February 26, 2025 — Housing Advisory Board Regular Meeting

Transcript

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

[0:03] Hi! My name is Karen Clairman, and I am Vice chair of the Housing Advisory Board. But Michael is not able to attend, so this is the 1st time I'm running this meeting. Bear with me. Let's begin with a call to order, and a roll call for the February 26th meeting of the Housing Advisory Board. Michael Chesey is not here. I am here. Danny Tordeo. Is he online from here? Chip Hennessey? Cheer. Hey? Okay, Karen. Hoskin here, and Emil Robles am here great. So I think we have quorum. So I'm now going to switch and go to the Agenda Review. So we're going to have public participation open comments from anybody who wants to say a few words. And there's matters from the board. We have a nexus fee study for demolition and additions, and we have some guest speakers. So when I go through the agenda, you can introduce yourself.

[1:17] Then we're also the board is expected to answer some questions regarding the information that we get from this nexus study. Then we'll switch topics and the Denver Regional Council for of Governments. Dr. Cobb will give a presentation. And then we will switch and discuss the the Hab Quarterly update to council and hopefully approve the draft. We will also do an approval of minutes matters from staff, and then we will debrief what we've talked about, and hopefully end by 9

[2:01] fantastic. Can I add one thing, please, so I may not be here for the staff update. So we are tentatively thinking that the racial equity training everybody got the email from our mayor. Right? Great for the 18.th Okay? And will that be here for the training in person. It also has a homework assignment that will basically take the entire meeting. Oh, alright. So we went slightly out of order. Okay, so Tiffany, do we have any public participation. There's a few people online. Once you ask for participation, they can raise their hands. Okay, please raise your hand if you want public participation. And then, Jay, do you mind outlining what the rules are? Thank you. You guys in hand, Tiffany.

[3:01] So far, no hands. Let me just repeat if there's people in the public that want to talk. Now is the time you just need to raise your hand in the video chat. No hands. Okay, let's move on. Okay, so matters from the board. Let's start with the nexus fee studied. Obviously. Okay. Let me share my presentation. Nope. okay, I'm Sloane Walbert. I am the inclusionary housing program manager for the city and helping with this

[4:03] nexus study. As I'm looking into small impact fee. So sort of the intent tonight is just a discussion of the findings of a recently completed nexus study on the impacts of demolitions of smaller, relatively more affordable homes with larger, more expensive homes and also substantial additions which also create less affordable housing. The study is necessary for the city to pursue a possible impact fee. and the intent, like, I said, is just to present and open up for discussion. We do have our consultant andrew Ratchford is here to present on behalf of the consultant as well. So once I've done, I'll kick it off to him, and then we can just have a discussion and questions at the end. Okay? So just on the agenda, I'm gonna go through some of the background on the project. The city's current affordable housing tools.

[5:05] Some background on inclusionary housing, and how these types of projects fall outside that tool. We'll talk a little bit about trends, and then I'll go back to Andy to present. So just in terms of where we got here, we did an update to the inclusionary housing program. in 2023, and it was identified that these types of projects were something that we need to examine and address because they fall out like I said, they fall outside the inclusionary housing program. So the intent is really just to look at these types of developments, the removal and replacement of homes, and also substantially substantial addition. However, we want to define that. This would a possible impact fee would just address some of the gaps that we have, and there would be more equity in how residential development contributes to affordable housing in the community right now that it's not very equitable in how people are impacted or contribute to affordable housing.

[6:10] And like, I said, there are some legal requirements we need to meet to sort of quantify the fee. What impact, what impact the fee has on affordable housing and justify the fee levels. So we hired Bruin Bruin and associates of October of last year to provide the research and analysis services. So just to kind of cover the city's affordable housing tools. There are a variety of tools used, including annexation, inclusionary housing. There's some funding tools like property taxes and other impact fees. In 2,015 the city adopted an impact fee on round residential development, and all of those funds go directly into the affordable Housing Fund, which is dedicated revenue source to support public investment in affordable housing. It also plays a crucial role in drawing additional State and Federal funding by leveraging, funding, and it's solely for the construction, purchase, and maintenance of affordable housing. So if we did pursue an impact fee, it would go into the fund, but used similar to other tools.

[7:22] And yeah, as you can see on the Graphic since 2,015. So this isn't updated for last year. But through 2023 from 2,015. You can't really see on the Graphic, but we've collected 102 million dollars. What does Srt. Stand for short term rental tax for 2020. No, it's 2,015 through 2023,

[8:03] so just to cover inclusionary housing, it's a requirement that all new developments contribute. 25% of the new housing is permanently affordable. There are some options and meeting that requirement. This, you know, original intent was to provide it on site as part of the development. They can also provide an offsite in a separate development, dedicate land for future affordable housing or pay the cash in lieu contribution. So developments under 5 units almost always pay the cash and loop contribution. So most single family homes, or, you know, duplexes, triplexes pay the cash and live. And one of the changes that was made as part of the update was that we changed to a per square foot structure which scales better with unit size. I think some of you were on the board at the time, and kind of remember this, but it results in a barcare burden across different sized units, and is also removed. An incentive for sort of larger market rate units that all said the program also has a a waiver for the demolition

[9:17] of units under 4, so 4 or fewer units, if they are removed and replaced within 3 years, you are not subject to inclusionary housing. so a new home on an empty lot would be required to pay cash in lieu, whereas if you purchased a property with an existing home, regardless of size, you know, status you would be be qualified for a waiver. So this is sort of the gap we're trying to fill through this study overall what percent of developments are cash in lieu as opposed to the other methods of inclusionary housing, the vast majority are cash in lieu, vast majority. Yeah.

[10:02] that's changing a little bit. And that's sort of a whole. Another discussion. but yeah, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. Just for those reasons I listed before the ability to leverage funds, and. you know, have public support of the housing. So this is sort of a extreme example. But this is an example in north sort of northwest of us northwest boulder. Let's see what I can found. So a 3,000 square foot home was demolished. Built in 1956, they replaced with an 8,500 square foot home that utilized a waiver. So they were not subject to Ih. If they had been the square footage rate for a single family home is $15 and 34 cents, so they would have been subject to $130,000 in a cash and a contribution. So that's sort of an extreme example. But that's

[11:05] the sort of projects we're talking about. What would qualify someone like that for a waiver. So it's because the inclusionary housing program is only subject to what is considered new residential development. If you're removing a unit and replacing it with 3 year within 3 years. It's not considered new development. You're taking a unit out and putting it in with it. Okay, so you're not increasingly decreasing them exactly. Yeah. So this is the table that was in the memo. But basically just trying to make a point that there's been, you know, there's sort of a steady amount of these types of projects. It's not a huge number of projects that would be impacted. But the best like you can see on here. The vast majority of that sort of single family type of development is receives a waiver from the Ih standards. Have you calculated? Sorry if you go back to that previous slide. If you, if you sort of added up what's happened like, how much money would that translate into roughly?

[12:10] We haven't done that. Yeah, not very interesting to know, like, how much was Missed in significant addition is there, a way, you landed on 500 square feet for that class. Because I assume that matters what you're going to tell us next, I can kind of answer both one. We have quantified how much revenue. It would roughly being a typical year if you implemented a fee that would now apply to these projects. And 2. That was the consultants suggestion. I said, 500 square feet. Some communities so much higher threshold, others have none. And I. The reason we kind of landed on it is kind of for administrative ease. If you will not sure it'd be worth tracking down and ensuring compliance for every

[13:00] 50 square foot porch that gets turned into a room kind of thing. but a views were excluded correct? Well, so we haven't really entered into like how you would implement phase. That was a recommendation and a lot of other communities do that. So you have. You could do that. You have to figure out a way to sort of take out that square footage from Impacty. But the other rest I'll be on. The 500 is, you know, no number is probably perfect, and some people might think that's low. Other people might think it's high. But from our perspective. you know, we don't want someone who's just adding a bedroom and a bathroom to be subject subjected to a fee. Right? The idea is, it's large additions that contribute to our affordable housing challenges. But that's a policy question that we'll have to figure out through this process. What? What makes the most sense? Is it 500, or is something higher? And also what's stopping from someone to doing 500 here. Finish 499. Here, finish the project. 400.

[14:08] Yeah, is it cumulative? That's a good point. Pretty expensive to do it that way. You have to go building. So is that possible? If you really want to get around? I mean, that's a policy question, too. We could look at it, can you? Relatively, I don't know. We'd have to figure out how to make that work. So I'm not gonna go into details, but just wanted to point out that they found there is rational access between these types of projects and the need for affordable housing and based on their fundings or their findings. The consult recommends that you could do a square square foot fee up to $15 per square feet.

[15:01] And if you went above it. are you basically saying that it would disincentivize people to doing that. That's not the rationale for the fee we're saying that it would be harder to substantiate. There's a need for $15 a square foot if you went much higher than that that make sense. Just in terms of a schedule. We're just looking at sort of moving into that implementation stage in the spring and summer and then bringing back code changes in the fall. And we're also going to planning board next week to present, so you'll get double dose of it. And then city council. Let me. And then all

[16:14] it's like me. It says. Okay, so I've tried to boil down. What's a really long technical report? Lots of math in it into 10 min. Give or take. And by all means, if you have questions as I'm going through. We can just talk about them. It doesn't have to be. I talk, and you listen. As Sloan kind of mentioned, the just city hired us to perform this nexus analysis specifically for single unit projects that aren't subject to inclusionary zoning.

[17:05] In short, it's looking at how single family, home expansions, replacements, additions. create a nexus to affordable housing in boulder. By that I mean some kind of linkage that you can prove up or causal relationship. So one could be a demand nexus where higher income households that purchase and occupy these homes create a demand for affordable housing. The other one could be a supply nexus, meaning you're actually replacing what used to be affordable homes with 8,500 square foot homes. So we consider both. The short answer is, most of the study is on the so-called demand side of the equation. and that's kind of for a simple reason, being that. Yes. you're losing less expensive homes to tear down home additions, major remodels, and so forth. But a typical teardown lot in boulder will sell for

[18:03] 800,000 up to 2 or 3 million dollars. So as the city defines affordable housing, it's a long stretch to say that you're losing homes that used to be affordable to low, middle, moderate income households. So most of the study is about quantifying the so-called demand linkage to these types of projects. We I'm not gonna go through all the details, but we came up with 3 scenarios that we think kind of capture prototypical projects that are happening in boulder and the gist is we've got a smaller lot tear down a replacement which would replace a smaller home expanding by 1,600 square feet. We have one towards the larger end of the spectrum. That's expanding by 2,500 square feet. And then we've got one that's on the much smaller side. Getting to this question of

[19:04] Where do you draw the limit? Which is just a smaller home addition? So nothing is getting demolished per se. You're just adding couple of bedrooms and a second floor sort of thing. These prototypical, newer expanded homes are estimated to increase in value by roughly 900,000 to 3.5 million. Again, this is typically just an average. The annual income you'd need to purchase one of these expanded homes ranges from roughly 200,000 to 600,000 more, and you would be required if you were gonna purchase one of the prior homes. So at this point, it's what line number 3 of this table kind of walking you through the methodology. By way of example, we've kind of established 2 things or 2 connections, one which isn't really that surprising is that the new or expanded homes do sell for considerably more than the homes replacing, and 2, that the new homes are more likely to be occupied by higher income households.

[20:08] The next step in this linkage is to quantify how those households impact jobs, employment and workforce needs in boulder so based on an economic impact analysis of each one of these 3 typical scenarios. We've estimated that basically little less than one job or a little more than 2 jobs are likely to be created in boulder for each one of these home expansion projects. The last step is then to take. So you've got higher priced homes, higher income households spend more locally on goods and services. They create more jobs which attracts, workforce. The last step in this equation is sort of to estimate the resulting need for affordable housing units to house those folks. That's what I'm going to get to next.

