 No, you're not at all. Okay, I just want you to know that. See you there, that was a long time ago. I'm sworn in, like, it's going to be a look at year on a personal benefit. Good evening, everyone. I'm going to get started. We don't have microphones, so if anyone needs us to speak up, just let us know, and we will try to project a little bit better for you. My name is Heather Carrington. I'm the Community and Economic Development Officer for the City of Winooski. And in that role, I serve as the staff liaison to the Housing Commission. So on behalf of the Housing Commission, I'd like to welcome you all, and thank you for being here for our Housing Policy Discussion. The Housing Commission over the past was stood up about a year ago, and over the past year, we've really been charged with looking at goals in alignment with the strategic vision for the city. Primarily, we've been looking at ensuring that we continue to be an affordable city for housing, so that we have a mix of high-quality, safe, healthy housing for people in a variety of different formats. Over the past year, we've looked at a lot of data and got a sense of what the current conditions are. And as a result of that analysis, we've identified some of the gaps in the housing in our community, and thus far the Commission has recommended that we put in place replacement ordinance for housing, and also an affordable housing trust fund. And the next thing that we're going to be considering at our next meeting, which, by the way, they're all open to the public, and they're held on the 4th Monday of every month, so please join us if you're interested. We'll be looking at inclusionary zoning or IZ at our next meeting. So we thought it would be a good time to really take a moment to educate ourselves in the community about the ordinances that we're considering, about the policies, about the incentives that we could potentially be using. And we pulled together a really whiz-bangin' panel of experts over here. So we're lucky to have the panel that we have, and we have, I can just look over there and say, I know there are decades of experience over there. I'm saying that you're very experienced and we're grateful to have you here, Eric. I just want the old white guy's panel. I also, because not everyone can come out for an evening meeting, we are live streaming this meeting. So anyone can watch it from home. It's being streamed now, and it also is being recorded. So it's available for people to watch later. So I think it's important to get a lot of questions on the table and have that information available for the community. So if people are interested who are watching at home, please feel free to come into the next housing commission meeting and share your opinion with us. That is going to be on Monday, the 22nd of October. So I'm going to just briefly introduce the panelists that we had tonight. We have Michael Monti from Champlain Housing Trust, Ehrhardt Manke, who has to sit next to him, apparently, which was a problem. He's from the Bromont Affordable Housing Coalition. Brian Pine and Todd Rawlings are in different... Brian Pine is the city counselor for the city of Burlington. Todd Rawlings is with CEDAO, the city of Burlington, and Eric Hochstra from Redstone. The discussion tonight will be a targeted look at the policies and tools that the Housing Commission is considering. It will follow a Q&A format and with the panelists taking questions from the audience. But to start off, I'd like to have each panelist introduce yourself, the organization that you represent, and what you've been working on primarily with housing recently. And I'm going to start down at the end with Brian. Sure. Thanks. As Heather said, I'm Brian Pine. I'm a city counselor in Ward 3, which is the western half of the old North End, but it goes all the way down to King Street and it covers the waterfront as well. So it's a pretty broad and diverse part of the city. For currently, I work at the Vermont Energy Investment Corporation with a focus on removing financial barriers to greater energy efficiency generally in affordable housing. So it's a position which brings my background in affordable housing from 18 years at CEDAO. Most of that time I was the assistant director for housing and was responsible for carrying out the policies that the city adopted in the 1980s primarily and the 90s somewhat. But both the policies and the programs of the city were my responsibility. Prior to that, I worked as a director of lending at a group called the Vermont Community Loan Fund where I was on the financing side of affordable housing. And interestingly enough, most of the work I did after college, but before having a real job, was political activism around the housing issue. And so many of the ordinances I ended up having to implement were ordinances that I was involved in organizing and petitioning the city council to pass. So it just so happened that I was that person who ended up being able to do that. I'm Todd Rawlings. I'm the housing program manager for the City of Burlington Community and Economic Development Office or CEDAO. For the 18 years that Brian worked there, I worked for Brian for 13 of those. My current position is the housing program manager. So I administer the Housing Trust Fund as well as the Inclusionary Zoning Ordinance for the City of Burlington. I dabble in the replacement housing ordinance as well. In addition to those things, I manage the affordable housing dollars for new development that the City of Burlington gets. Hi, I'm Michael Monti. I'm the Chief Operating and Financial Officer of Champlain Housing Trust. Brian has reminded me that it's now 11 years that I've been doing that job. Prior to that, I was often on involved with CEDAO for about 19 years and a little consulting in the middle. Champlain Housing Trust right now is probably the largest nonprofit in the Northwest Vermont. We serve three counties, about 3,000 apartments, 600 plus shared equity homes, a lending program, counseling and education program, and we do everything from homelessness to home ownership and in that range of activities. Right now, we have 136 apartments going up in two different locations which is a decent amount thanks to a state bond, but we need more state bond money just and we'll have a press conference tomorrow about that, promoting and pushing for additional state funds. That was able to happen because of state bond. We have been welcomed to the City of Wynusky again to do some more work and so we're talking about how we can work within the City of Wynusky a little bit more robustly. I think we just bought 105 units on Dorset Street and we're looking at buying more of those kinds of projects called NOAA, naturally occurring affordable keeping the middle income and so called workforce housing and housing which does not get wherever and don't get pushed out. I think I'll stop there because I have a long list. Thanks for coming and thanks for having me on the panel. My name is Ehrhardt Monk, I'm with the Vermont Affordable Housing Coalition. As Heather mentioned, my primary work there and I've been working there for probably close to 20 years now is to do a lot of advocacy at the State House around affordable housing issues. So I follow the state budget very closely. We have organizationally about 80 members that are mostly organizations like Champlain Housing Trust, CEDO, Community Economic Development Office in Burlington, Vermont Energy Investment Corporation. So these guys all work for organizations that are also members of our statewide coalition. Follow the state budget, follow housing policy on a statewide level, follow a lot of different housing legislation, having to do not just with affordable housing but because housing is central and foundational, branches out into domestic violence issues, homelessness certainly, mental health, because everybody needs housing, needs affordable housing, stay stable and affordable housing to succeed in their lives. Before working for the Affordable Housing Coalition, worked for a nonprofit that created low-income limited equity housing cooperatives, many of which now are operated or managed by the Champlain Housing Trust in the area. And before that I actually worked for the City of Winooski for many years. I started off as a housing rehab specialist for the city back in the early 80s and eventually became Community Development Director. So worked for Winooski for somewhere around 8 or 10 years. Rehab, I think a couple hundred homes, existing homes of low-income residents, both home ownership as well as rental housing. And then was also on the City Council during the 80s in Burlington and the ordinances that we're discussing tonight, inclusionary zoning, housing replacement, housing trust fund, were all created during my tenure on the City Council. Not that I was responsible for them or anything, but just help work on those and actually started working on them when I was a Planning Commissioner in Burlington in the early 80s. And the district I represented was the one just across the river where I've lived for about 40 years now. Oh, I was on the City Council too. Yeah, I love that. Thanks for that morning. Thank you. I'm Eric Hochschah. I'm the Managing Partner at Redstone. We're a real estate development and management company based in Burlington. We've done a lot in Winooski. We own the building next door that we're trying to figure out what to do with along with what used to be the Peking Duck House is now the Millhouse Residential Complex. We've got 110 West Canal Street where Chittenden County Regional Planning is based. We've got River House and River Run down near Spinner Place and the new side of downtown. We bought the Winooski Block last year and been renovating that building and a couple of other buildings on East Allen Street. We've got a big warehouse down on Elm Street and I'm sure I'm missing something. We love Winooski. We've done a lot of work here and we hope to continue to do more and more work here. I personally live in the Old North End in Burlington. I feel very close to Winooski. It's a very similar community to where I live. I'm here almost more frequently than I am downtown on my personal time. So as a managing partner at Redstone, I kind of manage everything we do on development and property management side before working with Redstone. My first job in Vermont, I was working in development at Housing Vermont, a non-profit that partners with groups like Champlain Housing Trust, building affordable housing all over the state of Vermont. They do low-income housing tax credit syndication as well, which is a really complicated financial instrument that helps build most of the affordable housing that we see statewide. So I come from the affordable housing world. I understand that stuff pretty well, but also have the market rate for profit experience. Great. Thank you all. I'd like to introduce a few people who are here tonight before we get started. First of all, this is Robert Millar, who is the chair of the Housing Commission, and he'll be your facilitator for this evening. There are other members. Actually, a really good turnout from the Housing Commission here tonight. So it could raise your hand. I'm going to call your name. Bobby Arnold is here. Leslie Black Plumeau is here. Mike Oler is here. And Anna Wagling is here. Did anyone else sneak in that I didn't see? Oh, Jessica Bridge. I'm sorry, Jessica. Also, we have Mayor Seth Leonard here and counselors Christine Lott and Eric Covey. So thank you for being here tonight. And I think we have someone from the Planning Commission. We have Palace Support in here as well. So thank you for being here, all of you. So this is going to... I'm sorry, who names? Oh, it's going to be a Q&A. So if there are questions in the audience, please feel free to raise your hands and we will call on you and have the questions answered for you by our panel. All right, I'm going to start with what I think are some basic things that we should cover in this kind of a conversation. What are we talking