5.21.24 Pasco Board of County Commissioners Workshop: Affordable Housing

of a household's income and it's very essential to our economic stability the more people spend on housing the less money they spend on Essentials like the food the health care and the education that is needed so like Mike said today you're going to see the results of that study um that'll be presented by Dr Elizabeth STM you're going to see Marcy esberg uh director of Community Development talk about some of the things that we have done in Community Development and then going to bring in David uh Engel and David Goldstein who are going to bring it in for a landing and maybe some suggestions of what we should could be and what we should be doing and I want to say thank you to this team um we had many conference calls and talks trying to put this U PowerPoint together and truly I learned so much on going through this whole process and how important it is affordable housing but before I bring Dr Elizabeth STM up I would like to uh bring David Lambert up and have him share some of his thoughts on the affordable housing and uh thank him publicly for what they've done so David come on that good afternoon Commissioners thank you all um uh when Kathy and I met you know as chairman of the Housing Authority for the last 14 years we have seen a significant issue um with people being able to afford housing so we started a program called family self-sufficiency so where the Housing Authority would put a portion of someone who was at the Housing Authority's rent in an escrow account and helped them put a down payment on a house this was after they went through all these Financial courses and everything else and got very self sustaining and then we went to the market to try to find housing there was none available that they could even afford uh in Pasco County and I don't call it affordable housing for me it's Workforce housing because these people although they lived in a Pasco County Housing Authority Community worked every day they were working in our County they had a um we even worked with them get them through all the courses and everything else and still could not afford a home and when we went around and met with businesses and things like that they were having a problem finding a Workforce would actually work in the county and uh just couldn't afford to live here so Kathy and I had were having lunch one day and we said you know what is the County's affordable housing plan and we didn't have one so you know how things get muddled and everything else we had done a tril be Luchi tril Luchi strategic master plan and we focused on that with the University of South Florida and then I seen a plan and looked at plans from several other counties throughout the state one the University of Florida did I think for Maran County places like that and I said you know we need to have takes everybody else out of the equation and bring people in that are

professional people to do an to analyze what we are looking to do and to present something to the county so the county could have a plan to go off of and adopt potentially and it was great collaboration between the county between uh the housing authority and stakeholders we had multiple meetings with stakeholders developers U land use attorneys you name it that work in Pasco County to get their input so you know this is a uh I believe a good first step forward I'd like to personally thank Dr STM and all the county folks that worked on this plan and Kathy uh and Community Development we just were looking for something to try to give people in Pasco County uh let's find a road map A Way Forward uh so we could address some of these issues and everybody calls it one issue or another but you know um I look at it as Workforce housing what people can that need to do jobs here each and every day can afford to live in our County and work with so that's the plan and uh uh the Housing Authority was really gracious in doing this that's because we have a we're in the same business of taking care of the people in Pasco County and we wanted to see a plan that that that really worked for our citizens and uh that's how we got here today and welcome pleas thank you so uh thank you all for your time today and I look forward to listening to Dr stm's presentation for the third time and and David David 14 years serving the community on that board thank you so much you're welcome commendable one thing I'm proud of you all all have it June 17th we're going to have a groundbreaking for our first veterans housing complex in Pasco County family housing complex and I'm proud to say half of those units will be for single veterans which is a big part of our homeless population in pville County would not have happened without all of your staff working on it I can remember when commissioner Oakley and uh um commissioner Wells commissioner Mariano talked about getting our own veterans family housing community and we finally are going to have it so thank you and thank you to Congressman Bill RS he got us $4 million in the ear Mark yeah that's good Kathy I'm going to say one thing uh as we're starting I did find an agenda I want to let everyone and put on notice that everyone all five Commissioners are present and that we're going forward with the workshop okay so if I could respectfully ask um we have uh Dr Elizabeth strum's going to come up and present first if we could hold the questions till the end because it might be three or four slides later those answers to some of those questions that would be great so Dr Elizabeth strong okay thank you welcome so first I just want to thank you for giving me this opportunity and giving my students the opportunity to work with your wonderful staff uh it's been a great experience for all of us now my role today is largely to paint uh broad picture of housing need and some approaches you might take to address it

