 Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us, and we'll ask, feel free to still help yourself to the buffet, but eventually come over and take your seat. My name is Mary Catherine Painter, and I am the chair of the Future Forum Board here at the LBJ Library. On behalf of the Future Forum, thank you all so much for joining us today. I really want to offer a quick thank you to our sponsors, FF Law, and the Downtown Austin Alliance. The Future Forum's events are made possible. Yes. Thank you. Thank you. Future Forum's events are made possible by our incredible members and sponsors. The Future Forum is an organization that brings together individuals with different backgrounds, experience, and points of view to discuss local, statewide, national, and international topics that affect us today. Our goal is to create a place in Austin for civil-informed and bipartisan discussions. If you are not a member of the Future Forum, I would strongly encourage you to join. Members enjoy the best of what Future Forum has to offer, including first access to events and happy hours, networking opportunities, and benefits here at the LBJ Presidential Library. Our next event will be a happy hour gathering and networking event at Antonelli's Cheese House in July, and we would love for you to come. And do we have Sarah? Are there the little postcards for people to sign up today? Where's Sarah? OK, well, there she is. Yes, we do have those on a table, maybe somewhere. OK. Back here. There's a postcard with a QR code you can scan with your phone. It'll take you directly to the link to sign up and become a member. We would really appreciate the support and a new addition to the community. Today's conversation on growth and affordability in Austin is timely. Just last week, US News and World Report released their best cities to live for 2023 and Austin plummeted from the number 14 spot to number 40. In large part due to affordability. And on Thursday, the US Census Bureau released the latest data on population showing significant growth in the Austin metro area. Austin now ranks as one of the 10th largest cities in the US. And on a personal note, as a need of Austinite, this event means so much to me because the culture of the city has always been such a touch point for those people in Texas who felt like they needed a place to come and be creative and to be successful as a creative. And as the city evolves and grows, we have to ask ourselves, who is it leaving behind? So that begs the question for today's event, who is Austin for? I am excited and honored to hear from our guests today. Nora Linares-Molaire, Executive Director of Housing Works Austin, Adam Orman, Board President and Co-Founder of Good Work Austin, Peter Schwartz, Co-Founder and Consultant of Sound Music Cities that conducts the Austin Music Census, and Selena Z, President of the Austin EMS Association. And moderating today's discussion is Dan Solomon, Senior Editor at Texas Monthly. Please keep in mind that there will be time for questions at the end of the event. And now I will turn it over to our speakers and Dan to join us up here and begin the panel. Thanks everybody for being here. I'm just going to get right into it since we're going. So I guess the question I have for everybody is what are the issues that you see that have put us in this spot where we're sliding in national rankings and everyone is kind of aware that there's a lot of challenges to being the 10th biggest city and growing the way that we have? What are the challenges that you see? Hi, I'm Adam. I own a restaurant in the Mueller neighborhood and also co-founded a nonprofit called Good Work Austin that was founded by a number of bars and restaurant owners to help other businesses pay better wages, provide benefits, all small independent, locally owned businesses. And that's kind of where I'd start is I moved here. I had worked in the restaurant industry in New York and San Francisco. My wife is from here, so we moved back. I have a little bit of credibility. And what I saw in both of those cities, which are well, which are further along the unaffordability train tracks than we are, is that the restaurant industry had become dominated by large groups that are venture backed with money from out of the state, out of city. And the hospitality industry was largely becoming a real estate play. That has increased exponentially over the last 20 years as retail becomes less of a commercial real estate option. And restaurants are one of the last viable real estate profitable real estate plays. So on the one hand, 20 years ago, I probably don't get to open the restaurant that I opened in Austin. There may not be a need for it. There isn't the population, whatever. But on the other hand, we haven't done the things here over the last two, three decades to make sure that the growth is sustainable, to make sure that the businesses that are opening are to make sure that we're supporting locally owned businesses and keeping money in Austin and creating a more circular economy. And that is a hard genie to put back in the bottle. My name's Selena, and I'm president of the EMS Association. And so I sit in this very interesting place where I talk to work with our paramedics, EMTs, and also our other public safety partners, police officers, firefighters. And I talk to them about their concerns at the ground level. And I also talk to policymakers about how we can make public safety better in Austin, health care better in Austin. And so these two perspectives really makes me think about how the policy that we have at a city level and a state level really affect the lives of people who work for us, who serve the community, who serve y'all. And one unique thing that I see is that Austin has a very liberal place in the seat of a very Republican state, creates so much tension within the state that it makes it really hard to do local policy that stays local. We know this session that there's a lot of state intervention. I also think about where our housing policy comes from and look at some other cities, even across Texas. You look at Houston, and they start out with a very different math when it