about in the first place? What is a replacement ordinance? So I think probably I'm going to go City of Burlington with that just because you have a replacement ordinance. And if you could speak to that a little bit, basically what does it do? What doesn't it do? What's it there for? I think the intent of the ordinance is to ensure that any time a residential unit is removed either through the conversion to a commercial property or demolished, that the owner of that property essentially needs to make restitution to the Housing Trust Fund, which will help in the creation of a new affordable unit. That's, broadly speaking, how it works. In terms of the amount that actually is triggered by that, it's a fairly complex calculation, but it's not something that we see a huge amount of in the City of Burlington. We see a couple of, since I've been involved with that ordinance, I think we've seen it three times. And the most recent time that we saw it, the payment was about $25,000. So it's not anywhere close to being what it will take to create a new unit, but it does provide some important subsidy through the Trust Fund. I would just add that the ordinance was, in response to the conversion of lots of buildings that were residential to non-residential use, is somewhat demolition, but more the conversion side. And it was intended to really be a disincentive, a little bit of a stick in the marketplace to say, yeah, if you're going to remove housing, we want you to replace it. And if you can't replace it, we're going to require it to pay to the Housing Trust Fund for someone else to replace it. And it had a bit of a chilling effect, which really was the intent. The council was pretty clear about that, that the ordinance was intended to really hold on to our limited housing supply, recognizing it's really difficult and expensive and with limited land and all the challenges of building new, we should retain as much housing as we have and not allow it to be lost, even due to other market forces. So it really, it wasn't intended to generate funding for housing, but that is what ultimately is the penalty for it. I have a question for that. So when you replace the ordinance, do you replace the ordinance just within the house or does it have to be affordable? Well, I think since it goes to the Housing Trust Fund under the ordinance, and the Housing Trust Fund has a priority for permanently affordable housing, then I think the effect is that it goes... But if you're a private owner who does the removal, you need to replace it with actually a unit that is affordable to households, spelled out in the ordinance, it's 65% immediate. So it does require you to get into providing affordable housing that you may not have been providing before. And that's actually a requirement is it can't have been an affordable unit for the previous, I think it's two years, I'm losing track of the exact details. But it's for some period of time, it cannot have been an affordable unit. And you could actually go to the Burlington Housing Authority as an owner and say, I'd like to make this a Section 8 apartment and that would qualify. So that's sort of one way to deal with that. Part of the background for this was, there were a lot of pressures in the 80s from the institutions, mainly the University of Vermont. And University of Vermont was buying up property in the district that I wound up representing and taking residential, existing residential property off the market. It's not always affordable, but it was residential. And we had and still have an affordable housing problem in Burlington. And so the idea was really, as Brian said, was to try and create a disincentive. And it wasn't just the university either. There were streets emanating from the downtown Central Business District that were being, residences were being bought up by lawyers' offices and by law firms and converted into law offices as well. So the idea was to try and prevent some of that from happening and prevent an erosion of our already challenged housing stock. Can we just stop talking? Yeah, just start talking. Yeah, feel free. So this is an incredibly important ordinance. If there was a housing replacement ordinance in the city of South Burlington, or the city of Essex right now, the 60 or 80 units that were lost with the redevelopment in front of the movie theater, for instance, or the, I think it's a couple of 160 units that were out in Essex. I can't remember how many they were that got torn down and replaced with a very high-end housing. By the fairgrounds. Yeah, so if this replacement ordinance was in those locations at this time, there would be a net increase of a new affordable. Well, first of all, those people might have, when they were displaced, might have had a place to go. Secondly, those units would have been replaced for affordable housing for a stock of people who came after them. So it had a dampening effect about that, sort of doing that work. I think there's probably other things that happened. So the tearing down of the housing as well, besides just one ordinance. But that's kind of a critical ordinance when it comes to preserving some of the existing affordable housing or the naturally affordable housing that existing right now. And it's something to consider. I don't know if Munozki has those pressures, but certainly that has occurred in a couple of locations in the last two or three years. And it's a couple hundred units there, couple hundred apartments. Another example is all the housing that's been torn down around the airport. If South Burlington had had a demolition replacement ordinance, could very well have been that the federal government might have been helping to pay into the housing trust fund that South Burlington has created. It would have been required to. Yeah, it would have been required. And to show that it applies evenly, the first property that was hit by it was actually the city of Burlington buying a house on North Champlain next to a school, Lawrence Barnes School to expand the school and the parking lot. And so the city had to pay, they had to pay itself basically to the trust fund for that property. And then Fling Theater got acquired a building that had some apartments in it and they had to pay it and they weren't really pleased about that because of their sort of public purpose, but it has to apply evenly. So it's applied that way. I just want to say that South Burlington did enact a replacement policy a little late, but at least it is in place and was passed by the city council. I mean, you know, people, the public here, since we've heard all the people chime in to say what great this term should be, and I'm not disagreeing with it, but I'd be curious to hear what Eric says in response. So, yeah, I mean, I think, you know, you've heard a lot about what Burlington has done. And I think the important thing with all of these kinds of ordinance considerations is there is no one-size-fits-all. You know, what you have to do in Winooski is look at what are the issues in Winooski and how do we craft ordinances and policies to address those issues. So the first question with housing replacement is, is Winooski losing housing? Are people tearing down houses and not replacing them? Are people taking houses and converting them into lawyers' offices and dentist's offices and things like that? You may identify that this isn't a problem in Winooski and then maybe you don't need a housing replacement ordinance. But, you know, I think the, you know, the sort of the economic theory here is supply and demand, right? We have a supply-constrained housing market across the board in Winooski, Burlington, all of Chittenden County. We have a supply-constrained market. So we don't want to have a situation where it's easy to reduce our supply of housing. And that's what housing replacement fundamentally is all about. So, you know, probably I would guess it makes sense for Winooski to have some type of a housing replacement ordinance. Exactly what that looks like has to make sense for Winooski. The other challenge I want to point out is that in mixed-use neighborhood, very active in the North Street Urivitalization Project, where you really want commercial activity on the ground level, it became a real conflict between two competing policy goals. One was preserving the housing stock. The other is that is the commercial neighborhood or commercial corridor that serves the Old North End. We had to actually grapple with that. And in the end, we decided that there was flexibility in that zoning district. And in any neighborhood mixed-use district, you can kind of, you're not subject to on the ground level. You're not subject to housing replacement because it was viewed as a public good to have commercial activity on levels. So, I'm going to differ with Eric just a little because I think he's mostly right. But I think that there is an issue. It's not just supply and demand. It's also the supply of the kind of housing that is getting, that is being eliminated. So, I think that has to be something that could be taken into consideration. If they tore down all the fancy houses on the hill in Burlington, that might be okay. They could replace them with almost anything and it'll still be fine in terms of its economic impact upon people who are living in Burlington. If you did that then for a section of this, of Winooski over here, that in this direction I won't, then you suddenly eliminated blocks of housing. Those people displaced, then you got a critical issue to pay attention to. I think to me it's the issue of the sort of the economic classes that are basically being impacted. So, it is supply and demand. We support supply like crazy, right? We want that more of that. But it is the impact on people. Awesome. Because I know you're talking about the Burlington ordinance. It sounds like the triggers for that ordinance are when residential properties are converted into commercial properties or if a residential property is demolished and not replaced. So, the first thing is I'm wondering if somebody comes in, carries down a property and builds higher density. Does the ordinance still trigger in terms of the permit or ability of replacement? I think that at least it is, I think the Winooski conversation seems very different than the Burlington conversation. So, I just want to, I don't know if you guys have read kind of where the Winooski, I know it's still in process, but my understanding of what Winooski is talking about is not talking about a change of use, but purely talking about any time housing is taken down and replaced, that's what triggers this replacement ordinance. It's not about conversion of residential to commercial. So, I just wanted to see if that was analogous to Burlington or really talking about two different kinds of policies. My experience with this has been that if you are redeveloping a site, let's say you've got a single family home, you're going to take it down and you're going to build a four-unit building. In that instance, the replacement ordinance doesn't really apply because you are creating housing on the site and you're actually creating more housing than what was there before. If you're tearing that house down and not replacing it with housing on that site, you either pay into the fund in Burlington or you have an option to create a replacement unit off-site somewhere, but if it's off-site, it has to be affordable. I would mention too that if you take a building, Winooski has lots of these, Burlington does, especially in the North End, where they were single family homes that have been turned into duplexes and triplexes. If you take, at least in Burlington, the interpretation has been that if you take a two or three-unit building and turn it back into, or turn it into a single family, it's still residential in use. So even though you're losing units, the interpretation has been it's staying residential. That's not a law. So that's an example of the fluidity and the flexibility that allows for changing, you know, demographic changes to be accommodated. Sounds