 Priding slash good morning. I'm Senator Kejron Hinsdale. This is Senate Economic Development Housing in General Affairs. We have a quorum of the committee, and we're starting with Moira Collins from VHFA High Court. Good morning. Thank you, Moira Collins. I'm the Executive Director of the Vermont Housing Finance Agency. I'm here briefly and without a formal presentation because I was hoping that I could give a little bit of background of my organization to maybe our newer members, and then also give some updates on some more recent programs that you all are familiar with at VHFA Ministers. So again, I know that this is repeat for many of you, but I just always think it's helpful to remind ourselves about the alphabet soup that is the housing organizations. We are one of several statewide housing funders. VHFA is unique in the fact that we do not come to the state to get appropriations. We are not a state agency. We were created by the legislature and... One of our better modes. I agree completely. See, session is starting off in the green zone. So just, again, I do know that this is a recap for many people, but that VHFA is self-supported and sustaining because of our ability to issue tax exempt bonds. And I know we have many finance committee members here, but the feds... And this explanation won't be as long as it sounds when I reference the 1960s, but this... Oh, you met seven persons? Yes. Okay, hi. Hi, nice to see you. So in the 60s and 70s, when the feds decided to create tax exempt bonding, they did that for certain charitable purposes and said, people want bonds in their portfolios and they should be able to not pay taxes on those earnings, but we only want that to be possible for certain, I say, charitable purposes. And so at that time, the legislature created four very similar organizations with these charitable purposes in mind. One is affordable housing, and in 1974, you all created us. And then I believe that same year, just about, economic development is another one of these purposes. So you created VEDA, the Vermont Economic Development Authority, and you created the Vermont Bond Bank to support the infrastructure needs of the state, as well as VSAC, the Student Assistance Corporation to serve higher ed. Obviously higher ed lending has changed over the years. In many ways, but VHP is now 49 years old and we operate by, for instance, today, we are pricing a $25 million bond, because we need more money for our mortgages and both single family and multifamily mortgages. And so today, we will be going out to Wall Street and saying, we need $25 million, please. And they will look at our stellar rating and our 49-year history, as well as our things, and hopefully they will give us good rates. And we will borrow that money, we will issue that bond and take in that $25 million. And we will promise, and I am making these numbers up, we will promise them, let's say, a 4% rate of return, which is not great, but you're not paying taxes on that, so you would accept a lower rate of return than a taxable bond. And so we will need to pay them back 4%. We turn around to our borrowers, the mortgages, and we make mortgages at, let's say, 5%. And so we live off that spread, that one-point spread. The feds limit how much that spread can be for single family mortgages. It's one in an eighth. So we can't live off a 4-point and make all the money in the world. But that's how we keep our interest rates a bit below the market. So for many, many years, that worked great. And then the market really changed. In the 2000s and the run-up to the 2008 crisis, we actually saw more creative lending products by lenders. Outside of Vermont, that was quite problematic, and there was predatory lending, and there was real manipulation of people's understanding of the lending process, and it was obviously not a good environment. We've all read those articles. At the same time, within Vermont, we have a lot of protections in place. The legislature was very forward-thinking, and the Department of Financial Regulation has been charged with doing a lot of things to protect consumer protections for that. So with that, we did not see the same kind of predatory lending, but we did see a lot of community banks get into affordable housing lending. And so I'm going to say from VHFA's perspective, this is great, because VHFA is here to serve where the market has failed. And for the first, I've got to pick a number, 35 years of our existence, we were filling a market need because the market was not providing low-cost mortgages to folks. And then interest rates went down so low that low interest rate mortgages were not that hard to find. I'm sorry, any of us could have gotten a rate almost below 3%, definitely at 3%. And so the need for us declined a bit, and so our share of the mortgages we've been doing in the state has really declined. So we always need to look at where is the market failing? The market wasn't failing in providing low-cost or low-interest rate mortgages. It was down payment assistance. People didn't have the money to buy a home. So the legislature in 2015 created a down payment assistance program, and we've been running that ever since. And so we can help people first-time home buyers only. We can help them with that down payment assistance in the form of a 0% loan that they make no payments on until they sell or refinance. So we've operated that very successfully over the years. Now what we see is that the market isn't performing in a different way. It's stock. It's inventory. It's finding homes. In the first week of December, we were in Addison County doing a big press conference announcing the Missing Middle Income Home Ownership Development Program that you all authorized with $15 million of ARFA money last year. And in doing so, for the event, we looked at Realtor.com. And in all of Addison County, we found three single-family, four-sale homes priced under $300,000. So right now, we see that there's not enough stock. And so I'm talking a lot about home ownership. And I can also talk about that these same bonds, these tax-exempt bonds, are also issued to support lending on multifamily housing. Usually, the bigger source of money that we administer on multifamily are federal tax credits. That is nationally the