 Do you have any way you want to, or we can just jump right in? Well, I'll jump in and I'll make sure that there is a free time for questions, but thank you so much, because I know what a scheduled committee has to go on at times, so thank you so much for giving us a chance to do this. We're a place economics, our firm is a real niche consulting firm, and the only thing we do is at the intersection of historic preservation and economics, and about half of that is impact studies, usually at the city level, about the impacts of historic preservation. So this assignment, technically the client was the Historic Columbia Foundation, although the city's preservation office, Amy and her staff, provided a lot of access to data, introduction, review, and so was a real partnership, but the study itself really covered five areas, the demographics and the historic districts, the contribution of older housing, whether or not it's designated historic to housing portability in Columbia, the impact of local historic districts on property values, impact of the baili bill, which of course is concerned to all of you as it should be, and the heritage tourism. So I just pulled out some compactoids from each of those areas on what we learned, but the basics was to think about what there was to look at, and there's the historic districts in Columbia of a variety of flavors, but the ones that we looked at specifically were the architectural conservation district and the protection areas, and I'm sure you all know this, but the architectural conservation districts are more like a traditional historic district. The protection areas are a little less robust in terms of architectural detail, but more about the character and the context of the neighborhood, but both important for neighborhoods in Columbia. And again, we are pretty transparent about our findings and not all the findings are great. In fact, over the two decades, two prior decades, while the city of Columbia's population was growing, the population in the both of the historic districts, kind of districts that we looked at, in fact, shrank. Now, some of that is in consolidation. Some of that is conversion of what might have been a duplex back into somebody's single family home. So there's lots of reasons, but that is the pattern. But having said that, oftentimes one of the critiques of historic districts is that they are, we need density to have cities run efficiently and historic districts are keeping density from happening. Well, in fact, that's usually not the case that both of the architectural conservation districts and the protection areas have a density per people per square mile, in fact, of three or four times that of the, all of the residential areas in, in Columbia. So in fact, they are giving you density, but in a different form, it's density at a human scale. So it's density other than in high rises. It's because of lot sizes, building sizes, multifamily, small scale, multifamilies and others, but there's sizeable density coming from the historic districts. And then we looked at the demographics in the historic districts. Again, just to think in whole, about 6.5% of the population of Columbia lives in those two categories of historic districts, so 94% of people do not. And the income distribution would be interesting in that both of the, both of the kinds of districts that we looked at, contrary to kind of popular belief that it's only rich white people that live in those places, in fact, had a greater share of households at the lower end of the income spectrum than did the city as a whole. Now, the architectural conservation districts had a few more, statistically few more at the upper end. But to a large extent, this is not a significant skew of incomes. There are people of all income levels living in the historic districts. And the other story, however, is that the architectural conservation districts are in fact decidedly white, where the protection areas have a racial distribution, not unlike the city as a whole. In fact, there are significantly fewer African American populations, greater white populations in the architectural conservation districts. But the other one kind of renter owner spread was pretty much the same, whether it was the city as a whole, or either the new district. Our basic methodology, by the way, is to look at the historic districts, the characteristics there and say how are they the same or differ from the city as a whole? Can we go back to that previous slide? Alright, so do we see this in other markets or other cities our size? This type of distribution between owners and renters? It really is very locally specific, but this distribution is not uncommon. I would say that if I had to make a general rule, there's probably a higher percentage of home ownership in historic districts, except for the fact that historic districts often have a number of small scale like two to four to six unit rental properties mixed in with single family, and that tends to both add density, but then also reduces the home ownership ratio. So this was not a particular surprise to us that those numbers came up. Okay, so what you're saying is by it's almost, it's almost like this by design, because of the just what's what's in the neighborhood itself. Well, that's right. And we, again, it's a perspective that everyone doesn't have to share. But we think it's kind of healthy for a city to have a mix of smaller scale rental units and single family in the same neighborhood. They don't feel as disruptive to the single family character, but they add density and allow a much wider spread of, of nature of households. So we kind of like that. But it does have this consequence that that sometimes it means a lower than might be expected home ownership. Okay, thank you. Yep. Thanks for the question. And here's another one again, want to give the not so great news along with the great news is that there has been a significant reduction of our statistically significant reduction in the African American population in the historic districts where that population has grown in the city. In the last decade, it is shrunk in both the architectural conservation districts and the protection areas. Now, hypothesizing some of this is a result of student housing, moving into areas that were historically African American neighborhoods, and kind of changing that balance. But it is a it is an issue that that shouldn't be hidden to kind of address how do we make sure that the historic districts are, are serving all of the population of Columbia. When we look at this issue of older housing and affordability, and we talked a lot with Amy when we were talking about what that study would include. And she really encouraged us to include this look at older housing, because housing affordability is such a critical issue in most places, but certainly in Columbia. So here we didn't make a distinction between whether it was in a historic district or not, or even ought to be, but simply wasn't housing built prior to 1970 was our was our date of 50 years and older housing, and how that contributed to affordability in in Columbia. So there is the kind of unit count of and and where the where the population is how many units and and so forth in population, just as kind of a recap, about 45% of the housing stock, housing units is in pre 1970 block groups. Now what we did because so we could get as granular as possible, we took block groups that the low census area that had more than half their housing units built prior to 1970. So that's where that those numbers come from. So about 45% 32,000 housing units in those block groups, older block groups. And here again, is kind of telling is that just the marketplace itself, vast majority has no subsidy, no underwriting, no anything just there and affordable oftentimes, simply because it's available in the marketplace, it still exists. And so you can see is that there is a higher share of people and 30% of every median income and below in that older housing stock, and a lesser percentage at the at the upper end. So it really is meeting that lower end of the market need in that older housing. And here, unlike the historic districts here that the racial distribution is pretty reflective of the city as a whole, that in these older areas, it is kind of a reflection a mirror of the demographic distribution of Columbia. And here again, is the is the owner and renter spread. And interestingly enough, there's a there's a higher percentage of home ownership in the these older neighborhoods than there is in newer ones. Now, part of that, frankly, and because so much of the housing stock in Columbia is consumed by students. So a big, you know, development is half students in the, you know, 200 unit, that's going to be in those will be newer buildings, or high rate buildings will be mostly or 7070 buildings. So that's a large reason for this. But it means that there's a sizable share of home ownership in those older neighborhoods because in fact, it's more affordable. And then we looked at the change in median income in both the older neighborhoods and in the newer ones for both owners and renters, because this issue of affordability, of course, is an ongoing one, and the change in both home value and change in rents in those areas. By the way, I'm going to so you can get on with your meeting. I'm going to just kind of give the highlights, but I'd encourage you if you're interested to download because all the background data and explanations of all of this as in the full report. And then there's issue of property values. And for a long time, and I've been doing this stuff for ever. And for a long time, there was a concern and appropriate one of people saying, Well, we don't want that historic district, because that means another layer of regulation. And that means prima facie, it's going to hurt my property values. Well, that's the area that's been studied probably the most by more people and more methodologies and more parts of the country than any other in this economics of preservation side, with pretty consistent answers. And it's what we found in in Colombia. So there is the the average value and the average change in value between 2014 and 2022. I will say that the county's assessment officer was really, really, really valuable. We had great data. The reason that 2014 is the is the base number is that's when the digitally available mass data was available. And that's when there was a major reassessment. So that was the kind of reason. So you can see that the that the values of the architectural conservation district are more than the average of the city as a whole. The protection areas are less. But in fact, both of them had rates of value increased greater than the market as a whole. So those who chose to be in a in a historic district, in fact, benefited from