June 26, 2024 — Housing Advisory Board Regular Meeting

Transcript

[MM:SS] timestamps correspond to the YouTube recording.

[0:02] Yep, kick right. Oh, hello! Welcome to the June meeting of the Boulder Housing Advisory Board. I'm Michael to the chair of the Housing Advisory Board, and I'm gonna call this page later, and we'll start with roll call. So Karen Clement vice chair. Karen is now our vice chair, very pleased to have her in that role. Sure. Oh, my gosh, it's going to be a good meeting, Michael changing up here. Danny Theodoro here present. Well, look at that. friend said she was not going to be able to make it. Apparently that's the case

[1:02] here. We also have Ml. Robles, our planning board with us some guests. I'll do the event review for tonight. We'll go over some rules for the meeting, and then we'll jump into it. So item, one follow order. We've done. We have a quorum with 5 members present. That review we're doing now. Approval of minutes will be next. After that we'll have an opportunity for public participation through open comment. Via zoom. that's item 4 and item 5 from the board. We're gonna have a overview of the city renter protections, mechanisms from city staff or J. Allen. That's information. Informational item. not promoting. That's item A under 5 5 b is the zoning for affordable housing phase, 2 scoping. That's an item for input. And we have our city Staffer with us again. Carl Dyer. Good evening, Carl. Number 6 is matters from staff. There'll be an update on one b funding. One B is the county affordable housing funding mechanism.

[2:15] and jay signet, our staff liaison will close on that. We'll go over our summer meeting schedule Id. Of 36, and the 7 is debrief meeting and calendar check, and we'll try to adjourn by 9 Pm. Before. Okay, let's looking for a motion to approve the minutes from May 15, th 2024. We have a you have a second, all in favor. I motion to pass this 5 0 brings us to public participation. Do we have anyone interested in commenting? We have 3 people attending tonight? Right? Nobody. 3 people. Oh, 3 people. Okay. Well, Joe, would you mind going over the rules of engagement? Then I would be happy to do that

[3:07] right? So rules for community engagement the city. Oh, that's not the screen I want to share by this one. It's a chill. And then was the I don't know. That's not my screen. That's yours. Okay, Zoom has updated and I haven't so public participation at city meetings so the city has

[4:01] engage with community members to co-create a mission for a productive and meaningful and inclusive civic conversations. So it supports the physical and emotional safety for community members, staff and board ambition members and everyone else. isn't that more information about this go to this website? Following examples are rules of decorum found in the boulder revised code and other guidelines that support this vision. These would be upheld by the chair. During this meeting all remarks and testimony should be related to city business. no participant shall make threats or use other forms of intimidation. obscenity, racial appetites. Another speech will not be tolerated.

[5:03] Participants are required to sign up, speak, and to speak, using the name they are currently known by, and individuals must display their whole name before they're allowed to speak online currently, only audio testimonies permitted online. Thank you. And that is it great. So thank you, Jay. And we have 3 people waiting to comment. Who's going to go first? st So we have mark fear. Alright! Thank you for joining us. Howdy are you able to hear me. Oh, yes, very well. Alright! Great thanks! Howdy for those who don't know I'm Mark Fuhrer. I'm a member of the Tenant Advisory Committee for the City of boulder. along with being on the Board of Commissioners for boulder housing partners. But I am not speaking in either of those capacities. but I do have a strong interest, obviously, in issues that have is, always considering.

[6:02] And what I just wanted to say is, I am looking very much forward to your discussion on tenant issues tonight. and also I wanted to float an idea of have, as as probably most of you know, in your conversations throughout the community. Most people don't know that have exists. This is true of tenant advisory committee and boulder housing partners, and most of the communities and commissions and boards of boulder And anyway, I wanna suggest perhaps you all hosting a city? A either a community dialogue or just a a What's the term? I'm looking for a civic forum on affordable housing. There's been other venues for affordable housing. but usually put on, for for instance, the board the Chamber of Commerce

[7:05] and other professionals in the field, and that's important to have. But it's it's not too often that the community as a whole gets to chime in on affordable housing issues. So I would just floating. The idea of having a town hall. That's the term I was looking for a town hall on affordable housing, and that's that's all I wanted to say. Thanks. Oh, thank you, Mark, that's a really interesting idea. I have attended a number of forms like that over the years, but maybe it's time, and there was a very good regional form in January. Well, I think was recorded for all of the Bulgaria County housing interests, but that's an idea worth producing any comments from board members on that. I think it's a great suggestion. Capacities in the past and so appreciate it

[8:11] participated during my tender I mean, I think it's just, you know, could be a listening session that's on the road. Essentially so. I mean, things are something to be done properly notice, you know, for fun to be down here. So I think it's a great idea. I think housing affordability is the biggest problem facing Boulder. And to Mark's Point. I don't think that this Advisory Board has significant amount of exposure, and I would also support moving our meetings to the Penfield Tape Building, so that our meetings are more accessible to the public. certainly could be open to the public as well. What's the to do with that, Jay? Is that still a matter of city policy on our enterprise call.

[9:00] We're still waiting for work to be completed on council chambers to enable the boards to go back. and then it's not even clear which boards will be allowed to come back. It may just be planning, for I think it's a great idea. don't feel so badly about absolute profile, since most Americans can't name 3 members of Supreme Court. I do feel that there's still a lot of misunderstanding about what affordable housing is which serves what holders doing. And I'd like to see it's an informational element of that, as well as listening to what the public has to say, if we do indeed engage with such a session. Okay, let's go on to our next public commenter. Thank you. Again, Mark. No. Their hands raised. Currently

[10:00] remember the hint that was it. Okay? Great. That brings us to matters from the board and can turn it over to Jay Alan for informational items overview. Great excuse me. Well, thanks so much for inviting me here. My name's Jay Alan. I work with City of Boulder's Housing Services Department in the eviction prevention and Mental Assistance services group. so I will go ahead and and share my screen here. I I already missed the 1st thing you said. Yes, sorry I I speak slowly sometime. So I work with Jay with the Housing Human Services Department, and I I work with the eviction prevention and rental assistance services program under the community mediation and resume resolution services Department.

[11:00] Empress Epris and Chip and I work pretty closely around eviction prevention here in Boulder. So. okay. I thought, I mean, I just wanted to go over some of the the overview of the work that we do around tenant protections here in boulder and then sort of dive more deeply into what I know the most about, which is the eviction prevention program. So just a little bit more about me. I've worked for for this department for coming on 14 years for various roles. We've been starting this program since 2021 started working in the eviction prevention program.

[12:00] so I thought I'd start with this sort of overview of what I think of as the resources around tenant supports in the community. Both within the city of Boulder, and then many, many community partners that we work pretty closely with. And then I'll go over all the different roles and things, and feel free to ask me any questions or anything I can clarify within the city of boulder. There's the eviction prevention, rental assistance services or at risk program. which is part of the media community Mediation and Resolution Center. We also have the office of human rights. Which does some some pieces around. you know, defending the rights of people in the community specifically around discrimination issues. There are also other city groups that would be involved in this work. For example, the only adult services program

[13:01] does help a lot of people with their like rental assistance and things like this, and they'll they have case managers who work with people if they're facing like issues with their with their memories of their their older adults. Also the the children youth. And I'm sorry that family resource schools program would also be able to help some people with their rental assistance. If if that was helpful to to stabilize a family. But this is kind of an overview, and obviously there's a number of other resources here. I didn't. I'll send this this presentation out. And I have links to everything in this presentation. So but we do a lot around rental assistance. And we do a fair amount around resources just to to start diving in a little bit on the Empress program. It was passed by statute in 2020 to the vote. I want the people to vote on it in the community, and it was passive time as military representation. So the main thrust is really legal resources for people who are facing eviction.

[14:08] If it has a a tax on mental licenses in the city of Boulder, it's $75 per year per unit for every every rental license. Well, not every. Some of the affordable housing would not be who's exempted from paying the the the fee when was passed. Excuse me. we brought it into our into our department, and we needed eviction, prevention, mental assistance services which sort of reflects that we have had a longstanding mediation program doing a lot of eviction prevention in course, prior to this program. So we kind of wrapped it all together. We have one full time staff, which is me. We have 2 part time, staff and then we work with rich to justice. So we've contracted with to help provide legal resources in the city.

[15:01] And that's a pretty close relationship. We also have an advisory committee which meets once a quarter and and and talks about and gets feedback from renters in the city of Boulder about that experience and about the program. So this is 2024 we took. We started working on this January 2021, which is really very agile. considering it was passed, and November of 2020. So we spent a lot of time kind of building up the program. And and now we're kind of just trying to refine it. And work the whole system. we sort of focus on these 4 areas. Ask them for the question, of course, is, the tenant advisory committee? The same thing that Mark mentioned a bit ago. So he's on that. Yes, yes. So we focus on these 4 basic areas for supports, navigation and resource referrals. We do a lot. When people call us, we refer them to other resources in the community, we focus our direct resources on people who are facing eviction very immediately. So we end up referring people around to a lot of different places to see if they can get help and prevent going to that stage.

[16:22] We have contract mediators. We also have volunteer mediators who work with people to try and try and stabilize housing. They do a lot of work on housing issues, other issues as well, but they do end up doing that mediations to try to resolve conflicts. At an end of your stage, and we have our contract with rich to justice. And that's a pretty unique kind of feature of this program. There are a number of right to counsel programs that that are coming about in various cities across the country. We really. what what we kind of focus on is making sure we have representation available for for people when they're actually Integration Court

[17:06] which happens every Friday here. And then a huge part of our program is rental assistance and the rental assistance environment is a little bit complex. We have some funds from that that fee that we charge on rental licenses. We also work with emergency family assistance, and in fact, we we grant a lot of our funds to them to process how people expedition. We also work really heavily with the state resources and the state resources. I mean. One thing that has overshadowing this program is, we obviously started working in the middle of the pandemic, and at the time a tremendous amount of resources were made available to help people in that situation. Hi, there! Sorry. announced. So we do a lot around 96 and navigate up and navigate that fairly complex environment.

[18:04] But at the moment, really a lot. I mean, the majority of funds that are going out to help people is really coming through that state program. Have some slides on what we what we are actually doing there. Just a little bit of numbers. For this program we worked with 809 tenants last year, which is a pretty big increase over the previous year. Now bear in mind. In 2022 there was still some remnants of some of the protections from the covid pandemic, for example, eviction moratoriums started fading out in 2022 and a lot of you know. So conditions change pretty dramatically. But but we we have worked. The number of people we worked with really did increase. And it looks like this year is going to increase more above 2,020

[19:02] Again, the majority of people we work with are in their eviction process. Most of them have been there for a year and more. The vast majority of people we work with are an innovation situation because of non payment of rent. It's income income issues really in front of it. many of the households have children, and people of color are just disproportionately represented in evictions and procedures. Little bit more numbers. you can see the amount of funding that we provide to emergency. Family assistance is really the most most of the budget that we have for rental assistance. And that's really just leveraging their expertise and working with people. And it it also helps when we can connect people to Epha. They they are aware of a larger resources that might help stabilize a family.

[20:00] So we we really work closely with them. And that's a really great relationship for us. But, we're pretty singularly focused in our department around election issues. So I'm sorry the 377 that's the amount of money you have available to spend on rental assistance. That's how much they that is, how much we have. We spend from January 2023 to January 2024 directly. So kind of an annual budget for this. Yes, and you can see we granted in 2023, 350,000 to register family assistance to to work with as well. You can see in this. In this graph, on the left. beginning in May of 2023, we really reduced the amount of rental assistance we were processing directly. which was a result of a lot of the pandemic era programs. They change very drastically at the beginning of 2023, and we were

[21:04] really spending a lot of money trying to replace those programs. But those programs were putting out during the pandemic about a million dollars a month in Boulder County, and we can't. We can't back. And all that comes from rental license. So there's 2 different programs. And I. I apologize. We made the acronyms as complicated as we could, so we have Empress, which is the city of Boulder, and we put out about 350,000 a year. Then there's er which is the state program that is really focused on eviction stuff. But that was pro. When that was at the height of the eviction. The sorry at the height of the pandemic. That program was putting out about a million dollars a month. So in the beginning of 2023, when that program really cut back on who's funding? It really impacted us heavily because we were trying to backfill what they had been doing. So we have a million dollars a month for Boulder and Boulder County or Boulder County. Really? Yeah, okay, yeah. And so quick question, I had regarding those statistics in the 809

[22:14] client served Do we have the the the numbers in terms of how many eviction actions there are, and a lot of things to come close to eviction. There's no way really telling, but actual eviction actions versus how many people in the eviction action process are utilizing the service. Yeah. so we have X amount of clients that are coming through the program. What about people like? What's that number compared to the number of people who are dealing with eviction actions a year in Boulder County. So if you look at this, there's sort of 2 databases here. So if you look at this on the bottom, right? We recorded, I mean, one of the things that our statute really has in it is, it? Has. It has an actual mandate for us to collect data around the patients

[23:07] which is collected in some ways statewide, but it's collected a fairly. not very granular level. So we actually have collected outcomes in in court from the beginning of the program through now. So we're in court every week. and you can see across all county in the past year from. So this is going from January through through this month. We've recorded 1,800 total case cycle. Most of those are not going to be city. We're a city funded. We're much more closely related. With that you can see about a 3rd of the cases are city boulder about a 3rd are along. So it's a tough, I feel in terms of the question you asked.