like a very similar conversation to the one that we're having with our ordinance currently. Can you just clarify? Is there a lower element on the Burlington ordinance because we've been on a number of units before it kicks in? Really? We've been looking at four. We had, there was a, there was, didn't you have somebody above some building somewhere on Cherry Street that went through hell? Excuse me. I can either deny or confirm. You can't say yes. But had to go through a lot of stuff in order to convert a very tiny apartment, but they were sorted to the ordinance and the ordinance. Yes. Yeah. So you want to be careful, I think. Jessica, did you have your hand? Yeah, this is different by... Zoning districts. Yes, it does. Yeah. So just to clarify, so I'm going to say if it goes residential to residential, the affordability of the unit doesn't matter. The policy wouldn't be triggered, right? So if somebody buys a lot and tears down, you know, four units that are at 65% AMI, but then puts up, you know, however many units of a luxury condo that still wouldn't trigger the policy. Right. Correct. Inclusionary zoning is triggered if it's big enough, but that's another issue. That's a different one. Yeah. Yeah. Bobby, thank you. Yeah. Can you talk about some of the projects and uses of the Allen Cross Fund that were on the past? For example, for people that are displaced, you just opened like a four-hour conversation. Yeah. They aren't able to, no, there's nothing in the ordinance that allows trust fund dollars to be used to assist those tenants, although there is language in the ordinance that does provide some protections for tenants that allows, I think specifically, it's around notice requirements and the reimbursement for some costs. Not clearly. It doesn't tackle the whole impact to the household, but there is some, yeah, there is some relocation content there that is borne by the person tearing down the unit, not the trust fund. If you use federal funds of any kind, then there's a whole relocation, Uniform Relocation Act that requires you to provide notice, provide assistance, provide a differential in rents, provide moving costs, a whole range of things that is something that we wind up doing quite a bit for different reasons. But that's only federal funds. Excuse me. State funds too. Yeah, and state funds too. It's both federal and state. The federal funds are governed by the requirements of the Uniform Relocation Act. So if you're using HUD funds like CDBG dollars you apply to the state's community development program to help fund the development of the Uniform Relocation Act we'll apply. The state doesn't have a Uniform Relocation Act but your state funders are going to want to know what your anti-displacement strategy is and how you're going to mitigate the impact of potential displacement, whether it's temporary or permanent. As a nonprofit developer, we wind up actually having one person practically spends a lot of time on doing relocation and supporting the individual tenants on a temporary basis and an permanent basis. We wind up doing that a lot. But not the trust fund necessarily. Those funds are not used for relocation. The trust fund itself, I mean, Todd and Brian I think are more concrete examples but generally it's for, you know, the latter. It's for development of housing and or there's a portion of it that goes to help sustain some of the nonprofits that provide affordable housing. For instance, HomeShare Vermont, which does home sharing usually gets funding out of that. Could be some operating funds, just basic, you know, operating funds for nonprofits that are involved in affordable housing but then also Sheppard Housing Trust has an annual work plan that helps receive funding from the Housing Trust Fund for specific units that are involved. Not to put Mike Oehler on the spot but if you are a tenant and you get displaced and you're low income and you would qualify but you don't have Section 8, they'd probably send you to see Mike and see if he could help you. In the olden days. Yeah, not now, but that's what Mike would have done. Yeah, so the housing authorities then local preferences can be used if you have, if there's a subsidy available, of course. That depends on availability. If there's a place due to no faulty urban, you should rise at the top. Yeah, yes, yes. But there needs to be a subsidy available. Yeah, yeah, question you're just looking forward to. I just want to emphasize Michael's point you about it really does depend on housing that is getting replaced, even if you're replacing it one for one or four to one or five to one on site because we have a fair amount of unsubsidized housing that serves a lower, more mattered income range. You do need to be careful about how you go about tearing that down especially in a city like Winooski that has a lot of older, dilapidated housing stock in spite of the city's best efforts to make sure that it maintains stays up to standards. There's, you know, I remember from working with the housing stock, Winooski's housing stock is very old and a lot of it was not that great, was not built real great to begin with. So I imagine that some of what you might be, must be looked at is until development and potential tearing down of existing older, older housing stock. I think it's very important to look at the economics of the buildings, you know, who they're serving, what population they're serving and make sure that you're going to serve at least that same number of folks at that same income stratum with the housing that replaces it. Initially when we discussed replacement ordinances, we had put an inclusionary component into the replacement ordinance. So it was a percentage, a certain percentage had to be replaced with affordable if you were tearing down. Would you recommend going in that direction or having two separate ordinances to cover that? I'm going to pass on that. I'll have to think about that for a minute. I don't know if other folks have a response to that one. I mean, the inclusionary zoning ordinance in Burlington really is triggered by five at this point, five and folks here were on, so as recently as you may know, a panel that was looking at, you know, after 27, 28 years of inclusionary zoning history and Michael was on it, Todd staffed it, Ryan was on it and Eric was on it. I went to a lot of meetings. So, but obviously the inclusionary zoning ordinance in Burlington, you know, mostly applies to new construction for, you know, five units or more. So if you're going to construct new, you might be able to take care of it through an inclusionary zoning ordinance depending on what your trigger is. It's an interesting idea and maybe anticipating what Eric's thoughts on this contradict me if I'm wrong, but the inclusionary zoning working group acknowledged that the IZ ordinance can pose financial challenges to very small projects. And so part of their recommendations involved making some modifications to the payment and new option for that. But yeah, it's, yeah, even if you were to rebuild a, if you were to tear down a 10 unit building and build a new 10 unit building that wouldn't trigger IZ under, it's really, it's triggered by the number of new, new units that are brought online. So, I think it's a good idea. Which would speak towards having it in places. Yeah, we were trying to make an elegant solution that was one ordinance, but. Jessica. So just in the interest of viewers and especially people who may be watching, oh, I think we are trending very quickly into the conversation about inclusionary zoning. So I think it would be beneficial if the panel could just answer the question, what is inclusionary zoning? And if the city council's stated goal is to think about exactly or are we, you just outlined as we develop, as we see some naturally affordable, naturally occurring affordable housing being torn down and replaced with large more housing units. How do we ensure that our commitment as a community to being an affordable option for residents of Jenin County states and it's maintained and it's maintained at the same percentage as we currently have. And therefore is inclusionary zoning a nation of that, a good, good tools for us to think about as we try and achieve that goal. But I think it would be useful to start with just what is inclusionary zoning and your expertise in that policy? Let me take a crack at that if you guys don't mind. But what is it? So I think... We should have beer up here, buddy. Next time. We can all talk a lot about the specific inclusionary zoning ordinance in Burlington, but stepping back from that, inclusionary zoning in kind of its purest form. The idea is to encourage or require mixed income in housing development, right? And different communities have approached that in different ways. And in some communities, there's more incentive based inclusionary zoning where it may not be required. It may be an option. But if you do it, you get these benefits. In other communities, it's been you have to do it. Here's what you have to do. And there may not be any incentives associated with it. So it really starts with a community conversation about what are we trying to achieve here? Burlington decided a long time ago that what they really were after was socioeconomic integration in the kinds of new housing projects that were being constructed. In Burlington, it wasn't about incentivizing or encouraging supply across the board. It was about socioeconomic integration. And that's the conversation that's continued in the panel that Earhart described. That's what we kept coming back to, was Burlington decided a long time ago this wasn't about encouraging the creation of more housing. This was about maintaining socioeconomic integration. Other communities have decided that their ordinances are about other things. So it really depends on what you want to do. I have three things to say, a little bit of that. One of the things, I think it's called the IZ Working Group, said that being integrated within each project wasn't as essential now as making sure each neighborhood was integrated. So there was a little bit of shift. Principally, I think, for Burlington, there was a lot of affordable housing being developed throughout the old North End. And so you didn't really need to have every property be integrated. The neighborhood needed to. And so there's a stronger enforcement of it must be built on site in neighborhoods which have a higher income as opposed to a lower income. So that was one thing that's different than historically it was. Initially, it was every building must be integrated and all the doors must be sort of integrated, that kind of thing. So that was a shift and that was a change. Winooski is probably similar in some ways in terms of its size in the neighborhood perspective. The other thing was that I just went to a group called Grounded Solutions Network or part of that network which does shared equity affordable housing and IZ. And that's its purpose. And in the conversations that I went to for a day, the conversations around what was a good IZ ordinance, it was the ordinance that you adopt in your local community because there were so many different opportunities and choices that you could make. It was often enough not necessarily a right answer. It was often enough you can make a choice if this might be a little bit better, this might be a little worse, but you're making still policy choices at the local level and the Grounded Solutions Network, that particular website has a ton of resources around how to do that. And I think you all, your expertise here and Winooski knows about this source and site and could go there. The third thing is that Burlington did try to incentivize and make the twist and there was a lot of discussion about this last week when I was at this conference about how to make the developer whole, shall we say, by giving them incentives. So greater density, greater height, greater lower cost, no need for parking requirements or less parking requirements. Waivers of fees, all those things was a