value increase more than the city as a whole. No, this honestly is a two sided thing. That has consequences for housing affordability, sometimes for gentrification. But the reality is for the vast majority of American households, the only real value asset we have is our home. And so this is showing a change in household wealth and intergenerational wealth transfer opportunity because of this enhanced rate of property value enhancement. So can you get back real quick? I think it's really interesting that you see what happened between 2018 and 19. Yeah, and everything else would be the same with the exception of that one year. And you're absolutely right. And thanks for picking it up. And that's because there was a major reassessment done in that year. And so that's why all of them jump. You can see that all of them jumped some, but the architectural conservation district, when they reassessed them, they just saw what the market was doing. And so they jumped kind of disproportionately. And then heritage tourism. We don't always look at heritage tourism. But this was a case where they both the city and the historic Columbia Foundation said, this is we need to know what this is. And we're very fortunate in that long woods, the big international tourism research firm had just completed a statewide study of South Carolina for the State Tourism Office. And we were able to buy then the county level data. So I'm calling it Columbia, but in fact, it's the county level data on heritage tourism and sort the data out to look at heritage tourists in particular. Now, what's interesting is that for those of you who, you know, in most of you on the economic development committee will know, but what we love visitors is that overnight visitors have a lot more economic impact than do just day visitors about is a rule of thumb about 60% of whatever somebody's going to spend on vacation, they're going to spend in the town where they spent the night. Well, overall of visitors that the heritage visitors are about a quarter, almost two and a half million of all the visitors to Columbia, but almost 40% of the overnight visitors. And this has consequences then of their of their impact. So of the of the overnight visitors, 47% of heritage travelers were were overnight visitors. And that that and other things mean that they spent more that the pattern of heritage visitors is that they stay longer, they spend more, they visit more places during each of their visits. So with recalculated, we use the implant data that you all are probably familiar with, it's the kind of econometric model that you can take outputs. And based on that calculate jobs and income and so forth. So just the heritage portion of Columbia's tourism industry is 1500 direct jobs, and you can see how they're distributed there and then there's additional indirect and induced jobs again, just from the heritage portion of the tourism industry. And that means direct labor income, the people whose job is dependent on those heritage tourism, 181 million dollars with the pockets in the pockets of Columbia workers. And the taxes again, this is state and local taxes, but the heritage tourism component of your tourism industry generates 37 million dollars in in taxes. And then finally, the baby bill, which is a great incentive and it's been used a lot and it's been very effective. But I also understand there's concern saying you know, is this all right, fine, it's good, it fixes up small buildings. Is it really a prudent act with taxpayers dollars? So we looked at all of the all of the baby bill projects. And what was of interest to us, because it was a bit of a surprise is while the giant projects get all the headlines. In fact, more than half of the projects were pretty modest size were less than $100,000. Now that's not true of the investment dollars that tended to most of them go to the big projects. But in terms of numbers of projects, in fact, it was pretty modest. And that's due to the fact, to a large extent, that you were smart enough in enacting the baby bill in Columbia to apply to both residential and commercial properties. So lots of people in these areas are using the baby bill on modest rehabilitation of their their home. So about half of these were in architectural conservation districts, 20% in protection areas, and the rest, not in local districts, because the baby bill is applicable if it is an individual landmark building locally, or if it's in a national registry district, that might not be a local district. So that's why there's a sizable portion that weren't in these two categories of local districts. Here is the where the projects were almost half of them were residential. 40% were commercial and the balance mixed use. And but then here again, was the dollar side. So three quarters of the dollar amount in the baby bill, in fact, went into commercial properties. The other thing was a surprise. And, you know, some of the things like I mentioned, weren't just as we expected. This wasn't, is as you all know, there's a minimum threshold that you have to spend as a percentage of the value of the property in order to qualify to get the baby bill benefits. Well, and for all the projects we looked at that minimum investment required, if people would have just invested the minimum that they had to invest to get the get the benefit was about $15 million. Well, they spent 15 times that much. There's $270 million was spent, although the minimum threshold was only $15 million, meaning that there's a trigger for, for a significant amount of investment to use that incentive. Sorry, I went the wrong direction. We, that is pretty volatile. And it goes up and down a lot based on you know, lots of external variables. But when you when you stretch it out, that during since you've had the baby bill in Columbia, an average of about 58 direct local jobs every year on average and about 45 indirect jobs each year for the last 15 years. And those workers getting $3 million in paychecks. And again, those are local workers that you know, theoretically, there could have been some workers coming from someplace else doing work. This is simply because of how the data is structured. This is Columbia resident or at least the county level residents who are getting these paychecks. The geekiest, the geekiest of tests, but one that was really important that the kind of public policy side of incentives. And I'm not telling you anything that particularly this committee doesn't know. But is the is the but for analysis that would this have happened anyway, or did it only happen but for the incentive? Well, if we interviewed everybody used it and said, would you have done this? If you couldn't take advantage of the daily bill, we'd have had 100 people 100% said, Oh, no, we didn't ever done it without. Well, that's not true. Some would have been done with without the daily bill. So here's what we did to get a kind of proxy on this, but for is we took just a we took an investment of $1 million. And we said, What is the point? What is the the share of people doing daily bill projects, who would have done them anyway, as opposed to those who would not. So if 75% of the people would have done them anyway, would have done them without the daily bill 75%, then you're in a you're in the city in the county are the nominal loss for every million dollars about $3 million loss. And when I say loss, what I mean is the present value of 30 years worth of tax revenue property tax revenues, the first 20 years frozen in place, and then 10 years of revenue generation. So we took that stream of future income from the from the property taxes discounted it. So we're not talking about the nominal numbers, but we're talking about the effective present value of those numbers. So you have in the city and county of you lose about $3,500 a year on every million dollars with the residential property, you lose about $5,000 on million dollars with the commercial property, if 25% of the if 25, if 75% of the people were done the project. The magic number is about 29%. That is, if at least 29% would not have done the project were not for the daily bill. In fact, you have more dollars in the car for that had you had no baby. And again, I can't promise you that it was only 1% or only 99% that would or would not. But that's the kind of measure and just on the kind of common sense. If it's only if it's if it's less than, you know, 29%. Again, I want to make sure that I'm saying it right. So I'm not confusing the magic number is at least 29% of everybody who did it would not have done it were it not for the baby bill, you're better off in terms of the present value of revenues than had you had no incentive. So with that, I'll just shut up and be happy to take any questions, comments or get out of here. The next guys on stage any of those are fine. So the conclusion, if you can wrap this up in 50 words or less, what is what is all this tell us? One is that the heritage in whole is beneficial to the city in terms of tax resident revenues. It's beneficial to the property owners. It's beneficial to businesses that have tourism. As there's 30 of the year years in and forth, either Bailey bill is really, really, really defensible as an appropriate public tool for that for the investment that it generates in the city. Where do you see the the next 10 years in Columbia had you had to get? Yeah, I would say that if I were the czar and could make those decisions, that I would say there's a real importance to look at how we can historic districts that better serve the African American population. I think that should be a priority. I think that there's an issue of encouraging the use of the Bailey bill, because especially since it's available for residential properties, but it's a kind of steep learning curve. So there has to be some hand holding, but that ought to be encouraged. And then I think to look at what are the other historic resources in in town that maybe should be designated. And then finally, this issue of older stuff forget if it's historically appropriate or not, we just you can't build new and rent or sell cheap can't be done. So this this importance rating of keeping the older housing stocks in place is best to can just to simply provide market provided affordable housing. Thank you. Questions? Yes, thank you for this information, sir. This might be a question for staff to chip in on. What is the process that these neighborhoods went through to either get on to the concept as a conservation district or protection area? I should know better. I'm Amy Moore. I'm a preservation planner with the city. I staffed the ddrc. And the process is that there's a public process basically neighborhoods usually approach the city and say we're interested in this staff talks them through base, you know, in a very basic way, what is involved with a