January 22, 2025 — Housing Advisory Board Regular Meeting

Transcript

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

[0:06] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Right. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Good evening, everybody! Welcome to the January 20, second, 2025. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Meeting of the Housing Advisory Board, our 1st meeting of the New Year. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Welcome, everybody! We've got a 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: really good agenda and some voting items. We'll talk about that in a moment, but we'll start by calling the meeting roll call of members in Theodoro. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: I don't think any is here. Austin. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Good here. How do you see here, Ramsey? Here 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: with Jay-z here? We do have a quorum, so we'll be able to vote on next site and appreciate everyone being here, especially with the cold weather. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: I'll be reviewing the agenda, we may we may be moving things around a little bit. In a moment. So item, one is roll call, item 2 agenda Review, which we're doing now. Item, 3 will be approving our our minutes from the November 24, th 20, th 24 meeting.

[1:15] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: After that we'll have an opportunity for public participation. This is the second half meeting in the hybrid format with members of the public invited to attend in person as well as to comment, via zoom! You have a couple of members of the public here delighted to see 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: item 4. Right now is matters from the board. I think we're going to switch that around and move 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: our panel up to. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: let's see, is currently item B, under Number 5. We're probably gonna move that to a assuming all of our panelists are here, and that, the topic on that is the practicalities of office conversion into residential hot topic in boulder right now. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: We have a voting item. After that we'll be voting to

[2:04] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: approve or not. Recommendation to accept modifications to the draft ordinance on adus live 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: holders, policies with what's required by State law. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: and we'll have opportunity for public comment on that as well. And then board discussion before we vote. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Another item for feedback is have member Quarterly update to council. This is something that 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: a member of Hennessey proposed a few meetings ago that we're ready to think ready to act on. We'll talk about that a little bit more later. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: We'll continue to discuss listening session topics. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Item 6 is matters from Staff 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: 7 debrief, and then we'll attempt to adjourn by 9 Pm. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Board appointments. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Oh, okay, I'm sorry. I must be looking at an older Virginia.

[3:02] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: We also will be making a recommendation discussing recommendation to Council Decision Point regarding upcoming board appointments. We have a board vacancy coming up in March. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: so with that we can talk about approving the minutes. I think. At least one of our board members would like to amend the language on that before we vote on it. So the potential listening sessions for 2025 number. E. Says that Ogren and Karen both strongly oppose having listening sessions regarding 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: the homelessness issue. And I'd like to clarify that. The reason why we're opposed to it is one because have already had a meeting focused on housing solutions, and 2, the underlying causes or factors that relate to it are being addressed by like the Chamber. There's like an upcoming Tedx. And so I feel like those are 2 reasons why. I'm not supportive of

[4:12] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: list of sessions 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: would like to propose a provision of the language we modify. I propose that we modify the language to clarify why we're opposed to listen. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: I said that I didn't want to do it for 2 reasons, one, because we already had a session on solutions, housing solutions, and 2, because the underlying issues are being addressed by other organizations like the Chamber and an upcoming edx meeting. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Okay, very early, just simplifying that and perhaps just modifying it to edit your phone.

[5:08] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: But we already have that. It's opposed. And if somebody needs this, I don't want them to think that we like don't care about homeless issues. It's more that we've already addressed it, and some of the issues are better. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: And if you want me to draft some language, we could also just delete it. You've explained that you strongly oppose the votes on the record and everything's recorded. It doesn't necessarily have to be stated in the minute. So you strongly oppose. That's the easiest. I think that's the easiest way for all right, we'll just delete it. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Thank you. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Okay, 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: So I guess unless there's any more discussion on that. I could ask for a motion to approve. November 20. Meetings with that deletion.

[6:06] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: I'll make a motion to approve the minutes with that one solution through a second. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: all in favor of approving minutes for that change. Say 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: board member. Theodoro has arrived, and we now have a full house. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Okay, we do not have all of our participation 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: open comment. And we have a couple of members of public here that you care to comment housing issue. And is there anybody waiting online to comment via zoom.

[7:00] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: there's 3 people online. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Alright. I just need to go through the rules. Give me a second before the slides. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: It's here. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Alright. So just a couple rules about public participation at city meetings. So the city is engaged in the community members to Co. Create a vision for productive and inclusive civic conversations. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: to support the physical and emotional safety of everybody involved 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: more information. You can go to our website. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: The following examples are found in the Boulder Revised Code guidelines to help support division. These will be upheld during the meeting by our chair. Michael, we ask that all remarks and testimony be limited to matters related to city business. No participants shall make threatening

[8:06] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: something in the way whoops 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: so make threats or use other forms of intimidation, obscenity, racial epithets, and other speech behavior that threats or otherwise impedes the ability to conduct the meeting are prohibited, and participants are required to sign up to speak, using the name they're currently known by and we ask that you display your whole name before being allowed to speak online. Currently, only audio testimony is allowed online. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: So shall we start with in person. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Oh, David, you're not quite ready, are you? I think, have you? 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Let's start with online, Tiffany. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: No hands are raised. Currently something 3.

[9:02] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: There is no one on my. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: you do it without fear. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: One you don't have email. I do not not yet. I went through. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Let me check John. Hold on. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: but 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Shadow on the wall. Just not that effective but great to see everyone. Thank you so much for your service. I'm David Adamson. I'm Goose Creek Community Land Trust. I'm working to resurrect that fine nonprofit organization. But I wanna 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: just take a few moments of your time to harken back to the great win-win solution on housing that the older

[10:08] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: back porch group presented to city Council in the shadow of unfortunately Covid, in 2020 we met for 2 years the Bruce Creek Community Land Trust convened 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Yimby and Nimby. Folks like Leslie Durgan and Scott Holton and Alan Feinberg and Leonard Siegel we had a great conversation for 2 years at Bix Backforce. That's why it's called that. And one of the things that Scott Holton came up with that everyone loved, and Roger Lewis helped 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: elaborate the innovate for impact housing pilot. If we feel there's so much about 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: doing what we need to do to add density and maybe restrict cars. But people are concerned about that. And could we mobilize the community, all the beautiful smart developers and neighbors and affordable nonprofit developers to show some examples.

[11:16] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Of how we can add density. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: restrict cars and have it be beautiful. No 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: covering mountain views, etc. And we have all city council loving this idea. It's gonna not require very much staff time, just like the Boulder energy challenge. I don't know if anyone's familiar with that that we did in 2014, 27, anyway. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Since you're not too familiar with it, and was a little while ago, and since I don't have my super persuasive slides here to show you why this is such a good idea. I'm just really making a quick pitch for anyone who wants to work with us, to resurrect this idea of innovators in Boulder getting a chance with a lot of public participation to build, you know, to design. And then best ideas could be built could be independently

[12:12] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: evaluated. And then we could scale up the best examples of how we can really have mixed income 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: housing in this town that you know response of the climate existential crisis. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: and our desperate need to recruit and retain great folks here in boulder for our employers and people will recognize. Oh, I don't need to go to Europe anymore to see those beautiful medieval cities. I have this beautiful example of successful human civilization right here. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: So I'm just making a quick pitch. Anyone who would like to help us resurrect this idea, Danica Powell, David and sign we had the greatest folks help us put all this together back in 2020. Just Covid was a tough time to present it. So David Adamson, David Goose Creek communitylandtrust.org (303) 545-6255. Thank you so much for your service. Really appreciate it. Thank you for joining us

[13:18] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: email it to me in advance. Oh, yeah. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: As I mentioned earlier, we are reordering our agenda a little bit. So respect the time of our panelists so they can go home a little earlier. And we have a really wonderful panel on an important topic. That's a hot topic in other places these days. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: What is the potential to convert our ample amount of commercial space, which I think is tracking at about 33% these days into housing of all kinds.

[14:01] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: And 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: you know, it's not a it's not a slam dunk sort of proposal. There's a lot of nuance to it, and and challenges, but also some great potential. We have practitioners here who are, gonna tell us about some of their experiences. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: and we also have Holly Hendrickson of the Department of Housing and Human Services, who's gonna moderate our panel? And she has written a white paper that's available to everybody kind of examining some of the realities and potentials of this subject. So 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: gonna turn it over to Polly, and we'll figure out how to our panelists, for the public may take new skills. But 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: we have about. We've scheduled about an hour to talk about the subject, and our panelists will be presenting case studies and answering questions from the board. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Thank you, Ellie. Thank you. Thanks for the introduction. I sent the Powerpoint slide. So you can. Okay, thank you. All right. So I'm Holly Hendrickson. I'm with Hhs. I'm a senior project manager with the housing side of housing and human services so like

[15:20] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: like Michael mentioned, I did write a white paper which you will be quizzed on later, so don't time to read it. But yeah, so the the goal here is just to talk about this concept of the office conversion to residential units, do you? Wanna 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: so I just wanted to open this up with this this cartoon as kind of an entry way into this conversation. So the idea here is that Covid has kind of disrupted our use of space, especially office space. And it's been this common conversation in the city to figure out how to better use this office space and kind of maybe, 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: use this office space to respond to this for ongoing affordable housing shortage. So that's kind of the background of this conversation.

[16:06] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: So I won't go into the details of white paper, because, after reviewing slides from our great panelists, I thought, you know what these are. The guys that actually know kind of the ins and outs of these detail the details here. But I just wanted to start the conversation. Basically one of my big takeaways of all of of the the white paper and kind of looking into this a little bit deeper. Is that 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: I wanted to just emphasize right right off the bat that I consider this concept like I consider like a market tinkering solution like this isn't gonna shape our housing market. It's not this big solution. We're just tinkering with the market. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: So it's an important solution. But it's kind of this, this niche market. It's a small small component of this that they call and then, just to kind of give some kind of overview and context of when it really does work, and to the panelists here and to everyone in this room this will probably feel pretty basic. But just to get back to the basics, it's kind of the right space.

[17:06] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: you know, is the building that you're looking at have the high conversion for potential. Is it the right place? So is the zoning favorable, right? These are basic questions to kind of get to the fact that like this isn't a huge. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: you know. It's gonna shape our market drastically. And then the right people. There's a level of tolerant of risk that developers anybody involved in these conversions has to be have to be top 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: the risks that have have to be tolerant to take on and so that's a huge component here, and that leads me to our great panelists here. The risk takers in our community that actually have converted some of these converted, and are in the process of converting some of this office space to residential units. So our panel tonight with Pete Weber from Coburn architecture. So you'll start us off. You have 3 examples. I think I saw to dive into

[18:03] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: through examples to kind of get this. Get this conversation started. We have Gavin Mcmillan here. And you'll talk about a project that you're currently working on just at Spruce Street, so like with, you know, pretty close to here. And, Phil, sure you'll also be contributing to that conversation kind of like the realities of of some of this project. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Some of these conversions, so with that 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: an architect with and one of the principles of cobra, those who don't know us, we are architects. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: builders, and we do our own development work as well. But I'm really here to talk about sort of design side of things, and some of our experience with conversions, and how that's gone and where we've seen challenges and opportunities. So what you're looking at on the screen right now is a building. This is actually one of the original renderings from seventies of a really cool building that I'll bet you've never noticed before. The Geological Society of America, and

[19:05] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: go go on to the next one 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: this first, st I'm gonna just go through 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: some of the challenges in general and some of the opportunities, and then I'll walk through the 3 projects and then come back to this, but challenges as I see them. Architecture can be a challenge. You can see it's also an opportunity. But 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: the architecture that was what buildings are designed as office buildings, which is really what we're talking about here. They're designed with an office user in mind. They are not designed with the idea of living there. So there are some inherent challenges that are built into that 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: part of it can be location. You know, east of us here. East boulder in general. Once you get past 30 there is a ton of square footage out there that was all designs, offices, and it's in office parks. It's in places that we don't normally think about. People being so. Location can actually pay a big role whether or not residential might be appropriate. Is it surrounded by the uses that we like to have associated with with residential uses?

[20:10] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: One of the big problems you have with some buildings is the is the floor plates. They can be very large. Office users can suffer in the middle of a building, but people don't want to live there. They'll work there, but they don't want to live there. They want to live near the edges, where the windows are so buildings that inherently have these large floor plates that were okay for offices might not work very well. It might be very difficult to try to program some of that internal space that's in these larger buildings. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Circulation inefficiencies. With residential. You have different kinds of exiting requirements 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: buildings that might be appropriate might be might be aging. And so now you're not just taking on the idea of converting something, but you're taking on all the baggage that this building is brought along with us with it all the deferred maintenance. You're probably talking about all New Hvac. Hvac. Electrical likely needs to be Redone. Elevators are probably old and don't meet current code.

[21:08] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Placing an elevator in the middle of a building is no need feat. It's incredibly expensive and impactful, and energy codes are very different today than they were when most of our commercial buildings, older and elsewhere, were built. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: egress requirements. The ability to jump out a window in the case of a fire is very different in a residential building than it is in commercial building. Because you live there overnight. You sleep in there. And then use restrictions. How we touched on sometimes uses are not allowed and it can be that while residential might be allowed again, is it actually really appropriate in a given location. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Parking can be a challenge. If if you are downtown, for instance, with the existence of cages, the central area improvement district. You do not have to provide parking for a commercial project, and you can utilize the city's parking garages. So a lot of our downtown buildings, especially in the center of town. We're not. They do not have much of any parking associated with them.

