 Thanks everybody for coming tonight. If you were able to find a seat, please take it. I think we ordered more seats. I hope they'll be here shortly. I'm Kevin Donahue. I'm the chair of our Housing and Community Development Committee. I'm joined by counselors, also members of the committee, counselors David Marshall, Nick Mavadonis, and David Brenerman. And we are the Housing and Community Development Committee. We usually have business meetings on this evening and we've decided tonight to have a forum on housing issues but narrowly focused on or particularly focused on the question of how do we remove barriers to housing production and how do we close the affordability gap and we'll have a short presentation, a medium presentations from Jeff Levine, the planning and development director for the city and then we'll be opening up the floor for comments and suggestions for actions that this committee or other competent bodies of the city can take to remove barriers to providing housing types that are suitable for people in the heart of the middle class which are harder to find these days and also how we can ensure that the development activity that is occurring in the city has an inclusive element to it and that's all I'll say for setup and I'll hand it over to Jeff Levine, our department director. Thanks very much. I'm Jeff Levine. I'm the planning and development director for the city. So I will speak up then. I'm Jeff Levine. I'm the planning and development director for the city and first off, thanks so much for coming. It's really great to see such a good audience at this meeting and Mary Davis is here. She's our housing and community development director. So she's very involved in issues of housing policy. I see some other staff here too and thanks for coming. I'm gonna try to give a fairly concise presentation that I hope will mostly provide an overview as to where we've gotten to and what some of our initial recommendations are and then we're gonna be able to answer questions, hear comments. We will then take what we hear tonight and bring it back to the housing community development committee and hopefully continue to move forward on a process. So thanks so much and what I'll try to do is speak to you and operate this at the same time, which I think I can do. First, a little bit of terminology. I think the term affordable housing means different things to different people. And so generally when we refer to affordable housing, we refer to a range of different things. First off, low income housing, which I think is what is traditionally referred to as affordable housing. It's housing of any sort and it can be to rent it to own. It's usually to rent at this level that's affordable to households making 80% or less of the area median income. And to give you some context for a family of four, it's done by family size or household size, that's about $60,000. That's a level below which you can access some federal funding. It's generally when people say affordable housing, that's often what people refer to. When we use the term workforce housing, we refer to the same type of housing again to own or to rent. And it's more often to own at that level, but it's also rentals for about median income. 100% of every median income is the technical term. It's about 75,000 for a family of four right now in this area. When we say affordable, what do we mean by that? We mean paying 30% or less of your income on housing costs. And that can be your rent and or your mortgage payment, insurance, taxes, all in. And sometimes places will use a higher number. I guess the state of Maine uses a number of about 40%. 30% is really what we try to use, the feeling being that's an appropriate quote unquote housing burden for your expenses. You shouldn't be paying more than that to live. Deed restricted, you hear terms about de facto housing that's affordable versus restricted housing. A lot of times when, especially when public money is involved, we will put a restriction on a unit that says that it has to be affordable for a certain amount of time. Sometimes it's in perpetuity. Sometimes it's nine to your 99 years. Sometimes it's less. It really depends, but the idea being it's not just the first person who gets the unit that has to be at that level of income. When it's sold or when it's rented again, there's a qualification process again. And the idea is to ensure that over time that unit continues to be affordable. First off, the comprehensive plan, which is a city's overhaul plan, has a housing component. It was done in 2002. It's still current. It's actually a document we refer to regularly although there's probably some updating that could be done. It's aged very well. It's set forth a number of policies that we continue to follow. It's set six key policies, but some of the highlights are it's set a goal of keeping Portland's population at 25% of the county's population. That's in the name of growing sustainably and having a smart growth pattern and allowing the core city of this area to grow. It called for the housing replacement ordinance, that I'll talk about in a little bit, which has been implemented. It set a goal of 20% of all new units to be affordable at 80% of median income, so the more traditional affordable housing. And it set a goal of 200 new affordable home ownership units, particularly with an emphasis for families. The India Street planning process also had some work on housing and equity. There's a working group that Mary staffed that was recommending a requirement in that area, originally just in the India Street neighborhood that a certain percentage of new units be affordable. They decided that requirement would sort of might disadvantage that neighborhood versus the entire city, and that really that this was a city-wide issue discussed doing a city-wide ordinance of that sort. We have a draft that I'll hand out in a little bit that's really a working document. In the end, they decided that housing affordability was a real goal of the draft plan, but since it was a city-wide issue that perhaps it should be tackled in form, such as this one. The thing that I think you've most recently heard about was we commissioned the Greater Portland Council of Governments to do a workforce housing demand study. It was completed in January. There's a number of numbers in this study. I'm not gonna go through all of them, but I'll hit some of the highlights. 62% of Portland households are below median income. That's an increase over the last decade. Between 2010 and 2014, there have been over 1,000 units permitted. 29% of those were affordable, and you note that I'm not saying deed restricted affordable. This is both the ones that are affordable because of the type of housing they are, which is great, and the ones that were built as affordable units with deed restrictions on them. However, even with that production rate, the estimate is that there's a gap, that because there's a need for more affordable housing than the 29%, the production rate should roughly double from what it is right now. They really used two different methodologies to look at this issue. One of them said we needed 24% more. The other said 33%. Roughly, the estimate was that we should be roughly doubling our production of housing that's available affordable to median income residents. Some breakouts as to homeowners and renters, obviously, and this is no surprise, renters tend to have less income than homeowners. That's not necessarily surprising in and of itself. Why should we do anything? I think I've just identified that we have 62% of the residents less than the median income, but 29% of the housing produced is affordable to folks at that level. Clearly, there's a gap. The Great Recession in 2008, I think gave folks a pause. I think it's fair to say, based on how busy our office is, that Portland is not experiencing a development recession right now. In fact, the planning board is booked into late spring, so it's the yogi bearer joke of no one does any business there, it's too busy, there's too many people there. It's