comes to housing and deregulated land use. And then you see Austin is very, very fractured. And it's very, very difficult to make positive changes to increase the housing stock. And I also think it gets into some icky territory, because then when you talk about increasing housing stock, people who do this work then get labeled as shills for developers who are the ones building the housing stock, who then may, in the end, support bad policies at the state level. And so I think housing is one of the trickiest issues that we have. And I know that when I talk to my medics, it's one of the most pressing. I know that we used to have a ton of people from out of state apply to work for us, and that's happening less and less. It used to be about 80% out of staters that would come work for us up until two years ago. And the last three cycles, I always ask all the cadets where they come from. And more and more, they are homegrown, coming from Austin, which is great. But a lot of them are very young because they're living with their parents and just got their EMT license and are now working for us. And so I just think about how housing has become such a huge barrier. A lot of my medics have quit because they've moved to San Antonio. They live in Colleen. And they do see other opportunities that are comparable, especially as gasoline prices have gone up in the last few years. Their choice of living somewhere further away and having cheaper housing is offset by child care costs, by fuel costs coming into the city. And so all these things are very, very real for my medics, are very, very real for people who work for the city of Austin. And I'm really grateful for opportunities like this and places like this where we can really talk through how do we make those things better, because they really will affect every single person in this room if we don't fix them. You're hired. What for all the advocacy that we need to do in this city, in the state? I'm Nora with Housing Works Austin. And we do just that research, education, and advocacy all around housing affordability. I think to answer your question, Dan, we're in a perfect storm. We ended up with a land development code that's over 15 years old, not 18 years old. I haven't been able to pass it. It's a comprehensive land development code that would have changed the way that housing would have been able to be built in Austin. We ended up with a lot of new companies coming into Austin, which increased the number of people coming into Austin. And unfortunately, we all ended up with no income increases in our regular jobs. So when you have all of those things, it causes gentrification. It causes the displacement of all of our people. And so you end up with a situation in which even when Austin City Council is trying to make changes, we have lawsuits. We have the state legislature to deal with. And it is not a friendly way to try to do housing policy, as lots of us know. So we have a lot of problems. I think there's a good thing that's happening right now. And I think you're going to ask me some questions about hope. But I think there are council members and Travis County commissioners and our region that are all trying to increase the housing affordability stock. And we're starting to see a little movement with that. But we can't do it without changes in policy. I'd like to follow up on something that Selena said about people not being able to live here even though they're working here. And everyone is in such different fields. But I'm curious if that affects people in the restaurant business or musicians or everyone who builds Austin on any level. So I'm wondering if y'all can speak to that. And yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's an easy place to start. So one of the first, and it also involves the city council butting up against the state legislature, we have no control over the city of Austin has no wage control mechanism based on the Texas Constitution. The city's minimum wage can never be higher than the state minimum wage. So the reason that good work was founded was founded during the paid sick leave ordinance was being passed in Austin and then being challenged at the legislature and in the courts because a paid sick leave mandate was found to be a wage mandate. If you're paying somebody for time that they're not there, then you're effectively giving them a higher minimum wage than they have earned. So it was found to be unconstitutional. We also, so in the restaurant industry, paid sick leave is not a benefit that is typically afforded. Health benefits are not typically available. And the minimum wage is $2.13 an hour. This is different from state to state. And usually, a lot of people still don't know that that's where it is. So this is not a good city. This is not a great city to be making $2.13 an hour and to be dependent on tips for your wages, not even getting into how all of the complications around tipping, economic policy institute studies that show that tipping very rarely has anything to do with your service. It is based principally on the sex and gender and race of your server. So there's inequity there to begin with, and then there's inequity built on inequity. And how if you are making and tipped workers make an average of $11 an hour, we know that there are a lot of folks at Steak Houses downtown that are making $40, $50, $60 an hour, that is not everybody. You cannot live in Austin on $11 an hour with no paid sick leave and no health care. And I would say from the results of the music census, it really gives us good numbers on realizing how many participants are not able to access the social safety net because they're freelance, they're not employees. And some of the strategies that they're using to adjust to this rapid increase in housing costs is just to move out of town, further out of town. And so we're thinking more about a regional understanding of the ecosystem that stretches. We're seeing zip codes that are much further out of town than we would have suggested even 10 years ago for our network. And that's where people are adjusting in the short term to try to stay in music. We asked them what was their