 I hope folks are still coming in, but we're gonna go ahead and get started because we have a lot of ground to cover in a very short period of time considering how much interest and how much work is being done on the housing front. So I'm Rebecca Kelly, I work in the governor's office. I'm the liaison to the Agency of Commerce and Community Development, which has the housing department in it. So I'm gonna just kick this off and turn it over to the group. Just wanted to let folks know we are trying to cover a lot of housing ground, both through our department for children and families and our department for housing and community development. So I'm gonna try to, these folks are gonna try very hard to stay on schedule. I might jump in and either open it up for questions if it looks like folks have them or move us along to make sure that we can cover both ends of this scale. We will, we are here to take legislators' questions. So we will be pausing periodically or if you wanna just try to flag, we'll try to find a stopping point to answer those questions. But we do wanna keep things moving. So if there are more in-depth questions or things that we can't fit into this, please connect with our office or with this team or others to answer your questions. For press or anybody, any non-legislators in the room, this really is a legislative briefing. We can also connect with you separately after the fact if you have other questions. So with that, I'm gonna go ahead and turn it over to the department for children and families. Thank you and welcome everybody. Dr. Harry Chen, I'm the interim commissioner for the department for children and families. And I'm here really tonight to kind of kick it off and turn over the briefing to senior policy advisor, Katerina LaVance. So I think, you'll learn tonight about some of the complexities of housing and you'll learn about what we at the department for children and families does in terms of our housing is primarily emergency housing in our general assistance program and also the transitional housing program. It was one of those, one of the programs that was stood up during the pandemic to really try to address the health and safety needs of this very vulnerable population. You'll learn tonight that we really, this is an all government enterprise and that we work with our partners in the agency of Commerce and Economic Development. You'll learn that we also depend on many partners in the field. These are the partners that actually provide the support to the individuals in the hotels, in the transitional housing programs and in the shelters because ultimately the goal is to both provide a safe and a healthy place for them to be but also transition them to permanent housing. None of this could happen without the partnerships of the community providers and the partnerships and the hardworking individuals at the department for children and families and the economic service divisions. Many of which are represented here. So at this point I'm going to turn it over to Katerina to provide this back. I have a lot of things in my hands but I'm going to stand over here. So to start, as Rebecca said, I'm going to go pretty fast. You do have the material in front of you. So I'll be saying some new things and some additional information for context but again, I'm happy to answer questions either at the end of this or later when we can connect. So what we wanted to first start with is what does homelessness mean or homeless mean? So DCF uses the US Department of Housing and Urban Development definition of homelessness, literal homelessness. So you can see on the screen what a person can be experiencing to fit this definition but I think what is most important to our work as a department within the agency of human services is that a person can enter homelessness for a variety of reasons. I think when we look at the root causes of homelessness, we look at economic instability, we look at challenges with the healthcare system and we look at untreated health issues and social inequities such as racial inequality and domestic violence. And then I would just like to underscore the presentation with saying the housing crisis is faced by all Vermonters, average Vermonters included. So when we think about finding housing for someone who is experiencing homelessness, it's often even more insurmountable for them. And then when you couple that with experiencing other challenges, social challenges or health challenges, that can seem even more difficult. So this is how many people or approximation of how many people are experiencing homelessness in Vermont. There's just under 2,500 households experiencing homelessness and that's over 600 children. So as Dr. Chen mentioned, DCF has leveraged many federal funding sources to continue to serve Vermonters experiencing homelessness. And I'd like to emphasize that over 2,800 households have exited homelessness into permanent housing since the beginning of the pandemic. So something that a lot of people feel is that it's a stagnant population that's experiencing homelessness right now in our state, but that's untrue because we know that that 2,800 households have exited to the permanent housing. And then just again, we are leveraging those federal funding resources and many of them are the coronavirus relief funds and that are winding down. So to go into a little bit about the programs that are serving people experiencing homelessness, DCF administers the transitional housing program, which serves just over 1,300 households in motels and hotels across the state. The transitional housing program was created to respond to the immediate increase in Vermonters experiencing homelessness exacerbated by the pandemic. The pandemic, this program serves households at or below 80% area median income. And most households are, so 90% are at or below 30% area median income. Our historic program in hotels and motels is the general assistance emergency housing program. This serves just under 500 households right now. And you have to meet very specific eligibility requirements that also come with a certain number of days that you receive those services. In the winter months, we do have an adverse weather conditions policy that expands that eligibility, which is why we're seeing a slight increase right