with a historic designation. And once they've decided that they're interested in pursuing that, then staff works with them over several month process of explaining what that means crafting design guidelines together. And then that goes through ddrc planning commission and finally to city council who has the real approval or not for the district. So what type of I am personally from the neighborhood? We don't we don't have percentages. So we ask people to show up at the meetings. We ask them to read the guidelines and make sure they understand it. We're available to we do everything we can to answer questions and provide scenarios. But in the end, it is who comes to all of our meetings and speaks up and says whether they would like that or not. You know, I hear often from residents and in some of these conservation districts, you know, we, we, we want our residents to retire age in place and put but financially keeping up with an aging house becomes an issue or shift. Mr. Donovan, do you know any national kind of case studies where there's kind of that give and take for residents that live in these very focused conservation districts to help them, you know, especially our seniors that have lived there prior to this designation probably probably have lived there since the neighborhood started. Yeah, I don't know. I'll answer the question a little different than you asked it in that half of our work is in this impact analysis stuff. Another quarter is in policy recommendations to encourage investment in and retention of historic resources. And so we kind of keep track of incentives around the country that often address that very issue because it's a very common issue. And I have to say my favorite, my favorite because it's very modest in cost. It's it is simple an application. And that is in San Antonio and it's called under one roof. And and the thesis is this that that that how real estate doesn't have buildings don't have very many enemies. The biggest enemy is water. Water comes in for the roof. And oftentimes people of modest means and older housing can't afford to fix the roof. And so what it is is a straight out and out $9000 grant to fix the roof. They have a list of qualified contractors who can do it. They're not going to be screwing all people trying to stay in their house. And it's simple. You apply your your your has to be an older home. You have to be of modest means. And those are the qualifications and they they do year after year just makes a huge difference with a real modest investment on the part of the city. And the city council member there was the big proponent of this has told me he said you know some of my other council members will say well yeah but maybe the foundation is only going to last another 20 years. And he said I don't care. The fact is we put on a new roof and they could stay there for another 15 years. So that we I mean we we know kind of a sample I don't know 40 or 50 kinds of incentives but you're absolutely right. That is a very legitimate concern. And it is often a challenge. The other thing that some cities do is to make sure that the property taxes are not part of what's driving people out. So sometimes there will be a freeze of property taxes. Sometimes a simple deferral property taxes until the house is sold or the people die or pass to their heirs or something. Because oftentimes the issue is not a wealth problem. It's a cash flow problem. In fact they have an asset that was a lot more than what they paid for. They just don't have the money to fix the roof or fix the windows or whatever it is. And so really some pretty modest interventions can make a huge difference. But it is a problem that really ought to be addressed. And if I can add to that. We've been working with community development to talk about ways that we might sync up our programs to help some of our lower income neighborhoods and raising the roof that Donovan mentioned is one of the programs we're exploring to see if we can work together to provide that. And these conservation districts are for senior. Right. Right. That's a real concern because those folks don't necessarily have the 20 percent investment threshold needed to access the baili bill. Which is one reason we really need to get some dollars into their pockets. So the people who really can use it have access to it. When do you think we could hear from staff more on that about a true path forward if council wanted to really invest in our conservation district and bring our residents in their homes. Yeah. Well we're hoping we're going to have some things more solidified with community development in the next couple of months because they're in the planning phase with their funding. So hopefully in the next couple of months we'll have some more information. And there may be other avenues to additional avenues kind of inventory of residents that might need that type of grant help. Well we know some of them just because we have interaction with them on properties that need repair work that we're working with. But we tend to focus more on just the low income areas by census that we know are lower income areas. Yes. That's right. That's right. And I did want to add to with the designation of historic districts. We do have public notification. It's very thorough. So you know we have public meetings but also before things come to DDRC planning commission and city council all the properties are posted. Thank you for that information. Mr. Chairman. Can I just add one thing and I'm going to run for an airplane. But one of the biggest changes and you're seeing it both in your questions and in Amy's responses. One of the big change biggest changes in the preservation movement over the last 25 years is that there's really this broad recognition that historic preservation is not just about the buildings. It's really in the end about the people. And it doesn't do much good if you have great restored buildings but none of the people are left. And so this this kind of merger of other kinds of interest is a real change in the preservation movement. And I suggest for the positive. Thank you again for letting me be here. Thank you. Go get that plane. I will. Thanks. I was going to. So since he's gone I'll I'll I'll ask. So don't we see a lot of these areas though are turning over younger. We're seeing a lot of students moving into. Well some young families for sure. But I know for instance an old chendon lower Waverly that's a population we've been worried about for a long time because it's a generational neighborhood. But student housing you know students have really come into that area flooded in any area around the university. Elmwood Park though. I was thinking I was thinking more of Melrose Heights which is right in my neighborhood. So although they tell me I'm in Melrose and according to I know I know they told me I'm in the neighborhood. But I really don't think maybe I'm like an honorary not contributing. I think I'm an honorary member of the neighborhood maybe. But I see that neighborhood really turned over. Got much younger much more family oriented and less it appears to be less older. Yeah I think that's definitely true in one of my neighborhoods Elmwood Park. Yeah yeah yeah it's probably the same thing. Why is that I mean I think they're very attractive neighborhoods. So there are sidewalks in historic districts. The houses are built closer to the street. And so we have some great videos on our website that staff did about why people love their historic neighborhoods. And people talk about it. So you should check it out. Yeah I would love to see it. Yeah. Well at that point let me ask you Amy. Oh ten. There's a lot of students population there. What is it that the homeowners the property owners are doing to to convert that from what used to be a single family to a rental now are they they making investments into it. What what why why I'm just curious because it's in a what is the district a protection. I guess what is what are the what are the expectations of a protection area. Is it easier to convert it to a rental house. No no no. None of the districts would have that as a you know it's not a factor in any of our districts that's more of a just individual ownership decision about whether somebody wants to turn it into a rental unit or not. Keep the core structure I mean that they're changing the right we only review things from the exterior remember so if someone wants to divide on the inside if we can't see it from the outside we're not going to review that. And generally speaking if there's not a lot you have to do to make it a rental I mean whether I've rented plenty of places when I was here as well and it's largely the same structure it's just a matter of the whether someone's a homeowner or rentals. I think it's the perfect storm of buying low putting a little money into it and getting premium rates. Well because I think it goes back to the whole concept of the turnover right. So I mean I mean when I walk through Melrose Heights I mean it's you know you can tell I mean in I think you're right I think you can do a lot of up bit for a little bit of money and that's what I think that's why I think you see that spike in property values and that area is really I'd say it's probably in my mind is the hottest area in Colombia. And the rental is all about location I mean Olympia as well I mean it's not just any of our historic districts but it's proximity. Thank you. Thank you. All right. Thanks for any questions. You're good. I mean I have questions but nothing urgent. Yeah got it. OK thanks. All right so let's move on to the middle missing middle housing. Appreciate it. Poor the Opelix Coast team starts I'm Taylor Oxon I'm with the Central Carolina Realtors Association. My counterpart Kim Foulders here and then past president Steve Taylor and later with Buncie. Long time in the process project that really kind of started with Mayor Rickman and you know the late Joe Taylor and then picked up by Councilman Peter Brown when he was elected but we had seen that Greenville had done the same study a couple years ago and I know that was a lot of interest to City Council and how that really kind of changed the way that they thought about housing in that area and we've seen kind of the fruits of their labor over the past couple years seems like every other week you see an article about Greenville in the paper and that's something that we wanted for City of Columbia. So the help of Chris's team has been great to work with and Opelix Coast who's been in first class and with finance from the National Association of Realtors who provided full payment for this study. We wanted to present this to you guys to use in planning and development for the city to really find different options for housing that aren't necessarily just single family but to give more housing