um we do have a written report 70 or 80 pages so that will have all the details that you could possibly want uh but today I'm going more a big picture and some of the your staff the department heads are going to fill in in a more granular granular level so I guess the good news is that Pasco County must be an amazing place to live and I say that because people keep coming here so that's the good news the maybe not so good news is that it leads to Rising housing costs um the increasing price of housing is felt everywhere um but um certainly among renters definitely among home buyers but the ones who feel it most as we'll discuss today are those earning lower than average incomes these residents are important members of your community uh they're your healthcare workers they're your Cashiers they're your teachers they're even your County employees and so it's important that we make sure that they are part of the County's future now it's important to understand that improving the County's housing situation does not have one solution you need to have a variety of tools in your policy toolbox and you have to be creative in figuring out which tool best addresses which question so for example there are some tools that are great for incentivizing market rate housing um and so that's going to be less on the subsidy side and maybe more on the land use side when it comes to serving people at 80% of the area median income or lower Ami as we say then probably just land use tools won't be enough and that's when you need to have other kinds of uh subsidies and incentives to make the to make it pencil out for people at lower incomes so to start I want to make sure that we are all on the same page about what some of these terms mean so as uh you mentioned when we talk about affordability the federal definition for many many decades has been that if you are paying more than 30% of your gross income for your housing cost your housing is not affordable you are considered cost burdened if you're paying over 30% and so on this slide you can see what affordable housing looks like based on different household incomes now let me just clarify that to make this sort of a simple overview I'm just doing averages of meting an income so um uh Marcy will provide a table that sort of breaks us down more by family size but just on average you can see what different income levels are uh what you can afford to pay at that 30% affordability threshold um and um uh so what income um what what rent you could afford or housing cost you could afford based on that income and what you'll see as we go along is that there's a disconnect between what people at 50 or 80% of Ami can pay and what people uh what what rents and hous hous costs actually are in the county and the next two slides further explore this concept of affordability as it applies to your residents these slides are asking who in Pasco County is cost burdened in other words who is paying more than 30% of their income uh for their housing so if you look at this slide which is about

renters you'll see that clearly those under 80% of Ami are the most affected and the lower we go with income then the more people are cost burdened um and so by far the majority of Pasco County's cost burden population which is the column um on the right um are people who are earning 80% Ami or lower that's I think 80 84% or so of all cost burden folks are uh renters are in that category and that doesn't change much when we look at homeowners um so home owners also um while many people may be feeling a pinch if they're looking for housing now those are higher incomes are usually able to make it work in a somewhat affordable way but lower income people here even among homeowners are are um squeezing their incomes to try to afford housing um I also wanted to take a brief look at who are the people earning these um 80% Ami or lower wages and so you can see that these are people not just unskilled laborers um but also teachers and bank tellers um and uh building inspectors you know I've often seen people talk about affordable housing as something undesirable and the people who live in affordable housing are stigmatized but all of us every day not only are uh encountering people but are dependent on people who are at these income levels and so I think it's important to make sure that they are included in any plans we have for housing in the county and so this uh slide is a snapshot of on average what it costs to buy or rent today and who can afford it now again if you've lived in your residence for a longer period of time you probably have much more affordable housing your rent is lower you you bought it at much less your interest rate was lower but today if you're looking for an apartment or looking for a house these are the averages and these are the incomes you need to be able to afford that average rent or that average home cost now the next couple of slides are maps um and they address the question of where in the county do we find the greatest housing need um and so with some exceptions um our cost burden renters in the slide is renters tend to be concentrated on the eastern and western boundaries of the county largely in and around the municipalities so when you look at this map you'll see the very dark red census tracks in those census tracks 75% or more of all renters are cost burdened so like basically everyone is cost burdened in these census tracks the dark orange 50 to 75% of renter households are cost burdened still a very large number so you can look at that map and sort of see geographically what we are talking about now here's a map um with cost burden homeowners uh you can see that they are more dispersed and also I want to point out that the scale on this map is different so that the um the the dark red census tracks on this map these are homeowners who are cost burdened and the dark red means 30% or more of homeowners are cost burdened why are the scales so different just because on average homeowners are more affluent and less