now of that household served. And then the last one I just wanna talk about for services that are helping households experiencing homelessness is our emergency shelter network. So right now we have 28 emergency shelters, 23 emergency apartments, as well as domestic violence agencies accessing hotels and motels as well. DCF funds these programs, many of these programs for their services and operations around the state. And a big emphasis, which you'll see is that there were significant investments to increase staffing capacity and raise wages during the pandemic to support the staff that are serving households experiencing homelessness. The next few slides I'm gonna go through kind of quickly, but they give you a better idea of what people are facing in addition to homelessness. So you'll see that people being served in our shelter system are experiencing, a lot of them are experiencing chronic homelessness, have a mental health disorder, a substance use disorder or another disability. And the disabilities are self-reported. You'll see the trend over time. There was a steep increase in the data on the number of people experiencing homelessness in 2021. And that correlates with the beginning of the pandemic, when the data was collected, to when we expanded eligibility for our programs. So this information is collected at one point in the year in January of every year. So that's why you see the increase then. And then we're also seeing an increase in the number of days that people are experiencing homelessness. So in 2019, we had a low of 54 days, an average of 54 days a person is experiencing homelessness, where you'll see in 2022, we have 238 days. Why am I telling you this? Because DCF uses the framework of what is a solution or end to homelessness is keeping it rare, brief and non-recurring. So when we look at the number of days someone is experiencing homelessness, it's indicative of other pressures that people are experiencing to that exit, such as an affordable unit to exit into. But to also emphasize, how do we, what is the framework that we use to categorize how we move forward for ending homelessness? And that's this three legs of the stool to solving homelessness. So first, you need a unit. If you're going to not be homeless, you need a house to be in. You also need rental assistance to fill the affordability gap. Or often that's a housing choice voucher or some other type of rental assistance to keep you in that unit and paying your rent on time. And lastly is the supportive services. So these are individualized services to serve the household in that unit and to keep them in that unit. So when you see that someone might be having a mental health crisis or a substance use disorder, it's having access to those services as well. To talk about what we did over the COVID pandemic response is that we did stand up a lot of efforts to continue to serve individuals. So we expanded our Motel Voucher Program as you could see in the transitional housing program numbers. And that was initially the response to COVID to keep people safe and healthy in those non-congregate settings, especially at the beginning of the pandemic when we didn't know as much about COVID-19. We had alternative COVID-19 isolation and quarantine housing for people who experienced COVID for a place for them to be, to keep those other resources safe and healthy for the people who didn't have COVID. And then we've had additional supports for our shelter network. So there were regular calls with the shelter network to have on the ground support for them, training, supplies, rapid response, et cetera. You have the packet. Oh, sorry, this slide's like this, but this is to show how many number of projects and programs that we stood up over the course of the pandemic, mostly with federal funding to support these programs, to advance our efforts to serve this population. And one more. Once we determined that the federal funding would wind down during this fiscal year, we held a number of community engagement meetings across the state. And we had 14 meetings with housing partners and service providers. It was attended by almost 100 community organizations with over 300 attendees. I guess when you get the electronic copy, you can have the real link to the summary. But those meetings helped us determine how we're moving forward with a lot of our efforts. Keeping in mind that three leg of the stool, but also direct community feedback for what we should do next. And then I just wanted to talk about some of the strategies that we're working on right now. So when we talk about local collaboration and coordination, we have the homelessness healthcare capacity, building projects, which are linking DCF with VDH, the Vermont Department of Health, to coordinate care for these households. We are working on our coordinated entry process. Coordinated entry is the process in which anyone experiencing homelessness is connected to. And it leads them through the process, both to navigate services, but also to enter their housing unit. And we're sort of beefing up the efforts around that to both get people into that data system, but also how we as a state support that data system. Emphasizing some of those support services. Because again, when we talk about the three legs of the stool, that's an important part of that stool. We have a new coordinated care teams that the Agency of Human Services is supporting both the DCF staff, but also higher ability and a nurse from the Vermont Chronic Care Initiative that is going out to all of the hotels and motels and connecting with the households in those programs to both connect them to services, but also help them build that exit plan to permanent housing. We have housing stability services that is jointly administered by DHCD and DCF that's federally funded and supporting people who are experiencing homelessness or on the edge of homelessness. We have a new landlord relief program that's launching next month, which will be the first rental risk mitigation fund. So that's a fund to support landlords choosing to serve this population and giving them some extra benefits. And then as the governor addressed in his inaugural address, we want to address zoning and permitting barriers to expanding emergency shelters around the state because as our