options to provide more affordability and to make City of Columbia you know a more walkable area. So having said that I'll turn that over to Matili who is the head of Optikos our Optikos team over here and let her present the deep dive study in addition to the initial scan that you guys got a couple of weeks ago. So thank you. Thanks for that introduction to you and we are pleased to present like a few slides today and hopefully have some discussion afterwards. I hope I can share my three I'm just going to try that right now. I can modify the middle of the previous presentation. So can someone just share the meeting I think the meeting is real quick. Yeah so while we get that sorted out again I just have a quick round of introductions. My name is Vitalik Nankali and I'm a project manager with the Optikos team and I'd like to introduce our principals to find the retrieving by the introduction of your cells. Hi I'm so I'm Pella you're the principal of Optikos. Hi I believe you're on your designer here at Optikos. I'm Roger Foreman and I'm a senior designer at Optikos. Hi my name is Felicia Zisbas also senior in business here at Optikos. Where are y'all based out of? We're a firm based in Berkeley, California and we would have love to be the first person but this is going to be a virtual presentation but hopefully we can still get some good discussions over it. So to get us started can I first of all check if all of you can see the screen like you see the first slide of our presentation? Yeah. So to move on from here this is the very structure of our presentation today. We'll give a quick background about what this project is a little bit about the process as well and about Optikos, what we mean by missing middle housing because there are various ways in which this term is used especially nowadays and then reasons for considering missing middle for Columbia and then an overview of the analysis and the deep dive portion of our work that you mentioned just a little while ago and we will end with a quick summary of the types of recommendations that we include and then we hope to have some time for discussion and to spread. So to start us off a quick overview about us. So Optikos is a team of urban designers, architects, planners and also strategic advisors and we work with both public sector and private sector clients. We are based in Berkeley, California and as far as the term missing middle housing goes this was a term that was actually coined by our principal time parolic in 2010. We've been working with different types of like planning projects and design projects related to missing middle housing and so in other words we're bringing over 20 years of expertise on this subject matter to this project and we love doing this work. So about the work specifically today that we want to present to you. This is a scan and a deep dive for Columbia. So as the name suggests the missing middle housing or the MMS scan for short is an analysis and we looked at existing conditions to basically identify areas that can support more missing middle housing. So these are plugged into two categories which are missing middle housing ready that means that these spaces are ready to go. They're ready for supporting missing middle housing and also additional areas that with a little bit of improvement or you know help or some minor tweaks can also be supporting missing middle housing. The deep dive follows up on this piece of analysis and it includes zoning and regulatory analysis. It includes not testing on typical size within a selected zones to basically identify what are the barriers in the current zoning standards that are preventing or discouraging missing middle housing and what can be done to counteract this. And so this all ties into the overall project code which is to enable and encourage more missing middle housing within Columbia's walk of the neighbourhoods. So just to kind of get us all in the same page, what do we mean by missing middle housing? Because this goes into the term again that we see a lot of the news especially nowadays. So our definition quite simply is that we are talking about house scale buildings that have multiple units and ideally located in walkable neighbourhoods and all these three criteria are pretty important in missing middle being successful. So these are middle housing ties and they will link to different ways. They create like a middle form and scale between that or single family homes and larger mixed use and multi-family residential buildings and they also deliver housing choices that are more attainable to typical middle income families and households. So when we think about just planning for housing needs in any community especially looking to the future and also trying to counteract this rising problem of housing and affordability across the country, missing middle housing can definitely be one of the many solutions that must be considered by most cities and jurisdictions and that is because since we're talking about multi-family units but smaller building for trends, immediately these can be lower cost by design because the land and construction costs are small. These are simple construction techniques that I use. These are not larger buildings that require concrete or steel frame construction but also because the units that we're talking about within these multi-family buildings are smaller, they provide units that are more attainable. So this also provides opportunities for incremental development and people can also bear role themselves in improving or adding more to their properties. So one question which we're often asked is why is the term missing in the name and that's because they literally are and these used to be a part of most towns that we see in the pre-war years and they've been particularly in areas adjacent to town towns and areas where like a unit is slightly more intense housing solutions. These were always part of the housing stock of any traditional city but due to the variety of reasons specifically restrictive zoning practices, they have effectively been disallowed in many parts of the country and between these years and these figures are a little bit old, less than 10% of all housing units that were produced in the US between 1998, 20, 13 but are often missing middle type. Now, the zoning around Columbia, actually the numbers look better than in many of the cities that we have worked in. This is just a break up of just the spread of different housing types and I believe these are from the American community survey, the ACS of 2022. So in this the balance of missing middle types in Columbia is 26% with about 56% being single family and the rest being either larger but are building some other types. So this is actually a larger percentage and we have seen in many other cities. So the grounds are already there for missing middle to kind of come back in force and be built in an additional eight years as well. So in terms of what are the typical characteristics of missing middle types, not all small scale multi-family are missing middle. The single types are a palette of unique building types which focus on several things that you see highlighted here in the green boxes. They focus on smaller well-designed units in housing with the things that are smaller for prints. So they really blend in well with the single family members. There is an emphasis on shared open space, typically shared to some degree there are also private open spaces in some types. They support and they also thrive in walkable environments and they de-emphasize the reliance on driving for all your needs. In other words, missing middle types try and optimize the available space on a typical lot for providing additional housing units or open space and they prioritize this over providing additional parking spaces instead. And because these are inherently very flexible types, they can accommodate a wide range of lifestyle and household options. So here we see a few examples of missing middle housing in Colombia. There is quite a robust stock of MMH types in Colombia, all the way from townhouses to larger multi-plex buildings. But the two images that you see highlighted in yellow they are in zoning districts that if these were to be built today, they would actually not be allowed. So that kind of ties in with our work of trying and getting what has traditionally been built, just allowed and encouraged to be built again. And here you see a summary of just the unique dimensional attributes and other requirements that accompany the typical missing middle types. So in other words, you can't just kind of add on a unit and add in duplicates or triplets. These with any types have been carefully calibrated to optimize in terms of the unit sizes, the circulation and trying to minimize any wasted space and also to provide like a very single family like living experience for all the units which are within a typical MMH type. So here you see a summary of minimum, not dimensions, not widths and also building for twin dimensions. And when we talk about the entire palette of missing middle types, largely talking about what we just usually call the typical MMH. So these are like your duplexes, townhouses, poor places, cottage forts. So what you normally associate with a missing middle type like the mention that you might have and these are often regulated to be very house-scale in terms of the building footprint and size. So a maximum height for two and a half storeys typically and you can see the building pendants are very similar to most in the family homes, but at the same time we also have in focus locations not the missing middle types that can provide additional housing choices, so particularly around like busy corridors in the city and in areas where there is a transition to either larger size development, whether residential or mixed use such as on the edges of neighborhoods, etc. So those are areas where larger missing middle types can be used to create a transition from these lower intensity to higher intensity areas. And in the same way we also use these missing middle types to create house-scale and block-scale environments. So by house-scale we typically mean using the typical added of the smaller footprint detached MMH types to basically add a very general form of density within existing residential neighborhoods. But at the same time many of these missing middle types can be attached and they can take up all or most of the block to create more you know, kind of block-scale environments that can let me see a traditional downtown. So not the faint kind of given an overview of what you'll be defined in missing middle housing as here are some good reasons for considering missing middle housing for Columbia. And this ties in again to the way you can apply missing middle housing. You can either, you know, just