used for very low or moderate income housing and then they clarified that for development that qualifies for streamlining and requires approval under the subdivision math act um approvals have to be objective and focused on the compliance with the criteria for streamlined projects um so it it also requires that the state determines whether jurisdictions like the city of subject to streamlining based on the last annual progress report that we submit and they base that looking at the number of building permits that have been issued for very low or low income households right and with that staff recommends that council accepts this report and uh we're we're here and happy to answer any questions you might have thank you questions from council members uh council member matthews um this is a good inventory of the changes which is what we asked for and um reading who it seemed to me well i maybe this is for a future time but really understanding which of these um have already um shown legalization in Santa Cruz which ones we feel are productive which ones are problematical um a lot of them are they're big density bonuses um abu parking streamlining inclusionary i mean those are all big issues that have been tackled and um reading through these i could see some where they'd come up but um maybe maybe just some comment from staff um i don't want to derail a little reading but but where's the real um potential and kind of problematic um just in our community because i could i mean my gosh you just look at the um density bonus where you can get the very low off the tree i think i'm reading it up to three more stories you know that that could be controversial so we can we can predict that so um where do we have flexibility where do we have potential um all of these bills have been approved and uh and are all and are all in effect or or will be in effect the 2020 legislation will go into effect on january 1st so for instance that 50 percent density bonus law will will be effective uh january 1st of 2021 um and so yeah you you bring up a good point to the density bonus projects uh are you know understanding understanding those as well as the replacement requirements for sp330 are our two important pieces of our work and i would i would say also um there there's other other impacts such as uh we recently have a a few churches that are interested in developing housing on their parking lots so it was worth mentioning that 50 reduction to them are to you in regard to their parking requirements so we are seeing some of these utilized already and and like the support of housing has come to council too so so from from that end those those are some of the more important items um in in figuring out and and working with just do you have anything to add not particularly i know i don't work on arena directly but i know that we've been implementing these changes as they've been coming through in order to stay consistent with the state law and and i all know we you know we did a lot of work uh in the last year on ad use too and uh some of that still needs to be accepted by the california coastal admission um our commission so so there is there still is a process involved in getting those fully approved for the city and and within our local coastal zone area so uh so we are still working on those too and and and again you know we're always monitoring to see if there's anything else we need to do to conform and as well as you know keeping our ears to the ground on future updates to to bring further amendments on those uh 2020 did not have any major ad u changes except the one i mentioned but the previous two years uh the previous three years had a number of them so we also worked quite a bit on that too no and if i could just add i concur with matt's comments um and um in response to your inquiry councilmember matthews i'd also really just want to i know matt mentioned these but i i'd want to stress the um the changes and the importance of the changes that came forward as results of ab3194 and sp330 um those two bills um really um tied local jurisdiction's hands in terms of um their ability to deny projects um and they also substantially increase uh development capacities on um on certain sites so as matt mentioned the ab3194 was specified that um the general plan um objective standard so essentially the the dwelling units per acre or the floor area ratio that's permitted by the general plan designation essentially has to be allowed so even if you have a zoning designation that um would preclude you from achieving let's say a zoning a general plan allows up to 55 dwelling units per acre but based on your development standards in your zoning ordinance you really can't feasibly fit the parking the setbacks the height regulations and so forth and get 55 dwelling units per acre well that law came along and said sorry you have to allow what the general plan allows and so there are deviations that can happen from the zoning ordinance standards to allow for the capacity that is specified in the general plan so that was a big change um that um is you know not just here but throughout the state um just starting to be seen with with some of the projects that are coming through I think that was my my point we're we're kind of in the middle of a sea change right now and these are definitely pro-housing pieces of legislation that have only begun to be felt here and there's great great interest and pressure for affordable housing and more housing and I just see a lot of these we all know it's being wildly unpopular among certain parts of the community so I think it's more of an observation but it's definitely a challenge going forward sure I would know when you when you're referencing the you know the density bonus for example and the proximity to high quality transit that Matt mentioned we've added a layer in our GIS that shows the half mile proximity to transit and so that is available on our website but it really shows the uh that a big chunk of our city is within that half mile radius and therefore a hundred percent affordable project could by right get three additional stories or an additional um 33 feet in height so you know in a single family neighborhood for example you could feasibly have a project not at 30 or 35 feet wherever that height limit is you know it could be 60 feet for example in certain areas that would that would have to be a hundred percent affordable project to qualify for that you know so not every project can happen and you know there's still various regulations that that they're going to have to meet I know that some uh affordable housing developers have looked at smaller sites for that and found that it wasn't feasible so I don't see that happening and when that when that law first came out I was thinking wow affordable housing developers are going to be snatching up properties and putting in a lot of units but that really hasn't we haven't seen that materialized and in talking with the affordable housing developers part of that's just an economy of scale in that you know those smaller projects are harder to pencil and part of it is that they still have to meet certain regulations you know you're still having to get in certain instances unless you're providing a certain percentage I think it's 20 or 25 percent supportive housing you still have parking requirements that are applicable and so you know there there's still things that the developers and affordable housing developers will need to deal with but you know if someone if a developer comes along and says that they can make that work we will have very little ability to say no and and you're right you know that could very well be a controversial project if we've got that kind of hype going into an established single-family neighborhood for example over the one in school districts it kind of went by me too fast but that legislation was I don't have the number I think that was 34.08 yeah so that um it specifically talks about low-income housing tax credit so it's assuming that a school district project is going to use those funds in order to develop their project and so what it's saying is that generally you're not allowed to restrict who you rent those units to if you have that on your project but um the state is making a declaration that they're trying to support housing their teachers and school district employees so they's um by making this declaration they're essentially allowing school district projects to qualify for both federal and state low-income housing tax credit so right now the legislation allows if a project gets built only teachers can live there or prior to school district can live there yeah so it's not that they can only live there they can be given a preference so um essentially like the first uh perhaps the first line you look at for applications is going to be those teachers and the school district employees this bill actually allows um public employees like city and county employees to also qualify for there and then should the the school district choose they could then open it up to the general public so it's a preference working down okay thanks a lot thanks we've been updating you know some of our policies are related to objective design standards and so I was just curious with all the different bills are there any other city policies that we'll need to update as a result of some of these changes and as a result of some of those legislation so we're we're certainly coordinating with current planning on on that aspect as well and making sure we we have all our application process processes of a line with SB 330 so some of that will be double checking our application forms and making sure all the requisite information is contained in each of those and that we're we're asking for the right things you know at that very early stage in the project because SB 330 really doesn't allow us to ask for them again after that first review so so those are the kind of things we're working through uh as well as making sure that our our uh you know currently our density bonus uh code like our language in our code references the density bonus so we are good on on that aspect but other things we need to look at our things like our replacement requirements uh in in our code too and making sure those conform with SB 330 and I was actually gonna my follow-up question was actually to ask if you could elaborate a little bit more on those replacement requirements that we do have some things Matt mentioned the density bonus we haven't done updates uh to align um some of the density bonus items um like the the um was it 1763 Matt which they allow which allows the 100 percent um the 80 percent or unlimited density depending on um your proximity to transit that hasn't been added in similarly what came forward this year AB 2345 um that hasn't yet been added um uh to our code um and we will want to do those cleanups the the reason why I wanted to to be clear about uh or to to make the comment is that um for those items um state law will trump our local ordinance so while we don't have that um AB 2345 um we're not going to have that in effect um to allow a 50 density bonus um before the January 1st deadline I think the council members are all will recall how we've scrambled to get some of the ADU regulations in place in years past and part of that was because the ADU regulation specifically said if any of your code um is inconsistent with any part of this code your entire code is null as it relates to ADU so we were scrambling to get this forward it's a little bit different in terms of the density bonus where we're saying okay you know uh developer you can use this we don't have it in our code yet but you can use it so I just wanted to point that out that we will have some of those cleanups coming in the future and um they that applicants can still utilize those even though they're not in our local codes also mentioned to that SB 330 uh sunset of uh 2025 as well so it was originally put in place for five years uh you know of course we don't know yet whether that will be continued or not so that's another factor and figure on how we we bring that into our our code um so we're working through that but as far as the replacement uh item goes that you mentioned Justin for mayor at the replacement for for density bonus projects well we we look back through the 2016 and 2014 bills and those were those were uh at that time that density bonus law went into effect required replacement of one to one for affordable units that were that were being removed for for project so so that does um our current code that doesn't stipulate that exactly we have different replacement requirements but they don't say whether it's a density bonus project or not um and if it is a density bonus project the replacement requirements are actually greater than what our code currently is so there is some there is some clarification that's needed uh in that regard um and and those replacement requirements were further uh fleshed out through that SB 330 uh work where they say really detailed what those replacement requirements are and uh we got a better idea of how to go forward with applicants and in determining that replacement requirement and then it came before the council when we had a presentation of where we were at in terms of meeting our rain nickels and um i don't know if we've seen anything this year but i think it'd be good you know the beginning of next year if we could just see where we're at especially given that we're gonna have a bunch of affordable projects coming online and so i'm sure those will help us meet some of those lower low and very density bonus projects um you know as as the council knows the very low income is the place where we've had the most problems in getting those units and the density bonus projects um you know are coming in and and typically they're not required to provide very low they they have options they can provide a certain percentage of very low or a certain percentage of low um in the case of ownership they can also provide a certain percentage of um moderate income um but in general we're seeing um most we're seeing some come in at the low but most are coming in at the very low to get those additional um uh units in the areas where we're having the hardest problem or biggest challenges producing one thing that i would say to your last question mayor coming matt put together a um analysis of sp3 30 it was an attachment and at the end of that there is um some details about replacement housing and i will say that um i would encourage you to read that and not the state code because the state code is extremely confusing uh and so um i appreciate the work that matt put in to try and decipher that and i think that that um while while that in and of itself isn't um you know really simple it's it's a thousand times simpler than trying to read the state code so that's a good resource for you would like to comment on now's the time to call in using the numbers that are on your screen once you've called into the meeting um please set star nine on your phone to raise your hand and this is red j can you hear me yep yeah this was uh yeah this was a really interesting presentation there's a lot of like projects that like they're coming online um i guess one thing i'm wondering about is with the very low income housing you know nusum has this project home key thing where he's like got a ton of money coming in and he's buying uh motels and hotels that are struggling during covid um and so they're selling for a very cheap price because they're not allowed to sort of like pivot towards any other use um and there was a ucla study that uh sort of inspired this project and so i'm wondering uh why not sort of take on because it seems very successful at this point for producing low very low and no income units why not sort of like start heading in this direction to meet that demand because it really seems like it's the cheapest way we can get a lot of these units very rapidly and not like in a multi-year uh coming online construction timeline right with all those complexities like in 2019 there was this uh motel 11 units at 123 bixby street and it sold for less than two million dollars to market rate housing investors and so that could have easily been purchased by the city um and now here's where i'm gonna get a little controversial uh if we took let's say 20 of the police budget uh and then just put that into a yearly affordable housing budget now the reason i say that is because the police have self reported that 80 percent of their time is spent dealing with the houseless and so it kind of just almost makes a very intuitive amount of sense that we would take some of their funding and just completely try to address this issue at the root um 20 would be about six million dollars motels like this and other multi-family homes so uh just wondering your thoughts on that thank you it was on this item staff and additional additional information to provide with any hotel there or property owner with interest in selling the property to the city uh I think early on they were interested in participating in in the rental uh or the use for uh for homeless to stay but not necessarily to sell only to uh to lease is what I the information I have I don't know if we do have any more money if you've got any more information from them yeah I just what you're saying um city manager early on when hotels were completely closed there was quite a bit of interest in um collaborating um with the project to be able to provide um lodging however now that hotels can open again we you know and there is occupancy we've seen that change so when there was complete closure there was a lot of support I'm not aware of any hotels particularly I do think um that possibly Susie or Paul um were engaging directly with some of the hotels in the program at the state level they may have a little additional information but probably weren't expecting that to come up today so I'm not sure if they're available councilmember Byers the person who just spoke to us um I just want to reaffirm that all the research over and over has been telling us you have to house people to solve the problem so I just want to agree with them we and maybe listen to those motels how about 10-year leasing um they just make the interest I think we ought to be approaching them uh affirmatively waiting rather than waiting for them to come to us so it's just it's so true we've got it and get them off the street thank you thank you um are there any further comments from councilmembers we appreciate having all this information which has a huge amount of content and implications to it uh appreciate having it brought together in one report so I'll move that we accept the um the update and agenda report I'll second that uh so in motion to update and the report from staff motion to make my councilmember Matthews seconded by mayor Cummings there's no further questions or comments we'll why don't we go ahead and take the roll call vote on the item councilmember Byers aye Matthews aye mayor's is absent and mayor Cummings why don't we before we move to the next item why don't we take a quick maybe 10 minute break to the next item how long we can go ahead and move on to the next item um I'm just going to put my face up but I'm here and I'm listening in this presentation is uh economic development director uh Bonnie Lipscomb as well and there's a number of slides where we'll kind of be jumping back and forth between the two of us on them so with that uh this is the the housing blueprint subcommittee recommendations report just really an update on where we're at team there was about six months of outreach spent on creating the voices on housing community report and that was eventually uh uh reported to council uh presented