largest source of money to create affordable rental housing in the country. There's two types of tax credits, and it gets confusing quickly, but those tax credits will often cover about 70% of what a project needs to be constructed. It is the go-to resource nationally. We're not doing anything different in Vermont than anywhere else. This tax credits are usually a part of the funding stack. And that's why the state's support for affordable housing is so important, because tax credits in no state in the country pay for 100% of a building. They only pay for a portion. It's by design that way. The Feds want this to be a private-public partnership. They like these tax credits that get sold to private investors who are contributing their money into the system. They also like having it set up so that then if the tax credits pay for 70% of a building, that 30% of the pie that you still need to raise comes from developer contributions. It comes from debt, so that's where our tax exempt or our loans can, taxable loans can fill some of that debt. HUD and rural development and other traditional federal sources fill in some of that, as well as the state funding. And if we didn't have the state funding through BHCB, then we would not be able to get all the money we need to build these properties. So, I've spoken about a couple market failures and how VHF is pivoted. I want to now talk a little bit about what you all have asked us to do recently in terms of you've had us sort of change our down payment assistance a little bit. I'm going to talk about the first generation home buyer program and then what we're doing to address the stock issues through the missing middle program. But before I moved to that, I'm realizing that there was one other, two other sort of base activities that VHFA provides for the state. So, I talked about how we do our lending for mortgages on single homes. I shouldn't say single family because we do lending on manufactured homes and duplexes and condos. And then we do lending and tax credits on multi-family housing. We also have a pretty robust asset management compliance department. That's actually one of the only, is that we have 42 staff at VHFA. And it's one of the only positions where we have multiple people doing the same job. Otherwise, we have like one person doing each thing in our shop except asset management compliance where we have five people all doing the same job. They each split up the portfolio of properties to where they go out and inspect the units. They are looking to make sure that they're up to code and up to these housing quality standards that they have to abide by and also that they're following all the rules of all these federal programs, the tax credits. You know, they're checking incomes, they're checking reserve amounts. We have to sign off when they need to tap into those reserves to pay for broken elevator or whatever it may be. We're ensuring that the waiting lists are dealt with through fair housing appropriately and on and on. So it's both the physical and financial and operational compliance of these housing developments for the term of their loan or in the case of tax credits forever because these have perpetual affordability tied to them. Then the other thing that VHFA does is not surprising you all because you get to see it probably the most is a policy arm. It helps shape housing policy in the state and look at the housing markets that we see and the needs that we see and share that information. We do that by having this housing data website. If you go to housingdata.org, you would find an inventory of all the affordable housing in the state. The government subsidized affordable housing in this case. It's just housingdata.org, not Vermont. Correct. We got there. Just for a little Vermont. I joke that that was actually my first born baby before I ever had two children of my own and I was hired at VHFA in 2002 and I was a research analyst and nine months later we birthed the housing data website at housingdata.org, April of 2003. That website has the inventory of all the subsidized housing as well as community profiles for everyone's town where you can find more data than you can ever imagine. Some of the hot pieces that people like to look at is housing stock and how much the housing stock is growing each year or not, which is what you'll actually find. We have lists of short-term rentals and how much that's happening in each community as well as income and household demographics, homeownership costs, rental costs, and the like. Is there any data you'd like to share right now? Well, I'm talking a lot about data, so that's great. Yeah, I mean just because one of the reasons we have wanted to have a rent to registry is to get the data on short-term rentals, which we... On rentals. No, on all rentals, but short-term rentals included. And so I had not realized you had a robust registry of short-term rentals, which is basically what you're saying you have. No, it's not a registry. I have a listing of all the units that have been rented out as a short-term rental for the entire month. Right. And it's the quantity, not the addresses are worked. So you don't know them individually. Correct. You don't know their locations. Correct. You can't do it by day. I can tell you that for the town of Woodstock, I can tell you how many short-term rentals every month, going back to I think 2014. Are paying to. Every month, we're available as a short-term rental for 30 days of that month. Do you have a term for that instead? I've been trying to figure out what we can hold in the middle. But like extended stay or, you know... Because that's not our definition of short-term rental. And I think we need a term for... We don't have a term of definition of short-term rental. But I think it needs to be... By the night, yeah. And by the week or by the month. It's up to 14 days per month. I mean, we've got a very definite definition. But you don't have a definition of what's between short-term and... Right. Exactly. What's the source of your debt again? It's called AirDNA. We pay for it. It is a Spanish company that has compiled and they include Airbnb, Vio, and I need to check the... Those are the two biggest, but I know there's others. So do you know if they also, though, have