 Welcome Michael Montes here. This is exciting. He's Champlain Housing Trust CEO having joined the leadership team in 2007 and appointed CEO in January 2021. He has over 40 years of community and economic development experience, both at the nonprofit and municipal level. He worked at Burlington's Community and Economic Development Office, CEDO, from its creation and was its long-serving director. Prior to CEDO, he was employed as executive director for several nonprofit organizations, including the King Street Center. Michael is also a founder and partner of the Independent Community Development Consultant Group Burlington Associates, where he worked with community and land trusts around the country. He serves on the board of the National Neighborworks Association, the Grounded Solutions Network, and leads the CEO forum of the Housing Partnership Network. He's the chair of H-Plex, a national insurance captive that provides workers the comp, health care, and property and liability insurance to members of the Housing Partnership Network. Michael is a recipient of the Kahn Hogan Award for Creative, Entrepreneurial, Community Leadership, and has been recognized for his work by the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board with the Molly Beatty Award. Michael is a graduate of Achieving Excellence of Leadership Program of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and NeighborWorks America. He holds a BA degree from Goddard College. Please welcome Michael Monty. So thank you for being here. I'm very happy. And it's great to be able to speak to so many of you. I will go through some slides, but I really, you know, I'll take questions earlier. I hope that's OK. Nobody gets in. I don't know. No. No. OK. You hold your questions then, but I'll try to end a little early, because I like dialogue. I think information gets. Oh, yes. OK. That's fine. But I'm more inclined to understand what you need to know. And by asking questions, I'll get that. So I'll do my best to move through these and not to bore you too much with the presentation. How are we doing with this? Is this good? Yeah? OK. Excellent. So I am the CEO of the Champlain Housing Trust. I have been working there for about 15 plus or so years. You heard the introduction. I've been the CEO for the last few years actually starting being the CEO during COVID. And so I'm going to give you a little presentation. Oh, come on. Now you're supposed to move. Huh? Not going? Excuse me. One more time. Hey. OK. So just to say that we, this is our mission statement, we do permanently affordable housing. That's the work we do. And we've been around since 1984 doing that work, where we are a result of a merger of two companies that got established in 1984. Lake Champlain Housing Development Corporation and the Burlington Community Land Trust. Everything we do is permanently affordable. We are governed by a 15-member board. We are a membership organization. I would hope that some of you are members. Doesn't cost you anything? No, it costs you a dollar or more, if you want. But certainly as a membership organization, we respond to membership, but we respond to the community. All our residents are members. And a third of our residents sit on the board. So we're constantly getting feedback from the people who live in our properties. We provide housing on a continuum. We don't do one kind of housing. And though we really work from homelessness to home ownership and everything in between and little bits and pieces of each of those types of things, if I could sort of maybe do a little iterative about each stuff. So a lot of different kinds of work in homelessness, a lot of different kinds of rental housing. Home ownership is principally the shared equity model, but we do a lot of counseling and education and support for people who simply want to be homeowners in the regular market. So a really range of kinds of services that we're providing in the community. Here's our numbers to get you a sense of who we are in terms of sort of scale. We're probably the largest nonprofit certainly in Vermont. We're probably one of the few of the largest in New England, certainly not in the country. But we are a decent number of apartments, shared equity homes. We have a range of different kinds of commercial spaces, five different kinds of loan programs, which I'll give you more description of those as well. And an operating budget of $29 million, which does not include all the development work that we wind up doing, nor some of the partnership properties that we actually own. And 151 staff, so not a small organization by any means. We just won, or will be one of the best places to work in Vermont. And we are actually the over the last 15 years the second largest growing company in Vermont for under a certain number. So I'm not sure our growth is necessary. It's unfortunate in some ways, but also it's good that we'll be able to meet the need in the community. Here's what we did in 2023 in terms of the total number of things. You see some of the same information, total number of apartments, total shared equity homes, some new buyers in our shared equity program, $2.3 million in lending of different kinds of loan products, which I'll describe a little bit. We have a very robust resident services department who are providing services to our residents in terms of supporting them. So you can see what else is up here. 201 new renters who had been previously unhoused. That was housed over the last year. Right now we have about 500 or so plus people who were previously unhoused who were living in our rental apartments. But again, a diverse portfolio, so a different range of different kinds of things, not just one thing. So five different kinds of shelters that we're operating. We're actually the biggest shelter provider in the state of Vermont. We go from a motel, which we operate at Harbor Place, all the way to the pods in Burlington, to actually just owning property on behalf of nonprofits. So steps to end domestic violence. We bought the building for them. We rented to them for very as little as possible. And they run their program out of our property. And we make sure the property is good and works for them. So we have a wide different kinds of relationships in terms of the homeless work that we do. Or supportive housing homes. These are group homes. Different kinds of supports going on within the properties. 