add new building types to existing neighborhoods and they can also be added to existing single family homes to create additional housing for, you know, extended family or, you know, for other reasons. So what you see on this graphic is like an illustration of this general infill that we often talk about is one of the highlights of missing middle housing. The buildings that are painted in yellow are the missing middle housing types and the rest are either single family or larger building types. But if I were to remove the coloring, you know, often you would not be able to tell which is a single family home and which is a case in the single housing type. So that is one of the unique qualities of MMH that made them a really, like an important tool for adding density to our residential neighborhoods but without creating like a drastic change in the built character. Again, I like to sum up the attributes of MMH which lead to them increasing housing choice and housing affordability in our neighborhoods. They are a wide palette of housing types. They are very diverse and they can help me housing choices, local needs, changing demographic needs supporting diverse lifestyles and also enabling incremental infant. Like in other words, this for many middle housing projects, it can be a one-off project on one single lot or maybe even onto adjacent lots that are consolidated. You don't need like a developer or like a large builder firm to come and build this upscale the way we often see townhouses getting built. This is a way that can be applied for new development areas or for larger sites but these are also very adaptable to this kind of incremental development that homeowners may take upon themselves. And as we see again in this illustration, the yellowish covered buildings with the kind of light rust roofs, these are the middle housing types and this just shows the way that they can be used in many different contexts. They can be distributed within residential neighborhoods or this likely larger types can be used to transition from a single family to a higher density residential or a corridor kind of environment. So now let's kind of jump straight into our analysis for Karambia. And the first piece, we have two deliverables which correspond to each of the two sections of our work. So that is, there's a deliverable with summarizers all the work we've done for the residential housing span. And similarly, there's another deliverable for the residential housing deep type. So as far as the span is concerned, that one key cost that drives a lot of our work in finding where are the appropriate areas for residential housing is to think about walkability. So as a starting point, we try to find the existing walkable centers and surrounding walkable neighborhoods within Karambia. So by this, we mean like what do we mean by a walkable center? But talking about an area where people can go to focus on some of their daily needs and often without needing to drive to do that. So we're talking about mixed use areas that provides services, food, local shopping. These areas often also have transit or access to transit. So these are typical centers and the area is around them generally work very well for the single house. So you see here the three types of walkable centers that we identify in Karambia, downtown, the neighborhood, Main Street and Neighborhood Centers. And on this map, you can see those same walkable centers illustrated. So you can see that we have like several large educational campuses which are big destinations for many people in the city. And we've had a lot of discussion about the students as well in the preceding presentation. Also, you obviously have downtown and you can see the neighborhood Main Street and centers identified on this map as well. Now, so now in these centers you see the dashed lines in blue and red. So these are outlines that define a typical five to 10 minute walking distance. And that's why we call this a walk shed often because it's within this optimal walking distance of approximately 10 minutes that we find that miscellaneous housing it fits in really well because the dependence on a card is reduced more than in other parts of the city. Also you see in the kind of light at night the availability of transit. So all these factors like access to amenities, access to daily services, access to transit are very important in making miscellaneous housing work. So as part of our work we also were scoped to look at certain zoning districts. So we looked at four zoning districts trying to identify what are the the higher level barriers to miscellaneous housing in the current like the standards that are there in the zoning districts and other supporting standards. So here you see the centers that we were just looking at in a hash pattern and this is overlaid on top of the four zoning districts that we analyzed. These are R and 1, R and 2, the neighborhood activity corridor on the NAC and the MU1 district. Here is a summary of what we found in terms of the existing barriers to miscellaneous housing within the regulations that apply currently. All you can see on the ledge in the major barriers are in a kind of old red cross. But the good news is that a lot of the existing regulations are actually very supportive of miscellaneous housing. Like you know we worked in cities where in pretty much including you would see in the summary table you would just be in a red cross. So comparatively this is a really good situation and you know like especially the typical areas that we find such as density and of street parking requirements are not prevalent in each and every zone that we analyzed. Can we? We also didn't see Can we stop here for a second? Is there any way, Chris, that maybe you can help us with this? Can you give us examples of neighborhoods that you know where this, what we're looking at here and this is this is a little confusing with the with the just general zonings. Some background on sample neighborhoods I think would be helpful. And Natali if you go back to I think you can see the zoning, yeah the where the zoning districts are. The next slide. Yeah, and in fact we have a, if I could just kind of skip ahead to the next section. We do have a slide which points out some like not neighborhood outlines but we do have some local landmarks that will help orient the group. Then take into account the barriers sheet as well. Yeah, I get some back to that but here is like a way for us to just orient ourselves. And in the presentation today we are basically summarizing the analysis that you see here for two of the four districts that we have looked at. So this is a map that shows you the R&1 district. And you can see where some of the, you know the key landmarks are within the city and how these kind of overlap. So you can just kind of look at this so people get oriented. And let me add in most of our neighborhoods have R&1 or R&2 zoning classifications within them. There are very few that are all single family residential. More of our newer ones are actually the ones that are single family but our in town walkable neighborhoods have both single family residential and R&RM means that you can have more than one depending on the lot size you can have more than one dwelling unit. It doesn't restrict it to single family. But yeah, and like if I could just kind of go back to summarizing this, we will be looking at this in more detail when we look at those two example zoning districts as to how we have tested to identify what are current barriers. But in general, the two top barriers that we found and they weren't many but density requirements been too low and parking requirements being too high. So let's kind of look next at how we use a tool that we call log testing to identify what needs to change if missing middle housing is going to be enabled within these zoning districts. So in this, what we do is to look at typically occurring lot sizes. That you know lot sizes in terms of width and depth are very common within these zoning districts and then we actually model like what is in the power by current zoning in terms of the zoning envelope. What actually can get built once we consider other standards that apply. And then trying to disregard some of these tools and just testing with typical missing middle housing types to see that if you were to enable missing middle housing on these, what standards would need to be adjusted with the kind of controlling standards just to make that work. So here's just a quick summary of the lot sizes that we looked at within each of these zoning districts and these were selected on the basis of the citywide analysis of existing lots to be fairly typical not sizes. So then go back to the map that we were. It's a R&B district. What you see in the two shades of yellow are this, you know the area zone for R&B one which are within this defined five to 10 minute workshop or the walkable areas map as we call it. And the lighter yellow are areas which are also R&B one but which are outside the walkable environment. So now within this, what is the zone allowed with? The intent of the zone is of having a walkable moderate density residential development that does allow, as someone's pointing out right now, say the family homes, you know, two-plexes or two-family homes, standhouses are also multi-family buildings. So in a way it is not a barrier outright that it is disallowing the single housing but the density, and we'll get to this in a minute, the maximum amount density is 8.7 dwelling units an acre and you can see the parking requirements are very high, you know, in the sense two spaces per single family unit, 1.75 per unit per multi-family and then you have a mixed use project that it requires an approved parking plan. So within the zone we looked at two different walk sizes, 50 feet by 120 feet, 55 feet by 150 feet and we tested with three different kinds of three middle touch, a duplex, a triplex and a fourplex. So I'm going to just walk us through our process for one of the most difficult walk sizes which is 50 feet by 120 feet. The first process that you see on the left is what the zoning allows. Like this is simply just an extrusion of if you could just kind of pour everything that the zoning allows you to build on this particular walk. But there are also additional requirements such as setbacks, you've got to think about parking requirements, you've got to think about like, you know, heights and such. So what you see on the right-hand side is if someone were to just build, what would be the actual resultant maximum the yield and the form of the building on this particular site? So in other words, it isn't super restrictive. As you can see, you can get a decent amount of building area on the slot. And now we have analyzed the same walk size with a variety of typical missing middle