the ability to drill down further other than simply the full month? In other words, are they in effect like a data broker who can cut and select the data that a customer might want? I need to look into that more because I see what you're getting at and I need to know are we only willing to pay for the cheap version and if we pay more, could we get more? It's a really good question. I do want to clarify something I think I wasn't clear on. It's the rentals that are listed in our short-term... In our data on short-term rentals. They may be rented out for one night, three nights, a weekend, a week at a time, all that. I'm just saying that the housing unit was available to be rented for 30 days. That's okay. Which is different than... I know some people on Church Street in Burlington who... Commencement weekend, they will go stay with their parents because they're young adults and they will rent out their place for that weekend or maybe homecoming or other things. But it is not otherwise available for that month. That's what I'm trying to weed out is those episodic, you know, on Tuesdays and Wednesdays you can have my place because I travel, I don't know. People do weird things. People want to stay a weekend. But not otherwise for the month. And I just also... I know that short-term rentals, especially for some of the communities that your committee serves, are the favorite cause of the housing crisis. I do want to say we didn't get here overnight. It's not all Airbnb's fault. It is a contributing factor. There is a top 10, top 12 municipalities list. Your towns are represented in that top 10 list. So I see why you're focused on it. But if you looked at the 250 towns, you would see a real drop-off after the first 10 towns that are mostly ski communities plus Burlington. You would see a real drop-off in how many short-term rentals actually happen. And there are so many nuances to this conversation. For instance, I was like to point out my next door neighbors in the city of Essex Junction are retirees who go to Florida for three months in the winter. For two of those months, they rent out their place to warm me up. And that helps make it affordable and that home will never be available year-round for someone to live in. Most legislators are renting... And so I just want to say that this is a nuanced conversation that deserves its own testimony if you were going to do something. We are going to hear from the short-term rental clients. And they have been doing more in-depth data collection in Washington and Lamoille counties with data that their Airbnb and other platform agents want to give them to say, this is what we're doing and most of it is renting a month or more to nurses and people in transition. And so this is an example of you all laid the groundwork last year with the legislation to allow municipalities to regulate short-term rentals. And so we have followed on your coattails and through our housing data website we have a housing ready toolkit where we try to explain to communities, here's all the data. Look at these community profiles where you get more data than your eyes could ever take in. And you could get all the data. We explain how to do a needs assessment on your own. We're just going to pull it up. Okay. And then it also has... We also have information about if your needs are X, Y, and Z. Here are the policy levers and tools that are available to you. One of which is trying to do some best practices around regulating short-term rentals that communities could consider. So this is the website. And if you scroll down just a little bit, Scott, right there, you'll see you would link there. You could click the community profiles on the left. If you look at that gray box on the left, these are the types of information we have. And when you clicked on homeowners, you would see from the property transfer tax data around how many home sales, there's a worship rate by race. There is more information here than my testimony would allow me to go through. But each of these, you can click on one. Pick your favorite, Scott. Is there anything you want, like something you want to point out? If you go over to housing stock is my favorite. Housing needs would be good to look at. Yeah. And then scroll down. I'll see you next month. That one. Great of change in housing supply. This is one of my favorites. When you click on it, you could get this for your town as well. But what you're seeing here is are the decades. Scroll just a little smidgenwort. There we go. So you can see that in the 80s, we were adding about 1.8% of our housing stock every year. It was common in the 60s, 70s and 80s to add about 2% of our housing stock every year. You can see that each decade, we have been adding a smaller percentage of our housing stock. And we now are creating about 2,000 homes a year, 2,700 over the last decade each year. And that's not enough. We estimate that we need between 5,000 a year or up to 6,500 a year. And so adding 2,000 homes a year is just not enough. I want to be clear when I say adding homes, I mean adding homes to the market. I don't necessarily just mean new construction. Right. I mean that we're bringing something back online. There's adaptive reuse. But you can see on the left there, just to finish up on this chart, this is true for all the charts where see how there's communities listed on the right. I said left. On the right there's, you could select. Does anybody want to see their different towns? I'm giving you what's that's already been mentioned. I had a feeling. So if you click, yeah, there you go. There is a little search at the top. It's already on the left hand. There you go. There you go. Great. Yeah. And so... A Woodstock Village. Now look at that. You did something in the 90s, right? And so you can see... Now the smaller area you go, the more you start going, what went on in the 80s in Woodstock Village? Is that the village? The village is on the right and the town I believe is in the middle. And... I think if you went a little bit above and looked at Winooski, you'd see the opposite. Oh, you should see the increase actually. Yeah. And so... You know, there's just... There's so much here that we... It's so wrong. So this is why we need housing commissions and this is what we create. If