13 group homes in special purpose housing. We have almost 1,800 affordable apartments, plain, vanilla-old apartments. Seven co-ops and resident-controlled properties. 458 apartments. These are apartments which are organized by the residents. Self-managed. Dream mobile home parks. And community facilities and commercial sort of spaces. So if you're familiar with downtown Burlington and City Hall across the street, that little range of the Mad River drinking place and the wine shop and the hairstylists, those are our places. We rent those out to folks. We also do the Old North End Community Center. We're about to buy the O'Brien Community Center in Winooski and improve that. So we do community facilities like the food shelf and childcare centers all the way to sort of typical market kind of stuff. So I was asked to talk about a handful of topics and so I'm a little bit all over the place, so I'll try to give you some descriptions. See, these are some of the, what we see is some of the macro market forces right now causing, I think, probably the most difficult affordable housing environment we've seen in Chittenden County or in Vermont in decades. There's a large immigration to, in migration to Vermont. A few years ago, if I went to somebody, one of the private developers said so, how us rental sales go and they would say great. And they would have maybe 10 or 15% of the people who are asking them about apartments to be from out of state. Now it's 50%. Okay, now it's very large numbers who want to move to Vermont. Why is that? Because people can work from home. And you could live anywhere. Two houses on my street, which is just a one street, sold to people who, one couple works in London and New York City when they're not living in Charlotte Street in Burlington. The other couple actually just moved back but owns something in North Carolina and we're happy to be back in Burlington because it was a better place to live, okay? So those are some of the macro forces in terms of the jobs and employment activities that are going on right now in the marketplace. That's driving prices up. Deep in prices, both in sales and home sales and in rent increases. Very low vacancy, a healthy vacancy rate is 5%. The vacancy rate now in Burlington is about 1%. It was actually 0.5%, which means it didn't exist, which means that there was really no vacancy. When apartment became available, just when the survey happened, it was empty by chance. Not that there was in fact a healthy vacancy. Vacancy rate has gone up a little bit but not quite where it needs to be. Increased interest rates are causing both the developers of affordable housing, developers of private sector housing and homeowners to simply have housing out of reach. It used to cost us, I just looked at this recently. Well, it's actually a higher construction cost but the increase is what I wanna talk about. The higher construction costs are also a factor, somewhat inflation but certainly just labor materials. So we built 74 units of housing for $20 million and now costs us $22 million to build 40 units of housing. So the construction costs and the cost of everything is so much substantially higher that it becomes difficult really for, this is true of private sector but also certainly in terms of what we have to do. Rise of short-term rentals is an issue. That's a major issue in Burlington or an Inchon County in Inframond. There's a statistic which I don't know if it's true anymore but it's likely true that if you wanted to house all the homeless people in San Francisco, you just put them on an Airbnb and they'd be all set. There's enough housing that's come out of the market, in other words, mental housing that's come out of the market to create the Airbnb's that has caused an impact overall in terms of the availability of housing to anybody. And then we're gonna be seeing some significant property tax increases in the horizon which is gonna create, I think, some difficulties for everyone. So these are some of the factors influencing the most vulnerable. A larger number of displacement occurring due to rising rents. We see actually people being kicked out of their homes because the landlord can raise the rent by $500 or $700 a month. We've seen that happen in terms of redevelopment occurring in different parts of this county where properties are being eliminated, torn down, and new housing is being built because the cost of the demolition and construction gives it the owner a chance to make a lot more money on such increased rents. Higher numbers of mental health issues and substance abuse issues. A little bit of the trauma that coming out of whatever happened in COVID but certainly much more intense than ever has been. In 2020 when we, and see at Sampley Housing Trust, we had three people who would do resident services, support for individuals in our properties. We now have 15 people who do that. We've increased the number of people, supporting people in our properties. They're not doing counseling and therapy, they're simply trying to assist them to get them through the regular work, the regular day. A lack of shelter options. And so there's hundreds of people now who don't have any shelter right now and starting in the next month or two with the Motel program ending at the state of Vermont, there'll be a lot more people also still on the street. For me, I don't see a comprehensive treatment program out there. There are some, but they're not strong enough. And the drugs have changed. I can tell you that the kinds of drugs that exist to 10 or 15 years ago and the kind of modalities and the responses to those kinds of drugs 10 or 15 years ago were much more straightforward in terms of what people could do, in terms of substance abuse disorder. Kinds of drugs that