probability that they would continue their music career. And 84% said, I'm definitely going to be staying in music. They're very passionate and committed to continuing their work. And then the same question, are you going to stay in Austin? And that dropped to 64% who were committed to staying. So we're definitely seeing that these are short term strategies to try to stay in music and to stay in Austin. But we can't really bank on them being helpful over the long term. So we have right now employed 521 medics. And I found an Excel program that looks at, we have all their zip codes. And so what I found out is 70% of our medics don't live in Travis County. And I did a little heat map. And you can see that there's this almost ring around Austin where people primarily live Georgetown, Colleen, and then all the way down to San Antonio. We have a shocking number of our medics who live in San Antonio. And it's just really, really sad to see that. Because a lot of these folks that I've talked to, they do want to live in Austin. And the ones that do are primarily very young live. There's this one house where five medics are living together. And so they're young, they're single. They can afford very small apartments. But some of our folks that have kids, that have families, they just can't live in Austin. I can't think of a single family that actually lives in Austin. And especially during COVID, coming out of COVID, we saw those huge rent hikes. I think that made the news a little bit. That rent jumped up a lot. We have a relief fund. And I'm really grateful that we have that. Our medics contribute to it. And the relief fund really did dole out quite a bit of money just helping people bridge over these new rent hikes until folks could figure out how to work more over time and make their, readjust their bills and make it work. So it is really shocking to see these national and local trends really affect our medics and where they are forced to live and be able to raise families. Nora, I have a question for you as somebody who really is so focused on housing, which is what does a city like Austin lose when the people who serve it and create it can't afford to actually live here to do those things? We lose people that wanna work in your restaurant and EMT workers. If you are currently working for Selena right now and all of a sudden you realize that you're having to travel two hours just to get to work, you're at one point gonna decide, hopefully not Selena, but one point decide maybe I should become an ES person, EMT person in San Antonio or in Hays County. So I don't have to travel so far. We lose people. We're losing people across the board. And that's part of the problem. We don't have the housing for people that need the housing. When you look at HUD, every year puts out something, what we call the MFI median or the median family income structure for the MSAs, which are the five counties that surround Travis County. And what happens is the people that are the poorest, they need to have housing at what we call the 30% median family income level. The city has been, that's been the hardest to produce and it's hard to produce because it takes more money to subsidize it because when you build affordable housing and you have people that need that affordable housing, it needs to be for rental units. It needs to stay affordable for 40 years, which means you need the money in subsidies to keep that apartment at that level for 40 years. Think about the money it's gonna cost to do that and home ownership for 99 years. So we have a problem in building them because we don't have the extra money to build them, not just about where they're built, which is a whole other conversation, but how much are built currently right now? So Peter, you mentioned how musicians are sort of trying to fill in gaps and you come up with these sort of short-term strategies. And I know that Austin has certain nonprofit resources for musicians who don't have healthcare and things like that. And I'm curious for everyone, what you see as are the nonprofit solutions or the organizations that are trying to fill in the gaps, how successful are they at that? How successful can they be at that? How well structured are we to even allow nonprofits to fill in some of the gaps at a state or city level? Yeah, I think if I were a musician, very young and completely committed as we find that they are to pursue my career, I would be very interested in moving to Austin. In fact, we did see an 8% of our ecosystem has moved here in the last three years. And why is that? And the nonprofits I think are a major attractor. Los Angeles, New York, big music towns that we're competing with right now, they don't have a specific organization like the Health Alliance for Austin Musicians. They don't have the patronage models, a shout out to Sana Gild who is putting together grant money, cash to put in artist's pockets as soon as possible to help sustain this incubation period that they need to develop their skills to hopefully become financially sustainable. So, harkening back to this question of there being a big disconnect between our civic resources and the passion of our community to preserve its, in this case, their creative economy and their creative class, nonprofits do really provide those foundational assets that make a difference. And that's, I think a good reason why we would see a greater exodus if it weren't for those resources. I think that nonprofits can fill the gaps but they can't solve problems. Not on the kind of scale that we are creating problems. We do a lot of, we just started doing a lot of work in food access during the pandemic getting contracts from the city and the county for restaurants that were shut down to provide meals for different food and secure communities across Travis County. And when the pandemic was, when that funding ran out, so did those jobs but food insecurity did not. And there wasn't another mechanism to step in. The city is, there are parts of the city that are working diligently on a food plan, on a comprehensive food plan. Excuse me, comprehensive food plan. But that's still ways away from being implemented and then a