we could go back out of this data and get back a couple of times. At this point, you know, we don't have houses. We have conservation commissions. We have energy commissions. One more back. We do not have. Most towns have houses. My bad joke is that every town has a cemetery commission and very few have a housing commission and so we clearly care about where people live in the afterlife. But that's permanent housing. And that is permanent. And it's affordable. Sometimes. So if... Can you just click the logo on the top left to bring us back to the main and scroll down a little bit. Thank you. I can bring my laptop next time. If you were to click that center, one about the housing range toolkit, I think it says you would see on the left there the resources. There's not enough time to go into all these but you can get a sense from that gray box on the left. The... We have sample charges of housing commissions. Like who should be on it? We actually really encourage non-residents to be on it. People who want to live in that community but cannot yet. We think that's the best practice. We have information about policies that should be promoted and the like. And so we are trying to promote communities but it really takes a housing commission to have these conversations. Planning commissions can't do it. They're too busy enacting the rules that are already in place and updating the bylaws and such for the next rewrite. It's a housing commission that takes that rate of focus that can really dive into all of this information that we have. Do you see us trying to incentivize the creation of housing commissions in some way and policy this year? That is interesting. I'd like to give it more thought. I will say communities have never been... Our phones are ringing off the hook in a way that they never have before. They know this. And so there are concepts being discussed. I know about housing resource navigators for communities to support housing commissions. This is where most staff outside Chittenden County do not have a community development director. They don't have folks who could support a housing commission like this. And so that kind of assistance for communities is a great thing. Just two quick things. In Brattleboro we have developed... It's an informal housing commission. There are four people on it of different parts of the community including planning folks and actually health individuals who are working to identify what is needed and what has been built. And they're doing it just completely informally and it's crazy that we needed to do it that way but it is effective. So that's one question or one just FYI. And I want to say informally but impressively because the housing study that came out of that effort was really well done and that's one we like to show other communities as an example. Good, good. And I'm impressed by what they're doing and their resources for me. We've done housing studies. We've done a bunch of them. Right. But studies are good. There goes the next step and starts talking about the policy lovers that need to be looked at next. Yeah, like the gentler. I love that term and this is such a great website and you're going to get more hits I'm sure. Are you tracking the missing middle program and how that's being used? So the homeownership development program. Oh, the missing middle infant development. The new program. Yeah. This is where in Vermont we do so much right but one thing we do wrong is not better name things and when you talk missing middle, last year the governor proposed this missing middle and come from our ship development program. I don't know why I called it missing middle because missing middle is a planning term that has long been used by planners about duplexes, triplexes, four flexes that is this in between where it's not a multifamily big building but it's not a single family and that we needed to better use our space and land by encouraging that kind of density development. And so we use the same term in multiple ways. The planning term I would say Chris Coffin's team at DHCD is really the best ones to speak to that and what communities have done and they're really tracking the progress communities have made if we pivot to talking, because I know we only have a few minutes left about the missing middle income development program I could tell you a little about that missing middle income group of trying to build starter homes or retirement homes. There was a lot of concern on the income education tax about people like me who are living in a three bedroom house and there's two of us, it's the family home but unless I want to move into senior living there is no place to downsize in Montpelier and there's a lot of folks that want to sell the farmhouse that they renovated 30 years ago and move in and there is no place and you move in from a farmhouse you might want a single family so those little slab ranch one story that are starter or move down that's what we haven't built. Downsizing has a good desperate for in the upper valley. So that's what you all were envisioning when you were at 15 million of ARPA funds to VHFA last year. The fact that it was ARPA funds there were a few particulars that we need to get through with the agency of administration about eligibility of this program with that funding source so I'll say we got the final sign off and signed the agreement with the state just in late November and launched the program the first week of December but we had put our guidance draft application everything out to the world in June because we knew it was coming so developers had a good long time to learn about the program talk through, have meetings with us about would this be eligible what do you think about that and so when we opened up the application within the first month all 15 million was applied for so it went in a heartbeat it's what I recall and so we made a difficult decision that wasn't popular with all those applicants to actually leave it open for another month because we know how important the legislature was very clear about geographic diversity and wanting to serve lots of communities so we had 17 pre-application meetings over the summer and December 7 of those were with for-profit applicants 6 were with habitat chapters and 4 were with