are out there right now are just so different. I don't know if you really wanna go down this path, but heroin costs a decent amount of money. You did a fix of heroin and you were good for the day. Fentanyl costs like 50 cents. It's good for a couple hours, but you need a lot of it. And it's destructive in every way. And it's not really a good way to get off of it. And when you mix it with methadrin, which is speed, or crystal meth, and you mix it with a couple of other drugs that people are mixing it with, it's deadly. And so this has occurred over the last three to five years. And it's brand new, I think, overall, to society. You know that staffing and social service agencies is at a difficult level. They're having people are having a hard time finding the people they need to be able to do the work because it's hard work. And then overall, community safety has declined. We know that that's in part because of a response to the need of people needing to be housed. The number of people who are on the street who are struggling and who are looking to do some kind of damage in the community has increased as a result of all this. I guess I'm not gonna tell you that. Well, I will say that the state has been very positive and responsive over the last few years, in part because of COVID funds, but also overall seeing the greater need that's out there. And I think they still want to be responsive and we believe that in fact, over the next few years, there's gonna be a sort of continued support from the state of Vermont to do more. Before COVID, there would be an allocation to the Vermont Housing Conservation Board, which was the principal source of funding for affordable housing. That allocation would be $15 million, half of which had to go to conservation. So we're talking about $8 million, okay? I can't do anything. We can't do anything with $8 million anymore. And the number of, the dollars amounts that were spent in the state of Vermont were more like $100 million. And that was really just being able to keep up. And so that allocation over years has not quite been enough in order to be able to sustain the need for greater affordable housing. Again, factors such as Airbnb's, in migration, higher interest rates, higher cost, all of those factoring into the fact that the need is even greater and the appropriation was so less little over a decade prior to COVID has created a sort of a bit of a crisis. We are, there is a policy activity now going on in the state of Vermont around and eliminating single-family zoning and pursuing Act 250 reforms. It's fine, we're all basically for that. But it really is just a small move. It's gonna maybe save some time and cost, but it's not gonna be substantial enough to really just sort of change the dynamic we have in front of us. But so as you can see, we've been very busy and we have lots of new product buddies coming online. And so post-apartments is in downtown Burlington that's at the former VFW building. Gonna tear that down and put 38 apartments focusing on veterans with a ground floor for community justice center. Cambrian Rise, which is a thousand unit development that's on North Avenue. We've done 74 rental units. We're gonna be doing another 30, another 40 rental units and 30 home ownership units there as well. Bay Ridge, which is in Shelburton, is gonna be another combination of rental and affordable home ownership. Ride your bike hula, what is ride the bike hula? Sounds like funny. So this is the south end, which is for those of you who are dated as old as me. General Electric, General Dynamics, all of that property. That's ride your bike hula, okay? A thousand units being planned for that area, which will include some rental housing, some home ownership. Working on getting, with the city of Wienewski and getting the armory to be able to become rental properties in Wienewski. And again, our home ownership pipeline is again, ride your bike hula, Bay Ridge, Hinesburg. We got some development planned. And we work closely with Habitat for Humanity. Everything, all the Habitat for Humanity homes become part of our portfolio and we work with them closely. I'm gonna come back for this. Somebody told me that you wanted to know what we're gonna do with $20 million, right? Yeah, who, we'll come back to that. Here's a picture of post-departments in Shelburne in downtown Burlington. This is a photo of Bay Ridge in Shelburne, which is the former Harbor Place site. Then I'll tell you see actually, the ones furthest that way, those are home ownership. This one over here is rental. So it's like a dual use. Six acres on land, gotta be redeveloping. A lot of support from town. This is Cambrian Rise. Jesus, look at that, holy, oh, I can move around, can I? So you're familiar with North Avenue? This is not built yet? No, right. We own this one over here. This is Cathedral Square. This has been developed over here. That's S.D. Ireland. So so you know if you wanna buy a $1.8 million home at the top of that floor of S.D. Ireland, you could do that. That's all it costs. Starts at a million, goes up to 1.8. Or you could rent there for $4,500 a month, $5,000 a month. That's the pricing for that particular property. We're gonna be building here. That'll be, again, 30 shared equity homes and 30 apartments. Our rents will be about, this is probably gonna sound high to you as well, but $1,100 for one bedroom, including all utilities. Our homes will be selling for $170,000, $175,000. So that's what we do when we do the affordable housing part of that redevelopment. This is in Heinsberg. And Heinsberg has got a mix of uses. We'll have a childcare center way, way over there. We'll have some single-family homes being built by a private developer. We'll have some habitat homes in here as well. And we'll do also some mixed-use multifamily rental and some ownership as well. So it's a mixed-use development. This is land that was donated to us by Jan from NRG, owner of NRG. Again, we do a lot of service in rich housing. This is just showing you some of the, we bought, we have purchased 10 motels over the last 10 years, a