certainly a great time to be in Portland. What we are finding is that there is this gap that we're not getting a lot of housing developments at that 80 to 100% of median income area. There are some that intend to be at that level, and that's great, but clearly, given the great need, it's not adequate for what is the need that's identified in this study. And again, in particular, there's a tight three bedroom unit for families. It's very hard to find a family-sized unit in Portland. We do have an ordinance that keeps you from subdividing family-sized units, but in and of itself, that doesn't seem to be accomplishing the goal. And obviously, it depends a little bit on what kind of unit you're talking about. There seems to be certain areas where we're getting towards saturation and other areas where there's a lot of need. I was lucky enough to go to the Merida annual real estate forecast, it's a great event. And one of the presentations talked about the housing market in Portland, I've hit a couple of the highlights here. Certainly a higher end rental market is expanding and spurring investment. I think that that's certainly true from my perspective. Rents were up eight to 12% in the past year. Prediction is at another 5% increase over the next year. Sales prices are up 19% since the recession. And then in terms of what the market rate rents are, studios are renting for about $800 a month. And then it goes up to three bedrooms that are renting for $1,400 to $1,600 a month. I noted the federal fair market rents there for some of you housing junkies. That's what you're allowed to get from the federal government if you're getting, say, a section eight voucher. And this is sort of a side issue we're wrestling with, which is it's below what you can get on the free market. So as a result, people don't want to provide, people don't necessarily want to take a voucher because they can perhaps get more rent on the free market than they'd be getting through the voucher. Again, so how are we doing on some of these goals? We have permitted a fair number of housing units over the last few years. I don't think we're quite meeting the goal of 25% of the county growth goal. The good news is as you look at this trend, although it went down a lot, our percentage is in blue there. We seem to have held our own over the last 10 years. And certainly that's better than continuing to lose ground. Hopefully we can reverse that trend. You know, I think that the question's been asked why 25% and I think that's a kind of a goal that says let's at least stay where we are. And allow a certain percentage of the county's growth to occur in the core. Cumberland County is actually one of the most sprawling counties in the Northeast when you look at the numbers. And the goal is to try to counteract that, encourage dense urban development that allows us to allow Portland to continue to grow and thrive. You break out the housing development between the peninsula and off the peninsula and you see some interesting trends. You have about a thousand units produced on the peninsula and 124 off the peninsula. And then when you start looking at the affordable numbers, the difference is even more significant. A good third of the ones on the peninsula are affordable. And in this case, we're referring to basically 80% of median income and below. And off peninsula has been very few affordable units produced. So what do we have on the books now? Obviously, you know, we have some ordinances that are in effect right now. They do some good things. So what are they? We have what's called our housing replacement ordinance. And this says that as you, if you decide to remove a housing unit from the supply in the city, say you want to tear down a triple decker and put a parking lot in. If you're not replacing those units, you have to pay money into the housing trust fund. And right now it's $64,700 per unit. And that is our only source of funding for our housing trust fund. So you'll hear about communities that have housing trusts, they get capitalized. Our housing fund very rarely gets money put into it compared to what you see in a lot of other communities. We have a density bonus provision that allows up to a 25% bonus of density for affordable housing developments. The catches that the percentage bonus you get is pretty much the same as the number of affordable units you have to provide. So it doesn't necessarily have the effect you might think it has. We do see it used in some cases, mostly when people are developing affordable housing developments, but it hasn't really produced affordable housing much in market rate developments. We have a great number of city programs. It keeps Mary and her staff, I see Rhonda over there very busy. I'll highlight some of them. We get money from the Department of Housing and Urban Development. They're a great partner to us. We get money through the Community Development Block Grant program and the home program. That is money that can be used for affordable housing for low income residents that is below 80% of median income. The cities invested almost $9 million since 2000 of HUD funding. And we've had a great relationship with HUD and produced over 800 units, about 700 of which are affordable at 50 to 80% of median income. So although that I don't think is fair to say has met the demand at that level, certainly the city and the federal government have had some great impacts in terms of producing some units in those areas. I mentioned the Housing Trust that's funded through the Housing Replacement Ordinance right now and through very few other sources. That can be used for workforce housing at 80 to 120% of median income. What's great about that money is it's flexible. It can be used in a more flexible way than federal money. Unfortunately, when you spend it, it's very rare to get money back into it. We've received about a million dollars since 2002 and we've spent about $500,000. So the balance, if you're doing my fuzzy math is about $640,000. So we're looking at a variety of strategies but I think it's fair to say we're looking at both things that allow us to encourage more housing development and things that allow us to ensure more housing development. So how might some of those things work together? Well, we've already been working on up-zoning areas of the city where we think it makes sense. The city council approved an up-zoning of the B2 zoning district, which is along Forest Avenue and elsewhere in the city to encourage additional housing. You can now build up to 100 units per acre in those areas. We're working with the planning board to bring some proposals forward to the R6 residential zoning on the peninsula. They'll should be going to the council in the next month or two. That followed a three month period where we worked with neighborhood groups to try to explain to them what we were trying to accomplish and get their feedback. We're looking at some density bonus changes for housing, perhaps expanding the density bonuses to allow it to apply to workforce housing, looking at the numbers, seeing if we can make the density bonuses more effective as well. And then we are looking at a requirement it's referred to as inclusionary zoning that would require that for large developments, a certain percentage of the units be affordable for workforce housing. And I'll get back to each of these in a little bit at the very last slide. And then we'll want to hear from you. There are about 500 municipalities that have inclusionary zoning requirements, 27 states and the District of Columbia have them. This is too small to read, but what's interesting about inclusionary zoning is it's really done different ways in different communities. There are numbers, communities have as much as a 25% requirement. The requirement can be as low as I've seen, five or 6%. And they can kick in as low as six units. There are some communities that actually have no minimum that any development other than a single family has to meet some requirement. And then I've seen ones where it doesn't kick in until you're