likely to be cost burdened so it's just a different scale of need um and then this map I'm I've um I've put here because I think it's really interesting how much of a correlation there is between areas with older housing stock and areas we high levels of cost burden because what that is showing you because they here again the darker colors are older housing and so what you see is that the areas where we've seen the most the highest cost burden biggest housing need are also the areas where the oldest housing stock is located and so what that means it's relevant to policy because it means your poorest households are living in the oldest most in need of repair most dilapidated housing and you'll see that when we talk about policy we will focus on that source of problem um if People's housing is in very poor shape um to the point where it becomes unlivable then that uh decreases the amount of affordable housing available um also I want to note that this particular map which there's like basically a DOT for every property um this includes mobile homes 177% of your housing units are mobile homes and what I found interesting and somewhat surprising is that the vast majority almost all of them were built before 1994 now why is that significant because 1994 is when we see new higher standards for mobile homes so anything built prior to 1994 was built to an older standard um and that's what you have in terms of your mobile housing stock now let's look ahead because when we're talking about building housing and planning for housing we're not talking about what are we doing for the need today we're talking about what are we doing for the need tomorrow so what does the future hold um there's always uncertainty when we plan for the future we don't know exactly what will happen but we can look at Trends and project ahead with some confidence so this slide um is the um projected employment and it's Pasco and Hernando County together but Hernando county is about 20% of this so it's mostly Pasco and what you can see looking to 2030 I've put here the 10 fastest growing um job titles and the wages associated with them and so some of these faster growing areas are fairly High wage but the majority of them are low wage uh jobs um in retail and and uh you know weight staff and Lawn Service and that sort of thing and so what that means is that a lower income group um will be here in the the decade to come and I know that you are all working very hard to bring in higher value employers um uh employers like mfet but even when you're bringing in a mfet for every MD and PhD they hire there will be three to five support workers who make a lot less than the MDS and the phds and they need to live here too um and then also this is sort of consistent to what we see when we get data from the University of Florida shimberg Center um this is looking at Cost burden looking ahead to 2050 um the top row is projections for percentage of renters that will be cost burdened and you can see that remains in the 40 to 50% range and the bottom row

are homeowners and we're looking at between a quarter and 1 of homeowners likely to be cost burdened if current conditions continue looking ahead to 2050 um so what else do we see when we look ahead this is probably not a surprise to you because your your planners tell you this all the time but your population will keep growing um and so looking at these projections it looks like you're going to gain a couple of hundred thousand people in the next couple of decades and they need to live somewhere um and so if we assume two to three people per household so if you're gaining 200,000 individuals you're looking at 80 or 990,000 new housing units you need um now that's over a long period of time but don't forget that's just to house the newcomers we still have the deficit of housing for lower income people that exist today and we still have older housing that could be going into disrepair that needs to be replaced so that's a lot of new housing and if we're looking ahead to let's say 2040 you know the planning for that starts today did you yes no we're supposed to hold off on question Yeah question I'll write it down for okay um so now we get to policy so what approach can the county take to address some of these deficits now as I said to start um I wish I could say it's like you do this one thing and housing problems go away but housing is super complex you all know that so it's a multifaceted approach and I'm just going to give sort of headlines of a couple of strategic areas that I think are good to look at um and um and don't worry if I'm going quickly because I'm going to go in through each of these bullet points so the first sort of gets at what we had talked about a little bit before with the age of housing in which lower income people live um and that is making sure that we retain the affordable housing stock that we have so part of that is going to be sort of Market based affordable housing sometimes in the field that's called naturally occurring affordable housing in other words it's not subsidized it's not rent restricted it just happens to be uh lower cost and so to maintain that housing Supply which is where most lowincome people live we need to look at rehab and other ways that people stay housed even if they encounter some kind of financial difficulty now the county already has um a homeowners um rehab program and also has a program to help people out if they are in tax aers and so you don't need to reinvent the wheel but I think those programs should be serving more people I think they should be broader and should be more robust even perhaps consider let's say helping people with homeowners insurance which these days may be more than their property taxes and so um helping people pay that homeowners Assurance could mean that they're able to maintain their homes even if a storm comes um and um the other thing I think we need to do regarding U um affordable housing maintenance is making sure that the current assisted housing stock you have remains affordable and habitable so