types. Now our selection of missing middle types whether we chose a duplex or whether we chose an eight-plex which is a larger building depending on what are the existing conditions on the existing context. So in other words, this is not really like a lower intensity residential neighborhood. So having like a much taller and larger building there would not be appropriate. So that is why the palette of missing middle types that we tested for the R&M on Superm are all very high-scale and very close to seeing the family homes in size, scale and height. So if testing for a stacked duplex, you can see like on the table what are the existing R&M standards in play and what we achieved as a result of this particular test fit of this model that you see illustrated here. And actually we can comply with all of the standards that are there in R&M on except for the resultant density. We are getting the density of 15 to 20 units an acre by building the stacked duplex whereas the maximum allowed density is 8.7. So in other words, the takeaway is that even though this building type is very appropriate as traditionally to being built in Pukarnambia and in similar neighborhoods or even within these neighborhoods it would not be allowed to be built at this because of the density restriction. So that automatically becomes a barrier that needs to be adjusted from a single. The next option was to again look at a slightly different configuration of the duplex just to see how this fits because we have again stacked duplexes and side-by-side duplexes. So in terms of barriers and numbers it's kind of the same situation. Next we looked at three units. So in this case because of the parking standards that started becoming a barrier as well. Because the minute you add an additional unit you need an additional number of parking spaces to accompany that unit and thereby instead of having a massive like a real yard more and more of that is starting to get taken up by parking and we are still not meeting the maximum number that will be required which is 5.25. We cannot fit that on the lot. We are showing three units the three parking spaces on this particular lot. And the density as you can see is by now three times higher than what is actually allowed on this lot. The last example is that of a four-plex. So here we have four units and again the number of units is allowed in this zone on this particular lot. But when you actually try to build it the resultant density and the number of parking spaces needed will actually disallow this type from getting built in real life. That's four separate single units. The four one-bedroom dwelling in this example. That what you found me? These are non-dependent building footprint that you see over here. There are four individual housing units. So each of them I think would be a maximum. I can look up the numbers and tell you whether it was either a 1.5 or a two-bedroom unit at the last. It's probably 1.6. So each individual average unit size within this building is 680 square feet. So that would be like a one-bed unit. So this in a way illustrates again the premise of missing middle housing that within what is allowed by zoning you can either build like a really large single family home with many bedrooms but at the same time within the same building envelope you can build say a four-plex as in this case and it's the individual unit sizes within this footprint are small. Well I think that's a detail. So again, those are four single-bed units, each four different addresses. So there's no doubles, there's no triples, there's just four beds and four units. Exactly, two above and two on the ground floor in this particular configuration. All right, thank you. Next, we also looked at the R&D but in the interest of time I'm not kind of including all those sizes because I'll take a long time but let's just look at something a little bit different. So this is for the neighborhood activity corridor or the NAC district. Now this is a district which is very permissive of basically your kind of settlement which is why if it's interesting to test this I'm focusing on this one. Here again you see on the map the areas where the parcels are owned for NAC both within and outside this walkable area, box shed that we have to find. And in this case, density and parking are not constraints because there are no standards. Maximum standards are applied. So let's see what happens when we test for missing middle here. Again, the intent is for a moderate density walkable neighborhoods to create an excuse type of development and a wide variety of building types are allowed in this zone whether it's live work, multi-family, excuse, offices, et cetera. So on paper this seems like an ideal environment that would be supportive of missing middle housing but we just want to show you what happens when you actually start building and here are the typical graphics. This is the maximum zoning envelope. What you get when you actually consider parking, et cetera is the maximum you can form. But when you actually start putting down a building what you realize, and this is true of many typical lots existing within both the NU1 and the NAC zones is that these are very narrow and deep blocks. So when you actually start putting down a building and then you think about parking access and provided parking, et cetera if either the truth for development potential of the lot in terms of its size cannot actually be next. So here you see, for example, if we were to be a triple X homicide and then even if we add on an PDU if we're not missing out or we're not kind of exceeding any of the above standards but the point is you're leaving almost half of the lot on the list. So now this may be okay for some people but if you're trying to maximize the development potential the resident housing in a particular situation may not work the best. This is a triple X and an PDU and here you see again a slightly larger building of again a four-plex with like four units two on the ground for two above. You can see the average unit sizes are similar to what we've been previously looking at for the RU1. And here again we can comply with all the standards but you end up leaving a large segment of the lot undeveloped. So this got us to thinking about additional considerations that we just get to but where is overall a summary of the findings from our lot testing for all the four sorts. So we just showed you two right now but basically we found the conditions or the constraints rather were similar in RM1 and RM2 of the density requirements being too low to enable many similar housing types also parking requirements being too high and then surprisingly the driveway with you know the location of the driveway those standards are often causing like a significant hurdle to actually be able to fit on the segmental type because many of these lots don't have access. So the parking access needs to be from the front and you know for like good design reasons and for just like many other associated reasons they try and always locate the parking at the rear of the lot to create like a more pedestrian friendly frontage to the building and in other words driveways became like a significant barrier to actually fitting in the segmental on many of these lots. In terms of the MUI and that the main issue that we encountered was that the development standard seemed to be here towards a higher density than what is typically the segmental housing. In other words if a developer can build a larger like a forced story building then you know taking again from the developer standpoint what would be the motivation for them to build a smaller segmental housing type. So if we do want to see the segmental types in these contexts and they can definitely be part of the valid and especially for the reasons of providing more detainable housing types then we need to look at slightly different or innovative solutions. So this is just an exploration of what can happen with these narrow and deep lots that you see. Here are just some examples of how you can use a variety of different segmental types and you know just to kind of you know be able to maximize the potential of these lots because many of them are located in areas where land values are comparatively quite high. So if you really want to see house care environments, more detainable missing middle housing types but also not leave half of the lot undeveloped here are some examples of how that can happen using a combination of different missing middle housing types. And here you see also a slightly higher intensity example because there are locations especially for the land that it has a higher development intensity than MUI and in this these zones as well you have many kind of narrow and extra deep lots. So here are some larger building footprints and how these can work to again provide more detainable housing options. So here another thing that we had to kind of put in was that in some cases where the lots are particularly narrow they can be a longer like supporting design standards to make sure that someone doesn't buy a half a block and build like a really good building but they can be advantageous to not consolidation in certain cases. And here are again just simple illustrations to show how you can get additional units and basically make full use of the lot in both like low intensity and higher intensity environment. So to sum up and we are going to get into all the recommendations here right now because they are kind of nuanced and kind of put into different budgets. So I can pull up the PDF as well if you want to look at this in more detail but overall we have a non-reader style recommendations and these are grouped into policy recommendations into recommendations related to zoning standards and the entitlement process and also there are focus areas which have been included for the four zones that we looked at in more detail which are RN1, RN2, NU1 and NAA and then there is also included with in the DTAEF delivery group some guidance for the steps and implementation. So that kind of sums up our presentation and I would love to have discussion on any of these stuff because then you can go back to the other side. Yeah, thank you. So Chris, I can answer your question. So how much of Columbia is RN1? I don't know if you need to repeat that question I couldn't record it. Oh, so I can field this one. And the percentage of, you know, for our residential it's RN1 and RN2 is more probably around 20 to the exact amount. That's all right, that's all. We have more single family only because we have so many new subdivisions that are single family residential. Okay. That we've annexed. I got you. Actually. So in the difference between RN1 and RN2 is what exactly? Is the required lot size. So an RN1 requires a larger lot size than an RN2. So in the core of Columbia we're talking about how much would that RN1 and RN2 be? We forget the Greeks and the other world. I will get you a number. It would be higher than that. What do you think? 