[21:04] Sorry I skipped the spot the most important part on this is the bottom line of the table, which is how many jobs are generated. It's not a huge amount of employment for each one of these projects, but the city experiences somewhere between 50 and 75 a year. So for larger projects, yeah, there every 2 is adding another job in boulder. Sure of those jobs that are added. Do we also have an increase in in commuting to fill those jobs? Well, one of the assumptions that's in this long analysis is that most meaning. 2 thirds of the workers generated are assumed to be provided housing in boulder right? Meaning. We're not assuming that for every 10 jobs created, one person is housed and the other 9 are commuting in from Westminster or Longmont, or wherever we're providing housing for 2 thirds of the workers generated. And now, how is that assumption substantiated?

[22:11] It's based on It is just an assumption, I mean, right now. I don't know less than a quarter of people employed in boulder work in the community. But there's analysis. It looks at correct, sorry. That looks at where dual income households tend to live and work. The short answer is, it's an optimistic assumption, but that's kind of the reason for having a fee. In the 1st place. It's generating revenue to house people that work here, but can't afford to live here. So why wouldn't you have used a more realistic assumption rather than an optimistic assumption. Because that's that is Boulder's big problem, right? What percent of construction workers who work in boulder live here? That would be, or any of the jobs that are created by the bigger houses.

[23:05] Yeah, I absolutely agree. I think it's a great point. Yeah. The short answer is, it's an assumption that could be tinkered with. But if you're only gonna provide. you're gonna impose a fee providing housing for a small fraction of people. The fee is going to be pretty de minimis. both put it this way, most nexus studies. This is standard accepted practice. So it's not something that we're just pulling out a hat. We'll assume that all workers generated by new development are housed in the community. You look around. That's never the reality on the ground. But that's that's the impetus for having a fee. In the 1st place. If that makes sense. Also, part of it is is having an assumption that's legally defensible. Right? Correct. We could do this with a hundred percent of workers live in the community, and I don't think it would be

[24:05] inappropriate. So in some ways we're being conservative, I think, with this assumption. So what was the assumption? Again? Here, let's just take scenario. B, this, this analysis is basically telling you that every 2 larger teardown projects will generate one job in boulder. So if you can be. Assumption is that we're trying to build housing for all those people, not for 2 thirds of those people. 2 thirds. Correct. Hmm. I'll see you next week at planning work. It might be easier to illustrate this as I move further along. But let's revisit that topic and assume you agree with the workers and household generated by these tear down or expansion projects. We've quantified

[25:01] how many units would be needed, but we haven't addressed what it would cost to house those households. That's where these financing gaps. That's what we've called them, anyway. Anyways. become relevant. And part of this calculation. So basically, what we're quantifying is the difference in a typical cost between a market rate unit in boulder and a housing unit that would be affordable to these different income levels here on the screen. So let's take the example of a rental unit that's affordable to a worker household that's earning 50% of the Median income. We've estimated in the report that there's likely to be a gap about $140,000 that unit relative to a market price. And what this suggests is that somebody like the city could acquire an existing unit for, say, $300,000. They could reduce its cost by a hundred $40,000 with this hypothetical be revenue that you would be collecting.

[26:06] put a deed restriction on it, and then turn around and rent it to a worker, at 13 or 1,400 bucks a month, which would be quote affordable housing to somebody at that income level. We've kind of repeated this exercise for these different categories of housing that are coming from the cities. Current policies. We're not stretching here. To come up with what an average gap per affordable unit is when you wait it all. I mean, there's all types of different workers at different incomes that are generated from personal spending in the economy. The average is roughly $100,000 per affordable unit. And are you assuming these are like one bedrooms, or are you assuming this is like for families. No, it's in the report off the top of my head. It's roughly an equal mix of one and 2 bedroom units, so we're not assuming everybody gets a 4 bedroom detached home on a

[27:05] quarter acre lot. This is very modest existing housing. It's not again. I don't think it's stretching as far as what we're saying. This gap is so tell me again. This is saying that if the city contributed 136, $500. It would subsidize the rental rate for like a 1 or 2 bedroom apartment for somebody who is earning 50%. Ami. Correct? Okay. just want to make sure I understood I had to read the report like 3 or 4 times. That's an annual, and when you go to the home ownership is that annual, too, like that would be mortgage payment subsidy. No, this is the one time capital cost, if you will. I mean, you could buy existing apartments in Boulder for roughly, 300,000. We're saying the difference in rents to make something affordable to these income levels

[28:05] is a 1 time difference of roughly 140,000 for that income loan. So this is assuming that the city buys a unit and then rents it as opposed to like subsidizing the rent of something. It would be the same effects as far as calculating a fee. and I guess you could, instead of opposing it for you over time. Make it a ongoing sort of thing. But essentially, you'd be collecting a hundred $40,000 for this example. The city wouldn't necessarily have to buy the unit with that 140,000. They could keep it as a private unit and give the household 10,000 a year for 14 years to give them a rent voucher. If that makes any sense.

[29:02] yeah, it's not like the city is, gonna take that money and buy these specific units that are in as examples that money gets combined with right state and Federal sources. You know, when we talk about how we leverage local dollars with State and Federal, and we build opportunistically. but for the purposes of his analysis. He has to make certain assumptions about what the demand is who it's gonna serve for it to be a legally defensible feasibility study or nexus study. Thank you. Well, sir. so the last step in this long math equation. We've estimated the needs as a number of units per typical project. We've quantified what the gaps are. It's basically multiplying one by the other here. so the maximum fee for a smaller lot. Tear down replacement. Think of somewhere like South Boulder, with a lot of 8,000 square foot lots

[30:05] where you're not building a 6 million dollar home, but you are tearing down and replacing a small 1,000 square foot home. The maximum fee. According to the analysis we did is somewhere around $25,000 for that project. You go a little larger in size to a larger lot with a bigger home. It's probably around $45,000 per project. and for a smaller home edition. which again was 600 square feet. Right above this cut off we made, it'd be about $14,000 per project before I get into what we can. You go back just a little second, sure from my scene that the smaller. the more modest work that you're doing you're paying a higher fee. theoretically based on the nexus analysis. Yes, the fee per square foot could be a little bit higher. As I'll get to in a minute. We're suggesting just one fee for all projects, because this is kind of a

[31:11] how would I describe it? A byproduct of the sausage being made? It's not to suggest that we're trying to get into the weeds about this size of project has one fee. This. Yeah? So it's literally just an analyt analytical result. Not because we're being sneaky and trying to suggest that the city charge smaller projects for fees, and vice versa. I had that same exact question that was my 1st one to discuss. But the other piece is that it. It's a fairly small overall fee right with Andy saying, so you're doing 600 square foot 600 times 15, whereas if you're doing a $1,200. That's gonna be significantly higher. Yeah. But if you're only adding 600 square feet, your budget's probably tied 14. And it's gonna look like a big number.

[32:03] I'm thinking, like the 1st time home buyer in Boulder, who still needs a ton of money to buy a home. But they buy the house. Then they decide they want to have a kid, and they need another bedroom, and that's 14,000 bucks. The city of Boulder, plus the expense to subsidize affordable housing. These people are like, we can barely, if I afford the smallest home in South Boulder for a million dollars. You know, we're getting taxed by the city. Yeah. My honest response would be, we did consider that kind of what you're referring to. And even this 3rd scenario scenario C, which is somewhat modest. Addition. To buy a house, expand it, hire a contractor, I mean, you're talking well above 2 million dollars. All in. So I'm not. Again it gets back to the initial point. I'm not sure this is really for a 600 square foot addition. No, no, not to build the project, I'm saying, to acquire an existing home.

[33:09] add on, I mean, 800,000 for the cheapest free market home in Boulder, plus a 600 square foot addition like, that's not 2 million dollars. Can I say something? In response to Chip's point? I would just. I would just point out that there is. There is no path to market rate affordability through single family homes. It's just not a sustainable, affordable model. So I I I just sort of flat out disagree with you, Chip, that that's a viable approach that we should be hanging on to. And I'll review our recommendations. I mean, we're not. This is the 1st presentation of this. So in some ways it's up for you all to decide. A lot of communities will exempt home additions altogether.

[34:01] we're just trying to be more thorough and help you work backwards rather than the other the other way around and say. why didn't you think of this? Before I get to some of those? Just some quick examples we discussed with James Sloan, and I think the gist is. I'm not. I forget how you describe this, Sloan, but not sure. There really are other examples out there that would be directly analogous to boulder. There's not really that many cities anywhere that even have these kind of fees to begin with, and the ones that do. It's a whole haphazard mix of different ways to do it, and which projects are required which ones aren't. To give you a few examples. Evanston, Illinois. wealthy community north side of Chicago, another college town. They started somewhat of a trend in suburban Chicago of creating a demolition tax.

[35:02] This is, do you demolish 50% or more of a home, you'd pay a flat tax. There's no discussion of how large the home is, what it's replacing. Denver, just down the road. They have linkage fees that apply to any residential project smaller than a certain threshold, including single family homes. They exempt home additions less than 400 square feet. Los Angeles, you know, huge urban municipality, the exempt home additions, smaller than 1,500 square feet, but they have higher fees for projects that do apply aspen. They have don't want to misstate what they're called, but basically mitigation requirements that would apply to the types of projects we're talking about. There's complicated formulas about how much of the home you demolish and what's the fee schedule that applies to you? But the gist is the fees are very high, 40 to $50 a square foot.

[36:02] Our recommendations are just based on the analysis we did from Boulder. We're not just trying to copycat other places, although I think the the results are similar to the fees you already do have for single family projects that would apply, which in a way gives me some comfort that we're not misstating or overreaching anything. So we've suggested a slow mention just to have the one per square foot fee that would apply to above ground area. So we're not talking about finishing a basement and so forth. we've suggested the city should phase in the fee to see how it goes, and then thereafter, you know, periodically adjust as conditions change. Lastly, we've already discussed this, but we've suggested exempting smaller projects. Could be less than 500, more than 500. It's not really gonna change our analysis per se. We suggest exempting 80 use.

[37:00] And then some communities like Denver, you know they'll make reasonable exceptions if your home is destroyed in a flood or fire, or something to that extent. On the topic of well, how much revenue have we been missing out or living on the table? Considering the typical number of projects in a year that occur. That would be what we're talking about, as in more than 500 square feet at a $15 square foot fee just across the board. We think it's probably around 1.2 million dollars. So 1 million to a million and a half dollars a year of additional revenue you could use along the lines of what Jay suggested. To give you some additional perspective. Among the examples I just talked about. the fee in Boulder would be, you know. 24 to 38,000 for teardowns. Less than 10,000 for a smaller home edition.