as most of you know when you have um assisted housing it's usually funded by the state or the federal government there's some kind of a contract that runs several decades that says we will give you a subsidy and you will keep rents low well those contracts end and so you have housing that was built 10 20 30 years ago where the contracts are going to expire and so to make sure that those remain affordable and and remain in good enough condition to be habitable it often takes some local government action to make that happen you don't want to have affordable housing kind of dropping out the bottom as you're trying to put more in on the top um so the other thing I think is sometimes we just need to give money to people and you already do this because you have a down payment assistance program um and that's to help homeowners who qualify buy a home um so we're suggesting expanding that um thinking about different ways to make it more accessible to more people um considering the rapid increase in the price of a typical starter home it may be that the limits you have on it now are just not realistic and so those are things that we've discussed the other thing I wanted to mention is rental assistance um during the pandemic then uh you used the federal ER program to provide rental assistance you worked with nonprofit Partners to do that and that kept people from being evicted um so those particular federal funds are gone but there's other federal funds that could be used for that now not everyone is wild about the idea of handing people money because they didn't pay their rent but let me just point out that sometimes people are getting evicted because they um had you know lower hours one one month and couldn't pay a month's rent and so over 800 or ,000 they're getting evicted so when you think about it in terms of being cost effective sometimes paying two months rent means that the landlord's not incurring expensive court costs a family is not ending up having to move in a sort of a forced way and if that family were to end up homeless you're not spending $2,000 on them you're spending 20,000 and more so a well-targeted um emergency rental aid program can in fact be a cost-effective use of money now also you don't have to be an economist to know about supply and demand affecting the cost of things so right now um you have a short supply of housing at least at certain price points and so that means that the cost of housing are going to go up as your population increases and so it's important to make sure that we always have our eyes on the prize which is building more housing and that means making sure housing can be built at every price point now building for uh people at over 100% of income or 120% of Ami that doesn't require subsidies but it may require some other policies I'll get to in a sec but building for people who earn 80% of Ami or less usually require some kind of subsidy and so incentives like we or bonuses can help bridge the gap

between what people can pay and what a developer will tell you is um important for them is is what they need to make uh to make something work and um that gets me to my next point which is one of the things that's really key to any kind of local housing policy is using land strategically we are not making more land we have what we have and so we need to make sure that what land we have that is in any way appropriate for affordable housing or for housing is used for that purpose also you all have amazing amounts of open space and Recreation space you don't want to give that away um you also have agricultural land you don't want to give that away and so what that means is that the land you have that is possible for building needs to be used really efficiently so one thing that I mention is thinking about Surplus public land um you you know the county may have land I know you don't have cra but municipalities do school district there are a lot of local and state agencies that hold land that can be declared Surplus um and when you use Surplus land to um to sort of have rfps to build affordable housing it's great for the county because you get have a lot of sway over what gets built there you have a lot of carrots and sticks you can use when it's your land and that can make sure that the projects are affordable and so I would encourage you to look closely at what land could be deemed Surplus and then to you look at mechanisms like U um Community Land trusts or land Banks as ways to hold and manage housing but perhaps even more importantly is the other part of using land efficiently is thinking about zoning um and um you you know regulations are important we don't want people to you know build in wetlands and all that but we don't want to have regulations that unreasonably prevent us from building housing um and you are not likely to meet all of your housing and affordability goals if the only thing you can build in Pasco County is a detached single family home you just won't get to the number of units you need at the price point you need and so there are ways to introduce greater density and I know density can be a scary word in many situations but it doesn't have to be scary in practice um you don't have to look like Miami Beach or Manhattan to have greater density so you may have heard terms like missing middle or gentle density um and these refer to housing types like accessory dwelling units or adus um duplexes and triplexes that can be integrated into a single family home neighborhood without changing the neighborhood's character but to get housing at scale uh you still need more multif family housing um and so you specially need that around areas that are um convenient Transportation routes and near employment centers you do not want a situation where your lower wage Workforce has to commute 45 minutes from Three Counties over you want them here um and so to uh to do this you need to think about where you can accommodate more density because uh denser housing with smaller Footprints is always going to be less expensive um if large scale