programs wind down because of the availability of federal funding, we want to make sure that there are other options for people to go into. And then I think one way to address homelessness is to never have it occur. So an important part of that is homeless prevention services. So this last month, we have additional funding in our housing opportunity grant program to prevent homelessness. So helping people who are at risk of homelessness have access to their back rent or their rental or rearages being paid. And then we also temporarily expanded the Vermont Rental Subsidy Program, which is administered by DCF, specifically for Reach Up Families. So Reach Up Families have been receiving rental assistance. You max out at 18 months. Some of them are coming to those 18 months but still don't have a way for paying for their rent. So we're making sure that they stay in their permanent housing instead of entering homelessness. We're also launching the Home Family Housing Boucher Program which launched this month and is going to serve about 100 families exiting homelessness. You'll see in the Budget Adjustment Act that we have an additional $3 million to support this program, to support an additional 150 households with children. And this is modeled after something that was funded by the CARES Act that helped 272 families with this temporary voucher. You'll get the electronic copy but I wanted to make sure that you had some access to some of the work that we've been doing in the past year, as well as the VHCB legislative housing presentation that occurred last month. And then this is just a helpful framework when you think about how we address homelessness. This was created in the roadmap to ant homelessness, which was the report that came out in 2016. And it gives you sort of these buckets to think through that we need to support around the state. I think I did that as quickly as I could but there's our contact information. And I guess I'll open it up to question. Is that, yeah, Rebecca, I'll open it up to questions. Were people from out of town or out of the state come in and take advantage of that? I think that becomes hard for us to quantify because when someone is eligible for the program, they have to say that they're going to stay in Vermont and that's our best piece of information. I think anecdotally, we can say yes, there are people coming from out of state but we don't have the data because that's not how the eligibility criteria operates because of a Supreme Court decision. Nicole or Andy, would you add anything to that? All your figures you showed today, I wondered, are we paying for homeless to stay in our hotels now? Is the state paying for that now or is that reverted to federal or just, or maybe we're not paying at all? Could you explain? No, I'm happy to shed more light on that. Right now it's all, or it's mostly federal, funding going to that. We're using the emergency rental assistance program funds which are funding six different programs in the state but it's a big bucket of money, it's $352 million but we have almost spent it all. So the programs will be coming, the specific transitional housing program will come to an end at the end of March. So right now it's mostly federal funding, there are specific eligibility requirements of that federal funding source. You can only have 18 months worth of funding. So for those who have maxed out those 18 months we do have some state funding that's supporting that but I think the vast majority, I would say 95% if not more is all federal funding. We're spending over $7 million a month. So that emergency fund you talked about is a federal fund? Yes, that's correct. Yes. Earlier in the slides the people having a homeless event, the shoot up in 2000 there, you had quickly mentioned something about like the criteria changing as part of that big jump and was that, a couple slides before that it said we use literal homeless category one, did we use a different category and that's more people qualified or what was it? So this was, the point in time cow occurs in January so the pandemic began in March 2020 so the next time that we did account was 2021. In March 2020 is when we expanded the hotel motel program to be more or less open doors as a public health response. So the next January was the first time we could count. So that's why this slide looks like a giant jump in 2021 but it's actually just the opening of that eligibility. I see you know other questions. I'm gonna pass it over to Alex. I have one. Oh, okay, yeah. The money that goes out goes out to nonprofit agencies. What's your plan or do you have any strategy to use? Like for instance, a builder who has an approved project in the town to build houses that doesn't have money to put the road in yet. I think that actually Alex would be the perfect person to answer that question. Yeah, so I think that there's a lot of creative solutions right now to build permanent housing and there's my segue. That's right, you did this Katerina. All right, hi, so I'm Alex Ferrell. The deputy commissioner of the department of housing and community development. The commissioner is right here, Josh Hanford. I often say that I'm his cover band and we'll see tonight if he thinks I do okay. This is Sean Gilpin right here, the housing director in our department. You'll see all three of our faces in the legislature from time to time. So what I'm gonna touch on here is I'm not gonna be able to hit all of our programs but I'm gonna talk a little bit about some of the approaches we're taking, the way we're thinking about trying to fund and develop housing right now and then what we have seen in particular through the pandemic response that we're gonna need to do in order to make sure we can continue to make improvements in alleviating the housing crisis even once this historic funding now goes away. So you can see up here I've got the department's mission and all that I wanna highlight in this, I'm not gonna read it to you, all I wanna highlight is you can see it takes a lot more than just funding houses and building homes in order to meet the housing crisis. There's a lot that goes into preparing communities for building and somebody just touched on infrastructure and we can talk about that a little bit more but that is one of the big barriers at