[38:00] If you look at Aspen, these same exact projects would more or less at a 0 almost in some instances. So you're talking, you know, 100 and 12 to a hundred $80,000 for teardowns. The fees we came up with. They're frankly very similar to what would apply in Denver, which I do think is probably your most comparable area in terms of housing prices. I mean the Median home price in Aspen is like 14 million. So Boulder is very expensive and in the same state. But I'm not sure that it's the same situation. And there's a whole. the whole section of the report that gives examples. If you want them. Yeah, I was, gonna say, I'm done. So let's talk about it. You know the elephant in the room. It's land value. Boulder has got the green belt, and that makes our land finite. Is that? How is that taken in as a factor for even the smallest

[39:08] single family detached house is going to have a huge price tag because of the land. How how is land impacted your study land value? It's explained in the report. Maybe not those terms. But they back up here to get to this as far as land value goes, I think they're kind of landlocked also. So to get to this I guess maybe the second line increase in typical value. That's kind of what's driving these estimates of the so-called demand nexus. Oh, so a big chunk of A or B. The majority of it is buying the land. You're paying a million to forget what our estimate was, but almost 2 million dollars to buy a lot and knock down the home. So we are. This does recognize it

[40:03] so that increase in typical home value dollar is relative to what relative to the existing homes that are roughly a million to 2 million dollars. If that makes sense. it does. That's okay. I'll read closely before the meeting. I think. Correct me if I'm wrong. But what you're getting at is like in Boulder. So much of our the value of real estate is tied to the land, not the house that's sitting on it. You know the the houses in South Boulder are worth what they're worth, because the land they're on, not the fact that they're this mid-century ranch with one bathroom. and I think you're saying the like formula here is purely tying into square footage as opposed to like land value. Is that right? I just wonder. I mean. It's such a significant factor in in kind of personalizing the results to boulder rather than this is just, you know, looking at a process of

[41:04] land value being increased by doing demolitions and additions. Boulder's got that basic land cost that, I would think would skew things. It's reflected in here. We didn't copy this from another city. It's all I mean. We researched it. We talked to builders frankly, so we're well aware that the reason I mentioned that the onset. You're not really losing affordable housing is because a lot in South Boulder is worth a million dollars to somebody else. So the way I would describe. It is the reason you've seen this happen in Boulder is because you have high land values. This doesn't happen. doesn't even happen in frankly, the eastern part of Boulder. It's very specific to Broadway and West more based on what's happened in the last several years. Anyways. So yes, it would be a citywide policy. But

[42:00] you know you're not seeing teardowns and gun barrel area because the land value is not this high. It wouldn't be financially feasible to buy somebody's home for a million dollars, because there's a different housing market. So we're kind of speaking nerdy economist language. But I'm not worried that we're not capturing them. What you're referring to, which is, yes, I think in a way, we're confirming it. The land values are high. There's a market for these types of homes and people are willing to. they frequently millions of dollars, just for a lot. Just kind of proving your point. So so in your analysis is, are there any strategies that can be brought forth that starts to kind of neutralize land value? No, we're specifically looking at this one nuanced topic of what Fee could be legally defensible for the projects that

[43:02] you're not proposing anything on right now. She's asking you if you have some ideas how to do. My gut reaction to this is this could potentially be very controversial politically. Just, we're proposing a tax on homeowners in boulder like that's who's gonna get taxed by this, no one else, and for 1.2 million dollars that doesn't seem like a ton of money to me. Is there a better way to raise 1.2 million dollars. And is there a way to do it where we tax people who don't even live here? That's that's more politically. Are you talking about the replacement homes or the additions to me? They're 2 different things. I think there's different logic that goes in. These are just kind of gut reaction. I definitely am more opposed to the idea of taxing the additions. I think it's more politically palatable to tax a tear down

[44:08] but I I think we have to sort of listen to the community and say, to what extent does this upset people who live here and vote here? And when I say, you know, tax people who don't live here I just think like we have other taxes like Boulder makes a ton of money off of sales tax, because we have so many people. People who live here have to pay sales tax, too. But we also have so many people coming in and shopping here, and then we generate all this revenue off of people who don't live here. The 1.2 here would come exclusively from landowners who presumably live in Boulder. So you know it's just well they may not already be here. They may be buying, buying a modest home and then demolishing it or renovating it, to to reflect what they want it to be. And so

[45:01] I I think a million 2. It won't solve the problems. But but if it provides funding so that there's a larger bucket of money to create more affordable housing, then it's then it's sort of yeah, and taxing the wealthier to support, the less. And I agree with you, Karen. I I think you know there's a good distinction, that whole notion between a remodel and a a teardown. But really, you know, when we're talking about making recommendations, which is a really big part of it, I think making recommendations to exclude remodels under a certain square footage, etc. Then you're really kind of starting to point it at the area you want to point it at, and then it starts hitting a really important thing. And and it's not 1.2 in lieu of generating revenue somewhere else. It's 1.2 that can be captured, because this has been going on, and it really ends up. You know the the and I absolutely agree with the points that were made regarding, you know, having this legally defensible. But you know that, said

[46:11] the, the reality is, then you lose the ability to capture the cost of some of the esoteric loss of neighborhoods, etc, right and South Boulder's. Excuse me, a poster child, for that. So I think it's great. I think it's really important to do. I think it's it's a Achilles heel right now, because there's nothing going on on it, and I lived in South Boulder, I can tell you. There's people who lived in South Boulder, and whose kids went there could not find a house there in large part, because every house that was bought became a teardown. It's it's endemic over there. And so something like this helps to deal with the accounting of that. You know. It's not going to stop it, but it helps generate revenues, and it helps kind of put that balance out there and and help send a message that you know we're worried about how we affect neighborhoods by letting this go without having the same kind of expectations that we'd have on other developments.

[47:06] So that's my thing with it. I mean, I think it's great. I think the study's great, so. Well, I think, to Danny's point, when analyzing this, we should address from the perspective of generating revenue. But also, how much do we want to deter people from changing the character of their neighborhood. There's there's 2 goal or there's I wouldn't say there's 2 goals, but there's 2 outcomes associated with this policy. One is making money for affordable housing, and the other is present. It's just going to deter development, and I think we should look at both angles. I think and and maybe you could talk to a little bit about this. The feasibility analysis that you did. Yeah. So part of a legally acceptable nexus study is, you have to take what you're recommending and conclude that it's not going to make projects infeasible, or else you wouldn't be allowed to have, whatever the fee is. In the 1st place, at least they'd be at odds with one another, so I don't think

[48:01] the fees we've come up with for most projects. They're not gonna be enough to disturb somebody from purchasing a home and completing a new 4 million dollar home. We're talking around a half percent of the prices these homes would sell for. So yeah, some projects. If I'm a homeowner and I might have done that addition. And now I've got a $10,000 fee. Maybe that's what scratches it off my list. But I think for the most part it's not gonna be deterring this activity in my my thoughts or impression on this topic. Having done studies like this all over for a long time, is there's 2 types. One is we're gonna have a fair nexus. And we're gonna generate revenue that we're not collecting to compensate for whatever impacts are created. It's an honest thing. The other type is, we're gonna do a study, and we're gonna make sure it results with fees that are so high that nobody in their right mind will ever tear down a home in Boulder, and we don't know which

[49:06] side we're on. We did more of the 1st side. But I think it's going to be hard to make the fees so high, because it would be very challenging to defend them if and when the wealthy homeowner sues you, which does happen in places like aspen, which have gigantic fees because it's worth their while to do that. So let me make sure I understand. Let's say I'm scenario B, and I'm going to renovate a house that's now going to be worth like 3 and a half 4 million dollars. I only have to pay $37,000 to get a 3 like I feel like that's not very much. So. Let's be clear about what a renovation is versus an addition. Right? So if you're renovating existing square footage, this doesn't apply right? I just want to be clear about that. It's only if you're adding another room, another floor

[50:02] adding to your footprint. Right? Yeah. But if I'm adding to my footprint, and as a result, I'm gonna have a 3.5 million dollar house. I don't. I feel like $37,000 is like, that's they probably spend more on bathroom tiles like, I I kind of feel like that's not well, and I would say, that's scenario. Be! What was it like? A 3,500 square foot home, or something like that? So since it's a square feet square foot fee. If in that sort of extreme example it would be much higher, because it would. You know, it'd be 8,500 square feet times 15. Does that help? I don't know. I just wonder if 15 is too low. Maybe not for the scenario C, but if we're trying to, wasn't it? $23? What was the $23? It was 15 to $20. When they do the math we've laid out. We're suggesting you

[51:07] avoid getting into the weeds and just pick one number to the 18. There's the backup to suggest why it's reasonable. But to your point again, the purpose of this. The nexus is that you're charging a fee that's proportionate with the needs of the impacts you're generating. So and what percent of the 1.2 million that's generated goes into enforcing this like, how much is left over? I assume the money. You know, we're gonna have to enforce this. Somehow. People have to go out there do inspections you have to pay city salaries is that is that good work? We haven't made an estimate of that. But that's 1 reason for picking up minimum cut off for projects that would, I mean. you know, for small projects. It probably wouldn't be worth the costs and benefits of administrating it and collecting the piece. But that's more for city staff to answer your typical development. New project. Oh, sorry! Go ahead, Danny.

[52:10] I was gonna say so about 15 years ago, we did this in Summit County with an impact fee very analogous. The 1st thing is in terms of inspection. It's part and parcel as part of the building permit. Process. Right? You know you have to bring in your plans. You have plans review. You have everything like that. You can maybe throw an additional be in there for plans. Review, but it really becomes just part of the whole thing. There's no really way to navigate around it unless you don't get a building permit, which is an incredibly ill-advised path to take for anybody. I've had some clients that have had to deal with that with. But I think the the other part of it, too, just getting back to that whole notion. So the impact fee that we had anybody who's been in Summit County knows there's certainly no shortage of ridiculous trophy homes, and there continues to be right. So what you can do, you know, I guess we're in a weird time in terms of of

[53:01] you know, government. But you know, typically, you know, government's got its restraints. And you know these are the things we can do, and we don't do when we follow the law, and from that I think the whole notion is we're speaking as as firmly, horizontally as we can about you know where. You know we're looking at things and moving forward. And I think that's the whole notion of where there's a policy perspective, there's no way to stop it but to account for it and to and then for the people who do live here already, because really, I don't think, you know, like I was just talking about all those teardowns that I saw. I don't. I don't think anybody that did one of those teardowns live there and then move back in, you know, because they usually take a year and a half anyhow. So typically and I and I've seen tons of them, and I have friends who or contractors and stuff. So I guess the point is, it accomplishes a lot, even if it accomplishes a little. That's my thought on it. So. I have a clarifying question. I think so. I think I misunderstood something. So that 1st recommendation applying to net new. So if it was a house that was 2,500 square feet.

[54:12] They demolish it, and then it's they build a 5,000 square foot. The per square foot fee is for that. Whatever that difference is, somebody do the math. 2,500, not the total 5,000. That's what we've suggested it. It's just a map, meaning you could say, the the amounts here, maximum fee per expanded home. Those are fixed. It's just a matter of if you're gonna have a per square foot fee. Do you charge on everything? I we're suggesting that just make more intuitive sense when we're talking about what we're talking about, which is expanding homes to get people thinking about. It's on the additional square footage. You know what I mean. But again, wouldn't bother us to do either way. Yeah.

[55:15] you ready to go to the questions you want us to answer. So we are you done with your presentation? Yes, everybody done with their questions. It was a very helpful presentation. Thank you. So I think what the Board is supposed to do is. do we have any feedback do do you want or like? Are we thumbs up in thumbs, Downing, we're just listening. You're providing input to staff. Okay, here's my opinion. I love the idea of capturing additional funds for affordable housing by addressing things that we haven't sort of taxed before. Right, and there is a lot of the before and after the $800,000 before house, and the 2.5 million dollar after house. And so I like this solution of charging for demolition and renovation.

[56:14] I I don't know if $15 per square foot is the right answer. I don't have to decide that, but I do think this solution, as well as like the empty housing tax, which is something that is being fancied about as well or just ways to figure out. How can we provide more affordable housing for the people who want to live here and who do work here. But in I like that point. I mean tax policy. That's 1 of the big tools government has. I like the idea we have to tax. We have to generate revenue, but we can be selective and how we do it. And I don't love the idea of taxing

[57:00] someone who owns one house and lives in it and taxing them on the work. They need to do that to that house to make it more livable for them or their family. I do like the idea of taxing corporations that own multiple homes in boulder and do develop them like that. I know it has a trickle down effect on buyers in the end, but I just feel like hitting a homeowner with a tax when they want to do a modest expansion. Versus, perhaps a new buyer who wants to tear something down and build something that's twice the size. We are looking at sort of different scenarios here, and I think we should try to be as respectful as we can to people in our community who are trying their hardest to buy a free market single family home in Boulder. I I know that if you're buying a house in Boulder that means you're rich, but some people aspire to do that one day might take 20 years of savings, and then to get hit with a gut punch by the city, saying, you saved all this long. You gotta pay more because you want to have a kid or something. I don't know. I think we can be. I think we can be a little more

[58:08] mindful of who's going to be affected by this tax policy when designing it as opposed to looking at it purely from just a square footage perspective. Would you propose or dream of there not being this additional tax? If it's a an addition, or do you would you feel would you like it better if the square footage were. You know anything? Over a thousand square foot is maybe one or 2 bedrooms right, or a living room of sorts. I mean 500 square feet about the entire unit I live in. So I live in a 600 square foot, one bedroom condo. So depending what you're trying to accomplish, you know. That could be a living room expansion with maybe a guest room. It could be a relatively modest addition. I would be in favor of increasing that threshold to a thousand.