ways away from being funded the way it would need to be funded. So they can't, and then you look at crises and see what happened during something like the freeze where the city was entirely dependent on nonprofits to get food to people who had lost power and gas. And that happens once a year now. So we're not, it's not enough, it's not nearly enough and it's only getting worse. Sorry. I know. You don't have an answer. Okay, and I understand. On the housing side, we have nonprofit developers. But there's not very many of them. And what they do, they do a really good job. Foundation communities, you keep seeing buildings that are coming up, but they're our largest nonprofit developer and they are also struggling with sort of the capital stacks that they have to build and the money that they need to go ahead and move forward with these buildings. So nonprofits can help, but we don't have enough of them. So we can't depend on the nonprofit world to build all the affordable housing. Sorry, we really do have to depend on developers, market rate developers who have a mission and are okay with building affordable housing. Generally they do that with some kind of density bonus program, some advantage that they get so that they can build higher or build more units. And that's why you hear about that all the time. And that's why it's so important to sort of support any kind of density bonus conversations or compatibility conversations that the city council is having right now, particularly, but we can't unfortunately nonprofits can help with food sometimes or with rent sometimes, but they cannot solve the affordability crisis. We just don't have enough of them. So it sounds like nonprofits are a piece, but not a major piece of finding a way through this. I'm curious in other cities, I'd love to start with Selena on this, as somebody who's involved directly with the city and the county in other places, what do you see that's effective or that you look to and think, man, if we could do that here, that might be a solution or part of a solution. I think that Austin is pretty unique just in how quickly housing costs have risen and how stagnant wages have been. And so I really don't see too many models where in public safety, medics are able to live in a lot of really unaffordable places. Boston, for example, they actually have residency requirements for their medics. And then you see that people have roommates up until they're like 40, 50 years old, even married couples, even families. And so I think people just are comfortable living in really different ways because of that. Same thing in New York. New York medics are also not paid very well either. And you just see a lot more cohabitation just among professionals. And also what you see is you see a really high turnover rate. People leave the field really quickly. The average turnover rate for EMS is about five years. And so you just see people leave after a year to go into the fire department where they are paid better and other fields in healthcare where they're paid a little bit better. Or you just see people with really, really long commutes. We even see people that fly from Las Vegas to places in California to work because they work one day on three days off or two days on six days off. And so they actually will commute thousands of miles and fly, and that's cheaper. It's crazy. And the totally sustainable way of trip. I'd like to go around if. Oh man, what was the question? I guess what do you see in other cities that... Right, right, right. Sorry, I was just... I'm sorry. There are little things that have been done in different cities where I know Milwaukee has an incentive for restaurants that are paying above a certain wage. There are incentives for providing health benefits for small businesses that are providing health benefits. So there are little pieces here and there that help to defray some of the costs. Nothing like the kinds of incentives. It's complicated because the hospitality industry is still the largest private employer in the nation. But even though there are as many chains as there are, it's still dealt with as a small... They're all still dealt with individually as small businesses. So you can't have the big incentive programs that we're working through an incentive program with the Economic Development Department now that was clearly not built for a restaurant, for a business that only adds one or two or three employees a year. There's just, there's too much work and there's not enough money in it for us to, whereas a business that's coming and a Tesla, a Google. Economic Development Departments in most cities are still working with, are still looking at businesses like that because there's more bang for the buck. It's really hard to incentivize, to create incentives for, to create the kinds of small incentives that matter to us. And in Austin in particular, there are very few tax levers to play with because we've eliminated most of the taxes. I remember sitting in Representative Hinojosa's office seven years ago and she was talking about creating a franchise tax incentive that would, for restaurants that were gonna pay over, that were gonna pay over the federal minimum wage, which is still only $7.25 an hour. And she got back to me the next day and said, I'm really sorry, they just got rid of the franchise tax. So, you know, it's like, it's hard. So there aren't that many, it's a hard industry for cities to have a big positive impact on. Well, I was gonna ask you if it has to be in the United States. Oh, let's look all over. All right, cause it's kind of cheating, but you know, a good example is, and I think in the US, this is something that we learned with COVID and the kind of relief emergency funding that was the first time a lot of these freelancing musicians ever had any kind of subsidy at all. But for instance, like in Toronto, they did a short-term pandemic relief of property tax for live music venues. And just last month decided to make it permanent. It made such an impact to have a lower property tax that those live music venues were able to pass on those savings to keep live musicians working. And that's, I think that's