[22:10] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: whether we like it or not. People have cars, and they need some place to put them if they're going to live there. Not everybody, and hopefully fewer and fewer of us. But it's still a reality. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: So on the opportunity side, some of these are the same. The architecture can be beautiful. We have some beautiful old buildings that actually we want to keep as a community. We don't want to get rid of these buildings. We don't want them vacant. We want them lively and vibrant, and they can be wonderful places to live. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: location again. This can be a challenge. It can also be a benefit, particularly in Central Boulder. People want to live in Central Boulder. We've got a ton of square footage there that could could be converted to people living there. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: and some of these old buildings have really good bones, you know, they're built to last 100 200 years. And so most commercial buildings are also built with steel and concrete. These are solid, solid buildings. They're not built out of wood and plywood. Generally speaking, they can be really solid. So there's a lot of good bones there that we can work with

[23:10] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: and then parking a little bit. Conversely, if we are talking about office buildings that are out east of east of downtown, they often have ample, if not more than they ever needed to begin with and so they might well 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: have more parking necessary from residential standpoint. So I'm gonna touch on a bunch of these things, and again we come back to them at the end. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: So the Gsa, this is a really cool building. It's this brutalist architecture from the seventies. I don't know how many of you remember Art Everett? Phil probably does. I'm not sure anybody else does, but he is a prominent architect in Boulder, one of the founders of what eventually became Oz architecture. This is one of his early buildings, and it really is. It's quite. It's a really cool building. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: It's heavy, it's big, it's it's bombastic, not something you'd normally associate with residential. But as we started to get into the weeds on this, it actually lent itself fairly well. With some exceptions, Germans, Germans would probably like it that we have here. They might. Yeah.

[24:13] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: go ahead. So this is where it is if you know the cemetery off of where Iris turns into the diagonal and meets foothills the orange square there is where this building is that is not well understood or well known, but it is actually quite a beautiful spot. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: a little noisy, but other than that, it's pretty great and it's a real again. It's a really cool building. Go one more. It has this. It's in a beautiful setting, too. A lot of they've taken the folks that manage this building over the years. The Geological Society did a great job taking care of the landscaping and the trees. And so it's a really beautiful place, and not in addition to the building being robust. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: I think if we were our client on this is boulder housing partners, so this will be affordable housing and they

[25:05] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: recognize the beauty of the building and never wanted to tear it down. I don't think we've been able to if we had asked. I think that this building is eligible to be landmark. It's really quite a beautiful piece of architecture, whether you love the style or not. It is significant. If you look at some of the detailing, it's pretty cool. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: So I'm gonna show you the floor plans and kind of what we started with, and then how we converted things, and it might help illuminate some of the some of the challenges that we had to deal with, and some of the things that make it work. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: So this building? 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: it's pretty convoluted. It has a lot of exterior skin which make it actually pretty friendly because we can populate that exterior skin with people's bedrooms and living rooms. It's organized around these 3 light wells which are the the yellow squares here. These are huge skylights that bring light into the core of the building. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: And so we didn't wanna get rid of that. It's it's pretty neat element of it. It takes up a lot of square footage, takes up a lot of room, and the circulation here is really gracious. In the existing building. It is offices at the exterior, some ancillary or cubicle kind of stuff in the middle. And there's a lot of circulation. It's big, it's wide and

[26:21] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: in days of less expensive construction and really nice budget that was pretty cool when you say circulation, you mean talking about foot traffic moving into how wide the hallways are in the middle of the building. It's really, really nicely done and gracious! Most of my developer friends would not be able to stomach that today. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: and so 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: so they can see how that all works. And if you go to the next slide I'll be able to show what we've done with that. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: So we cut the light wells as I talked about. We did keep the general circulation, didn't try to rethink that entirely, but we did reduce it quite a bit. We cut the circulation about in half.

[27:03] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: It is still pretty significant. But 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: much, much better than it was at one time. So the the central part of the building you can see where bathrooms are. We try to put all of those back a house kind of uses towards the center of the building, and bedrooms and living spaces out of the exterior, and it actually worked pretty well. The 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: again. The circulation in the non rentable square footage is high on this building, and that is, I think, something that we might see in common as buildings get converted because you're dealing with some baggage that wasn't designed originally. The guts of it are for what 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: we're trying to repurpose it for. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: but it. It worked fairly well, I think, largely because it had this convoluted and stretched out aspect to it that made the residential fit in fairly well. It's ones and twos, and I think studios in here as well. It's fairly diverse. I don't think we have any 3 bedrooms in there.

[28:09] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: sorry, and we're not making any structural changes like that that you do not want to change structure. If you care about budget at all. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: that structure can sustain. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: you explain how the the light wells are accessed by the residents. It looks like they've been kind of walled off, maybe, but I don't know they are partially, and that was to try to be more efficient with the building and utilize more of the square footage for people living rather than circulation. But they are open at least on one side. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: so you can see. The one on the left is open entirely on the right hand side, and the one in the middle there is open on 2 sides. So we tried to keep. There's like a patio space there, for it's a light. Well, through this floor. It. It is just a light. Well, that brings light down to the lower level. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: And on the lower level it's kind of like a little interior court thing. I didn't include all the floor plans, but

[29:06] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: the doors open to that to that court on the lower level. There's a couple couple of times there are. Yeah, okay, how much? How big is that? Well. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: it's about like, it's like 24 by 24. So it's pretty sizable. Yeah, maybe like any tables in there, or something. Yeah, at the lower level. Yes, this level again is just a whole floor at the lower level. Yeah. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: and I think that this speaks to some of the 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: some buildings are repetitive, and you can do the same one over and over again. Some of the Reynolds buildings east of town. You look at those. They're pretty much the same thing. But one or the other, they're not a lot of differences. But, generally speaking, you're talking about unique buildings that have unique challenges, and they bring their own 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: positives and negatives. And so there isn't a 1. Size fits all to this. I think every building has unique challenge. Some of the things some of the projects we have not been able to do, which I'll talk about as well, have unique challenges that were deal stoppers at the end of the day this one worked. They don't all work.

[30:09] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Okay. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: So if you go to the next one. I want to show a couple of very different things. If you don't know who Bridge House is. Bridge House is an organization that it's a nonprofit that tries to bring people out of homelessness. And what's unique about their what they do is they provide a residential program called ready to work. They have a couple of other programs as well, but our work with them has been through ready to work ready to work is a program that 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: takes people that are clean and sober. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Puts them in housing and gives them a job. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: and through that people are able to get on their feet and try to reorganize their lives outside of homelessness and being housed. And they do amazing work, and what we have done with them is help provide places for them for ready to work

[31:03] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: for the ready to work program. There's 1 in Boulder. It's out of Table Mason Doorhead that was their original location. We did not work on that one. We were able to work on 2 subsequent ones, but, 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: they've been very successful in what they do. Their success rate is something like 70%, which is remarkable. I think. So I'll show you how they have inhabited some some buildings if you go to the next one. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: This is ready to work. Aurora. This is a really typical kind of seventies office building. These things are built for square footage, and 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: that's about it. Put in some windows. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: this one happens to be brick. It is a robust building. It's made out of steel and concrete and brick. It will be around a long time if we don't screw it up. Put a good roof on it, take care of it, and it'll be around a long time a little bit hard to inhabit. It's hard to imagine that this is going to work well for residential

[32:09] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: we did not change the exterior of the building, except for some windows, so that we could get that egress component. I talked about to work. We didn't have the budget for that. And our client the ready to work program. I don't want to say they don't. They don't care. But their job is to put people in. Give them a place to live. Ultimately, give them a job and get them out of there. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: So their program is a year long. So folks live there for a year and try to get on their feet. So if you go to the next one, I'll start to explain 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: idiosyncrasies in this building. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: It's entrances on the wrong side. It is 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: got all kinds of things that I wouldn't do today, but it is what it is. Again. It's got its own baggage. You can see from the interior photograph that it's it's I mean, how how many millions of square feet of office space do we have that looks like that.

[33:02] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: So to the next one. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: So this is one of those buildings that it it is deep. It has a deep floor plate. It's not huge, however, so we were still able to get access to the exterior for most of the most of the folks 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: it has a lot of program. That is 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: not where folks sleep. So they have day programs. They do a lot of communal things together. The upper floor of this is actually part of it is for growth, and the other part of it is really a cafe where folks can gather and actually learn to cook, if that might be part of their vocation. Going forward. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: The bathroom components of this take up a huge amount of the square footage. This is men and women. In this case they're separated by 2 floors. So there are fewer women than men. This is the men's floor, and it's broken down into. It's really dormitory style. So each one of these pods

[34:07] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: has 4 beds, and what a resident has is really a bed and a dresser, and like a stool. I mean, it ain't much. It's like a dorm 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: but there's a lot of communal space. So the large footprint of this actually worked out. Okay, because we do have a lot of communal space. And really, the dorm piece of this is, they are just sleep. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: maybe sit down and read. Look at your phone. But there's not much to do in the residential component of this. It's it's like a college dorm. You just kind of sleep in there and very little else. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: So 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: This was challenging, but it we were able to to kind of make it all work and get every. Get all the program requirements in there. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: And they've been up and running now in Aurora for a couple of years, and by all reports things are working out pretty well, so can you clarify like if there's a pod of 4 beds that, like people can hear and see each other, you don't have a bed with like walls like you have your own private walled in room? No, and that's on purpose. The folks that are in this stage of their world.

[35:23] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: It's safer for them to actually have some level of 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: supervision might be maybe a wrong the wrong word, but it's more like there's eyes on them, and they have eyes on each other, and they can support each other in that way. And someone one of the 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: I think I think they call them guides or something there that the folks that take care help them! The employees can open the door and see everybody, and there's a security piece to that, too. So no, you don't have your own entirely private room. The walls are very specifically, I think they were 4 foot 10, I think, was the height of the walls, which we've

[36:07] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: found sort of a magic point where there's enough privacy for everybody that they're not being stared at 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: all the time. But there's also enough like, Hey, man, stand up. I gotta make sure you're here. Can you raise your hand? So it's very specific to to this population, and in the way that they run their program. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: So say, yeah, you're with 4 people. So my daughter, her dorm in college sort of her roommate, they're living together where they like it or not. And it's kind of like that. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: So it's pretty similar to the Boulder project. It is yeah. Boulder has 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: they. They have different numbers. They've got quite a variety if they got threes and fives. Sixes. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: but they what ready to work has learned the 4 is a really great number. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Where's where's the table, mesa? Okay, that was an office building. Do you know which architects were in charge of that one?

[37:09] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: You know what which architects were in charge of that one. He was the original. So the original. Oh, Yagi, Jim Yagi, yeah, you're asking who did it for Bridgehouse, or who did the original? Yeah, who did the renovation for Bridgehouse? 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: I don't. I don't remember. I probably had that somewhere, but I don't recall 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: this is sort of a vague question. Obviously, this isn't something you would put on the free market to sell. But how expensive, you know comparatively, was this to do for this this type of project to renovate this office building like that? 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Yeah, good. That's a great question. And I don't know that I can give you a firm answer they. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: They're they're a nonprofit. They get all of their funding. People are living there aren't paying rent. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: So all their funding comes through grants and donations they don't have. They did not have a lot of money to spend on this, so they had to do it as inexpensively as they could, and so some of the finishes are not what you would expect at the at a. Certainly a for sale level

[38:14] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: but even a 4 rent level. They just couldn't. They had to be pretty down and dirty. So as a result, I think this, the exception of that, is the bathrooms. We spent a lot of money in those bathrooms because they their experience in boulder is the bathrooms. Just get hammered. And so you have to have this kind of institutional level of quality to them. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: So that they can take that that level of abuse. So the bathrooms were probably more expensive than you might do for a typical residential project, but they are grouped. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: and then the rest of it is probably less than you would see for a typical residential conversion 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: outside of the bathrooms. Because, again, just just really, just what can we do to make these things cheaper.

[39:02] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: so tied into the costs of of the conversion. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: like. So what was this building beforehand? What's the acquisition cost that you're looking at? Generally speaking. Well, I'm assuming it's I mean, that's that's gonna dictate everything. Yeah, I think the acquisition cost is 0. It was so it was donated somehow, or it was, I think, the city of Aurora. If I'm not mistaken, purchased the building okay, and essentially donated it 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: to right? Because what Aurora was trying to do, what Inglewood is trying to do, they're trying to help. They're trying to find a path 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: out. Yeah, not just clean up the camps right? Like we give people an option. They don't. They're not equipped to do it as good a job sometimes as the private sector nonprofit might be, so they saw a benefit like as a city. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: We will contribute this to the project, the big question to me, because I think it's it's a it's a wonderful concept, and it's a wonderful idea. And and you know the exigency of the circumstances. Certainly. I think kind of help ameliorate a lot of the concerns over location, or whatever else. Right? And it's like, you know, this, this being a great example. But the thing that I'm really

[40:15] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: curious about I've I've represented several commercial landlords and stuff, you know, 30 years of practice, and sometimes they're not necessarily 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: very silver about what their Billings are worth, and stuff like that. And that's big trigger to me. So I look at that building, and it probably 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: limited value. And and there's certainly limited value in that kind of mass office space right now, and it's a big trigger to me. So I'm just really interested in that part of it, because that's the big part of the equation, right? So if the city's got to pay. Are they paying 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: market rate? Are they paying, you know? You know. Hey? We just want to get our hands on it, you know, and then there's a lot of stories back and forth like, you know what they've been doing in Denver with, you know, old hotels and stuff, right? So I'm really curious what happened? What's happening with the the market? And yeah, clearly, it's not what it once was. This transacted

[41:05] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: prior to us, really seeing this work from home shift. So it was early days of Covid, and we hadn't quite gotten our arms around what the future of working is gonna be so at that I don't know how that affected the value of the building. I think it'd been vacant for quite some time. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: it's in a kind of a crappy location. It's got freeways on 2 sides of it. It's 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: that probably affected the value, too. But the owner was glad to be rid of it. Yeah, I I've I have a client 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: commercial like a lab, and and he's the only he's the only occupied space in the whole building right now, and they just send him something saying, You know, well, you know, we're gonna increase the rent. So you know, that's that's yeah. Just that we get through the presentations and just ask clarifying questions. Otherwise, you know, we'll be here all day. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: adds one more to show you, and then I can take over. So this is same program. But now we're in Englewood. And this is a it was a I think these guys did siding. They were a siding contractor and a building that have been built onto over the years. Concrete blocks. Pretty crappy building, to be honest.