[24:01] Do we know how many people reach out to us at 1 point, and that don't go through eviction or do. That's a really tough number to get but way way. More people reach out to us and get help from us than go to Chicago. Right? Great. Yeah. Can ask a basic question. I'm not quite rocking this slide the the. If you're if you're distributing 350 k, from the empress tax, well, okay, so how much how much does the text collect every year that 1.4 million I see. Okay, so there's plenty left over for hiring contract lawyers, for example. So we get about 1.4 million. We provide about 700,000 total rental assistance between city directly controlled and provided for. Attend the grant that we make the effort. So total rental rental assistance is the majority of them. Are the funds to be collect. We obviously

[25:04] provide staffing for the program comes out of that funding, and then legal services is between 150 and $200,000 a year. At the moment. We also started operating in 2,021, before the tax have been collected. So for the past few years we've been having to backfill the funds from the 1st year. For that land next year, which is a good thing for us, I think. increase the amount of funds available. But that's basically how we dispersal. Yeah, stem slide, but just gives you an overview of how we're thinking about this, how we're tracking things. we have a lot of touch points with people when they're facing eviction. Hopefully, we ask people that you know. We try to get our kind of name out there, so to speak. Just make people aware that our services are there. But

[26:02] I've been told that our our particular page, our web page on the city borders site, is one of the most heavily visited. So I actually think we're doing. Okay? Getting the word out. And one of the really big advantages that we have is the courts, the city Council of Boulder and the court system in boulder have really supported us. So our information is is required to be included every time someone gets served or provision, we have our number with that. So yeah, speaking back to that point of like, we, we contact a lot more people than end up working with. I think this is worthwhile pointing out, because it it's something we end up explaining a lot. There's sort of 2 kinds of rental assistance not and the way we were hoping things work out at the moment is, there's a certain amount that's

[27:01] both from our funds and from the state funds that are sort of dedicated to people who are already in eviction court. We call that emergency rental assistance. And it's and it's pretty timely but most of the time, if you're not in that situation. You'll be routed through a family resource center, like Emergency Family Assistance Association to to work through their program to get weapons of. did want to talk a little bit about the office of human rights. We don't interact with them that often. But I think it's worth knowing that the resource exists so specifically around discrimination and fair housing. Kind of complaints. When we have that the office of human rights does exist as a way to file a complaint it'll be it'll be investigated. And and you know, the the person who works for that program we actually just that position just change. And it's it's somebody who's been working with our program for a long time is now

[28:01] but that's a good resource, just to be aware of. If someone's in a situation where they feel like they're being discriminated, or you know, they have a reasonable accommodation or disability that's not being met. That's a great way to sort of start that whole rolling. we also have a landlord tenant handbook that we publish with city boulder. it's a it's a pretty good guide, for which is generally, however. that there's there's resources for landlords, there's resources for tenants. So it's a pretty it's a pretty handy resource for anybody, and and looking at renting and people, or It is also fairly onerous to update this. And I've I've mentioned that this this year, in 2,024. We have a a lot of changes to housing law that will not be reflected in our current version of this handbook at the moment. But it's still, I think if you're if anybody's interested in looking at what rights, what resources there are in the community that's a good place to start. So

[29:15] just a little bit more about legislative action. Chip. he's more knowledgeable about this than I, but housing law has changed really drastically. at least that's what I've been told in the past 4 years. What we've heard is that it was fairly stable. I mean, I'm not an attorney so, but we've heard it was fairly stable for, like 1015 years, I know in the past 4 years we've had changes every year, sometimes fairly, drastically, and I think that what we've seen in 2024. I think a lot of this are still kind of reckoning with what those protections the new protections are from the State legislature. I won't try to go too detailed. On any of this. It's a bit above my above my head. But it is pretty significant, and I think anybody interested in this. It's worth trying to try to do a deep dive of what these changes are, because it's it's pretty significant, especially if you're a landlord, or if you're a tenant, wondering what what your rights and

[30:16] and responsibilities are under these new kind of changes, because it's the just cause. Evictions is a pretty significant change. and I think we need to find what evictions are in ways. So But it actually has been pretty handy in this beginning. There's a number of protections that have come online for the past 4 years. There's a lot to work with. We do go in court and try to get some evidence. But most of what we do in court is actually just negotiate positive kind of outcomes for everybody, but we rarely go to trial. But yeah. I think that's all I had. So any questions question. So let's say you provide a couple of $1,000 or whatever to to help an individual or a family that's in the process of getting evicted because they haven't made rent payments. To what extent does that or what percentage of that

[31:14] sort of fixes the problem. And then they can remain in their unit and keep on going. Or are some of these families coming back multiple times, because they just keep needing more assistance. It's really good question. And the answer is a little bit complicated. I think you know just generally, this kind of work. Which I've been around services for. There's a certain number of people who rely on these kinds of services to get by, and you end up working with that group of people fairly often of I don't have. We don't, really. I've I've tried to sort of talk about this. We collect a lot of data.

[32:02] and I don't know that we have the capacity to maybe analyze it in a really in depth way. I imagine you could look at the data we have and kind of determine like who like what size of the population is that we work with all at once, and what size work with at once, and then it goes away. So it'd be kind of just a guess. But I mean, you end up using a lot of your time in cases where someone's having difficulty over a long period of time, just because that nature that being said, I think most of the time we work with someone once and most of the people we work with. A lot of our resources will be used for people once. But most people work we work with are not in that type of situation. Thank you. Have a comment. It seems like, if you have a lot of data that needs analyzing. You might pair up with some graduate students that see you?

[33:03] Yeah. The the the program that comes to mind is the boulder affordable housing research initiative. Bari seems like that would be a perfect master. Thesis is to is to spend some time with wrangling that data into submission. Okay, it's highly personal data. But I think, yeah, it'd be good to maybe jump and thought about that a lot. We have some capacity issues. So Fortunately, this isn't focus on my practice. But I've been around real, save a lot. like many different forms manifestations. And so I guess the question is, what I'm really interested in is how you know. So if we have this process, we and ever increasingly finite resources, right, which we're all running into, especially post Covid.

[34:02] You know, Federal block grants and everything. Yeah, chop down. So the state program goes gets lower and lower. So how do we go about processing that? You know I've I've seen evictions where it's like you really need to leave right, acknowledge their unit, or whatever it is. I've seen evictions where it's you know, kind of predation that's going on. And there's a lot in between and stuff like that. And you know. just interesting to see when we have those resources like, you know, there's families. And then there's, you know, housing, stability for children, etc, etc. Is there any way that we can kind of? Take those cases and process it and say, this is where we need to focus our our resources and our efforts, etc. Right? I think I get what you're asking. And i 1 of the big changes that we did make was when, when in 2023, when the funds from the State really kind of cut down, we really prior to that, we've been sort of just generally offering mental assistance. Then we had to really focus on people who had

[35:08] an eviction court date coming up, for I'm not really targeted that funds and it wasn't, you know. I mean it doesn't. It's tough to do that, you know, a lot of people are are going to be left out under that situation, but in terms of like triaging in terms of who we? We prefer to work like like around. like high high intensity groups, or like families or things like that. The moment we've not had to really discuss that I'm traffic is really good. We have not encountered a situation yet where we're like we're out of. We're out of funds. We can't help there's still a pretty significant environment of funds that are available. And our funds are actually not a huge part of that which is which is good. You know, things could always change in a million different ways. But we haven't faced that discussion yet, and and so, in terms of the legal assistance, is everybody entitled to a lawyer.

[36:12] a kid who was in trouble? And it amazed me that he didn't qualify for a public defender. just from from family income, and his his background is nationality, and there no can't have it at all right, which is a real shock to me. So I guess you know, that's another big question, right? A lot of the legal assistance programs have incredibly onerous eligibility requirements, you know. So is that is, everybody, however. is a caveat. So Boulder has. I'm sorry. Bridge to justice has been a really great program to work with of us in our contact with them as anybody who comes in. You know, we don't have any limitations on who we work with. There's nothing in the statute that gives us limitations around who we're working with. So that being said, we have jurisdictional. So because we're funded by a city voter

[37:13] and combined court is all a Boulder county. It's a little different if you're in the county versus if you're now, which justice has done a lot of really great work to get funding to make sure that they can work with anybody in the county. but they're a little bit warmer strings attached to some of their county grants. So it's a little different. But for the most part, if you're if you're in that situation of eviction corridor have access to literary great. That's great kind of a hypothetical, but probably not hypothetical. I mean. you wanna prevent evictions. Then you have people to. you know, generally distressed, and can't make a rent or whatever. And then you have people who are maybe not playing by the rules, not playing around like we don't want to see anybody wind up in the street because that becomes our plenty of problems. How does your department address or sort people out, or do you

[38:10] restrictions. Well, yeah, sorry about that. Okay, so we have restrictions on how often we work with somebody. Basically just saying, well, we'll work with somebody specifically on like rental assistance once every 12 months, and that's pretty consistent across all of the funders who do this work. The state program they do a tremendous amount of work on identifying any kind of potential fraud doesn't come up often. But it does happen. for our program. We're because we're very emergency focused. We do. We do check to make sure. And and you know, understand that when we're providing funding for this. we're providing it to the landlord, you know, it's not going. There's some checks and balances.

[39:04] and to our, you know, we've we've seen cases where we thought there might be some issues there and investigated it. but it doesn't come up with us that much, especially, I mean, we do relatively small amount of funding compared to an organization like, stay in that program which doesn't truly sound the work identifying. So and effort does tremendous amount of work. And we do a lot of work, but we we don't face the same level of like I think, risk that you would face if you're in the state. So I'm interpreting that to mean that you try to take the landlord's point of view into account as well. I think it's only fair. Yeah. And really, we have. Really, we have tried to develop really good relationships with landlords, because it's a huge part of this whole piece of work. Okay, next question is, you know, this board is not dealt with

[40:01] rental issues in general. And now we have Japanese. We talked about it an attorney with expertise in this area. We talked about it during our tree. We were to investigate one policy change that would both help people that need help and also make your life easier. What might that be? That's an interesting question. Yeah. Should have given a heads up on that one. It's a good question. There must be something that's occurred to you like, if only Council would do this. this program would be more effective. Maybe it's a hard question for this program. That's a very different question. Right for this program more effective. That's a very interesting question. Because, like you think about, we've been talking about our funding, for example, potentially going to

[41:02] we're talking about how we're the the statute does give us the ability to or give city council the ability to change the amount of the the fee that we charge under the licenses. But if I'm thinking about this, the amount of funding we need to like cover everything that we wanted to would be pretty pretty severe. So I don't think that you can really address this program by like just increasing the funding and a thousand foot view. I think a big change I'd like to see is, I mean, one of the big risks that we face with Eviction court is. if you end up with an affectionate record. It's it's permanent. and it's a permanent detriment to your ability to maintain housing. and that goes away. Other things go away. But the permanency of this is, I think, something that

[42:00] I would like to, or if I was paying for the IC Swap address. Like, as I understand you know, people end up in tough situations. but it, it puts people in a really tough spot. They're facing that permanent like a judgment against you that have to disclose any sort of financial application, etc. So I can speak to this under State law. And this is a relatively recent new law in Colorado. when an eviction action is filed against a residential tenant in Colorado. By default the court record is suppressed. and it stays suppressed until the court enters judgment against the tenant. So if you lose your eviction case. then there's a public eviction judgment under record. But the law does allow the parties to negotiate that it stays suppressed. So a large part of what the attorneys are focused on is negotiating suppression. Okay, to make sure that even if the tenant has to leave their own, and there's not a public eviction that's often resolved through some sort of stipulation.

[43:19] And that's really, I think, a huge part of the services. One thing I'll keep in mind is when Jay talks about eviction services from my perspective as an attorney. The only people that me and the other contract attorneys do this are able to help with people who show up. If you don't. If you're being evicted, you don't show up and we can't help you. We're not your lawyer. You're not there. Those people will have public evictions on their record. So you know, just showing up to court can be tremendous asset to someone, because they can have a lawyer who can help them navigate the suppression issues. They can talk to city staff without funding

[44:01] from my perspective. There's a lot of people in our community who get a summons, and they are terrified to walk into a courthouse, for whatever reason you know they may be very uneducated about the American legal system. They might think that they're going to end up in jail if they show up in court. People don't go to jail for evictions. But some people have, I, I think. misimpressions about what it means to come to court the people who show up to court for an eviction almost always get a better outcome than the people who ignore the summits, and I guess from my perspective, and I think Jay would probably second. This is making sure that people are aware these services are available to them that can go a long way, and there's only so much you can do. We are fortunate that by local Administrative Order and the 20th Judicial district, when you evict someone Boulder County, they have to get a flyer with all the local resources attached to all the other legal papers. That's 1 thing, but part of it is, just. Do people know that when they show up to court. There's people there to help them.

[45:08] and you know, as a lawyer we can't. There's not much I can do that. I only can help people when they show up and ask for my assistance, or what the percentages that are actually utilizing the system versus what's potentially out there. Well, and I think, James, how you on a different level, they provide assistance, like non legal help to people who don't necessarily show people contact about funding. That's not the rental assistance isn't really something the lawyers advise all too much on. It's more the legal process. My understanding is that under the older Empress, statute or ordinance. Someone is eligible for legal help. Once they've been served with the initial eviction demand. And then they can call in at that point. And then, of course we're available in court, for when people are summoned and that happens every Friday.

[46:02] Yeah, I think we talked about this another meeting. Conviction is not like a conviction of a crime. Something else it's known, but I mean by default. The vast majority of court records in the United States are public record. In theory. anyone can go down to the justice center and search people's names and see all the civil court cases, divorces, everything. There are certain a very narrow subset of cases that are suppressed from public record, and in Colorado evictions are one of the at the onset of the case. If you win your eviction case. I had a trial yesterday, and it it stays suppressed. If you lose, it becomes public, unless you negotiate something with the other side. One last question for Jay Alan is,

[47:00] what's our success rate? Like? How many people are evicted? Whatever period you wanted to find and to to go back to this point. So so. so this is really relevant to this discussion in terms of who shows up in the court and what preventing an addictions? So a couple of points to make. Like one thing, there was an organization called motivational gun representation that pushed this statute forward, and what they actually started was they canvassed as many people as they could to try to get them into the vision. And that's actually something we do. A lot of. We are aware of the docket so ahead of time, and we try to contact everyone to get there. And so when we talk about that question because we we will focus on keeping someone in their home. We'll focus on finding a solution that that pays off the the rent. That's that's a order. If that's the major issue. but at the at the very least, we'll try to make sure there's no additional record.