times to building new housing is just getting the infrastructure in to allow for that. So communities really need to be thoughtful about how they invest and plan for housing into the future. Okay, so yeah, so setting the scene, how did we get here? And some of the scene was just set with Catarina's presentation of sort of how drastic this is, what we're facing but this is decades in the making and so the line chart you're seeing here on the left this shows building permits over time and so what you can see is that the last time we were really building at the pace that was meeting our needs was in the 80s and now the trajectory here you can see a little peak after 2000 but it continued to drop off and that's a large part of reflection of both state and local policies that were us Vermonters very intentionally put into place to curb development. The governor touched on this in his inaugural address where at a certain time maybe there were legitimate concerns about the pace of growth and so people were responding to that but we can see that's now put us in a situation where it is becoming impossible to meet the needs and so we find ourselves in the situation we're in and you can see over here this is the rate of change in housing supply. We are losing units and I'm gonna show you a slide in a second that shows you the age of our housing stock building new units is not necessarily going to equate to net new because the age of our housing stock we do lose housing units and Vermont has one of the oldest housing stocks in the country so this right here actually can show you how old our housing stock is so this biggest bar right here 1939 or earlier and so this is especially challenging in rural communities where we've got housing units but because of the age perhaps they're falling into disrepair it's harder to keep them up to code and these are units that we definitely need in order to house folks so we do have strategies in place right now that we're implementing to counteract that but this is just to say the rate at which we build new needs to take into account that we have an old housing stock and we lose units so talking about preparing communities for development preparing them for housing so municipal planning grants and the bylaw modernization grants you can see some numbers up here about the what we've invested in these communities the purpose here is just what I was talking about before we know that either communities don't have zoning or they have outdated zoning that doesn't necessarily enable or focus development where we know we have the resources for example if there's sewer and water and roads in a certain part of a downtown or a village that's where we should be focusing our development in a community and so in order to make sure communities are ready for that and developers can go in and they understand the process the process can be predictable we can go in with bylaw modernization grants and help them improve that zoning and this has been we have continued funding for bylaw modernization grants but you know 53 communities with that amount of money this is slow progress we need to keep doing this and this is incredibly impactful in preparing communities for future growth but this is very slow progress so while we are working at this problem of land use and improving our zoning we know that there's a lot more we need to be doing the state designation program so this is a really really good tool this aligns incentives this helps to alleviate some of the barriers to housing such as Act 250 so this when you hear downtown's village centers growth areas this is the state designation program and this is really really how we help to focus where we know we want to grow where communities are ready for growth this is how we can create some incentives and reduce barriers to building there so I'm gonna talk about a success story so this the pictures you see here from Bristol and this is sort of just a tale of how a community has really planned for growth they recognize the need to reinvest in their community and they now have it stopped so the first picture in the top left that's Bristol in 1979 and if you look at that downtown that might not necessarily be a place where you want to spend time where you want to open a business where you'd want to rent an apartment so Bristol through very thoughtful investment and sort of re-engagement with their downtown you can see now this is taken right before the pandemic and it's such a drastic difference but the years that I just mentioned right there I think are what's really important it took a very very long time and it took thoughtful focus on revitalizing their downtown so that's the amount of work that it took to get Bristol back to an energized beautiful downtown that we know it has now but Bristol hasn't stopped so what you see up on the top right this is a groundbreaking for some apartments on Firehouse Road, is that right? And so back in 2015, they came to us got a planning grant through our Vermont Community Development Program, I'm gonna touch on that in a second but did a feasibility study started planning for where housing could go a few years later, had a project on that site got funding through the Vermont Community Development Program a few other sources for VHCB, Vermont Housing Conservation Board and now it has broken ground on those apartments and so this is something that takes very thoughtful and intentional action over time I think somebody's calling us okay that's all right, good they didn't want anything so VCDP, I bet a lot of people in here have either seen VCDP project or have some experience with community development block grants but so Vermont Community Development Program is housed within the Department of Housing and Community Development so this is funded through HUD US Department of Housing and Urban Development through the Community Development Block Grant Program and so this is our sort of ongoing annual federal allocation that we get this is a program that we've had since the 70s and consistently funds between $7 and $8 million but just to make the point that this is a program that we really have to work with other funders and we leverage private funding in order to help development happen so the numbers you see up here is 6.1 million invested this is