[42:18] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: but it is solid and and it's in a part of town that the community 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: was okay with having this user group at that location. Not everybody wants ready to work living next door. But location of this and location of the Aurora one. While it was a crappy location, it was the right location for that user group. So this I'll be quick with this one. It's really a lot of the same same thing and same issues. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Here's what it looked like, and this speaks to some of the the baggage. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: the you know it was a 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: siding company, so they've got all their junk in there. They've got machinery. They've got tools. They've got materials. You see a forklift there overhead door.

[43:05] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: picture on the right there shows I don't know how many different generations of electrical, but, like some of these things are abandoned, some of them are not abandoned. This was well we stopped untangling. We said we always got to start. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: so 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: that kind of stuff is real and you know it has a cost associated with it. You can't just assume you're just gonna go plug stuff into the same plugs 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: and put a put a bathroom in a kitchen in. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: So next one. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: So this is that floor plan is construction drawing. So it's a lot harder to read, but it's the same concept that we were just looking at with bathrooms in the middle and the residential components at the outside. Some of the communal spaces are also on the exterior wall, because we want them to be places where folks want to go. So they've got a kitchen component that's on underneath the picture there. Picture of ourselves.

[44:02] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: And but otherwise it's really it's very similar to the to the previous one. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: where we took advantage of some of the. You can see the bathroom group that's up on the upper left there we would have put that internal, but there was already plumbing there. And so it was really friendly just to plug another bathroom in at that location rather than complete, completely relocate things. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: same thing with the split between men and women, except this time. It's not on the it's not now on the same floor. That was a really complex issue with this floor plan to try to make that work 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: to keep men and women communally together, but privately apart. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: and then the separate bathrooms and all that, of course, so I won't go into the details, or it's kind of the same program as a as a previous 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: oh. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: that is under construction, about to finish and they'll be moving in. I think a couple of the 1st group will will get in there. So I've spent a little bit of time on this earlier. I don't know that we really need to go through this. I think I touched on a lot of these things. But,

[45:10] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: you know that the ready to work. Stuff is a very unique 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: very unique user. And I don't think that for the large part, that's what we're talking about. Michael mentioned that, you know we should touch on that because it is a little bit unique. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Most of the the Gsa projects probably more. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: What we think of when we think about a residential conversion. So while we're looking at this, there in this list again, the only other one mentions the projects that have not worked out. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: We've probably 4 other ones that we've touched on that that have not come to fruition. At the end of the day every single one of them came down to cost 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: and the cost benefit wasn't there? It was too expensive to get. We were getting out of it, and a couple of things. I'll point out that that led to some of those cost challenges.

[46:01] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: One is a little bit. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: I thought would go the other direction. I thought that smaller buildings would be more friendly. But it turned out, at least in one case, that that was not the case, because so much remedial work had to be done. We needed to get an elevator in there. If we were only getting 4 units out of it. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: So to amortize the cost of an elevator or 4 units is a big ask 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: ultimately that and our affordable housing cash in lieu requirement. Became the downfall of that particular project. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: along with some deferred maintenance. It was that building was a stucco building. It was drive it Phil will know what I'm talking about there. It's a stucco system, that is, we don't use anymore. It has all kinds of problems across the country, not so much here, because we're lucky to be dry. But they were gonna remodel that building, keep that on there, and yeah, and be able to sell anything

[47:03] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: so they could continue to rent it as office space, but if they convert it to residential and try to sell it, no one's going to buy a building to drive it. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: or unit associated with a building like that. So some of that baggage was not. They weren't able to overcome. A couple of other ones were configuration issues where we could not get to the yield that you would normally want. We could be too much circulation, too much common area, too much non residential, non-sellable, non-rentable. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: square footage 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: ceiling heights that were not acceptable in in another one were part of the problem, along with some of that, some of that baggage. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Another one had. It looked like a really great candidate. It seemed almost too good to be true. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: It was. The building had windows that were on a property line 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: and a lot of windows on the property line which is not really allowed

[48:01] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: under the code. If your walls on the property line. You need to 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: fire rate that wall, and you can't poke a bunch of holes in with windows. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: As long as that building stayed. What it was that can stay the way that it is. We convert it to residential 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: can't do that anymore. Now you have to bring that aspect of the building up the code. I should mention a little more about that when you make the conversion, when you change the use in a building. Essentially, it's a trigger for everything coming up to a very, very close to being up to the current code, and that trigger 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: brings you into a lot of change that you might not have anticipated when you just think about the concept of of converting to residential 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: so in that case, that particular wall which was beautiful, and you can see the flat irons, and it was amazing. Well, now, you can't do it. Well, now, I don't want it. So just a few examples of things that didn't work.

[49:00] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: and I'll pass it on to Gavin. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Awesome. Thank you. Thank you. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Do all of our questions once these get through their presentation. So thank you. Thanks, Pete. We'll talk about a lot of similar challenges and have our own little twist on it here as well. My name is, I'm a planner project manager and developer of housing in town here with Phil Schult tonight, who is founder of the new construction and 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: developer of many things in town as well. We're gonna talk about 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: older office residential conversions and some of the land use challenges that are associated with them, and then talk about a project that Phil and I are working on in 1521st Street, which is the image in the picture there. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: and then sprinkle in some recommendations, maybe some ideas and thoughts we have on how we might make this type of thing. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: you know, more convenient or easier to occur. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Go for a J 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: like. We've already been noted. There is a lot of office vacancy in town, and I think all of you are very well aware that we have a need for additional housing options in town.

[50:07] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: So there's this sentiment, right? That converting office to housing is an easy solution. And we're gonna solve that problem pretty simply, and I do think it's a great solution. But I will. I will take a 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: objection to the word easy. It's it's just not as easy as it just seems on its face. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: There's been a lot of literature, a lot of white papers other than Holly's about this topic. National conversation. You hear about it in New York City. You hear about it in San Francisco and Denver. There's an article post a little while ago, about 16 top structures ready for conversion. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: and all that's great. But Boulder is obviously a different place, right? We don't have buildings like this with massive floor plates and 50 stories. Our buildings tend to look more like this, a lot of them. And I think Pete's right. There's a lot of stuff out East that is of a different

[51:00] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: type of building, but a lot of the stuff that that Bill and I have been working on is 2 to 3 stories. Adjacent to or located within residential areas. And a lot of it's like approaching the 50th year of its life. And it's ready for this new iteration of like, what is it gonna be? And so there's this great opportunity, I think. For conversion. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: And the reason I highlight this building is because Bill and I did actually attempt to convert it from office to residential. It's essentially located building. As a great structure. It was elevator served had covered parking, and we're pretty excited about working on that conversion. But I want to highlight kind of the 1st problem that we ran into which I think we run into a lot, and not just with office or residential conversions. It's just. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: and any type of change in an older building, and that is pud zoning which Pete sort of touched on. But is everyone sort of familiar with Pud zoning planned unit development zoning.

[52:03] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: It's very popular in the eighties and nineties. We can essentially write your own zoning for a property, a lot of flexibility to look at high setbacks and things, to really allow some creativity, and how we develop these buildings. And there's a lot of buildings that are built like this in town, and those beauties run with the property. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: So 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: All that is great until you want to come in, you know, 40, 50 years later and and make a change to that building. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: And in in boulder. We're we go through a process to amend the Pv which takes time, and process. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: And inevitably there's not conformance. You either have an existing building that does not conform to the underlying zoning. Or if you're going to remodel the building, you are now not conforming with Ue. So you're stuck in this process that can be a little bit uncertain as to what what will come up.

[53:04] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: and it can take some time, and in this case I won't get into the weeds. We're well into the weeds. We actually would have had to amend the Boulder Valley comprehensive plan and use map to ultimately make this conversion, and it was going to be a 2 year process and uncertain outcome, and 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: decided to walk away from that process which was which was really hard to deal. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: So my first, st I think you know, sort of tidbit is. I think there's some work to be done on how we address these peds in town moving forward, and how we either decide, you know, to abandon them or just make conversion from them to the current, zoning a little easier, and there's probably some work that you know support could could lend to that conversation, and I would just say, no way easier. But I think it's worth discussing. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: So undeterred, we, Phil and I moved on. And then mostly this is this is Phil's doing. This is 1525 Spruce Street, this. This building was built in 1984, and maybe maybe we didn't learn our lessons because it also has pud zoning and there's some other complexities. Here, too, though the eastern half of this building, which is like kind of purple blue building, is 10 residential condos.

[54:20] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: and then central part is like a kind of entry corridor or an atrium. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: and then the western half is 7 office condos, and it's been that way forever. That's how the initial pub. Set it up 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: And there is a common hoa that manages the whole thing on behalf of the office and on behalf of the residents, and I'll get to. Why, that's interesting in just a moment. Go ahead, Jay. Thanks. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: We are just looking to convert the western half of this building to a residential we're gonna fill in the atrium there, which is now just void vaulted space with some floor area

[55:02] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: and ultimately end up with 6 residential condominiums for sale. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: The biggest challenges we've come across the pud amendment process. Although I think everyone was well intentioned. It just takes time. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: and we also had to get sign off from all of the owners of those residential condos which was the 10 individuals on our plan to amend that Pd. Because they all had an ownership stake in that 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: so wrangling all that which was Phil's task, and it was, it was amazing able to do it. He did a great job of just kind of talking everyone through the process. But these are the kind of things with with these conversions and and neighbors, and the types of conversations that come up 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: that make this process difficult and time consuming. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: And then the second thing I'll note is that we had to in filling in this age room. One of the requirements is that we could not have a net gain in the floor area. The entire project. So we ended up having to chisel out balconies from the facade and skin of this building to sort of delete some of that square footage

[56:13] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: so we could not believe in terms of how many square feet we could have developed there. So when we filled in that atrium, we were essentially adding floor area. So per the zoning, we had to then delete area somewhere else. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: To keep that floor area as basically what it what it was originally approved. For so the balcony is intrude on the interior space rather than extending it. That's right, yeah. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: And they're more expensive because of it. Yeah, probably more importantly, yeah, the square footage losses is, of course, hard. But you know, one of the benefits of these buildings is, you'd like to think, oh, we can just kind of reconfigure the outside, and but you end up getting into modifying the skin of the buildings and the roof, and you lose a lot of cost efficiency that you perhaps hope to gain so

[57:05] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: time, uncertainty cost, for I don't know, Phil. Maybe 2 years into this process all in right now, yeah, we don't have a building shows a dark rectangle I was just trying to like. That's not the western side is the brick where the 6 condos are. That's right. Yeah, yeah. Your object with this project is to sell this 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: these spaces for money to people who want to buy something. Right? 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: If you go to the next slide, I think you'll see that the render of what we're attempting to do here, so we'll be modifying the facade of the office building to end up looking something like this. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: We're in for a building. Permit. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: We hope to be under construction on the 1st half of this year. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: And I think well, I'll segue to to fill here there is this assumption, I think, that these conversions are going to be less expensive.

[58:01] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: The new buildings and new construction. And in our experience, I think, they're just. They're just not really that much less expensive for a lot of different reasons. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: and I'll I'll let Phil maybe take it from here and kind of highlight some of those things and some other challenges that we face. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Thanks, Kevin. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: We'll try not to to restate what Peter and Gavin have done so well. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: The a lot of my expertise here is is probably about what these things cost to do because I work in 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: the marketplace as a developer. My company to do 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: has built every kind of building and a lot of commercial, and now almost 90% of our pretty large volume is in affordable housing. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: So we have a really big database of costs in all kinds of a lot of them are readaptive uses. You know whether it was Larimer, whether it was Union Station, whether it was.

[59:00] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: you know, Lowery, whatever so, and and we've done permanently supported housing. We've done 200 unit apartment buildings, and we've done smaller kinds of cohousing stuff. So. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: but full disclosure as a developer. I only do stuff for sale at the higher end. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: I'm sure this group is probably more concerned about the missing middle or affordable stuff. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: and that that takes you into a different niche, particularly in terms of finance. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: So if if you assume that you're gonna be doing for rent product 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: and that it's gonna be affordable. That puts you in a certain place. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: I will say, as a contractor who builds a whole lot of affordable housing, it isn't affordable to build 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: at all, it's the same cost. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: In fact, the agencies that do this kind of housing are now 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: leaning in to make them much more sustainable, much more environmentally friendly and much more. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: I mean, we're we're doing net 0. We're doing all electric province in Brooklyn. So

[60:06] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: that's a different game and a different cost basis. So if you ask me what something costs to do, one of these office conversions say, well, it depends. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: And and the range will be huge. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Yeah, I think you could probably apply that in general to almost any kind of conversion. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: We- We office is an easy topic to talk about right now, because the vacancy is pretty apparent. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: We've had empty warehouses in Lodo, for, you know, 40 years before we turn it into this vibrant, mixed use. Kind of gritty gorilla neighborhood with a lot of residences a lot. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: So the cost thing that I look at these and I would say, any developer needs to do this 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: one of the things I count on, and we our clients count on is 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: doing a lot of pre-construction service to try and figure out with the architect

[61:02] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: where it's gonna end up. And so you've you've got to have some pretty good database for that. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: and all kinds of construction. As Pete says, these buildings are generally office buildings are generally pretty durable. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: pretty, salvageable structures, but depending on their age. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: and whether they were built like the one in Aurora you were talking about, which was just a box with some band windows on it. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: you're you're not gonna be easily converting that to something that feels residential has some appeal even in the rental market or in the middle middle range of rents, you know. So 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: that building there 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: the embedded value of that building is in the land has nothing to do with the building. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: the cost of demolishing what we're doing there 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: and reskinning new fenestration. New elevator, new Hvac. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: New landscaping was dictated. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: We'll easily offset the value of what structure is going to be left on the go.