pile of them during COVID. This was one of them. This is the former handy suites, which we then converted into the new steps to end domestic violence shelter. They really had a little house, little house, big house on Colchester Avenue, but that's all they had. This was formerly 30 suites. It is now 21 suites, meaning full kitchens and bedrooms and all that, plus their offices all in one location. And we read that basically we were able to get the money to buy the whole thing outright, do all the renovations and we own it and they just are paying for the carrying cost of it. They actually have an option to purchase this from us for practically nothing in five years when they choose to do it. In the meantime, they're very happy that we're sitting there with a full maintenance staff ready to support them when they need some help and assistance. Here are the pods, 32 individual pods, scheduled to be out of existence in two years. We'll see how that works. A lot of the folks who are at the pods have substance abuse disorder. They're working through it. We have placed just a handful of folks now in permanent housing. It's been a struggle. Let me just dial back. We have a whole bunch of apartments to rent to people. We give certain preferences in different properties to homeless folks. We have about 3,000 applications every year for 300 or so apartments that might be available. Not all of those folks wind up with us. They may go someplace else when they may find some other alternatives. So we have a waiting list now, a waiting list and we don't have some waiting lists, but we have a waiting time of about 15 months. That's how long it takes to get into one of our properties. Sometimes there's some preferences and people can move faster, but often enough it takes a long time to get affordable housing. So when we started the pods, when the idea of us doing the pods started, our waiting times were less. It was more like six months. And the notion was we were gonna be able to move people out more quickly. It's taking longer. In the meantime, the people who are there are doing way better. And they're not on the street and they're actually surviving well and beginning to build the skills they need in order to be housed well. This is one of the motels we renovated. Brayburn is, we bought two home homes. We bought the home home one on Willison Road and one home home on Shelbourne Road. This is the one on Willison Road. During COVID, we operated 32 rooms, which was the COVID isolation and quarantine facility for the state of Vermont. Anybody who needed to have a shelter or be quarantined came to the home two on Willison Road, we operated that. And then we have now that program ended and we have converted them into 20 apartments with support services. Converting those old roadside motels is actually pretty easy, it's not, but it's pretty straightforward. You have two doors, you block up one door, you put a door in between the two rooms, you turn the bathroom into a kitchen and then you have basically a 600 square foot single bed apartment, which we could rent pretty cheaply and which actually is way less expensive to build than building brand now. We have 20, oh that's not the right number, 34 beds that are recovery housing, working for the foundations of recovery for recovery and that group is basically making sure that people who have gone past the part of addiction disorder are now in recovery, have a program and a place to live. And that is in Fort Ethan Allen. We bought 21 apartments in Fort Ethan Allen from the University of Vermont. We saved three of the larger buildings, this is one of them, and the other 18 we turned into home ownership. Oh, this is the Old North End Community Center. We do community centers. The Old North End Community Center is the one over here on that side, see it? That's the front door. If you've been in Burlington and you needed to go to a childcare center or a very merry theater or pickleball or something else, you've gone to the Old North End Community Center. It's become a great community center for the Old North End. It used to be, oh Jesus, former, anybody? What was the name of it though? No. No. No, I can't remember. All right, anyway, we turned that old school into a great community center, has the Association for Africans Living in Vermont. Sandy, you have an office there. Yeah. I know what it says up there, but that's just, that's just old Catholics. I'm an old Catholic, so that's just old Catholic stuff. Yeah. But next to it is the O'Brien Community Center, which was done 15 years ago, which had a community health centers of Burlington and a few other uses there, but we've been asked to buy the property from the city of Waduski, which we're going to do and to expand the level of community health activities and dental clinic at that location, create a new library, a brand new library of the city of Waduski that doesn't have a really, really good library, and then to do an event hall on the top with a community kitchen and some nonprofit office space. Here, I'm running out of time. I want to get back to tell you how we're spending all that money. Here are the number of different kinds of loan programs we have. Again, about three to four million dollars each year is going out in different loans. Many of them are operating within Northwest Vermont, but some of these are statewide, like the mobile home lending program and the farm worker housing program are two programs we operate statewide. Very successful and really over 100 people, over 100 loans over the last year, so. I don't know if you know what shared equity is, but we basically take a home. We make an investment and in exchange for that investment and money coming from us, the family gets to buy the home from us, but when they sell it, they can't sell it and take all the money back and keep it. We keep it within the home and basically it's called shared equity. So if they buy a home, we sell somebody a home for $175,000, usually means it's a praise at $350,000 in the market. If it appreciates the $450,000, that extra $100,000, they keep 25% of