50%? I can only put out a document that would illustrate this is true. Thank you, Mattali. That's fabulous. Yeah. Eight from the number list. Thinking it's more 30 to 40. And Chris, the policy recommendations and all of that, the summary, will you provide that to us? Absolutely. Yeah, it's a great, I'll give you PDFs of both the scan and the deep dive with recommendations. Is that all? Yeah. Can I just share the deep dive to the group list then? I think I can just quickly skip. So you get a visual of what the recommendations are like. Here are some of the policy related recommendations for like lander changes and like additions to Columbia Compass, as you can see over there. So I'll just scroll up so you get a sense of what these recommendations are like. And then the next section is about our zoning-related recommendations, both in terms of the process and standards, and it's a whole group in their reach. And then following up on this, we have best practices that we would recommend as you think about zoning edits and updates in the future. And then here are some specific recommendations. Sorry, that's very too fast. There's a specific recommendations for the four zones that we looked at. And that is followed up by some recommendations for implementation and kind of next steps. So Chris, we've talked about zoning and traditionally I've always wondered or thought that maybe we had too many zoning restrictions, but is it possible that we don't have enough zoning? Like different segments for the city because they're so different. If you look at, we talked about Columbia is different from place to place to place. Is it possible that if we go through some type of zoning review that maybe we need like an RN three? Something that's different for different areas. So I'm questioning my own thinking that I've had for a long time. So I just wanna get your thoughts on that. Certainly. So a district that would allow this type of density. What's important to note though that has been presented here is that we're always talking about appropriate as well in the form. So we have to couple the idea of allowing the additional density with what the form looks like. And so that wouldn't necessarily just be adding a new zoning district that allows for more density. It would be adding a district with these extra regulations that make sure that it's house-sized, that it's compatible with the neighborhood, that it's a walkable type of development. And so that's what we're trying to put our heads around is that an overlay that, you know. I know, I know, and I hate the word overlay. I mean, see, you're already, but you're, okay, again, I'm starting off this conversation by admitting that I'm a little conflicted with the words coming out of my mouth. Okay, so when they hit my ears, they don't sound as good as they did when they were leaving my mouth. And then when you say it, it sounds even worse when it hits my ears. So I wanna clarify, there are different types of overlays and an overlay can be such that it's just regulations. It's not a design review. It's, these are additional regulations that apply here and it doesn't go to a board. It just says that it has to look like this and it's objective as opposed to someone interpreting it. Okay, yeah, I like to write that down. So. I'll just paper that. It was on YouTube. It was on YouTube, yeah. So we are trying to think about how we would implement this while maintaining that really important aspect of it that is the character. Cause she talks about thoughtful, gentle density. And then we also had a lot of conversations about the fact that we're a university town and how do we do this and not have the impositions on neighborhoods that we already have. And I wanna throw something else on there. We wanna make it easier to do, not harder to do. So what we want is, we want all the, I can live with gentle, I like purposeful, but we also want it to be somewhat user friendly and less overlays and regulation and stuff. I mean, I've always thought that what we really want is, we want things to be relatively black and white, right? Yes. Well, especially with this type of housing in Matali, you can chime in here. I mean, this is something that is new to a lot of folks, building it and developing it. And so it's a little bit riskier as well because it's not your cookie cutter, single family or big garden style apartment. So we do want to make sure that people understand and can do it easily. And Matali, can you talk maybe about how it's going on around the country right now? And I would just think, I think the biggest barrier regulations aside would be the nimbyism of like, people don't, people freak out when you even mention that something's turning into a duplex. And the fact that we're talking about potential, what quad, quad, whatever the four plexes, I think that's gonna be one of the biggest barriers. So it would be great to hear about any case studies of cities in the South or of a similar size that have been able to balance both the need for more missing middle housing or affordable housing with existing kind of neighborhood context. Yeah, I mean, first of all, yes, you know, nimbyism is not restricted by any, that particular area, we face it on a day by day basis. But I do want to say that once what has been effective for us, what we find to be effective is that also if we can communicate that it's not the four plexes, which is important, the fact that there are four units in it, but the fact that the size and the height and the scale of the building ability actually controlled through objective standards, then we often have the need to kind of don't react in such a, in such a strong way. Because often times when people think of like, you know, four additional units, they instantly, you know, the thought goes to like a massive building coming right adjacent to their single family home, but that is often not the case. So, you know, that's why visual health and kind of communicating what the main character can be like, especially supported by standards that control for this building footprint and building sizes in, that is, that is often like our method for trying to get more broad community acceptance. Okay, so- Otherwise in terms of, yeah, sorry, please go ahead. No, it's okay. I don't want to forget what I'm asking. So, you know, and I think about this a lot and I've talked to the mayor about it and it keeps me up at night and frustrates me to no end that we have all these areas in Columbia with empty lots and they've been empty my whole life and they continue to be empty there and then, but also respect the concept of the neighborhood. And because a lot of times we're afraid of this, we ended up with empty lot. So, couldn't we just kind of take area by area and neighborhood by neighborhood and really do some type of really strategic, qualitative, quantitative study and talk to the neighborhoods and kind of just lay out what we want that area to look like and kind of just model it for my area by area and literally say, okay, so your neighborhood has 40 empty lots and this is the modeling that we've done and this is what we want based on your feedback too, not just when I just shoved it down your throat but based on the feedback of the residents, based on Columbia and kind of our culture and our, I think I would say, our specific dynamic, this is what we would think that the neighborhood should look like. Is that not possible to do? It's certainly a possibility, yes. I think it would be slow going. That's slower than a bunch of empty lots that are here for the rest of my life. Right, but to go neighborhoods never die, so I was thinking to be around for a while. To go neighborhood by neighborhood, just having gone through different zoning processes before, neighborhood by neighborhood, I mean, you're probably talking about it. I'm saying something that you're taking not the way I'm saying it. Okay. I'm addressing the uniqueness of each neighborhood but I'm not addressing the uniqueness of this. So I'm addressing this as a city-wide issue but I'm addressing the uniqueness of certain areas that have become used to having an empty lot but I don't want a triplex because that'll ruin the neighborhood. This goes back to our discussion in community development is if there's several neighborhoods that have 12 plus empty vacant lots. Significant. That's where community development and our initiatives with community block grants, those initiatives that the city can actually control to bring in housing developers to do those single family lots. That is a direct, is that what you're talking about? We're taking this neighborhood and we're going to. I don't think so. What I want to do is I want to, I want to lay the fears of development of this. This will, I think this is so important to Columbia yet it's going to get push back. Oh, it did. It already has. One thing that really helps sell it, a lot of these folks who live in these houses, single family houses and neighborhoods, they're going to age out of them and they don't have anywhere to go that's still in the neighborhood necessarily except for these types of housing. I think that's a great way to look at it. Timothy on Divine Street. I mean, any of those, that is a missing middle type of housing. Or if you want your kids to come back right out of college and they can't afford a single family home, it's about options. And the only way we're going to keep those folks here in town is to provide them options that is not a single family home all the time. I get it. I said this, this morning, we had a meeting and I always throw this out. If you have a friend who lives in Chicago that you went to college with and he has a 25 year old daughter that's moving to Columbia and she asked the college that says, hey, my daughter's moving to Columbia. Where should she look for the final place to live? What's your answer going to be? Throw out your top destination. If you're 25 years old, you're moving to Columbia. That'd be cool. That's exactly what we just said. We said the exact same thing, which didn't exist two years ago. And it's still not fully existing. It still doesn't fully exist. That's good. Hey, you're right. So then, all right, yeah. Well, we're going to put everybody in there, which we can't do, what's your second suggestion? Right, and sometimes people don't want to be in an apartment environment too. Maybe a town home or a quad or something like that. I mean, I've lived in quads as well. I mean, it's the other option that we're looking at. And that's why we looked at the NAC and the MU-1 districts. Those are along our corridors. And so they're not embedded necessarily in the