really important for us. If ever you guys are thinking about a creative economy like music, we're mostly talking about local musicians who make most of their income playing live. So we're not necessarily talking about universal music in LA and how much money Taylor Swift is making. This is about community and how a community is able to sustain creatives that live next door to them that are playing in unassuming sort of non-traditional locations, not at the Moody Center or something like that. And so I think out of COVID, we're realizing that it is an enormous help to a creative community to have any kind of public help. And they typically don't pursue it in the past because they can't just show their W-2s. They don't have, and also a lot of times traditionally economic development money or grants have only been accessible by nonprofits. So we're seeing some shifts here where people are starting to learn, okay, let's try to figure out how to get money to these free, this atomized cloud of freelancers who are really suffering to give us some live local music. So housing is different, right? In that if you look at Austin, it's quite unique in terms of the city and how it was built and the history that we have. It's very centered around neighborhoods. So when you look at how we compare to other cities and particularly even in Texas, we have the strongest standards for where we can build and how we can build, which when I say compatibility, that's what that means is how far away can you build something, two or three stories from a neighborhood. We have the strictest in the whole state. We have an antiquated land development code. So everybody in council is trying to piecemeal the policy instead of doing a comprehensive. And it didn't pass because of what we call in my industry, NIMBYism, which is not in my backyard. People always say they want to have affordable housing. Sure, I have four affordable housing, but not in my backyard. And what they don't realize is people, all of the industries here, but we're even talking about teachers and firefighters and police officers who now qualify for affordable housing. Capital A, income restricted, affordable housing because they don't make enough. Travis County employees, city of Austin employees in some cases can also apply for them right now and we don't have them. So people need to learn a little bit more about affordability. It's really complicated, but there's some really basic information you can learn. And so I challenge you to go and listen and learn about it. There's always been good news in that everybody's talking about affordability now. So people are learning a little bit more, but it is really challenging in terms of, I would even venture to ask you and you don't have to raise your hand, but when we talk about cost burden, we talk about people spending more than 30% of their income on housing, which is what you're supposed to is less than 30%. Probably the majority of you are spending anywhere between 30 and 50% of your income on housing, which means you're extremely cost burden. So that's not a good thing in our community. And so we've got to fix it. Our medics who are here up to seven years qualify for affordable housing, like on our pay scale. And I think up to 11 years if you have any dependence. Yeah, I'm not surprised. Obviously restaurant workers, obviously musicians, right? So we're talking about everyone that makes the heart of the city where we want to keep it weird, but we also want to keep it stable. As a matter of fact, I was so surprised when I heard the chair of the forum say she's an Austinite, very rare to hear someone say they're an Austinite, because most of our Austinites have had to leave. That's true. So let me stay with you and work our way back. I'm curious, if you get to pick an item from your wish list of things that might actually help for whichever, whatever you're working on, what's the top thing on your list? Past the land development code. I mean, yeah. If we did that, we would not be able, we would not be having the kinds of issues right now. Even if you don't deal with the zoning and you just pass the policies, this code is about this thick, and the city spent over $8 million, and it got two weeks within having passage. And because of rumors and misperceptions of what was happening, they pulled it down. And since then, we've not had anyone want to take it back up again. So I would say that's my wish list. I'm with Nora. Ah, the minimum wage is still probably the place to start eliminating the tipped minimum wage. I mean, we thought that as a business, that was our first step, was that we were never gonna pay, we were never gonna pay less than federal minimum wage, and learned quickly after that that's just the start of making somebody's life, of creating a professional, of professionalizing the job, that there are these other benefits, that there are other, you know, thinking of other countries, what happens, how the restaurant industry is different in Western Europe. But that, so just changing the minimum, just eliminating the sub minimum wage is not enough to all of a sudden say, great, restaurant employees can afford to live in Austin, and their lives are, those jobs are just as valued as other corporate professions. But it's a start, and it would make the restaurants that are paying to 13 an hour have a conversation about, have a conversation about how to do that, and what comes next. Well, my first wish was already granted just by being here, which is for creative economies, music people to even be on a stage at the table for these kinds, conversations, it's not been our history. And so it's just a lot of gratitude that we are starting to self organize as a community and understand that when we do get a place in the podium, we get to make coherent arguments about our work in a way that's respected as any other piece of the total economy of a city. So that's already granted. But beyond that, you know, to have people actually read the music census and look through the data and think about it has been really tough, even in the music community. There's the strength of the lived experience and you wanna