that, okay? And also all the mortgage payment they made, plus all the improvements they made to the house, but we get to keep it the rest of it and make sure that it's affordable to the next generation. This is called permanent affordable housing, home ownership model that is basically becoming even more popular now across the United States as a way to ensure that there is permanently affordable home ownership opportunities for people in neighborhoods but they don't exist. Am I, what is all that? Oh, this is telling you all the great things about shared equity, yeah? I think that's it. Now, let's see if I can go back to, oh, gotta go through all that. This is great TV, isn't it? Did I get to, there we go. The Kenzie Scott gift. So I'll tell you a story about how we got a Mackenzie Scott gift because I have never met her, I have never spoken to her, I have not even exchanged a word with Mackenzie Scott ever. The Mackenzie Scott, if you know, is the former wife of Jeff Bezos who decided to take her divorce settlement and give it away. That's the best way of describing it. She has been giving money's funds away for the last few years on a regular basis and the good thing about what she does is when she gives the money away, she says, here, go ahead, do good work. Don't have to report to us, don't come back, and it's yours to spend on the work that you've done. We had no idea that this gift was underway. Okay, the story is that we as an organization, the Champlain Housing Trust act on a national level as well. We're engaged in, I think in my bio there, talked about different national organizations that we are part of, but we're known across the United States for a variety of different kinds of programs. As Mackenzie Scott was looking at different opportunities, our name kept on showing up, but we didn't know that. We got a call in February of last year, not this recent February of last year, which was, hey, we represent a group of donors. We'd like to talk to you about what you do. Do you mind if you have an hour? We'd love to spend some time with you. And I said, sure, me and Chris Donnelly, who works on community relations, and we got on the phone or Zoom and these people sitting around the table in San Francisco and we were just chatting about our work and we talked for about an hour. They said, do you, we have some questions? Would you be able to answer some questions in paperwork? We said, sure. So we send them all the stuff. We usually send people around our audits and our financial plans and strategic plans and all that other stuff that good organizations do. I sent them a couple of other emails. Hey, you know what? I forgot to tell you this. I forgot to tell you that. Months go by. We just thought, God, who is that? We really didn't know who it was. We couldn't have been anybody. And I think I was at a conference in Newburgh or gathering in Newburgh, New York, with other neighbor works organization where a neighbor works member. And I got an email that said, hey, do you have some time over the next couple of days to chat about a potential gift? I said, sure. And I went, ooh, I got a little chill. I said, okay, yeah, like right away or tomorrow, so I'm at a motel room and this person gets on the phone and said, Michael, I want to tell you that McKinsey Scott is trying to give you $20 million. I said, oh, it was pretty startling, frankly, and kind of like just shook me a little bit. I got teary-eyed to get teary-eyed to decide to thinking about what a gift it was. So what we had to then, amazingly enough, as soon as she said that, I put together a little email until our staff and said, of course, you have to keep this quiet. And I kind of wrote this up, more or less. If you'd asked me right now, how would you spend $15 million? I could tell you. If you ask any organization that's active doing work and you're gonna say, hey, how would you spend? They should be able to tell you how they spend $10 million. They should be able to tell you how they spend $20 million. It was pretty quick. Our eternal joke, I probably shouldn't say this out loud. Our eternal joke was, if only it was 25, it wouldn't be perfect. So let me just describe to you how we put this pile of money together in different ways. Probably in 2004, Lois McClure and others raised an endowment for CHT. Brenda Torpey was very much in leadership of that. Raised a couple million dollars. At the time when CHT's budget was $6 million, that was enormous. The amount of money that endowment provides in terms of regular cash was great. As I told you, it used to be six, that was six million then. It is now $29 million now. And so we were thinking our endowment needed to grow and be a little bit more. Now, endowments are just not cash sitting around not doing anything, right? For an organization that is in real estate, we are required to have money. You probably all know, you look seasoned enough. The only reason you get money is if you have money. Nobody's given money to anybody who doesn't have it. You have to show as an organization that you're strong, you have the capacity to manage the properties, that you have the potential capacity to manage debt. And so for us, we actually needed to have more money sitting in a bank. To be there to ensure our grantors, the banks who are lending us money, everybody that in fact, we're a good financial health. We're in a bad financial health, but knowing that we needed to grow endowment was something that was on our mind. So we put $6 million more into that endowment fund. And that means that we have an $8 million endowment. So what is it doing? It's generating money. It's generated about last year, generated about $600,000 to $700,000. And where are we putting it into resident services? Because nobody's giving us money to do support for residents. Like when we do development, we can get rental income, when we do loans, we can charge a little fee, but nobody's giving anybody money for resident services. And so we immediately put it into resident services. Essentially, that cash flows back to CHT to support its resident services