upzoning is not realistic then at least think about density bonuses which you can use um and negotiate for affordable housing units in exchange for those bonuses and finally of course scaling up your housing policies requires that that you have the appropriate Partnerships and staff capacity to carry out new and expanded programs um you can build on existing Partnerships with housing nonprofits um you can develop new collaborations I've heard um others like David Lambert mentioned talking to employers employers have a huge interest in affordable housing if I'm the CEO of a hospital I need to have people who don't earn a ton of money and they need to be working around the clock and so I need to have them living nearby so that they can get to their midnight shift and so working with these employers to see what they might have available in terms of surplus land or resources or simply um support that they can give in various ways also we're talking about making programs more robust and expanding programs and of course you need to make sure that you have the staff in place that can handle those new responsibilities and that there's training for existing staff that they can take on new tasks if that is indeed what is required and so to conclude um the goal is a healthy housing market we want housing options for the doctor and the home health aid for the CEO and the receptionist and there are multiple tools and strategies the county can use to get there thank you very much um do you want to do you want me to take questions now okay so I'll stay here for your questions M Mary yes I wrote it down um when you said we were 880,000 we were in need of 80,000 units um is that above and beyond what we've um may not what we've encumbered but maybe haven't pulled permits I mean we no it's not I'm I'm was just looking at the population projection and saying that 200,000 people are going to need 880,000 units so there may if you've already permed 80,000 units then then you know that takes you part of the we may not have permited them but we may have given them um approvals to move forward what's the right planning word entitlement yeah right I would wonder how many entitlements we have out there that are potential that would be a question for your planning department me some of them may potential but most of those units are not restricted to being affordable no no yeah but well she didn't say we need 880,000 affordable units um but just to accommodate new incomers you would need about 82 90,000 new units we don't have enough I just wonder if that was above and beyond what we've entitled but it sounds like it isn't so but thank you I loved your presentation yeah I'm looking for some quadruplexes that I just saw up in Louisville um when we get to us talking so yeah yeah I mean the fact is when you look at really well-designed quadruplexes and adus I mean they look great nobody would say oh my God I don't