[62:05] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: I was pretty sure we saved the roof. I think you have to assume 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: roofs are going to change or be so penetrated by New Hvac and new plumbing that you might as well plan on a new roof. So 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: it's about the same cost as new construction 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: so, depending on your buying costs, which you're referring to. What is the basis of the building. If you're a commercial owner. 1st of all, a lot of commercial owners don't want to be in the residence. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: so so they either have to figure out how to sell their building, and I'm sure on their balance sheet. It's overstated 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: in the market right now. So that's 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: that's an issue that they've got to come to grips with. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Now let's just say that you can acquire a property that that's something like 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: re in your mind a reasonable cost. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Hopefully, with some value, add, you can add square footage. You can take it to the next level in terms of the marketplace, or you can get much greater density out of the smaller units.

[63:06] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: when we do this kind of stuff in the in the higher end, I'm building a 2,000 or 2,500 square foot condominium. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Most rental apartments are. Gonna be half that fat, you know. So 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: all those things start to drive the pro. The the program that that the client sets up 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: is going to dictate a lot of what you're gonna try and pull off. How many corners you're gonna cut. How many things you're gonna try and salvage 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: and 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: I would. I would say that the marketing of these buildings is not that hard, I would say, if you're in the game, financing is not gonna be that hard. But the land use process can be a killer. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: and one of the things we do in Boulder. I don't know if all committees do this, but 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: we're advised to 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: go through what they call a pre application process. Go ahead and write. Write your 10 or 12 questions about the property. This is before you put it under contract. If you want

[64:00] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: so, and then the staff will give you 3 weeks to. They'll answer those questions. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: I have found those largely to be be not very effective. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: I don't think it's because the staff isn't competent. I just don't think they can take the time to do as much research as they need to do. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: So that thing that we were talking about on North Broadway. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: We were into that. What months, 4 or 5 months be before it came up through 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: the legal city attorney's office that the underlying land use. Designations were not compelled. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: and it was a it's a nonstart 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: it would have had to go to 4 Body Review, including board, county and border planning commission. So it just wasn't gonna make any sense for 4 units in that building. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: So you you gotta early on set some parameters that you could accept 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: and build in large contingencies and assume that 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: things you you like about the building. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: You might like the entryway. We had a perfectly good plaza on this thing. City made us change it because it was too commercial.

[65:07] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: So you know, it was hard to argue. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: any things like that come up and they're just, you know, headbangers 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: most of us in the develop business have more than our share of those things, and we get through them. And it's part of the game. But 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: if, as Pete says. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: you, you get to a point where it just does a pencil, and you've already spent 5 months on, and $50,000. Then 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: it's pretty frustrating, I really hope, and I think it would take some more work to 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: talk about what kind of exemptions for affordable housing. I mean, I think some of your minutes suggested it was a hundred percent affordable skip. The Site Review Site Review is a 6 to 8 month process at least. So 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: you know, somehow to to get. I don't think we'll ever have my right in this tab. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: but somehow something between buy right and Site Review has got to exist. It just has to

[66:02] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: on these things that are important to the community to bring forward whether it's in 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: really supportive housing, or like Bridge House is doing. I mean, those those are necessary kinds of things, but 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: those are going to be underwritten by the community just like Aurora bought that building, you know. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: just like a university is going to buy the movie theater in Louisville. And they get students. You know. I mean, those kinds of things are one offs not one off so much as 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: not what we're talking about something. So 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: let it open to questions. But echo Gavin's sentiment that 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: it is proven hard, and I don't think it has to be. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: There will always be challenges. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: I think good designers like Peter can solve them in terms of getting density 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: and figuring out how to put windows into places and still maintain architectural integrity. That 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: part ever it's building should be left intact if you can, you know. So 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: it's a it's a challenge to balance all that out. But

[67:03] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: I just think you can't go into it 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: with poly app. You just can't believe that it's gonna be as easy as it might appear. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: I have a question given that the Boulder Valley Comp plan is in the process of being revisited or revised. Are there? Are there edits or suggestions that you would recommend that would make the process easier, less cumbersome. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: you know, Phil just touched on one, which is, there are a number of places in town where the underlying the way the whole thing works might be. It's it's 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: little tricky. But if the land use designation in the Boulder Valley comprehensive plan, says 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: A. And you wanted to be. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: though the city's code might allow, give a mechanism for that. The Comp plan still needs to be changed, and that just takes a ton of time. So, to the extent to answer your question during the update that we're doing now to the extent that changes can be made in parts of town where it would be sensible to have more housing, and the underlying land use designation does not allow. It does not align with that

[68:19] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: realigning that would make a lot of sense. That's just updating the tables. The land use tables is what is the? It's the map separate from the city. Zoning map is the county land. Use map and different different but similar kind of designations. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: In some cases they don't align. And so that's minimum. That should that situation have been nonconforming for years. Yeah. And the city doesn't do anything about identifying those kinds of conflicts, and because they do take time just putting them in motion through that and try to get things to register. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: and we said to the situation, I mean, come on, wave your hand here, make this go away. You, you know you want it.

[69:03] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: you know it's not right. Fix it. It's like there's a process for this. Is there an amendment that would incorporate the challenges you have with Pud 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: like that be incorporated into the Boulder Valley Comp plan. I don't know if that's a comp plan thing. That's a pretty technical issue, and it's something that I don't think we really speak to at all currently in the land use code other than if you have a pud, you need to amend it. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: To do these types of things. So I I suppose the Comp plan could say, Hey, we should look to move on from the Pud question and a broad, broad statement. But it's it's a really technical nuanced code change that would need to happen, I think. And I believe puds are also 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: state law has some play there in terms of what you can and can't do with regard to Pud, and that's about as much as I know about it. The Land Use attorney might be able to help more with that. But I think there's some State law issues for us around what we can and can't do with the Pud. But one thing I think, you know, at one time from city staff, I got to read that you needed 100% of owners in the Pud in order to make a change.

[70:14] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: then I basically have a veto. Then I got a reading that said, No, what you need is actually permission to be right. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: which would not the same thing. So then, I. And then, if you have been successful and actually modifying 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Uds without explicit permission from everybody in the Pd, so it's a little bit all over the place, and I I don't know what kind of change might be possible. There's so I was at the Summit County attorney's office when we litigated this issue in the cases Lotley versus Bocc. If you're making the modification of the Pd. Only the property that's directly affected needs to sign off. So if you have everybody in the Pd. They don't have util power. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: We do this whole thing. So that's absolutely the case there's no veto power. That's a big thing. And you know, I just want to say, I really appreciate. And from all the different perspectives. And you guys come here and talking about this, and I appreciate what you're trying to do, too, because to me, you know, and I'll just say, like, I see everybody talking about, you know. Going to war with the Faa, you know. Take over the airport, please, all these

[71:21] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: bones here that can make a lot of sense. And really what I heard from all 3 of you, from a different capacity, even when you're talking about the ready to work program is the regulatory obstacles 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: to making something pragmatically effective that can really work. You know the whole thing with the windows and stuff like that. And I understand fire code. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: availability for 30 years. So a Pds can. So you just work in some accounting that still, we've done ton of affordable housing, and we use the P. And D as a mechanism to get that done because it is flexible zoning. That's the whole notion of it. And the Pd modification can be great. We've done in keystone and multiple locations, copper Mountain, etc.

[72:07] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: And and it just really underscores that whole notion. And what I heard from all 3 is that if they're particularly, you know, you could have a sliding scale. If it's market rate. Okay, you know, then you gotta swim in the. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: you know, in the choppy waters, with the sharks and the you know, piranhas. But as you're getting down the line, something that's more what you said, I've said it a hundred times. Nobody gives you a discount on PVC. On concrete, on anything, just because it's affordable. So what can you do? There's 2 things that we all do. It's well. 3 land dedication 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: subsidy from of some sort. Right? That sort of city of Aurora is. And then regulatory. Facilitation, right. And that's 1 that we keep coming down to that. We've had a lot of conversations here. And so I think you guys bring it up to me, you know, and we've been talking about it. I have 2 months left. I've been here 7 years. We've been talking about it for 7 years. The whole notion whether it's an adu, whether it's a a tiny home, etc.

[73:09] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: The whole notion that one of the things that we can do 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: is, loosen up the regulatory process, and as well as some of the constrictions of the regulations, to make these things happen. If you really want to see affordable housing. So I really appreciate what you guys are doing. I think that you should get a lot more assistance from the city. You should get a lot more assistance from everybody, you know. If you're going to talk the talk walk the walk, and that means that you have to let go of your regulatory control. And you need to be more creative in terms of that. You need to. You need to let go of process which is really hard 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: for most government entities. They've spent, you know, 12 and a half years as a government attorney. So I understand that right, and the and the part that you talked about, too, because I've had this myself. Where you go in. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: You're pre submittal. Everything's great, but it's still got to go through. It's like, you know, it's like buying a car. And you know the finance manager or the office manager in the back, you know, like, well, you're gonna have to get the undercoating right? So we finally got, we finally got a call back the city attorney. Those are the things that I think need to be fixed. And I think

[74:13] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: you know the the message that I heard from all of you really resonates, as far as I feel is in terms of if there's going to be a solution. That's what it's going to be. And then we can take all these spaces that are there that can be useful right? And and some of them maybe it's useful, like the you know, that siding place look pretty pretty janky, right? But it could be useful for that kind of housing which is serving a huge, huge need right now, where there's not a lot of money for it, and there's 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: not a lot of opportunity. And so the answer on every single one of those is, what can we do to make it easier? So that, you know, when you're getting into it, you're like I'm not gonna do the 2 year Russian roulette, and then get a no at the end of the day. That to me, is the answer. So that's all I have to say. But I appreciate. You know, you guys come here and talking about it because it is an absolutely huge issue. I think now exactly what we should be talking about here all the time.

[75:04] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Question for you guys, are you familiar with the city of boulders? Construction, use tax. And if the city wanted to encourage development of currently commercial spaces into residential and elected to waive the construction use tax for those projects? Would that incentivize development on your end? 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: I certainly would. I mean, it's just it's it's it comes down to the dollars at the end of the day. And if the the more the less you can spend, the more likely a project is is able to happen. So certainly that would help. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: I think the finance director would laugh in your face if you said, Give out the tax on any of these things 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: that said. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: There's other fees that we pay these commercial buildings in their lifetime have paid a lot of property tax 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: 4 times what the residences do. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: They've also paid, depending on their age some amount of excise taxes, but not same thing we do for residences, you know. Parks, transportation, all those.

[76:05] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: But if you, if you 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: waive some of those fees for the readaptive use of this building, but still gonna pay property tax. And again, the city doesn't get a lot of property tax. County gets quite a bit of it, but but still 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: there's a way that that it's more than a gesture. Those are real dollars 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: that that add on to the costly sink, and and if you were, you are developing new residential, if they could waive the cash in lieu. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: if none of it was affordable. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: that would matter as well, so all those those things really pile on. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: and I don't think use tax would be one of the things they would easily give up on. I mean? That's 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: it's kind of sacred. But the other fees 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: I can't see why, for a building that's already been hooked out of the system and using sewer and paying bills and everything for 30 to 40 years shouldn't be given some credit. Yeah. When office buildings are developed, too, they pay a commercial linkage fee for housing

[77:03] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: which is a a pretty big fee. So 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: you could. You could say in theory, if you're going to take a commercial structure and convert it to residential, and, by the way, then pay inclusionary housing on the residential portion, which is part of current policy, that perhaps there should be a credit for removing the commercial structure 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: which paid a linkage fee. To begin with. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: That's the kind of kind of thing those numbers definitely definitely will move the needle on whether these types of things happen. He's unmindful that, you know, red tape to development is a feature of Boulder Colorado that also makes our real estate, so expensive and desirable. This is not Houston, Texas. I'm sure it's a lot easier to get things built there, but 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: people pay more to live here because it's beautiful and culturally and politically, people want to have their hands involved in everything developers do. But I do wonder if there's ways that we create a financial incentive. And I'm also mindful. I mean, I haven't done an economic study on tax use here. But

[78:11] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: if we have an empty office building that's still paying property tax, and people then move into it. Those are bodies that are then going around to all the restaurants and generating a lot of sales tax revenue for the city. So while you might lose tax revenue in one spot, bringing people in increasing the population, increasing spending generates revenue elsewhere, so it could be a net wash. Granted. I haven't done a study on all this, and it's a hard thing to pick. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: but if our city council decides, this should be a priority for the city of Boulder, I think maybe one thing we should be mindful of is, how can we at the very least, reduce 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: cost to encourage this specific type of development and construction use tax seems like low hanging fruit to me is one thing which I don't know. If you guys have a list of?