[48:02] and when we talk about that as preventing an addiction. I can count on one hand the number of cases since this program started where someone came to court and ended up with an eviction on their record. I mean, it's it's a very, very significant difference. That being so, we think we don't have great numbers. But we think prior to this program existing 40% or so of people showed up to eviction court. We're down to 50. We're up to 50 or down to like. So then we've increased the number, because we're trying to be there to reach out to everybody. So I mean, if we can get you there, we can get a much better outcome than if you're not there the number. But then, after that the the outcomes we've we've kind of ranked can see these orange bars here. They range from one to 4 or 4 is basically a

[49:01] picture, the record. And you can see between one and 2, that's 62% of cases, 62% of cases that we we work with in court. I'm sorry which part bar graph. All this is saying is that we rank outcomes in our data tracking between one and 4, 1 being good, 4 being evicted. 60, 65%. We rank as good or or positive which we think is a. It's reasonable. And again, about half, you know. don't care and end up with. I have a question, does your data indicate how many people have like rental vouchers or rent that's based on the percentage of their income. And how many of them are like rent burden where they're just, it's market rate unit. And it. And and

[50:06] they may be paying 50 of their take home income on rent. Or do you have that? Do you collect that data? We don't. We don't, is sort of the short answer we talk about rent a lot, but we don't really quantify unless we're directly funding someone. We don't quantify like what their ideas how it's being paid. We work with a lot of people do have housing vouchers. But yes. thank you. I'm kind of curious about the political landscape of Empress. I I assume I mean, I remember in 2,020 that there was opposition to it. I don't remember exactly what their talking points were I'm kinda curious to know if there's still people who are like this is a terrible program. It should go away. It's ruined everything, cause I assume they say that would ruin everything and or on the flip side, I'm kinda wondering if, like

[51:03] there's a lot of other local municipalities, or maybe legislators at the State level who are looking at what's going on and saying, Hey, this seems successful, and we should expand this everywhere. I'm just kind of curious if you have a lay of the land. Politically speaking, of how this is shaken out, it's a little bit above my pay grade. Obviously, it's a regulation on landlords. It, I think it tends to work more towards I mean, worst, the interest of both sides of this sort of situation, especially around rental assistance. It's, I think, I think, in a lot of cases a landlord would prefer to be made whole by rental assistance, and to them to a fixed level. But in terms of the opposition, I mean. who wants to pay more taxes? And well, you know. So so have a long conversation about what the implication of that

[52:02] That being said. I talk to people, maybe once a quarter from various other municipalities who are looking at something like this. Spoke with Broomfield recently. They're looking at something like this for Collins. I've spoken with Santa Monica, Jersey City, New York, has a big program like this that they're still, I think I still think, trying to think to put together. So these programs are kind of all over the country in various ways. and people are definitely, you know, we, I think we we are a pretty clear success story especially because we've focused on providing representation. For for people in court. That's not a that was not an easy thing to do. I mean to what Trip was saying about like their inability to reach out to people head of court. I mean, they have ethical moral codes, and you know, to not do that because we have our program staff like me, who can do this stuff? We end up being able to work together to really work with people? So

[53:16] you know, I think there is a lot of interest in it. from various places, but I mean it did go to another similar statute went to vote in Denver in 2022, I think, and failed. How much is the rental license tax? $75 per unit earlier? That's just the efforts. Part, I assume. Is there more to the tactic. I don't think there's any other. It's just tax. It's a fee. It's a fee, right? And and I mean, it's directly related to what the fees charge for. Yeah. So just like building permits, I mean makes a lot of sense to me. Exactly. Surprisingly well, from my perspective, I don't love taxes either, but you know surprisingly, love is providing the service, and I think

[54:04] What's great to see, and you know it's still fledgling, you know it's a few years, but I I don't know. I don't know how much once you hit that 50 mark right? So a lot of the other 50, like I was saying, I mean, I've seen types of affection and a lot of the people who are more savvy or have more resources are the kind of people who, you know can go talk to a lawyer, go talk to their dad's friend, or whatever else it may be, and like, I gotta dip out of here, you know, before you know, before before they start coming and taking a look at all holes, right? So I think that that really I'm encouraged to see that 50 and and some of these trends, and the whole notion of providing the education providing legal assistance, I think is absolutely important, because I've just seen so many times and and hate to me but a lot a lot of the evictions that they did out there real estate, a lot like development. But

[55:05] you wish to see everybody represent, because there's a lot of it super technical. There's a lot of protections that aren't Facebook. And it's that they just don't know about. And I think that public outreach part of it and that education part of it is terrific. You know, if you raise it to 100 or 150 dollars a year. It's still well worth it, even for the landlord, because, like you said, I can't think of a single landlord that enjoys eviction process, either. Right? They just want the. They just want the rent. So yeah, I think this this is great, you know. It's a great start. And you know I I do meant the fact that there's a spicy drying up which we know from a lot of programs right now, I guess right? Let's think it's well, so. But yeah, I commend you, I think. yeah, it's not like you have a huge staff there, too. I saw that, you know. It's like, it's a lot of work. So you know. Thank you. I think one thing, it's also important to keep in mind that I think I appreciate about this working you can probably relate to this is just being a lawyer is

[56:13] as lawyers, as litigators, attorneys go to court, we deal with things after a problem has already happened, you know. So something has already gone wrong, and our jobs to try to resolve it. But after a while that does set precedent. So in Boulder County, if the landlord is engaged deceptive practices or they've habitability violations, it's a big landlord, and they get held accountable once in court with one tenant that could change how they do things for a lot of people in the future, you know, if they get hit with a big they lose an eviction trial, get hit with attorney fees award, or have to pay it damages to the tenant that can change things on the front end their practices. People learn from when they lose lawsuits, businesses learn from, when they lose or even settle lawsuits.

[57:04] and I do think that, making sure that these, almost every landlord that comes to court as a lawyer, not all them, but the vast vast majority, and when the tenant is also represented that results in a fairer process. And it's not just a matter of landlords, rich tenants, poor landlord wins anymore. Now the playing fields evened a little bit. and that can improve the quality of housing in Boulder County when landlords know I can't evict this person because the water hasn't been working for 3 months, and maybe that means you better make sure the water works in your building so that you can evict people if you need like. They know. That's that improves the quality of housing, because that is a defense to eviction, is there's habitability violations. My clients stop paying rent, because the water stopped working

[58:00] and empowering the tenant to raise that on the back end. When there is an eviction that can make this a better place to live overall. So that's the bigger picture. I don't always see it like that. But the optimist to me likes to think that our legal system does shape the way we act as a society. I'm glad to know there's an optimist not to forestall. But are there any concluding questions we might have for yet. I just wanna say I've had the opportunity to work with Jay over the past years, and I think he's a tremendous asset to the city of Boulder. Also Boulder County. There's a unique relationship, I think. For example, mediation services are provided to everyone in the county through some relationship with the county. This guy's incredibly knowledgeable, and there's a lot of issues that lo! As lawyers we can't really help the tenant with, especially when it comes to like applying for money and stuff, and to be able to point that in the direction of a non-lawyer you can focus on a different aspect of the service.

[59:15] It's a huge asset. I know you've made a tremendous difference in probably hundreds of people's lives over the past few years. So I just wanna say, thank you for that. just just to flag it for you. And we'll talk about having a listen session on right? There's issues. Yeah, we're gonna hit. You. Speaker. Thank you, Jake. Okay. Well, thanks. So much for thanks for having me. I'll but if you have any questions, feel free, I'll send this over to Tiffany here, and you'll all have it. And I said, I put in all the resources. So questions come up soon.

[60:06] Have to do so. Hope yourself to more food. Okay? again, the item, 5, item B, we have the zoning for affordable housing phase, 2 scoping. This is an item for input, we've had Carl Tyler present year before for some really productive discussions. We hope to have another one tonight. So take it away, girl. Alright, good evening, Board members. Carl Dyler, Senior policy advisor with the Department of Planning and Development Services. most of you have seen me before talking about the zoning for affordable housing project that we worked on. I'll go into the background. But that concluded with an ordinance in October of last year. We had a phase 2. That kind of grew out of that we call it zoning for affordable housing. Phase 2. It's evolved into what we're now calling the vibrant neighborhoods project at the request of Council. This is a new work program item, but it it's a basically a continuation of that prior project looking at expanding housing choice in boulder. So I'll talk

[61:16] more about the things that we're looking at tonight. So this is really just to provide the board with an update and then get your feedback on what we're looking at now. So the questions we have for the Board, or does Housing Advisory Board. Have any questions related to this project? What feedback does the Board have regarding the options that City Council has asked us? To explore as part of this. Some of my slides are probably pretty familiar to the board just starting at the high level. The visioning everything that we do is guided by the Boulder Valley Conference of Plan on many different levels. In this case. you know, there's Comp plan policies and land use maps that set density that we have to follow as it is in the plan. And that gets implemented through programs, different types of other specific plans and also through our land use code. So it has to be consistent.

[62:15] So this is our our land use map. This is kind of a high level visioning for boulder based on current land use, but also the land use. So we wanna see in certain areas that may not be consistent. You can see there's a lot of yellow that's a lot of our what we call single family neighborhoods of boulder, the lower density areas. Those have been getting a little bit more attention these days as opportunities for more housing. So we've been looking at that. But we've also been looking at a lot of other different zones that we worked on as part of the zoning for affordable housing projects. And I'll I'll talk about that. Obviously, housing is like a huge issue for boulder. We have challenges with the cost of pricing cost of housing. It's 1 of the biggest priorities that's in the comp plan. So that informs a lot of our work.

[63:06] The States also gotten involved. With the housing. I haven't really talked to you all since. The bills have passed, but we've been closely involved in monitoring. What has gone through the State. I can answer some questions on my, I know pretty well, but There's proposition 123, which is looking at more streamlined processes for permanently affordable housing. There's the Residential Growth Management Bill passed, I think, last year, therefore, we moved forward with an ordinance in February to remove the residential growth management system that we have here in boulder that restricts the number of housing units per year to meet that law. recently, in May, the prohibiting residential occupancy limits passed at the state level. So we're currently working on an ordinance that would remove our occupancy limits as they are in the zoning code. The State law still says you can impose or continue to use the life and safety demonstrated requirements for occupancy, and we'll continue to do that. But we'll be removing it from our

[64:16] our zoning code in coming months. So is this like the definition of a family thing? Yeah, you can't use the family as a as a limiter. So it's 1 person per 200 square feet. Yeah. So it has to be done according to what we're what we use now is the International property management code, the Ipmc. so that'll continue, there's life safety issues, obviously. But yeah, anything related to familial relationships has to be removed. So it's it's quite complicated. Actually, we have to go through the entire boulder, revised Code and strip it out of every little place it touches. So we'll be bringing forward an ordinance on that later this year.

[65:00] Accessory dwelling units. You know that we've passed some ordinances to make them more allowable throughout the city. The State passed legislation on. Adu. So we do have to make some tweaks to our code to also align with that. So we'll be coming forward with that. There's also the housing and transit oriented communities, or it's actually called the land. Use criteria for strategic growth. I don't know if you've heard about this, but this is all about, you know, getting more housing on transit corridors that have more peak level service. It sets a really high bar for the number of units that should be allowable in that area. It doesn't necessarily mean you have to provide that number of units but it will probably require some tweaks to our land use code as well. The zoning for affordable housing ordinance that we did last year actually gets us a lot of the way there, though. So it was a good thing that we actually started working on that and got that done, because that actually gets us much closer to meeting the Toc Bill this sustainable Affordable Housing Bill, I think, just deals with like housing elements and forecasting for what the housing needs are in the community. So I I know we're working on that one as well.

[66:12] So I'm gonna jump into the background. So again, this is just kind of the evolution of the zoning for affordable housing project into what we're now calling. The vibrant neighborhoods project. So this is phase one of the vibrant neighborhoods project that will evolve into a phase 2 after this year. So I'll get to that right now. The problem statement guiding us is kind of the same thing. We've been hearing just the challenges of housing availability in boulder and the rising cost is something that's been a major issue for boulder and and the whole nation. Now. Zoning regulations. Are under the microscope now for creating barriers or limitations to how many units can be built in cities, and that's been widely seen as something that that needs to be addressed. So that's still our guiding

[67:04] problem statement. This has been an ongoing process. And we've gotten a lot of input on this issue. This is similar input that that we've talked about before. But people that are in favor of it. Say that adding more modest sized housing will increase housing opportunities in the community will temper some of the rising costs, or that, you know, obviously having a more units within the same floor area spaces inherently more cheap than than just having a large single family house that might have a lower occupancy. Moving forward with these changes is consistent with the city's housing and racial equity goals. When we asked questions about allowing duplexes and triplexes in single family neighborhoods, it was a mixed result. But what we got from the be heard boulder questionnaire again, which, again, is a questionnaire. It's not a scientifically valid survey but got us that 55% we're supportive through the results of that of of being open to duplexes and triplexes.

[68:05] Although the caveat there is that, like the changes that we made last year, still use the same density mechanisms that we have in those neighborhoods, it just opened up the door to more housing types, and that does open up a pretty good chunk of housing that could potentially go into those areas. Some of the concerns that we've been hearing. increasing housing supply alone won't move the needle. The demand to live in boulder is so high that it won't make a difference that there should be more emphasis on increasing in loop fees, commercial linkage fees or rent control, or things that can get deep, restricted, affordable housing. There's also concerns about adding different housing types into lower density areas. And what impacts might come from that? I have a question regarding the community engagement. What role did the whole notion of, you know, the scenario with little houses getting mowed down, giant trophy home getting put in there, and we talked about that a little bit in terms of linkage and stuff like that. And it's kind of a an out right now. So is that part of the community engagement discussed because absolutely, I mean, and it really kind of grew out of the large homes and lots project which came from 2018. So it was like

[69:22] the the neighborhoods have already seen a lot of transformation in terms of visually, in terms of going from the small house to a very large house, and that you could what there's the term invisible density has been used that like on these larger lots, with the large homes. Theoretically, you could have multiple units in those houses, you know, if done right, design nicely, you could get like a triplex in there. So and people largely wouldn't notice. It's still the same massing. So what we've been trying to look at is not allowing more floor area. They're not allowing more massing, but just the same, far the same flora ratio requirements, same setback, same bulk planes, same solar access regulations, but just

[70:10] loosening up the number of the maximums on units so that you're keeping. You're trying to keep consistent with the character that exists in those neighborhoods arguably more than what you've seen with the big, you know. Explosion of large houses. So yes, that's a that's a big part of this. So, in other words, got the same far for triplex. It's essentially sit on the same footprint on that X-acre lot, or whatever exactly you could for one giant trophy. Well, we're not looking at increasing the massing or floor area. Yeah, yep. thank you for asking that. So as far as the ordinance that passed in October. It's ordinance 85 99 it's got a number of things I won't go into too much depth, but we, since we talked about this before with most of the board members removes the Site Review thresholds that are based on number of units for places with far footage limits.

[71:04] eliminates the mandatory Planning Board review that was in the code for adding additional units. Revises the the form of bulk standards to allow townhouses by right. We've also made changes to the code that get rid of the solar access requirements in between town houses. If it, you know. So you're not limiting the ability to do townhouses without site review. It allows duplexes and triplexes by right in the Rl Rr. And Re. Zones. But again, according to the density limits that are already in the code and consistent with the Boulder Valley Conference of Plan, we got rid of use review requirements for efficiency, living units and then in the commercial. industrial and high density residential areas, we we looked at most of those zones and removed the caps. Since the Boulder Valley comprehensive plan. And those areas doesn't have a density cap. We just put far and square footage limits and got rid of that maximum density, so that incentivizes more modest size units. We also made some tweaks to our parking and subdivision regulations to also loosen things up.