program. LIFT is basically strategic investments in property. We have used LIFT money to buy Dorset Commons, which is in South Burlington. Basically, it is an internal fund that allows us to carry low debt on a property that we may need to build, to buy and redevelop. We have used LIFT, we have invested more money in LIFT and we have used it to lend money to properties that we have taken over or control to help those properties be more successful. There's still some money left in there, we spent some of that. Working capital. We do about $60 million worth of development every year. And often enough, there's a need to invest a certain amount of money early on. And so $2.5 million in sort of working capital, which is very important. And then community centers. The Old North End Community Center had some debt that was coming up in the next few years that we had to pay off, which we were gonna go out and raise money for. We paid that off early. The O'Brien Center, we're gonna be buying that building from the city of Winooski. And we're gonna be using some of the money to reinvest in that building as well. That's the community center part. On the one, those are what I would call ongoing investments. In other words, they're gonna go into properties or they're gonna go into endowments and they're gonna generate income or positive cash for us. The one-time investments are a little bit more interesting. Home ownership equity program is a program we have initiated a couple of years ago which is down payment assistance for people of color that buy homes. I can go into a long description of that if you want to, but basically the number of folks who've been able to buy homes who are people who are black or African American is so low compared to white homeowners in the state of Vermont and across the country. We have provided $25,000 of a very quick loan that disappears within a few years through something called the Special Purpose Credit Program and we have funded that in Chittenden County, Northwest Vermont through a generous grant from the New England Federal Credit Union of $3 million which we got a couple of years ago and that's money that's being dispersed to individual homeowners. What we did with this $1 million is we said, let's make it available statewide to our non-profit partners across the state of Vermont. So basically this is funding a statewide home ownership equity program across the state. Community building and engagement is just that when we see little opportunities where we could invest some monies to do some work where we know we could build a community within our properties or outside our properties, it's there and that's true of the special initiatives and the stewardship fund. So these are monies that we expect to be spending and not getting back at all. So that's the profile of the $20 million and I think I'm gonna stop there because we have 20 of and I could just ramble on for a bunch of things and I'd rather you ask me some questions and we can get to your answers. How's that? I know I mumble and I talk fast so I'll repeat anything I said. Kathy, anything from Zoom? Oh, come on Zoom people. Is this one working? Yeah. It is? Oh, he hasn't turned in one minute. Yes, he's fixing them. Now? Okay. Hi Michael. It's my understanding that the Army reserve property and coming available is Champlain Housing Trust thinking about what they might offer to do on that property? The Armory and Winooski? I thought it was larger than that. That may be. I thought it was the National Guard site. Am I? National Guard I think controls the Armory and Winooski. It's not that whole National Guard site that's behind St. Michael. Then I misunderstood. Well, it's okay. But we are working with the city of Winooski. It has to be put through a certain process for sale. It's gonna be demolished. There's a whole bunch of stuff. Before you demolished the building nowadays you have to go through a whole process. You just can't tear it down. It has to go through that process and then it becomes available as a request for proposals from the public. We're working, we've made, we being us working with the city of Winooski have asked the government and the legislature would you give us a right to purchase the property, first right of refusal so that we could then redevelop the property for range of affordable housing options? So we are engaged in that. I think that's gonna be another year or two process before we get to the end of that one. Hi, I'm seeking to understand the input of monies from say section eight or from paid employment that residents might be able to proffer to pay. I don't understand how much of this Champlain Housing Trust is supplying, it's just ignorance on my part, is supplying the wherewithal to live in these units or whether residents have to, especially in rental units, have to come up with money by applying through section eight and public monies? That's a good question. Of those, can I move this again? Of those 1700 or so apartments, which I described, probably about a little less than 50% might be people who hold section eight vouchers, okay? Our apartments are still $1,100 for one bedroom are still $800 less than the market, okay? And so for somebody who's earning 70% or 80% of median income, it works for them. If somebody's making 30% of median income or is on social security or disability, they can't afford our apartments. We then work with the local housing authorities to ensure that those folks get vouchers so they can come into our apartments. So it's a conversation and a sort of a work with the individuals as they come in. We encourage people who are making a certain income who might be to say, might not have enough money to be able to afford even the affordable apartments that we have to work with the local housing authorities. Winooski, Brunelton Housing Authority, State Housing Authority. When we're working on homeless population folks that have zero money, we are usually designated units and usually have the housing authority willingness to provide the individuals going into those homeless units because