building, say, 40 units. So it's really, I call it buffet style, you can really pick and choose. This is just an example of how you might implement one version of inclusionary zoning. So on the left, you see the number of units that might be in a project. And then under a couple of different options, how many units you might provide. It's often standard to allow that you could pay in Luffy rather than provide the units. You could put money into the city's housing trust, which isn't necessarily about alternative. Some communities like that alternative and some don't. And that's really something that it can be tailored to the needs of a particular community. So with a 10% requirement, if you built a 10 unit development, one unit would have to be affordable at median income. You could optionally pay in Luffy instead. And then obviously you do the math at 10%. At 20 units, it's two units, at 30 units, it's three units. And then oftentimes in some communities, at some point you have to provide the units on site. I think we're not at the point where we know what we're recommending at this point, but these are just some examples. What are the communities in Maine doing? Everyone always asks that. Cape Elizabeth has a mandatory inclusionary zoning requirement for subdivisions. It depends a little bit on the exact type of subdivision, but it's generally a five to 10% requirement. And I asked my counterpart in Cape Elizabeth what's done to the housing market there. And she said, no, it doesn't really affect it at all. And that's obviously it's a different community, so I don't want to read too much into that. But she hasn't really noticed any particular difference based on it being in effect. And then many communities have incentive-based ordinances as well. How effective are these tools? Obviously, this is a long discussion. I try to summarize it in one slide because I see Kevin working and looking at his watch. But density bonuses can be effective. They're most effective when they're at the state level. For example, in Massachusetts and New Jersey, they have statewide requirements that allow affordable housing projects to totally trump local zoning. So you can bring an affordable housing project forward to Massachusetts, and if the state certifies it as affordable, basically the bonuses on the city to prove why they can't just do that project. It flips everything on upside down and says, the onus is on the city to say why you can't build that project. And that's produced a huge number of units in Massachusetts, not surprisingly, but it's a state-level initiative. Economic arguments against inclusionary zoning are pretty straightforward, that as you increase the cost of building units by putting a requirement that some of them be inclusionary, you'll reduce the production or increase the prices. Anyone who's taken ECON can do the charts and it certainly makes sense on paper. So what do the studies say? I've looked at three different studies of this effect and they've either said there's no actual impact or the impact is very minor and the communities need to weigh that against the public policy benefits of implementing an ordinance. But none of them have said that there's a linear relationship the way that you might model if you modeled it economically. At least the ones I've seen. So this is the last slide and I'm gonna leave this one up because it really summarizes the approach that at this point we're thinking about. It's a two-prong approach. It's to encourage and ensure, to encourage housing development by removing barriers to traditional urban housing types in Portland. We are underway or have completed three different zoning changes for three different zoning districts, the R6, the B1 and the B2. We're looking at accessory dwelling units and how we look at space that's already there that's being underutilized. We're looking at density bonuses. We're proposing looking at other zoning districts and to remove unnecessary regulatory barriers. You should be able to build a triple decker by ride in Portland. That is a traditional vernacular housing stock on the peninsula and we shouldn't be making it difficult to build a triple decker in the city. At the same time, we wanna ensure inclusion of workforce housing in significant projects. So we do recommend an inclusionary zoning ordinance, what I call inclusionary zoning light because I feel like we would approach it prudently and move cautiously. So working with the council committee at the last meeting, they recommended that we explore further a 10-10-100 approach and I emphasize the word explore at this point to start a requirement of development of 10 units or more to require the 10% of the units in that project be workforce or affordable housing at 100% of median income and possibly, and this is not necessarily an ordinance thing, but if somebody chose to make some of those units more affordable, once they got below 80%, we could look at federal funding. We could look at home and other sources as well. We're recommending at this point a fairly liberal ability to buy out of units to pay money into the housing trust because we really wanna find a reliable source to capitalize that fund and also possibly looking at off-site provisions. So say you've decided to build a really high-end building, one option might be to buy a two-family nearby, rehabilitate it and use it for workforce housing. That's something you need to be cautious about because you don't wanna export. You wanna make sure it's in the same basic neighborhood, but it's something that's used successfully in other communities. So with that, I'll stop talking. Sorry, I went a little over and now I mostly wanna hear from you folks. I'm gonna try to write down some notes, but really Mary's gonna be taking good notes and we are recording this and hopefully we'll be able to play it on local cable access as well for folks who couldn't come here tonight. Thanks, sure. So I think at this point I'm open for questions and comments and I will get my writing pen ready. If you could speak up, we do have a microphone so we can record what you say and I will hold on to this microphone for the response. I might repeat the question if I feel like it's worth doing. Sure, can we make sure we get people's names? Absolutely, yeah, so that's a great point. Thank you very much. If you could please say your name and your address, that would also be very helpful. Evan and Carol, five average. What was the 100 and the 10, 10, 100? That's saying that perhaps at this point rather than that the income level at those units would be targeted for would be 100% of median income or below. Actually, it's much more common in inclusionary ordinances to either require 60 or 80% or a mix of 60, 80 or 100. At this point we're looking at just really focusing on 100 or below. Yes? Carol McCracken, North Street. How long could it take roughly to get an inclusionary zoning ordinance in effect? Can you answer that? Well, there's two answers to that. The question was how long would it take to get an ordinance in effect? The answer is it could happen very quickly, theoretically, but we're trying to be thoughtful about this process and hold forums such as this one. I know the Housing and Community Development Committee wants a chance to think about this some more. So I can't speculate as to a timeframe, but really we just wanna make sure that we've been thoughtful about this. Yes? We're doing very well with that. I'm on Salem Street. And my question is about the aging of our population and the fact that a lot of people are attracted to poor people when they're older because of the amenities that Portland offers, all the transportation, the healthcare, all these sorts of things. And I understand all these targets for workforce housing and things like this, but in the 2010 census, where I live, the West End, that census tract was one of the oldest census tracts in the city and there were lots and lots of single person households. And how are these people going to be able to still stay here unless they're living in