bundle of benefits going to the developer to offset the cost of the developer's expense to create affordable housing. Of course, what we discovered on the working group is that the developer is not recouping their cost and so they had to make it up some way. In Burlington it seemed that we found ourselves in a review of the ordinance failing to see how those things really made a difference all the time and that there was other issues around zoning that had to be paid attention to in terms of the developer's rights to develop. So then I'll say fourth thing and I'll stop and all these things. Ordinances and zoning is a pretty imperfect tool to create affordable housing just by itself. So I would encourage there being a strong set of ordinances at the zoning level but it's really one thing amongst two to three things that need to be done. Probably maybe four, five, six, maybe eight things that need to be done in order to create affordable housing. If you rely simply on ordinances and zoning to create affordable housing, you'll fail. You'll get maybe some things out of it all but there's still so much more that could be done in terms of what the initiatives could be and should be about and it was never in Burlington zoning was a piece of the pie but it was a trust fund. There was a bunch of other things as well in terms of moving things forward. So I'll stop there. I'll just add two things, one to be really specific. One of the things that we thought initially would help mitigate the impact on private sector developers was a density bonus and that is one of the things that really has not turned out to be all that true. It's kind of an unfulfilled promise because generally when a developer comes into the development review process, if they're going in with the maximum density, you get a lot of neighborhood opposition. And so there's some developers choose one strategy. They come in at the max knowing that they're probably going to have to come back off of it. Others come in and sort of back off of the maximum density that they can develop at supposedly by rights under the ordinance and sort of come up with a strategy of backing away from that in the hopes that they won't have as much neighborhood opposition, but invariably no matter what number you choose, you wind up with neighborhood opposition of one kind or another. So you're kind of damned if you do, damned if you don't. So that was an unfulfilled promise of inclusionary zoning. We always felt that when we created the ordinance, if we gave the developer a density bonus, that that would help allow them to get more units to spread their fixed costs over and that would help mitigate the impact of the internal subsidy that might need to happen for the more affordable units. The other thing that I'll just add to it is the idea, again, as Eric said, we did not conceive of it as a pro development or develop, an ordinance that was going to incentivize development was the idea behind it was inclusivity and making sure that when there's development that there is that kind of socioeconomic integration. And the hope was that this would be done without necessarily having to draw on other public resources that were, that have always been scarce and get scarcer and scarcer as time goes on. Whether you're talking about federal resources or even state resources. So ideally the ideal goal was to be able to create something that would promote that or require that inclusivity but without necessarily having to go to community development block grant funds or housing trust fund. That said, the reality is that a lot of number of developers have fulfilled in Burlington at least to fulfill their requirements by partnering with organizations like Champlain Housing Trust or Cathedral Square Corporation. And they then do bring in public resources. And as a result, usually achieve a much higher level of affordability or a greater, you know, more low income targeting than a private sector developer that is just using the inclusionary zoning ordinance and seeing that next door to me where 235 new units are being built in the old SDIR property which is being done. They got massive, very large bonuses not just for inclusionary zoning but also for converting an existing non-conforming industrial property into a residential zone into a residential property. So that kind of that extra incentive that they got and they got just about the maximum, they didn't get the maximum but they got a considerable amount and that made it work for them without any public resources. So this is a wrinkle on the clear area which most people haven't heard about and Eric was the first at least I think maybe it was Eric Farrell when I thought it was you to do it on the CHT King Street block, 88 King Street. So it's the private developer buys a property, the for-profit developer does the permitting, holds the, basically bears the carrying cost of owning a piece of property, gets it through permitting. And for the non-profit in an ideal world they also pay for all the infrastructure and then they say here's your site and the non-profit then goes about assembling less expensive on a per unit basis perhaps is the idea because the private developer has acquired the site and essentially gotten it ready for development and that is a new way of, essentially a way of complying with the ordinance that was never envisioned when the ordinance was created and I wouldn't say it's controversial but there's some who say was that really what the ordinance was about and we've basically taken the position that but for that private investment the affordable housing wouldn't have happened so that really was the test. We like it. You've done it a bunch. Michael's doing it right now. We like it. Cambering Rise is a great example of, you know, how, I don't know, folks are familiar, might want to talk about Cambering Rise and how that works but that's a whole other... Well it's essentially what Brian said, we working with a developer, we're doing a development that is going to cost us a lot less than we did ourselves and what we wind up doing, the ordinance really allows you to simply say, is it up to 100% for that, right? Your incomes can go up. Your rents have to be at 65% but your incomes can go up to 100%. Correct. So we now take that and we mold it even to even a deeper affordability. So we say our rents are at this point and who we serve is a much lower amount plus we throw in other kinds of fancy bells and whistles and important things like serving people who are homeless as well as serving people perhaps and domestic violent victims and a range of other things. So we take the ordinance, I think Eric can serve people and it's not, I don't think it's easy necessarily but he does a handful of IZ units. He's serving people in a fairly plain vanilla kind of way. You receive an application, you check off the mark in terms of the income, your rents are at this level which is lower than he would typically like to do but there you go, we do a whole pile of other things. So, you know, it's been controversial to say well, those ordinance, those units would have been created anyway which is absolutely true. However, they would not have been created in terms of some of the deeper affordability things that we wind up doing and serving people at 30%, serving people at 50% and these other things and so it's a little richer, you know, moving towards affordable housing. We feel pretty comfortable with it. Other folks are challenged by it. At a prior housing conference, I heard, I believe it was someone from Housing Vermont say that doing fewer units at a deeper subsidy would be preferable for some of our development partners with inclusionary zoning. Is that the case and what would that be based on? Oh, so fewer units at a deeper subsidy for home ownership, I think is what has been said. So that, I don't know, well, I don't know if Housing Vermont said that about rental but I do, I think from home ownership perspective we have pushed for, you know, fewer units at a deeper subsidy, a deeper cost. Well, with Eric Farrell, we're about to buy 20 condominiums at $248,000 or something like that and we're going to wind up selling them at a much lower cost in order for what we think we want to achieve which is serving people at 75% of median income. His numbers would be much higher. How do you close that gap when you serve your house? The Vermont Housing Conservation Board. Okay, grant funds, like, yeah. Great, and we could go and do tax credits as well. Home ownership tax credits, some of those are available but it's a lot easier simply to go to VACB and do this. So we bring in additional funds and bring the costs down even further. So in that case, we've got to like a deeper, we like the idea of a deeper subsidy. I don't think we changed the ordinance much in Burlington when we were sitting at the table. I mean, this is, we didn't change anything. A recommendation. A recommendation to the city council ordinance committee and others was, I don't think, was something close. At least I think I advocated for this but I don't think we made any kind of changes. I think we might have changed it 75 to 70. Yeah, there you go, there you go. We went to 75 to 70. 70% of AMI. That was the big win. So to go a little deeper and to make it a little easier from a price point perspective. I don't think that was for rental housing. No, it was just for a hold, just for a hold. And we're referring to this IZ working group in Burlington that recommended changes. I happen to sit on the city council committee that's going to consider this with the ordinance committee. So that's beginning next week. We haven't even dug in yet. So we have this, yeah, next week. Yeah, yeah. So we'll look at all the changes they've recommended. They are on to you. So we asked you very quickly to dive into solutions on this issue. I'm wondering if all of you could take a second and maybe just identify the way you see the top two barriers to the creation of affordable housing, new construction, new redevelopment of properties and maybe just identify whether or not those are items that are adjusted through policy, financial tools. Can I start on this? Yeah, go ahead. Just chopping it a bit. So there is no magic to affordable housing, right? Affordable housing is lower rents or lower home prices, but somewhere it has to be subsidized, right? And it's either subsidized with public money, tax credits, which are in a roundabout way, redeployment of private money for a public purpose, or private developer like me has to figure out how to internally subsidize it by somehow trying to make more money on the other stuff, right? So the challenge with affordable housing, the biggest challenge is money, right? There's only so much resource out there for affordable housing in our greater community. The state of Vermont only gets so much allocated federal tax credit every year. We only have so much VHCB dollars, home dollars, CDBG funds, you know, all the acronyms and sources that are out there for this stuff. And CHT and Cathedral Square and all the partners that are around here are doing, you know, Yeoman's work and a hell of a job using those resources as efficiently as possible to create as much housing as possible, but there's only so much money to go around and there's only so much housing they can create. You know, this is where, you know, my view of this may diverge a little bit from some of my friends here, but you know, housing fundamentally, the affordability of housing in our greater community comes down to supply and demand. When there is insufficient supply like we have, when we've had for 40 years a 1% rental vacancy rate, there is tremendous pressure on price, right? And rents go up because we don't have enough supply to address the demand in the marketplace. And the more layers of regulation we put on this system in whatever way, the harder we make it to create new housing, the more we're constraining that supply and the more indirect pressure we're putting on prices and indirectly pushing rents up even more and