[72:21] So currently, that's your list. The changes to the inclusionary housing standards that basically didn't penalize someone for having multiple units. It's based on floor area. So that I think I've been pretty much in the same timeline. Yeah, so that it was a perverse incentive. So what we're gonna really focus on tonight are these 7? I'll probably spend more time on 1, 2, 3, and 4 less. So on 5, 6, and 7 since the 1st 4, the more housing related and density related. These are suggestions that came from city council when they adopted the prior ordinance, they said, Look at these other things do this as a subsequent phase, this has evolved into the Fiber Neighborhoods project that we're currently working on. So I'll go into depth on all this and obviously jump in with any questions I know I can get

[73:23] complicated. But it's basically adding the Rmx. One zone to the scope, the Rm. One zone. and then taking another look at the low density residential areas to see if there are other opportunities to add more housing again being consistent with the current Boulder Valley comprehensive plan. The second phase of this project would go into something that would be implementation of any changes that might come from the next update to the plan relative to housing. So that'll be happening between 2025, probably 2027 looking at different housing types and allowing them more broadly in the city. We are a lot of discussion about like mixed

[74:08] density and medium density. What's the version? Older to just more high density housing. I think what what we're focused on is. firstly, density at a scale that is more comfortable to people, particularly in the single family neighborhood. So not stacked flats, you know, or apartment buildings that are bigger massing or more height. But I think the other part of it is is that we're looking at missing middle housing so that it's a housing type, not a deed restriction. So in the United States, we've largely seen a lot of single family houses being built and apartments being built, and not a lot in between, you know, as far as like duplexes quad plexes. townhouses at lower, at the lower scales like Per, for instance, the current housing inventory in the city, I think, is like 9% middle housing. So I think the focus of this project has really been on that it's not to say we haven't touched that other piece, because we did in the last iteration of the project with removing those density caps in the business.

[75:18] commercial and high density, residential zones that that does incentivize a lot of the higher density of housing. So I think this particular iteration is focusing more on that missing middle. Yeah, I just look at a lot of like housing projects in Boulder, and it seems to be like the the townhouse, is like a very favored form of construction. But you know you, what about condos multi floor condos? You can fit in a lot more housing, and I feel like there's an assumption that the missing middle doesn't want to live in condos or have floors or something that's for low income people. And I, I just look at like sustainable growth and boulder. We don't have that much land here. So if we're gonna continue to increase the housing stock. We need higher density housing. I don't know. Town homes are really gonna get us there, and in turn, like boulders, always gonna be a desirable place as long as the flat irons are there, and no one's proposing condos in Chicago.

[76:17] But I I just think, like the missing middle for Boulder could very well be comments. And this assumption that we need to build row houses or townhouses. I just I don't know something I'm curious about. Yeah. And I think another big part of this is that we're trying to do these changes under the current Boulder Valley comprehensive plan. So that does have maximum density in it. So a every change we've made has been delicately done to fit in with the current plan. We do expect to be kind of opening that up as part of the next update is maybe there's other areas where high density or other types of densities would be appropriate. But we're we're not at that point yet

[77:04] taking the thoughtful, gradual approach. And it should do some density a lot of times when we're talking about townhomes, it's on like in lieu of a single family home on what's already a single family lot and part of the thing that you always. It's always this delicate balance. And so when you change it. You just have to keep tabs on things like infrastructure parking all those things. They are very real. It's just New York City this weekend. It's very, very real. And so I think I think you know, it's a good job to kind of work in that direction, and then have those areas in the master plan where you can kind of pinpoint. They have the capacity for higher density, like something more along the lines of Condominiums, where there's more intensity and stuff like that. But as far as part of this goes, I think it's great to say, instead of the. you know, 9,000 square foot home, and that's probably small, relatively speaking, but you know, we can have multiple multi family homes like something along the lines of townhomes or or triplexes or duplexes where you know it, it still fits

[78:05] within. The fabric of that neighborhood doesn't tax the infrastructure too hard, but allows for that opportunity, because once the trophy homes built. It's built. That's that's part of the reality, too. So that's my take on it. I think it's got to be a gradual process. It's a great point. You know, we have such a limited palette of housing types. stack apartments, town homes, and big family planning houses where the older housing stuff I just visited my sister in DC. She lives in a condo full of families. I mean, they have community garden playground, a swimming pool. It's like half a mile, Metro, and walking distance to a grocer, to grocery stores. And there's a lot of outdoor space. So it's like, why not? It doesn't have to be this little family house. We need more variety somehow inside. Can I put a planning board perspective on the table there, and speaking to your consideration about, why aren't we doing condos?

[79:12] And that's a question because condos implies ownership. And the builders, the developers aren't interested in building condos because of the liability regulations. And that comes up to our board again and again and again. We're getting luxury rentals. and we're not getting means for people to own their I know. Ho! Anytime an Hoa is involved. The insurance for builders is high. But is that any different for constructing town homes? Yeah. is it aspects of Sadar? And the way that it was laid out where an ha way so essentially, if you have an ha way

[80:01] with a large number of constituents based on just a few constituents that alleviation on behalf of all the constituents or construction defects, and it's gotten a little better in the last few years. But. speaking from the development side of it. It completely kill me for a decade. I just wonder, like, you know, when you're in like that Goss Grove neighborhood near cu. There's a lot of like small. I used to live in one small condo complex, like it's a very small condo building with like 8 units. And I want. Does that present the same construction risk? I mean, you could put on in theory a single family lot, you know, 2 story condo complex, maybe 6 units in it, or something like that. you know, that's just something. I wonder you could probably sell each unit for, you know, 6, $700,000 if it's a good neighborhood, and that's that could be a pretty profitable construction project, which shows how

[81:06] onerous it is, because when you see it not being built. That means it's really oners. Because there's a lot of people pencil run on. Yeah, quadruple my supply. We ask that question all the time, and we get same answers like it's not. It's not viable. So even though there's rap insurance that that mitigates it, the developers on the hook for I think, 8 years, and I think there's no right to cure. There's starting to institute right to cures. But like if we had it. and he took every precaution and got the rap insurance. I saw him a few months ago, he said. being sued. I'm never going to do another condo, so I know I know this sounds like kind of backwards from a market perspective, but, like, you know, I I live in a condo building. I'm a tenant here. My landlord owns one unit.

[82:13] And then I look at some of these, you know, like Bhp properties that are coming up, that look like luxury properties compared to what I live in. Is there any thought in converting apartment buildings that people rent into ownership, and it could even be an opportunity for people who rent there. That's always been kind of a concept. And for the longest time I mean, that was the best example. We saw apartment, complex after apartment, park complex come up, and it was built in construction and design in a way where they could convert it from rental to kind of mess. This up because more like tax base after 7 years or 8 years, whatever it was right. So there was that on the notion, I mean this thing. It went to Congress every year for

[83:01] a decade. And and every year is like, Okay, we're finally gonna get some resolution on this. And every year there was. you know, trial attorneys, hoas on this side and and then and then, you know, developers municipalities on this side, and it just went nowhere. And so, you know, there's been a little momentum. It's still a little bit daunting. There were some state bills that were, I think, 2 or 3 to meant to address that this year. But actually, I've been following these more. So so I don't know where where those landed is not gonna provide home ownership sounds good. That's 1 thing we'll talk about a little bit. I rode my bike by our governor's condo in downtown boulder 2 days ago.

[84:01] It's got folding up all around, I'm like, Oh, my God! They got hit with a construction team explosive and all the signs of it. Well, I have a comment to follow up. I'm really glad you brought this up because I kicked off a similar discussion a year or 2 ago, when Carl gave the presentation. The update for the last round, and the this is kind of depressing for me, because the kind of takeaway I got from you was about. Well, if in the Boulder Valley comprehensive plan. We could just update the the density maps. Then a lot a lot of changes could cascade from that, you know. But it seems kind of seems like based on this conversation. I know this has come up many times, too. That even if those density maps change doesn't mean we're gonna get 6 plex condos in the form of a Mcmansion

[85:01] and coming to a single family neighborhood near you. Well, I have this question, maybe for Carl. I'd say I wanted to subdivide my property into 4 homes and minimize. Keep one. So 3 would I be subject to the same kind of exposure as the developer of a big condo building. So you can navigate around that. If you have a duplex you can navigate around that. If you have many homes you can navigate around, even if you have triplex. There's a lot of things you can do. You can dip them, can divvy up the parcel. So you have less common interest, which is the reason why there's propagation duplexes in a lot of places as opposed to right. So I I think the other issue, too, is I call them sort of ambulance chasers, like a bunch of the lawsuits, are being instigated by lawyers who want to get enough of the residents to be part of the lawsuit, and so, if a

[86:08] condo project is smaller, it sort of flies below the radar of the ambulance chaser, and they're less likely to. I guess my point is a slightly hopeful one that we might see some advances in density with ownership opportunities if you know, we're done on a smaller scale, which is maybe a good thing. It's not just construction defects, but anytime there's common ownership that will naturally human nature result in conflict. I mean, you see it with divorces, people own things. But setting that aside, homeowners, my relatively short career as an attorney, I just hear like Homeowners Association. I think, Kiowa, I think litigation like it's it's someone in the Homeowner Association gonna be unhappy. And they're gonna sue. That's just like how we are as human beings when you share something and I don't know, May, what maybe something we should think about is, is there a way to do denser housing where people are not sharing property.

[87:17] It's daunting because you can't divvy up fee interest or land interest. Right? If you have a compliment, and you have to do airspace. If you do airspace, then it's necessarily going to have that level of common element to it. Right? But maybe the answer is, you know, not tiny home by like the Crs definition, but small homes that are essentially condo units, with 2 feet of space between them and a property line running between them. And I think cottage courts. You know, things like that, and that's not as much a part of this phase as it probably will be a part of the whole Comp plan update. I know there's still a lot of interest in cottage courts that also interest in town halls because of that fact that a town home could be on its own lot, you know, with a you know, shared wall.

[88:07] I'll jump into the analysis that we've provided to council and what Council directed us after the discussion in April, we'd like to get your input on each of these suggestions. So I'll probably stop after each one to get a sense. But just as a refresher the way the zoning code works this is how we determine the allowable number of units in our low density areas of the city. So we have Rr zones, which is rural residential. Those areas are actually per. The comp plan only allow less than 2 dwelling units per acre. So that is a pretty big barrier right there. And then the low density residential areas are like the Re. The Rmx and Rl. Zones, which is 2 to 6 dwelling units per acre.

[89:11] Rmx allows some medium density up to actually almost 20 dwelling units per acre. I'll talk more about that. but it's all done by just dividing the lot area to determine how many units so like in Rr, you have to have 30,000 square feet of lot area per unit. So, for instance, to have a duplex, you'd have to have 60,000 square feet of on your property. rl, one has a 7,000 square feet minimum. Those are the minimum lot sizes. But it's also 7,000 square foot of lot area per dwelling unit. So I'd have a duplex. You have to have 14,000 square feet, right? So that's in the code. Now, we've changed the code to allow duplexes and triplexes. But it it's still according to this

[90:00] or else use a little more complicated, does it? By open space per unit. But that's how it's been, you know. calculated for many years. We've taken another look at the Boulder Valley Conference of Plan at the request of council. It does have language that talks about density being averaged. It's not as strict in the Comp plan as as far as the language code is written it. You can have some areas that are higher. Some areas are lower as long as the average stays within that range that's specified in the plan. So we've done some analysis on this, and we've looked at it through the lens of gross versus net density analysis. The way we've been doing it is through the net density. So that leaves out public rights of way schools open space that might be zoned. Rl, one, for instance. And we factored all those into into the gross density analysis. And we looked at all the different polygons that are under the same zoning to see what is the actual density in that polygon. That's zoned a certain way, and we get gross and parcel. Density parceled is like, if you pull out the rights of way and everything. But you can see that. In this analysis, it actually shows that we're well under the limits

[91:21] when you look at it through the lens, even with the parcel, even with the net. It's well below that 6 dwelling. It's per acre in a lot of these low density areas. So it does show some pathways to getting additional housing in these areas beyond just the numbers, though we do have to follow the Comp plan. So the Comp plan has density limitations, 2 dwellings per acre, 2 to 6 dwelling units per acre. But it also has descriptions of the zones like the characteristics. Or there's also the policy. So we do have to. you know, make changes that are still consistent with the Boulder Valley Conference of Plan, so that this phase of the project is still under this this particular plan. So that's so. The suggestions that we've been looking at are still under under these limitations.

[92:10] Mixed density residential applies to the Rmx. One zone which I'll get to, but that allows 6 to 20 join units per acre. And I'll talk more about that. But so so Rmx. One. So, for instance, Rmx, one is actually this the zone that that we're looking at when you look out the window? It's also like Whittier. It's also parts of Goss Grove. It's also parts of Uni Hill. It's an interesting area, the city, I would say, a sensitive area of the city. When you read the Comp plan. But it was basically built as a single family, you know neighborhood around the turn of the last century. And then it was change, the zoning was changed to allow high density for for quite a while. So that's why you started seeing a lot of these single family houses becoming high, you know, higher density apartment buildings. So if you walk around the neighborhood outside of here, you'll see that that mixture you have single family houses among apartment buildings, and then in the 19 nineties there were concerns about the congestion, the parking, the intensity of the zone.

[93:12] and it was changed back to a low density. So it actually the Rmx. One zone actually has a density that's not that different from rl, one. It's really a single family type zoning now that it has apartments. So a lot of these apartments that you see are are non conforming or grandfathered. So, to make changes, then you often have to do a user to do things like that. So we've been asked by Council to to look at this zone again, because it does allow up to 20 dwelling units per acre per the current plan that maybe there's some flexibility in that area. But obviously taking into account the the descriptors of what the concerns are about, you know, keeping the same scale. keeping the same, you know, massing and things like that. So Council basically asked us to look at applying the far, but allowing more units, actually applying single family far, and setbacks which do not now apply to multifamily, and applying them to multifamily, but allowing more units to keep that character.

[94:17] So the purple here shows you the the analysis of of the Rmx area, you can see that the the gross and net density are actually very much in line with what the Comp plan says. What we suggested the Council is, we could take the 6,000 square feet of lot area per dwelling unit and change that to 3,000. Get more into a medium density range. I think that's still on the table. There was some mixed feedback from council, but there was a lot of interest of going further. Change it to 2,500 or 1,500 to get more units. So we're still analyzing this to see if that would still be consistent with the current comp plan. So it's on the table, and and we're looking at that.