[59:10] probably, which a thousand square foot addition is obviously a significant expansion to be home. I guess the other way you could frame it is instead of just square foot. Did you ever consider saying any addition that increases the existing footprint by X percent, then falls in the tax. Because. you know, 500 square feet for one house might be a lot and 500 square feet for another house. Might not that could be. Perhaps you know another way of looking at it. If it's a hundred percent increase of the home's current footprint, we're clearly doing something big to the home. or if it's a 25, maybe not. If you go up, then you shouldn't have to pay it. But if you expand your footprint you do have to pay. No, I'd say, I guess if you're going up. Does that factor into this square footage formula as well, I imagine. Yeah. But you're just looking like, if a thousand square foot home, the 2,000 square foot home expands to

[60:13] 3,000. That's a 33% increase. You're obviously changing the neighbor the nature of that building significantly. But if a 4,000 square foot home goes to 5,000, that's not as big of an expansion. That's just a thought. The other thing I've purchased a 4,000 square foot home, and you're about to increase 5,000 square feet. I don't think you're going to have problems with like. spent a ton of money for a very small house in Boulder. And I I think we don't want to impose additional barriers if they need to expand that small house. Yeah, something that we discussed with Jane Sloan and. We don't have any great ideas, so we didn't make recommendations on it. But, mainly in other States, where the State laws are different still have exemptions for homeownership

[61:06] any, if you lived in the home for 5 years, demolish it and you but final. not a deed, but a covenant that you're gonna live there for another 5 years. You don't pay any any of the fee, and if you sell it prior to them, like you're on the fast one, and you're gonna flip it. You owe them the fee it would be hard to. I think it might be hard to do here, but administration is that we want to incentivize families and working people to be in Boulder. I wonder if there's an income component to it like. so if you're below, you don't. You're basically in, you'd have to income, qualify

[62:00] to get a waiver for them. Yeah, yeah, this is in administration. Yeah, I I just wanted to. Give give a few comments I appreciated Karen's summary. And I basically agree with most of what she said. I think you know just kind of filling in this gap. It seems kind of like a loophole that that seems unfair to other developers building new housing. I guess one thing I would say about Chip's last comment about about expanding homes is, I guess I would just also reiterate that like there's there's no path to affordability in any market rate approach through single family home. That ship has sailed a long time ago. The the notion that someone might buy the smallest house they could and expand it so they could have a child. That's a very endearing scenario, and I'm sure that's true for some people the overwhelming statistical

[63:12] trend right now is that fewer and fewer people are living in larger and larger homes, and we should not be incentivizing that in any way we should be disincentivizing that. And so I think I would be. I would be reluctant to carve out an exemption for expansions in the on the single family home side, I think in terms of like expanding affordable housing. We have to focus on other kinds of missing middle housing and and figuring out how to raise revenues. And I think this is one nice kind of simple way to fill in a gap in in an already existing program. I wouldn't anticipate a lot of extra overhead to implement this versus the ongoing program for inclusionary housing fees. So anyways, that's that's kind of my my overall comments. Thanks for the presentation.

[64:14] And circling back to your point. How many people like live in a house and then decide they want to like, flip it and then sell it like on the back end, like, I feel like it's mostly people buy a new and then flip it to live in it, or a developer comes in and just flips it. But how often do you see someone who's lived someone for 15 years at the end of 15 years, said, I'm gonna do all this work so that I can sell it for a bigger profit. Is that in your line of businesses that seems like it would be less common today. So I tend to do more commercial, not residential. Do you think that before you sell your house you you spruce it up a little bit right like you're paying. Make it make it look better. But I don't think you're adding rooms. So so I think most of what this analysis was was people who are coming into the market

[65:04] who are buying an 800,000 starter home, demolishing it and building and and replacing it, or they're buying a single story ranch, and then they're popping the top, and they're doing extensive renovation, and they'll probably live in it, or maybe one of several homes that they own, but it's but it's making it so that there's fewer and fewer viable starter homes like I'm I'm really in support of this concept of a homestead exemption for people who people get a break for living in their house, and that's their only house and living it as opposed to the developer who owns 10 houses or someone. You know. This is their auxiliary home, and perhaps maybe like an exclusion for someone who has lived in their house for certain amount of time. You know, I think we want to make housing.

[66:01] and I feel if I 100% hear you, it's even if you own one house in Boulder, and it's cheapest house in Boulder. You must be doing well, and that's not particularly affordable, but I think to the extent we can give people a break when they are that single fit. This is my only house in boulder, as opposed to the person who. Oh, this is one of my 7 homes that I visited. and it's worth 5 million dollars like, I don't know that I want you to have an exemption like I think the goal of this is to is to is to either retain starter homes, or, if you can't discourage Mcmansions, at least generate funds from the Mcmansions to support affordable housing, so I understand your goal of like, oh, can you just give a break to somebody who who finally purchased a house? But if they purchased a house for 2 million bucks. I don't know that I

[67:03] or renovated a house so that it's now worth 2.5 million bucks. I don't know why, I'm giving them an incentive because they're going to live there. Well, here's a hypothetical. What if we doubled or tripled the fee that said, If you live there for 5 years. You don't have to pay. you know that that makes that more palatable. So can I suggest instead of having this policy discussion. Now we wait. So part of that. The other feedback we wanted was the process that we're proposing because there has to be. You know, community engagement. We're we're just sharing the consultants report right now. And these are all things that are gonna have to be discussed in more detail later time. So anything else that you want to share with Staff. Thank you for your analysis, and thank you for sharing it with us. Yeah, thank, you. You're welcome. I have a kind of a broad question. Sure.

[68:02] Can I ask a question? Attempted? So the goal of the project. As I understand it, the way it's been presented is to Do this study, and as a means to understand how it impacts housing and affordability or not. So the problem of scrapes and large additions has an impact to the land, right? Just coverage, etc. lose groundwater, recharge, higher key islands, etc. So there's land. There's neighborhood consequences changing the character of neighborhoods suddenly you have no views anywhere. It's all locked in. It's so those are impacts and housing. So there's 3 major areas

[69:04] that these large demolitions and scrapes impact. And I'm just wondering. Or the impacts to the land or the impact to the neighborhoods. Did those play a role, and if not. why not? Were you instructed not to only to look at? No, we were instructed not to look at that. But we were. We're specifically quantifying you mentioned it. How these projects impact affordable housing. So this is specifically an affordable housing impact fee. If you were to if the city were to implement it. I suppose you could. These other categories right? Have a impact fee. But I'm not smart enough to figure out how you would quantify that in the dollar amount as far as changing neighborhood character. And you know, I know there's property rights and lawsuits all the time about views. So that's pretty well established. But that's a tax policy in boulder

[70:09] if we don't look at it holistically, you know that like we talked about the housing creates jobs. But do those jobs create more in commuters? I mean, it's you've got to look at the whole. And I think I mean, I live right here in this neighborhood. Somebody was talking one of the online people about South Boulder being completely new. You wouldn't recognize it right? So the impacts are both soft and hard, and it seems that to to capture at least, if nothing else, say we understand that there's these other things as well. We're only going to look at this piece, but to acknowledge that it's in a context that we talk about livability. We talk. We're doing redoing the Boulder Valley Comp plan this year, which are the values and aspirations for the city. I think that these kinds of any anytime we take on a study or look at how do we solve problems in our city? It makes sense to at least start holistically and then say, Well, we're gonna reduce it down. But we're not gonna forget.

[71:15] you know, that there's these other things that are being impacted as well, and how that's how unexpected solutions come to the table right when you leave these little things out there. But you know it's out there. It's impacting. You know the neighborhood leanness when you can't see everybody's got the tall buildings or the fact that, you know suddenly Goose Creek isn't getting recharged because all everything's paid. These are big impacts. And I'm just, you know nothing particular about your beautiful study. I'm just curious that we don't or how do we? I think that's put the holistic lens. So what we identified is a big gap.

[72:02] So you can tear down a house and build a new one, and even you might pay impact fees, but probably not a lot, certainly not towards affordable housing. whereas if you build a brand new house on a vacant lot, you pay significant amount. So again. Just bring us back to that equity piece. So we're trying to make sure that everybody who's perfect has an impact on affordable housing is paying someone a fee. Right? But all these other things, I mean, yeah, I mean, stormwater is measured, based on your area of imperviousness. Right? So that's how you measure that, and sort of affordable housing has this nexus feed? Stormwater has, you know, different measure. So it's figuring out what is the appropriate measure. And how do you assess if they're on private property, how do you mitigate? You know some cities? If you tear down a tree you have to plant, you know, X number of trees of a certain diameter to replace, however much standard, you took down same thing with our compatible development standards. Right? So

[73:12] I mean, that's designed to protect views to protect. You know, basically monstrous bulk, bulky buildings. But it's applied city wide, right? So they still have to meet all of those things to achieve those community objectives right? But this is really just focused on affordable housing. Right? That I mean, unfortunately, that does happen right? We've got to focus on on the things that come to us. But you know my land always tries to get bigger and see well, how can we add a little additional. But thank you for indulging the question. You know I I know, probably wasn't in the scope of your of your project, but

[74:01] you know it's impossible not to think holistically great. Thank you. Awesome. Thanks for having me. Yes, okay, let's switch which topics. So Dr. Cog, thank you for your patience sharing here. you guys can get started and take a minute. Great couple of seconds. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for having us. I'm Sheila Lynch. I think everybody before the meeting I'm Sheila Lynch. I'm the Director of Regional Planning and Development at Denver Regional Council of Government, and I'm joined by my colleague

[75:02] Alright. who is our manager of data, science and analytics. And we're really excited to share the work we've started around housing, and we hope it's helpful to the city of Boulder and we thought I'd start with a little bit of background on. Dr. People probably generally know who we are, and and the work that we do, and then a little bit of background on. Why we entered into this conversation around housing. Think! Up to the next one great. So Dr. Cog is a regional planning organization. We serve 59 local governments. Now, we just added one more this past couple of months. And we tend to talk about our work in 3 key areas, one in the transportation and mobility space. We are a metropolitan planning organization, which means that's a federal designation that has us playing a role in terms of facilitating transportation, planning conversations and also transportation investments. We also work in the space of regional planning.

[76:12] So we through State statutory authority, we are a regional planning entity, and I'll talk more about what we do in that space. In just a moment. And then the 3rd area that we work in is aging and disability resources. We are an area agency on aging. The boundaries of that are a little bit different, because Boulder actually has an area agency on aging. So Boulder is not included in the one that Dr. Cobb manages. But in that regard we are engaged in direct services to policy advocacy to really see how we can really support healthy aging across our region. Okay? So in our role as a regional planning council. One of the things we do is adopt a regional plan. We refer to that regional plan as Metro vision. The 1st metro vision was adopted in 1997. Our last major update was in 2017. And what you see on the screen is an objective that's included in our current version the one that was adopted in 2017, and I should say it was adopted unanimously across the 58 Member Governments that were involved at the time.