pushing home prices up even more. And there's a lot of new progressive thought, a lot of stuff happening around the YIMBY movement out west where people are starting to recognize that when we put layers on layers on layers through zoning ordinances and other mechanisms that make it harder to build housing, I don't care what kind of housing, harder to build housing, we are making our communities less affordable. So, you know, a lot of the things that you're talking about right now, there's some great ideas in all of these types of ordinances, but if we don't get it right in Winooski, we are going to make it harder to build housing in Winooski, which will make Winooski less affordable over time. Because my non-profit friends only have so much financial resource to go around to build as much affordable housing as they possibly can. So, I'm talking about housing across the board. When I, you know, honestly, when I, you know, I know, you know, Nate Digest is in the back of the room has been developing some housing in Winooski as well. When we build rental housing, even when it's 100% market rate on rental housing specifically, we are busting our butts to just try to make these things just barely work. And when more layers and more requirements are put on top of it, it's busted, you know? I've been figuring it out in Burlington on a handful of projects where I've done the inclusionary internally. I haven't had any public subsidy. But, you know, I could lose my house on some of these projects. And the margins on these things are razor thin. And, you know, it's not widely known, but, you know, some of these things that I've done over the last five years, they're on the edge, man. And if things go the wrong direction for me, when my mortgage is ballooned in five years, I could lose my house. So, there's a reason that not a lot of developers have been doing what I've been doing in Burlington. These numbers are freaking hard. And when construction costs are going up and interest rates are going up like they are now, it's even harder. You know, Nate's looking at projects that he's having a really hard time making them pencil. I'm in the same boat. And that's in Winooski, where you don't currently have inclusionary requirements that will make it harder for me to do what I've been trying to do. There's a lot of other things that Winooski can do to retain existing affordable housing, to encourage creation of more affordable housing, but don't make it harder to build housing in Winooski. Should I do a counterpoint just for fun? Because I don't necessarily disagree how difficult it is. There's no doubt. And I think it's actually pretty hard for the nonprofit world to figure out how to get through development. We, Bright Street co-op, 40 units, took us three, three and a half years to try to figure out how to do that. And grasping at resources in a lot of different places in a lot of different ways. So the answer, Mayor, is capital, money. And then the second answer would be money. Capital. Because ultimately, but then I'm going to disagree a little with Eric, but ultimately Eric and I as owners and representing the owners have apartments that we have to rent that have fixed costs. And then after that, whatever money we could charge above those fixed costs or go to mortgages and financing and other ways of doing things. And that becomes how we finance. That's how we move these projects along. And it's the same category and calculations that we have to make when we're sort of doing this. Eric has to go out and get regular bank financing. And you know, we get some fancy footwork-y kind of financing and tax credits to make our rents affordable. Eric has the flexibility to go up and do other things. He has the flexibility to go ahead and sell the units at some point and make a killing or lose a shirt in that context. We're forever affordable. So, you know, we have different economics and different set of conditions that we had to face. But ultimately, the spreadsheets ultimately look the same. It's the fixed cost, it's the cost to develop. It's how much money we get from different sources, investors, equity from tax credits, and how much we borrow. And that becomes the same spreadsheet. It's not much different. So, you know, I think the question becomes, this is where I challenge Eric a little bit, and knowing that Eric really does a great job and really works really hard at it. It's what is it that you can do to enable the development to continue to take place and still sort of have some of these requirements so that Munozki doesn't simply flip and become just a place where it's just higher rents. You really want to make sure that it's preserved and it's not displaced. And I think that's really the policy imperative, right? So, you know, Eric's going to come in and say, if you do this, you have to give me that. And I think that becomes the right way to at least to think about the ordinance and not doing any other way. I would like to just add that we keep talking about the cost of housing and people pay their housing. They pay their rent based on their income, right? If your incomes go up, this isn't such an issue. So, I think it's just important to mention that this isn't just a housing problem, it's an income and wage problem. And I think it's, as housing people, we tend to just focus on the housing side, but little wages are in many ways the antidote to lack of affordable housing. So, I just want to put that out there. I wanted to just talk a little bit about the, I think that many of us feel like the successes that we've had with respect to affordable housing in Vermont and Burlington have to do with the permanent affordability requirements that are attached to the affordable housing. So, for instance, the inclusionary zoning ordinance, there's a whole bunch of different ways that cities do this. Some IZ ordinances have an initial period of affordability. And I get calls every month from folks who administer these programs who say, we've created hundreds of units of, hundreds of IZ units and they're disappearing, essentially. This is around the country. Right. Yeah. I got one from Montana a few weeks ago and they were saying that they had an IZ program with home ownership. And folks would buy this at a reduced price that was affordable at the time. Five years later, essentially that owner realized a huge windfall. So, that's not something because permanent affordability is one of the requirements of Burlington's IZ ordinance and is part of the state law, essentially, in Vermont, then that particular problem is not an issue. That this affordable housing disappears over time. It doesn't exist in other places around the country. Permanent affordability is the key issue. Once because you have tax credit partnerships disappearing at the end of a certain period of time and we don't have that in Vermont because of state policy. I'm sorry to interrupt you. That's a key issue. No, that's exactly right. And I think Eric's absolutely right. It's about money. And I've recently done a little bit of research about what the environment was in the 1980s around the creation of Burlington's housing agenda, which included inclusionary zoning, housing trust fund, and then shared equity. And all of the environment was essentially one of scarce federal resources. And all of these things were created because city government believed at the time that they had seen declining federal resources and we need to be essentially resilient and be able to produce new affordable housing in the absence of those resources. And so jumping to the housing trust fund, the housing trust fund prioritizes projects that provide permanent affordability. And permanent affordability is part of CHD's shared equity program. And so it all sort of ties together. So I would, in terms, it's a long way of answering your question, but I would encourage you to contemplate that whatever solutions you have an appetite for, I would encourage permanent affordability to be one of the things that you consider. Can I say the CHD, the housing trust, as the Browns Community Land Trust in the 1980s was created as essentially as an anti-gentrification, anti-displacement organization to preserve what was essentially the Old North End neighborhood. And that was the focus. The target neighborhood was to make sure that the lower income people who live in the Old North End could stay there. They were not displaced. It was a critical part of what was, is the history of who we are. And that's really permanent affordability. And once you do that, and we have that in the Old North End, creates a bit of a buffer for, you know, a range of other kinds of rents that could be charged within the New North, the Old North End that don't have the negative impact that it might have if the neighborhood didn't have that permanent stock. That's a critical piece. The other thing I'd say is that there's been a large, over the last couple of years, we've built a lot of housing. Truth is, when you look at the reports the last few years show 500, 600, 700, 900 units coming online, not just being permanent, but actually being shown that there's, there will be a press conference tomorrow about that. The vacancy rate has just, meh, like this, has not really, had not really budged as much as, as we all hoped. And we're still thinking that maybe a little bit more will do that. What I think is happening is, is that our stuff just may be true, you could tell me if it's not true. It's probably more, people like it more. People want to live there better, more. It's new. It's well done. You pay a little bit more, but you have, it's clean, it's got good management. It's great fixtures. All the things that you get, Eric, both Eric's and all of the people who are developing new housing, basically those units, that market is strong, I think, and what's going on, I think there's a bit of a fluffing out of some of the units that are not as good. And those people are suffering a bit more in terms of how they can rent, but it's not showing up in the vacancy rate just yet. And as strongly as it could be, people may be moving, may be living a little closer, have better choices, but that's, that still has not yet the impact. And from a percentage of affordable housing that we really need, we didn't come close. We just didn't come close. Next year we might do better, but we just, we still have a long way to go in terms of some part of that housing that's being built. So to that point, one of the key resources that is missing is more rental subsidies. Michael and Eric both talked a lot about capital subsidies to build, but even, you know, with all the creativity that our non-profit developers either working alone or in partnership with a private for-profit developer, all the subsidies that they can bring to bear on an affordable housing unit, the base rent is still at a level that is not affordable to the lowest income folks. And so there you need a gap filler and even a $15 an hour minimum wage won't necessarily, if you have one wage earner in the family, they're still gonna have to work way more than 40 hours a week to have even an affordable unit be affordable with that. So what they need is section eight or state, there's some state rental subsidies as well. So that's another key resource to reach really the lowest affordability levels of the market. Couple of other things I would just suggest is we focused a lot on rental housing, but, you know, given Winooski's balance of rental versus home ownership and, you know, Winooski being at about the 60% rental range, I think it's still around that. That's what it was when I was working for the city 30 years ago. So that hasn't changed much. And I think one of the things that you really want to look at is the shared equity program that CHT has and get more folks into stable home ownership and try and, you know, increase your share of homeowners because homeowners clearly provide, you know, longer term stability to a community. So that's one thing I would encourage you to look at. And part and parcel of that, I