[95:05] So I guess I'll stop here. See what the thoughts are when you said in the 19 nineties they readjusted. That did that mean they changed the definition of Rmx. One. Or they just changed the rules in each neighborhood that were under. This was focused on Rmx. One. Okay. so if you were to add, and you're saying in the suggestion to add more of this right, or to be allowing more units, but applying the far and setbacks and bulk restricting requirements to the Multi family. So it wouldn't mean that you'd be getting a bunch of these bigger apartment buildings. You might. I think the point is to like, maybe try to get more like conversions because there's a lot of historic housing stock in those areas. So like, instead of someone having a single family house. Maybe they can move some walls around on the inside to get a triplex. That's the kind of thing we're we're trying to work towards here. So I think the like, I lived in God's Grove when I was in school, and I think like neighborhoods like that, including this one, are pretty unique to boulder like. It's this

[96:12] kind of quasi urban neighborhood where it's like you can walk your dog at night, and it's chill, but also there's dense housing. I don't know. I just. I think that's cool. I I like that folder, and if we increase, it sounds like what you're promoting is not really any new building, but allowing people to like bifurcate current homes. And I've seen some apartments on the market that are like in a house, and it's like 3 separate units. But is there no political will to allow for construction of more of those denser housing types? And Rmx. One. I think there is political will. I think we're trying to keep the you know, the character, and we're trying to avoid some of the concerns that came out of the 19 nineties was that there were a number of

[97:00] historic homes that were demolished and replaced. I I was, you know, walking around Bus grove. You can see that there's like a lot of old buildings, and then some not so great looking 19 seventies apartments. So I think the the zoning was in reaction to that. So I think us approaching this through the lens of far and setbacks at a lower scale. is trying to avoid incentivizing, tearing down these, these older homes. older buildings. I I love the the concept of approaching this in a way where essentially, we're not changing the overall allowance. We're just changing the unit allowance within it. And those are in areas that are already established. When we talk about a conversion that we have less of a concern regarding infrastructure that could be someone's parking. There's a lot of ways to deal with parking. We're all trying to. you know, you know. Kind of step the course apart and realize, you know, maybe you know, less parking could be better in some ways. Right? So I I think I think it's a great approach. I think when you keep the setbacks and keep the far

[98:07] you're keeping the same dynamic that you have in that neighborhood. I can understand where people might have gotten a little bit touching in the nineties as they see things changing. But I think doing something like this. The the changes are modest. It allows for those internal changes, too, which is a really great thing, right where you say, you know. this is the near and dear folks heart. We've heard say it many times, like the unused bedroom thing, right? And so, instead of having big house where only a fraction of it's used, you could take that house, and you can convert the existing house a much cheaper aspect. We talked about a lot of this with adus to to something where there's more efficiency. probably more economics for the person that's involved there, that that maybe doesn't have the resources to bulldoze and build the trophy home. Anyhow, we wanna keep them here, too. So I I think it's a a great approach, and I fully support it as is. I wouldn't. I wouldn't try to

[99:03] stuff too many things down the neighborhoods, throat all points, and I think this is a nice gradual step in the right direction. I think there's some really good thinking that's gone to this. I would like to see the I would suggest looking at relaying the density levels to what you want to get out of it to try to define that now. So right now. you know, medium density is as fine as what? 6 to 14 per acre. Yes, yeah. And you know, 6 6 per acre is not going to get your walkability. It's not gonna get your neighbor services, not gonna get your transit. It's really suburban. fairly in my mind, fairly low downsteak prescription. So it'd be nice to see some language that says, if we want to achieve our goals for better transit for 15 min neighborhoods for walkability, you know. Here's and there's been some studies around this that demonstrate what levels of

[100:04] it's easy to support a bus stop and regular service. For example, there's lots of retail formulas for the number of rooftops that need to be clustered around in one area to attract a grocery store. Seems like. maybe we're still too low density in our prescriptions to achieve some of those goals that might be good to call that out some of the language and say. here's how we get there. Now. It's also interesting to note that you don't need to add a lot of density to meet those goals. In all cases like the full subdivision of a big modern to free homes, to make a huge difference. I don't know was when you need so would translate like 6 du till we put it in. Adu. Now there's 2 2 homes there, so it's 12. Wow doesn't always take a lot so I think we're heading in the right direction. But I'd like to see those prescriptions

[101:07] put into the logical explanation, for why, we're changing density, and that, you know, it's more than just shoving more people. And it's actually going to get us to some of the other goals. And I think that speaks to the title of the project. You know, vibrant neighborhoods. It's it's working towards that mixed use potentially mixed use. Or, you know, like walkability, 15 min neighborhood element, right? And I'm sure a lot of people are not really aware that, you know a modest increase in density can get you other benefits that can make life more to me. It might have a grocery store or pharmacy in your neighborhood. Get to my work school, or wherever it is, Alexa called out, highlighted. So I appreciated the analysis that distinguishes partial density, partial density from

[102:00] growth, gross density. And that's I. I I'm still kind of trying to wrap my brain around that. Can you? kind of explain to to me again why you did that and what you're hoping that you know, by observing those differences, what that might allow you to do. Well, I mean, I think it grew out of the fact that you know there are some council members that are pretty familiar with the comp plan and the the the language in there that talks about averaging, and that perhaps, you know, it's been done on a very conservative level for a long time, so like the per parcel density, calculation is like the most conservative way you can do it, because that that way you never have one area of a a particular zone. That's like more than the yeah. And I I think you know, honestly like, from my perspective, I was kind of surprised at what the analysis showed cause. I think we do have a lot of single family lots that are not

[103:04] at the minimum lot size. So there was an assumption that maybe some areas are potentially maxed out. And the analysis showed that they're actually not like. There's actually a bit more room. And I I'll talk more about that for the low density part. quick question. So this change, looking at the change, the intensity population down 2,500 to 1,500. So would that do? Theoretically, some of those nonconforming properties would become conforming theoretically. Yes. that's a good selling point as well. Not probably not all of them. Because I think you know, you walk down that street, you there's like a lot of density in some of those buildings, you know. So it's 1 of the things jump out of me, too, is, it would be nice to see as part of this effort those yeah, we allow foreign parcels. But you know it's kind of like the Scarlet letter you're carrying here. If there's some way to say right where you can form. Now, right? There's a lot of ways that you can do that so that you don't have to worry about all half of the Clones down, etc, etc. I I would be a nice thing to see if we're trying to really encourage.

[104:12] you know, blend some more high density. That's a great way to do it. Right? Yeah. Cause again, it did go from high density to low density, because it used to be what we call the Hrx zone for a long time, so I think a lot of them would probably still stay non-conforming. But I think some would definitely fall out of that. and just be able to let them redo their stairway or something without going through the process. Anything else on this one. No, just to really condense my statement, make the benefits of density or explicit other than that great work. Rm, one is. This is a zoning map that shows Rmx related to Rm, one. It's a medium density zone. It's in that

[105:03] kind of salmon color they're typically found around. The more I would say, suburban shopping centers of the city. They're open space based. So we did an analysis of that to you at the request of Council. We just did kind of a high, level kind of hypothetical like. What if we changed it to a instead of 3,000 square feet of open space per unit? If we made it 2,000 square feet of lot area per unit. You know. What does that get us? What we found is a a certain. a pretty high percentage of these zones are actually condominiumized already, so the chance of them redeveloping is probably pretty low. Given all the ownership structures so based on that there might be some ability to adjust the the density in the areas that are not come up, condominiumize and get more units there and still balance out and meet the current Comp plan. So we've been looking at 2,000 square feet of open space per dwelling unit, or 2,000 square feet of lot area per dwelling unit. So

[106:05] we, we suggested those. I think we're kind of leaning more towards the open space still, just because it is a zone that's similar to Rl, 2. If you know. Rl, 2, it's based on open space per unit. It has specific setbacks, kind of like. The DNA is all held together. If we were to change it to Lot Area, we'd have to change a bunch of other setbacks. So I think we're kind of leaning towards open space, but there was general support from council. I think there were some that were concerned about doing this. Some were concerned about lowering open space. But I would say most of the Council members were were on board with us. So we're still analyzing those areas as well. Can you please go back to the map again. What are some of those salmon ones like? So I live in one of the. So what are they where I live? It's like it's all condos, and there are these big condos. But then there is a bunch of like

[107:00] green space outside of it. You can't really build anything there. It's like sort of necessary to support the economy. You got a bunch of people in one space, and then they need some grass to go across from it. So like I look where I am is you can see where the diagonal goes off to the right. I believe that's Iris. So like Willow Springs area like winding trail. The Kings Ridge area. basically like north of the north border safeway. It's a bunch of big condo complexes surrounded by a lot of it was developed in the seventies. That's like when they came up with the open space regulations. Yeah. thank you. It doesn't seem like it's that common in boulder that space right? It's I think I wrote down. It's it's a pretty small percentage of the land area of the city. Looks like that one in South Boulder is probably Tantrum Lake. I think that's a Bhp property. Yeah.

[108:13] but any support different. I concur with keeping it as open space. I think there's some importance to that as well. and just for the consistency. But on top of that, you know, we have open space requirements there for a reason. I don't think that, you know. We have to stick to the 3,000. You know, but I think that keeping it articulated that way is great. 2,000. Something like that is awesome. Yeah, even that. The other nice thing open space is that we deal with purpose and purpose. There's a lot of things you can do to find a way that you know. Maybe if you're reducing the open space, you fortify the open space, if you're looking for, or something like that, right? So there's always that possibility. But I I like the approach. I think you know, we just gotta be really

[109:00] contemplative on on where the natural limit is to kind of, you know, working against the counter building, the vision of the open space that was there. Cause I do agree, it's kinda already set right so we can change it. But we should just be cautious. But right? I don't know. Well, especially, we're an urban design component to this. How many of these identity? 1970 projects you go by like the apron of parking, and then the lawn that nobody uses, that just wastes water. Yeah, how do you make that better? So you actually get a usable open space which also could play at the issue of all the people with families might believe there, because it's actually got a courtyard for something that people would like to use to provide some open space. So you know. There it is. It's a tree log with next to a text corridor, something like that. But

[110:01] how can we get better quality and description? I mean, we typically try to get that quality through the site review process. But there's been a push of trying to get these projects out of site Review, because that's a barrier. So it's a it's a balancing. We made it useful. Open space I lived in Will Springs when I 1st moved here. I loved it back in 95. I like my little patches of grass. Got a pool of everything. Yeah, we also kind of a long term project of relooking at our open space rags to Try it? Maybe not. Maybe a couple of years before we get to that. But or next year we'll see anything else on this one. Yep. alright. So this is probably the biggest one. This is like where we're looking at the rr l zones the low density zone. So again, Rr. Is

[111:11] less than 2 delegates per acre, and RL. 1 is 2 to 6 dwelling units per acre. So we did this analysis of all the different polygons. Again, you can see the gross and parcel existing comes to be quite a bit less than the maximum throughout the city. and see in the yellow and the kind of the the beige. And then we come to the Comp plan, and what the descriptions are for each of those areas we do have to honor that. So that's a big part of what Staff's analysis was to counsel. We do allow duplexes and triplexes in these areas. But the Comp plan does say that it's a predominantly single family detached character. So that's kind of something that we have to to bear in mind here.

[112:04] So we did. A pretty in-depth analysis of this. We looked at 4 different scenarios. If we change the lot area per dwelling unit from the 7,000 per unit? To what if we did? 5,000? What if we did? 4,000? What if we did 3,500? What if we did 3,000 so numerically? You could still fit within those land use designation, you know, caps, it's more just the descriptor of predominantly single family. So the highlighted cells are the ones that we thought were consistent with the Comp plan, and that it would, it would allow roughly, a 30 to 40% increase potentially for, like, say, duplexes in these areas. So you would keep it predominantly single family. We're not gonna see duplexes just pop up overnight, so it would be predominantly single family for a very long time, and to be very gradual.

[113:02] So that's what we presented to council. They were generally on board. With allowing that potential increase you can see in the Rl. One. That's a, you know, fairly sizable number of lots that would become eligible. It's like 4 over 4,000. So the interest of Council was really to focus that increase along transit corridors rather than potentially allowing them all over the zone. That might be something that could happen as part of the Bdcp update potentially. But they wanted the focus to be on transit corridor. So that's something that we're analyzing right now. We have our mapping folks looking at. What if you allowed that a amount of duplexes along all the bus routes in the city. How many like, how much of the zones would then be impacted? So we don't have that answer yet. It's it's going on right now. Well, right now, it's like we're just using. Well, that's what we're trying to find out, because if we spread that say that 4,000 across the entire zone

[114:06] across corridors. It could be 500 feet from a corridor, or it could be like 2 lots. We don't know yet. Right? So I'm I'm kind of in that neighborhood like. If you think of the demographic, let's say you take a house in South Boulder and make it into 2 houses. It's still gonna be very expensive to live there. And you know, you're taking maybe a house that's right. Now, gonna sell for 1.2 million, and you're gonna turn into 2 $900,000 houses, or whatever the way I think about is whoever's gonna live there is gonna like that that type of demographic who can afford to live there. So if it's only along transit corridors is not really good parking, like along the transit corridor. These people are gonna want cars. So I don't know. Just limit to transit quarter is a good idea.

[115:04] Yeah, I'll I'll throw out my full of carrier and say. I'd love to see Ira. I actually was right in one of those areas. North Boulder is riding through there, and there's a new remodel, and and the house looks like a a castle right? And it's like, you know, and it's maxed out. I mean, it's Max. I could just tell even you know I didn't even have been checked for the survey stakes. But you know it's right up to setbacks or whatever, and and to me it's almost like whatever we could do to encourage less of that, because, like I said, the reality is once that's there, that's there for time and memorial, right for better or worse. If we take, if we take our time eventually, that might change, and it gives. you know, the difference between 1.2 and 9. I mean, that's kind of like some of our. This is middle buyout program, right? And the other part of it is, that's why I keep saying, if there's some sort of proportional.

[116:03] I will say tax cause I'm supposed to say the word tax, but some sort of proportional accounting for when people are maxing out there a lot with single family, too. So if you do the both of those at the same time. So that we're saying we're discouraging that because I think we do need to discourage it right? And I think that I've seen a lot of communities. be it? You know. You know, cities like New York City, Seattle, where they have done things discourage that. It has very positive results. I think that's a good point, like maxing out a lot for a single house versus. Maybe maxing out a lot for 2 houses. I think the latter should be favored. So when you look at like these comparisons of how many houses are allowed per acre. And then, you know, like the square footage land use, maybe we should be factoring that in like how many smaller homes can use up more of a lot than a bigger boulder. How much would each unit

[117:11] sell on that duplex? Probably a million? Do people people want to spend a million dollars on a shared wall. I think there's something there's I. I feel like consumers have a different, at least my philosophies like, if I'm living in row houses like 10 people that's cool. I'm a little iffy about just moving into a duplex. Who's my neighbor gonna do it? Communities? I mean, it's saying how people like, oh, we don't care. And and a lot of times they end up being, you know.