during program year 22 and then the private dollars that are leveraged as a result of that and that also is paired with Vermont Housing Finance Agency's tax credit low income housing tax credit it's paired with Vermont Housing Conservation Board so people utilize this program because it can really, you can use it whether it's for infrastructure for housing for a community space or for an actual housing project it's very versatile but funding and the funding stack can be really complicated and this can be a really crucial tool so now just touching on an example of a success story that CDBG and the Vermont Community Development Program was involved in so I talked before about how VCDP could be used for both planning and then actually investing in a project and that happened in Bristol and now this is a story about Putnam Block down in Bennington and while they didn't use VCDP for a planning grant this was very intentional action by Bennington to focus on Putnam Block which is right in the heart of their downtown very visible and really a reinvestment in the Putnam Block, this four acre section was a reinvestment in the entire town of Bennington and so this required 17 different funding sources it had money from our program from VHFA had money from VHCB all of our major housing partners as well as several other it's in an Opportunity Zone so it leveraged private Opportunity Zone funds but this is what it takes it takes very intentional action and forethought by the municipality and years later it became a tremendous success story but enabling and the municipality planning for this revitalization took a very long time it took a lot of work and it took very intentional action and in many cases to undo what had been done in years past so this is a couple examples this is not every housing program we have that directly funds the development of housing but this is a couple items and two of these are fairly new one's very new so on the top left one of the incentives that I was alluding to before with our state designation programs the downtown and village center tax credits this is a huge source of this tax credit leverages a ton of private funding and if you go to downtown St. Albans you can see that's one example of where there's tremendous benefit from tax credits in that designated downtown now over here so Vermont has an improvement program this is directly funding unit creation but it happens in a very different way than we typically see when it comes to creating portable units so firstly I'll just point to the number that you see up here actually I believe Shawn now is 408 right okay all right so that's right so anyway almost exclusively focused on the creation on rehousing folks out of homelessness and this is happening at see the average cost here $31,000 per unit this is a program focused on bringing back online units that have fallen out of disrepair or creating an accessory dwelling unit so this 31,000 is more significant than it might might appear at a time right now when we're seeing new unit creation anywhere from 300,000 400,000 500,000 for a single unit even in a multi-unit building to be bringing units back online at $31,000 a piece and focusing on rehousing folks out of homelessness housing refugees that is a tremendous tool that we now have in our tool belt a new program that's it's still in the pilot phase and it just started accepting applications the missing middle home ownership development program so this came out of the recognition that there's a there's a math problem right now in developing single family homes and what that math problem basically is that we cannot build affordable homes for the moderate income person somebody making around the median income for an area now we we focus so many of our housing funds on folks that are low income you know it's sort of a loose definition we could just say 80 percent of the area median income or below oftentimes focus on extremely low income which is far lower than that but that is only helping one one part of the housing spectrum and if we're going to solve this crisis we're going to make it need to make sure that we don't choke off a certain part of that spectrum and so this in addition to continuing to fund things like shared equity or or serving folks at 80 percent or less of area median income this is a program that is helping not only to fund development but also subsidized buyers up to on a sliding scale just over at the median income this is a recognition that for workforce development for the sake of allowing you know our population to continue to grow we need to fund all parts of the income spectrum when it comes to housing and helping to get those folks out of rentals and into home ownership so I'm just going to touch on VHIP again real quick because what's great about VHIP is that you know while it it's a tremendous tool in all parts of the state you can see sort of it's it's achieving this more geographic equality because in a place like say the northeast kingdom southern Vermont where there might be housing stock sitting there but it's empty because it's all out of code this is a tremendous tool now to bring those units back online get somebody living in those units now we don't have a downtown with just empty housing sitting there so you can see the how this has spread out across the state and you know just the fact that Chittenden is not the largest in this list I think says a lot about how this tool has been used across the state to fund private property owners and bringing units back online okay so and you know I just I just kind of want to recap you know where where we came through and what our focus is going to be going forward so you know I touched on some of the the proven tools the tax credits Vermont Community Development Program these are ongoing tools that we know we can use to fund housing they have a proven track record and we do continue to bring in units online but we also have new new ways to approach rehousing folks one of them being VHIP and this with the efficiency that VHIP is operating at you know this extremely low average cost per unit this is a this is a tool that to be able to continue to fund that and to continue to invest in rehabbing this aging Vermont housing stock that we talked about before this is a way that we can really