subsidized housing? People who maybe own their own homes or renting a department, but they have a fixed income, how are they gonna keep up? And lots of the, oh, assisted living or retirement homes and things like this, it seems that people that are living there or people who spent their careers out of state come here with lots of money to be able to afford those places where if someone chose, I'll take a personal example as a teacher, to teach in Maine, you top out very low and your pension is not impressive. If you teach in New York or Connecticut, then you can afford to retire here. If you spend your career here in Maine, lots of people are gonna be pushed down to Portland and be in a trailer in Med-Dubs. I think the age of the population is a real issue. And certainly I've seen situations where as part of meeting an inclusionary requirement or voluntarily people have looked at elderly housing as part of the mix. But I think we also have to have a conversation about how well fits into this versus incomes. And I think, I don't have a quick answer, but I think your point's a good one. Over there in the back, yeah. There's some local news from the other day on radio heard, it's gonna affect planners because it always seems to turn out where homeless people are used and exploited in order for the city to gain politically on this or that. And I speak more specifically. There was a news item about how there's some people on the rolls who are in the homeless shelter and they have these big bank accounts. And that's pretty disturbing for, I mean, for homeless people like myself because I understand that most homeless people don't have lots of money. And that's kind of been a brainer. And it's the first thing that I thought when I heard that on the news yesterday was, well geez, on the other side of the wall, who are some of these new consumers? Are they rolling in the money? And they're in the shelter to take advantage of homeless people who have poor sense and politics are censoring the hell out of us in order to make money. So I'd like to know, do you expect to profit politically from that news item? And I just want to also add that I've grown up from a real estate family to understand that the city and the public sector is always, at all, it's in the private sector. The far left wants capitalism to shut down and grow the public sector. Where's the tax office and come from? If all Uber planning is going to move in this direction only to be nicknamed by a good ol' governor low-page, do you expect there to be a sudden shutoff of state money that's going to affect your so-called two-pronged approach down the road? No, this is a short answer. And no, I don't plan to profit politically from this. I'm trying to do what's right for the community. I've been to Post-36 Federal Street. I was just wondering if people see any conflict in ideology between your objectives and those of the newly composed form-based code? Well, I think the form-based code has been thinking about this issue. I don't think that there's anything that is inherently inconsistent between the two. That's really more about the design of the development. This is really more about what types of housing units you might build in a building. But certainly it's a good point. I think we have to make sure these are all consistent with one another. The first thing comes to mind is just the density issue. You know, when you're limiting the density response. Yeah, no, I think it's a good point. I think we need to think that through in India Street. Yes? Yeah, Jim Devine, 696 Congress Street, and specifically I might ask you as a home source of justice. I'm particularly interested in what's known as supportive housing, that helps people get housing and deals with issues, besides economic issues, say mental health issues, various issues that people deal with. So I'm particularly interested in that and anything the city can do to promote that, more would be in my interest for our interest. Thanks. Yeah? Steven Sharpe of High Street. I've had a mantra. I was actually involved in the 2002 housing plan development back then. And since then, I've had a mantra that we need to build all types of housing for all types of people in all the neighborhoods of Portland. That means we need to best build affordable housing in every neighborhood in Portland. We need to build high-end housing in every neighborhood of Portland. And we need to build middle-income housing in every neighborhood of Portland. That's what that mantra. We actually, a group of us, took what the housing plan said and turned it into some numbers. And the city council didn't like it that we turned it into some numbers. And those numbers said that we need to build 4,200 units of housing in 10 years. We didn't make that goal. And we're not even close to that in now, 15, bless you, almost 15 years. One of the things Roseanne asked, how can we keep people in their homes? And the key way we keep people in their homes is by keeping the taxes down. By keeping the taxes down, we also encourage builders to build more housing, which encourages more tax incomes so that we can continue to keep our taxes down. For the city council continually raising the tax rate every year, we are defeating the purpose of that. And that is essentially the key to how we can keep housing being built in Portland is by keeping the taxes down. Thank you. Next. Yes. Betsy Rammage Healy from Peaks Island. We have a particular proposal, specific proposal to address some of Peaks Island's particular needs. Is that appropriate to make that pitch now? Sure, yeah. It's short. Yeah? In fact, we encourage your input that's aimed at concrete suggestions as to how we could approve the landscape of housing production and close the affordability gap. Because hopefully what you share with us tonight becomes actionable in short order if it ends up making policy sense for the city council. Kevin said to keep it short, so one page. I will sit for a moment though. Okay. So as you may know, it is an island and we have some particular needs. I work, I'm associated with Homestar. That's the affordable organization on, affordable housing organization on Peaks Island. And we own one property that, well, we have a large mortgage on one property. And when it became unexpectedly vacant in June, and we weren't sure what we wanted to do with it, we said, well, let's do a summer rental for a couple months because we know that that works on Peaks. And so while we figure out what we wanna do, we put one notice out on our island listserv and a little bit of what word of now. The basis of that, we got 12 responses of people who were interested in our house. But only one of those was somebody who wanted to rent it in the summer. Everybody else wanted year-round housing. And so that was year-round rental housing. That was an instance survey, if you will, that did bear out something we knew already, which is year-round affordable housing, rental housing is very scarce on Peaks because people can rent it out just during the summer and make more money. But that doesn't help people live there. So we got thinking, what can we do to help encourage year-round rental housing and not wanting to reinvent wheels that are already rolling along, looked into other places that have addressed this. And one place we found was Wellfleet, Massachusetts, which does have certain things in common with Peaks in that it's on Cape Cod and it's a very popular summer destination and they needed affordable housing for year-round real people who live there. And they came up with a variance that allows people to develop an accessory dwelling unit and an in-law apartment, if you will, to get a variance to do that on the condition that it be rented year-round and that it be rented at affordable rents. And they've been doing this, they've done that it's been going now for 14 years and they've had 16 properties over that time span. And looking at that, we would guesstimate that if we, Peaks is about a quarter the size of Wellfleet during the winter, you divide 16 by four and