[79:00] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: I'm sure you could put together a list of things you'd want waived. But you know that's a policy decision for the city. How much do we want to encourage development to the next section? This has been so interesting. But you know, this is 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: primarily I mean, we are a policy 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: oriented board, and I'd love to hear 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: and I agree with everything that Chip said. There could be financial incentives and other carrots. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: But I think our greatest role would be to make some policy recommendations to council that could 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: simplify speed up. You've already mentioned a few things, but maybe kind of a lightning round of like. What would you? 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: What would you ask us to ask? Counsel to change if you have your chance to do it? So

[80:03] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: and things like, you know. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: removing site Review for 100% affordable to think great example of where we might go with some of our recommendations. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Anything in particular. Well, just 1 1 thing I'll mention on the 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: the city fee and tax side of things. I I heard a very cynical point of view that I gotta say I thought had some legs, which is that 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: it is not the city's responsibility to solve 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: this problem and receive less income because of it. The city has all kinds of priorities. With all this money they receive, and it goes to all kinds of things that we all love right. It fixes our roads. Sometimes it takes care of our parks sometimes, but those monies go to things in our city so to reduce them in some way means that either things don't happen.

[81:00] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: or that money has to come from somewhere else. And further, take this cynical thing one step further. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: but really the city should not be responsible for bolstering property value by subsidizing this kind of thing. The property value is is that eventually a commercial property gets cheap enough that 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Phil could make it work. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: and that's a real burden for the owner of that. And it's not the city's responsibility to bolster the value of that property. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: it's the owner's problem, not the city's problem. So that's a really cynical point of view. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try to approach the incentives to try to make this thing happen from the city's standpoint. But I think maybe to Phil's point about the use tax. There's some sacred cows that just 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: can't get blood from a turnip, you know. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: and the only kind of what I give that Peter, is that if we let buildings and billing owners 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: fend for themselves, and there is no market for their product. We're gonna end up with empty buildings that become abandoned, and at least to a kind of like, maybe not ugly, ugly blight. But still it's not. It's also economic waste, you know, like I said, if we have empty office building, sure like not, no subsidies all that. But if we have people moving in there that grows the economy that results in sales, tax revenue elsewhere.

[82:24] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: The other thing I was just. We already touched on a lot of this. But if if the the regulatory, some is environment and the level of review that the city requires. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: I work with developers. Really, from all over the country on stuff, and as soon as they 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: know a project is bolder they roll their eyes and either 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: add a big number to their thinking, or they run for the hills like, it's just if we have a well earned reputation for being very, a very expensive place to business from a development standpoint, and a lot of that time is money. So the 2 years to fuss around with something that isn't just time. There's money associated with that time. And so anything that can be. And this is where it doesn't cost anything right. This doesn't cost the city anything to remove some of the regulatory barriers.

[83:15] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: So I I think the things we've already touched on 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: anything that can that can speed the process for us is going to be helpful. Fair appreciation of the time value of 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: time, you know, in the in the duration of review, and 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: I I've been inside the beast long enough that I know there's days 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: where my project is set on somebody's desk and was not being reviewed was not being handled anyway. What whatsoever. So do I want my own doge. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Maybe not. But but I think there's a way

[84:03] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: to cut some fat in this thing, and to cut some some weeks. I think our our building on spruce 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: has been empty since June, because that's when we programmed that we would have our permits and delays throughout the process extended that till now, March. So 9 months of carrying the building, paying taxes, paying utilities, paying insurance. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: It's it's not gonna screw the project totally. It's just diminishes and makes it less fun, you know. So 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: and I don't think it had to happen. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Yeah. So so whatever that tool is to just 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: be sensitive to the fact that that when something is not being reviewed. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: or if there's what I'll call obstructions, I don't believe any of the people on the staff. Think what they're doing is obstructive. I'm sure they don't, but it is, and it it costs a lot of money, and it makes some projects less viable.

[85:02] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: I'll just be 2 specific things, I think, as I mentioned some some way to streamline this beauty amendment process, or I don't know wholesale sort of say 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: that the beauties can go away again. I know that is way easier said than done, but they do cause a lot of trouble. And then, second, I do think the commercial linkage fee. If you want to look at a specific one line item, if you are redeveloping a commercial building into a residential building, that there should be some credit applied for that commercial building being converted into housing. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: and I think that would help. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: And then I just want to say, too, like a lot of the things that like this is not a session for us just to just bash bash on the city. I think some great things have happened over the last couple of years with the zoning code. Jay has been working on a lot of that stuff, so I do think we're make. We're making some changes. There was some pretty Byzantine regulations. With the zoning code that have been changed recently to allow more density, do more things. So there is like some some proactive energy in in that direction. And so I won't want to say

[86:10] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: good job and I just think we'll take it a step further, because we still get bogged down in process sometimes. But there have been some great things happen, you know. That's fair. That building on spruce would not have happened. Not been a zoning change. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Yeah, in the process in the middle of the process, and they said, you'll wait 3 months till January first.st Yeah, you can do it. Yeah. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: yeah, they. And they were great to work with in that regard. We found a solution there, I think maybe we there wasn't 1. So 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: one last thing about the pud thing, there is an amazing amount of property in this town that is governed by Pud. It's not these little one off things like that building on Broadway. There is an amazing amount of land that actually is under all of Wonderland hills, for instance, is a pud. Just to give you an idea of what we're talking about. Not a lot of office over there, but it's an amazing amount of property. A lot of the the office parks out East were done under puds.

[87:06] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: So it's it's a it's a it's not a small issue. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Well, I have a question. Maybe it's a wrap. But 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: is this a area that has enough potential that it's really worth 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: the city putting time into it, or is it so niche that? 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: And we might have bigger fish to try. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: I think, what would ever help this particular 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: segment of development would help all segments. So it's worth doing. And if it's immediate application is on these kinds of buildings, so much the better. But but all these problems are not specific to converting office buildings. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: That seems to be a current opportunity. But the problems are generic. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: I think we have some other questions from the board. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: I usually have questions, don't I? But I guess the thing that I come away with is

[88:05] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: like you've made some great suggestions there. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: They feel a little hand wavy in the sense that I wouldn't know how to go meet this room and go write them down in a way that I would 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: feel good about. I know you're making notes, too. But 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: it feels like there needs to be a couple of rounds of iteration and maybe a working group that 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: puts together some, maybe recommendations rather than just sort of like, hey? Wouldn't it be nice 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: in this general direction, you know. Let me actually make specific 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: recommendation. So the the linkage fee is really interesting to me it seems like a kind of obvious 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: like, symmetry. It feels it feels like 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: right to like, do a reverse. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: You know 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: that linkage is relatively new. So it's not probably a ton of square footage that falls in that that actually paid that linkage fee, the big takeaway I have from you guys, you know, turning an office building into marketable residential real estate. Someone buys with their own. Money is a pretty difficult cost endeavor. Maybe there's certain situations where it works, but otherwise there's a lot of costs involved.

[89:21] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: But I also get the sense doing this Bridge house type work, you know, taking an office, making it a habitable space for someone who is not paying money to live there. Maybe they don't care if they have a nice living room or a balcony. That's probably more manageable. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: And you know, I think one thing we've been looking at is solutions for homeless problems in boulder, and whether you know, obviously there need to be government involvement for this species are not paying clientele. But if that's a feasible endeavor, endeavor to transition office space to like transitional housing for homeless people, and I get the the gut instinct that perhaps that might be a more feasible

[90:06] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: thing to do, just from a development perspective, that turning it into a you know, marketable condo, you'll sell for 6 or $700,000 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: capacity issue to somebody's got to do it. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Not gonna happen is probably pretty maxed out. So 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: who else could take on projects like that. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: It's not a question to be answered. Just point that out 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: in the public. Make your comment. No sorry Dude, no sorry 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: if I send it to you if you can forward. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Well, I think we can wrap now. Thank you so much to Pavel and Holly for being here and sharing so many 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: wonderful examples and being realistic about it. But I agree. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: it's it's worth investigating. I like Phillips 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: suggestion that we might have a working group that could perhaps

[91:03] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: take some of the notes we've brought away today, and 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: it down for a resolution to be considered one of our next very simple meetings. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: That's a pretty good notes. I'd be happy to work with one of the board member on that, since we can't have more than 2 meet. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: just as a as a quick follow up to to that suggestion. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: for instance, I'm a few of these, which is 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: something we've all mentioned. All 3 of us are aware of it. If you said just that just one sense to the city, they would know what we're talking about. They would know what you're talking about. It's been brought up for a decade. It's a problem. They have hundreds of 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: histories where it was a problem. So it just cancel for the city, too. They would want to change it. It's just a big deal, right? 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Okay? So fixed puds is a really easy recommendation. One other quick thing, Michael, I think I mentioned this to you the other day, but the chamber is also studying this, and that's right. And so you might think about at least touching base with them.

[92:14] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Bloomberg, I think to study this issue. I'll let you know more about that. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Yeah, it's with, it's with Bloomberg. And it's yeah. It's more to study the middle income slash missing middle 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: piece, which may include this office conversion. It's kind of a 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: anything's on the table for that. I think. I'm sorry to put you on the spot. But I think you were about to launch into that last time we talked. Is there any any updates that you can report out on. No, we're just getting started. There's a handful of city staff that are on a Bloomberg City leadership initiative program 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: to dive into the issue of middle income housing within the city, and the idea is that we convene as a small group to and do some level of community engagement to come up with like, really.

[93:03] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: you know, big or small ideas that push the envelope on this issue. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: We haven't pushed sales. We just got started. We have started. And with it. It's like, you know, 6, 6 months long, I think. So. We'll be this summer and coming out with some 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: recommendations or some ideas. There's any idea to get different communities to share. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Yeah, it's really to like. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: be innovative. And the truest sense like really trying to find some ideas that haven't been tested here, or any anywhere else. Really. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: we'll see what we come up with. Great. Well, let's have a hand for our panel. Great job 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: was on the call she'd like to speak. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: I'm sorry Ml. Robles or pnds liaison. I'm sorry. Who's on the call, ML. Robus, hey, Mel?

[94:06] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: And Amel has a question. Yes, good evening. Thank you. Michael. I'm not sure if you would like me to weigh in on this conversation or not. If you do, I do have a couple of thoughts. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Think that's fine. Ml. Is on planning board, and is our liaison. So fire away. Great excellent conversation I appreciate. The perspectives that were brought. The I think the most. There are 2 salient points that I think, are are on the table that could be advanced. One is we are updating the zoning to allow residential and more zoning areas that's underway. That's happening. I think one of the panelists recognized that change changes there.

[95:04] and the BBC update is intended to loosen a lot of the complexity that you see now between land use versus zoning. So all of that is on is on the radar. As we try to accommodate more opportunities for residential in areas that historically have not been earmarked for residential. I think the conversation about reducing the oversight, ie. Site review process we did just recently exempt affordable 100% affordable housing projects from site review liabilities or responsibilities. So these thoughts are are on the radar. The conversation we've had on planning board many times relative to

[96:01] how do we loosen site review requirements is what value does site Review bring to the community? And the conversations have been very interesting in? We think we get better buildings as a result of site review, so that particular administrative public input what could look like a burden is actually yielding community benefit. So that is a conversation that has happened, and I'm sure will continue to happen. I appreciate you all bringing it up. The piece that hasn't been talked about at all. Here in the reuse of existing buildings, is the carbon footprint that is a big added value

[97:00] in the conversation about why would we reuse a building? I heard you talk about the economics. build new building, reuse the building. The economics really aren't a driver for reusing a building. But there might be these other factors which are environmental factors. And I think we have updated our energy code to begin to identify carbon footprint as a factor. Our city has always had carbon reduction goals. So I think that that is a piece that isn't on the table and maybe should be on the table in the conversation. so, anyway, those were my 2, my 2 thoughts. I really appreciate the conversation and and the questions and the dialogue that has happened happened here. Thank you. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: I'd like to follow up on the carbon footprint just

[98:04] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: one of the big things that you need to assess in looking at one of these buildings. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: They're probably all gas firing, and then our all electric future 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: upsizing the electrical service to the building 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: is a pretty big deal. I mean, it's a big ticket, and it's very likely gonna have to happen, which means 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: starting over with meter stack and 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: the distribution panels and everything else, all the heavy stuff. So 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: I'm not fighting that future. I'm saying it's, you know, unless you have enough power coming into the building, not gonna apply to water 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: and other things, too. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: that assessment has to be done very early on, so that you're not wrong about it, presenting whatever's there's but serving a building full of people 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: won't necessarily work for residential. I I guess embodied carbon is the factor that comes into play when you're reusing an existing building. I I hear what you're saying about the future and how we get to a carbon neutral building with building use. But the carbon that's already existing and being sequestered in the existing building that

[99:13] is historically a factor in, you know, around the world for reuse. That's 1 of the ones is the material is already there. And it is serving can potentially continue to serve a useful purpose rather than becoming part of a of a destructed and carbon release process. So it's more embodied. Carbon. Sorry used the wrong terminology carbon is corrected just in what state. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Oh, I'm glad you brought it up, because talking about 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: environment is a good way to get people to pay attention in boulder and make policy changes. Well, I wonder if there could be some kind of credit around that? You know there is, and things like lead, and so on to get credit for that embodied carbon aspect. But is there something we can do from a regulatory standpoint that somehow is tied to that? If you get some somehow get credit that could lead to better outcomes for that. But it's a good point. Ml, thank you.