unleash a lot of this this housing especially in parts of the state that often don't see that investment to be able to focus on middle income housing where we often don't see federal or state dollars go to help make sure those folks can get into home ownership that's a tremendous tool through the Missing Middle Home Ownership Development Program and I think it bears recognition that rental units are also a tremendous tool for bringing middle income folks here that need to be able to live near where they work you know a model like that like the Missing Middle Home Ownership Development Program but for developing rental units I think there is a tool in our toolbox that could be added that could really help make sure that employers are able to bring folks here work good jobs and make sure they can find housing that actually you know is within the income thresholds so that's something that I think we should really focus on looking forward but then this bottom slice of the pie is where I think we really need to look look at ourselves and just recognize we just had historic funding the governor alluded to investing over half a billion dollars in housing over the last few years and we created or preserved 5,000 less than 5,000 housing units and that's great that's tremendous but with all that funding that wasn't enough we weren't able to meet the need with all all the funding we could have ever imagined so that has told us that is a test case that has proven that we need to do something with our land use with our local zoning to make it so that we can enable more of this development so we can let communities plan and develop going forward you know I think I said before it was very intentional the actions that we took over time to make sure that housing did slow down so it's going to take really really intentional and thoughtful and direct action to make sure that we undo that I think that that is it I want to put contact info up here and then we're happy to take some questions just elaborate on how the ARPA package including things like wastewater was part of the effort to prepare communities for what the infrastructure they need for housing development yep yep so some of the funding through ANR as well as through our sister department department of economic development has specifically targeted wastewater and other infrastructure to allow for additional development which those constraints often can stop a housing project one because they're so cumbersome to invest in and two because there's not always a clear tool for that investment so one of the newer programs that is housed within the department of economic development this is CRRP the community revitalization and recovery program so this is an economic development program but with recognition that additional housing is really an investment in economic development right now the DED has included housing as one of the components that they're going to be investing in as well as assistance to municipalities to invest in infrastructure both of those are going to be incredibly useful tools in terms of enabling housing whether it's directly funding the the housing project itself or just investing in the infrastructure that's going to support the housing and and just to say you know another tool that has been used TIF at times can be a really useful tool in terms of creating the funding for that infrastructure and whether you know there becomes an opportunity for project-based TIF that you know that that could allow for project-specific investment in infrastructure but TIF as it exists now has been a useful tool in creating housing in terms of new or renovated housing require that would include geography and income levels and are you tracking new and renovated housing and housing that's provided by employers or colleges yeah so I think there's a couple components to that to that question I think one of them is sort of the geographic distribution of new units you know when it comes to sort of tracking new units outside of those that we are partners invest in or have some investment in a project we may not necessarily capture all unit production aside from being able to track building permits that has a little a few year lag so we might not know all unit creation from this past year until later this year you know as far as sort of geographic equality and making sure that we're having an equitable investment across the state that is top of mind for for the governor in terms of making sure ARPA funds are invested across the state but beyond that we you know Department of Housing and Community Development we are constantly meeting with VHFA, Vermont Housing Finance Agency and the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board who are the other major funders and we discuss exactly this who's funding what projects where are we funding them where have we under invested where are their projects that need additional help because of where they're located so you know as far as specific number goals I you know I think we really just look at equitable distribution of investment and you know we have at different points set specific goals for housing creation I don't know Josh do you want to touch on any part of the challenge is we can't meet those goals with just the public investments we have the private market needs to work and solve some of this problem and it's out of whack before the pandemic our housing needs assessment we do want every five years to get our federal funding from HUD that supports the emergency solutions grant program the CDBG program the home program the VACD administers and several other requires us to go and do basically a needs assessment of the housing stock rental home ownership every five years and at that point in 2019 we needed 5,800 new units just to meet the current demand I would guess we'll probably at 10,000 units at this point because we've had you know nearly 5,000 new residents move into the state but I think what we're experiencing is despite half a billion dollars and that's just housing construction dollars there's probably another half a billion for support services rental assistance we're not able as as as the public to fund every single unit of housing we need it needs that the market needs to work to and that goes to that underlying issue of