to council in December of 2017 and at that meeting it was decided that the housing blueprint subcommittee would be formed and uh there was once that was formed there was a lot of outreach and a lot of community outreach and the subcommittee made initial recommendations for the housing blueprint on in March of 2018 there was further community outreach and then on June 12th 2018 the housing blueprint subcommittee submitted recommendations that were accepted to council and I really want to stress this was this was an award-winning process this outreach and the documents produced by they received awards for the American Planning Association both regionally for northern California as well as a statewide award of merit in 2019 really followed three three categories one is community vitality the next is housing protection and then finally housing production and housing productions has has a a large majority of the items that we identified and staff went through the housing blueprint subcommittee recommendations report and created a matrix of 57 actionable items for us to track and follow and follow the the completion of and of those 57 actionable items staff determined that 37 of those were completed 17 were underway and three have not yet been started so so really in addition to this being an award-winning outreach process it's also been a very successful process uh in in completing a lot of these items and moving forward a lot of important housing initiatives in the city and so i'll start by going through some of the highlights of those items and talking more about them and so community engagement this is under the community vitality category and all and my my first one here is that planning created the community engagement policy in 2018 and it was since amended in 2019 so that was something that that the planning and community development department took on through this recommend foundation and and created and we've been using since which has been successful in in our reach and transparency for projects and i'll hand it off to bonnie here for the next ones thanks matt so as far as the state of affordable housing updates and actually the next couple ones we've taken sort of a holistic view towards this obviously it's part of our mid-year and our annual budget includes some comprehensive information about our affordable housing both in creation funding that we've gone towards supportive projects as well as current status on our affordable housing trust fund and other funding sources for the creation of affordable housing as far as our housing speaker and engagement series we did kick that off last year with our housing 101 course we have put the in obviously the in-person meetings and that was a i should back up and say that was a collaboration with national development council we have the in-person meetings on hold for right now so we are looking at zoom opportunities we are hoping maybe to re-engage next spring and in person but we'll we'll see on that we're looking at taking some of these classes online and national development council has been developing online platform for those so we're looking at opportunities the specific class that we had with national development council was developed specifically for Santa Cruz using Santa Cruz model local real estate information and so that was a special class just for us so we would look at potentially providing that class again having more in-depth at home excel performer analysis and kind of building from there as far as the affordable housing academy we piloted that somewhat through the citizens academy that parks and rec kicked off last year and in a conjunction and collaboration with planning we did sort of have a housing 101 and a downtown walking tour of affordable housing projects that was a really sort of fun and interactive um evening that we had so we look forward to doing that again and expanding that into a larger program in the future and then one of the requests that we had that we really taken to heart and it is now on our two Santa Cruz under the housing division is the interactive affordability map that's on our website and mad if you could advance that there you go and as you can see you can click on each one of these red houses represents a multi-family project over 10 units and so you can click on that this one for example we clicked on jesse street shows you the project type how many total units are in the project typically number affordable units because they usually have one manager's unit and then the major funding source for a project so this you can click on that for any of the projects over unit size 10 affordable housing projects and get this information which is really great next slide and back to you Matt all right completion update prior to this this presentation there's a really a number of adu of recommendations in the in the housing blueprint recommendations as well and a lot of those were were done also through conforming with state law as well so so those changes they were brought to council in just on December 10th 2019 and again those those included things like modifying rear yard lot coverage requirements allowing junior adus and adus modifying size of detached adus and then also no replacement parking for paroch conversion adus to things like that and a lot of these adu changes really went went towards the legalization of unpermitted units which is under our housing protection housing protection category and in in in making these changes it really removes some of the barriers to the legalization of these unpermitted units which was one of those you know key tasks in that housing protection category by the by the subcommittee recommendations and staff is deemed that complete but still will continue to evaluate you know any other barriers to legalization of unpermitted units and then as far as a variety of housing types go junior adus were included in that which which staff has completed and something on our on our work plan going in the during your future is to work on the single room occupancy SRO and small ownership SOU units so we'll be we'll be bringing those forward as as possible changes in the future into housing production fully as far as the categories go and one of those was affordability and inclusionary and something planning worked on quite a bit was the large rent increase planning went to four separate council meetings in 2017 three in 2017 and one in 2019 and really continues to provide you know landlords and tenants calling for information on this ordinance and what really came out of that was the large rent increase which you know defines the rent increase of five percent or more in one year seven percent over two years and then the next one is on the transient occupancy tax and this is a funding source that we were that was under discussion with the revenue council subcommittee and we did look at that we had a series of meetings over the last year with a hotel with the hotel community and industry and we're moving you know having some really in-depth conversations about what could be supported and definitely affordable housing creation was an area where there was quite a bit of support from the lodging industry particularly with the recognition that many of their employees can't afford to live in the Santa Cruz community and do commute so there was support for this discussion however under the context of the pandemic we did make a you know both internal and in consultation with council members sort of policy decision to put this on hold for now while our local businesses and hospitality industry recover from the impacts of the pandemic of course which were all and which they're all still feeling so that is an avenue that we were pursuing at the appropriate time you know we'll sit back down and and really look into that again as I said there was support for that specifically for the purpose of affordable housing creation and then on the updated the inclusionary requirements we've done quite a bit of work on this you know last year we did have the approval to take inclusionary to 20 percent we did make that change in the ordinance and we've been working with the planning commission and recently had approval of a specific flexibility around section eight for a portion of that 20 percent and that will be coming to council to you for consideration to be included in the inclusionary ordinance that proposed language on November 24 related to that we have two other areas related to inclusionary requirements one is some cleanup language related to the settlement of the lawsuit on the Pacific Front Moral Project related to our inclusionary ordinance and cleanup items that's coming forward as well as an area that there was quite a bit of interest at the council and the community level through some of the outreach that we did through the housing blueprint work around coming up with a meaningful workforce housing definition one of the things that we're looking at right now in the work that we've been doing with the planning subcommittee has been looking at employer sponsored workforce housing as a pilot we have a couple of projects at least one specifically we've already referenced today in the school leadership if we could find a meaningful definition that actually would work going forward as we really look at the what would be required for that definition of rents that would qualify for workforce housing that definition so that will be a really good discussion at the upcoming planning commission november 17th and our goal is to bring both of those back to you for consideration on the first meeting in january but the first will be the specific section 8 language that's coming to you on november 24th thanks and next in the recommendations we have a list of parking policy recommendations and all of those were all of the parking reduction items were completed in fact the staff just went to council a few weeks ago on the like over 13th to bring forward the the remaining items in this parking reductions category as far as in-loop parking fees the report recommended that we create a policy for in-loop parking fees for specific developments outside of downtown if they're within a quarter mile of an alternative parking facility and that's something that staff hasn't completed we've been working that working on that in calculating that as a project to project basis but we don't have a specific policy developed yet and then we've done a number of the downtown parking updates as well last year and those included things like off-site parking allowance as well as in-loop fee updates and tiering of those in-loop fees for affordable housing and then an additional one we haven't finished yet is talk peak residential parking permit program and that's really just because there's currently not technology available to to implement that project and and it would be a significant cip expense to put that in so we're still looking forward to doing that at some point if it can fit to the cip and that would move forward for density bonus as i mentioned a number of changes were adopted through the years including in august 2018 we we did a number of density bonus changes that involved the tiering system minimum square foot modifications for for density bonus affordable units defining a transit stop to be consistent with state law and then also allowing housing choice and section eight vouchers for the affordable density units created so those were a number of recommendations in the subcommittee report related to density bonus that that staff completed and then it also recommended you know continuing to look for ways to expand the density bonus and to update it and certainly that that's all been taken care of at this point by conforming with state law given given how much density bonus density bonus bills have passed recently and have increased and expanded the role of density bonus in our work such as the the projects or the the bills that we mentioned previously ab 2345 moving to a 50 density bonus for projects and then that ab 1763 which was the 80 density bonus for 100 affordable projects so those those are two that are certainly incorporating into the density bonus work that we do and we'll continue looking for other expansion and updates on those and then finally another another item that was mentioned in the in the recommendations report was with looking at ocean street zoning district and and really effectuating that as an area plan and you know that was something that was was really included into the the corridors effort and since that failed staff has applied for and received sp2 grant for doing the objective standards and we really feel like this is an important next step in that work in into completing that objective in this report to really brings the city in line with many requirements under sp3 30 and also provides a lot of direction on residential and mixed use development which is an important step in aligning the zoning code and the general plan objective standards then in terms of downtown housing creation one is that again i mentioned a lot of parking updates that were done those those overlapped with downtown housing creation also we completed that item through our previous parking updates and then in terms of enabling new projects there's a number of projects that have come on board in the past few years whether it's specific front and the laurel project which is expected in 2021 as well as a few others 175 unit project on front street which is seeking council approval next week and then there's actually another 170 projects currently under review by planning and under this as well it's it's also important to mention that uh planning actually just just last week already received approval from ambig of our of our reap grant which is a $300,000 grant that's going to go towards the project to explore the expansion of the downtown plan boundaries so with that funding approved we're going to be starting that project in the near future to explore that downtown plan expansion and potentially allow for a number of new sites in the downtown area for housing and mixed use development and i would just add to that as far as enabling new projects one thing that is actually related to a couple of different items earlier in the housing blueprint recommendations it are really looking closely at specifically at our fee waivers which is part of our inclusionary ordinance and as part of enabling new projects we really want to be able to provide some greater certainty to developers that are building affordable housing in the community around what their fee fee and fee schedule will look like so that's something even just this morning we internally had a meeting across departments about the fee schedule recognizing there's a number of projects that will be coming before you in the next few months and a number of them will have will either be a hundred percent affordable or contain a certain amount of affordable housing and we'll be looking at some assistance as far as the city fees that are charged so specifically we have been as the project on coral street will be one the Calvary church potentially is another one and then the city site own project on metro which i'll show you to talk about in just a minute would be another one so it's really important that we feel to look at this part of our inclusionary ordinance as well and being able to provide some certainty around fees for developers around affordable housing creation as part of the housing blueprint recommendations we were asked and directed to really look at the city own parcels we did present that to council the previous year i will say that part of the two overwhelming directions from that and opportunities would be the sale of the city owned sky park property either or something creative with the city of scott's valley to enable affordable housing creation so that's one thing that we have been looking at and the other one would be the consolidation that math already referred to earlier of some of the city-owned sites that are parking to look at those for the possibility of next use projects and obviously the library project is a good example of that one and i'll just show a couple of slides about a couple of those projects currently so the first one this first one actually is was recently completed last year and this is a great project and this is funded with 4.7 million of city funding including former rda and affordable housing trust fund this is the 41 units water street apartments on water street next slide show rendering at this point this is actually the sort of connection graphic on the far left is an early version is dated now of the public peseo that connects through as really called out in the downtown plan that sort of visionary piece of making those connection points from the downtown through a pacific in front connecting to the riverwalk and so this is a rendering of what that could be and this also is sort of a bridge that connects pac station north to pac station south we originally had an envision this is two separate projects but it really is working out that way through land dedication and the city acquisition which you approved over the summer we've been able to assemble the land south of the metro center and have been moving forward on an 85 unit 100 affordable housing project in conjunction with Santa Cruz community health center and deansis and so providing both low-cost medical and dental care for the Santa Cruz community and Matt if you go to the next slide you can see and you've seen this recently this summer but this is just to really show again the progression also of that you can see that public peseo connectivity point from pacific avenue all the way through to the riverwalk as well as really how engaged and active we can have an affordable housing project be in our downtown core by having some commercial retail facing pacific avenue frontage with Santa Cruz community health center and deansis on the second floor and then above that is our housing at our 85 units we are waiting just day by day now to hear on the funding for this project we do have funding secured for it but we additionally applied for a pre-sizable grant funding which we're in the final round on next slide this is pac station south and this is just to show that's under discussion right now so the area that i just showed you specifically is the blue the lower the blue three parcels and the yellow parcels together that makes the pac station south all the properties above that shaded in blue where it says city-owned properties and metro-owned properties is where pac station north will be and that will be between a 50 and 100 unit project what we're looking to do is have changed that you do a transfer or joint use development where the city develops the 75 feet depth along pacific avenue and the metro will have a new bus transfer center on the back and you can see what this looks like in a very conceptual rendering in the bottom right photo where you can see the metro new transit center in the back that one just has sort of a cover over it and the new development by the city on the front so this is an exciting project we are hoping to make the next round in affordable housing sustainable community grant funding a sick funding and we've been working with metro to meet to meet this really tight timeline and seeing if we can really get get the project specifics together to make that happen and to that end we did release earlier this month an rsp we've already issued first rsi a request for information response to developers there's a very robust interest in being the developer partner at a minimum for the affordable housing component potentially for the whole project so we're looking at that right now we're hoping to be able to be in a position