was looking at kind of the list of other recommendations that you're looking at, you know, accessory dwelling units are a really good thing to look at. And I would say try to come up with some way of incentivizing ADUs is a good thing in Winooski, especially there's a fair amount still of single family stock in Winooski. And so ADUs, I think, would be something appropriate. Eric talked about, you know, the difficulties and the challenges and not adding more regulation. I know no one would say that Burlington was very successful at reducing its regulation. I think some of that. You are a planning commissioner, aren't you? I was. And one of the things that we did, I see this on the list and Eric may say this isn't as effective as we had hoped it would be, but there's an ordinance on the books in Burlington around impact fee waivers for affordable housing. And I think you should definitely look at that. I know Winooski is pretty challenged being one square mile without a lot of new developable areas. It's always had a tax base that's challenging. So you may not be able to provide any breaks for affordable housing through impact fee waivers, but I think it's very much worth looking at. And then I guess the other thing that, you know, private sector developers and for nonprofit developers talk about is the predictability of your regulatory process and having, you know, folks, you know, ensnared and engaged in a lengthy regulatory process can be a real challenge and that costs money. The state through its various, through legislation is, you know, made, created basically designated areas that could be free of the duplicative, often duplicative review of Act 250 and local development review. And I haven't really thought through how that meshes, you know, in Winooski, but if you haven't already taken advantage of those special development zones that the state has made basically Act 250 free for mixed use and mixed income development, you should look at those because they will help provide, you know, eliminate one extra step in the process for all developers. And another thing that people have looked at, I know Burlington's looked at it and it's, you know, been controversial and even with Burlington's well-staffed planning department, it may not be totally feasible to do, but I think Winooski ought to look at on-the-record review as, you know, part of its regulatory mix so that when there are NIMBY appeals or other kinds of appeals, they're not looked at de novo from the environmental court, but they're looked at as a review, as an on-the-record review basically. We're working on, I think, Eric's been asked to join on this set of recommendations to act 250 in terms of making, you know, some of the rules of the state level being a lot easier once you go through, I think mostly the rigorous process you might go with Winooski, you have to do that again and then even on the state level there's a whole bunch of stuff that they could be doing better, so that's something outside of it. But just around, I mean, capital comes in the form of a range of things, so it's reduced costs, but also it comes in potential land that might be available to do development. For us, you know, there's, and this really is tax credits. There are long-income housing tax credits for rentals. There's tax credits for home ownership as a Vermont Housing Conservation Board, so there's lots of resources. The state, I think the city of Winooski has gone off and gotten funds from the VCDP for a wide variety of different kinds of funding when we needed to do that here. But there's a potential for new market tax credits for home ownership. That's something we're ready to explore with the city of Winooski as well. But you know, I think I did a calculation. Did I talk to you about updating this calculation? It was, it took everybody, it took 1% of the Housing Trust Fund, it took the property tax value of this county, and you said 1%. It's like one and a half million dollars. One and a half million dollars, yeah. If you took the Jenny County tax. I think it actually could be a little higher. Could be a little higher actually. Yeah, right about now. So like Burlington has something, but if everybody did 1% in all the communities, and certainly in the core communities, you have a million dollars more. You know, we just bought this Dorsal Commons to keep it affordable for a while. We struggled to come up with $480,000 of basically interest-only financing for a period of five or eight years until we got to a point where we had to do something else. I mean, where Eric says in five years he's got a balloon? I got those too. I'm not losing my house, but I'll probably lose my reputation. And CHT might go down a little bit. But we fought for it. I mean, there's a board member here. We fought for that to get every kind of financing piece that was different than straight traditional financing. And even the bank did something fancy for us to get there. So it's not, you know, to keep things at the $1,200 a month range, which sounds, may sound expensive to some, but actually is 80% of immediate income and the people who live in Dorsal Commons are all fairly working people, all working people that will retail and nurses and other things like that. To get that read, you know, we had, we really had to struggle, felt a little bit like Eric to struggle to get to that place where we had all these different-like kind of sources. If Winooski has money that's in investing in somewhere else, we'll take that investment in the next development opportunity. You know, we'll do that to those kinds of things. We did that with the City of Browns and once, and we're doing that with the State Treasures money. We're doing that with the Brown Community Foundation money. So we, you know, there's a wide rate when we say just capital, and then the second thing is capital, there's probably about 10 different categories of capital-like things. We really could do that. We'd throw a toss in a bag and thought about a little bit more. Trust fund being the easiest one, probably. Sorry, there was a question in the back for a while back. Yeah, you see, you talked about it a little bit already, but given the fact that the City has only so many numbers they can really pull, what type of incentives do you all feel are going to provide the most impact from your, I guess, various components that will allow the development of affordable housing to occur more easily, that really the City has much control over? I think one of the things that you've already done that I think is already yielding some results for housing development, I don't know, and some affordable for sure, is form-based code. I think that's made a huge difference and I think I'm pretty sure that there's neighborhood development area designations that overlap the form-based code corridors, right? So, you've made the Act 250 process a little bit easier. Earhart was kind of mentioning that as a tool. That helps a lot. You have a designated downtown, that has made Act 250 a little bit easier to deal with as well. Other things you could do, I think, it really is about money. I mean, so anything you can do incrementally in Winooski, it may not be a huge thing, but the little incremental things like saying, we're not gonna charge impact fees if your project meets this affordability level. You know, if you can stomach that as a community and it doesn't feel like a burden, that everything be able to do. Do you think parking requirements? Reduce parking requirements, yeah. That's part of the ordinance as well. I always thought that you should waive the first-year property taxes. Wait, I'm not done yet. But have that payment and property taxes be essentially the fee structure that you pay. So, if you're assuming that Eric is not, this is nobody so far, nobody has thought this is a great idea, but I think it's a great idea. If Eric has to pay all these fees and you're expecting property taxes and you're gonna get property taxes for the rest of its life, waive the first year, let that be the fee structure. Make that sort of equipment to the property taxes. And then the next year, you're gonna get all the property taxes. So, you're putting it off for a year, but ultimately, you're getting all the taxes you need. It's a little like a tax increment thing. But a little plan. Is that a tax abatement? Pure simple. It's maybe a tax abatement, but you're still not waiving all the impact fees that are critical. And you're gonna get the property taxes eventually, not eventually, but the second year, you know. And so, I'm getting stare from the manager. All right, never mind. But I think that that's, but now he, now that goes into an operating cost as opposed to needing to capitalize that from a mortgage cost, right? You don't have to pay that as a development fee. It's now an operating cost. And he puts that at those first year of operating. So that puts off a half, you know, 300,000, 200,000. Some amount of money. I get worried about a slippery slope of tax abatements and people, you know, saying start starting to, you know, sweat up, sweat municipality saying we won't develop here unless so. I don't disagree. As a city official, I said no to tax abatement more than a half a dozen times. But in this context, I don't think you're saying really no to receiving money. You're doing what tax increment financing does actually. You're taking the tax increment and you're buying public infrastructure. You're taking that tax increment for a year and you're making capital impact fees and fees for the city and everything else. It's not much different. You're just talking about the incremental additional. The one year of taxes that you would typically pay instead now translates into the fee structure that Eric would have to finance. It's a crazy idea. I don't know if the legislature would ever support it. You'd have to go to the legislature to get that done. But I think it's not. Actually, there was a neighboring legislation that was passed a couple of years ago for revitalization of deteriorated neighborhoods. It was done for Rutland, West Rutland, in large part, but on the books. I know you've got a question, but one thing, you know, Erhard mentioned accessory dwelling units. I really do think that's a huge potential untapped tool. There you go. I know you were interested in doing it at your house at one point, right? No, not at my house. No, somewhere. My neighborhood was interesting. Yeah, yeah. You know what? My whole neighborhood was at your house. I think the state required all communities to have some kind of accessory dwelling provision in their ordinance. But there's a baseline. A lot of communities have crafted it in a way that makes it nearly impossible to actually do. So it's not really implementable. Like in Burlington, you know, Burlington says, well, it can't be, you know, bigger than this and that ends up being too small sometimes. Oh, and you have to provide as much parking as you would for a primary residence. You can't go over the lock coverage allowances, you know. So you have to, if you're going to do it and when you actually want it to work, you have to create some, you know, remove the parking requirement for an ADU. You're not right. Allow it maybe by writers or an easier path. They are allowed by right. I actually worked on this about 15 years ago when the ADU ordinance that part of state land is planning law chapter 117 has changed. And it used to be that ADUs were basically any community could create its own ordinances. And in order to encourage ADUs to state created a floor of requirements. Now that doesn't mean that a municipality cannot liberalize that floor. But it did create a floor so that ADUs, which used to be in most communities, were conditional use, conditional use of approval were by rights as long as they met the floor, the floor requirements. It was an affordable housing initiative. That what's his name? House of the Mount Director before the answer, Eddie. And it was pushing. It was part of the Blue Ribbon Commission that looked at chapter 117 and the