our communities need to be prepared with water sewer roads broadband plan for that help support it through all the different programs that exist so the new housing can be built and our land use regulatory both at the local and state level have to be more welcoming for housing development because right now there's many barriers and costs that make that market response not work we're not alone in this there's other parts of the country that are experiencing this but we had a cost analysis of our housing done also right for the pandemic that showed that Vermont's cost to build housing was rising faster than our other New England states so this has been brewing for a long time and to touch on the logic that led us to the creation of the missing middle home ownership development program when it's costing about four hundred thousand dollars to create a single family home that's a modest home two or three bedrooms that you you would think would be aimed at something somebody making about the median income of the area but you can't sell it for what it costs you to build it or to develop the land that's just there's a gap right there in that market and so yeah this pilot program is is one step in seeing can we meet that need by helping to fund the creation of these units as well as the purchase but it's clear we're never ever going to be able to have enough money to put into that program to be the only solution it's got to be a tool but we've got to really be able to unleash all the the private investment and allow development to happen in thoughtful ways so over here so so based on that comment and based on the commissioners comments a minute ago um you know u.s. economy is basically a supply demand response environment so what's inhibiting the private industry from investing in these programs in this construction without state incentives i think there's always going to be a role that incentives are going to play in certain types of housing but there's also a very clear role that land use and zoning has played in in getting in the way of these things because in order for a certain project to pencil out perhaps housing needs to be more dense densely built or more concentrated in the specific area but if zoning doesn't allow for that the the type of building that will currently only be the type of new units that will create the positive cash flows needed to actually build it well then we're just not going to get the building a a a builder can always rely on public funds to come through to make up that difference we can do our best with it but we just had more public housing funds than we're ever going to have again and that still didn't quite do it yeah i mean we're a scarcity you know situation right now in our housing stock so it's driving costs up whether it be rents or you know homes for sale people at the top are still finding a home to get built for them but with those numbers it literally cost you more to build a home than the average family that earns a hundred percent of very immediate income can afford by over a hundred thousand dollars i'm talking a two-bedroom ranch it's so out of lack that we need some supports in the system to make that possible and we need longer term changes to our building environment in this state one of them being regulatory another we need you know more workforce you know we need uh there's lots of things that the five ls of building a lot of those are out of whack right now some of them are temporary you know as far as cost of material and the cost of labor but a lot of them have been here for a long time and so the main point is we can't just throw money at this problem and expect we're going to solve it we've got to do these other things that are foundational and structural to how we got here so so my previous question um if if i had a building that um had a project that was approved been approved for 10 or 15 years hasn't been able to start it because it doesn't have the money to put the road to get it started is that something that you people would be interested some yes i mean i've talked to many of those builders that they literally have a parcel they need to put the infrastructure in themselves because x city or town no longer does that as part of their sort of municipal management and so they're looking for funding so we have probably five or six different sources you can go to to get some of that some of it does come with a lot of strings and it takes a lot of lead time um but if you have someone that's in that situation we certainly can try to direct them to where our sources are to help i think what Alex was saying is DHCD does not have some of that big investment money um we have the VHIP program we have this federal community development block grant program which municipalities can apply for to put the water and sewer and roads in to help but it's it's it's a fairly complicated federal program and then there's VHCB which has large sources of funding they're often not funding the infrastructure usually that's part of that housing development cost and that's part of what's driving the cost up so much is that these properties aren't development ready and so you have to bring all that infrastructure cost in at the same time and absorb those costs in the unit why one of our strategies is to look at our existing housing stock that same housing report that I said the housing needs assessment said that there was about 19,000 units in Vermont of housing that were in poor quality likely partially vacant or abandoned didn't meet code so that's low hanging fruit you know that we should be working on before we spend $400,000 per unit to build new we ought to get a production of what we have as existing housing stock back in use but you're right that is a challenge that I hear from many developers that they're in that exact situation and they're trying to piece together the funding and we're trying to show them all the sources with this new money but it takes water and sewer money wrote you know there's so many different pieces to pull off a new neighborhood development we have actually a pilot right now which is it's only a million dollars but it's a competition where we're hearing from developers we're inviting them to a roundtable with all the funders and the regulators at the table having them