to make a decision and move that forward before the end of this calendar year thanks next slide and the other project recently before you as well as a library mixed use project at a minimum this will include 50 units of affordable housing at our last council meeting we went over the financing specifically for the affordable housing component of this project i will mention that since we came to council we have formally been awarded the 1.5 million from the permanent local housing allocation and we've received the standard agreement for the first year of that funding it's spread out over five years and we have recommended that the first three years of that funding be dedicated to the affordable housing component of this project so this is just another project that we're pretty excited about to move forward on the affordable housing creation in the downtown thanks next slide in the recommendations report maybe something planning worked on extensively in 2019 to develop a plan for and that that plan development was was presented to council on December 10th 2019 and subsequently have been working for have been working towards an implementation resolution for that and staff is working on that currently and is expecting to present that implementation resolution to council coupled with the public safety impact fee in early 2021 and then in terms of the housing legislation legislative program it was recommended that we provide updates on housing legislation to council last year in 2019 we provided council with a league of california cities webinar on the 2019 legislation updates and this year just prior to this presentation we provided a significant update on on the legislation a more comprehensive update from 2018 to 2020 for council to meet that recommendation as well and on the regarding the budget considerations for tenant resources we have made quite a bit of ground on this one and matt if you could advance the slide we put together just sort of a brief overview of because we do have a variety of funding sources that go towards tenant assistance and tenant resources i will additionally say that on our city uh choose Santa Cruz site if you go to our housing subpage and click on tenant resources we have additional resources including contact information for a lot of our partners including tenant sanctuary um crla for existing and current programs to provide uh tenant uh legal assistance so we have those programs as well but just quickly a recap on the overview we have quite a few funding sources that are going to community action board we have the opportunity this year through additional round funding of CARES Act to provide an additional uh 30 000 to cab on emergency eviction prevention programs so we're across cdbg our special cares at red cross and home we're providing about 240 000 a year for eviction prevention program to community action board and then additionally 136 000 to the housing authority for our um security deposit program and then um this year additionally we provided 30 000 of cdbg funds for tenant counseling through california rural legal assistance and then through the core program out of the city manager's office additionally the city's providing 30 000 for tenant legal services and additional cab funding um since 27 at least over the last three years of 30 000 a year so we do have quite a few different funding sources they're going towards tenant resources and you can see an overview of these on the housing resources page that i mentioned thanks Matt and then one final slide we just wanted to leave council with a few especially important work items that were that were working on moving forward and in 2021 especially so for planning we've actually kicked off our objective standards work and have been working on that since september when that was when the scope was formally approved and we brought our consultant and we've since been having meetings with them and we're looking forward to presenting some of our initial results on those meetings to planning commission in december uh and following that uh to city council in early 2021 and then something we're also going to be working on soon is the housing element update planning is expected to receive uh grant funding for that as well through the leap grant so we have 300 300 000 dollars available to work on the housing element update which which first the city of Santa Cruz is two by 2023 so at that some point in 2021 we'll be starting to work on that especially once we get our our regional housing allocation needs the arena of numbers in from the state and then finally the downtown plan expansion project which i mentioned previously that that grant was actually already approved by ambeg who is who is overseeing that grant and so that's something we do plan on getting started to work on soon and and this was just presented to council uh on october 13th as well where we we do anticipate coming back to council once we have more information uh and and a plan for community outreach so we can receive further direction from council on that aspect and um obviously i'm a metro in the library project i just went over those i will add that we will be coming forward to council and doing considerable community outreach both once for approval of development partners as well as further refinement of the funding source applying for related grant funds and then bringing conceptual designs forward to you for consideration and then through the regular budget process we will continue to work on tenant assistance and additional resources and i i would add to that that we're in regular communication both with hab and the housing authority about their needs and sort of monitoring where they are in in extending the city funds and whether or not they need additional funding um throughout the course of the year so we have um we we look at that pretty closely thank you great and with that uh staff recommends that council accepts this report and we're here for any questions you have thank you thank you that was really an incredible report and looking over this um i was just so struck by how much has been achieved in basically three years so the housing um blueprint endeavor was very ambitious occupied a full year and i was just so impressed looking at you know in the day to day in the week to week we think all the problems are vast and what progress are we making but to see it compiled here there's so much that has been achieved and is in the works to say 57 actionable items 37 have been completed 17 more are underway that's incredible in three years and when you think of the complexity of these projects so just congratulations i know council member brown was on that committee and who else who's on that one can't remember martin were you on it yeah well good work i mean it's satisfying to see those recommendations having gone through so much outreach and chewing on by the staff and council to see the process is really impressive so good quick question bonnie on a b 411 kind of retrieve that redevelopment money what happened to that is it going to sit there forever uh yeah this is sad we all have even though we were able to get through both houses uh you know both both the house and the senate at the state level politically with the department of finance there we just couldn't get over that hurdle apartment finance came out against it they want that funding to stay in the state coffers you know we were successful we we have allocated and we're able to keep a hundred percent of the little over seven million and affordable housing bonds as part of that larger 35 million bond issue and we were able to retain 35 percent you know this but 35 percent of the capital bond so we were really going to bat trying to get that remaining you know 16 million that was frozen for affordable housing we thought we had a really good chance that it had a lot of support but ultimately i think the precedent that that would set for some of the other remaining agencies out there some of which were in lawsuits with the state i think was too much for the governor with the department of finance recommending against it so it is sitting there we have next year we potentially do have to defeat those we're still looking for other opportunities but we in meeting with actually meeting with mark stone just with the political climate we haven't pursued picking that back up in the current year however if there's some champions out there you know it's definitely a worthy cause and councilmember brown has been a real supporting uh supporting force and advocate for that so if there is desire we're willing to go to sacramento again and make another run at it but the the last feedback we had from the governor's office and from mark stone's office was that we would likely probably not be successful well i mean it just seems obscene i don't know any other word for it um and you know john layered is heading sacramento so and the need for affordable housing does not get less so i had to ask that question this would be this would be our last attempt if we wanted to do something uh yeah once john john layered is now going into office this would be our last opportunity so it is worth pursuing if we can get some support and then just a final question so if that doesn't work just to say just keep our six million dollars sixteen million dollars is that no basically part of how that would work is we they would want us to use it for our outstanding debt to pay off the remaining so for example we have uh uh agreed um agreements in place for our 1010 pacific and shape a road yes you know 40 affordable housing projects that go to the end of the life of the redevelopment agency which is 2033 3233 and so basically they would have us to use this outstanding funding to pay off that debt so that all the new tax increment coming in between now and 2033 would go straight into the state you know they could use it for what's what they want to use it for okay well anyway thank you um a couple other quick things what is the just general timeline for the objective standards i guess this is a lead question it's general see i can i can answer that yeah that uh it's expected to be a 15 month process and started in september so we're looking at completing this by the end of 2021 okay um put a question on the um grant uh for expansion of the downtown area um which i fully support looking at that a couple of points there um you know i i hope whatever work program that encompasses is not simply a matter of height and design and so forth but also vision for downtown i've mentioned previously um you know there was a hope that the tumor project could tackle that we're all so aware of how downtowns are changing all over the country um and it seems an opportune time who is at all possible um think a little bit more than simply boundaries and assessments so i wonder if there's any comment on that maybe from bonnie or planning or not maybe that's just my feeling throwing up sure thank you for that comment and i think it's a very timely one in that you know when we go out to the community we'll as mentioned at the last meeting you know we're going to be presenting our outreach strategy to the council in advance of of going and doing any outreach to identify what those boundaries will be and as part of that we will certainly be thinking bigger picture in terms of you know those boundaries are not only going to set what uh the downtown plan expansion is going to be but it's also going to really shape what the future of our downtown is like you know people have different ideas in their mind about um what our downtown is and um that is changing as new projects come in and it will continue to change you know many people think and when when you think about downtown Santa Cruz you think pacific avenue but as we start getting additional projects on front street for example and engaging the river then we're going to have you know people's mind's eye is going to drift to oh well downtown is also the interface on the river there and the restaurants that look out on the river and we're going to have this opportunity to have areas in the south of downtown what is now considered downtown you know south of laurel also have that sort of iconic visualization for what downtown could be and the warrior stadium i think can be a big component of that in terms of a draw that people think of and because so many people will be drawn to that area really thinking about what the vision for that area is is going to be crucial to understand all right how are we going to make this an extension of our downtown something that represents Santa Cruz well something that people think about and are drawn to because of the quality of the architecture the quality of the built environment the pedestrian interface the connections to the river all those things you're going to need to be considered and you're absolutely right that the vision is going to need to really leave the way before we dive into okay if we've got this vision what are the what are the components of that in terms of development standards in terms of height in terms of street interface in terms of required retail at the ground level and the the heights of those first floors all of that's going to be a component but setting that vision first is going to be important i'm sure you know i mean there's so much exciting work going on regionally in this whole field all this the fur activities up in the bay area there's just there's so much to draw on but it seems like a real opportunity to oh i just saw the sea jobs movie thank you rich and finally you know in all this downtown stuff i supported all the parking changes et cetera but i do see a tendency to always shift the parking requirement somewhere else to the point they're not ending up anywhere and realistically that's the component that does have to be dealt with down to the developer of the new calvary project it has been pretty who also did the 1010 pacific has been very explicit even if you shift the parking somewhere else or reduce the requirements it has to be realistically figured into the the overall equation and certainly that southern part of downtown you will feel that you need more acutely as entity that's it yeah thanks thanks for your comments on the on the parking as well and just just to follow up on that it's it's parking is something like we'll likely study more through our objective standards process in some fashion and then as well we had mentioned in the when the previous parking amendments went forward a few months ago we had mentioned a few other items such as looking into you know geographically based parking zones and things like that too for how parking reductions are created through the city so those are things on our mind we'll continue to think about going forward in terms of parking it's followed by councilmember brown yeah i i'll just echo um councilmember matthew's appreciation and gratitude for the presentation and all the work that went into creating the the subcommittee's recommendations and then moving forward and hearing from the community and i know at one point we really talked about monitoring the progress but also sort of just revisiting at a future time kind of a reiteration of this as we move forward and continuing to try to get the community's input and designing housing solutions so definitely something to think about moving forward i just have one actually have two brief questions one is in regards to all of the funding that was referenced to support tenants right now it has that been is that still adequate for the need that you're that you're seeing or where are we at based on kind of all the different kind of considerations for people with with the economy and such yeah thank you for asking that question councilmember walkins and that is something that we're we're working closely with our partner agencies on and today they have not extended the funds they're on track for for the year so you know we'll continue to look closely at that when we looked actually at the newest round of CARES funding we specifically looked at those that have been recipients and the additional funding that we gave them specifically around tenant resources and they were still in the process although there is some lag time for invoicing but they were still in the process of using their regular funding so it looks like at least right now from what's been submitted to us that we're on track for the year but it is something that we revisit regularly particularly in light of the additional CARES funding and the need that's out there one of the things that we have found around the CARES funding and sort of the outreach to our partner agencies because we did you know provide some CARES funding to CAB for this program was that the food those that are providing food food banks meals on wheels to community bridges actually the second harvest food bank and the farmers market have all been organizations that have you know if either already spent all their funding or on track to have spent all their funding that we're really looking at through the CARES has that really big need right now so we're looking at that closely as well but as far as the tenant resources we seem to be appropriately funded at least at this point in time. Great and maybe I actually have three brief questions but while you're on Bonnie you mentioned that this would be the time if we were wanting to go to the state to try to pursue getting that funding how what is the timeline that you think would be appropriate if there was sort of our local efforts to to get some of the funding that's being held up there. We're talking about our bond funding or sorry yeah I think we probably the first thing we'd want to do is to set up set up a meeting with our you know representatives and and see where they are because it is something this is the year where we could defuse or where we're sort of obligated to defuse we had a no kick out clause in 2021 so this is really it's something that we need to hit the ground running on if we're going to make one more round at this and see if we can get political support to take this through both through the legislation again which we were successful the first time but we really need the governor's office and DOF department of finance that's a tough one so if we can get support from John Laird's office I think maybe that that would be the route to go but that's something we should move on pretty quickly. Great yeah well you can definitely keep us posted on how to sort of support that and then I guess my last sort of question and I get like comments are you know in regards to the child care developer fee you know with all of the development coming on downtown having more child care facilities available will be really essential and I also know that we have vacant spaces and so even if some of those fee funds could be put into supporting you know existing structures you know to become state you know adhering to the state standards around child care facilities it's really critical that we're thinking that way and I so if the fee goes into place then it won't necessarily be applied retroactively to any proposed development so it would only be moving forward so that's sort of my question part of it going to defer to we know that one but actually Lee before you're muted but before you speak I did want to mention that on the pack station south project we actually have been working with a selected developer to see if it's possible to include daycare facilities child care within the project so we've been looking at that we have a preliminary site plan for having that in there and we're now looking at the state requirements to see if it meets the adequate requirements both on size and accessibility that we need as well as the public