non-profit applicants so a nice blend if you remember a third of the money needs to go to support shared equity housing developments which are primarily done through so far all done through non-profit partners the applications we were talking about spread across 13 towns and eight different counties and would have paid for about 155 homes I want to be clear I'm talking about these pre-application meetings we have not awarded this money yet the applications are still open just over a third were shared equity and so we then got formal applications from 7 of those projects to cover about 90 homes in 7 different towns across 5 counties Given we're now out of town would you be kind enough to send us that update on missing income? I will say though that again the applications are still open I really want to wait another few weeks to find out what we do we're going to award these at our March meeting We're going to hear from you a lot this session but it would be great for those of us who are just sort of digesting some of the updates on policy we put in place last year it would be great I'd love to hear that I'd love to hear if you'd also send us what you've got from the first generation applications and stuff I'm going to take chairs prerogative to card a few minutes out of Austin's test results because I want to give you a chance to talk about your priorities Yeah the first generation program just as a reminder was a million dollars of general funds where VHFA was as we've had a long-standing program through the state tax credit program to fund down payment assistance loans and as I said 0% loans you don't make any payments until you're done with that that right now you can get 10 or $15,000 depending on your income the higher amount for lower income used to be a $5,000 we had it all then at all places went up and now this program we have a $15,000 grant that you can receive if you're a first time home buyer getting a VHFA loan and your parents do not own their home because what we were trying to address through this was the generational wealth that has long been enjoyed by people where the parents and again when I come to give formal testimonies on this program I can speak to in VHFA's experience how many people have the benefit of gifts from parents when buying a home through a down payment and that it's quite a bit even for the low income folks who come to VHFA they often will get gifts from parents and this program was meant to almost be that proxy or that replacement when that's not possible because a parent doesn't own their home there's also a small carve out that if you've been in the foster care system you're also eligible even if there is a parent who technically owns own so we were instructed by the legislature and very happy to engage with BIPOC led organizations and constituencies as a part of this here's another example of a program that we could have stood up June 1 after you all passed it but we decided to hold off and not open until November because we really want to make sure that these organizations and this focus that we heard to make sure that people were aware of this program and how it was going to work and get the engagement going that doesn't come to us with applications these are individual mortgages and so you just go to your lender and you say do I qualify oh and I have here's a purchase and sales agreement and it happens in that moment we don't batch home purchases like we do with this missing middle program or larger funding awards instead they happen chronologically as people have an opportunity and so there was no way for us to put it in front of the list anyone and so we did that outreach and engagement it was I'd love to speak more to it it was a great learning experience for us I will say we did not have the robust network of connections with these groups that I'm embarrassed to say we should have had years ago and yet through that we have now formed some great trusted relationships and it's clear that while and I think it'd be important to have people speak for themselves but I'll say from our side of the table of what we were hearing from organizations one they were a bit overwhelmed by how many pieces of legislation asked for them to be engaged with and that is a burden that honestly we need to reflect on two $15,000 down payment is great it does not solve it is not going to solve the racial home ownership gap that we have in our state there are many more complex measures that we need to look at if we're really going to address that like the ones in that book like the ones in color law and then some and so there was when I say that I think we've gotten to a point that we've had trusted conversations VHFA had to be comfortable saying you know what we get that this was a first step I think the legislature knew that this was a first step we're in it for the long haul we'd like to engage in the further conversations this is been practicing in a certain way for definitely decades I'm going to say hundreds of years we are not going to solve this in the next three to five and so it's going to take some new tools for us to look at if we're going to really revolutionize a system that has structural racism embedded within it and so that is a much bigger conversation but we do need to be looking at all the steps along the process and not just down payment or not just that final piece we need to be looking at a lot more than that and so I think that VHFA is in a unique position to convene some of those conversations we work with all lenders in the state banks credit unions mortgage companies everyone who works in Vermont is eligible to be a VHFA participating lender they are not all participating lenders they have chosen sometimes to not bother with offering VHFA loans that is fine they have business reasons I actually know a bunch of those reasons and I don't think they're bad like they're not wrong to not want to offer our products sometimes but I think that because we can offer the great programs that we do with the payment assistance the first gen all that I think we offer something unique and so having the state use VHFA as a vehicle for convening conversations for bringing together the lending community and other communities certainly marginalized communities in the