pitch their project then give them feedback because we're going to award this million dollars in the spring and it's not enough but it's to prove the exact concept you're coming up with that we need a more coordinated way that figures out infrastructure and housing all those investments that are needed to a more coordinated process to award the funding so it can speed up this development so we'd love to hear the name and we can try to get involved in that problem yeah and that that pilot it's a it's a million dollar pilot it's it's called the neighborhood partnership here we might have changed it but the neighborhood partnership pilot and uh yeah the idea is if we if if you can choose an area where it's it's ready for growth and then all resources infrastructure housing funding uh tax incentives if those can all align can you truly develop a neighborhood yeah and aot for example is on this panel yeah and they currently in their planning they don't have a lot of new new money for new little roads and to develop but this is teaching all of us what we need and how we may need to look at um asking for budgets differently going forward how we need need to think differently about our investments if we're going to meet this housing need well given that in the probably beginning of the eighties my regulations were explicitly designed to stop growth and a lot of those folks are still with us today so you have a strategy on how you go about changing the sense I have a feeling the next couple days are going to hear some proposals to address those but yeah I mean from from our perspective um we can we can continue to chip away with bylaw modernization and municipal planning grants but that's like I said going to be one community at a time and I think there's a wide recognition amongst all of us that uh fairly large change is going to have to happen and we need to make sure that legislation focuses on that on on sort of helping to remove some of those barriers that were very intentionally put in place all right well now we've got to very intentionally remove some of those barriers and so um you know I think that's going to be statewide land use needs to be consideration I think in in terms of what the state permits for zoning in communities throughout the state that needs to be under consideration so um yeah I mean just as an example you know there's a lot of offices that are empty right now there's a lot of schools churches those buildings that we could change into housing but just just because they exist they don't get a free pass on our regulatory framework they're going to have to be a change of use through act 250 through zoning all those out barriers cost time yet we're looking at an empty building that's already has parking has broadband has water and sewer and so we need to think smartly about unwinding some of these things it doesn't have to destroy the environment you know when you look at act 250 the 10 year 10 units within five years within five miles triggers act 250 that was clearly established to reduce housing development and so we have to look at how to unwind that smartly not to encourage poor investments all over the hillside that require new broadband and new roads and all that but let's put them where we want them and get rid of those barriers um that's that that is ultimately what Vermont needs and frankly we're behind our other neighboring states Maine New Hampshire have passed legislation encouraging this sort of development in dense areas the federal governments just passed the yes in my backyard act which is going to be nationwide competition for funding for development but it's contingent upon you having land use practices that support housing not prevent it in the right and support it in the right places so we've got to catch up and and you know even where we've made attempts at trying to create pathways through act 250 which happened good but you know just for example within the state designation program we have certain certain pathways to help either expedite or exempt from act 250 the priority housing projects which if if your housing project meets certain criteria and are within these designated areas growth center downtown or village sure um you you can be exempt from act 250 but even that we've decided to cap based on a community's population so rather than acknowledge that okay this meets all the criteria it's a priority housing project and rather than allow the community and the developer to determine what the need is for that community we're capping it and we're saying if you create more housing than this cap now you've got to go through act 250 even though it's in an area where we already decided we want growth we've invested in the infrastructure for growth we should be enabling and encouraging growth so that we don't sprawl more broadly outside of the built infrastructure but we're still capping it it's left um so any any remaining questions just connect with us units that we built in the past couple of years and what percentage of those units are occupied by the target population do you have any idea on that so with the funding with the affordable housing investments we've made there are we're predicting we're going to uh produce 4 000 units of affordable housing with about a third of them designated to folks exiting homelessness not all those are built yet about half of them are built um but that's just our public investments there's other housing going on that's being built out there but it's not going to those least uh you know those at the most affordable um they're not going to those that need the most affordable house so that's why we're injecting this funding but we need a lot more than that and that is triple we've been producing three times as much affordable housing over the last three years than we did prior to the pandemic with all this investment how much is occupied we've got 4 000 units of 2 000 has been built and is occupied our time um so I know there might be a lot of lingering questions the contact information for everybody is on the handouts if you haven't had those yet Amanda has them for you um and we're happy to answer your questions give you more information um throughout you know throughout the week throughout the session however we can help on this topic thanks for coming yep