[77:21] and we were very intentional about including housing in that plan. At the time. Dr. Cog didn't have necessarily programs or initiatives specifically focused on housing, but we knew how important housing was to building a strong region next slide. Another bit of context I want to mention is that back in 2021, the bipartisan infrastructure Bill made some changes around how we do transportation planning and expanded to include housing as one of the planning factors that we need to consider in our transportation planning work. Now I will say that

[78:00] Dr. Cobb had been thinking about housing and its nexus with transportation for quite some time. But what this change did is it opened up some opportunity to actually use transportation, planning, funding to consider housing, to develop assessments and planning. I'm sorry. So one of the things that we are basing our work on is the is the construct of that housing markets are reaching. We know that people. You all just had this lively discussion about how people are making choices around housing, and we know that people are making choices around housing that really transcend local jurisdictional boundaries. And so in that case. we realize that in thinking about housing and moving towards creating solutions around housing, we need to be thinking at the regional scale. We need to develop be developing policies, programs, initiatives that really address housing

[79:02] beyond just a jurisdictional boundary. So when Dr. Cobb launched this work. About 3 years ago. One of the things that our local governments told us was that there are many great things happening around housing at the local level. You all were just discussing wonderful policy that you may consider, and I know Boulder has done many other policy initiatives and programs to really address affordable housing across your city. and at the same time we heard there are many things we can't tackle alone. We can't tackle one city at a time, and so in that our board had some very intentional conversations about, okay. So there's a need to convene regionally around housing. But how should we start that work. So we decided that starting with a regional housing needs assessment, really understanding the scale and scope of housing need regionally was a very good foundational way to start.

[80:02] and that we intend to then bridge that into developing a housing strategy that we have already started to kick off, and we'll be working on over the next year, and we are very committed to seeing this work be sustained in some way, and so we believe the best way to do that is to integrate that into our regional planning work. So, seeing this integrated into our next upgrade update to metro vision, our regional plan. So our regional housing needs assessment. We organized it into 3 key parts. The 1st was a deep dive data analysis to really understand the scale and scope of housing need. The second part was a systems, barriers, analysis. We will talk to many stakeholders to try to understand. So what are the barriers that are getting in the way of addressing housing need across the region. and then the last piece, because we knew we were moving into developing a regional housing strategy. We spent some time asking stakeholders, how should we be framing that strategy? And what should we be thinking about as we launch that strategy?

[81:06] So we throughout this process, we're very intentional about engaging stakeholders across many different sectors. We held focus groups, interviews. We even convened conversations hosted by different groups. And throughout you can't see it at the bottom. But we had an advisory group that helped guide us both in developing the process for the needs assessment and then weighing in on throughout the process as we were doing some data analysis just helping us understand if what we were discovering really resonated. And so the the groups that you see on the slide represents who we engage throughout the process, but also our advisory group. So I'm gonna pass it on to Zack Zach's gonna take us through the data analysis. So before we get too far, I'm just gonna kind of point out some of the key findings that we were. That we're looking at. So 1st is that

[82:09] while there have been moves in housing construction in the region we're still behind on production compared to population growth. So there has been a lot of building, and it continues to be a lot of building. But we're not keeping pace. Quick. Question. Yeah. Do you know, the last time the region was able to keep up with demand. I would guess it was oil and gas cost. so that would be my guess. But I'd have to look for sure. Yeah. Can I ask a ask a question about this 1st point? Do you happen to have a graph of finished square foot of housing per population?

[83:04] And or number of bedrooms as a function of population. We could probably get closer for number of bedrooms just because of estimates out of census data is that. I would love to know that. What? Which? Which way that is trending. If there's more bedrooms per person, or less bedrooms per person. Yeah. And that's something we can pull out of census data. And we've also kind of used. Yeah, but. Measure around under housed, where you have particularly high number of persons living in a house relative to the number of bedrooms or rooms. Yeah, I mean, I'm not. I'm not trying to undermine the need for more housing. But I I do always kind of want to think about also the distribution of the current housing that we have.

[84:02] because if if the actual ratio of bedrooms to people is is continuing to go up. there's there's maybe more to think about than just adding more supply. Yeah 100%. And and a lot of that will be kind of borne out in the Ami bins that we're seeing smaller households, lower income households. Are where the need is greatest, and and the housing affordable at that level is going to tend to be smaller. Yeah, of course. Thank you. Kind of the second point here. Low income households are. Really, the largest portion of need. And then that's really being driven in part by this 3rd point, there's an aging population and generally smaller households. So more working adults are gonna those households tend to have higher income

[85:05] as people as households age, they tend to have lower income, and there are going to be an increase in number of single adult older households which will have particularly low income and also have specific housing needs. And finally, the kind of the type of housing available, and the affordability is very unevenly distributed across the region, which obviously won't be a surprise to this group. So we're gonna walk through these steps to kind of just give a really high, level. Description of methodology. For this needs assessment at its most basic. What we're really looking at is just supply and demand in the future. And then we kind of back that back to the present to see how much need there is currently. So if we

[86:00] estimate how many housing units we'll have in the future. That's relatively straightforward. We know how many housing units. Roughly, we have. Now we use census data to get an idea of what portion of those are derelict. Don't have kitchens, don't have running water, which portions of them are likely to be demolished. And then we look at future demand which is fairly directly coming from the State demography office. So they give us forecasts on population and households. And we then use some of our forecasting to distribute that around the region. The next steps, we basically take both the supply and the demand side and figure out where it's sitting in terms of income bins around ami. So look at the housing unit. How affordable is it? And then look at the household, and this, then we can separate out this estimated need by income bid.

[87:07] The 3rd step was, we define regional submarkets. These sub markets. We kind of required that they be contiguous, and we used commuter data to kind of let algorithms try as best as possible to set these up as commuter sheds so that they're more contiguous housing markets where possible. Next, we defined a model to distribute that need to the sub markets. And then we used basically the exact same model where we have the data. From those sub markets to the local level. Importantly, this distribution to the sub markets and the local level. it's just the number of households. So the distribution of need by ami that's fixed at the region level, and all

[88:06] sub markets and local jurisdictions are estimated to have the same proportion of need at all. The ami bids. So none of the factors that go into these are are determining where higher or lower income households are needed. Okay, so here's where we get to the big number 511,000 new housing units by 2050. If we back that up through to 2032 to get kind of a a shorter term policy window. We're looking at about 200,000 new units for the region. and that could be like condos, apartments, houses, anything, any number of bedrooms? Is there like a Median? No, but we're gonna see that there are different ami bins of need. And then necessarily, we kind of expect those higher ami bins to be larger units.

[89:06] Here we've broken out. The current need separately from the future need. Current need is coming from 2 places. One is is an estimation of what we kind of call missing households. So we looked at historical headship rates in the census data and then compared those to current. So are there more adults living together that wouldn't have previously? Are there more children that have moved back home. How have those headship rates changed? And and we kind of can then estimate how many units we would have if we had kind of a a better functioning housing market. The other piece of current need is for unhoused households, and that's mostly coming from service outreach from Metro Denver homeless initiative. So they gave us counts of of persons and households that have

[90:10] reached out for services, and we make some assumptions about household size for households as opposed to persons to end up with a homeless number. Roughly, that's probably in the 30 to 35,000 for the unhoused households, and the remainder being kind of missing households. Here we can see the ami breakdown, so the shaded box is the current supply, and then the section at the top is the need by Ami band. So we can see there's still going to be a fair amount of need for higher income or fire. Higher income. Housing units. But the bulk of it is going to be in these 0 to 30 and 30 to 60 ami bins.

[91:07] Something to consider about this. This methodology. Is that what we're really looking at is out into the future. If we kind of rearrange everybody into levels of ami and trying to ensure that the households are not housing burdened. This is how we kind of hit those levels. So there are going to be people with lower income, living currently in more expensive house housing units. That would be people with higher income living and less expensive. This analysis kind of matches everybody up into their ami bin. So it's important to also think about that. We're we're we're really trying to point out in some ways where the kind of pain, point and burden will land. If we don't improve the housing market, it's not going to land in these higher ami bins. It's going to be in these lower ones where we see these large number of households that are going to be housing burdened.

[92:15] This is just pointing out the sub markets that were defined. We use some algorithms to kind of make to try to get commute sheds except for the West. Because it's it's mountainous. And demography office has much tighter restrictions on what they expect to be going on in that in that region. and these are the jurisdictions that fall into each sub market. You'll notice that they sometimes land in multiple. So Boulder is in both the North and the West. That doesn't make a lot of difference for the estimation itself, because the estimation is done at the census block level and aggregated back up.

[93:02] So it's not like double counting exactly. Yeah. Next slide. Sorry I was engrossed. okay, so th, this is just to kind of give an idea where we are sitting currently in kind of recent housing construction, and we can see that it's very different by sub market. So the central total, which is is predominantly Denver has much higher portion of multi unit compared to the other sub markets next slide. Sorry I'm still unit. Or if one unit of multi unit of of 5 plus looks like. There's a lot of single family development in the southeast, which I imagine is Eastern Arapahoe Town

[94:10] and Douglas County, Castle Rock Castle Pines laundry where they have something we don't plan in North Central. Did you say Boulder is in north, north and West West doesn't really have much going for it there. Yeah. So West predominantly. The way the counties, the demography offices, county level forecasts, and Gilpin and Clear Creek County are not expected to grow much based on demography. Office forecasts. Wait. Sorry. So you're talking about Boulder County spans 2 different, not the city. Oh, this is not the city boulder. Well, actually, the city of Boulder as well, I think. cuts into a little bit of that, because these are based on puma geographies from the census, and those don't hit. Those don't hit any boundaries right? Those could just go anywhere. So there is a tiny bit of older

[95:12] city of boulder in West. But it's it's minimal. That's why the West is so low is because it's probably not most of the city of Boulder. Yeah, we're talking up tiny bit of boulder and then up into like, I almost didn't see the West, because there's like, basically no keep going. Yep. So when so so far, we've really been kind of looking at the big number for the region. These are the kind of factors that are used to distribute it down to the sub markets. So current population, future population, current jobs, future jobs, current transit, future transit, commute times additionally affordable units.

[96:03] There's kind of built in areas that have a proportionally more affordable units. Are are kind of allocated, a lower amount of need and same vacancy rate. So if there's a higher vacancy rate, there's an assumption that the housing market is kind of a little bit more sufficient in that area. And and also we are removing short term rentals and second homes from? Yeah, they're not in here. They're not in there. That's correct. Why. in the vacancy rate calculation. are they in the overall data set? They are in the overall data set, but they are not included in supply. But the consultants kind of looked at historically in this region the short term rental rates, and they're not super high, and they are declining. So it it would. It was not kind of a a large factor in the overall.