[100:27] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Hey? 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: With that we can make our panel one more time and move on to our next. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Thank you. Thank you very much. We are back to item 5 on the agenda. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: It wants to be. Item A, it's an important one. That's something we'll be voting on to make a recommendation. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: and that is occupancy and changes required by State law. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: We do not have a staff presentation on this. We will brief through it. That'll attach the agenda

[101:01] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: and the question. Perhaps it's pretty simple. Does it have Housing Advisory Board recommended modifications to the draft 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: coordinates. With that we have 3 components. We'll have board questions. First, st we'll have another opportunity for public comment on this issue 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: in the same 3 min format, and then we'll have board, discussion and decision. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: So I'll open it up to board members for questions 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: about Cnn, you. Changes required by State law. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: and this is just to conform the local ordinance to state law, which already controls well, this is correct. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: One of the ways the State law gets rolled out and implemented. It's important. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: It sort of feel like we don't have a choice. We have a choice. You have a choice whether or not. You want to make a recommendation. You wouldn't be rejecting the State law conflicts with State law. State law controls unless the Constitution or something, some a higher level of law. So I think this is all bridge in the world, isn't it? Yeah, I mean, I feel like this is a rubber stamp for something that's inevitable. But

[102:16] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: I'm not gonna oppose it, or it's just what are we voting on to like? Make a recommendation? 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Recommend the Council that they do we have any recommendations for modifications to the draft previously previously meeting for review. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: This is what we reviewed last time, right or re- recently. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Well, also you got a copy of it, but we're not getting a presentation. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: The memo has a suggested motion. If you, if you do want to go that route and read it to you if you want.

[103:04] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Should we do the public comment? First, st 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: make sure. You know you're okay. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: So Housing Advisory Board recommends that City Council adopt ordinance. 86, 50, amending title, 9. Land use, code and title, 10 structures 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: to amend the standards for accessory dwelling. And it's setting forth related details so pretty simple 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: because you don't have to do this but if you, if you, I think it's moving in the direction that I've heard, have say, you'd like to see our occupancy and our 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: did you start with move? 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: I think it makes sense because it's support. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: I feel like this is something. If if I were the city attorney I'd be saying, you guys gotta change your laws to conform to stay on. I just don't know if I'm comfortable advising like, if we're fully apprised of what we're advising on and all that, it's not like a policy thing we we've had discussed.

[104:16] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Does anyone have any proposed changes, I guess none. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: That's not no move to public comment. Then here with it. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Yep, we have one person online, the merchant fear. Howdy, folks! Can you hear me? 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Yes. All right. 1st of all, that was a fascinating discussion beforehand on conversion. And being on the Bhp board, it was really interesting to finally see what our Gsa building is gonna look like, because I haven't seen it before then. So

[105:02] it'll be interesting to see what it actually develops. And I'm actually surprised. Washington cohousing wasn't included in this, because that was a school that was converted to residential. none of which has anything to do with what's before you. It's a no brainer. It seems this resolution I would just comment that it's really nice to see the State finally follow again. Boulders lead on this, because this is something we've been working on for a while. But to me the big, the big. The only reason I'm really making a comment is, I I'd like to see outreach to the community. There's still a lot of pushback, and I have a feeling that a lot of people on next door knew about this hearing. They would be here making public comment against these things. But I think it's definitely the right direction, and I'd love to see the city keep track of the the benefits of adding more adus and and occupancy.

[106:09] And I know there's it's gonna be a little difficult to measure that. But I I think this is one of those things that people just need to see the benefits of something that they have opposed for so long. No, that's about it. Thanks. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Thank you, Mark. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: I think we didn't include Washington in school because it was done 20 years ago. We were looking for some current 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: examples, and also that is quite wrapped up in a bigger thing of cohousing. But it's certainly well done. I enjoy living a block and a half from it. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: I have a comment that the public comment, it's not too late to to say something. Well, I appreciated Mark's comments there, and it makes me think that was I feel like

[107:04] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: I would I didn't come prepared to to go into the weeds and make tweaks, or suggestions to the to the ordinances. But it does remind me that I I do want to be vocally supportive of of this. I am. I work really hard. Personally, I know a lot of people in the city work really hard on the occupancy reforms of Julianne. That's how she got involved with 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: housing in boulder initially. And I 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: I'm really proud of my humble affiliation slash contributions to boulder housing, coalition, which I think is a wonderful beautiful organization that's increasing, sharing and housing. I'm really excited for them that they don't have to reapply every year and pay $2,500 or something a year for for their for their renewals.

[108:00] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: and that they can kind of go off and create 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: co-housing all over the city. I think that's really awesome. And just also just the notion, that 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: of of preferring. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: you know, kind of traditional nuclear family, like arrangements over everybody else in terms of who can live with. Who I think, is is just not justifiable. And so I'm I'm glad that our code is gonna look like that. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: I'm also really excited about the adus. I I also would love to see the data on how that 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: changes over here. I I know they keep track of it. So it's not like we need some new data collection. But 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: I'll be very eager to see that data rolling over the next 5 years to see what what happens there. I've known a bunch of different people over the years who've had kind of like 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: overt adus in their backyards and maybe some of those will will get, you know, brought into into legal standing, or

[109:08] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: anyways, I'm I'm excited about both of these things. I think, as a as an Advisory board. We should be proud that our city and our State has moved in this direction, and I 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: hope that we'll all vote in support of it. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Do we have anyone else? 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Okay? Well, I think I'm hearing someone wants to make a motion. Then 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: person with food in his mouth. Of course. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: I move we vote and support. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: You'd say that the motion that's in the staff member. By the way, there are 2 of them. So there's 1 for the adus, and there's 1 for the occupancy of the staff. Recommendations in the memo in regards to Adus.

[110:26] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Second, all in favor. Aye, motion passes 7 through. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: And now we need a separate motion for occupancy. Yeah, I'd like to move that we support a vote in favor of the one about occupancy and detailed in the 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: session all in favor. Aye, motion passes. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: I think. 7, I think. Did you raise your hand, Chip? Yes, okay, great, wonderful. Thank you all for your careful attention to that issue, and excited to see the changes ahead.

[111:04] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: We have 2 more things to consider their decisions 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: not recommendations. The next one is item C in the agenda. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: and this is something that Chip has suggested, and we followed up with by drafting some language. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: I think everyone partly agree with this idea that Tab should be more present in city council by making a quarterly report out just on what we've been doing what we're thinking about, irrespective of recommendation. I think Council would be interested to know about our inquiries into 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: homeless housing solutions and office conversions, for example, even though we haven't digested all the information yet. So we already have that language, and we can have a discussion about whether we'd like to adopt it, and then 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: perhaps entertain a motion to adopt. I would like to make 2 edits to what was attached. One is, it currently says Monthly, and I think we need to change it to quarterly, and then I think we should, for the second chapter or the paragraph, it should say, for starters have has been investigating solutions to homelessness. I think we should start with last fall. We convened a panel

[112:21] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: and then the outside of the schedule should be second. So start with what we did. And then the second part would be the tour. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: One question. We would do this quarterly, do we wanna maybe push this out until 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: I like that. It's in here like, I think we should discuss this at every single meeting. But do we want to kind of like 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: talk about this, and then finalize it at our. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: I guess, like February meeting to do it in March, you know, and then we'd like. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: or something like that, like I think we should. What's our framework for doing this? Moving forward like we should talk about it at every meeting, you know, as a work in progress, but we want to present it to council every quarter. So when do we want to start presenting

[113:12] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: December? I think what you're saying is, we could 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: not table this, but next after the February meeting, then we have 3 meetings after that. So then, when we want to edit this to include 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: this discussion that we had today. We probably do. But we need to be mindful of our time constraint, because we are limited to 3 min, 2 min under the city charter. We have a right to the floor. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Apparently. Maybe not. It's in the charter clarification on that jay. Yeah, I think our city attorney might disagree with you on that. The city charter says we have a right to the floor. The voters, the city council wanted to change it, and the voters rejected the change in the last election.

[114:04] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: So the charter stands. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: But we should maybe then, but I don't see a reason why we should exceed 3, so I don't think that's a prudent use of time right? And I don't see any problem with signing up to speak. Just so we avoid the question altogether well, and I know that city council doesn't 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: for the time being is not doing in person. They're not. You still have to sign up to speak. It's easy to pull minutes, too, if we want 3 min. 2 of us show up to the meeting. I don't think, I think, as an Advisory Board. The City charter expressly states that the advisory boards have a right to the floor to advise the City Council. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: When an Advisory board goes to advise council. I don't necessarily think that it's considered public. It's coming from the Advisory Board, and that's how I would. I would interpret the city charter, and that just makes sense from the design of the charter, that it's different from an individual member of the public

[115:11] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: respect. I don't see a lot of point in pressing the point, if we have the opportunity to make presentation. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Just follow whatever rules and make our presentation full minutes get more time. No, what I am saying is when we agree on something to give advice that should be given heightened attention compared to public. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: But we're not making recommendation. We're just reporting on what we're when we speak to them. Yeah, I mean, that's sort of the power of our board, and I think the chart. So I don't know if I think we just need to come up with this a statement. And then email. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: who is the like version of you? Who does city chart? It's city Manager Metaverse and the city attorney are typically present at cap at council meetings.

[116:01] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: We could probably email them ahead of time, saying we'd like to address the board. We have a prepared comment, and I'm sure they would, Michael. What's your reluctance to doing that? And if they just shoot us down and say, No, that's not possible. But to me it just seems like if we say, Hey, you know, Chip knows the section we'd like to address City council on a more regular basis, and just see if they're like, sure. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: I think they'll probably say yes. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: So wait. I'm a little confused. If if the issue is, can we present quarterly? I think there's no objection to signing up and doing it quarterly. If the issue is, how long do we have to talk, we can argue back and forth about what we should or shouldn't. But 2 min we should be able to be succinct and share like, Hey, this is what we met. This is what we've discussed in some of our meetings. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Wanna just give you a a brief update. And I think that that will be heard better than a longer

[117:05] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: recital of what we thought. I. I have much less of dog in this fight. I'm short timer, but I absolutely agree with that point. I think it's absolutely inane to try to get into the face. I can tell you what the city attorney is going to say, and to engender some sort of dispute over the time we're allotted for. If we say, Hey, heads up, we just like to come every 3 min and just say, Hello! Have our emissary let you know 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: what we're talking about, and and where we are, and if you want to hear more from us, we'd love to speak more to you, and and, you know, put us on your agenda, or something like that. Outside of that, I think it's absolutely innate. It's very, you know. Off the hook. Public comments are very discordant, for very dense agendas. City Council has to go to. So that's that's just my opinion. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: It's not worth even the perception of picking up fight. But we can get our 3 min through the, you know, established process and not even worry about it. So here's something else to think about. If if what we've presented here is about 2 or 3 min, and we want to share

[118:16] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: information about our topic today. Then maybe we say we want to report on a regular basis, and we give one presentation in February and then another one in March, because we've had 2 great meetings that we want to talk about. So 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: if you'd like us to come more, we'd be more than happy to. We're gonna be here every 3 months. We're gonna give you a quick update. We can elaborate more on some of these things. If you want. We could come back next month, if you want, but 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: and just in terms of of comedy and and and 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: not comedy, just a meeting so, and good and good relationships and effectiveness. I think that's the way to go about it. I think one thing I'm hopeful is if someone goes and reads this or a version of this, they say, oh, that's really interesting. We want to know more about Xyz. That person writes it down, and then, at the beginning of our next meeting, says this is how Council reacted.

[119:21] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: And then I think that puts us in a better position. Alright, let's maybe focus on this one more because they seem to care about this issue. I mean, all we can do is advise. So what advice do they want? You know they're more likely to listen to us. So based on this discussion. Should we 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: send revised edits to 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Jay and Michael about what we talk about, and make sure that if you read it at home. It's between 2 and 3, is it 2 min or 3 min? It depends on the meeting and how many it is that sometimes change it. Okay, so 2 min, but I don't. I don't think we have to worry. I think as long as we're not there to give a 45 min presentation, if it's 2 or 3 min. I don't think we should worry about

[120:13] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: this brief letter or script. We're not. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: We're not presenting any guidelines for how we're gonna present. This is just what we're going to present. But if this is 2 min and 20 seconds, I don't think they're gonna cut us off, because that's the parameter they set for published content. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: If we're go belaboring with a Powerpoint presentation, you know. That's that's just my thought. It is. I I view it as distinct from public content. This is. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: it's all better. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: I think, for now we need to get the words right to decide. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: We want to present it, you know. Let me approve or disapprove. I think this is good. I mean, I agree with the comment on court We-we discussed quarterly as opposed to. I think that should be our minimum.

[121:03] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: and I like the idea of funneling comments, perhaps through Jay to Karen and I to come up with a new refresher version to look at next month. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Okay, so I think we're, I'm gonna deferring this for now 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: brings us to. Is everyone comfortable with moving on. So wait, are we when we edit this? Are we gonna include what we talked about this time. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: the conversion of the office 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: because we got a lot of good content here? Logistical question. So if it's March 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: that we want somebody to appear to speak to council, when do we need to contact Council to say, Hey. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: you don't. But you do want to sign up. Actually, yeah, okay. But I think that was the difference that you, the distinction, if we agree on language. In the next meeting.