go right forward with your pet project and your initiative. But with numbers, we can start to really narrow that range of darkness and think about policy change that will affect the most people in the most positive way. So fingers crossed on that. And I think I would say to a community like this too is that the difference that we, a big difference we see between Austin and other cities that we've done work with is there's always about 30% who are, the only thing they do is music. They've found a way to be solely focused on music as the profession. And then what do the other 70% do? And in towns where you have a static lack of growth of their music ecosystem, most of those people have taken primary jobs in something else and their music careers are not in a position to really progress for them to advance. And in Austin, it's a much lower number. They're putting together two or three jobs as a strategy and they're not taking a primary job outside of music. So what that means is there's a community that's helping them take a month off in the summer to tour, to take a week off in November to record a record. You need that kind of flexibility from your employers to develop as a creative. And somehow in Austin, there's more options to do that in a lot of the cities that we talk to. What current policies, what that's going on, whether it's at the state level or the local level or nationally maybe, I don't know, I'm looking all over, is there anything that you think might help that gives you some hope? You're looking at me. I am. Yes, there is. And I've started to see some movement with a little bit more of the affordable housing units being built, not just in Austin, Travis County, but also in our region, in our five MSA counties, which is a good thing. And the city council and the mayor are really trying to sort of move forward with some of the policy changes, even if we don't have a land development code, some of the small changes they can make now. So I see hope that those changes will actually do some good for us and move us forward. And I will say just real quick that if you wanna research a little bit about where we are right now, HousingWorks does a, we do the scorecard for the city of Austin, where we compare what they came up with, housing goals in 2017. And since then we've been doing a scorecard and it's on our website under the research tab, but it'll give you an idea. 2022 numbers will come out in a couple of months, but you'll give you an idea of how hard it is to build at the lower levels and where we are with all the other levels and all the other things, including homelessness and preservation and all that kind of stuff. So I do see movement. I'm excited about that. I want the legislature to go away so that no bad policies are passed again against Austin. They have really tried to not allow for Austin Knights to, if you have a will and you voted for it, like Project Connect, they're trying to take that away. And so I'm very skeptical about that and really worried about that, but I do see our council and may are moving forward. Yeah, I think about so many things specifically. I mean, I think a lot of y'all are probably engaged in the city and so know that in Austin, all of our elected officials are Democrats and so the divide, except for one, excuse me. And so outside of that, and even when you, Adam McKenzie, who's the lone Republican on council, the biggest divide on council is really where you stand on housing. I mean, like if we're just being really honest, either you're a NIMBY on council or you're a NIMBY on council and sometimes those lines bleed over and sometimes you don't even know where Republicans stand, but in this council, we did shift towards more folks that are interested in building a lot of housing stock, but it's really interesting because then when you look at the state level, a bill just died last night and a lot of Austin representatives voted it down and that would have actually increased or made it easier to build ADUs or granny flats. And so the state, there are some people at the state level have actually tried to attack Austin by having more housing, which is it's a really weird place for everybody to be in and you see legislators that are so great on so many issues like the one that you talked about, them vote against policies because they're afraid of preemption from the state but that actually would have increased our housing stock in Austin. So it's just so complicated and tricky and I think a lot of like my union, for example, we are generally singularly focused on EMS but housing has become such an important issue for us because we see that that is what is reducing our workforce. And so we're really thinking about adding that as a core issue when we talk about who do we endorse and who do we support. So things are really changing, I think, very quickly in Austin and I also think it's very promising to see and we'll just see the next few years but I do think that we have to strategically think much more seriously about how we interact with the state ledge because they are becoming increasingly dangerous for Austin and just news stories that pop up in February, we see a bill about it by March and that's just a really scary place to be. The comprehensive food plan is a good thing. They've a lot has been done over the last two years to develop how the city, everything from how the city and county treat urban farmers to how they procure food, how they institutionally procure food, how they deal with water and how food is distributed and to which businesses they're buying from what the labor practices of those businesses are, what the other organic and sustainability practices of those businesses are and the city doesn't control, the city buys a lot and the city also can influence the way AISD purchases, the way the convention center purchases, et cetera, the way UT purchases. So all of those things can make, if a lot of that purchasing gets funneled towards local businesses that are engaging in ethical business practices and taking care of their employees, then it makes those businesses much easier to run which starts to get us to a more Western European