[97:08] the second home and the short term rental. even though the second loans generally aren't rented, they felt insane. They're they're kind of falling into the same. Yeah. Well, because the short term rental and the second home they're not housing permanent households, and and this that assumption would totally fall apart in a resort community? Or did you want to remember it next slide? And so here are the sub market numbers, and and we can see that 0 to 30 and 30 to 60 is the biggest biggest chunk here, and you can also see that that proportionally, that the same across the sub markets, because that proportion into each income, then is fixed at the region level, and then filtered down

[98:04] next slide. And here is Boulder so 10,000 units roughly, 6,000 of them for the lowest. Ami. Sweet is this county or city city. and in our dashboard we also have additional information about what is driving that allocation of need to each jurisdiction, and for boulder a lot of it is employment and access to transit. Both of those are really high high current employment, high future employment and high access to transit just to clarify. This is a 10 year 8 and a half year projection. Oh, sorry. Yeah. That looks like there's a type of that's a 2023 to 2,032 projection. Cj. Will. We have 6,000 affordable units built the next 7 years, or 8 years? Probably not, since we only have 4,000 right now. How many units generally build a year? Do you know, our average over the past 10 years. I want to say it's 147

[99:14] per year. This is based on jobs. Is that what you're saying? That's a good portion of it is. So if we actually go back one slide bye. yeah. So these are the factors that that go into this allocation to the sub markets, and then where available? They're then used for allocation to the local jurisdictions. boulder doesn't boulder has a fair amount of current population, but the future population is that much higher? But Boulder has a high current jobs and a high future job. So that tends to be what's driving a lot of this estimated need for boulder in addition to transit. So when you say we need 6,000 more affordable units, principally to keep up with the job market. Here

[100:12] we do a great job of building housing. But it's not gonna happen. So does that just mean 30 36 gets more crowded. Is that. So I think if we if we bump into this Denver one. yeah, or boulder, sorry. It's important to kind of keep in mind. This is just the needs assessment stage. That what we're pointing out is in this analysis is where the pain points and and the and the burden of lack of housing is gonna land. It's going to land on 0 to 50 and 50 to 80, paying more than 30% of their income on housing. So it's unlikely that, and it's impossible. We're not going to be building affordable units to get our way out of this. But all across the housing spectrum, a full range of strategies will hopefully produce

[101:13] a better functioning housing market. And and there also may be strategies in terms of people who have houses that are underutilized, housing additional people in them. Greater liquidity in the housing market, so people can can move down in housing more efficiently, which is difficult. Now. There's definitely kind of a full hopefully will be a full range of strategies. So we definitely want to emphasize that the expectation is not that 6,000 nearly fully subsidized units are gonna be built great. So this, as I mentioned the second part of the regional housing needs assessment, was a real analysis of the systemic barriers to addressing housing need

[102:09] slide. So we engaged over 200 stakeholders to have conversations about what were they experiencing? And this is groups, as I mentioned before, from developers to to service, providers to local government staff. And we learned a lot about many, many different barriers. And I'll just emphasize that there were many barriers. There was not one single barrier like if we just fix this. And, as you all know, being on this committee how complex it is. But we did try to organize it into these areas or categories for the exercise of trying to wrap our heads around. Where? Where would we take this when we start doing our housing strategy? So we plan on leaning on this analysis to be a foundation for how we start building a strategy, a regional strategy. So go to next slide.

[103:03] So Some of the things we heard like in land use and process. This was not just that there was not enough zoning that. It's it's not exclusively single family. That was a piece of it. Part of it was the process like what process people need to go to to build housing. The entitlement process. It could be the requirements around open space requirements, parking requirements that all of those together start creating significant barriers for addressing housing the other piece we heard it was around infrastructure, and this was a really complex conversation, because in some ways it was simply, there's just not enough funding to to address the needed infrastructure to to address housing or to build more housing in some jurisdictions. It was the complexity of addressing infrastructure. For example, we have some communities, mostly on the west side of our region, where they have upwards of 30

[104:05] water and sewer providers in their local jurisdiction. And so the complexity of working with 30 different entities on whatever the given project is just decrease, increase time, and with some of that, what we heard, too, is that the there's great variation in the infrastructure in districts that provide infrastructure, and there may be different approaches to capital improvements. And so, while a city may be articulating a certain areas for growth, the infrastructure providers that are not necessarily run by the local government don't necessarily have that same vision for growth. And so that just creates a significant barriers in the process. Next slide development costs you all mentioned some of these here tonight. The land land values and water supply. In some areas other things like workforce is is becoming a big barrier, and increasing development costs

[105:02] funding and financing. One of the things we heard loud and clear is that our typical financing approaches or strategies are really overtacked. And so what do we do about that? And how do we create either different funds to address those gaps or really think about leveraging different resources? And, for example, land like, is there one of the things we heard a lot was, could we be leveraging? You know, a publicly owned land for for housing development? The last category. We really just bundled it into this idea of community will and collective action, and some of that is local resistance to housing development. But some of it is about, how do we actually address some of the policy tax specifically, tax policy barriers that some local communities are experiencing? With our laws in that you know. How do we actually

[106:00] leverage and and take advantage of all of the revenue that we're collecting in order to address housing or put that towards housing. So a really important piece, it's something we heard actually from our board as well, and that as policymakers. How do we do our do our good work to build a support for housing development early. So we're not dealing with it. Public hearing by public hearing. So, as I mentioned, these barriers are complex. They also have a lot of interplay with each other. And so we recognize as we start a regional housing strategy. We would organize them nicely. It seems really succinct. But it we're gonna have some very complex conversation, because if you address one on one side, you may be impacting another on the other side. So, as I mentioned, we are launching our regional housing strategy, and next slide. One of the things we did during our assessment was we engaged both stakeholders and our advisory group to help us start framing. Where should we begin? And these are some guiding principles that our advisory group kind of signed off on as we launch our regional housing strategy.

[107:15] One of the things that we need to keep front and center is that this work around housing needs to stay aligned with our real vision for equity across the region. and that, Dr. Cobb, we are always committed to being data informed and grounded in in good data, we recognize that while we need to be flexible and comprehensive, we also need to recognize what are the different roles for different entities and be really clear about what we can do and can't do, and which groups can need to participate in order to make that happen. One of the things that I find really important is that the challenge we have around housing took a long time to create, and we are not going to solve it. In just a a short period of time. But at the same time we need to be balancing. Some near term changes and some long term changes at the same time.

[108:12] So I had this slide earlier in the presentation. Just want to reiterate that Dr. Cox's commitment is to to do this work and to integrate it more fully into our regional plan in the end, so that we can keep these policies and strategies that we we come up with through this process center to our regional planning work. That's it. So on this slide, we have a link to our website where you can find the report. I know your packet included our written report. We also have on that web web page a link to a data dashboard. So a lot of the slides that Zach presented showing the bar graph, you can actually interact with the data and look at different cities. You can look at different counties, different regions. So I encourage you to do that. But just thank you so much, and happy to answer more questions. Concern

[109:06] question. Look at Jay, but please please. So one of the things. That we do is to try to change behavior. Last night we planning board met around the auto, the car parking and those kinds of things. How is or does the changing behavior around housing impact the way you translate and make predictions with your data? One of the comments you made was a higher ami, equal, higher, square footage, you know. That's an assumption. That's behavior. That's not necessarily a human needs, a bigger bathroom to bathe. So I'm I'm just curious because we are at that kind of point in reality, where we can't keep doing things the same way again and again and again, and expect new outcomes. And so we're seeing that with the way we deal with our cars by changing up just from State level down.

[110:16] How do we store cars? And how do we use cars, etc, etc. Is that playing a role in how we think about housing, moving forward changes in behavior. Yeah. But I think completely. I mean, I think if we take a more holistic look at what 30 years is going to look like if we have a better functioning housing market it. It may mean a lot of normal changes in what people consider like normalized housing for families and older adults, that it may be more condos and townhouses and much denser living. I think that's all. Gonna be part of it. Particularly.

[111:07] There's an interplay with water and traffic and air, pollution and noise. Those may also put restrictions on where people live and could actually push to kind of more environmental and more sustainable structures. This is all a bit speculative on my right. I mean, you guys aren't in the strategy phase yet. But you know, like in Boulder, we're right now, just trying to herd ourselves toward 15 min neighborhoods which have to do with walkability, which have to do with, you know, local and all those things that you're talking about, and in some ways changing the behavior. You don't need to get in your car and do almost anything. It changes the way we use land, and it changes the way we think about dwelling.

[112:05] Do we have to have the yard? Do we have to have them detached? But it almost seems that changed behavior. Those stories or those potentials have to trickle along with the process and not just show up at the end. Right? It's just like, how do people go from the thinking of the detached family house or the single car in the auto industry? To being part more engaged in a more communal way of both sharing the neighborhood streets and the the way you dwell. So it'll be interesting to see how those stories come forward those data points. How do you gather those data points of change? Cool. I have one small follow-on comment to Amel's Point, and that is one of the cartoons at the very beginning showed a

[113:01] single family homes on a cul-de-sac very car dependent. And you might just consider changing that graphic as a way of motivating how people think about future housing. Right. and I was just going to add to, I think, one sorry one of the things that I think we will lean on during this housing strategy is certainly other sectors outside of planning turn to evidence-based research to to really understand behavior change. And I think that one of the things we're seeing in the data is, we will have a higher proportion of people over 60 in in 2050. And so what are those? Neighborhood and and residential conditions that really promote healthy aging. And and our concept that yes, aging in places has tremendous value. and living in walkable communities. Easy access to goods and services is also a huge component, and research has shown to assist with healthy aging. And so if we can lean on that evidence-based research through this strategy. Perhaps we can start promoting strategies that are really based on positive aging in space. That seems like something we want to hold on to this idea that people stay in their homes

[114:22] as they age, but usually that means they're staying in their single family home, where, without good walkability and community resources. It's also very expensive to get people healthcare needs in their home. And finally, I think this is a housing affordability issue. All the baby boomers stay in their single family homes until they're 95 years old. With modern technology, the generations beneath them are not going to get a house to move into. So I do think we should rethink the consensus on aging in a place. I think there's benefits for everyone. When you know we we tend to move around. That's just a thought not trying to kick anyone out 2 topics. One is you mentioned, construction, defect, and Colorado's laws

[115:14] are are basically prohibiting the construction of what might otherwise be entry level ownership opportunities. So are you a lobbying organization that can take the data and say we need. Here's big reasons why we need to change construction defect law. So we we are not allowing organization, however, through the the strategy conversations. What we're hoping to do is bring stakeholders together to gain some consensus about. How do we address some of the challenges, the barriers that come to housing so hopefully, then gaining a vision, for well, here's the path forward to address something like construction defects. With that, said it. It'll be important that we can engage

[116:04] a variety of groups to to gain a consensus around that perspective, because we aren't necessarily going to kind of lobby or take one approach to it. And Dr. Cox's board has been supportive of simple legislation around construction defects that have not passed. I mean, they've passed resolutions and bad documents supporting that and just clarify it. So when the term aging in place doesn't necessarily mean staying in your home, it means having the option of staying within your community where you already have established relationships and supports. The biggest challenge we find is that people living in those older adults living in those large homes. What they've told us in the past is just really challenging to find a place that's suitable that they can afford. Oftentimes it's the most cost effective thing to stay in their large home, and perhaps that's something we, as a board should explore is what is the availability demand for senior living spaces. These are in boulder.

[117:14] because I think that's important for seniors. They can stay in Boulder and get the services. They need to have a happy life in their golden years. But I think it also plays a role in freedom housing stock for other people who are trying to age into a house to perhaps raise a family. So I I think it's more of a holistic issue. It doesn't serve just one demographic. It serves all of us. And I think one of the things just to build on that that I think our strategy will hope to do is that there's not going to be single strategies for for different populations. And I think we're going to have to understand the complexities of of different topics like aging, in order to suggest a number of different strategies, to address that one of the things that has. We've been discussing just internally to illuminate the complexity is, you know, when we when we see the data that shows you know, people that may be staying in in a certain affordability category as they age. Part of it is because their house may be paid off. They it's really it would be.

[118:18] There's significant barriers to move into some to another, you know, whatever that unit may be, and so are some of our strategies around. Well, how do we support aging in place while opening up our opportunities for other other people in the community? So is that you know programs that match. You know, seniors, with other I think either roommates or different scenarios where they could stay in place. Maybe this is our next one, but the sharing bedrooms. I know some friends who in grad school and college grad school mostly did silver nest, which is where an older person in boulder has bedrooms, and they want someone in their house maybe to check in on them, or, you know, make them go to the grocery or whatever, and they get a good rate on, you know, a bedroom, maybe in the basement or something, and it

[119:15] serves 2 purposes. It creates housing and creates support. So maybe that's something we can broach at our next meeting. Do you have a timeline? I didn't see a timeline. When is your strategies? What are you thinking? Your strategies will start to. Yes, merge. So we've kicked off with our consultant, and we expect the more robust engagement start in April, and then we hope to be finished through by the end of January of next year. Strategies? Strategy? Yes, yes, and our. And as far as deliverables, I mean, our goal is to understand implementation. I'm not sure we'll have it all figured out by next January, but at least we will have heard from stakeholder holders understand which strategies seem more feasible, and where there's momentum and and frankly partners that are willing to engage in those strategies.