want that in my neighborhood yeah you didn't you didn't mention the word Adu um I you know what I skipped over something where I had meant to mention it so I did want to mention that a lot of the your your neighboring counties and municipalities have recently um permitted adus um you all have that just in very few master plan areas where people can have like an apartment over a garage but countywide we can't have you can't build an Adu yeah I've been asking and asking and asking and I think it's in the works but for a couple years I've been starky we we're going to cover that later in the presentation yeah but anyway yeah I think St Pete um city of Tampa and some other Counties have now included that and they have different a different range of regulations um about size and appearance and all these things to make it more consistent with the neighborhoods they're in I think you find out in in Pasco most of the houses new homes being built are way over $300,000 I mean they're 400,000 500,000 not affordable for most people I mean it takes two red winter working in in a home bringing in good pay to be able to afford one of those houses absolutely we uh we need a lot of housing that is Affordable for our workers that are coming in for jobs we're bringing in uh all over the county we don't have the housing for them yet but we have to be and that's why we're having this meeting because we know we need Workforce housing so thank you chairman any other questions okay thank you thank you thank you so we're going to bring Marcy esberg up and then followed Marcy will be the two Davids David Engel and David Goldstein so okay welcome Marcy good afternoon Commissioners for the record Marcy esberg director of Community Development and uh I'm going to take it from the point of the things that we're doing currently with the limited resources that we have and then we'll go on to uh take some of the suggestions that Dr strum uh came up with from the report as a way of suggesting a way forward for our community so uh the Dr strum ended with uh looking for a healthy housing market and really what we're all looking for is a place where every person in Pasco County can live work and play here and so I like to always start with this slide which comes from the University of Florida shimberg Institute and I I like how the fact that uh the last time we were talking so much about University of Florida and another name there was all this competition that was at the tourism banquet but I like how the USF and and shimberg Institute UF have worked together and really providing really good information for us and this slide talks about the housing types that we need for the market and what we are primarily looking at are subsidized housing that's below 80% of the mediate income so we start off on the leftand side with Supportive Housing and those could be affordable units but also the type of wraparound services to

help people stay housed these could be people that have been experiencing homel homelessness uh older adults people with disabilities or special needs so we want them to be housed it's uh healthier for them it's less expensive for our community for them to be housed but in order for them to stay house they need services along with their housing from there we move into the affordable rental housing and and we heard a lot about the statistics of what type of rental housing we needed and cost burden uh rental housing could include uh housing from the public housing units also the units that are subsidized through Florida housing uh the Department of Housing and Urban Development USDA and then vouchers that come from the housing authority and as mentioned earlier the naturally occurring affordable housing which could be housing that uh some of us right here in our in right here today are living in and then we go into in our Continuum affordable home ownership and we started with um David Lambert talking about the family self-sufficiency program and how uh those people were looking to buy homes and they couldn't find homes to buy so what do we need in our community for that affordable home ownership and it could be something like a community land trust but it could also be the programs that we're already doing like down payment assistance low interest loans uh affordable construction like our work that we do with habitat for humanities and home rehab and weatherization so we are doing a number of things in the county with our limited resources and for those of you uh that maybe not know that our department is completely Grant funded and I'm going to do just an overview of the funds that come in to the county to our department and I'm going to specifically focus on how we use these funds for housing so there's sometimes there's other uses for them but today we're just going to talk about housing so the Community Development block grant the home investment partnership and the emergency Solutions Grant are the three grants that come from the Department of Housing and Urban Development and that's because we are in an entitlement community so Pasco County gets these grants every year and why why are we in entitlement Community because we have over 500,000 people a certain amount of low-income people and the age of our housing we've earned it we've earned it so for cdbg we get about $3 million a year plus a little bit of program income and in addition to Public Services we can do some affordable housing activities oddly enough we cannot build housing with cdbg but we can buy housing we could buy land we could clear land get it ready for housing and we could do access modifications or infrastructure an example of this is uh uh those of you that know that Vincent house uh we helped them build the beautiful facility that they have there and now they're getting ready to build 39 units of affordable housing for their members and we put $1.1 million of infrastructure money in so that they could be prepared