[118:07] they they're they're bought pre-built, and people are like, I mean the ones in the Highlands. It's just like I think this little house are, gonna make it really pollen, Skinny. You know, your 4th floor is about the size of this table. But I I just think anything that changes W. What I've seen is like the trend you know, post Covid. But even before that, like the tech, the tech trend. Right? I come in those little cute little craftsman that's been here. I build a monstrosity, and my neighbor does. My neighbor does, because the killer affects. That can be. really detrimental, lasting over time, you know, changes around even just kinda esoterically, the the message of the community right? And so anything we can do to say, hey, we're going to discourage it. We can't stop you, but we can discourage you, and we can kind of even the playing field a little

[119:02] 100 behind. So I'm at it with this. So there's other ways, because that we did here presentation from Michelle about this year ago, like, what do you do about really big houses to either discourage them, or at least get some community benefit out of them if they're gonna be both. Anyway, we can do is well, that's the same thing. That's what I'm saying, right. If you give them the options. On the other hand. now they start doing the math because every developer it's just a question of pencils, right? And what's gonna be easier in terms of the approval process right now. It's super easy to redo a home and Max out a home. A single family lot, super easy and super inexpensive compared to a lot of things, because, you know a lot of things like the, you know, there's no linkage fees. There's no reason, etc, right?

[120:02] So might as well, residential. The idea is to make people pay more. Once you get back 2,000 feet. Yeah. Carl, I have a question. You were talking about the in order to meet the Boulder Valley Comp plan densities that this becomes an average. We reduce the square footage for minimum house in the zones, and then we average them. What zone is this average? Is it averaged over all the Urls? Or are there more discrete? That's something we're looking at now as well. Whether it's just an average across the entire zone as it exists, or whether it's in individualized polygons we're we're looking at that as well, cause. We had that

[121:04] write the radius. the maximum amount of abus and a radius, and that created a lot of stress. The outcome of the polygons could result in a lot of complexity. So we're aware of that whole city. And yeah, I mean, it seems that that's a an unintended consequence that we don't want to fall into again. Same same with the transit designation. So if you're close to trend Mike. you have to draw a line somewhere. You're saying this person can walk to transit. But the person across the street can't. Yeah be a lot of harder skin. I'm too far from transit. I have 72 feet. I don't any other thoughts on this one. The next one is kind of linked

[122:03] based on the concerns that if we allow more units in these lower density areas. There's the potential for like properties being bought up by investment companies. one of the suggestions was putting some sort of owner occupancy, restriction on on a lot if it adds a unit and this is something that we do now with accessory dwelling units, except the State law is actually impacting that we're gonna have to change the code to only allow it only require it at time of permit. But not after. So we're we're trying to reconcile that we did not recommend the owner occupancy requirement just because number one. It's it's an it's a huge administrative burden to monitor owner occupancy across so many lots across the city. Obviously, if you did it, it could help, you know, mitigate some of the concerns that might come from investment companies coming in, or the concerns that revolve around rentals with.

[123:15] you know, maintenance or parking impacts things like that. But our concern is that it wouldn't really align with what councils been asking us to do in removing zoning barriers. It could actually deter the creation of units. If people have an owner occupancy requirement, they might actually, it might be easier for them just to subdivide their lot and create a new single family lot and sell it off. So we didn't recommend this one the Council didn't agree with that, and said to continue exploring this option, so curious to hear, what what's what's wrong with outside investors coming in buying up a lot and subdividing it like someone needs to do it. Your average homeowner just can't really finance that

[124:02] I think it's more just like having local ownership of of homes, and and how that fosters. You know, the neighborhood character. If you have a bunch of independent companies coming in and renting out the properties. There's concerns that is there large demand in Boulder, for, like renting like a house, you know most. I feel like most rentals, and the demand is such that you can rent your house for up to $12,000 a month for a single family home. And there's a big market people going around for a year, 2 years. The other thing that happens, and especially in new loops in our neighborhood. Michael is investors by, buy the lot. buy the small house, erase it, put a big house up, never live in it, never rent it, never do anything with it. So it sits there as an investment.

[125:00] and the community gets no benefit. Right? We don't have neighbors. We don't have, you know, people able to come and go and rent it and whatnot there's there's it's like dead space. And we have. If we look at the map of Newlands, we see how many of those there's a lot. And what's the idea? What's the idea on owner occupancy? You're saying? It's too burdensome to monitor Bye. What? Why is that so burdensome to monitor. Well, just that there'd have to be a record of owner, occupancy and proof legally shown to add the unit. But then there'd have to be an ongoing monitoring program to make sure that someone doesn't just do it and then sell it after. I mean, here's a thought. What if we tax it at a different rate. So the property taxes, if you're the opener occupant, are less expensive than if you're the owner, landlord. owner, landlord has to pay higher taxes that discourages investors from buying it, or maybe investor comes in.

[126:02] They tear it down, put in 4 houses, and then they sell because they want to keep paying the taxes, they want to flip the profit, and then you have 4 off. And so when it comes tax season, you declare, under the penalty of perjury. I mean, our whole tax system is basically an honor system that I live here. And you're you avail yourself to the lower tax rate. If you lie and you're committing tax problems. I like that approach. I think it's really hard to do that with advert taxes. But I think on the flip side. Building fees permit fees. rental fees, everything else like that. There is a distinction that you can make in class on on that basis. A lot a lot more joining than we could fax, for like that approach right rather than you know that my only my other concern or occupancy is, of course, you know, is that somehow, then suppress rentals, which is, kinda yeah. A lot of people are trying to do here, too. But i i i I agree with staff concerns and position on this, but I think that there's I think this is a a

[127:08] a real passive potential in terms of saying, you know, there are a lot of things that you can do here. Just like we're talking about. But there's there's plenty of others where you can say, here's how I can flexibly kinda change around the playing field a little bit, so that, you know we're we're trying to get the result that that we want to kind of tinker with it, you know. I I got a project right now. So we have 50 foot setbacks everywhere, and all these little stupid lot lines. I should have never been there in the 1st place. So 50 foot setbacks, stupid lot lines. You know, it's a hundred feet. That's a lot of homes when you're building locals housing. So that's 1 of the things you know, we we said. And technically, we're in violation stuff like that. And then we're talking about doing the Pd. And everything that goes with that. But the whole notion is, you know, if you have something said like for setbacks. right, allow flexibility, if you're you know. Put in this kind of deal restriction, that kind of deal restriction, whatever else it may be. Right X. Amount of death. Those kind of flexibility kind of leveling up the playing field.

[128:10] I I think, are a great opportunity to try to, you know, guide things gently in the direction that you want it to go, because you deal with some really powerful forces on the other side in terms of just the economics, right? And it's just a good way to kind of level it off a little bit and provide those incentives, for maybe somebody does something that we want them to do. And you know, we're articulating what we want to see by our regulations and policies as well, so other occupancy. I share those concerns. Some other ideas. Are not gonna be so all this to come up with any right now. But you know, there are things out there. And yeah, just kind of a chip is saying something along those lines. I think you know, I think there's room the tax code to encourage other occupancy. I mean, I look at like the State of Florida. They give everyone homestead exemptions, big homestead exemptions be so many out of

[129:03] State people on property there, that's essentially giving a discount to the residents and then collect your tax. Can't can we replicate that? I mean one way, even doing it would be like you increase the property taxes, but then you give every owner hot and a tax break that puts them back to where they are, and that, you know, like, I think there's. I'm not a tax expert, I know, in America. We dictate policy through how we tax people coming and buying a place in Boulder, which is like their second home, their 3rd home there for them, so it might be owner occupied, but, like you mentioned. They may only occupy it like a couple weeks out of the year. And so you're diminishing the vibrancy of the neighborhood because you don't have occupancy. That's like the homestead concept, which is when you I mean, I don't pay property taxes on the tenant. But when you pay your taxes, don't you have to say, this is my home address for paying my taxes. Does it match up with the property that you're paying taxes on? If so, you pay less than if

[130:23] you know I live my addresses. Yada Yada, California. I'm paying the city boulder taxes for my property, Colorado. Maybe that charges a different tax rate. So Council has asked about the second home issue. We have explored it with our city attorney's office and the basic messages. You can't treat them differently in terms of taxation given exempt or discount residence.

[131:01] And do we have? What are our rules about? Requires owner occupancy? But if I own 3 homes like. If my home, the owner, has to occupy the property, and they can only short-term rent for a short period of time, like a limited number of weeks or months a year. You can't buy it to be a permanent airbnb. Right? Thank you. Pretty stringy compared to most jurisdictions in the country. and I talked about it. Not that we're going to rent our house, but what if we rent our house? We'd have to go to the city and get a rental license, and they'd say, you already have a rental license you have to name you. We're not going to give you the rental license. I don't know if that's true or not. Yes, that is true. That's what I thought. You are not eligible. It's just. My wife told me that I figured it was true, the adus used to be regulated by a rental license, but they're not regulated by a rental license anymore. Is that correct? So the rental license is new it used to be. You had to have a license just to have an adu correct. It wasn't a rental license, it was a license to have.

[132:15] Oh, well, it was a license, a rental license. and it expired every so you had to renew it. No sorry anytime you rented as soon as they. The city passed the rental license. If you rented your adu, you had to have a rental license in 2017 is when I did mine. but the and that's gone, though right? No, what's gone is the it's now allowed. Idios are allowed by right right before they were not allowed by right. You had to have an active license. Do you even have an Edu? Or maybe you license? Not around an Edu license? Yes, thank you. Fun. I mean, I I'm I'm no tax expert, but if there is concern about

[133:03] owner occupancy outside parties, you know, just buying up all the land. I think there's there must be some way you can leverage tax code or licensing to create incentives or discourage conduct cause to me. it sounds more like it's coded for. We don't want renters. I don't know if that's necessarily true. I mean, I think in Boulder, like we want there to be rental stock for lower income people right? So that they can afford to live here. But do we really need a plethora of 15,000 a month? Rental units in the city like? Is that the demographic who's spending $15,000 a month on a rental or something is that? No, the concern is not how much they're charging rent. It's who owns the property. So out of state investors buying properties, different things but clarify for me. One is okay. So I say, investors buying properties, scraping them and putting up a large structure.

[134:05] In most cases those folks are gonna buy something to sell and look at their profit margin at 20%. Whatever it is, we're talking about investors to buy single family homes, convert them to higher density in the current roles. create 3 like free units. And you know, we don't get that much out of it, because there's no affordability. Is that kind of where we're going with this. Yeah, I mean, what I see with this zone here is. This is low, residential, and the city Council is exploring the idea. Can we allow, you know Big House on a big lot to be torn down and put in 4 houses. Right? Is that? But yeah, if the lot's big enough, you could do maybe like a triplex. And the Concern City Council wants feedback, and Staff's concern is that out of state investors are gonna buy up those properties and then lease it out.

[135:06] and it's gonna thwart our homeownership goals in boulder. And how do we discourage? How do we allow for that justification while discouraging that problem of out of State investors just profiting and not really increasing housing ownership in Boulder, and my thought and this would require legal analysis is leverage. The tax code. Most access come from, or license from the county, not even from the city. But I think just be so if you said, you know you're going to be an owner, occupant, and you and you sign an affidavit and tend to be an owner occupant for X amount of years. Here's your building. Permit fees. If you're an outside developer doing this with no representation of occupancy. Here's the building. Permit fees. Here's your inspection fees. Here's you want to lease out your condo for $1,600 a month your annual license, landlord license. If you want to lease out a house that you just

[136:11] built out of a you know, a single house that you built into 3, and you want to lease all 3 of them, and it's going to be $12,000 a month in rent. You gotta pay more than $75 for your rental, and like, I don't think those tenants, the ones who are paying, you know, $12,000 a month in rent are really the ones that we're super concerned about, are we? As a community? I don't know who those people are. So I'm gonna change the paradigm a little bit, and maybe it's not related to what you do like. In theory, like our housing could be a bell curve right with like, mostly middle income with smaller amounts of affordable and smaller amounts of of wealthy, and that is clearly not boulder like, I think, Boulder is more like a flagpole, right? Like essentially very little middle income.

[137:06] We're moving towards what 12 or 15 deeply affordable. And then you have the entire flag of like very wealthy, expensive phones. And so, in my mind. older maybe, should think about, what do we want? Do we want 12 deeply affordable? Maybe we want 30 middle income, you know with families, and then the rest of it can be very expensive, because if we just rely on supply and demand, there are enough wealthy people out there that can buy town homes for 3 million dollars, and then we're never going to get the families and the firefighters and the teachers to live here. So I think, while I understand what we're doing in terms of like the Boulder Valley Comp plan and zoning, and all of that, I feel like if we really want? We really need to figure out, what do we want our population to look like? What do we want our housing base to look like? And then I think you probably need to deed restrict those unix

[138:12] to satisfy the populations we're looking for. Well, it sounds like that's been Boulder's approach to the missing middle is the restricted housing that caps appreciation. And, Jay, do you know what is the percentage of permanently affordable housing? How much can it appreciate and value each year. It varies. It's anywhere between one and 3 and a half percent. But it's based on CPU price index. Yeah, I mean, I don't know like is so is that something in terms of like is that something most people want to buy into is the equity in your home is capped at one to 3% like you do the math, if you're more, how much is a mortgage right now? You probably know this residential mortgage? Does that make financial sense? Why not throw my money at the stock market and keep renting? Well, so let's say, let's say you're a teacher or a firefighter or a nurse, and you want to live in Boulder, and you want to send your kids to Boulder Valley Schools. You may say I will go

[139:17] appreciation for the right and ability to live in boulder, and I will generate wealth through a different mechanism. But at least I get to live here versus commuting, or in some of your right, and not everybody will choose to do that. But you don't need everybody to choose to do that. So you know, I think we need to be careful of presuming that one thing begets the other right? So in other words or so, just because we have. This doesn't mean we can't do things to try to orient towards local employees. Right? So I give you a good example, too. So let's say there's 1 of these lots and

[140:04] fire department. The school district can get their hands on it, and they'd like to build a fivex for for their long term administrative staff, or whatever right principles, whatever it may be. This allows them the opportunity to do that. Have you ever seen the fire department build process all through the mountains, every mountain community, fire departments, every single mountain community. Fire departments are buying and developing property. So word of districts, so school districts. Now there's a huge school district project in Eagle County. There's another one. Are they tenants, or are they owners like a lot of them are built on? And then some of them are, thanks, right? And so it just depends on where the need is. But that's employers doing that. But I guess the point I'm saying is, what we're talking about here is allowing the potential and flexibility to take those giant trophy homes. What we're talking about is something that would only be a single family home.