open space component so we're looking at that we're trying to see if there's a way we can do that and then if we can get it funded through additional grant funds so we are we do recognize that and we have heard heard you and saying that that's the need and we recognize it's a need so we are we are looking to see if it's possible to do that with the city with the city project on pack station south awesome thanks for that and council member Watkins the the fee is a moving forward application so depending on when projects have specified submittals so we would likely have this apply at the building permit stage and there have been some some state law changes actually in sp330 there were some provisions about the ability to apply new fees once the project has been deemed complete however and i'm going from recollection here i believe that impact fees have an exemption related to that so we could have that move forward so if i'm recalling correctly then we could have that move forward based on when building permits are applied and not you know miss another round of applications that you know are deemed complete say today but don't actually pull a building permit for another six or eight months or a year okay no that's that's really great okay thank you for that you're welcome thank you council member brown thank you uh yeah thank you for the report um uh the reminders of uh all of the work that went into uh the developing the housing blueprint uh report and um all of the issues that we really spent a lot of time delving into and you know really getting rolling up our sleeves and trying to figure out how to make some of these things work and it's really nice to see how much has been accomplished it's like council member mouth you said you don't really notice it um because it comes to us in bits and pieces and um to have kind of this assessment is is really great today um i have two questions and one of them so i'm just looking at the the matrix that you gave us part of the agenda packet and one of the um one of the pieces under uh it's on we don't have page numbers so um it um so i have my questions just so you're ready or one is related to legalization of uh abated units and so i guess i'll ask that one first while i'm looking for the others so i um i'm wondering if it would be possible to just talk a little bit more about the work that's gone on there um and uh what some of the obstacles perhaps might be in um in how we accomplish bringing those abated units back online because um i have in i've had the opportunity in the past couple of months to spend a lot of time talking with people in neighborhoods in their home or at their homes near their homes and i've heard so many stories about um folks who have not who have had issues with the rental inspection program or um you know having their units abated for code reasons um and there many of them on the face of them at least as they're explained to me seem um very um mild-mannered um uh trivial almost um and so but i i know that there's always more to the story and i also know that there are constraints that um the city um has you know that give us limit the discretion that we have but i i so i'm just trying to understand um without kind of going into details of any of the particulars of the situations there were just enough of them together to make me feel like um there's got to be more that we can be doing because i mean in in total i've heard just in my own anecdotal kind of you know small end sample um going around and talking to voters um of you know these are like a lot of people have lost housing the rental housing as a result of um you know being in um uh non permitted units that are discovered and it just seems to be like it's a continuing issue and um so i i guess i just would like to hear more about that work and um the kind of picture looks like for moving forward um and this may be something for you know a longer conversation as an agenda item at a meeting in the future but i i just feel like um there's there's some there still feels to be some disconnect for me between the what i see in green and having made progress and completed all these things but yet there are so many units that are still either um have you know are just in limbo or people have had to move out etc and i just feel like it's this is an area that we talked about it so much during the housing blueprint subcommittee meetings um i'd love to see more progress on that sure thank you councilmember brown and you nailed the the issue in many respects um one of the um one of the big challenges that we have is um that we do um have the the building code requirements that need to be adhered to um and one of the things that um has changed since 2017 um and 2018 when we were working on the housing blueprint subcommittee is um ab 1226 does offer more flexibility from a building code perspective than we had um previously that said you know what um what still has to happen in many instances is um a substantial investment to bring something up to code um to establish that it it was built to code um yeah for example um you know if if you're coming in to build a new structure you get your plumbing electrical structural mechanical you get all that completed you get plans that are reviewed and uh the green building requirements all of that is is reviewed and then approved and then it's constructed when you've got a building that's already been built then someone that's trying to review the connections between the structure and the foundation for example you know they may not be able to see those at all without going in and doing um some uh investigation you know tearing off one side of the other you know the exterior siding or the interior um drywall and um their costs associated with that and sometimes it's identified that well it wasn't actually built to uh built up to code at the time um you know i've asked some of our inspectors have you ever been to a job where you didn't have any corrections and not a single time has anyone said no i haven't been to a job where you know i've been out there and haven't had any corrections there's a checks and balances system in place so that we can improve the safety of these units and make sure that they are built according to plans and oftentimes you know what we hear is well it was built according to code at the time but then when they get in the way that it works is for the legalization they would have you know they have to hire those same disciplines that would have been hired at the front end they've got to hire those same disciplines now to verify that it did meet the code at the time and so you know i think sometimes the expectations are that well this has been safe and oftentimes it's actually been um inspected by our rental team as as the council's heard from us over and over again you know we do our best not to keep people out we um if we don't see any immediate um life safety issues we try to keep people in those units now once we do that that's a different level of standard than actually legalizing the unit they may have to get someone out to verify all those things that i was talking about you know we may not see um electrical hazards when we're out there because they could be hidden behind drywall but maybe you know the entire electrical wasn't done well or are done up to code or similarly you know we may not see a plumbing challenge but when a plumbing professional gets out there to verify that it was completed according to code then um there may be some very substantial costs that need to be incurred in order to legalize it with ab 1226 one of things that's been helpful is that there is actually now a five-year stay on having to bring those uh deficiencies up to code and so that does allow for some additional leeway and some additional time for people to um uh save for that cost um that they may incur um so that's been helpful and then uh the other thing that i would say is that you know many other things as Matt mentioned many of the things that we've done with ad use like just things like minimum lot size you know we had a minimum lot size of i think it was 4500 square feet but um uh don't quote me on that in any case there was a minimum lot size before and um due to state regulatory changes there's no longer that minimum lot size um things like the um the parking changes things like um the changes to um the allowable setbacks um for um ad use a lot of these things have made it possible to legalize units that weren't previously legal yet i i do want to go back to the fact that even though it's possible to legalize those you know sometimes there's still a very substantial investment that's necessary in order to you know and i'm not talking about like a $10,000 you know there there's multiple you know multiple tens of thousands and that could be for something that you know is in uh in the layperson's perspective safe and and maybe but uh from from an ability to habitate in order to occupy it now as a habitable rest resident but for that legalization even using the prior codes which the ab 1226 allows us to do um could require significant investments um so um we have you know we've brought these conversations to the council multiple times and um what we continually try and do is um is look at and evaluate the challenges that we see as part of that legalization program and see all right are there things that we could be doing to um help uh facilitate these legalizations that we currently uh don't have on the books and so um a lot of those have been covered by adus but there are also some other ones that are that are up and coming um some of the slope regulations have the potential to uh some of the updates to the slope regulations have the potential to assist some uncommitted dwelling units um the uh work that we continue with the coastal permission to legalize some of the um the standards that the council adopted and that are in effect outside of the coastal zone still need to be effectuated inside of the coastal zone and so all of these um are uh an ongoing an ongoing opportunity and an ongoing challenge thanks um okay and it's a conversation that I'd really like to continue because a lot of the things that are going through my mind are the specific examples which I don't want to spend time on here just seem like they they they still just don't fit into some of those categories so um hopefully we can you know just this will be an ongoing uh work yeah that'd be great I'd encourage you if you come across those please send them my way and I can get it with the right people or if we if we say hey you know what there's a code change that can help I mean even if it's one property you know we can wrap that in and and I will also just to close on this um I'll say that when we um are looking at um the legalization program if we see the potential for changes down the line we actually like put those to the back of the queue and so we've had a lot of them that you know have come up and it's your turn to go through the legalization process and oh wait you've got a roadblock here but you know what six months from now the the state may be passing this law or we've got this on our work plan and that's going to help you out so we're going to put you back in the queue and we're going to take the next one so we we try to do that as well and especially if we're identifying these new things that we know aren't going to be online for some time but yes please reach out and we're happy to take a look at those thank you thank you so my other question and again I'm scrolling once again I forgot oh yeah so um this was related to the taxes so it's number nine under in the matrix in the housing affordability and inclusionary category um the fee is on outside investors is in progress and I see a note here about um it sort of explains what that means um but I'm I'm trying to get a sense of um you know what what that means that um so to be included in a complex compilation of options to be completed in 2020 what's the timing like look like on that and you know what kind of taxes or fees are kind of are you all what's percolating in the planning department I ask because you know I've been thinking and talking for a long time about this idea of a vacancy tax and um it's you know I'm just thinking of you know I think it would really be who the city um you know to think about ways that um we can use uh the tax and fee structures to um to discourage the kind of speculative investment that is um at least you know in a large part responsible for driving up the cost of housing in our community and so and so vacancy tax is one but I know there are other models that folks are looking at and so I guess I'm just I'd like to hear a little bit more about that um you know when to be completed in 2020 we're almost at the end 2020 um and what you know what does that uh entail so uh let me jump in on that one because um that uh direction from the council uh I overlooked when the blueprint subcommittee report came out and it just came back to my attention um as a result of preparation for this meeting so that's why you know no progress has been made on it that concept was based upon an ordinance that was adopted by the city of Vancouver British Columbia and um and they adopted a a tax on real property purchases by foreign investment investors in other words investors who were not Canadian um so uh that was basically a discussion that I had with council member crone back in 2018 and apparently it ended up on the blueprint subcommittee report but I didn't flag it so we're researching that and yes a vacancy tax is another thing that we're looking at as well um there's a straightforward um a possible option would be increasing real property transfer taxes because um Santa Cruz is is currently 0.5 percent like most of the cities in california but um several cities have increased their real property transfer taxes by orders of magnitude created for that so that's an option um vacancy tax and I've also begun exploring potential um tax options sort of modeled after uh to prop 15 with you know categories of uh investment property or commercial property or vacant property that would be identified and you know wouldn't be a real property and the long property tax it would be more of a parcel tax concept and so those are those are the options and we're that's an ongoing process right now um I have not been part of the meetings with the finance committee who has been looking at potentially bringing forward tax options but that was one thing that um you know as result of this discussion uh I thought would be a good idea for me to sit in on those and um work with council members on beyond um preparing proposals for the council's consideration to go forward thank you that's helpful next up we have council member golder I thought of this while council member brown was asking her question and I know maybe one of the roadblocks for homeowners might be when you said it was expensive to do those um upgrades that they would need to to bring their project to code and I'm wondering is there any like and I know we're not a bank but is there any way that we could work with maybe some of the credit unions or partner with somebody that has money that could invest to to help people get like low interest loans or you know I don't know you know something like that because I just know getting an equity line can be kind of hard for for people sometimes and um so I don't know I'm just trying to think of any way that we could help facilitate that so that would help people bring it up to code get it back online and be able to afford you know the cost up front and um I will call on Bonnie here momentarily um if she's got additional information but I know that we have had some initial um discussions with some of the local banks um and looking at low interest loan programs um and I had some initial contacts with the banks that I I believe that Bonnie's team picked up um that progress and so I don't know um that was pre-pandemic when I was talking to them and I I don't know if uh what the status is so I'll see if Bonnie has additional information. I don't actually have anything to add to that other than the fact that um we have worked with local banks and um you know I think part of our challenge is having funding to be able to leverage with them so some of the partnerships that we've been able to do with local banks some of them have been their community reinvestment um you know uh that we've partnered on for our revolving loan program or when we've been able to use our funding like the economic development trust fund to leverage and create like the micro loan program that we did I think we're always open to these opportunities and I do think that our local banks are interested as well I do know that um with some of the um funding sources that were available to the CARES Act they've definitely been really busy um over the last number of months um processing PPP loans and opportunities but I think as we're looking long term we're specifically going to be looking at um our uh six million dollar revolving loan program you know with that partnership through the award by the Economic Development Administration and and then our partnership with National Development Council to make some really meaningful loan opportunities available locally but I know that the banks um local banks have a lot of interest and certainly expertise in this area so that's something that we can continue to pursue because I know like once like a house is under construction too already or if it's you know has any kind of tax red tags or anything like that it's probably impossible to get the financing if if there's anything like that or the other thing I was thinking was um like maybe offering like a percent rate reduction in the loan amount if you agree to do um affordable housing for your adu or whatever it is like you know kind of like pain points or something but the opposite if that makes sense uh note that's that's a great idea and one that um we actually had some early council direction to explore in 2018 and um I'm going to see if Sarah Noisy is on the line here she is I believe and Sarah being our resident expert on adu's I believe that we um cannot put any affordability restrictions on adu's but there may be a workaround from a perspective of a voluntary program but I'm not sure so I'd rely on her expertise related to that and see if she has anything to add in terms of what we are allowed to do I mean typically when when affordable housing is created there's um there's some kind of exchange so affordable housing is sort of considered like good or community good and so in in exchange for the community receiving an affordable housing unit we're granting some sort of you know concession or waiver to incentivize the property owner to rental income um because the state law has become so lenient and so um the housing crisis we don't have a lot left to give so they're really just the we we have very minimal site standards you know we had to have a height limit and we have a very small setback and that's kind of it um you know we don't have affordable housing so one of the things that we had discussed in the housing blueprint was like well maybe we can make this exchange for like relieve people of the owner occupancy requirement and exchange for creating an affordable housing unit um we looked into that and in the mean and we hadn't quite landed on you know what level of affordability would be right how would section eight interact with that you know how do we want to do this and then the state law changed and so now for the next five years at least we can't require owner occupancy at all so that incentive you know that incentive wouldn't create any new housing units um that said the city does still have on the