you'd say, well, you know, we're looking hopefully at getting about four units. This is a very modest proposal, but if we could get four units, that's four more than we have. And this is a free market, do-it-yourself kind of thing. But what we would need is to, or what we're proposing is the big limitation has been the size of the lots that are required now to build an accessory dwelling unit, which is for most of Peaks Island, 30,000 square feet. And that's way, way bigger than the house lots are. So what we would propose is to allow the properties be defined as the lots of record as of July 15th, 1985. If your house existed there, you could go forward with this. And that it would be focused on properties probably that had, were hooked up to city water and sewer just because of the expense. You're not gonna be building something that you can't charge a whole lot of rent on and have to expand your septic system. That's just not gonna happen. And then on the back, I lifted these directly almost from the wealthy variants just to give you an idea. I just think it's helpful to have something to respond to. So that's our deal. We would need to work out and we've had some preliminary discussions with Mary and some other people. I mean, there needs to be some sort of accountability and how to encourage people to do this. One thing that, two things that Wellfleet has had is a tax exemption for the additional unit. You're so as an incentive for people to wanna go ahead and spend the, you know, it's expensive to build. And so you don't want your taxes to go up if you're trying to break even or get a little money out of the deal. And they have also been able to offer no interest loans. So hopefully we can work something out and look forward to working with you. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks, thanks. And as I forgot to mention, we do have a handout that summarizes some of these materials. If we can just pass these around, we may not have made enough copies. Thanks, it's really helpful to hear suggestions like that that are really concrete that allow us to try to add to this mix because certainly a belt and suspenders approach is really what's gonna be needed. Let me just make sure no one else is, all right, you haven't spoken before. Go right ahead. Carl Zewinslow, Auburn Street. Following some of everyone's Stevens comments, I would like to see you looking at density increases in R5 and R3, particularly with appropriate safeguards, but in particular, in regard to basin parcels that might be in those neighborhoods that zone. Great, thanks. Yes. Christopher Hickey. I'm an owner at 14 Auburn Street and that's a great segue. I have a property that fits really well into that abandoned residential space category. I've owned it for almost 10 years and for almost a decade, I've been trying to find a way to utilize that space, bring it back into the residential building that's underutilized as an agreement. Ms. Schmuckle and Lawrence and we have Mr. Levine. Everybody seems to think it's perfectly reasonable, but there's no mechanism in the ordinance to achieve it. It's basically a four-unit, historically a four-unit building that's currently being used as two units with large bulk vacant space. So Mr. Levine suggested that I attach an affordability component to that and I drafted an ordinance amendment to that effect that would uphold pieces from different sections of the ordinance that I think harmonizes the proposal of public priorities. So I'd like to have you take a look at that. Great, thanks very much. And it's in the R5 zone. So it's one of the things that Mr. Levine suggested was that perhaps my property would affect from the events and bonus in the ordinance, the density bonus, the way that it's constructed with a 25% bonus really locks off anything four units or less because it's, I don't know how you get 75% of a unit have a Murphy bed or something. So for a two-unit or a three-unit or I guess in theory even a four-unit, there's really a lot of the current ordinance language that's seeking to develop additional affordable housing focuses on large-scale development projects. And of course that's where the meat of the housing standard is starting to come from but no, sure the Belton's suspenders mantra. I think that there's some opportunity albeit more reduced or infill development in some areas like the R5 and I hope that what I'm proposing there might be a piece of that. Great, thanks. Before I go to the next person, there is a sign-in sheet, I believe it's in the back corner next to the snack. Oh, it's being passed through. If you put your email on that, we will just, we will send one email to you. We are updating our federal consolidated plan for home and HUD money. And we would like to send a survey to folks if they could send it back to us if you're interested. It would help us understand the needs of the community. Obviously you don't have to respond to the survey but if you do put your email down, you will get that one email from us and then we'll try not to bug you. And someone out there hand up back there. Okay, yes, thank you. I'm John Gerwin, Harris Street. I certainly love the goals of the inclusionary zoning and I'm pleased to see you seem to be moving a lot forward with it. I thank for my own reading about it. It seems like there's some communities that have had great success with it and a whole lot of communities that have not implemented it well. So I caution you to move slowly and get it right but it is done right, I think it's a great thing. I just had three thoughts. One is to try to make sure that however the inclusionary zoning is raised, it incentivizes or in some sense for two and three bedroom units, two often are affordable units or one person, two person match and even in affordable housing there's an inability of families to live in this room. Second thought is that if you do allow buyouts whether it's paying into a fund or a developer or helping somewhere else, please make sure that the developments as a previous speaker said happened within the same neighborhoods. Rather than letting all the high-end development happen, say, on London Hill and through buyouts all the affordable housing goes to, say, Bayside. And my third point is ultimately we do need affordable housing as a stop-gap measure and there will always be some need for it. Ultimately we need more market re-housing in Portland. What the dollar value of market rate is will lower if more units are being brought in. So that's more of an end suggestion and a process suggestion but continue to encourage the development market again. Thank you. Great, thanks very much. I think you've been very patient for your second comment. Go ahead, Ed. Thank you. To follow up on a East Island presentation, I have a question which is has there been efforts to allow accessory units in my apartments for every single single family home? And if not, why? Well, there are some accessory dwelling unit allowances in the ordinance. I think that's something we need to take a look at and make sure that we're accomplishing other goals. They're not allowed in every place and there are conditions on them. Some of those conditions I think make sense but I think we need to take a look at that and say if you have an empty carriage house in the back of your building, maybe it's a very sort of low impact place for another housing unit. So I think we're gonna be taking another look at our ordinance requirements and try to right size them up but there are some allowances right now for accessory dwelling units. We're not producing very many of them. Are you in the questions with the city? Yes. Yes, Peter Monroe, 32 Main Street, West End. I believe I heard accurately and correct me if I'm wrong during the Community and Housing Development Committee meeting that when you received this report on workforce housing that even if you implemented all these measures or similar measures that you might well fall short of the goals that the city has set for itself to achieve affordable housing in all the levels of affordable