[141:10] It could be a tiny one waiting to get mowed down, or it could be a giant one that's built, and even the possibility of converting that into something where? Yeah, it might not be cheap. But it. It's also kind of creating, just between the love supply and demand and the different type of product, something that is available to a wider sec, which might even include, you know, maybe a a upper part of the missing middle or whatever it is. But it's just one solution. because there's not one solution to everything. It's 1 arrow on the quiver. So from that perspective, I agree with what you're saying. I agree with what you're saying, but I think we need to look the force of the trees here and say every single one of these things as an amount helps make the situation better. It helps. Give us more creativity. And I think you see that at the state level the course of the last year and a half, finally. right? Finally, after 2

[142:01] decades. But I think that's something where I'm highly supportive of all these things, because it allows flexibility. And what we've learned over time is that all of our development codes are incredibly more rigid than we really intended them to be. So from that perspective. That's why. So I'm totally supportive of that. And I would love for you to talk, maybe at our next meetings about how week, like what they're doing in the Mount. Well, what I'm looking at here. What I'm thinking about here is there? I've walked my dog through here many times. There's areas in North Pole between 28th and Broadway. kind of what's that new affordable complex, that relatively new on no holiday like west of holiday south of Holiday, where there's some monstrosities that have been built on these big lots. But then there's also some like older homes that I look at, and I'm like this could be a teardown. This is a big plot of land. This is an old kind of smaller, pretty house, but like

[143:03] someone wants to tear this down, and when they do they're probably not gonna tear down the new build monstrosity anytime soon, because it's just built. But these older ones, what can you do with that plot of land? Just replace it with the monstrosity? Or can we put for smaller houses there? And I support the idea of 4 smaller houses there, allowing that to happen. Obviously, there's so many other factors at play. If the concern is well, if we do that, some out of state investors could just buy it up and turn them into very expensive rentals. And it's gonna go against our goals of of, you know, home ownership. Then, is there some sort of financial incentive? Maybe that's a higher premium you have to pay more money for a rental license. If it's a big house that you're renting out. I mean, that makes sense to me. If you're making $10,000 off a month rental, you should be paying more than the mom and Pop landlord, who's making 15 or 1,600 renting to the Cu student.

[144:06] Yeah, I think. a little bit beyond the boundaries of what Carl's talked about this proposal or this scenario, and you know, to your question, Jeff. 20 years ago Boulder did a lot. We had deed restricted exclusionary housing for sale housing, and people bought those places still buying them. What's that? They're still buying them? They're still buying them every day with the trade-offs, and they said, I want to live in Boulder and do exactly what you said. I'm going to put my. This amount of money can afford to my house, and I'm going to have other money to do other things to my life, and I think the combination of some kind of a density prescription with a requirement of 25

[145:02] affordability through date. Restricted housing could create a whole. Another opportunities for that 50 middle. And I'm not shooting down the restricted housing, but, like just densification, is one way that we can also have more affordable for Mark. Is it not necessarily reduce the cost of housing in boulder? I don't believe that you could build enough to make it ever be really important. with no affordability. All 10 platform. I think we might want to come back to Carlos, and I appreciate the talking about things outside of the realm of zoning, because I do agree that a lot of this has to go outside the realm of zoning. There often is

[146:08] this feeling in the community that zoning will solve everything, but it does take, you know, other mechanisms to to address it. So I do appreciate the ideas. and we'll keep talking about it and try to figure it out. None of these things is in a vacuum. But I think we gotta keep moving to make our German time. So you have anything else. Yes, so there's 3 more suggestions. I can go through the really quickly. They're more like technical or this particular suggestion was another way. To get more missing. Middle housing was to exempt them. If they don't require any modifications from the Site Review process. I think what Council was thinking is that there was other methods of getting missing middle housing through all the other things we're doing, and that maybe we should just be exempting out permanently affordable housing. And and that's kind of the direction we're headed in based on there. Yes. So

[147:09] is that include middle income. or is that what are we talking about? If it's deed restricted? If it's deed restricted, it must be 100 permanently affordable, so can't just have a small portion of it, but it's affordable. The range of affordability. Does it capture the middle income if it's perfectly affordable, I would think so. Yeah, yeah. it's not very. I can see a lot of there we go. Sorry project. That's a hundred percent middle income that's going to be very rare, right? But we were talking about missing middle housing. This is a good graphic, if you haven't seen it before, but like how so much of our country has been single family or apartments. And it's showing that middle range is the city Council direction here that we can develop in this zoning pattern. denser housing only, if it's deed restricted.

[148:01] permanently affordable. says, Do not pursue this option. However, the city could exempt 100 permanently affordable developments from Site Review. Well, we were originally suggesting just missing middle housing. So just housing types would get you out of the site review process. So that's why we said, do not pursue this option. So that's why the discussion kind of moved towards deed, restricted, permanently affordable to exempt from Site review. but not other types of missing middle have to like rowhouses. I mean, that's what we had suggested. Original Aoc Row houses. I just I don't know. I look at this macro level, this idea that rich people can put their house on the free market and appreciate at 9 per year in the middle class are capped at the government capped by the government at appreciation at 3%. Is that, like the future. the only middle income housing is capped at 3 appreciation. And essentially, if you're a middle class person in Boulder.

[149:05] you don't get much Roi, it's subsidized. I like, I understand how it works. But like, if the concept here is that the only missing middle housing we're gonna give a fast track to is if it's deed restricted. I think the issue is, there is no middle income housing left in boulder. So if you want housing for teachers and firefighters and nurses. you have to plan for it, and I think the only way you can do it is with some sort of subsidy, indeed, restricted. If you're a middle income person and you want a house. I don't think you can afford boulder. That's what we're all complaining about. It's like, no one can afford to live here. Yeah, you get a restriction literally a deep restriction when you might be getting $600,000 in value of house that you can't otherwise board.

[150:00] But it's a chip. I think the point is that missing middle has nothing to do with Council suggestion to exempt permanently affordable housing from Site Review. But they said the original proposal was all middle missing. That was Staff's proposal. It was Staff's proposal as part of the ordinance that we did last year, and they said, Don't do this. Let's explore it further, and then we went back to them, and then that's when it kind of evolved into permanently affordable housing, I should add, though, One part of the State Bill on the Transit Oriented communities is to not require discretionary review for any multifamily housing on these transit corridors. If they're under 5 acres. so that'll probably capture a lot of potentially missing middle housing projects as well, if not some probably apartments. Again. if they go for like a height, modification, or setbacks. They they could elect to do site, review per the State law, but it would require us to not

[151:06] require site review for the the smaller scale ones. Pretty significant. Yeah. 6. Sorry suggestion. 6. Sure. This is just taking another look at our site. Review thresholds. We we did a lot of changes to it last time. They wanted council. Basically wanted us to remove any more thresholds that were based on dwelling. It's per acre, because if you do it based on dwellings for acre, you're discouraging housing. So if we're looking at additional zones to just make it based on floor area or make it by acreage. We'd be basically getting rid of all of the dwelling units per acre thresholds and council agreed with those changes. and then the last one is really we put something in the code in the last ordinance where

[152:04] we would encourage residential uses in industrial zones if they were mixed on a site with other industrial uses. The purpose of that was to you basically get a a flurry of bonus. If you mix the uses on the site. It was basically to encourage mixed use in the industrial zones, encourage residential, but also encouraging preservation of industrial uses. But there were some concerns about, maybe not all industrial uses should be conducive with residential. So they've they've asked us to re-look at the code at what uses would we suggest could occur on a site with with a residential project without a lot of impact. And we we made this list of of uses that we thought were appropriate to be on a site with residential on council, agreed to get that residential bonus. So that's that's where this one landed fair to say that targets

[153:04] East Ravo Boulder Junction, maybe parts of North Boulder, and we don't want to see these long time businesses leave. Yeah, would incentivize a certain amount of a site being remaining in a light industrial use. interesting while getting residential in those areas as well. We 1st started talking about Easter abroad in 2018, when I started here. And that's exactly the kind of conversation we're having. So I think that's that's great. And I think that's really important things. Yeah, the whole notion. It's so non residential over there. And there's a lot of, you know, potential. So to try to keep the businesses that have residential units hopefully for employees or business owners, or something, you know who you know, upstairs, downstairs, all over the right. So I think it's great anything else on this one. It's just next steps.

[154:01] So we're we're still moving forward with all these options. We're we're working on getting feedback from the community. We're working on. Another be heard boulder questionnaire and what we're calling a story map that just kind of helps people visualize better what these changes might look like. So we're doing some graphics development and mapping. We're hoping in the next few weeks to get that out to the community to get specific feedback on these changes that we talked about tonight. We're gonna provide an update to planning board on August 6.th So be a similar presentation to this. We may or may not have all the results of the the feedback. By then. ultimately we would take all of the feedback from the boards and the community to city council and and get further guidance on the changes that we're working on. I mean, the goal is to complete this particular ordinance by the end of the year. Again reiterating that this is phase one of a new project. Now the phase 2 would be looking at more housing opportunities in areas throughout the city, maybe looking at some limited mixed use for 15 min neighborhoods. But that'll be part that'll be linked up with the update to the Comp plan. So

[155:12] that is the presentation. Thank you. Awesome. Thank you. Good work. Thank you for all the input. Every time I come here I took a lot of notes. This is pretty impressive. You are looking at the changes that will not change or be reliant on a Bbcp Update. That means they can happen now versus in 3 years or 5 years. I think that that is just a brilliant move. Yeah, and that's the point to be brilliant. I like it changes, too. I really appreciate you guys doing crunching the numbers and stuff like that, too, and saying like, Well, we take averages and everything. It's been really interesting. Next level stuff.

[156:19] Cool. Okay, let's give Carl, and we'll go on her next agenda. and you can take all the food from staff. Item 6. An update on one B funding. One B is a countywide funding rental for affordable housing. Yeah, sure. So hopefully, everybody had the opportunity to vote on this on the ballot measure one day last fall. Pretty significant. So it'll raise anywhere between 17 and and, I think, upwards of 22 million dollars every year.

[157:01] That is specifically supposed to go to affordable housing or services for homelessness services as well. So the county commissioners are the ones who get to decide exactly how the money gets spent. They had asked the regional housing partnership, which is an organization. I've talked to you guys about that. Everybody familiar with the regional housing partnership. So it's staff from all the jurisdictions in the county to get together. And it's also the structure where the county countywide. All the jurisdictions adopted the 12 goal permanently affordable housing. Anyway, the county Commissioners get to decide. They asked the regional housing partnership to come up with a recommendation on, on how to spend the money, and we gave them one. They didn't quite like it. So we tried to make the argument that there are existing funding channels. That reduce or increase efficiency. Reduce left administrative burden.

[158:06] And it's the way we've been distributing Federal funds for decades. But they don't. It's difficult for me to describe intentions of the county commissioners, but it it seems pretty clear that they don't really wanna give up control because the way that we had structured it. It is jurisdiction based on their population numbers. We get a set percentage of the total pie every year. And then we would be able to combine that with our other sources of affordable housing like boulder long month. And we would be able to basically get more projects built in the county, get get to credit for almost every unit built in the entire county. Anyway, lots of politics behind it, just going back and forth. I think it's become clear that county commissioners want to set up a competitive process so that they can basically stay in control of how that money is spent. Unfortunately, it means all the jurisdictions are going to compete against each other for these funds.

[159:05] it's gonna be less efficient, but likely Boulder will still come out ahead. Because we have staff that can put together good proposals. And we have good projects. Same thing with Longmont. It's really the smaller jurisdictions that are probably going to lose out. Anyway. I just want to let you know this whole dynamic is playing out. There was an article in in the boulder reporting lab a few days ago about this but you probably haven't heard about it. That's why I just wanted to share. So the concern is, there'll be a kind of a Balkanization and collaboration in private housing which is the exact opposite of the goals of the regional housing parks. It's a great somebody we can do better than his head. But we just we should know back. Just wanted to be aware. Could we write a suggest a letter of recommendation, or does that be political?

[160:00] It's being a bit political. I wouldn't recommend it. But you said the the county commissioners are opposed to just diving it up to the various housing groups, I guess concern like one thing, I think, is, if the money supposed to go for like homelessness. Services like you know how much money does like superior Lewisville need compared to boulder and long line places with more need. but if they had more services there, then they'd have like. If some of those other municipalities had a shelter and offered food and services. Then I think the homeless people from there actually carve off 20% off the top for homelessness services, and there would be a really considerate process that would go to existing organizations that provide services. The 80 would be focused on housing and the construction of housing years back, a really significant impact fee that we got adopted on a basis, and it was the same. It was like

[161:22] everybody's together. And this is that, you know, it was like, you know, cross fire everywhere, and and the what they would say. Fortunately it did change back to that right. So 1st County Commissioners. that is all, for housing is all worthy cause, though. Or Oh, yeah, right? Right as well, they impact the huge houses and stuff like that primarily right for housing. And it's gonna be picked up, and then the county is like we're gonna take it and we'll figure it out as we see appropriate again. So there's you know.

[162:06] So the concern was equity. So, but it's difficult to clear what they mean by phone right? Cause. Equity can be resolved by calculation a lot better than hmm ourselves. So I just wanted you to be aware this is happening. The money starts being available January 2025. But it's still 17 to 22 million dollars that we didn't have before. So it is significant, yeah, yeah. So based on this document you sent us. I saw this last month. Steve boulder has more than a 3rd of population. As a candidate we probably have more than a 3rd of the office people in housing need. we got a bigger share of the pilot fair deal.

[163:00] Well, I would argue, we might get more if it's competitive, because, like I said, we, we will compete well. depending on what the criteria we don't have, we said the homeless part is segregated for a competitive process. Well, we don't know how they want to handle the homelessness piece, either. So it's not clear to us what how it's going to get divided. The homeless funding would also be divided among community capacity or Longmont have a percent goal like Boulder has a 12 affordable goal this long month, or or the county have goals. Boulder has has 1515 and then the county through the regional housing partnership, every jurisdiction agreed to 12, recognizing that some would be higher, some would be lower. And that's rentals and homeownership.

[164:01] That's not a statewide mandate, is it? No, but part of the legislation that Carl talked about was There is going to be a requirement for housing assessments to be done statewide. So like all the counties, don't have to do a housing assessment to determine how much housing we actually need. That's been happening anyway. For most places, but it will be new for some parts of the State. so like is the assessment based on what was 55,000 cars that incommute. Therefore, we need 55,000 more units. It's a housing needs assessment. So yeah, it'll based on the population. which is also part of jobs, determining how? What is the demand for housing in a certain time period? Thank you. let me get some other stuff for you, too. If you want to hear about that.