they're part of a system, a coordinated entry system, they automatically get a voucher when they come into our housing. So it's not that complex but basically the answer is we use, our tenants use vouchers as well when they're only making $1,000 a month, they can't afford $1,000 a rent. So we do a combination of both things. I'm just amazed at the number of new apartments going up over here off Market Street in South Burlington. You talked about the ones off North Avenue. The population is not growing to the extent of the number of apartments going up. Is this really due to Airbnb's? And if so, are we doing anything to take some of those Airbnb's off the Airbnb list and making them back into housing? It's a complicated question. I would say that there has been some population growth. Even Burlington had a 10% growth between over 10 years, which is not a lot if you're from Arizona or somewhere like that, but it is still more than Burlington has had for a while. And two things are happening. One is that the size of households is smaller. So you need more units in order to deal with the number of folks who need housing. At the same time also, actually some of the new immigrant families are much larger. We actually had to build three or four bedroom units as well here and there and then not in existence as well. So I guess the point is that the number of housing units is not direct correlation to population. Just the population use of the housing has changed. In terms of Airbnb's, Burlington has begun to regulate it. When Husky is looking to regulate it, South Burlington is beginning to look at regulating it. And Burlington, I think the regulation has had some impact. It's also charging people now for their use of their Airbnb program and that has generated a million dollars plus or so for affordable housing programs in the city. So even though it might not be, it may not get those units back to be in the regular marketplace, but at least the money is coming back to be able to build more affordable housing. And that seems to me, that's a decent formula and a way of dealing with it. But that's, in part, you see more hotels being built in part because the motels, the motels are sort of not in favor as much as they used to be. And then also there's been a slight impact in terms of Airbnb's. And so the hotel market is growing or opportunity for a market is growing. Well, test questions. Oh, good. Talk about senior housing, please. Well, we have some seniors in our housing. We do. And if I showed you the slide, can I, I can't go back, can I? Oh, look at that, I'm going the wrong way. And then we look at some of these sort of programs and opportunities. Often enough, we are finding ourselves working closely with Cathedral Square. I went by it. And there. We're working closely with Cathedral Square as a partner. So we've done four different kinds of developments with Cathedral Square meeting where we've gone in and they have gone in and built senior housing and we have built regular affordable rental housing for multifamily housing. And so we do a partnership with them. They don't build as much senior housing that they want to build. We don't, we feel the same way. They are less aggressive. And they do a lot of service programs, which have been great. We do a wider range of things in terms of homelessness and home ownership as well. So in terms of senior housing, they are our partner. Although we don't have a restriction. As a matter of fact, every once in a while I suggest to a tenant maybe they want to be in senior housing because they want to be closer to a family in Milton. There's one family that lives on North Avenue. Writes me every year a nice postcard saying, our family lives in Milton, would you build housing there? And I say, you know, no, we can't right now, but you could talk to Cathedral Square and they say, we don't want to live with Cathedral Square. We want to live with you. That's great. But I think that we always encourage people to go to Cathedral Square at some level. I actually have staff who live in a Cathedral Square housing who are older, so. Here's another one. Do you work with the USCRI Refugee Agency? Oh yeah, we do. We work with AALV, who's in the Old North End Community Center. There we are. They are actually, that's how we got to the Old North End Community Center is when Jacob who is a director that called up and said, you need to buy this building so that we could stay here because it was for sale in the market and they might have been displaced. So Jacob actually called up and I could do an invitation of him, but I won't, but it basically was you need to come here by this building so that we could have our programs here and other people could have programs here. So we work closely with them and we work closely with USCRI, mainly in the early stages because USCRI steps back after nine months or a year. But we have been quietly housing USCRI refugees in about three different properties now. The Hoham Motel, which I showed you a photo of, that was, we housed USCRI families there in between. I know it sounds kind of funny, but after we shut down one program, which was the COVID isolation facility, and before we turned it into the rental apartments, we had about six months of the place being empty. We didn't want it to be empty and we rented a fairly inexpensively USCRI. We did that, right now we're doing that in Schuller as well, and we did that at the Zephyr place, which is the hotel in Williston, where the building, we bought the building, it was vacant for three, four, six months, and we housed refugees, families, short term. So that's how we've been working with USCRI principally. They would like to be in the O'Brien Community Center, I'm not sure if we have enough space for them. So we do talk chat with them. There's kind of an addition for the same person. Are there any complications of finding housing for refugees? You're going to answer the question? I would say that the issue is not so much, I don't think it's easy. I'm going to say that, I can't really, I'm not an expert on this one, but I