books a fee waiver program so for units that agree to restrict their occupant and the rent that their occupant pays for you know I think it's in perpetuity currently to various rental levels they get a certain amount of fee waivers so it's restricting it to um you know low-income they get a partial fee waiver restricting it to very low income very low income they get more of a fee waiver and I think there's I think there's three tiers and that extremely low income they would pay no fees um the challenge with that program is that because it involves an it's essentially an exchange of funds between the city citizen um it's a gift of um state law requirements that yeah all the construction labor would have to be um would have to be paid at the prevailing wage these are one-off units you know there's no economy of scale with an adu most adu developers property owners develop a single adu in their lifetime so this isn't something that where people um you know are building their developers building apartment buildings and they understand how to do this and they're you know building 50 units so they can make some trade-offs and like you know you know payment standard for their workers so we have not seen anyone take advantage of that program since um we got that sort of determination and ruling about um triggering prevailing wage lots of provision that as housing elements are updated they now need to include how they are how jurisdictions are going to create affordable adus so de-restricted income qualified affordable adus our housing element is not due until the end of 2023 bay area jurisdictions are doing theirs right now and so hopefully they will have some creative ideas and we can sort of you know have at least some menu of options within the next year or so we can see what other jurisdictions are doing and sort of you know hold some ideas from there yeah i have one more and by the way sorry i tried to clean my computer screen i don't know what i cleaned it with but i made it all blurry so that's why i'm all blurred out housing matters couple like policy and i'm sure there is because i've seen them but like companies that sell like ready-made like adus that are just like pop pop that like because that would be kind of an economy of scale like where the city could purchase some and then sell them back to people or or low or you know finance them where someone could put in a foundation and plumbing and da da da and have like a little plan and and and they could make you know payments to the city of five hundred dollars and rent it out for eight or whatever make some profit but but as a way to does that make sense has anybody looked at anything like that yeah so so there are private companies that have that exact model in fact you know i think they the first ones that i saw were up in portland and there have been even within the last month more inquiries about pre-approved plans and so there are multiple ways that that's being done some folks are pursuing pre-approved plans so that they can take the same design that they have approved and even though it's built on site construction there's a reduced cost in terms of the upfront design there are others who are actually doing prefabricated off-site construction and for those there is it's actually they're actually inspected at the place of manufacture and they're given a placard by the state department of housing and community development and then there are certain things that need to be done when they bring it to to place it on site so you know we look at soil conditions and may need a geotechnical report we make sure that the connections between the foundation and the structure okay we make sure that the that there's adequate capacity from for electrical the new electrical load and whether any upgrades are needed there and the sewer connections and so forth so a smaller amount but you know we haven't looked at a lot of those the anecdotal reports that i've heard back and this is just talking to you know a limited number of folks in the construction industry is that those also have with them significant costs that said i think over the long term that there may be a higher potential for cost savings taking that route i think because it's such a young industry that the costs per unit are still high but i think that there really is going to need to be a a change in the industry and similar to what we've seen with with taxi cabs and so forth at some point there's going to be a disruption and that's going to allow for more affordable construction i mean just in the last six months we've seen construction costs jump from four hundred and twenty five dollars a square foot to five hundred dollars a square foot and you know if you think about a small ad you even if you're looking at you know a 500 square foot ad you you're talking $250,000 right now and so looking at those alternatives where the off-site construction happens is is something that i think is going to gain more momentum as the on-site construction costs continue to increase to members of the public so if there's any members of the public who'd like to comment on this item that's on our agenda which is an update on the housing blueprint subcommittee recommendations now's the time to call in once you've called in please press star nine on your phone to raise your hand and when you've been called upon you'll be asked to unmute your phone you'll be given two minutes to speak on this item on this item i'll bring it back to give my appreciation for the amount of work that you know we're over halfway through completing those recommendations and on our way to you know likely completing all of them so help support these recommendations moving forward you call for public comment mayor sorry did you call for public comment did i miss that i did yeah no one know what the call them thank you so i'm very happy to say yeah happy to move the recommendation for us with gratitude for everyone who has helped make it possible for this point so in motion by councilmember maxis councilmember brown give a second by councilmember brown to accept the update um the comments i'll ask the clerk to call the roll call vote thank you mayor councilmember buyers hi i'm gonna make note that it looks like katherine has left the meeting i'm gonna do a little staff presentation before we start your demo oh perfect thanks sorry my computer crashed i had to start up again i think we're just waiting on vice mayor mires now is the time to call on using the instructions on your screen and with that our lee butler uh saranoise the senior planner and matt van waprin's look whiter to kick us off on this item and council members and i'm gonna rehash part of a presentation that i did back in february just to kind of bring um our new council member up to speed on what exactly it is we're talking about and then i do want to make sure we have um reserve the bulk of our tower that was affecting our community and the various components and people within our community even those of us who weren't on the council council can recall that that was um it was that was a very hard time at the city and there were a lot of people that felt very passionately in on both sides of that issue um just in the community and between the council and the community and community members against each other there was um sort of an initial effort to create a rental housing task force we evaluated the feasibility of doing that we had we brought in an outside consultant who specializes in you know conflict mediation who we thought might you know facilitate a process like that if we went that route um his analysis was that the city really wasn't quite in a position to engage that conversation in a productive way so in june of 2019 the council you know declined the option of forming a task force to collect information what do we have the capacity to run given our current levels of staffing and technology we came back with a and that was sort of something we thought we could get our arms or establish a two-member subcommittee um which consisted now mayor Cummings and councilmember Brown direct city staff to apology that the city has available work with staff to explore other cities in california and around investigate how they work and um what lessons can be learned from those existing programs and then eventually to return to the city council um we returned to the city council with the recommendation from the subcommittee in february of 2020 and the resulting um action with a tie vote due to the absence what this means procedurally is that the item is neither passed nor denied and at a future date for reconsideration by the city council that reconsideration is not what we're doing today today we are just presentation right now is just to simply give you enough context there will be at some point in the future this committee will sort of return to the committee recommended by the subcommittee for you know if the city chooses to pursue creating a program would be to you know create a complete and trustworthy data set um that's useful to all kinds of different users can inform city policy um and that would contribute to stabilizing the rental housing market that's really the ultimate goal here um also included with your staff report as an attachment are all the objectives that would that you know collecting information about the total number of rental housing units um rents in various units how things change over time so all of that information is available as part of your staff report um and the idea was that you could sort of watch and there would be a lot of influences that would you know create the trends that we might be able to see in that um in that we have a more comprehensive list in your staff this could influence changes in our zoning code perhaps to facilitate or pursue or even rezone property for types of units that we see more in demand based on vacancy information um it could help us create some refinements in our inclusionary policy to better target we could understand that the state well how the statewide rent control is influencing our local market and identify the need for any additional local tenant protection we could understand how much housing is is owned locally within Santa Cruz city within Santa Cruz county within the state of california um and otherwise and just sort of get a sense of who owns the property that we um are responsible for within the city limits um now i i want to be clear the city council hasn't determined the community hasn't determined staff hasn't determined what level of detail of this um you know information would really be made public would it be you know aggregated city-wide statistics would it be broken down by you know census block group by neighborhood would we how much information would we be able to find out about an individual unit um that has not been determined yet and i don't want to make any representation here like we have decided about that programs that we've looked at elsewhere they do allow some um information to be shared about individual units so depending on the level of detail and the you know what's included in that information that's available about a specific unit potentially be used so um it could allow property owners and tenants both to do due diligence on one another and kind of view past rental history and behavior um it could allow property owners to compare rents and determine you know as they're determining how to establish the rental rate for a new lease um in words of the community decision makers community housing advocates landlords tenants everybody to do their own research and analysis and um bring forward policy proposals on their own to add into the it could also allow all of us to open market trends again we do need to keep in mind that to macroeconomic that goes into understanding any statistics that are created is going to be really crucial to making sure that the that the information um that we take out of it is really useful um and really reflective of things that we may have some local influence over ran into with the subcommittee is was sort of identifying like how could we run a program that would really capture all this information the city doesn't currently have a platform that is really geared toward tracking trends over time and creating statistics out of those we we use our land use management software for a lot of different functions or really stretching the capabilities and one thing it really doesn't do is aggregate information for like a whole set of units of housing units that exist or properties even um that exist so that you can draw some conclusions about that it's really kind of clunky to try and manipulate that exist perform this function that we're thinking about so as we were researching with the subcommittee you know talking to other um jurisdictions that run some sort of rental registry typically it's associated with a local ramp within a city or county not always but most of them were using an outside vendor to provide them with a platform to manage all 3di um what we identified them as the most frequently used can demonstrate the capability they bring experience from other jurisdictions about just worked well and what kind of have this existing platform which means that um you know rollout than if we were developing our own tech it provides the opportunity for a lot of self-serve to the information so important in terms of creating transparency about the data that the city has um there's you don't have to submit a special request to get the data platform is really customizable to needs you know needs for this program may change over time um it seems like this particular platform could be very accommodating of that i mentioned already it can be highly customizable and one of the things that we've identified it could be useful to our um residential you re-inspected it could just then total rental housing units within the city us would cost about $77,000 to initiate so in that initial year where we're building getting the database fully populated would take about about a year and then moving forward to maintain that database you know um registering is about $42,000 a year involved in um initiating a program like this you know working with the community to like establish what are the parameters of the ordinance and what is the level of detail and what are the concerns and protections for privacy and how are we maintaining those um it would obviously be involved and um finance would also be involved just to to some degree should there be a fee involved um you know this would would be um that happens in my section to housing related to a new platform where in the process the council vote um outreach by the city to you know concerns about privacy the level of detail in the data all the other standards you know we would be drafting an ordinance so would there would be all of that effort and outreach involved and and then we'd also be working internally within city departments and with 3di on you know establishing our recommendation today is gender to consider taking Rajiv and Don from 3di. Thank you sir and uh thank you for the opportunity um gonna let me know when you can see my screen you today is really the platform that we developed uh that has been it's a result of a lot of work that's we've done over the last 20 years we started the company 20 years ago working with a Los Angeles housing department when it was formed separate from the building safety and they have about three quarters of million units uh under um under management and they have various rental programs and they needed a system for just tracking what they do and uh we was software companies selected to build that and that program became um sort of a often considered a gold standard Harvard kind of called it the gold standard of housing management or whatever they call it for industrial stabilization and all those things and as we as we sort of over the years developed more and more components to it realized that a lot of constituencies require the same entire information uh and so we said we can't need a common platform and of course there are lots of variations in housing from you know from of course due to size of uh constituencies and also of course uh you know different demographics and so on so the housing programs of course are all over the place so we said what do you make that actually allows that to you know and of course how can you make different decisions using that kind of the platform so what I'm going to do today is describe what this platform does and how it applies in your context of uh rental data in a collection as I mentioned uh the there are many many programs and here's some of the examples of programs that are currently running on this platform across various customers will come to several ones that use right now so it will be rent registry which is basically dental data collection uh to rent stabilization to programs for homeless management and how you transition that to accessible housing all the way to NOFA uh where you essentially start from the funding spot uh and then not sort of entire life cycle of of an affordable housing property or project and so uh and various customers uh have use it in different ways and I'm going to sort of cover that a little bit but the fundamental sort of you know the basis underneath is uh is really how you manage the rental inventory and how you establish that how do you maintain that took no sort of the the as a as a reliable source of data and how you work with that um we're going to talk primarily about rent registry uh and of course these are all the programs and of course even as you were talking I saw a lot of other programs that you do that could also be mapped into this so the sort of these four pillars of the system the most important being the property inventory property inventory basically is driven by GIS but it has property structure like how many properties do we have projects we have what parcels are they on how is that connected to the county you know how many buildings on it how many units in it you know kind of even down the room level you can figure out what's what and that sometimes becomes important because you compare rents and such I mean how many bedrooms how many bathrooms all that kind of stuff does it have parking does it not have parking so really managing that kind of information needs to be in such a way that it of course across you know a very wide range of of property structures that exist now and and you can imagine there are homes and there are multi-storey buildings to to of course you know garage conversions to everything the other very important part about the property inventory is ownership because ownership data is complicated because county often is not always up to sync with you know what's actually happening in the market so managing the property ownership data transferring the property ownership data all that also becomes important and then of course occupancy types you know that changes sometimes you know it's attendance sometimes it's an owner owner sometimes it's a depending on your on your on your ordinances you might have different types of use types on on occupancy that that allowed not allowed so for example there may be low-income housing there could be affordable housing there could be accessible housing so how do you use these occupancies to really understand you know what you're what you're going to preserve the the structure you have there's actually a built-in CRM into the system that actually manages different contacts so tenants you know owners property owners of course and of course all the other people that interact with the system so and it can it is very going away tightly with the property inventory because after all these people live in this