early laws. So Eric, are you, are you putting ADUs in the category of naturally occurring or would, or do you think that they, that in terms of solving the affordable housing issue, then would the new ADU essentially be, have some sort of affordability restrictions or is it just that the provision of more small units? I think, you know, with all things, I think the easier and, you know, quick, the less restrictions around it, you can put it the better it will be. But what I think about ADUs is, you know, it's potentially a source of affordable housing. There are folks that might be inclined to build a small accessory structure in their backyard or next to their house, and it's relatively small and they're going to rent it at a relatively affordable rent to somebody. The other piece of it is I think there's a demographic of kind of the empty nester aging in place crowd where I've got this big old house. My kids are gone. I don't really need this big old house anymore, but I really love my neighborhood. I love the street I live on. I want to stay here. If I could build a little house in the backyard, I could sell or rent out this big old house and I could live back there in a smaller dwelling. Moving to the garage. And that frees up the big house for maybe a family or, you know... Add subdivision to... Yeah, maybe. You know, you can get creative about, you know, there are paths around subdivision. You could condo the site even if the municipality doesn't allow straight subdivision, but, yeah. One of the things we discovered in Burlington, frankly, also when we went through the Izzy ordinance that there were still sections of Burlington that were sort of zoned to make sure that density didn't occur. And that, in fact, there was, you know, it was the higher income neighborhoods that were sort of being just make sure that that stayed that way. And that's something to sort of pay attention to, I think. Yeah, in Burlington there's a lot of... Many of the low density residential neighborhoods are zoned at a certain level and the actual development is considerably higher than that. The existing pattern of density is higher than that. So in your low density neighborhoods that are, what are they, like, six units per acre? Are there about seven? You know, I think the average density is actually more in the 10 to 12 units per acre range. And, you know, that speaks to Michael's point of, you know, if you, in those areas, you cannot build to the existing neighborhood density because of the zoning requirement being actually a lower density. I wanted to ask a question, though, which is, has Airbnb or short-term rentals been an issue at all in Wynuski? I mean, we're starting to hear a significant impact for, you know, some areas of the state with the loss of, well, ADUs, for instance. I mean, ADUs are a great way to, you know, make some extra income and, you know, do an Airbnb. And I've heard, you know, some comments around incentivizing ADUs. Well, yeah, but don't, you know, don't make more Airbnb's, you know, make it so that it's an actual rental unit. You know, ski areas, towns that host ski areas or that are near ski areas, obviously, are more impacted by this. But I'm beginning to see Airbnb really eat into rental markets. We have them here. My next-door neighbor has an Airbnb. So it's something that our code enforcement is looking at and certainly something that we're going to have to keep an eye on at the state level as well. But we do have them here. I think probably it's not as many and not the percentage that there are in Wellington, but they're certainly here. I think there's a site you can go to to see exactly how many are listed. Oh, I've been. Your DNA, I think it's called or something like that. And there's a new ordinance that just got, a new state law that just got passed last year. It provides very minimal regulation at the statewide level, but it's, you know, I think Airbnb may be part of the, what you were talking about. We've had all this new supply, but the vacancy rate hasn't changed. I think Airbnb might be part of that. It's 300. I've been doing the research because I'm developing an ordinance for Burlington. And it'll be basically saying that if you're not an owner-occupied or operator-occupied premise, you can't actually do it. That's the proposal that will be coming forward. So it's pretty heavy-handed, but it's basically trying to really allow for owners to do it or occupants. So if you happen to live in the building and it's a three-unit building, you could make it theoretically a unit available through short-term rental. But if you're not, you can't use it as an investment vehicle because right now, if you look at real estate listings in Winooski and other towns, it says ideal Airbnb, ideal short-term rental investment. So that's what they're talking about. Wow. Can I follow that with a question about compliance monitoring? Because that is something that came up. I've read the evaluation of IZ in Burlington, and it's something that came up. And I certainly in a city with the resources that Winooski has, it is a big deal to make sure that we have the right compliance monitoring structure in place or the funding that we need to be able to purchase compliance monitoring elsewhere. So can you speak a little bit to what would be required for compliance monitoring for IZ and for our replacement organizations? If you don't mind, I just want to check in with the audience for questions. Yeah, sure. I thought I saw at least... I had a question earlier. I think it's a little outdated at this point. Sorry. But developing in these cities in Syria, I fully agree with that. Developers like us work really hard to make these projects happen, and there's a lot of work in effort that goes into it. So I think everything that Eric said, I fully support. I think that's a big piece of how to wrap this language. I understand that. Other questions? Compliance, I guess. So in the last couple of years, the city of Burlington stepped up its compliance on the IZ ordinance considerably. And in the course of doing that, I did a bunch of research about how other municipalities are doing it. And what I found is there's an incredible range of what folks are doing. So it goes from city employees who maintain a waiting list and income-qualify tenants and place them in specific units, who annually income-qualify them on an ongoing basis, if their income rises above the IZ level, then they are evicted. So that's on one end. The other end is essentially municipalities that don't. And what's the result of that in terms of what you end up with? I think a lot of it, I think has to do with certainly the resources of the municipality, but also what is your appetite for compliance? What is your anxiety level? Because really this is a trade-off that a municipality has to make between risk and documenting compliance. So essentially what the city of Burlington has done is we have 0.15 of a full-time equivalent that 0.15. And so to give you a sense of the first case that I gave, I think that that municipality has four or five full-time people doing that work. So we just finished our first year of IZ compliance. And what we found, essentially what we did was we did an extensive sort of data mining to make sure that we had complete files on all the projects. We did this, we did an inventory to know exactly which units were IZ units. And then we sent out documentation to all IZ property owners, including the nonprofits, to find out what sort of compliance they were reporting. With the understanding that there would be some folks who would have limited memory of IZ, what we found actually was pretty encouraging. Over 90% of the units that we did monitoring on were in compliance with IZ. And so the question for Burlington is does Burlington have the appetite to move to the next level where we are doing deeper dives into the monitoring that we're doing, if we're doing site visits and looking at tenant files and all of that. And so at that point, at this point we're not sure how deeply we're going to go into it. But it absolutely is something to consider when you're drafting your ordinance because it takes staff time. I know that, or I understand that some municipalities either are planning to essentially subcontract that to an on-profit. Heinsberg? Heinsberg has written into the ordinance. Oh, that's nice. It says you will contact Champlain Housing Trust and ask them what the rents should be. And then they will certify that, in fact, the rents and the individual who's renting meets the standard that is in the ordinance. 1.15 people. Take care of one new unit or two. But just as part of this, we have at times provided sort of, well, we have a client department because all of the things that we have require huge amounts of federal rules and regs and the people who have come in. I mean, Todd comes and monitors us and another group comes and monitors us. We have lots of different funding sources all making requests and requirements of us. And so we have essentially two people who focus on compliance and there's another four people who are dealing with applications and lend hand to the compliance issue, all in rental housing. And so they have on occasion, and we have created forms for different developers to use that we then have reviewed the information and say yes or in compliance. And then provided that then to a municipality that says, thank you much, that's a different set of eyes. It's all, it's not a deeper dive. It's all independently and perjury, you know, penalty and perjury, both the individual doing it as well as the municipal official doing it, you know, involved in the owner and the tenant. But it is a level of compliance to assure that all unit is affordable and the individual is meeting that requirement. And in most contexts, it says typically been on turnover, not on every year, which is a pretty serious, I think, level of sort of enforcement. But on turnover, this individual comes in, it's set, the rent's right, and the individual's income is correct. And if you do yearly enforcement, then you're really finding yourself a bunch of stuff. And just to clarify. On turnover, it's a little easier when somebody else comes in and you say the rent is right, and the individual's income is correct, and you move on. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it's compliance at initial occupancy. But that's not what he, that's not what the example that you were giving it was. Yeah, just the example that I gave is not Burlington. That's why I mentioned it. There's no appetite to be evicting over-income people with an IZ unit. We want people's incomes to get better. Right, it's a ladder. Part of the point. Providing a ladder. But you're verifying, you're not, you're verifying their income at move-in. And then year to year, you're verifying that they're still there, or if someone new has moved in, that their income was proper. Right, so we want to be, that's the main thing that we're really looking for when we're monitoring is there a new tenant, and if so, then this is something, information that we need to get. So we've charged the owner. So the owner is getting the service from us, and we're charging them $35 to do that, and we're taking that, and that's like, there's no moneymaker involved. It's just simply for like, you know, the whatever, I guess we had hundreds of those. We have a position doing that, but I think it's just a, it's more like that's a reasonable fee for review. It's like a credit report that you do. This issue also came up with the neighborhood designations, you know, that were enacted as part of state law, and I can't remember the exact details, and Leslie's not here anymore, but she could tell you what I'm recalling is that the housing finance agency was basically required to publish numbers every year that give private sector for-profit owners that are using one of the designation areas a way to know like what is the affordability level that's required. So you have, I think it's VHFA, possibly with a combination with, in conjunction with the Department of Housing and Community Development, I just don't remember the details of it. It was done about a year ago in the 2017 session. So absent Champagne Housing Trust or municipality doing it, a private sector developer is supposed to be able to go to a website and say, these are the rents that I need to charge in order to comply with, you know, the affordability criteria, say, in one of the designation zones, like neighborhood designation areas. Wow. You wind us up and... Yeah. No. Yes. No, no, no, no, no. We have more housing inside of Burlington. Okay. Then we do it. Then comparing jurisdictions, this may be instructive for Manuski. I mean, you tend to look at a bunch of different zones where they're based on Chapter 117, but maybe they all model themselves. I'm just curious if there's a differences that you already see that make development in some communities, particularly parental housing, easier than others, since we can pretty much guarantee or at least historically, whatever you build for the rent is going to be built. So that is a question. I think the... Yeah. Should we name towns? I'll name towns. I'll see if I can join you. I'll tell you, like, my experience in working in Manuski versus working in Burlington is night and day, right? And I'm not, you know, saying any of this to be critical of any of the folks that work for the city of Burlington, but my experience, right, and the way it feels to me going through the process. In Burlington, I go in and I say, I want to do X, Y, and Z. And the response I get is, whoa, here's a list, man. You got to do all this stuff. I come into Manuski and I say, I'd like to do X, Y, and Z. The answer I get in Manuski is, let's get everybody together and figure out how to get this done. So I don't know, you know, that's not an ordinance thing so much. It's just, I don't know, it's a cultural thing. It may be the size of Manuski. You know, it's a small community and you've got, you know, you can get, you know, three department heads together in Manuski and figure it out. And you don't have the scale of bureaucracy that Burlington has and that makes things quicker. They're all different. I mean, they're all different. I would say Shelburne is the worst. Shelburne is the worst. Sherlock, man. Have you ever tried Sherlock? No, you can't even go near Sherlock. It's like there's an invisible wall there. And Heinsberg, Heinsberg, as much as they want to do more, sometimes it can be very difficult in terms of different details. We found South Burlington to be really easy, relatively easy, I think in terms of sort of doing development. We haven't done anything in Manuski in a while, so it's hard for me to be able to pitch it. I mean, we do well in Burlington, but we have a lot more to pay attention to in Burlington than we do in South Burlington, you know. We do well there too. In all of the systems. So you figured it out over decades how to navigate it. I mean, there is a distinction and difference between the ability to have big chunks of land that you could develop and being in a fairly crowded and compact community. In Manuski is that. I think it's just a little harder. But I also think that there's expectations that are different and opportunities are different. The physical constraints in Burlington and Manuski are very similar as what you're saying. You're building on small sites. You're hemmed in by your neighbors. Your costs are higher because your scale is smaller and you've got neighbors on every side that you have to keep happy in the middle of it. You're not building in a field typically. Cambrian rise is something that with plenty of land makes it a lot of but we had to tear down three buildings in order to get 40 units up and we had to really bring in one property that we owned. We had to buy two other properties to bring it in to get the critical mass to get something like that done. Eric's got the same kind of thing where he's like jamming in. I don't want to say that in a negative way. But you're really putting a lot of development into a footprint. Even on King Street we have the building that we owned and that's it. As soon as we take a step we're in some other world. Some other owner. In your opinions do you think it's better and more effective to have two separate regulatory documents that address inclusionary housing and replacement housing with the understanding that they will work together or to try to integrate them as one document? Eric will say you shouldn't have either so we can ask Tom. No, I don't agree. I think a replacement ordinance at some level makes sense and I think if you're going to do these things they should be separate. Because they really address separate issues. I think it makes sense to fold them into zoning ordinance or development ordinance and that way they're part of the same document but they should be separate articles or sections. The only thing I would say I would be careful about the displacement we've seen in lower income housing which is housing low income people it's not going to be owned by a non-profit but by its nature it's maybe naturally occurring affordable housing which tends to be it's actually decent property and I find that the property is not that decent and needs to be torn down but those families that might be displaced in that case you really want I think the housing replacement ordinance to trigger a few things to protect the families and it's all about protecting the families that are in that housing it may mean that you've got to build something else but it also is simply what happens there? What happens with that community? What happens with those people? I think that's really a personal issue as much as it's anything else it might be good to tear down I had no from a developer's point of view because I'm a developer at heart for Larkin to redevelop that parcel in front of the movie theater it kind of made sense it fits, it's okay from a development point of view but those people who lived there they're gone they're all about disappearing and that's the issue I think that needs to be paid attention to and we all need to do better at to that end then replacement ordinance and some protection of tenants however you might do it may be the right thing to do in mobile home parks now you just simply can't sell a mobile home park you had a process to go through where you're giving everybody notice there's an opportunity to purchase in a range of things I think in the condo conversion ordinance also there's a whole range of notices and opportunities and maybe the condo conversion ordinance is a better sort of look at in terms of work but the protections are good but the protections may be really really good the state has a law but Burlington's goes quite a bit further we did that mainly for Northgate at that point you instead of saying instead of those 15 families and those four those five units they get a notice and so you got something to do well it's the example that Todd brought earlier was if you have a 10 unit building and somebody's going to tear it down because it's dilapidated it's not worth fixing up and you're going to replace it with something that's potentially a gentrification situation but you want to be careful about that you really want to be careful about that you asked about parking earlier and I guess I can't remember exactly where the inclusionary zoning workgroup ended up on parking but it seemed like parking might I remember earlier discussions that the workgroup had was that parking might be one of those more fruitful kind of incentives to reduce parking requirements for affordable housing so it's already 50% that's what it is now the developers would say let us provide the parking we think we need and forget about the ordinance Eric has argued that in the downtown we sort of said the same thing we're not going to have less parking than we need more parking than we need making the requirement is great from an ordinance perspective but it's really just like a blunt insurance to like sometimes we're going to need more and that in the housing location and what we do and how we're going to rent it out is going to make that determination well you know but you could say that very specifically around parking and the level we had to build another 36 parking spaces at St. Joe's that was what was required we took a big lawn and we created parking spaces we have 66 spaces there it's big it's also what the building needs just by chance I think and even then it's crowded at times you know it's not enough but it's like the Disney thing you get it right 90% of the time 10% it's chaos and so we'll live with that but I think that's just by chance often enough though when you look at parking requirements you just go oh come on that's crazy that's just too much whether it's just for thank you all and Seth do you want to say a couple words actually can I make a quick announcement before the mayor gets his just to let folks know if you haven't heard already we have a biennial housing conference it's happening on November 13th and 14th at the Hilton in Burlington I'm on the planning committee I think we've got a number of really exciting workshops the first half day is going to for folks who want to learn more about the basic nuts and bolts of housing we have a housing 101 housing 102 kind of introduction to affordable housing and then there's also a couple of workshops that are really going to take a deeper dive into the intersection between housing and healthcare which has really been an emerging field over the last five or six years and then the second day we're especially looking for you know folks who are involved at the municipal level to think there's a number of workshops that are pitched set the mayor is actually working with us on the housing 101 and his professional non-political well it's not a political right where in the other hat there you go we're working with set on housing 101 but the 14th is a full day of I think some really constructive workshops and just encourage y'all to go vhfa.org it's the housing finances agencies website and that's where to go to register sorry sir not at all these conversations are really exciting because I think they're a fantastic administration of the community the new ski is the most diverse community on a number of levels people like to look at the language that is spoken here and the nationality that people have but the socio-economic and economic diversity that exists here is also something we value we celebrate not just as something that's really cool but what we think makes us what we are as a community we set out around a year and a half of the amount to really look at this issue of housing we have this interest in the investment we've taken these steps to try to say didn't stay on the corridors is okay we're going to embrace that that's going to be something that's part of who we are that we invest in this conversation as a community and for us to have that a vacuum without really thoughtful experience with people who have been the ministry mayor so we can't involve you in that in your time our policy makers in this room but also the public at home and have an opportunity to share their own perspectives the best thing we have to do is people in this room are inspired to share their reflections on what kind of community they want to see as a result of this type of conversation I just want to say quickly too we can't thank so many of the housing commission members we've not thank you enough we've asked you to carry a ton of water on this issue this has obviously been made a high priority and this happening tonight is your doing and you're pushing to do that in coordination with the great work editor to Mr. Chair Robert to the entire commission thank you very much for your work we certainly hope that this was beneficial we are so very very fortunate to be in a place where we can happen to people like you coming here tonight so thank you very very very much for coming here tonight and bringing all your ideas thank you thank you I'll be in touch I'm sure