housing that they're seeking. And in that case, my obvious recommendation without specifics, I don't have the suspenders available apparently, would be that you implement as many of these measures that you can and consider any other measures such as somehow transferring the low cost loans that you can get as a city to developers who would be developing affordable housing and so forth. I guess the other point I would bring up from the report, first housing report was that, yes, we're always in favor, in fact it's fascinating to see the first market rate housing come on board. We've got West End Place coming up in our neighborhood, which some of us are pretty excited about. And it is some of the first market rate housing that's gone on rental units that we've been built in our neighborhood. And on my street, apparently there's gonna be both a house and apartment building built on vacant lots that have been vacant for almost 30 years, at least, in my knowledge. But the report notes that the creation of more high-end housing will create a demand for services and people holding service-level jobs, which will increase the demand for medium-priced housing. And therefore, it is not a neutral, it's not a housing neutral proposal to allow a lot of high-end housing to be built, because you're gonna increase the demand on middle-class housing. So the race will be on to create more workforce housing as we allow the upper-end housing to go on, according to the report. So I would just urge that whatever measure can be taken to create workforce housing be undertaken. Thanks. Thanks. Yes. My name's Dana Totman and I work at Vesta Housing and I live at 32 Kenwood Street. And I just really appreciate what you're doing as a person foremost, but I wanna put another little lens on this to step back and sort of look at the state's housing affordability problem in general. There are 82,000 households in the state of Maine that are paying more than 50% of their income on housing. That's a big number. We have the oldest housing, we have the oldest population in the state and we're among the oldest housing stock in the state. When you put those three data pieces together, I think what it really says is we have a fundamental mismatch of what our housing supply is versus what our population needs. Our housing supply is not kept up as our population has aged, as our households have shrunk. So today, much of our housing tends to be in the wrong place, the wrong size, the wrong energy efficiency, and definitely has long accessibility to accommodate the seniors. So the only way we can really address that is about new housing. So I appreciate what you're trying to do here. I think at a desk, where we took a look at who came to watch last year, looking for housing, and we had a little over 3,000 people, about five was, we had 300 openings, so the other 2,700 are planned to come and wait for us. But I think the most notable thing that we have heard was the income of the 3,000 households, it's $13,400, so there are a lot of poor households in there. My estimate is about 30 of them were poor. So there's no shortage of really poor people. I think we also hear that Portland's poverty rate is 20%, while the rest of the state's there. The state overall is 13.6%. So we've had some real huge challenges here. So reacting to your proposals, I can quickly say, I support all of them. I think anything you can do to help with density helps. I think anything you can do, such as these zoning options to help, I think anything you can do to minimize parking will help. I think anything you can do to repurpose public building such as schools or public worksites in your affordable housing will help. So I support everything you are doing, but I think most importantly, I want to just say to you, it's definitely needed. Thanks. Are there comments, questions? Suggestions. Suggestions? Yes. I guess two, to the extent this forms on productivity and the IZ's, it says, affordability, but I think we're talking about IZ, really. With regard to, I'm sorry, Ethan, excuse me, Ethan Boxer, Malcolm Berglin, what happened? Thanks. Thanks. With regard to production, I just wanted to say that I applaud the things that have been done that are enumerated in this handout, such as upzoning certain areas. I think that the focus seems to me has been largely on peninsula and living on peninsula and attempting to do development on peninsula. I can tell you that there are tremendous unmet opportunities out there or unreachable opportunities. One gentleman here spoke to the R5, I think that's probably just one example. Accessory units, upzoning, by and large, I think my overall theme would be let's just commit to changing all the alternatives so that the beautiful fabric we have out there that would all value is legal, because there's so many of my neighbors cannot put an addition on their home to match what their neighbor has or have an accessory unit to match what their neighbor has because it's been zoned out of being legal. Also, in certain zones, there just seem to be egregiously difficult barriers in terms of different parking, that make it difficult to do really appropriately-scaled, mixed-use projects in some of these areas, like during center and so forth. So I think we need to not turn a blind eye to the peninsula. I think it's harder to stir up the mud and start talking about policy changes out there, but I think we need to do it. I think that's an important part of, like Stephen Shrupp said, making sure that this is happening across the city and not just on the peninsula. As much as I love everything that is happening on the peninsula. So I see, I too applaud the effort, I too have worked in communities that had preclusionary zoning ordinances. I saw it working very successfully, not quelling development, but like one of the other speakers says, I think it used to be approached very cautiously. The two things I'd say specifically is the draft document that we have on our hands here looks like a great start. It's a good starting point. It looks like it's very well thought through. But it's a legislative tool and there's a really big administrative burden and function that comes with an ordinance like this. So I, as a developer, my immediate thoughts are, who's gonna provide all the legal templates to document how these affordability restrictions are maintained on a rental? How the resell provisions are gonna operate on an ownership unit? And the devil is truly in the details because if not crafted properly, it's gonna disresent buyers and it's gonna scare away banks and nothing's gonna happen. So very important. It has to predate the legislation itself. Also, I'm a little concerned about the level that I see proposed for the in-loop payment fee. I think $100,000 a unit would probably kill just about any deal I'm looking at right now in Portland, not to be dramatic. But I think it's a high number. I think it's probably too high. This is a very difficult market to develop in. Construction costs are very high. Land costs are very high. Land in Portland is very challenging to develop on because by and large, a land that remains is, was never developed for a reason. And so to put yet one more barriers to development in Portland that can't, I'm saying the state has to appreciate it, but I think the level may be too high and I'm hoping that's a subject to future discussion. So. Thanks very much. Other comments, thoughts, particularly as I said, you know, I think we've heard some really great ideas for things to supplement these or to look at again, anything that says we should look at something else, we should change, look at changing one of these proposals. Those are really helpful. Obviously, any comment is also welcome. Yes. Oh. In back first and then your next. I adjust it out fun. That's the reason we stick it forward. I speak tonight as someone who's done two projects in Portland and voluntarily moved to Arizona and I did it on a condo project on Monroe Hill and a rental unit on Congress Street. And I did it because it worked my budget and