property own this property so it's very tightly coupled the third very important leg of this the programs themselves now one thing I'm going to say programs it's course registry program how do you how does someone register how does someone seek an exception you know to registration how does someone seek an exemption there could be a program that manages elections some program that's special for you know young families or something so how do you and programs are always evolving there are new programs so the actual work growth of program changes over time and so we need a system that actually could accommodate these things and as many of you have seen across our state you know the rental properties have of course you know been in our inter propositions all the time and there are many sort of sub-programs that emerge and they sometimes disappear sometimes they you know so very so what do you do when a new program comes you go out and buy new software every time how do you kind of just keep keep building upon what you have and of course there are other components like cost recovery so many of these you know inconsistency actually use this as a basis for creating a cost recovery process and and then become the cost of actual system also and then there are other programs as Sarah mentioned that you might have rental inspection so how do you tie that back to this or preservation preservation how do you tie that back to this and then the fourth pillar or fourth piece of that is of course you know there are common components that apply across the thing like you might have property code or code you know you might have self-service so you have portals you have can people access it on mobile or not how do you alert people of new new new issues that might arise how do you notify people such are common elements like reporting analytics how do you integrate with our systems and then of course security the data so those are kind of the general four pillars that define the system now the system is built with these three perspectives of course this is a rental so the three primaries or roles are the tenant the property owner and of course the the city or the policy you know or administration of this from the city perspective and then what I've got here are just some examples of what each can do or each might do so typically a tenant might check the status of a property before renting now like is this in control or not is this whatever the history is and all that that kind of stuff or they could verify information that that let's say a property owner submitted this is okay the rent is 1500 dollars is it really 1500 dollars you know so they verify that sometimes they might have complaints or requests or some kind of arbitration that's required you know they could appeal a decision of eviction as I'm taking a report eviction so you see various use cases that actually can be done in tenant because these are just examples and and I'll show you some where you know how some cities are used it you know as sometimes perspective from property owner's perspective there are there are a number of things that they can do of course the most important being that there may be an annual or as as the events happen registering the property now what that means is okay I've got a property I live in Santa Cruz now I get my property in there I've got five units in it and the five units have this much strength and so on and who you know you may or may not require tenant information and then of course where does it go from there the rent change you know what type of property is it is it exempted not exempted so there are all these sort of tools to maintain and manage the property information as you go along and and of course you have you have other information that might go along with it so you've got four documents you could if you actually have rent you know rent and civilisation type of program where you have a fee then they also pay online so just become like a portal where you go and you manage your properties there's a lot of other sort of specialties that come in depending on how your program evolves there could be exemption management there could be eviction management there could be sort of both decisions and how do you dispute them or how do you sort of you know go comply with them I don't know that I'm new to have more sort of esoteric programs like tenant buyouts you know how do they work and you know question of how do you manage complaints from the city's perspective you've got the system administration side of it you know how do you manage different users setting up different types of users or maybe the issues like can we create a special rule where another housing agency access this data so for example in Los Angeles you know we have a NOFA program which is in the county in the city so the NOFA program wants to have a view of what's going on in the rental state position program so they can share data like that so giving access to things how do you dig in so the city has all these other functions typically city can also do all the functions that a tenant and owner can do because many times owner is just not interested or even capable of doing it and they might say I need some help you know so and of course all the all the case management that goes with that can be done by the city and a lot of it is really reporting analytics understanding how to project their information and so on so generating ad hoc reports and the such and of course there's inspection components in that concept as in the city okay so and there can be various roles there can be unlimited roles so you could define the roles by directors managers and elected officials of course you know the the actual city policy department and planning and so so you can sort of create roles and make the system sort of appear to them as in their role they need to to have those functions i'm going to give you some examples of where it's used and what they use it for and then i'm going to come back and actually show you a demo so we currently work with city los angeles we have for really 20 years over interest you went in place about 15 17 years ago and they use almost every kind of program these are just examples of what they do they have mandatory registration they have manual mandatory annual fee the registration levels are north of 95 percent i put 95 because they will say it's 98 percent but it's just because some years in the new property they're they're not there as the county just started that with us they will actually go live in 2021 and the they have about two million properties to register and so that's going to be a more or less the same same sort of scale as Los Angeles City is and again they also will have a mandatory registration program annual fee and of course right now we don't know the registration level we'll know next year city of Beverly also has it they have no annual fee but they do have manual mandatory registration and they primarily do registration registry and some stabilization work in the service management also they also have 95 percent registration level Mountain View is you know is has a registry so basically data collection they don't have mandatory requirement and they don't have any annual fee they were about six percent and registration level now they didn't didn't expect that it's been two years and they're in touch so coming up a little bit but they realize that without actually requiring somebody to do something so why would they register you know i hope with a benefit for them so now they're changing that and starting January 1 they will also be on a mandatory registration process which will actually hopefully definitely lift that Berkeley which is just that we are in contract conversations them they are they are the oldest registry in our rental stabilization program in probably the country if not Cambridge is probably older in mass but I think the oldest program in the country we've just begun working with them and they also have mandatory they also have annual fee and they're very high penalty for not paying any fee so basically they have very high level of compliance but the basic idea is that they've been aware they've got a very successful program over almost 40 years and and they're also and part of the reason they can do that is the amount of data that they have of the program Alameda also one of your neighbors they have almost all these things that are written there you know they just started this year and they are actually I didn't put a number there but they're actually right now at 95 percent and this is their first year and they also they began this you know it's not big in 2021 they they charged for a number and they actually collected more in fees this year than they ever did in the past it's all online so Alameda that shared 95 percent also and then Englewood will start next year again so what they're watching is that they're actually looking at each of the ordinance and saying what's working and what's not working what I was saying that and we are fairly well there's just a couple of example columns there are many other aspects of this program and you can sort of see over that tenant buyout sort of doesn't work or maybe this kind of data collection is it doesn't really matter so you can sort of watch that and we across a lot of different ones you know we have information that we can we can certainly share and of course Oakland is only uses the system for eviction management they also started last year they also have 95 percent of evictions now in the system not just for this year they go back eight years now so they have complete data for eviction for eight years now in the system so they can delete this and I'm going to show you some examples what I'm going to do is I'm going to switch over to my browser here and show you how how the system works and what typically is involved in getting the central data that we talk about and so this is the exam I'm going to use Alameda's you know sort of test system to to show you and of course I'm going to show you some other examples also so here in the case of Alameda then you see two different logins landlord and tenant so one of the key things in the development system was that it has to be super easy to use if it's very complicated then of course that'll be the first problem that people won't want to use it or they can't use it and then it becomes ineffective so user experience was critical and we've now been doing it for so many years and she found what sort of works and what doesn't work and then what people like and what people don't like you know so I'm going to log in first at the landlord our property owner and then I'm going to show you that how it looks from the other perspective of the other users here's an owner and they have to register when they register that anybody can register and then depending on your role you actually you know you can sort of and it can be both a property owner and a tenant it's not unusual at all so I'll show you tenants by going to tenant silencer later so this person is just okay there's something sorry about that so because it's a demo account this person owns a lot of properties in Alameda no this is not a real account so one of the things we want to do was to actually have the ability to manage multiple properties and it's not not at all uncommon for people to have multiple properties and then each property has this thing called property card and the way you add a property is very simple you come here and when you start first time there's nothing here and you can just say add property and then you do that it's just say okay well bring your part you know because all this can be changed to look like where we want to be so you have to go to your bills property bill and say okay what's my what's my uh a parcel number so that's on your property tax bill so you can just type in that property tax bill number or actually this is a parcel number and then you there's a pin now pin number is something that the city issues it can be issued or it can be actually included in the bill it's other can be some information in the bill that only they can have and so as long as you have a property bill you can get a pin number actually add the property so verify that's a real property so that is a corrected the address here so that is the address of the property and it goes back to the database and and verify that so we actually start these programs by pre-loading them with information from the county so we already have your county information for example most of those counties in the state we we have we have information for so we would actually on an annual basis working with your with your city uh be bringing in this data and also overlaying that for data that you already have and sometimes county has the right information in terms of units sometimes it's actually needs to be augmented by the information that comes and one of the first things that we found was that almost every city that i mentioned here and many others they just didn't know what rent they had i mean you think you got 15,000 but when you actually start you might find out it's 70,000 and or it could be it could be 40,000 and then that that estimate starts coming in and and people start sort of reporting things you suddenly find out your inventory is actually a little bit different and of course the number of units changes a lot over over for your time you know the city as old as yours definitely the unit counts would have would have shifted over the years since the original permits were issued so one of the things that happens is that that you start sort of getting that information so what i've done is i've gone and added that particular property and now it's it's also in one of many properties that i supposedly own here okay so the the idea here would be that once you get a property what do you do with it so what i do with it is that i can add units so i'll look i'll show you a property card and you'll show you what what actually happens with the property the other thing that's worth remembering is that also tracks for past properties you might have own so let's say i owned a property and i sold it well i might still have some litigation against it i might have some pending rents against it whatever the issue might be i don't lose the data that but i also shouldn't have any ability to change that data you know and i can pass it on to the new owner there is some information that's very useful for my own manage so you don't lose the information you actually can stay keep the past properties in the system okay so i'm going to pick one i'm going to start to see if i can pick the one that i just added okay i just added and it has according to the the system there are two units in it okay but i don't have any units in it added yet so it just says okay and it actually has already names for these units from some past information that the information i have had so literally all you do is you go there and you can change various things like it change the contact information i can add various types of contacts here i can say oh i'm going to add another one or i can basically you know create there's an owner type that it could there could be a you know property manager so this kind of information you can add and change and modify it and of course often properties might have multiple site addresses you might have a main street address and a side street address especially for multiple buildings so all of this stuff it manages really well so this thing has two units one is a lower unit and an upper unit so in a lower unit i can kind of go and say okay i'm gonna i'm gonna apply for an exemption because this is actually not a not for rental at all it's actually been say classified for exemption so i can do that so these all these processes you know have to be managed from here so right now there's no information and again each city does this a little bit differently so i can edit this property and say you know this is called the same address as the other one occupant type is a is a vacant is a manager so you can actually see that you can pretty much follow the process that let's say the rent subsidized tenant or it's an owner that's staying there it's vacant or whatever so i can say that it's owner staying there that's why i'm seeking exemption later on it's got two bedrooms that's there but watch that if i pick a different kind of tenant it'll ask for different information so based on what i'm selecting i'm collecting different data for that particular unit so let's say the data turns he started on a particular day let's just say it's number one and and i've got a base rent of fifteen hundred dollars and the current rate is also ten hundred dollars and i can say that in lasting pieces also number one okay what do you provide with it parking do you provide recycling you know and you put gas up that's allowed you may say i don't want to collect all this stuff and that's fine so every as i said every city every every customer of ours has a different form here but whatever you decide we can put in some cities say we don't want to collect the names of tenants you know others might say no we absolutely want to know so i'm going to put in my name and of course there are language preferences and all that you can offer now this is basically you know and why that is because if you have to say contact somebody then you can use that so i can add more information and so on i can add more tenants so essentially i can maintain this information on an ongoing basis once i do that i can start the process of registering this so registration is literally that simple you go through and you put in the information once most of the time the information only changes maybe once a year maybe every couple of years the property structure doesn't change for years and years all you're changing is one ten ten one ten ten one ten left you know and so really what starts happening in the back though is actually beginning to observe how the tendencies change in various parts of the city and that's what we're going to look at next the other things that you can do so this particular customer does a lot of things so for example now that i have this i can actually say i'm going to on the platform exemption still on a contact i can do a buyout of the event i can do a capital improvement on this particular and so i'm going to take this master market and do some capital improvement so i can make all the different requests to the city and communicate what i'm doing and all this is done digitally so there is not a lot of people going back and forth and the idea is that i can actually create this now if it was already rented i would actually do some other things i can also take the whole property and pre-city exemption in this case because that's one of the things that they allow the other thing you'll notice up there is a little card and what the card does is in this particular city for example they also charge some fees so i'm going to so the various fee for what is because this one has a lot of demo accounts we can go and pay pay pay for a particular fee right office so a lot of times you know this is very convenient and people just come and pay for here and so this is just a normal kind of a kind of an account that the people the property owners will have and they'll be able to to work for that okay so once i do this what happens is that i'm going to go back and look at some other properties already been registered so you'll see what happens in that case i'm going to open this other property that has one unit and in that you'll notice there is something called a case history below that so every annual cycle of rent registry creates a case and the case basically is just a name or what it says there's