to build so we could do that with cdbg our home money is strictly for housing so we could build new housing we could renovate housing we could do home ownership we could do rental housing we get a little over a million dollars a year from that program and then for the Emergency Solutions grant that is strictly for people experiencing homelessness you see we only get $250,000 hard to build anything for $250,000 but we can do rental assistance with that money and we could also do temporary shelter with that money the biggest pot of money that we have for affordable housing is using our state funding which is the state Housing Initiative partnership or ship and uh this coming year we're getting $4.6 million from the state for this uh since I've been here we had a year where we got no money for this and one for 700,000 and 900,000 so it's only been the last two years that that amount has gone up but again this is strictly for housing and again we could do a myriad of activities we could do new construction we could do single family we could do multifam we could do Rehabilitation we could do rental housing new uh the key with ship is there's a lot of pockets that we have to do uh so we have to do a certain amount for home ownership a certain amount of construction so sometimes that limits us all of these funds are used uh to build or to do affordable housing and it's all strictly by income so people will often call me and say do I qualify for this and this is the chart that we use so uh if you were to look at this chart and say person one person household if they earned 53,500 or less that would be 80% of the median income and everything is adjusted for household size So a family of four would be 764 76,500 it really depends on the household size and it this amount changes every year right around April or May so that's the newest cost um income costs so now uh I what I did was I took the report that Dr Str gave us and I basically are I'm going to tell you some of the things that are already doing and that we can do based on her recommendations so uh we work very hard in preserving our current housing stock and so with our ship funding we do owner occupied renovation and we run about 40 of those a year we could do anything from roof repairs or new roofs new AC units access modifications we put new showers uh we put uh new k replace flooring uh so we do a number of owner occupied rehabs uh we help as was mentioned people stay in their homes uh by paying their taxes if they are behind in taxes we do rental assistance for special needs and we can do rental rehab for developers and not for profits with cdbg and home we can do acquisition and or rehab again to keep the housing stock we have to preserve reserve them that's that's how we use the funding but we can also do more uh in the report uh uh Dr strum talks about doing an assessment of our housing conditions and that is

something that we can do in our with our team uh she also suggests that we can uh extend our um our ship requirements so we could help more people uh so uh we can do that with raising the assessed home value and also raising the amount of of money that we can give uh the other thing that we're looking to do is everything in our office is done through uh loans so uh those years when we got no money or 700,000 or 900,000 we were getting also paybacks from people who who previous years maybe 10 years ago 15 years ago benefited for those programs that money helped keep the whole team hired and employed but also helped us to continue to help new people so generally speaking everything is done that way but we can go into a program where we offer grants or for forgivable loans to special populations especially those on fixed income like those that are elderly and disabled and then one one thing that was mentioned earlier was the mobile homes in our County so with our ship funds we can only help mobile homes that are built after 1994 I will tell you that at least once a week if not long more than that we get a call from somebody in one of our mobile homes looking for assistance because of their roof because of their AC unit and we can't do it uh so one of the things that we're hoping to do is to start a program with our cdbg money to help those that are in mobile homes that are under that are that are older than 1994 and those could be over 21,000 homes um so that's what we could do to preserve our stock uh now let's look at how we could work with or what we do with assisted housing stock uh So currently we have partnered uh a number of times with the Pesco County Housing Authority so if they need Renovations in their properties uh we use those Grant funds to do that kind of renovation that leaves their money to to be used in other instances but what we can do and I've seen this in other communities is when we have those assisted units and according to the report we have just under 5,000 assisted units in the county um when they when their contract for affordability uh becomes close to being due uh we can go in with those Grant funds and purchase those units or purchase those units with one of our nonprofit Partners so that they continue to be affordable and uh that's really important because uh when we get into the type of housing market that we're in where it's really hot um those those units go market rate and I've seen that in communities I've seen them go condo can you say that again so uh there are assisted units that are in our County about 5,000 of them and that means they have federal or state money in them but when that when they got that money they were told they need to stay affordable for X number of years that X number comes due and at that point those units can go market rate they could sell them to be condo but we could come in and purchase them and we could use that we could use those Grant funds to do that and keep them in our affordable housing