model of running a restaurant. So if those small businesses are easier to run, our small businesses are easier to run, then we can spend more on labor and know that the city is supporting and promoting a certain way of doing business. So there's some hope. Yeah, I think we should definitely mention how just this month we have a first round of grants that is money from the hot funds in Austin, that the city of Austin, the economic development department is overseeing. So these are grants to individuals just in the way I've talked about before are most useful to get into people's pockets. And then I think just generally, I always come back to and we see this, right now we're working with Sacramento and they have all these laws in the books that have been so punitive against live music. You have to pay extra permits for a cabaret license and I swear it goes back to them trying to control the miners in the 1840s. And this happens with a lot of cities where there's just a historical legislation on the books that's highly punitive and now suddenly they wanna have this creative nighttime economy and they realize they need to make a lot of changes. So in any ways that we can help them to look at ways that that's been dealt with other cities, like for Austin had a big issue with their sound ordinance that had to get figured out. And once it did, it really helped downtown live music venues survive. So those are things that can be done on the legislative side. We've got time for some questions. So I'm gonna open up the floor. If you have a question, got one right there. They're asking me, should I share this here in the office area of the search organization which is a regional organization of public, private leaders. And you know, we're thinking Austin but Laura, I particularly made it to you but others too. How do we think counties as the folks who are leaving us are going to tile not that far from here or over the line in Bastrop, et cetera. So how can we report to some real regional collaboration missionaries or other non-profits in the area? Question for you. Here, I just think this up. It seems like, you know, if I'm paying $250 to go to a fancy Schmancy concert and we'd be centered with somebody famous, if I was asked to put a dollar in a till for some kind of a fund for musicians, I'd do that. What's another dollar? Is there any thought of trying to, you know, either mandatory or voluntary, don't call it a tax, call it a contribution to generate money for people already paying for different kinds of music to go to musicians who really need it or just crazy people. You wanna take it first? No, no, go ahead. Okay, so thank you for that. I agree with you, County, it's we're really now into the regional aspect. And so I think our County commissioners found themselves all of a sudden in a situation where they never had to worry about affordable housing before because the city of Austin took care of it. And now they have all these new companies that are coming in, in the Travis County area, right, outside of the city of Austin. And they're like, oh my God, we need to build some more stuff. And they're restricted by a lot of different things. They can't bond, you know, they can't go out for bonds, all those kinds of things. So we, you know, we're now doing our advocacy around Travis County. And then about four or five years ago, we started our County analysis where we looked at all of the five counties and started to determine where are they with affordable housing? What is the demographic changes? For example, 10, 15 years ago, we had a much stronger black population. If you look at the demographics over the years, we're losing the black population in Austin and they're moving to Bastrop and Caldwell to other places. So we're starting to see those trends as well. So I agree, we need to start, there's a lot of pressure on Austin to build, but we also have to put the pressure around us, right? There has to be a regional thought process around transportation. You know, we're just talking about Project Connect because Austin's a little behind in the transportation area, but we're trying to get there. But there needs to be an expansion of that eventually so that if you do live in the county and you need to find a way to get into Austin so that you can find affordable housing somewhere else but be able to come back into Austin and stay and work in Austin. So I'm with you, you know, any way in which Errol can help in that arena, I know y'all are talking about affordable housing as well, which we appreciate very much, but yeah, I'm with you. I think the conversation has to go regional. Yeah, and I'll just say a couple of things. Like the fastest way to get money into musicians' pockets is when they're playing live, you know, whether they've got merch or you paid a ticket to get in, instead of it $5 in the tipjarts, 20, you know, immediate money to them. There's great organizations who have put together the idea of enjoying live music. It's entertaining, weird or not. So you can take part in a charity that helps our local music community and also enjoy the amazing level of musicianship. So a shout out to Colin, oh, he left. So Sonic Guild is an example of a patronage model where people like us can become members of like a music listening club that gives all their money away to musicians every year. So look for those opportunities. Dan, I was just gonna say, Nora touched on it and we haven't said anything about transportation yet. And that's obviously the, I mean, we haven't gotten to people flying in from San Antonio, but in the hospitality industry in particular, as you move further and further away, you can't work till 11 o'clock, 12 o'clock at night. We've, people have, we have lost, or people have had to forfeit jobs a number of times because they just can't get home. And we are so far behind, you know, to have the kind of bus system that we have and even saying the word bus seems ridiculous, like, you know, but is shameful because we're denying people the right to work is what that comes down to. That's a, yeah, that's a really interesting way to put that because I think that it's true. We, you know, we