actually a record of what registration happened so all the information is right here you know what was done with the copy invoice and very documents and stuff that afterwards it's all kept here so over a period of time if i made any capital improvements if i did an eviction all of that's actually going to be recorded and and can be saved and that's very helpful as you plan so for example let's say that here's somebody who i would actually file a rent increase that's exceeding the AGA for that particular year i can do that let's say i want to submit a no-fault termination so you can do that but you have to tell me why you're doing it because that's now the state law so i can come here and say okay i'm doing this and i can create the whole process from here and the whole eviction process can be managed from here so let's say i want to make the eviction effective this is the day i'm going to apply is it in person what did you do well of course there can be all sorts of programs and particularly in alameda for example they have a location requirement so if you if you move somebody out you have to pay the relocation what's that depending on the you know equipment size and all that so all of these processes which are very difficult to manage very manually difficult to are all now digitally but manually and there are exciting ordinances and such so it's it's sort of very you know and it's controlled and and degree of the degree to which you want to use it totally depends on you know and you i can say i just want to this tree so i know all the data or it could be much more than that okay so that's of course from the site of the owner uh what is the tenancy so let's say i'm also a tenant in the same city so i'm going to flip over the tenant for most part you can just find partitions for some decisions that have been taken now that's alameda you might you can make it so that hey tenants can find out about a property before they move in you know a tenant can find out more about uh you know about the region where they're moving into what neighborhoods and such it can be tied to the other information that the planning and others might be putting out so you could actually look at this and say hey there's a unit exemption thing that that was that was putting for my unit so that's again because the demo data so you know some of this may be an appropriate for you know typically tenants won't do that so they would have some idea about about information like this so i'm a tenant and i'm in a place i'm paying $15,000 this is what i this is what the landlord has reported so some of these cities will say hey can you verify that's really the rent you know some cities say now i don't care as long as property not told me that that's good enough for me now i'm going to do is i'm going to log out and log in as from the city side a little bit and so let me do that so what does the city see and what does city do i'm logging in as say as a like a like a administrator of the program the first thing is of course i see my dashboard of what's going on in my program so of course this could be different for each program so you might have a program that's on affordable housing side of the rental there could be certain special category of rental program there could be also just in terms of capital improvements so here it tells me how many cases i have of each type and i can sort of dig deeper so 12 capital improvements that are pending that are you know 1060 unit that's in a part for exemption so i can directly see what my city looks like and you can say look i want at least this information to be visible to my later officials so they can also look at what's going on where they are what's going on we'll see in a second how and then of course there can be other types of reports and you can have extensive reporting capabilities that say okay show me all the ones that have bios you know what and you can say what what are the status how many bios are actually getting through how many are defaulting how many so all this information can be can be captured and you can create a fairly detailed sort of you know report on various types of aspects of your program you know whether it's registry whether it's stabilization whether it's rental inspection all of that can be captured here so and this is all the all the kind of all cases here i'll quickly go to let's say that or some other property here and you'll see that this is the same property that we registered but you'll see a lot more tags on the top the city is the same property than what the property owner might see because my role now is an administrator i can i can i'm going to take a number of photos during inspection that i might keep some notes on this particular one i might also have correspondence logs so i've spoken with the property owner i've spoken with the tenant so all those correspondence logs are also kept in the system i might also want to see it on a map to see what's going on with the property you know over time i said the data comes from google or some other place and of course the most importantly is something called a change log so from the day you start every every action that's taken by anybody whether it's by property owner or whether it's taken by by by the city is actually logged and this timeline really helps you to reconstruct what might have happened with the property over a long period of time and you can compare this data and see what each region has happened so this is one type of data which might do i'm going to in this time i'm going to switch over to a different one and show you how you can generate reports that are actually even more uh so this is actually oakland's uh data you know this is again not of their data but it's oakland's sort of setup so here's a database dashboard that's quite different so here what they're tracking is what are their trends and and and notices that they go out to or no fault evictions so they can say okay well looks like most of these are notice disease you know and then of course some of these are broken down by 90 day 30 day over where are they happening you know so they can have number of data sets and say looks like most of which zip code are most of the evictions happening they can also look at it on the map which i'll show you in a second and so they can track what exactly is happening in their environment based on the data sets that they have okay they can also do other data report but their data report is all tied to eviction that's the only program they're tracking again underneath there is a registry and every single property in oakland is actually in the system it's just they don't mandatory they really require anybody to register the property what they require is evictions have to be registered every eviction has to be reported just as i think that's an ordinance thing that coming up here's something that that l.a county is using this is there again to just sort of various various use cases that show you how how data is used by various constituencies so they use this data they also have an interactive which is going to go live very soon and on january 1 they'll start collecting information but they are tracking this is their preservation database the the long goal for l.a county is there were two and two or four million properties uh that that they're all together out of which how many are at risk in terms of projects how many are you know tax tax credit properties that are like that so i can just manage my tax credit program and see what is my current status of my tax credit based properties and how are they doing and where they are so this is a much more sophisticated use case of preservation database and they can watch on a map and say hey you know we don't have our transportation you know all of our properties are here so what do we do about that so again they're using this program for a very different use case this is subsidized housing so they want to see how their a long term subsidized housing risk structure is so they can watch the risk and say look we're going to lose 20% of our our properties because they are at risk so they can watch the risk levels for various types of properties and see what they need to be doing in a planning sense to enable that so that's that's another kind of use case that you see uh that's very it's also very effective it's not coming up because i think i've got everything on the same page okay so here they're watching these programs for uh what are under construction right now what are proposed what is coming when where they are and they can sort of meet bring in other planning data and decide if that's that's going to actually be effective or not given where the curve is where the county is laid out okay uh they can also look at the risk profiles for properties and see what's going to go and what's going to happen with various sort of properties over time so this is actually property by risk level uh you know where they where they are with city has most risk in the county and therefore they can sort of look at the budgeting and all that accordingly so it's coming up uh so these are all property at risk what are high level so and but these are diggable so they actually can be all so i can look at the very highs and click on them i'll get the list of all of the highest properties that can go through every single one of them and then kind of analyze that property and that's important because now what you're doing is you're researching this data and saying what can i do with it so now once again you'll see this property card that you saw before but that was in the rent context now you're looking at in the preservation area so someone like like sara's planning department could be looking at this and saying all right what are these different what position does it belong to or the tax credits on this program so they track all the over 140 different attributes on every project from here and of course how is this subsidized or not is it is there a ticket program or not and they can keep adding that over time so let's say something was not a affordable housing property but wasn't later on given some loan to to add some property or maybe convert some of the some of their property into a photo program and they got they can track all that from here there is and the last thing i want to show you in that context is the research tool so here's the research tool that's very let me log me out and just to find it here i'm going to do a property research so here i've got every single property in l.a county that's in the preservation database of the county the thousand thousand units in it and so i want to kind of research that so i apologize for the loading because i think we're running video and everything when we turn off the video a very affordable property in the l.a county that's available many many of them and let's say that i wanted to see which of the properties that are at risk and also are funded by l.a county and of course they don't have and they can apply this filters and as i do that these five properties are funded by them that also address so maybe they can take some action right away so then i can look at that and then go to go to one of those properties and see what's going on with that one and once i do that i can actually go to the same data card that we saw so some high-level information about bond hours here but i can actually go look at that property exactly like i was looking at the other so you can see that the core is the same it's everywhere it's the property card it's all the units and your information and so on but depending on the use case of the customer there are different use there are different use cases so clearly i mean if your primary you know sort of goal is to just compile this data and understand how they're into market evolving and what's happening in in your city you can do that county here is looking at affordable housing also on top of that and then and they're also looking at the RSO which is rent stabilization ordinance that they passed so they're all laying the data on top of that so this can really become a kind of a very powerful tool for managing housing over a very long period of time and also aggregate the information that's coming from various sources in the city from planning from from building building safety permits and so on actually see how really the policies can be shared based on the data that you think so i'll stop here and and see if you have any questions it was a little bit answered regarding the fees that i was wondering in other cities if you said it i didn't catch it what the fee was that they charge and i'm assuming that's to the property owner per parcel to cover the cost of the program because we're going to the typically that that amount depends on the volume of units you have most of the times the fee is based on number of units not number of parcels so if you have four you know it's per unit and it ranges from as little as $22 a year to $150 a year depending on what you have and so typically three to four dollars a month although we have to maybe ten dollars a month per unit you know it adds to the rent and that's determined so the first year most of these customers have gone and done their inventory kind of assessment how many do we really have do we really have 10,000 or do we have 15,000 because that can make a big difference and one and let's say and against that what is the cost of our program for cost of our program is it's requiring us to do say you know two staff members or three so what is the cost to run the program so based on that they would say this is a cost neutral program and generally the fee based on that and it ranges as I said from a very large program in Los Angeles it's really not not not not as high but you know in a smaller program that they a little bit higher but typically not much higher than I think $84 for example in Alameda which has which is five thousand per six thousand units which is very few so they have to spend the cost across more so I would sing back to your numbers a bit lower yeah thank you for the presentation I I'm a data person so I I love thinking about all of the the ways that this could be useful and and the you know the benefits of being able to aggregate data I am wondering and this is I'm not sure this is a question you can answer but given that you've worked with other jurisdictions I'm thinking you might have heard you know one of the concerns that we've heard from at least several property management company representatives and landlords is concerned about this being a really onerous process for data collection and so I'm just wondering if you know it doesn't seem that way to me based on what I'm seeing but again I don't have all the information I don't have you know I mean and we haven't even really begun to talk about what kind of information we want to collect the you know there's so many variables but how you know what has your experience been with staff from the jurisdictions that you work with talking about the you know the enrollment process with landlords in their jurisdiction if anything thank you for raising that question and actually I think generally property owners will say that it's so hard and so much burden on me and so on so forth but of course that has to be addressed and so as you saw I mean I was able to register a property within I think about for half a minute you know it doesn't really take very long it's actually easier than creating an account on twitter you know if you know so it's not that hard and the proof is not me saying that Alameda started this March April I think when they went live by June they had everybody on you know how hard can it be and we have elderly people who said look I really don't want to create an account there are other people who said I don't have access so what's what often cities have done they said okay you know I think 85 90 percent of the people are gonna really just go and register it's really not that difficult others are going to want some some assistance so they will provide that sort of helpless type of a situation and then there would have been we can also help out but actually registration process is quite straightforward I think what what David what people refer to is hey but you know I do eviction right now I didn't I can just do that you know but you know and I can just send the letter to three-day notice to the owner I'm done right I'm sorry the turn I'm done well this doesn't let you do that because you actually have to upload that but again I mean I think we're all used to taking a picture or something and uploading so I think that particular part of the I think objection is now less and less real as more people are just used to doing these things thank you and then one more question related to confidentiality and you know disclosure of public information information that we receive that may be private but because being a public agency then becomes public information so and that has been raised as a concern I'm just wondering how you navigate that with the other jurisdictions or what you know just kind of how that how that works so that's a great question so that that comes up every single time and as it should so there are really three parts to that one is we never store any financial information somebody pays actually goes to a otherwise platform is compliant we send it to the payment processor just like you take a parking ticket money you don't really store that so the financial information is never stored you know the second portion is property owners information so property owners information is actually publicly available everybody knows who owns this property so this is not you know so is unit information the third piece is the tenant information which actually is the most so this platform actually is encrypted platform we actually store everything encrypted from and it actually meets very high encryption standards it is you know it is sitting on amazon which also sort of further secures it and so we have and we've had 20 years of data of management this we've never had an issue like this so and every time we work with the city we go through fairly rigorous you know analysis of what the security standards are with county of Los Angeles they put it through almost a month worth of sort of what they call reputation testing and all these kinds of things so we go through a full analysis of the data security and then the last thing is that some city also take a decision to say I don't want to collect this information for certain information because I don't want to be liable for it for whatever reason you know and there are various levels of that I I think some city will say why do I need to know this information you know maybe this is not really relevant I just want to turn into one turn into others might say no I need to know the name how do I contact them to some third maybe I will take them a cinnamon turn into unless they choose to give me that information so there is all this sort of levels of security that that are fairly standard in the industry and we follow them to jump in here as well you know actually make a phone call like it's 1996 you know there are definitely advantages they are policy first and then make the text you know really and then building our policy picking up you know in terms of other you know there's like a 3-1-1 function that I think 3-D-I could offer public works and you know we're not really there yet in terms of some level we have residents at every income level make an educated guess right about how these units are functioning in our property in our um our housing demand at these different you know one piece that comes to mind for me a rental unit I mean I think they're really hearing different stories from different parties and