[122:11] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: which would be the 4th Wednesday of February. Right? I would propose that whoever goes emails the city manager, the City manager, city attorney, or whatever the email addresses, and just says 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: we've the City Housing Advisory Board has voted on a statement we'd like to 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: in accordance with City charter. Section 130. We would like to present it to council. Can you please fit us in? I think it's a good idea, for the 1 1 reason that that we might consider doing it that way is because there's often way more commenters 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: than they have slots for. So if we just show up as regular public for the comments we're likely to be thrown into the lottery, we may not get a chance to participate. So if we do this, we could, we could still say, Hey, we'd be happy to limit our comments to 2 or 3 min like any other public comment, and the city charter expressly states the Commission shall have the right to the floor of the Council to speak on plans and expenditures proposed.

[123:14] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: I can just tell you you'll save a lot of time if you just sign up for public comment. We can do both, but I do think it makes sense. No, because I just went. I went to this meeting, and I'll speak about in a second on public comment. 80 people wanted to speak and they address 20 questions, the city, the County commission. So you know, if we're investing all this time and energy and 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: the city, the taxpayers paying for our dinner to do all this, then we should, and the Charter says so. We should make sure we're heard at the City Council meeting. I I don't think that's an unreasonable ask. I've spoken to Council a number of occasions. I don't recall ever being pumped. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: It's very common, actually, who is?

[124:03] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Is is there a 1st like if we registered way in advance, then we're at the top, or it's 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: it's a lot already. Keep in. Mind. You have 2 meetings every month. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Yeah, right, so if you don't get one, you can get the next one. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: But I also don't think it's a good use of someone's time to sit around for 3 h and then find out they don't get to speak, and I think I think in light of the language in the city charter, it makes sense to reach out and say 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: respectfully, request 3 min to address council in accordance with section 1, 30. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: No, I feel like we don't have consensus on this approach, and 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: we might want to vote on it. Maybe we want to vote on it next month. We can all think about it some more. If we're not going to do anything until March. I move that we think about my motion is this.

[125:00] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: board members think about what they want to go into the statement, they email the chair Ccj. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: and then we address a final statement 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: and our approach for contacting council at the February meeting. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: We even need a motion to do that. I think everyone can agree on that. Any objections? 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Okay, 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: For your sake of sake, give me a half page of comments. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: You're gonna get a barn of comments from everybody like no revisions. Just a half page of comments. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: I think we're ready to move on to another decision item recommendation of City Council regarding board appointments. There is language on this in your packet. The basic idea is, we would love council to prioritize 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: appointing someone to fill a coming vacancy. Who has experience in housing production. I feel like that's an area that we really benefited from a previous board member who was developed. A lot of housing in Boulder continues to do so, and that it's a little bit of a knowledge gap for us to

[126:18] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: know what we're talking about, and the practicality is of creating and build and getting through the process, as we learned so much from tonight from a great panel. So we don't actually know who's applying, but it would be great if Council would keep that in mind making their appointments once they get through their interviews, and that closes. When do we actually find out who's applying? 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: As soon as they get a list from the city clerk. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: I'll share it with the rest of the board any day. Now. Yeah, I would think so any day. Now, applications are closed so soon. Yeah. And I want to clarify that we're not. It's not our place to endorse an individual. This is more like

[127:04] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: filling out the team with, you know, a short stop, a 3rd basement, a second baseman, a 1st baseman. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Maybe you say I love baseball. I'm sorry you did a good job of making that point, but you know that was well phrased. So yeah, I guess we should take a look at the language. Make sure we're comfortable with it, and see if anyone has amendments to suggest, and then we can vote on it. I thought, the letter is great. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: I'm I'll I'm happy to prove it as is. I second 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: no other comments before we accept. Okay, all in favor of approving this decision. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: When you send it to city council, who you send it to.

[128:09] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: So these are the ones who make the call. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: It'll copy all of that. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: I will copy all of that. That's right. Okay, I'm sorry. Let me scroll through my agenda here. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Okay, we that brings us up to item 16 agendas from staff. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: I don't really have anything anything he was curious about, or how you doing keep asking. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Don't know when you want to squeeze that up. You know, before we do that I think this is 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Chips opportunity to talk about the homeless form of attending. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Yeah. So the county Commissioners did a town hall on homelessness yesterday.

[129:07] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: My 1st observation, the only option for the public to attend was via zoom. There was no in person element. The 3 commissioners appeared to be at home, or in some they were in separate places. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: At the beginning of the meeting. They announced that there was like over a hundred people attending 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: and they seemed kind of like surprised by that, like it was more than what they're used to for their typical town hall. There was no like the way we do these meetings where people have 3 min to speak. There was no option for that. They also like didn't do a great job of announcing the format. People just started like typing questions into the QA. Like on zoom. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: And then they started like they did, like a little 20 min presentation. And then they just started answering these questions. And then, when people realized that was the format. There was like 80 questions typed into the QA. Did you attend it as well? I wasn't

[130:13] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: well over a hundred. Yeah, it was a lot. So it was like, I didn't get to ask. I my question was, Are we supposed to type questions? And then and that was never answered. But eventually I realized that's how it was being addressed. So it was kind of a bit of a free for all which just gave me thoughts on. If we do a town hall or listening session. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: maybe I think having the in person element is good, because what I really wanted to get out of this was like, what are what's the community's concerns about homelessness? 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: But I did read through all the questions, and a few things stood out to me about this. So the county's housing authority is really only responsible for housing outside of the city of Boulder and the City of Long.

[131:04] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: The city of boulder handles its own house. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: They handle unincorporated areas of the East County. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: a large percentage of the questions had to do with homelessness in the city of Boulder. It seems like a lot of people from Boulder went to this county meeting because they had concerns about homelessness, and a common response from the County Commissioners was. You need to address that with the city of Boulder, so that sort of signaled to me that the city of Boulder maybe needs to do a better job. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Listening to the community's concerns in the city about homelessness issues. The big issue that seemed to come up a lot was Boulder Creek, and a lot of different types of concerns about 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: the presence of tents along Boulder Creek garbage drug use? How do we address?

[132:02] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: you know the presence of homelessness. A lot of people just had genuine questions about like, Why can't move people all of that? I don't know. You know. The Commissioners offered some good insight. A lot of it again was, Address this with your local police department or your local elected officials. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: But I think that was the frustration, but I mean they have a point like it is. Boulder Creek is a boulder city of Boulder issue. The County Commission doesn't have much. Say, what's over there? They did say. In the city of Boulder there is a camping ban. It's illegal. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: And then people were. And then the county Commissioner set made a comment along the lines of, there is not enough space in the Boulder County jail to house these people or something along those lines. I don't wanna quote verbatim. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: But to the point of this is why we're not just arresting jail. But I got the impression from this. There's a lot of people in our community who are concerned with presence of tents and campers along the creek. I think that's probably something. People live in Boulder. We understand. Boulder Creek is one of the nicest public features we have in Boulder, and I think there's a lot of people in our community who are upset.

[133:19] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: and the solution should not be to just throw these people in jail. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: But there needs to be some other housing solution that serves the purpose of 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: providing housing and connecting homeless people resources, and also removing tents and blight from a public resource that the community enjoys. I think it serves both purposes and a comment. You've given to me, Karen, is. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: we need to narrow the issue. We can't just have a free for all on homelessness. And I realize this is this is a big issue in boulder like we love our creek, and people want it clean and nice and enjoyable. We also want to see homeless people treated with compassion and given the opportunity to

[134:06] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: better themselves and be in a better position. How do we create a housing solution that serves both goals? 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: and that's there's not gonna be an easy answer to that. I realize this is a very complex problem. And it's compounded by the fact that we're very liberal community. And we're also a very wealthy community. So I do think it's something that's worth. I think there's a lot of a lot of people. Our community have questions and concerns about this. I don't know if we have the answers. I don't know if the city council has the answers, but I think there is value to listening 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: and hearing people out and understanding what? What are the community's concerns about this, and I think just the number of people who attended this, and who had questions specific to Boulder that the county wasn't really prepared to address, signified to me that the city of Boulder, through its either its Advisory Board, or the Council needs to spend more time on this issue, because it is a principal concern in our community.

[135:12] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: So absolutely agree with that I think, in terms of having a listen session on this, I think 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: it's gonna be paramount to 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: really really specify the specific angle regarding homelessness that you're gonna talk about. And and and 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: because that was 200 people online, I mean, you could have you know, people out the door here, because there's a lot of kind of frustration which you saw and I can say the one listening session 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: that we had 2019. It was pre covid, but we had. That was kind of nebulous, and it was still. It was like. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: what funding mechanisms can we explore for for, you know, to develop affordable housing? 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: So we had. It was wall, wall packed, and and people were complaining about how much the rent was, and everything like fabricated. It's like you know?

[136:05] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: How would how long? Day? 4 h. Something like that. People yelling whatever. So there's that's probably gonna be a big challenge for the whole thing is how to really pare it down and say, Heads up. It's this issue, right? You know we can't. You know we're not talking about the Bullet Creek, or whatever we're talking about. How do we deal with housing options for for people who are, you know, housing challenge or something like that? 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Yeah, I appreciate the report. But I I mean, I also feel like we've kind of hashed out our our niche on this, which is, how can we provide more housing and get people. That's how you get people off the streets and housing and 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: safe, humane, supportive environments. And you know, I 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: and I've heard lots of complaints about Boulder Creek and experienced it. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: I think there's some other creative solutions out there that we could be talking about that. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: or at least housing adjacent. I've started volunteering at all roads.

[137:02] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: That's day shelter. It's just really interesting to see how many people are attracted to that. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: I'd love to see some analysis of whether any of those folks are choosing to go there instead. Go hang out by the tree. Yeah, I mean, I was just my mind was thinking today when they're talking about these transitional, you know, transitioning office buildings. It seems much more financially viable when you're doing. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: you know, 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: sort of like the Bridge House sort of thing. That's what I took away compared to a marketable unit that you would sell on the Free Market and Eastern Bridge House into, like. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: you know, Amazon or something. So they have capacity to do that, or is is what bridge is that something that Bhp could take on? I don't know. That's a really great question, you know, and and then it does go hand in hand with social services and policing. I don't think the solution to all the tents along the creek is at sundown, Boulder police Department, going through and doing raids and rounding up people and sending them to the jail.

[138:04] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: But if there was a different procedure where we have social workers going through 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: from housing human services and presenting people options. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Before they get the pink slip on the tree, and it says you've got 72 h before the police shows up. You know. How. How can we reform this process to make sure that people. We're not spending valuable taxpayer dollars sending homeless people to jail. But we're also cleaning up the creek and providing people with social services. It's not. There's not an easy answer to this. I recognize that what I'm advocating for is. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: I think there's a lot more I can learn and a lot more. We all can learn by just listening to our pink slip on the right tree. February 13.th City Council will be hearing the Hhs homelessness update for the last year, so February 13th will be the day you want us tune in, and on February 20 second, there is a Tedx

[139:05] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: event at the at the library about homelessness as well. What day was that second one, the 20 second, I think I just sent something to Jay and Michael, and we can forward it to them. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Well, information is great. Again, I feel like 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: we've done some fantastic investigations on homeless solutions 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: eventually get to the point where we make some recommendations that can expand success models 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: I still do not feel personally qualified to weigh in on policing issues. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: public space. All those things are, you know, to me. It's outside the purview of the Housing Advisory Board. No, I agree. Go ahead. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: What I hear you say in a couple of different ways is

[140:02] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: we should be offering a way for people 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: to share whatever their thoughts or concerns, or whatever, and for us to be listening right. And that goes back to listening sessions that we've talked about, do we do or do we not? And you're saying we need to have a specific 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: like topic or question, or something. So how can we word a question not like, how do we solve homelessness? Because that is far too big of a topic? And there's far too many things, and it's not just housing, which is what I hear you saying like, we're housing but how can we ask a question? Do a listening session and ask a question 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: that's really directly related to housing. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: because there might be somebody out there that has this amazing magical solution or a solution that we're not hearing. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: So how can we? Is there possible that we could pose a question, a topic

[141:04] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: about that that's specifically related to housing and open that up to the listening session and be able to hear people. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Yeah. And I think part of it is giving the community opportunity to interact with their government. I mean, people 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: say this people in Boulder are upset right now with the state of governance in America. If you just look at how this city voted in the last Presidential election. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: and I think at a local level, if we can give the community an opportunity to speak to their elected officials somehow, that's a positive thing. I emailed the Commissioners after last night's meeting. I said 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: I did not feel like this was a meaningfully a meaningful way to engage with our government, you know, typing comments in a chat and see if they respond. And I think that's part of what our city should do is at least say we're here to listen. And then, at the very least, when we do our quarterly report, we say 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: city council, we did this. We listened.

[142:03] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: We're not 100% sure of what recommendations we're gonna make. This is this is a con. These are common themes that we all agree. We heard from the community 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: when we did this, and I I think there is value to that, and we can keep thinking about it. I know it might be uncomfortable. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: but we can also, I think, talk about ways where, if someone were to show up 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: and just go off the deep end or something. Thank you for your comments. We appreciate it. You know it's 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: we don't have to engage necessarily. So I feel like I'm a broken record. The them the meeting notes from last meeting. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: I expressed that 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: I think Philip and I said, we don't want to have a study session about homelessness for 2 reasons. One, we've already had learning session with the panelists that talked about solutions to homelessness that are housing, related like actual developers, projects, strategies, financing lessons, learned that create have created

[143:13] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: permanent housing solutions for people who are previously homeless. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: and the second issue is that we are not in a position to be talking about the underlying issues of 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: drug addiction, mental health, incarceration, encampments. What's happening? So is there an issue with homelessness in boulder and boulder community? 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Absolutely. But I don't think that we are the venue for that. And I think that if the public has concerns and issues, and and there are like, there was just one thing that you participated in, there's another Tedx one, but I do not participated in. They said. You need to address that city of boulder. That's us. We are the Housing advisor

[144:00] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: right? And we are going to present our, we can present things that we learned, and recommendations related to housing, but I do not feel comfortable having a learning session or a listening session about homelessness, because I feel like it will be equally as 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: I don't know, frustrating out of control, unfocused like I'm not. I think that's a real risk. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Like I I completely understand where you're coming. I just don't think this issue is going away. And I I just can. I say one last thing 30 seconds, and then I'll shut it on. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: I recognize from the work that I do with eviction prevention that one of the number one. Things that prevents homelessness is the emergency rental assistance money that's given to people who can't pay their rent.