have a pretty antiquated system. You have to, yeah. You have to have a car, it's a barrier to entry, not having a vehicle, which is, which is not, I don't think the way it's supposed to be. So either. Well, I don't know if you saw the governor just signed a bill that if you have an electric car, which all of us also are concerned about climate change, now you pay more money for an electric car that you didn't have to pay before. So you're being penalized to actually go in that direction. So what does that encourage more cars? But I agree. If you wanna work at your wonderful restaurant and you could get there through transit and you could stay in Austin and work if your family has to have a house somewhere else, right? And that's the missing link that we don't have yet. Comprehensively. We got time for maybe, yeah. So, two things, one, electric cars. We do have an electric car. I have an electric car. We do have to pay for the roads. And that's the only way to do it. So it's fair, unfortunately, right? But the question that I had was Seattle looked into at one point the restaurant industry of getting rid of tips and increasing the price of food so that they could pay their employees better. I don't know whatever happened to that because I don't live in Seattle, but. I, Seattle has been a one fair wage city for, Washington has been a one fair wage state for a while. California's the oldest. So California hasn't had a sub minimum since the early 70s. And so like I said, I mean, I think that that's a great starting point. I don't know if a city could outlaw tips or make tipping. It's sort of up to, so I'm speaking without really knowing exactly what this is. But I mean, it's really up to the, it's up to the restaurants. Seattle and Portland and, I mean, having lived in San Francisco, even without the sub minimum wage, it didn't stop. It hasn't stopped the city from becoming unaffordable for restaurant workers. Making food more expensive, this makes me think of another conversation at the legislature when we were talking about paid sick leave and the chair of the committee, who is now the speaker of the house, said in our invite to me, well, doesn't that just, isn't that cyclical? Doesn't that just make prices go up? And it doesn't have to. It only does if you're in a broken capitalist system where you pay somebody more and then immediately pass that cost on to customers. So making food more expensive, that's not what we want to do either. I think we have time for one more question. I'm just curious, Selena, when you talk about your EMT workers commuting in from San Antonio or Colleen, if you could also give us some color as to then what their shifts are like after that commute. And then as we know, Texas being the state that ranks the last, in terms of healthcare and the healthcare challenges that we have, how do you see that affecting the healthcare coverage that we're able to provide to our community? Yeah, thank you so much for those questions because it does touch on some things that I've also been thinking about and just about civic participation. Since 70% of our medics can't vote in Travis County or in Austin, I've noticed that when we talk about engaging in politics, a lot of our folks are much less engaged because they can't vote. It doesn't really feel like it affects them as much. And so when you have employees, when you have folks that just work that play music that really don't have a voice in the place that they choose to work, it really makes you wonder who those people are gonna be elected by and also who they're gonna work for because they're not really gonna work for my medics because they can't vote for them. And the other thing about the increase in affordability is it has really changed the way that our shifts work and I'm sure you can probably see this in the restaurant industry too, but universally our medics prefer 24-hour shifts because it decreases the amount of times that they have to commute in. So we could work 12-hour shifts which are much safer and especially because Austin, our population has really exploded. We've seen a dramatically higher increase in 911 calls, but we haven't really increased our medics because A, we can't get them here. But so basically they're working these dangerous shifts because they don't wanna commute in twice as often. And also, yeah, they're very tired. We had a medic who went home after a 24-hour shift and he died on the roadway because he fell asleep. And so the city's response is like, well, now we have five stations that have sleep rooms so you can take a nap after your shift and that's the solution. I also think about, you know, we talk about transit is a very important component to housing. Well, so is homelessness too. And I remember the last shift I worked. I worked on Riverside and Faro Lane. And a lot of the patients that I saw that day were very housing insecure and like, you know, one month away from being homeless, one woman was living with her kids and they were about to be evicted. And so she was trying to figure out new healthcare and she missed an appointment and yada, yada, yada. And those things, those are some of the factors that really drive up the calls for EMS. You know, only 10% of EMS calls are actually emergencies that require EMS, that require ER care. 90% of our calls are actually a resource need. They didn't have, their car broke down so they couldn't get their medication. That's at HEB waiting for them. You know, they have an education lack. They don't realize that, you know, a medic was just telling me about how they took somebody to the hospital who had a hangnail. And you know, I've taken somebody to the hospital for an ingrown toenail, things like that. And those things only increase when people are less housing stable. And so we do get quite a bit of calls for people that straight up do not have shelter but also people that are close to not having shelter. And we see that more and more. Thank you all for being here. Thank you all for answering these questions and having this discussion with us. It's good to see you all. Thank you. Thank you, Dan. Thank you. All right. Thank you. Very good. Thank you.