[120:13] so so do you find that some of these communities in the West and Central, and whatever are more supportive and collaborative and participatory. And some are like, leave me alone. We're doing it on our own good question. I mean, I think what we learned through our needs assessment is that and and through our discussions with both staff at the local level, and our board is that there is consensus, that housing is a challenge in every community across the region, and that I don't. I haven't heard from any local government that says we have it figured out, and we're we've got it taken care of, and we can meet that need need number to what extent they think different strategies will work. I'm sure that's going to be a big part of of our conversation. I will say that one of the things, and I'll just give a plug, for I think another great great model that's happening in Boulder is, I think, housing partnerships and collaborative across jurisdictions is something we've heard during the needs assessment that actually

[121:18] is a strategy in the future. I know that Boulder has the Boulder housing partnership. Douglas County has a housing partnership, and not all counties do have that. But it's something we heard a lot of positive things about during the needs assessment. So that may be one of those strategies we try to implement across the region. So it's not easy, but it's effective. I have a question as a consultant, one of the Board members. But so a lot of my experiences in California, where every regional planning agency or Mpo. Does a plan, a housing plan and kind of what you described with the sub markets and estimating needs. They're then required to allocate housing needs to different jurisdictions, and there's all kinds of rules and consequences. If you don't meet your needs and communities can trade them back and forth. You know, Boulder doesn't want 6,000. They can give them to Broomfield, or whatever is that long term kind of what this is

[122:23] steering towards, or is this a totally different purpose, if you will, for doing a regional housing plan? Good question. I think our Board has given us the direction that they wanted to understand the scale and scope of need, and that they were comfortable, understanding what that looks like at the local level. But our dashboard, where you can look at every local jurisdiction, and their need level is really to illustrate need. It's not to assign sign responsibility in any way. We hope that during the strategy there's some robust conversations about, how do we measure success like? How are we going to do that as a region? How are we gonna ensure that, like the strategies we're coming up with actually make a difference. But I'm not sure there's a there's an interest to go in the direction of

[123:13] assign assigning us a strict accountability in some way of the number makes sense. I was curious. I've had other communities ask me about it. So it's also between California. My understanding is like a lot of these large master plan. Communities are pretty tight window, and in Colorado 50,000 units, and they may not start till 2030, or 2040, so they're already entitled. So the the kind of length of time we're talking about is much more difficult. It's kind of hard to trade things back and forth, and we're talking could be a hundred years. If if somebody's ever built up fully. Thank you. Any other questions, Danny Phillips.

[124:06] thank you very much. Are you ready to leave? Okay, okay. So we're now changing the subject to the talking points that that we for the Quarterly Update to City Council. I did not receive any edits from anybody. So does that mean we all approve the verbiage that was in the package, or or did well, did everybody see it in the package? So is is there a reason why you didn't email it before? Like, are we really going to spend this meeting talking through these edits? Or well, I think that makes sense, because it's the only way we can all communicate as a board is during our meetings.

[125:01] The the request that was that you sort of send the edits. So just sorry. Can I inject one? Just one thing before before I go? Focus on finalizing the letter, and who's going to present it? And then I'll work with you on how to get time on council or at a council meeting I've been reaching out to. and I just haven't heard back. Thank you. Thank you. It was good to meet everyone. I'll see you very much. That was in the packet. Yeah, it's at the very end. So one little tweak. It sounds bad, Picky. But I I'd like to change relationships to relationship, because I think this whole process speaks to the Board's relationship with Council as opposed to

[126:04] you know us as individual members having individual relationships. so singular, not yeah. It's our collective relationship. I like these 1st 2 points. I have no changes for them. I'd like to let me know your all your thoughts, but I think this is also an opportunity to ask questions and just see how the council members react is. Maybe say, you know, on the issue of homelessness, is there a specific area that the city Council would like advice from the Housing Advisory Board. And then I guess we could do the same with the second one. Just sort of follow up questions, because I'm hope I'm hopeful that this is an opportunity for us to tell. City Council is what we're doing. But also, what do you guys want really want us to advise you on. I think that could be helpful to us.

[127:07] It's sort of a reaction and a dialogue, and I think that speaks to the bigger picture here. And I don't know if we should do that after each point, or save both questions for the end, or something like that the one on homelessness. I don't know what the question would be for the second one. is there a specific, you know, area? You want us to investigate with respect to commercial redevelopment or something. What if we? What if we said future meetings are expected to focus on topics like missing middle and the solutions to empty bedrooms. What if we said something like we would love City Council's input? If there's specific topics you want us to address. I just think we should throw back at them and say, Where do you want us to advise you? I agree, and I also think

[128:01] it might be overreaching to assume that Council will answer those questions in the moment, but I would think it. I think it'd be nice to establish a means of communication between us and council back and forth, you know. Like, if we could find an effective way for the for them to give us that feedback. Yeah. And it could be. I mean, this is, this is like a new process. But maybe they're like, Oh, the app persons here I did think of something, you know, just sort of getting the rhythm we're here to report on. What we've been doing. Is there something you need advice on, or you want advice on? And are you expecting that they're gonna say something back at us, or that they're gonna listen. And then they're gonna come back to like they'll contact Jay. They might react on the spot. We've never done this. They might reach out to us through independent channels, like through the chair, or it could be possible that they sort of get in the rhythm of like every quarter. Oh, apps! Here there is this housing issue. But we talked about in our last city council meeting. Take this back to your board and, like whoever goes can take notes. But we can also pull up the video and see how they react and what they have to say so. I mean, I think it's like the the bigger exercise is sort of building that relationship in a public setting, saying, this is we've been doing. Is there somewhere where you want us to advise you? And I think that gives us guidance.

[129:25] Well, that and it sounded like Jay was going to set it up more formally than just showing up as a public commenter, which might, I don't know if that makes a special. or if it like sets a precedent for other boards, doing the same thing, and like things being more effective. I'm not sure but, like, for example, I found, and I think some of you watch that recent city council like homelessness thing I was like, oh, this is interesting. I'm seeing how like certain members are reacting. I'm kind of getting a understanding of. You know how they feel, and they are the people's representatives. They were elected. So you know, our job is to advise them. Let's figure out. Let's try to get a reaction out of them, you know, and not try to like bait them. But this is what we've been doing, and then

[130:11] we might be surprised that what they have to say, and then we'll take it, and there might be disagreement among them as to what they want to address. There probably is, but I think it's just a good way to develop dialogue and hopefully over time. If we do this every quarter, then it becomes more methodical. They're like, Oh, the Housing Advisory Board persons. Here, we address this issue in our last. We want you guys to look into this like, just get it kind of start a process and a dialogue like that. I think that's the goal of a question. So I'm open to how you want to word that? I just think that's how we should sort of finish it off. Who wants to anybody else have any edits or comments? Do we have to congratulate them.

[131:00] Thought that was okay. Let me just say thank you for your I don't know if we're congratulating them on. I don't want us to act like. Thank you again for your leadership we'll take out. Is this a word for word script that someone has to read and memorize? Or I. I do think that whoever I do think that whoever speaks to city council should read this because you are representing yeah. And we are. We are agreeing on the words. So we can go in. And even maybe we want to add at the very beginning. we obviously have to vote before we do this, but we voted 5 0 whatever the vote was on this statement, just to signal to them. This is something that this is our collective communication with you, you know. Yeah, Hello. My name is X, and I'm a board member. This statement was approved by the Housing Advisory Board. Yeah, I'm here to speak on behalf of the Housing Advisory Board. This was approved. This statement was approved by Expo.

[132:11] so any other, any other comments, if not, I think we should take a vote that. like we'll make these edits. I'll send out a row. We'll send out a revised, but it's basically like speaking on behalf of hab eliminate the S, and then ask the ask City Council if there are topics specifically that you want us to address. Yeah, I think that's great. I would include the vote talent just to signal to them. I'm not just saying I'm here like we voted on this. I think that's strong. You think it's implied. If you're speaking on behalf, I guess the only caveat, and we'll see. I assume we're gonna vote. But

[133:01] It could matter like, I think, for someone to speak on behalf of the Board. If I think a majority of Board members voted like 2 people could dissent, and it could still pass if it was unanimous that you know. There, I don't think there's anything controversial in here. but I could see a situation where there might be, and we'd want to know that. Let's take a vote, and depending on the vote, we'll figure out if we have to change the language, and then we'll vote again if we have to. Okay, all in favor of the the talking points that we're calling it have quarterly update to city council with like a few modifications speaking on behalf of eliminate the plural, and then like a sentence that says something like we would welcome topics. That city council wants us to investigate and address, or are there any topics? Are there? Are there any specific topics? City Council would like

[134:04] that? You city council would like us to advise you as a call to action, to council to report back to us so that we're not just so, are there any specific topics that city Council wants have to investigate. Okay, alright. All in favor of the motion motion. Consult. Wait. I think somebody has to make a motion. Okay, I make a motion that we approve the talking points. The Quarterly updates to council with the few modifications of speaking on behalf of eliminate the plural and adding the sentence, are there any specific topics that city Council wants to have to investigate and advice oh, and eliminate congratulations all in favor.

[135:12] Hi. Anyone great? Okay? So who? It passed unanimously. So does anybody want to be the Speaker to present this to city council? I would be open to doing it 1st time. Do we have to do a motion for that. I'd like to angle towards being the next speaker in case the top one of the talking points is an agenda item I get to add for next month's meeting. That's kind of preliminary sorry, but. And and to Karen's point, the whole Perk, I will stick. I might. I'm just gonna say, yeah, I'm gonna stick to this script. It might come up and be like, Hey, you know. But other than that, it's just gonna be reading this. Okay? So approval of minutes.

[136:03] can I? Yeah, I guess we should. We do. We know when the next City Council meeting is, or that's what Jay was saying that he would get with her after the I don't know when it is, but we'll find out from Jay when the next one is that we can sort of get our date slotted in, but I think it will be sometime in March. Could you send a copy of this to planning board? I think it would be good for planning board to see what have is. I love this innovation. You're trying to create a direct relationship to city council, because you guys have a bit more of a direct relationship to council. Right? Well, we do, because we have. We have to approve things that they have to approve. You know it. So there is a very but you know, housing is a critical piece of the development that we are looking at, and

[137:02] I think that have is kind of like this anomaly out there that we don't really, you know, you formally don't weigh in on things. And but since you're creating sort of this pathway to kind of expose what you're doing. you know. Just send a copy to planning board. Perhaps I think that would be a nice okay, a welcome thing. And I can read it if you want. Well, I can let people. I can let the planning board know that. Hey? Look, hab is up to, and here's their quarterly, or you can. However, that works, but I think it would be nice if planning board. You see it just. I'm intrigued as the liaison do you usually report to the rest of planning board like? Kind of what happens here, or this is a nice summary for you to bring to that. I know that's what it's occurring to me is that we don't because you don't take legislative action. And again, it doesn't really impact the work that we do, but I think that you

[138:08] do bring a a meaningful perspective to things, and that there isn't a pathway right now like there isn't 1 to City Council, so things could get to us if nothing else. Just on paper you have to come and present. I think it'll be interesting to see what comes of it. I think it's a good way. You know. Our job is to advise city council, and I think this is a good way for us to say, this is what we've been doing. Is there anything specific you guys want? And maybe it turns into something more, whereas you know the like, I was saying, it's, you know, like our 3rd time doing it. They're like, actually, we have a list waiting for expecting us. Okay, anything else that you want to talk about with this? Or can I move to approval of the minutes in January?