[145:01] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: A large percentage of those dollars is coming from Washington, DC. That's about to stop. So we are going to see, I'm fairly certain a lot more tents along Boulder Creek. So this issue is not going to go away. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Public officials are uncomfortable dealing with it because they don't know the answer. I'm empathetic to that. We don't have the answers. We're not the police. This is not be an issue. They get solved. But I don't. But I think we need to listen. That's that's where I stand. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Well, it's a lot to think about. But thank you. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: We are. Gonna go on to item 6 matters from staff 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: and maybe cave thoughts and things since we last. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: No, but thank Tiffany, because if you, if you want to understand homelessness. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: definitely attend the city council meeting, it's on my calendar

[146:04] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: at the library. I think it is. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: I do have a question for staff related to Alpine balsam. I think everyone has probably noticed 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: the construction, equipment and signs and the infrastructure project 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: being underway, so called. Goose Upper Goose Creek vacation, I think. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: and that's a very positive step. I'm very happy to see? Just 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: curious if there's anything else you can tell us. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: updates about actually getting housing built on that site like, what does that schedule look like? Absolutely so this month, they started actual construction on the green light. So that's the whole flood mitigation along balsam. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: So it's kind of basically under to 150 foot swath.

[147:02] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: It's gonna be a bike path or a multi use path. Greenway. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: There's gonna be a bridge. But auto bridge, and then a pedestrian bridge. So everything that's gonna get constructed as part of the initial infrastructure. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: So the infrastructure and the Greenway are starting this year the Pavilion Building, which is the city's new office building, which is right there in the old medical office building, will be converted. They'll take off that facade that's there now, and we'll get completely replaced. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: There'll be some work done on the on the garage as well. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Because part of it needs to be separated out specifically for the boulder housing partners. Affordable units 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: and then the the unfortunate part is that 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: for boulder housing partners to apply for low income housing tax credits. They have to have an approved letter of

[148:04] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: lower anyone know. Anyway, the flood plan has to be resolved. Basically, Fema has to approve the design or the the that it was built to the design. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: which means that really Php. Can't even start going after funding until mid 2026. So more than likely, you know, they're not going to start construction until 2027 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: but in the meantime you're gonna see a lot of activity like I said, the green way is, gonna get built 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: all the horizontal infrastructure will go in as well as the building. So I mean, the city is hoping to move all of the city staff into a new building 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: from everywhere right there vacated. Hey, Jay! What's happening to the buildings where this city is now like near Mustard's last stand, and, like those, are all in flood plains. Right? So do they get demolished. Those 2 buildings get demolished, you can convert them

[149:12] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: following up. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: do we know who's gonna develop the housing and any further iteration of design? What things are gonna look like and feel like, Yeah, that's the all the housing is fully entitled 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: bhp, did went through that well through Coburn and Pete. Specifically right. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: worked on this project. So HP. Will develop the 3 or 3 buildings that will be permanently affordable rentals. And then the 2 parcels that we've talked about. One on the northwest corner, right close to the park. That's 22 town homes

[150:03] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: that will be for sale that will help pay for it's the proceeds of that. A sale. That parcel will help pay for the affordable housing. And who's developing that we don't know. So we're that would likely go out like for an Rfp. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Or we would just put it on the market. But we're we. You wanna wait until we have the full infrastructure in place, because that's gonna increase the value of the property. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: So it's fully entitled, they don't have to go to the city for anything except for building permits where the horrible got built first.st And now work ventures is doing. I think it's opening next month their market rate, which is 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: told, like more than 90% pre-leased. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: So looks like that's a successful financial model. And we followed it very closely with Alpine Balson. Jake, can I ask you a question. Do you know, has boulder housing partners ever considered getting involved with some sort of like Bridge House

[151:08] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: development program, you know? 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Yeah. So the well, Lauren can tell you so. Lee Hill. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: It was the 1st from a supportive housing project that was a Php project. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Although 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: you know it's it's all roads that that basically manages it, that they were the developer for that. So it's not uncommon. But you know, it's not easy either. For prior 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: the biggest challenge is actually providing the services in those buildings. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Construction is fairly straightforward. It's like, How do you provide the long term money needed for all those wraparound services.

[152:01] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: permanent supportive housing, one at Bluebird, which is at 30, th and Mapleton, and one called Zinnia, which is in Longmont, and and then also Bhp. Will do some scattered site. Yeah, there's a distinction with the Bridge House, and that is permanent. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Bridge House is not designed to be permanent. It's designed to be 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: yeah. Bhp tends to focus on. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: So because one of the things that happens with bridge houses once you've gotten a job, and you're a little more stable. You you need to make sure that there is housing available for you to move into, and I don't know to what extent Bridge House 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: facilitates that finding a customer so 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: so they don't necessarily facilitate it. But everybody works together to make sure that someone who's successful in bridges can find a place to land.

[153:01] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Did they get vouchers? 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: If they're eligible, all depends or available. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Quick, Fyi, for you. I think somebody's going around trying to get a referendum going on against the. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: It's only stuff that we just talked about today. We support. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Oh, really. Oh, yeah. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: I had somebody come to me and be like, Hey, do you want to sign this? And I was like 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: wrong, Guy, so. But you know, to add to some older keep older neighborhoods or something like that. There seems to be some stuff coming around. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: I'm confident that Boulder has the red table. We're not. We're never gonna be used in Texas. I just don't think that's in the department. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Anything else from Staff that we should know about coming up so our next meeting, I think, will be very interesting. So we'll have the residential nexus study.

[154:00] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: So basically, that would be presented to council in April. So remember that. So that's potentially applying a fee for significant additions 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: to single family homes. Or, you know, scrapes and rebuild. So currently, that's the segment of the market that does not pay any sort of affordable housing fee. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: So anyway, you you, the consultant, will be here. You can ask them questions. It's actually pretty fascinating report. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: It's a little dense, but it's an interesting 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: anything we'd be voting on next meeting. No, it's not something you would vote on is we're going to go to council. And basically say, Here's the study. Do you want us to go forward and basically bring back an ordinance fee? So I mean, I guess the room originally planned this meeting, but the agenda got too crowded to have 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: the housing analysts from Dr. Cod come and present their regional housing

[155:06] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: survey, and that probably is going to be probably till March. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: No, I think we can do February. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: so we pushed it off. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Hey? Thank you. Ready to go to meeting debrief. We had a really productive meeting. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: freezing for the public attend in person. So meetings are growing in popularity at an exponential rate. Thank you for attending public commenters. Food was good, technical applications exponential. We had an excellent panel discussion on the topic of 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: office conversion to housing. We have some great case studies showing the challenges and the promise. We're very grateful to Hhs for moderating that and presenting her own expertise and her report as well.

[156:11] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: We voted to 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: recommend the Council that they adopt the draft ordinance on occupancy, and 80 use. With no further recommendations for changes. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: we started to Wordsmith 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: script for Have Member Update to Council, which we will complete next month and decide how we want to proceed to do that. But we will seem to be an agreement. We want to happen. We will make it happen. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: We made a recommendation to City Council regarding board appointments emphasizing the skill set of a housing production person. If there's 1 who applies, if they're selected, once they get through their interview process. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: We had another good discussion about how to address the homeless issue which I totally agree with. Chip is going to become even more pressing. Fortunately, in the near future already has, I think homelessness is up some like 20% last year, not in boulder, but nationally. So.

[157:14] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: it's not getting easier. Unfortunately. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: The only encouraging thing is, we have done some good inquiries, and know there are some solutions out there. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: We talked a little bit about Alpine balsam. And what's happening there? What happens next? 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: And we had a full 100% attendance at our 1st meeting of 2025, which is not a good time. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: So you'll get an extra cookie up there anymore. I just wanted to let you guys all know that I recently finished applying to grad school where I'm going to continue studying architecture and hopefully find some linkages between design and affordable housing on a bigger scale. But that means that I'm probably no longer going to be in Boulder coming. August. So I've decided

[158:10] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: I guess, for the betterment of the board, that I would resign at the same time as Danny Seat is up in March so that you guys could get 2 seats 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: filled in this new election. I like that. You guys are being really proactive about who you might want to come on the board and hopefully 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: speaking with counsel on that, to get somebody that really benefits or 2 people that really benefit. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Everything the Board has tried to do. And 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: yeah, I just wanna let you guys know that had a really great time and learn so much, and I hope to take everything with me to a program 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: I applied in 4 places, so I don't know yet. I'll find out in March. Are they all out of state or no? So the only one that's in state is Cu. Denver and I applied to Michigan, Ucla and Usc. One more meeting or 2 till March.

[159:13] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: and I really appreciate your contributions, and I think I think you're making a good decision for the betterment of the best 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: efficiency of the Board as well, and I appreciate that very much, probably not an easy thing to do. But 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: put in some time here and made some contributions, I think, probably learned some things that will help you in the long run. So thank you so much. Really badass on my application really cool to you know

[160:04] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: that timing is really cool, so excited for you, everybody, I think. Thank you. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Calendar check. Next meeting is February 26. Cool thing is that it's not a leap year. So the meeting after March 26, easy to remember. We do need I would love to see if someone wanted to 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: sit down with maybe with me or Karen to have around a recommendation or 2 based on what we learned from our panel today. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Any volunteers? 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: If you have 2 slots, 2 slots.

[161:02] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: any other fields you wanna throw in there. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: I think they'll figure it out. But 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: let me ask you a quick procedural question. If you're if I have a suggestion for a agenda item, do I just email you directly 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: before the next meeting, or yeah, sure, sure, the agenda. And when is that next meeting? It's 2 weeks before the meeting, 2 weeks after this meeting, rather than later. Better chance of getting on the agenda. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Do you wanna mention it now or no? 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Sure your topic is. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: I just keep. I just keep circling back on the need for sharing housing. And I did an interview. Speaking of my podcast an interview with a woman named Anna Marie Puhar, who runs an organization called sharing housing.

[162:11] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: And I just think 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: to just have a focus segment on what that means for the community and how we might think about promoting. That would be like, you know, like this. Whole conversation started off kind of with the the like. Well, it's gonna be hard, just just so, you know, before you get excited. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: It's going to be really hard. Sharing housing is also something that's hard, but for a whole bunch of different reasons, but but from the perspective of legal and regulatory and expenses and finance, it's all easy, you know. It's it's all the the hard part is social and if we could kind of open up people's brains and 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: imagination around how we have so much housing that sits empty.

[163:03] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: yeah, a lot of bedrooms that are empty you from you. And I am curious what you're saying makes sense for, like what government like the change on occupancy limits right? So that so there's like occupancy reform. I think now we need to like. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: put that on its head and think about vacancy reform. And so I mean, I guess my my ask is not to like. Let me explain it right now. I'd like to have like a little longer segment to to. So you think there's like a next step. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Some of the recent meetings that we've had is that we get a panel discussion with different voices and opinions. And so if this Anna Marie is one person and one voice, are there other people and other voices that you can recruit to?

[164:09] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Yeah, sort of well, someone that comes to mind someone that 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: you know I don't know who. Well, she's on the board of Bhc. That we could consider someone else from Bhc. To represent. You know she can. She can represent her. But you've heard of the organization silver Nest. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: I had some friends in law school. There's older people who they don't need like a caretaker, but they want someone younger in their home in case they fall, or whatever. And it. It's like a mutual relationship where there's 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: older person owns a home. And then there's some Cu grad student who needs a cheap place to live, and they sort of can offer them below market rent the understanding of hey? Maybe you'll pick up groceries once a week for me or something, and I know there's a silver nest is like a a web. I think that's what it's like, a website or something. But I don't know that that's just an idea that comes to mind. And I always thought it was a brilliant idea.

[165:06] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Well, let's put on the agenda on top of that for February meeting. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: I just want to report on something else quickly before we move to adjourned. Just clip this article and send it around New York City is actually going through some major housing, rezoning now, and it's surprisingly similar to Boulder. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Their previous focus has been on getting an exaction of a percentage of affordable housing. A very large building with the high rises going up along the waterfront in Brooklyn, and they're shifting focus to more of a general infill approach of like Hey, I mean, there's a surprising number of single family homes in New York. If you're not in midtown, Manhattan. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: You can build an 800 square foot. Adu in your backyard. You know, form of a lot splitting approach. And they're also looking at incentives for office conversions with a big goal of 500,000 new homes.

[166:04] 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: So anyway, just interesting, I'll pass it around. I think this is a national movement. Really, it's happening in a lot of communities. It's just so interesting to see 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: New York thinking. You know, we don't always have to think big. We can think small incremental driven by individual homeowners and property owners can happen in an organic way. It's a great experiment. So you know, the woman professor from George Washington spoke to us. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: That was, I mean, she was talking about the duplexes where there are single families and duplex use my right. That was, that was the city area. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: Eric Adams, close to the city of yes. 01.22.25 HAB Monthly Meeting: so with that do I hear a motion to adjourn all in favor.

[167:06] Good night. Folks great meeting.