those units were first to go. And it was really when I felt my responsibility to develop her in the city that I want to keep bringing reasons I felt was so important. And both projects made money. And so I'm very much happy to hear you guys are really thinking about this properly. And I know there hasn't been a lot of inclusion or it's only done in the city voluntarily, but I do do it and it worked for my part. I'm not saying that it's gonna work for every project, but I think it can. What I would encourage the city to do to make more projects happen when you or if you do put in a zoning court is you've gotta make the basket incentives real. They have to be simple and they have to be transparent so that it's not a guessing game on when you decide to do the 10% or when you're mandated 10%. It is very clear for a developer when they walk in why and what you're going to get for the trade off. And I think it's a good trade off that we do have inclusion or zoning in the city. So I don't think right now there's clear as they could be. I don't think they're as transparent as they should be and it's not simple enough going to what Ethan was saying that this has to be something that you just kind of have to check the box and make it as easy for developers to do. If you want us to do it and you have to really really step up your game to ensure that when we do the 10% it is simple as possible. Thank you. Thanks. Chris O'Neill from Portland Community Chamber of Commerce. As you know, we're convening, we were in the middle of a process of task force of interested stakeholders who are working on a very same issue. And as such, you're asking for concrete proposals and ideas and concepts. I have a great list in the making but you won't have it for a couple of weeks yet. That's okay, you've got a couple of weeks. Some of the things that we established kind of at our first meeting were that largely the development community and largely the chamber and they're not entirely the same thing are highly leery of inclusionary zoning from the get go. Of the four kind of proposals that our author has options for policy measures in the report that you got from GP Cog. As you pointed out, two of them have already been deployed to a degree, a third one is inclusionary zoning and the fourth one seems to be off everybody's table and that's rent control. There are people who will say that any effort at reform is a facto a rent control to a degree. That gets into a pejorative realm so we don't want to go there but that's out there in the community. But to the extent that the building community can meet thresholds that are definable and credible, they're asking what can you give me in terms of carrying down bearing where I think we're going to come out with this report that we'll share with the community, with you folks, is to bring forth these ideas that have more of a silver buck shot than a silver bullet approach. And in each measure that might shave one or 2% off the cost of a unit of housing, if we can package together 10 such measures, maybe we get 15 or 20% off the cost of a unit of housing, that will be largely our goal. We have already put several ideas and concepts onto the table, many of which have been mentioned tonight. Some have the disposition of public assets, et cetera, and the use of public assets, not just necessarily disposition thereof, but the use of them and other measures. But to wrap it up, we certainly appreciate the tension and time and the care that's going into this process. We have them back. Marcus Miller, Atlantic Street. This is what work you guys are doing. I appreciate it. I appreciate comments of many in the room that I've heard too. I just wanted to put out there that land is one thing that makes housing so difficult, so expensive, and any opportunity to remove an offset of land from the development of housing I think would be helpful. We look at removing a spring strip, for example, perhaps a narrowing of the Franklin Street corridor, maybe some other opportunities to capture, reclaim public land, and use that as a land base for housing under another strategy to consider. Thanks. How is this? Yes. I've been watching a housing important for quite a few years as it just seems like there has not been enough for the people who need it and the terms that they could afford it. And now I've gotten involved with the Meshcombe Community Land Trust, and we're looking at that with some of the best models for getting affordable housing that stays affordable. But I have a question. I was reviewing things on conclusionary zoning. I'm really happy to see them doing this, doing it kind of broad-scale, what communities doing this, doing it kind of broad-scale, what can we do to make Portland better? And we're not talking about a city that sort of has endless land, either the peninsula or even the larger city. It seems to me, you know, somewhat confined opportunities, so that there's not gonna be huge scale developments that are gonna create a whole lot of input on that inclusionary zoning. It's always gonna be a few at a time, it seems like. And looking at other models of inclusionary zoning, is there any time ever, we've got hotels and corporate offices and things. Is there any reason they perhaps under another name? I know there's more than one name for this type of zoning. Where their tax, their right to build would also include supporting. They need workers, they need people that can afford a great discussion with the guy with Schauderbeck and I can't say it. Fossil. I talked to him. Schauderbeck's a hard part. Yeah. Yeah. I can be Foss. You can't go to Schauderbeck. Yeah, you can go to Schauderbeck. When they had asked for support from CBBG and I was on the committee, I was like, he said, we have people that want to work. They don't have a lot of money but they have a regular job here. And so I just took all of it and wondered if there's, you know, some variations on the zoning as you're planning it at least. Sure. See, I think there's a model. I can't find it in my head. I think there is a model at least somewhere where they could be asked. Yeah, that's actually done in several communities around the country. It's called linkage payments. And what it, a linkage payment for commercial development. And what it's based on is exactly what you said, that commercial development needs workers. Workers need places to live and therefore for every square foot of commercial space you're building, there's a cost that you should pay into a housing trust. Boston uses it, Cambridge uses it, Sonorably uses it, a number of other communities use it. It's certainly something we should take a look at. It's not something that's on our list right now. But it is something that has been done in other communities. Yeah. Hi, Jim Brady, real estate developer here in town, press hotel across the street. Again, I want to thank the committee and the staff for very thoughtfully looking at this issue of inclusionary zoning and focusing on the need of workforce housing here in the city. One of the projects that I think really comes to mind is a project that I know the council has been very supportive of, and I would encourage you to continue to be supportive of, which is the Midtown Project, which stands to add, I think, roughly 440 units of housing to the supply here, a rental housing to the supply in Portland, which is one of the largest projects that's come along in quite some time. I think we've all heard tonight and would agree to concur with there is a lack of supply of housing in the market. And I just would encourage the council, I know it's mostly in the planning board's court today, but I'm sure it will come back to council likely with regards to ENS agreements and other things. So I would encourage you to continue to move forward with projects like that that have the opportunity to provide such a large scale of housing to help satisfy the demand that currently exists. Thanks. Yes. John Kamensky from Main Street. I agree with a lot of what's been said here tonight, but I want to shift the focus a little