would say that it's harder because the family's a larger and it's difficult to find those places. We've actually at times combined units to make an apartment big enough. I mean, my grandmother had 10 kids, we had two kitchens. So combining two apartments made total sense to me because that's what you need when you have 10 kids. You need two kitchens. So I think that that was, I think that's one of the principal issues refugee families are finding. The second part is that they are finding themselves displaced because they principally owe income and we could talk about a situation with Nuske that's going on right now where over about 20 families are being displaced and in part because of their status as refugees, at least some of us will think that because they present themselves very differently, culturally, and that's often difficult for some property owners to work through. And will the neighborhood, will the proposed neighborhood code in Burlington help housing availability or affordability? I don't know if it's gonna, well, I think the intention is that it helps to build more housing. I think the belief is you build more housing than therefore then it's more affordable housing. I'm not sure if I believe that completely. I don't think if you build, I think if you build more housing you are certainly serving the market and it's better. Certainly for middle income people and for upper middle income people, the more housing it's being built, the better it is and that leaves some pressure on the market. So there's no doubt that happens. But if you build a housing development that has 100 units and the rental numbers are 4,000 per month or 5,000 per month and higher, it doesn't, I've almost went like this, this is an Italian phrase for meh, doesn't do it, you know? So you really need to have a focus on building affordable housing. Now I also say that I know the code on a particular property we're looking at, we're working with the families who do, who are concerned about the disabled adult children on building a certain kind of housing. We have a property on St. Paul Street and that new zoning is actually gonna help us make that property better. So in specific instances, yes, overall. Kind of maybe not really, you know, not always, it can not necessarily have the impact. Building, being able to build more housing doesn't necessarily translate into more affordable housing in and of itself. Two questions, one is that... By the way, I can do this all day, I have nowhere to go. Right. We've still got five minutes. Thank you. Probably 35 years ago, market rents in Burlington were the second highest in New England. So I'd like to, if you know, and that was second to Boston. So I'd like to know if you know what that status is and then my second question is if we were to take the status quo right now and assume that four to five percent vacancy rate is what's good for a healthy market, how many units would still need to be built aside from the ones that are being built now? You know, I do spreadsheet, so I'm trying to look at the spreadsheet in my brain to sort of see if I could figure that out. I can't tell you precisely where we are in terms of the market in New England. I know when I tell people that our rents and market rents are 2,000, 2,400, they go like that from other parts of the country thinking that Vermont would be inexpensive and cheap. We all know it's not. And so therefore then when I tell people that, I think it turns out to be true. We are highest rents in the state of Vermont. We're probably higher than most places in New Hampshire. Probably more than most places in Maine, maybe Portland. I would say we're probably equal to a couple of places. You know, some parts of Boston. After that, I think we're probably a higher rent overall. So I'm not sure if that has changed. Look, maybe many of you were born here. Many of us came here. We came here because of the great place to live that has not sort of helped, okay? You know what I mean? People are not going to Platsburg. I hope nobody's from Platsburg. People are not going to Platsburg because it's not a great place to live. Rents are really inexpensive there. So our success is based upon the fact, people want to live here. And so we have to live with that and try to work through that. And that's true of all those other markets. Parts of Boston, parts of Portland, parts of other places. So it's not something we should feel bad about as much as we have to work through. If the vacancy rate is higher, rents would change. Okay, rents would adjust. Those people would have to compete. Time for one more question. So from your description, then you are primarily a landlord sort of thing. But I also do some things with Harbor Place and know that there and also over at the place on Susie Wilson Road that you are helping to include a food bank within this. Is this something that you envision continuing? Yes, actually we have two. We have food now at Harbor Place and food. And we have an art program at Harbor Place, which is now a motel operative, pretty much exclusively for folks who are homeless. And also it's at Susan's Place, which is now just for folks who are homeless, coming out of homeless, so 76 units. And we had to build a food pantry there. We see more of that. One of the people in resident services, actually a few people in resident services are there to do community building. That's their job. Community building tends to be coffee and ice cream socials. It's responding to basic needs like please build this offense so the kids don't run into the road. And it includes eating sort of the needs of the community in different ways like art programs and other kinds of social programs that build spirit and build character and people. So we do a range of that. We have people who do that. The resident services department has grown to do those kinds of things. We think it's essential. Something I've been wanting to do for a while and I think we now have the capacity to do more of that. So thank you for that question. Appreciate it. Thank you so much. This was wonderful. Thank you.