neighborhoods. They're directly adjacent. And so if people maybe start seeing this type of development along the corridors and how attractive it is, it can maybe start to migrate a little bit further in the neighborhoods. And quite honestly, most of our neighborhoods already have it. Our historic neighborhoods have it. They were okay with it because it was there when they got there. Right, understood. I agree with you. I think a good exercise, we have the initiative with working with nonprofits, faith-based organizations that are large parcel owners. How can we blend this concept with the acreage parcels that they have available? Because they are all on pretty well-traveled roads, major thorough affairs. It is. We just could do that same approach, the stair step into the single family. Did you see some type of collaboration there? Certainly, I mean, there may be an option where the city or another organization provides funding to get these design services to show how these units can fit on a lot because it does take a certain talent that like Optikos has and other to be able to figure out how to fit them in. But how would you do zoning specifically for let's take the Millwood property of the first Nazareth test? Would you put a specific type of zoning on there that allows for this missing middle approach? More than likely it already is zoned that way because I believe it's one of our, either the NAC or one of those that already permits it. So it would just be a matter of getting the design to fit. But it is a different way of thinking, but once you start thinking that way, I mean, I think it will catch on just like other development types. We put in our new code, a cottage development type that no one's used yet, which is a court cottage around central courtyard. They've provided us with some great feedback about how we might make it so it's more palatable. But someone's got to be the first one. I liked, okay. I'm glad you brought that up. So I'm also being kept up at night now by the block for sale on Jervais Street that I go down all the time. So Hank Mayberry's got a sign up. That's probably an acre lot, maybe. And gentlemen, let's cross street, I've called 10 people and they all say, ah, you can't do anything with it. Ah, the math doesn't work. Is there some way that we can look at those different things and almost, I mean, I feel like we're proposing what would fit there, like the cottage, because maybe I haven't thought about that. So it's like trying to, it's continually trying to put a square into a round hole on this stuff, because the first thing I raise my mouth is it can't make the math work. It doesn't work. It doesn't work. It doesn't work. We've always, we've talked about bringing on designer on contract to do those elevations for those of the world. I almost think you have to because you're not gonna get people to do it. I think you're 100% right. That's what I was talking about, the modeling. It's a modeling thing. You want to make investment easy. Yeah, right. And it's almost like you're, I'm telling people what to do, but you're kind of proposing that these are options for this particular property. I'm gonna go buy that sign for the, for who knows how long. And I just can't take it anymore. I guess I love it. Well, it's just like some people will only buy a house that's already fixed up, because that's all they can really wrap their mind around, whereas others will go in and they can figure out. They're supposed to be able to close their eyes and develop. I mean, that's that's that. So I'm specifically talking about the developer who's gonna go buy theirs. I can't do that. Then somebody does it. The first thing out of their mouth is, yeah, I could have bought that. We go, I know, they all could have bought it for 20 years. Quick question for Optikos. So how many of these types of missing middle market house or units do you think Columbia needs? We haven't actually done like analysis to see how many types of, how many actual housing units can be produced. We can do that and we do do that for some of our projects. So this wasn't the focus of our scope for Columbia. So we haven't carried that out, but it would mean an analysis of looking at, say, vacant properties or looking at properties that are within these zones and kind of coming up with like an extreme change scenario and a lower end change scenario and then coming to a point in the free. So the process can be done. It's just it wasn't included as our scope here. Oh, I'm not paying the bills. So, but I would encourage those who are paying the bills that maybe we'd take that look. I really think this is gonna take a super concerted effort from the community and from the city and from the real estate community to really make this work and not make it work so like painful, like work seamlessly and user-friendly and goes along and gets people buy it. Because, Chris, you did a good job of selling it, a few minutes ago. And I think we gotta definitely, we gotta sell this, but I also like Will's idea of some type of design component that we could do as part of this effort. So, I mean, we just got so many things we could do and I think this is the time to get it going. So. I'm sorry to interrupt, but if I could just offer an example, we're working with the city of Louisville, actually Louisville Metro, on kind of a city by housing analysis and that stands in the final stages of getting back up. But part of that work was just doing something very similar to what you were talking about, which was that there was this very unusual kind of site, which is kind of landlocked, it's a very deep site, but it's not gonna accommodate a lot of housing units on it. So, this was city-owned and they just did like a quick sketch study, just illustrating how this can be looked at. So, it's like not the design solution that might actually get built, but it's just an illustration, similar to the graphics that we just saw in our presentation of just showing what can happen on that lot. And then the city is going to kind of use that as just an example to start discussions with local developers and to actually go through the next stages of getting that site actually built out with like a real design. But it often helps to just give an example and get the development community. Well, it also goes back to, in my mind it goes back to the concept that this venture needs to be very strategic and purposeful in Columbia and not kind of randomly put together or randomly happens. And before you know it, nobody even knows what's really going on. So, that's why, I mean, I think this is super critical for Columbia. And I think we need to do everything we can to help facilitate getting it done sooner rather than later. I think we'll get any others. Just interested to see the recommendations and then the potential changes to our, the three zoning standards. Yeah, right, agreed. Yeah. So that'd be a good follow up for us. Hash out all that. Thank you very much for your presentation. That was super helpful. Thank you. Thank you all. So, this is the opportunity to see a fun project for all of us. And yeah, I would really be spending a long to see what happens next. Yeah. Thank you very much. Thanks. Taylor, you want to wrap it up for us? All right. Thank y'all. Thank you. Yeah, so I know us and Krista, we have the full deep dive breakdown that has those policy changes. So, we'll send that to you. I was with Mayor Rickam in and gave him a early look at that too. So, he's looked over that as well, but have that for you guys. Like I said, the National Association Realtors helped us pay for this study for you guys. It's about a $100,000 investment for the city from the National Association. So, really appreciative of the National Association for doing that. But if you guys have questions, obviously you guys have Krista, but reach out to our association as well. We're happy to help you guys through this and excited that you guys are excited about this study. So, thank you. It's like a lot of other things in Columbia though. There's a level of excitement and a level of anxiety. And that's fine. That's just where we are. And I treat them both with the same level of respect. So... Well, I think it's good to see that the city is planning for different options for the future because I mean, this is kind of the way I think things are going and how affordability is and lack of housing that we have right now having these different options will be big for... I think intentionally also having some of these conversations within the Economic Development Committee is important. Some groups that gets cornered into just community development or just one kind of like stakeholder group of affordable housing. And it's important for us to look at the long-term picture of... Well, and on that too, we're working with Krista and Opticus. We'll actually be doing a, I don't know which one to call it, like a business, a similar presentation, but to the business community. And that might help a little bit with some of the questions you guys brought up about just like thinking about it, design perspective, putting this on people's radar so they can kind of see the same presentation and what the city's looking at. Well, that is a good point, Autistic United. I really think that almost every conversation really starts as economic development and math component. The rest of it, but there has to be that there is an economic development component to everything. There's a math component to everything and there's a money component to everything. And I think that's important that we also recognize that as well. At least it is in 2024, so. Thank you, Tim. Thanks, Taylor. Appreciate it. Thanks. So Mr. Chairman, is this, can you find, we got the DDRC annual report. Are we doing anything with that today? Or is that an FYI? Yes, Mr. Chairman. We will drag this up next meeting. Maybe we can talk about. Yeah, I'd like to talk about it. And I would also like to get a little bit of history on the formation of it. I know we have like a couple of sentences, but TK or whoever the right person is, if you could just give us some insight on why it was decided to do a quasi-judicial as opposed to the recommendation for spec, you know, approach that planning and some of the other land use boards use. How do we get here? I like this. Is that my turn? Okay. Wait, wait, wait. I would like to make so much information. My brain is full right now, so. But I'd like to get it. It's just good. I would like to make a specific agenda item for the next meeting. How about that? Yeah. Okay. Anything else? That is it. Mr. Brennan. Yes. I'd like to make a motion to enter into. We'll kill that. All right. Dead. All right. So. Adjourned. Motion to adjourn. Second. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. I hope I can drive home after all that.