bit because we've been talking a lot about production of new housing. And I think I encourage staff and the council to look at how we can take the existing housing stock we have to introduce some of these elements and preserve housing as well. For example, I've heard anecdotally that a lot of housing units in Portland, I don't know how many, are being taken off the market as long-term rental and converted to short-term Airbnb-type rental. And that's as bad for the housing stock as taking you out and triggering a housing replacement ordinance. So what do we do about that sort of issue? And other component with respect to the existing housing stock, we'd be trying to figure out some ways in a way to provide an incentive to people who own larger properties now, who may be doing renovations or other things with the property to perhaps include an affordable unit or two in that property at the time that something is going on is a change in ownership or a change in renovation with respect to that building. Is there some sort of way to provide an incentive for an inclusionary zoning-like component to something that's not new production? Great, thanks very much. And I will say just in passing, the issue of these Airbnb-type uses is certainly something that we're taking a look at. It's on the work plan for the committee and I think we're all recognizing that there is an issue there. Don't have any recommendations at this point, but we all recognize we should take a look at it. The other comments or questions? Yes? Mark Abelson from Portland Housing Authority. I certainly want to support everything we've been saying here tonight that when anybody ever asks me what kind of housing needed, I usually say all kinds. It really doesn't matter. Large families, small families, SRO, supportive housing. You are reading this right now over 5,000 families, vouchers or public houses. The largest group on that list is people searching for zero and one bedrooms, small units, but there's certainly a large number of people who are family units as well. So across the board, all types of housing are needed. All those 5,000 people, I would say 95% are very low income and close to property. It really corroborates what Odessa Housing has seen with their weightlessness as well. I'm glad John brought up the issue of preservation. We own and manage a housing stock of about 1,000 apartments, all of those. About 95% built before 1977, all in a very tired shape. We've done a good job over those years, but they're kind of warm, if they're warm and safe, but they need renovation and preservation. And we'll be working on those for the next few years on that. We'll be spending a lot of resources, a lot of time and energy preserving those units as well. So anything the city can do to partner with us on preserving those units. We certainly need to talk to you about that. Thanks very much. Thanks very much. Yes. First of all, I've increased the density in our five and our three. In order to make that more acceptable and to maintain the fabric of the management requirements along the transit corridor density increases that preserve the fabric of those inputs, but also allow higher density and more exciting what people might consider radical designs along those transit corridors that can be a mixture of incomes and that can help workforce from coming from work easily on that road. Thanks. Yes. For an amazing 45 Eastern prom, just one other incentivization that I think might be worth looking at along with increased density is the element of more height in certain areas of the city to allow more units to be built on a lot. Pretty simple idea, but I think we just need to be a little bit more comfortable a little bit more height in certain areas. Great, thanks. Any other comments? I think we're running into a little bit of time, but I think we have a couple more minutes. Oh, yes. Thanks. When the rents were going up along farther street, a lot of artists had to move out of their studios I don't know what it was a couple of years ago, but it was really disinterested for a lot of people in the arts community because the presence of art studios in the downtown Portland area helps the economy and when the rents go up, you know, now we got it out. Things happen. But I was wondering, there's one reason why a lot of homeless people, a lot of people I've talked to, a lot of people I've talked to, one reason why they just don't want to get into the subsidized housing gig, sorry for my French, is that you go into these subsidized units, like in that one night of Valley Street, and you end up being researched like an insect and there's no normal city in one of these subsidized units. So why bother? Why bother going through the motions of the paperwork and the hoops? The behavioral management and being reduced to, you know, this height, we're all human beings and probably should not diminish that fact. So I was wondering, do you guys ever talk about civil rights of homeless people who are being subjected to all the research by the university for example and you're talking about homelessness and affordability, but what about US constitutionality of consumers? Because it's a real obstacle for people getting out of a shelter and then just subsidized housing. It's not a good situation to end up as a subsidized specimen, thank you. Thanks, and just briefly, income qualifications very simple, usually just requires showing either a pay stub or a W-2 form or a tax return. It's certainly something that's very straightforward at least in terms of how I've seen it implemented. Any other questions or comments? Suggestions, Kevin keeps asking for suggestions. And I see Bill Bernie's here from HUD, I just wanna say thank you for coming, I appreciate it. I got a $1,800,000. Well, we like it too. We've had a great relationship with HUD over the years. Marcos again, yes. For a similar, up-way apples to apples for $10,000 units. And I think it would just be a very creative approach for to have a design competition. What is going to shoot this stripped-down unit that we could build in Portland? And let's shoot for that, you know, and I know we've got a whole bunch of regulations that should be safe, habitable. So how cheap can we really build for? Let's put out a competition, let's say, habitably creative energy in the city and the community and see what we can come up with. Great, thanks. Yep, yes. If anyone has anything immediately relevant, they should build for us, mine is very general. But it's still your turn. Yes, I think you should. I appreciate it, but please go ahead. I often think of this peninsula as kind of a micro-couple in the world. Your name? Well, we're red ferrets. Finite space, lots of people. And it's becoming more and more clear all around that economics as the primary driving force has some major setbacks. And my suggestion would be for some kind of called a philosophical overview committee. So involve people who are really in charge of what they're doing, as well as other people now, to just inject new ideas. That's the part. I like to think of us as the philosophical oversight that we should take more applications. Great, thanks. Any other last comments or questions or ideas? If you think of anything after this meeting, as I said, we're hoping to have this broadcast on local cable access. You can email our office with any ideas. If you walk out of here to say, oh, I should have said this great idea I had, please feel free. There is time, as I mentioned to Mr. O'Neill. We are looking to move forward thoughtfully, but certainly this isn't something that's going to be happening tomorrow. I think over the next few weeks we'll be digesting a lot of these thoughts, going back to the Housing and Community Development Committee with some ideas. Obviously, we want to make sure that their ideas that work for them, at the end of the day, this is something the city council would have to approve. This is very helpful. I've learned a lot tonight. Thanks very much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. No, no, no. Thank you.