state I think we would be welcome to that we are on our own organizational and personal journeys in this we are a white led predominantly white organization that comes to this very humbly but with an interest to serve and to learn with the state and so that anyway so we can talk more to you there I would love to see some of the data that I think I've just alluded to data thus far that others may know we only have 18 black homeowners total in Burlington we have the fifth largest racial home ownership gap in the country it's in the low 20% for black Vermonters and the mid 70% for white Vermonters that is a huge gap so if you want to come in with some of that data and if you want to if people in the group you've been talking to would feel affirmed by sharing your story with us we'd really love to have that as we build a housing bill yeah and I just want to tag on that we knew this was just the beginning with this piece of the bill an important first step and I'm very eager to learn what you're going to learn as you roll this out more today and how we can help create the tools that you're going to need to help us over time you really whittle away at this challenge and have my testimony ready about the I guess my question anymore is are you going to have specific recommendations for us for this year or probably next year on how to improve and build on that tool or recommend other tools you know I want to be honest and say I don't even know if there's a coalescing of agreement around the tools it is so much more vague and hard to pin to a wall like if the question there's this eagerness of wanting to do something and I'm not sure we're at that stage right so that's part of why I'm asking you is I mean and we need your recommendation whether this is even working and worth continuing to finance because we're going to have to continue to finance yeah so I guess that's one question is is this worth keeping on and seeing where we get with it and then either this year or next would love to hear additional things we can do to it because we are going to need tools to whittle away at this it's not if we don't provide more tools to you know to to attack this problem we're just never going to get there so you know whether it's this year or next I don't want to leave the witness here but there are also tools that serve to take away the opportunity to create starter homes duplexes new housing historically been marginalized or had wealth you know depleted from your community you need access to a home that you can afford which is exactly the bigger picture question yeah very quick thing we can help get the word out if you have materials you can send into the legislature legislatures and we can help get the word out absolutely I will follow up with that I will say to make sure I'm clear about this first gen program it was before the new year that I last asked but we had two reservations right now this money is not flying out the door two reservations and the reason is there's no homes I'll rate you a $15,000 check it's a grand it's not hard to qualify for it there's not the homes to them find within our purchase price limits where VHPA is a lender so it is all interrelated and the last thing I'll just put a point in saying I'd love to think more about what those next steps are and I will take that under advisement I think there's a real question about if you wanted to support such things through again a white led organization like VHPA or if you wanted to hear from the land access and opportunity board which is a kind of led organization and start to really question if there's more partnerships that is led by people of color in this where VHPA can be a supporting actor in that part we will absolutely have you back in the question is do you want to come in next week we could probably make time for that but you're right it reminded me I want to make time for the professionals of color network in the land access and opportunity board and I just want to say for everyone's reference that you know Mara is going to be a partner on drafting our housing bill this year so she's been a critical partner all the way along yes we appreciate you I feel like this was a little all over the place so I guess I just wanted to reinforce that I am here as a partner and available I'm happy to give more updates on some of these more recent programs as well as any other of our long standing programs you may be curious about and thank you also for the housing conference this fall I thought it was terrific and it was on a couple things and I'm delighted to know we're moving forward on some of the zoning work yes the mapping I understand we're doing that separately past your graduate on to the people who actually did the conference they were great you were our hostess so thank you and I would say that especially if Senator Cummings and I include Senator Brock as well we're trying to figure out how to make sure we get the housing and economic angle in here and the finance and tax in finance since you're going to see the three of us quite a bit yes and I do think that there's and this is a perfect sideway to Austin because I don't want to keep taking up this time that we are hearing when I say that the phones ring out from communities the next most common call are from employers who every week or two we're seeing a new article about employers who are forced into the position of needing to go with their own build their own darn housing because they can't find it in the community that's a hard call for us who's supposed to be that housing resource and so there are some new tools we've been working on that would support employers specifically where revolving loan fund where the affordability provisions only last as long as that loan it's not perpetual it's not that deeply subsidized but just something where if an employer wanted to contribute something toward housing we would have a companion government sponsored easy to access development programs that would make their money go farther through a public partner and we're again that's exactly it so I'll let Austin maybe speak next about what he's hearing from employers thank you I don't know why no one wants to fancy chair but we haven't it was supposed to be only this chair but people are so used to it