[139:03] Are there any edits or comments to the minutes? If not, I'll make a motion to approve the January minutes. Second all in favor. Aye, anybody opposed alright. So passed all right. And one more thing. You also have the edited November minute. So and do you know what changed? It was? The item E under section homelessness. So yes, it was 5, or I'm sorry. 6 E. Letter E was removed, so it's no longer appears in. I will make a motion to approve the Revised. Sorry. Could you say that again, Tiffany? The 6 E, right? So if you compare. Thank you. Previously letter E has been removed from the current from the new one.

[140:04] based on the vote from last month to edit the No. Minutes from November. Okay, thank you. Okay. So I make a motion to approve the revised version of the minutes from. I'll second all in favor. Aye, aye, any opposed. I think the rules say that if someone's silent during voting, it's a yes. I do have a duty to speak out say no alright moving on so matters from staff. We talked about an April meeting for advancing racial equity and the role of government. It will happen during our April meeting time.

[141:04] which will also be when we have our new Board members. Oh, good! Do we know who they are yet. So are we not having this March meeting anymore? Is it that the equity training for April? Yeah, they're pushing it to April? Okay, I'm sorry it's right in front of me. So Jay did provide in the packet the work plan. which shows, like February, March, April. We are like, please add topics right like, if we can start scheduling out, what do we want? Our May meeting to be about? What do we want our June meeting about like like, express your interest in topics or discussions, then we it gives us time to to find speakers and get them, you know, fill up our agendas.

[142:05] you know I feel like you. Discussion now about possible topics? Or do you just want those emailed to you? I'm either, I would say, about both fresh. I'm sorry there's 3 of us. Well, it's kind of fresh, like the aging in place, or like aging well in boulder. As it regards to housing, I think is a really great topic. I remember we went to what was it called that dinner in maybe December, where it was like all the housing and human services boards, commission stuff. And we got to hear about everything that everything under Hhs was doing, and I thought that the age well, division of housing and human services is doing a great thing. So maybe someone speaks from there, or I think that's a great idea. Okay, I will add that

[143:01] I know. The construction defects seems like something you want to tackle, and I agree. I feel like that. That is something that should be tackled. I just don't know if that's something the city of Boulder can really do anything about. It sounds to me like that's a State law issue. I would also say that. there's a lot of activity going on right now to change the state law, and so I'm not sure how we would, we would meaningfully add to those conversations unless we got kind of in front of it. But yeah, I think I think if anything, it would be more about educational for us, and. Really confident city council cannot really pass any ordinance that changes construction. Oh, no! But city council will certainly weigh in on any proposed State legislature, and and we we do tend to have a lot of kind of outsized influence in that area. So But it sounds like aging that just came up today. I think that's honestly don't know what the state of like a housing for aging people is in Boulder. It's not something I've heard I've heard of. If it's an issue.

[144:11] So like Bhp. Does have a building on like more head. By the by, the Post office on South Boulder Road that is focused on 55 plus. So it's age restricted, for it doesn't provide any like continuum of care or like. It's not assisted living. It's independent living for seniors. I just feel like that's a demographic we just haven't talked about since I've been on the board. And just a thought I've had is it? Does it? Actually, I think there is a trickle down effect. If there's really good housing options for elderly people who are living home alone in their house. Maybe that opens up housing for others. So it's it's more of a collective issue

[145:02] or or one of the, you know. Jay and I had a giggle at it. But adus, and it's like the majority of work that I do, for adus in my neighborhood are people who want to stay in the neighborhood. and they can't find a new small house, and so they build an adu, and then they rent the main house, you know, so that becomes a way to open up housing in amenity rich neighborhoods, for people and or their children. Or you know, however, that works the intergenerational living in addition to new people in the neighborhood. But you know the the factor that would change that into ownership would be if we get to the point where we can sell 80 use, you know. Then you start freeing up small new houses that are for sale. We don't have that in Boulder, and we're probably never going to get new small houses for sale in the city of Boulder. So single people who don't want a big place. Maybe they don't want to live in a condo because it's unknown what the hoa fees are going to be over the years, etc, etc.

[146:12] You know, this is a a housing type that isn't really on anybody's radar, because it's difficult. But my advocacy for adus is like they solve a number of problems. But it it's interesting. You know, we have in in the holiday project. They have a a senior co-housing there. The gray or silver something silver sage, you know. So there! There are interesting. So it would be nice to see what options do seniors have in the city for diverse housing, because co-housing is different than, say, the Fraser Meadows or the housing authorities. You know, options. If we put together a panel for that, I can definitely help with connections from Silver Stage. That'd be great. Well, I think there's also, like seniors in Boulder, who

[147:09] maybe they have a reverse mortgage, or they have a mortgage, or whatever they have this house that they've lived in their entire life. But they need income. These don't work anymore, and finding a convenient way to rent it out, get that income, create housing for other people, but also. if they choose to stay in their home. I don't know if that's like a network, or there's a matching service the city can do, or something like that. Yeah. And I think there's some overlap there with aging. And that issue. So, Philip, think about it. Well, yeah. One of the speakers, one of the likely speakers actually talks directly about senior senior residents who own a large home, and want to have someone in in their house with them. Good ways of finding good housemates.

[148:05] hey? Can I bring up a a possible topic for sometime in 2025. Please. One of the things Chip likes to bring up frequently is leveraging tax as a way of modifying behavior or markets, or whatever. There's a lot of work going on in thinking about how to reform, taxing, for improving the housing market. The thing that comes to mind in particular is something called land value tax. and I think it would be great to identify an expert to just come. Give a presentation to educate us about how land value taxes work. how we might elevate that in our conversations in the community and in the State. And Yeah, that's that's 1. That's my idea. Taxes like it's above my head. I have some idea of it. But would the board like hearing from like I could try reaching out to a tax law professor at the law school and see if

[149:13] is that something I mean. they would know who they're presenting to. This is not, you know, income tax class from law school, but. I guess I had. My, that's that's fine. As another topic. I had kind of a specific suggestion about doing a deep dive on land value tax. Do you have a someone in mind who can do that? I have someone in mind who I have. I have folks that I think can find me somebody. Maybe we do. I know it sounds boring, but maybe we do a session this year on tax tax solutions and learn more about it. but that also include something like vacancy taxes or second home taxes? Or is that a totally different thing? I think the package of how can tax be leveraged to make housing more affordable in the city of Boulder. That's how I frame it. I'd be my old professor. It's like, Can you come up with a 30 min presentation up to mostly non lawyers. I know I haven't even taken a tax law class. So here's what I propose. I'm taking notes. So we've talked about like aging well and aging in place. We've talked about construction, defect

[150:27] and and taxes like land value tax tax solution, second, home vacancy taxes, so I will add one more. So I will have those. And Carnes one added to these, and then we can flush out what month it will be, who's going to help find speakers? Okay, I just wanted to catch Danny. Are you still there? Yeah, I don't love it. Come to the computer. I'm here. Yeah. Sorry. Not necessarily that you have to be responsible for this before you leave us. But but I just wanted to. Bring up that you had talked about an employer created housing discussion.

[151:15] What what were you thinking about that, and what. Well, just. You know the whole notion that you know employers can and should help carry the burden, and there's a lot of benefit for them, as well in terms of having housing programs for for their employees, so that their employees can live and work in the communities in which they serve. And and so it's become more common school districts. It's become more common with fire districts. You know, list goes on. Ski resorts certainly is is a big one. That's a big generator. That's that's kind of where it all originated from as well.

[152:00] And and so just the whole notion of how that plays a role in the overall approach and the overall program. Is, that. At this time. Anywhere in the counter but county by any employers that anybody knows about. There was one time one mention in a district accountability committee about the possibility of Bvsd looking into building housing for their employees. It was just kind of a throwaway 1 1 time statement it has. So it is. It has entered people's radar. But I, man, I would love to talk about this topic, especially like the notion that Bvsd. Might build housing for some of their employees, I think, would be really. really a cool way. So Phillip? The how's the school district?

[153:01] Did a lot of work on what is it? Twin Lakes near celestial seasonings, and kind of got a lot of pushback from the neighborhood, and so I don't know if they got burned is the right expression. But there's a lot. There's a lot of history and background that Jay can provide regarding the school district. Okay. So I'm sorry. Did they try to buy up like those condos, or they own land in Gunbrow that they tried to develop, and neighbors gave them a lot of pushback, and so maybe that would still be worth having on our list. Yeah, sure, I think that's a great. Maybe there's some one of the, as Danny was saying, one of the smaller mountain towns, that has exactly done, that that we could have as a guest speaker on Zoomers. Was it one of the goals with the Alpine Balsam development to have city employee housing

[154:10] available? I feel like that, was the initial dreaming. It was initial dreaming. So maybe it's time to relive that dream and say, Hey, because wouldn't that be awesome? Yeah, right? I think it was actually city and county when they were originally talking about it. I'm hearing the county is selling their county compound in bold, so they may not. They may not want housing here, but you know it might be a good time to remind people that, hey, the city owns this land, and we're not how some of the employees that aren't able to live in the boulder right now. Love that idea alright. Any other ideas or topics that people want to talk about.

[155:00] No, but I like doing this work plan and having it every week, and we can kind of have this type of conversation every month at the end of the meeting, or known that we could be involved in creating it. I think it's a great idea. Yeah. Just a meta comment about this process. I know. I kind of bungled, putting together the the panel for sharing, housing, housing, you know, sharing bedrooms. I kind of miscommunicated a little bit and was hopeful that it would happen this evening and and got sent various emails to different people as I was. You know it. I'll just say it's a little bit tricky trying to assemble a panel for an agenda item you don't know is approved on which date and so, and I could have just done a lot better about. So maybe it's just a cautionary tale. I could have done a lot better about

[156:07] back and forth with Jay and with Michael to understand what was up. I think all's well that ends well. Assuming that this agenda item gets on the March meeting. If not, I'll have some embarrassing emails to write but, anyways, I just thought I would point out that our process for delegating this task, and and how you go about assembling a panel and and inviting people is is from my perspective. We need to work it out just a little bit more, so that and again I could have been more mindful and just a little more proactive, instead of just sending but. Philip, I think you raise a really good point, which is like historically, Jay and the chair and the vice chair are the ones who organized the panel, and then you came up with a great idea, and we were like great go find speakers, and I think that there was a miscommunication in terms of which was the best

[157:11] month to have it in. And that's why I really like this idea of maybe we add to the agenda the work plan, and everyone on the board makes suggestions about what should get added. And if we decide, okay, in June, we're gonna do the aging well. And here the people who are gonna organize the panel. And in, you know. July, we're gonna do employer created. Then it just improves the communication of Who's gonna do the panel recruiting. And what month is it in? So I agree. I think it was a little bumpy. But we're we're sort of charting new territory by having someone other than Jay and the chair organize it. So thank you, Philip, for taking the initiative, and then pointing out that it was more about.

[158:03] I kind of didn't anticipate it, and so I kind of just mentioned it as a way of saying, like the next person who assembles a panel that's not the chair or vice chair. Maybe get a little. Get a little advice first.st Yes. That's it. All right. If there's no other topics, then I'm going to debrief the meeting, and maybe we get to adjourn a little early. So Today we had no public participation. We had Sloan and Andrew provide a nexus fee about charging for demolitions and and additions to create more money and kind of bridge a gap where where we weren't really collecting fees. Then we had Dr. Cog present. Both Zach and Sheila presented about their housing, regional housing strategy and needs assessment.

[159:08] We approved a slightly revised version of our Quarterly Update to Council. We approved 2 January minutes and revised November minutes. and we talked a lot. Oh, we talked about the April Board meeting being about a training on advancing racial equity, and then we had a discussion about the work plan and new topics, and how we can improve the process. So there's better communication. And now I would like a motion to adjourn. I don't think we have to approve my recap, do we? No. But your next meeting is March 26, th okay. Great. Next meeting. March 26, th great. I second your motion to adjourn. Great. All right, all in favor. See you next month. Thank you. Everybody.