you know the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle and this would at least get a part of the way there in terms of you know under some individual unit so our influence by how we might benefit from this information we did you have something you wanted to add yeah thank you um I appreciate those comments sir and thanks for the question mayor coming the one thing uh well sort of two related things that I would add um one um through IT's great work on my city of Santa Cruz dot com uh or the apps um we do now accept uh rental payments um online um so so that is an improvement I'll put a plug out there for those who have registered um and then um I just also wanted to note that um you know our our permit tracking system I will say that the residential rental inspection service um does not fit fit neatly within our current permit tracking system and as Sarah mentioned this um the system could offer some um improvements to how we do business there the the thing that I wanted to mention is that um that current system is actually um they're phasing out the service for that it's it's quite old and they've been trying to get us to upgrade for years and um there have been um some challenges that IT has had um some significant ones recently where our e-track it which we relied on heavily during the pandemic has had to get taken offline because of uh challenges and that seems to be happening more and we're getting less support from the vendor and so we are pursuing we're actively pursuing a new permit tracking system um and so you know some of the and so it's there are some uh benefits to having the the residential rental inspection service in the same uh system as say um the code compliance and even you know the current planning um so so there may be I just wanted to point out that there may be some opportunities for um some of the improvements that um that this system offers you know could also be obtained through another system the the larger permit tracking system upgrade that we are going to be pursuing and um that we're we're narrowing in on now in terms of uh how we want to uh and who we want to go with for that um so I just wanted to point that out because um you know the the real benefit that I see of this uh 3di is in relation to the um the data related to um rental housing you know I would not expect um that a permit tracking system has the same types of capabilities you know there's somewhat it's somewhat of a different animal the permit tracking system is um you know really uh functioning as something that is like carrying a building permit or a planning permit through the process and that's how it's designed 3di has kind of designed their system for um collection of and um the um analysis of rental data so um you know there could be some additional benefits related to the residential rental inspection but I also want to be clear that you know we may we may pursue a different path for that in and of itself and um the uh I would not see the vice versa necessarily uh happening I wouldn't see us using a new permit tracking system for the rental data I just I don't think that they're really made for that in most instances um so I just wanted to put that sort of balancing act out there for the council to understand Matthews then vice mayor Myers and then council member Watkins well obviously there's a huge range of what might be done with this in great depth and um um some of it as Lee just said um over could overlap considerably especially in newer um permit tracking system that the city might get into it it seems to be premature to me to go deeply with this proposal rather than kind of open up the RFPQ for a whole permit tracking um system revision um if that's the need and so it does seem like there are two different functions um I had uh I guess this is a technical question uh we were given a price for a set up and a maintenance and I guess that was based on the rough estimate of how many rental units there were in the city of Santa Cruz and then there was a a circle with four components and maybe it was three and one was the staff and the inputs of the staff had to put in if I'm recalling that um slide so I guess my question is for let's say initial set up fee and annual maintenance fee who's putting in all that data and that absolutely depends I would imagine on how much data we're expecting it's a whole permit tracking thing and the state burden on staff so it's not just fee and the maintenance fee it's all that stuff staff time putting in the data so it seemed to me that um there were a lot of questions to what are we getting for this and how much is it costing and it's the best way to get this information um I do have uh real concerns about the privacy issues of this I think I have very few support so it's no question um no secret um I have a good deal of uneasiness about um because the potential is so vast on this we might say we're going to start here and then it works into something that may not at all be um what council thought they were signing up for in the beginning and again no secret I do have a small rental property and I'm not going to be around the bush so I'm just going to lay that out there those those are my concerns they're probably shared by other people um I appreciate your question for the staff and the thoroughness of their um their response um I guess one housing stock that I think actually has quite an influence on our housing ecosystem is um ends up at the university and so I'm yeah I'm just I feel situation with regards to our housing situation um I I do think that um in terms of you know the policy fitting the product instead of the product helping us you know so I think that's another thing that we really probably need to think through but I appreciate the work of the sub committee and um very much appreciated the product review today um it does seem like the product is very very helpful in you know the management of of obviously if you're at your section where you are managing affordable units and you're you're sort of managing your own stock I can I could see potentially but you know we don't have a lot of that I don't know how much we would have moving forward but um I could um I could see sort of a potential in terms of maybe just an internal tool but um the broader application are not as clear um in terms of really assessing the community and the regional sort of market and the um ability to track all the various factors of that so I am thank you very much for the um for the presentation and really interesting product with lots of interesting uh applications so thank you thank you I I I sort of echo uh Vice Mayor Meyers comments in regards to the product and the interesting elements that you can use to kind of aggregate and disaggregate various data points and then applying it based on um sort of what the ultimate goal and outcome of the data we hope to have accomplished um I have a question though for the staff and you you mentioned that the original um proposal was and I apologize if I forgot but was to have sort of that internal database created um at a voluntary was that something that you would need to contract for or is that something that you felt internally within the city we have capacity to do and manage you're talking about um the first um if I can recall all the detail um when we brought that we could manage right we as staff we had never run a program like this we've never attempted to create a database um of this magnitude that would ultimately generate statistics um you know and sort of initially we were like well maybe it's just really simple and it's kind of like a google import into excel and we like quarterly pump out like five statistics when it's are we including you know as the subcommittee has sort of residential rental inspection service that serves about a leather every rental unit right it doesn't survey or you know room rentals if the owner's living on site because the idea there is that um that service is really focused on property maintenance so the assumption has been made by the city that the property owner lives there they are taking better care of their property if it's a mobile home it's subject to a different building code and it's not even subject to our local city code so we don't have really anything to enforce about those units so we don't track them and as part of that service the idea with you know collecting this information since it was more about you know the the market um is that we would want to capture those right so that's one piece room rentals is you know also included there so it's a bigger pool what pieces of information are we going to collect are we really just going to collect like yes it's rented this is the rent like if that's two pieces of information that's sort of like one scope of work if it's you know as currently we've sort of envisioned it through the subcommittee it's a lot of details about the property like how large is the unit how many bedrooms does the unit have what's included with the unit in terms of amenities like Rajeev demonstrated you know use provide parking and gas and you allow pets you know all of those things which affect rent so there's a lot of information that would be collected to give context to the rental amount then what we had initially proposed with like a voluntary pilot summer was you know we'll start with a pilot program and we're going to learn a lot because we don't know anything yet and we're going to learn how to do it we're going to learn what's not working we're going to learn like our limits you know as a I can dig that number up but I think that's that's ballpark if you want to if you want to wait until after public comment I can find that number for you didn't comment thing on this title I'm using the numbers that are once you've called Rajeev calling again hi this presentation I really like all the robustness around it and I like staff's idea that it applies to more than just sort of regulated traditionally regulated units because during this time with COVID and the sort of patchwork of state county and city protections against evictions and large rent increases I feel like we need tools like this to enforce those rules not like purely hypothetical of canvassing affordable housing throughout the city during this election season and I'm just hearing like really concerning things from tenants there were some tenants who are veterans living in low-income housing and they were asked like informally to pay increased rent to offset other COVID vacancies in their apartment complex and that just seems like nobody is sort of like watching that kind of thing I heard about some new management at affordable housing Casa de Del Rio which is on Blaine Street and then they're asking tenants to temporarily relocate during a pandemic so they can renovate units which they haven't done like 40 years and so these are just very concerning things that I don't know what they could lead to you know and I don't know how we're enforcing like the laws that we actually have on the books right now and so yeah I just would really like if we could sort of push this along particularly during COVID just to sort of have something in place to make sure that these new property managers and you know bigger landlords of more sort of slum lordy property are really just like following the laws as they are today and not sort of informally evicting people informally raising their rent which it seems like that may be happening thanks for those comments so the public would like to speak to us on this item now's the time to call in once you've called in please press star 9 on your phone to raise your hand and you will be given two minutes to speak I would just let you know 800 is the number of responses okay the number of projects that we're considering for the interim recovery plan the um I think housing with housing did come um I think we could talk this into the into that interim recovery plan but I'm not hearing a ton of support so I'm not quite sure but I think we could have another conversation possibly via the interim recovery plan process to see if we're narrowing this in for some use that we can identify through that process specifically I think during the COVID period so it's it to me it's a costly product and so I'm just trying to trying to understand sort of the the the piece in it but I personally I think that would probably be the only place right now to fit it in in terms of continuing the discussion so I'm happy to listen to uh to other members ideas or I can I'm happy to make a motion if need be okay council member Watkins and then council member Matthews um no I appreciate uh new mayor and and vice mayor mentioning the potential to kind of integrate it into our interim recovery approach as we do know that we have um very limited resources and are financially constrained as well as um thinking about the prioritization of the various uh trade-offs that were referenced at the beginning of the presentation so I do think it's part of that bigger conversation um and so those those are essentially my comments and and if vice mayor wants to make a motion or I see Martin Bernal is on here too as well if you want to speak to that yes I was just going to mention that the back to the uh interim recovery plan of formal approval on the 24th of the number so not the not Tuesday's council meeting but the one after that and then just by way of background the the three items that you uh adopted as the three priority areas were take actions to ensure short and long-term fiscal sustainability investing in downtown and other business sectors and improve and maintain infrastructure so again but this will all come back to you so you can review it maybe the planning director could comment on this but what I heard was that our um permit tracking existing permit tracking system was added towards the crash and burn situation pretty soon and that I mean you must be moving forward on that looking forward looking for RFP RFP whatever to um develop a new system for that so maybe you could speak to that that seems um more immediately urgent me sure so we um we did complete uh I believe it was last year a many RFP to get an understanding of the um the costs associated with the new permit tracking system and um we've since been engaging um the new owner of our current permit tracking system to understand what they can offer um in relation to um the an upgrade of their system and I'm sure Ken can speak way more eloquently than I can about the it challenges with uh that that you've had recently yeah just now we're approaching uh an eight to ten year old system and we've stumbled across some vulnerabilities especially with our public facing website that uh puts us at risk uh a lot of the uh current system is antiquated for the some of the most of the business processes that are taking place in our planning and public works division so we've been uh trying to get to a point where we could upgrade we've had some staff resources and some of the growing pains with the change in vendors of our current system uh we were we're realizing a level of stability now uh it's the most cost-effective path is to do this upgrade so we are uh we had a kind of a kickoff meeting with a consultation vendor that's going to help with some business process review but we're we're well in the mode of moving towards a new platform and it is absolutely a priority given the age of the system and the vulnerabilities uh that we're we're kind of encountering well um that kind of makes my point and I guess the thought would be are there aspects of the um the huge menu of opportunities that were presented today in in this program but are there aspects that you would want to incorporate into the into any revised permit tracking period without adding on another whole system and that would seem to be you have your most immediate needs and then some other questions that people have about tracking needs whatever but um that's what I would look to first is is getting our our core permit tracking functional and adding to that the things that we most want to know about our housing stock and I I also just have to say I completely agree with Sarah's comment enough there's so many just massive external forces on our housing market there are a whole lot of things that obviously we are not going to solve single-handedly services that we get to add in the and well that that my mind that would be the the first half and you get get the things up to speed that you need to put the speed that you absolutely know about and then if there are elements of the um housing stock is something that can be incorporated into any revision that might be the most cost effective way got you and so specifically around rental inspection that was a question that came up when when yeah when we did our conversation and I think the implementation that we're currently sitting on is poorly constructed and was customized into the application so they have they will be doing a business process review specifically of rental inspections and making some recommendations to see if there's a way to better construct it in a land use management software system yeah but to Sarah's point this would not satisfy necessarily a rental registry registry system right yeah but the inspection system we are looking we definitely would like to contain it in one system so that you know both IT staff and planning staff are not using you know disparate systems to to do to the same tasks motion that mid-year budget update we defer second meeting in january at the at the earliest and revisit the items then um so that would be my motion and i guess my follow-up comment is comment is without really understanding our budgetary issues um without you know prior to mid-year check-in I just think I think this is unfortunately a project that just needs to be sort of pushed back and uh reconsidered over time there's this motion I just also wanted to add that I just am concerned about moving forward with this at this time based on our discussions at the last meeting I think we put a lot of effort into making sure all of our arrows are flying in the same direction in our economic recovery period that's coming up and it's going to be difficult and while some things you know seem really important not every not every can't do everything everything can't be important so and I know um there's a slight cost and I think a lot there's a cost associated with this that I just wouldn't feel comfortable with at this time so that's why yeah I think I'll just let's just keep it easy let's defer mid-year budget would be maker and seconder uh include also um an update on the process of uh improving our IT permit tracking system yes I'm comfortable with that member golder with additional um the friendly amendment made by council member Matthews to defer the action on this item until after the mid-year budget update and also receive an update on it improving um if there's no further are there any further comments from council members at this time all the roll call votes thank you mayor council member buyers is absent based on which direction to go in I will say that I do for us to be tracking um moving forward town is going to be extremely critical over the next you know 10 years plus so 1 pm to 5 pm I want to say I know this is the issue that is personally very important to you and um I do appreciate you all the energy that you've put into this and I also appreciate that this meeting was able to incorporate the state legislation update these things are also wetted in together and that we did take time to look at the um progress on the housing blueprint I appreciate that this issue was made to be more inclusive so thank you construction that way no problem and thanks for the recommendations as well