[165:01] there is on July 25.th I would highly recommend there's a joint meeting planning board and and city council. Boulder Valley Comp plan sort of one on one. So if you haven't been through a comp plan process before. it'd be a good one. Because they'll go through what processes. what and what gets decided? Who and the complications around? Who gets to decide? I know there was interest in the Comp plan, particularly with this group and how we're involved, but understanding the process, I think, will help you to better understand what your role might be, and is that at like 6 o'clock, or something, most likely. Yeah, zoom, yes, absolutely. So. When I get the link I will send it out to you, or the information of when it gets the date where the Council is going to talk about the Airport Addition drive airport.

[166:01] which was the airport community conversation. It's not about the petitions. It's about the community conversation which has been continuing doesn't counsel go through a process of negotiation and deciding exactly what's gonna happen. That specific petition? So that went to Cac on Monday, and there was direction to. Yes, you need to figure out a way to engage with the groups. Think that's the message, right, does that sound right? Hmm, sounds right? I just wanna make sure this is happening. And just a drive to succeed. And and the required number of signatures to move forward the idea of closing airport and converting into the air, which were 2 separate potential. not issues. But there could be a lot of negotiation before language. Actual nature to balance

[167:03] is decided. Does that sound right there? Right? It does. So. Counsel could suggest changes to the language I don't understand. Make it even vote to not put it off the ballot, or put something else on the ballot. So when will that happen? And is that going to happen in public or in negotiations? No, that's a good question. I do not know that I've I've never seen mechanism of that like. I said. It just went to our Council agenda Committee on Monday. and it was decided, yes. it will happen. How it happens I don't know just to be clear by Jay, and I have talked about this a little bit. So in a way, this takes it out of the hands of like. We talked about making recommendation on the airport. This wise would be a valid issue. That's not the type of thing we could recommend on. but individual members of the Board can weigh in as they see fit. Be involved as they see fit. And we just not.

[168:06] you know it's not. I think we're legally or procedurally prohibited from. you know. Make make a recommendation, and so go to the voters. Correct. That's yeah. Yes. I'll be sure I'm understanding frankly. Thank you. anything else from. I mean, Carl actually covered my other stuff. So you know, the State ballot measures are going to counsel in August, September. Update typically to reflect legislate legislative changes. You saw we talked about or since the agenda went out. Michael, organize the tour for the July meeting. So that'll be an optional tour of the tiny home village in Longmont.

[169:01] So we don't technically need to cancel our July meeting. But Since this meeting. even though it's a tour, it'll still get noticed. But we'll basically meet out there. And I have to drive, anyway. So I'm happy. What's that? It will or not will get noticed? Other members of the public can join us directly. I mean we did. They did when we went to. You're good to read as well. Is that going to be about the shooting range or the driving range? And then but we're not then going to be meeting after here for, like a full-blown meeting. Correct? Okay? So no formal meeting. Yeah. You won't have any other agenda items. It's just the joy this time. That'll be at 4 o'clock. You'll get breweries up there just. We asked Walmart for permission for Boulder to

[170:11] join us during her work hours, and then afterwards, I guess we prefer here. Oh, I got a little distracted by the last conversation about the Airport neighborhood campaign, so Alicia sent us the the certificate of sufficiency. She gave us a 4 point outline of possible outcomes. So the possible outcomes are one. Council places the measure on the ballot as an initiated measure. So that's kind of like what we've been working towards. 2 Council proposes amendments to the measure, and the committee agrees it is placed on the ballot as a referred measure. so

[171:01] it would still end up on the ballot. 3 council decides to adopt the measure, and it does not go to the ballot so they could just they could just pass it for council decides to amend the measure, and the committee does not agree with the amendments. Both measures are placed on the ballot as competing measures. So that seems like the worst case scenario. Thank you for clarifying that. Sure. And then what was asked. After that everybody's wondering what's next, and that's very helpful. Thank you for volunteering, but information. And we'll be deeply on that. Those relate really strongly to our missing middle conversation, I believe. So keep getting updated on it. alright. So last thing, August agenda is everybody gonna be here in August. Yes. I checked my doctor.

[172:01] What is the what is the August 5, th 4th Wednesday? Yeah, thank you. So we also need agenda items right now we don't have any. Should we get someone to talk about homelessness? I don't know both you mentioned, you know, people well, so and let's see, we could get someone from element to develop blueber, to talk about permanent supportive housing development. We could get somebody from the shelter to talk about homelessness in general and how it's impacting older. The Chamber has 2 people who are on their staff, who are focused on homelessness, and that would sort of give more of like a

[173:04] older public business focus. So it's sort of what do you? What do you want to know? Who do you want to hear from? I think I'd like to hear from someone in the shelter who works regularly with homeless people. so like the individuals, or like how the shelter is operating, or their plan to move people into Housing day shelter. Like I. I feel like there's got to be someone in Boulder who works regularly with homeless people and has a good pull of sun. The problem, you know. Not necessarily. I imagine the Chamber of Commerce would be like the perspective of business owners. Yeah. what that is, but I think more like the actual, like someone who provides social services to speak from perspectives. I wouldn't mind hearing from

[174:03] both at the shelter, and from the chamber We could get you a diverse perspective. I got another one to throw in, and I really like the Bridge house model. It's a nonprofit. And they actually build and manage additional app people and job training. And then what else? California they can. They convert when they can afford to buy them, they convert, they can commercial properties and do basically oratories. I, really, I really like what they do. And they, if you could scale that up to a more public level, you can actually address a lot more issue than we are now. I mean, if we get a panel of people, including maybe there's I wonder there's gotta be someone who like specializes this the Boulder police department, you know the Public Safety angle. You know I'd I'd like to just kind of hear from everyone who sort of touches it in the community. Get that broad

[175:08] jump into this frame. We might as well clear to sleep for August. Try to tee that up for where we could get mathematics. Yeah, staff certainly has a big role with all that, too. So I think that's a great idea. Instead of multiple speakers come on, and maybe it's something. You know, people from the public will attend and certainly got everybody's ear right now, so might as well. I am beginning to appreciate that part of, I think, what this board does serve on it for a few years. And you hear from all these different people, and then, collectively, the port maybe develop some sort of holistic expertise. And I'm glad we got someone in today to talk about landlord tenant issues. It's obviously an issue I know a lot about. But I kind of want the whole board to learn some more hopefully. I'd like to learn more about homelessness, because I don't know much more than

[176:04] when people get evicted. They sometimes end up homeless. I'd like to understand the issue a little bit better. Yeah. So Jay and I and the vice chair meet every month to help shake the agenda. These are great suggestions. We had our monthly meeting regarding that on June 14, th and we did follow up on the tour of the area planning area reserve 3, 33, and you know there's so much. so many directions I could go in. But one thing we talked about is, what if the future were to focus on the 30 acres of city owned around. What's it look like? How do we overcome the challenges of developing infrastructure for that? What's the rental ownership split. What's the affordable market rate split? I mean, I don't know if we need to go into weeds on all that now, but it'd be interesting to have further conversation.

[177:04] help to shape thinking about. Sorry. If you're interested. It is going to council tomorrow night. So the urban reserve analysis, the baseline urban services, the draft at least and I don't know if you saw Mark Wilk sent a post asking questions and advance of that and the number one question was anybody I got, David, I'm sure, questioning half of the planning reserve being for regional Park. What's a regional park? Really good. It's a park that serves regionally as opposed to a neighborhood scale. Okay? So it's a big park. What? What's a current example? Regional park like East Boulder around the Rec center? Better. Only Rachel Park.

[178:01] I should know this. It's a big part. Yeah. So the subtext of that is. do, do does parks, American hill and land? And could it possibly be a hybrid of park and neighborhood development? So can I throw out a concept like if if we try and get 3 or 4 speakers for the homeless discussion, and they're not available in August. Then maybe that would be September. If it's easier to do the planning reserve, and in August, so we can sort of like figure out how that works. It seemed like more of a lead up for that one. So like you're saying, September would make sense just because you want to do it the right way. You might like. See if you can get some decent public participation, and maybe a little bit of additional notice than usual, and make sure you get all the speakers lined up for that day, so buying several months to do it, rather, I totally agree. I'm just saying, let's keep that on our radar. It's really important, right? So then do the so

[179:18] like Harrison, maybe do the home thing in in September and August focus on. So keep in mind what's next for playing reserve. Yeah, I mean, is the goal that we synthesize all this information over the year and talk about it, and then put together a letter to cancel the end of the year. Actually, we, just before you joined, have we were doing recommendations every month or 2 on pretty substantial issues, was a big year for housing they to use and selling for affordable housing and so forth. But no, we don't do it. What? Just once a year we try to do it when Council needs some input big issue. I just think I did the Like Advisory Board training for New Advisory Board members, and someone raised their hand and asked the county attorney, How how do the advisory boards like? How do you? How do you do that? She's like good question. So I'm just curious like, how how do we go coming in here? And and presenting

[180:25] proposals that they that they're making to city council and getting feedback from us, you know. That's that's part of our role is to help. You know. I can send you some letters. Well, I saw the letter right when I started. Let's go ahead. But, like, when they were about to vote on 8 years, we sent them up 4 page letter and 8 years, with a myriad suggestions, and they took like 4 out of 6 of them through them, anyway. But you know we there was some analysis, and it wasn't like a full blown white paper, but it wasn't a 2 liner either.

[181:02] so I'll send you that. I think that'd be helpful. So in relation to the homelessness discussion, so keep in mind. The follow is when city staff gives council their annual update on homelessness. So it's gonna be a lot of the same information. Okay, are we ready for a debrief? Can I make one of my little speeches? I mentioned earlier that I'm a little depressed about. Well, I mean, sometimes, sometimes, sometimes we have these conversations where we're. It just feels like we're we got these proposals that are nibbling at the margins at a time when we have this housing crisis right? And You know, I mentioned earlier that the the land, use tables and the Bbcp. A complete overhaul in order for Carl's team to go and make the kind of radical changes I would like to see.

[182:02] And then you know th. Then it came up. Well. if that ever gets fit, you know, if that ever gets done, the condo defects will be sitting there waiting to quash. You know, future condos that we'd like to see built. And if that gets fixed well, we've got this market that will never work, because, no matter how much supply we add, there's too much demand. And so like we just have like. we might as well just argue about nibbling at the edges for for all of eternity. And so one thing that I've just been trying to wrap my head around is, how would you make a healthy housing market in boulder like, what would that look like for me? The definition is just a lot of options at a lot of price points for a lot of people. That's that's a healthy market for me. And so I don't think that's equivalent to a free market. I'm not like a libertarian, free market kind of person, but I do. I do think that like

[183:08] to to have a really robust. inclusive community. You need to have a help housing advocate. So I would like to learn more about how you know, like visionaries that are thinking about this from a much bigger level of how do you have a healthy housing market? The only thing I've heard so far that is exciting to me is land value tax, and I would love to learn more about it. I don't know that much about it. I've said I'd like to learn about it way more than I've spent time reading about it. But so I'm just going to throw that out there as something that should be on our radar if we had an expert and like an economist who could come and talk about land value tax. I think that would be super cool. I have heard a bunch of other ideas that are way like more radical and weird. And I don't think they're like, probably worth our boards time, but that that one is

[184:04] one that stands out. Maybe we reach out to like someone in the economics department or a law Professor tax law professor. They don't get much attention like in the law school. I know that means no one wants to study tax. They might love the idea for sending to the house. help create a robust market. I mean something like that, and some people are more visionary than that I'd love to hear from. I love to see. I do want to clarify that a lot of those conversations. You know, it's not like. It's all this can never happen. But you have to have a healthy appreciation with the challenges are right. And so what I got from Carl is, you know. It's on the plate, you know. We have to do the Comp plan part of this right, but it's on the plate. We're talking about stuff like East Arapaho, and all that, you know. But in the in the interim, and and I think you made the point to in the interim. It's like, Hey, they're not even just they could be sitting

[185:07] on their hands, going well until we touch the Comp plan comes up. We're not gonna do anything that's subsid changes. And that's that's not just nibbling at the corners. But it's creating the the. It's creating the lattice that you want to help move forward broader and bigger changes as we go ahead right. If you don't hit those things on the corners and start cleaning that up. You can't get to that next big step. So I think that's the reason why I'm encouraged is not that, you know it's always going to be challenging. I mean, we could deal with this city level, state level, federal level, global level. Almost any issue. Right now you can sit there and bang your head in the wall. But you know there are. When you see, encourage size, you know. That's something I think, to kind of hop on. Yeah. Pushback is well taken. I don't need to be total, Debbie Downer. I just But to Philip's point, like one of the reasons why we have the most ridiculously complicated tax code in the United States is because our government doesn't just use the tax code to raise revenue which it does, but also to shape conduct. And it's a super complicated issue. And I'm wondering if there's someone out there who maybe can explain to us. How could a municipality such as Boulder use its tax power to

[186:23] shape the housing market. You know, and I I don't know just like I'm not that I I think I'm kind of smart, but like I don't have the answer to that. But maybe someone we should consult with as a tax expert to them and see what ideas I'm open to like. I do want to give that some energy.

[187:09] I think our Utopian community we want to use that would include Danny's concept of like, how do we provide housing for the service providers in our community so that firefighters can live here and police can live here, and teachers and nurses not maybe not the entire everybody. But like figure out a way that I mean, I get the sense that most people on this board believe like it should be policy in Boulder. How we get there we don't know that like homes should be for people to live in, not investment vehicles for someone who lives somewhere else just a park month, you know. And how do we? How do we get there? And how do we encourage that? How do we drive down home ownership prices for owner occupants.

[188:07] And is there a way that city can leverage its powered attacks to do that in order to assess fees which is not a tax. So I have some feelers. Let us know what you find. participant. We had a great presentation from J. And I'm sending a projector. It's great conversation about that. I've heard a ton. Good update on signing for affordable housing phase, too. We gave Carl all the input you could possibly handle. Good work team we got a 1 b funding update from Jay with some challenges on negotiations between the regional housing

[189:08] folks and the County Commissioners but not an action item for us. We talked about a tour next month in place of regular meeting. and that will be on Wednesday, July 24th at 4 PM. Then we'll have a regular meeting in August on August 28, th in which we're looking at the possibility of having a panel of experts on homelessness from slightly different perspectives. Educate us on what they've learned both problem and possible solutions. So with that, do I have a motion to adjourn. Thank you all in favor. Aye, thank you. Thank you. It's fooled. It's the 1st time we've gone over in a while. Good! I gotta get back to Mike.