stock so I'd like to tell you that we're doing a lot for affordable housing it's not enough but we are doing some really good things on the leftand side you could see and I just went back to since I've been here in October it'll be six years so I didn't take the whole history of this department but in the past six years we built 110 units of affordable housing in Dade City 30 units in Newport Richie another five in Newport Richie we purchased uh Rosal renue which was a multifam small multif family um units and we turned them into permanent supportive H housing beds for the homeless and just recently uh finished leasing up 88 units of affordable rental housing in Tanager Square which is right off of Old 54 that is a low-income housing tax credit project but look what's happening on the right hand side um and that comes to over 800 units of affordable housing that's in the pipeline including our veterans project with the Housing Authority June 17th June 17th 77 units of rental housing uh spear Village is going from 5 to 50 units uh Ozanam 4 is going to be 33 units of affordable one bedrooms for people experiencing homelessness the Vincent house housing I I mentioned and then the two uh dominium projects that you all are familiar with uh one in Newport Richie is a senior housing of 300 units and Kobe a Cove in um in the Anclote is 225 units of family housing and then lastly just recently approved as a low-income housing tax credit echos at banet point which is 114 units of senior housing in Hudson so we've got a lot of good things happening um we're well on our way but we definitely need more things to do so what can we do uh to build more affordable housing uh one of the suggestions is to work with development services under your direction to identify the land that is suitable for missing middle and multif family projects we can take the funding that we have which is uh ship funding and home funding we usually put that out to request for proposals and you can decide on some new incentives and along with your incentives we can add money to it so you have the incentive and you have the funding that's a nice pairing that doesn't often happen um and then we can we are doing this and we will continue to uh attend all the prea meetings uh our our team does myself or Jeff mckitrick our assistant director and uh I think sometimes we feel a little bit like used c car salesmen but we're always pitching the idea of affordable housing to all the developers that are coming through on their prea meetings so that's what we're doing uh now let's make this a little bit more granual granu I don't know if I said that right Gran granular thank you uh uh and I think this um will really hit home for you all uh I want to thank the uh HR department for this uh information and just thank all the county departments we really all worked together it was a great team effort um so uh the the question is how much can a Pasco County employee afford to pay for housing each

month okay so these are my fellow employees uh um that are working here uh for you and I together so we have uh on the First Column 92 full-time employees that earn less than $2,800 a month and these are divided up into basically 50% of the median income middle is 80% of the median income and then in the right hand side 100% of the median income so that's kind of how we group these so you've got 92 full-time employees your library assistants customer service specialists equipment operator train trainees custodian Animal Care teexs Park Rangers parkitect end okay and and they're coming from all different branches right uh 92 of them that can afford between $58 $835 a month then we have those that are at 80% of the median income earning between 2,800 and $4,450 a month almost ,500 employees your firefighters EMTs bus drivers project coordinators again Library Associates admin secretaries equipment operators utility workers all earning um uh 80% of the median income they could afford less than 13 thou 1337 a month rent and then we have at our 100% of Ami those are 1,070 employees uh our corrections officer paramedic field inspector plant operators planner to program coordinators they could afford up to $1,838 a month rent so the bottom line is 43% of the County Employees can only afford less than 1337 a month or they they all qualify as 80% or less of the mediate income so how does that translate to our rental market uh we just I just want across use Zillow realtor.com and on the top line going right across the county what is an average one bedroom in Newport Richie you know from the last time I did this they actually went down just slightly uh but you're looking at 935 to 1225 a month Land of Lakes it goes from 1330 to, 1500 Dade City 1,400 to 1600 Wesley Chapel up to 1,800 and Zephyr Hills 14 to 1800 well if you flip back and you remember that is uh a lot of people uh in our that we work with cannot afford uh to live anywhere except for in a one-bedroom apartment in Newport Richie so if you look at the middle one again that's uh the 50 80 uh 100 and 120% of the median income and then in the last line uh just taking the information from Dr str's report uh not just our uh County Employees but having uh just under 18,000 cost burden Pasco households at 50% of the median income 10,000 at 80% of the median income so that's 20 8,000 under 80% of the median income and then the uh the number go down as the median income increases so I hope that this information uh uh helps you to see uh not only uh the need uh but also how this impacts uh uh the people that we work with every day uh next we're going well let me see does anybody have any questions yes let start I'm going start my first one um on the cdb G or

whichever one of those um groups of money that you said we have um how do we I you and I talked when our family was going to do a build to rent um we were going to work try and work with a developer or Builder to buy down a cost of a house for someone to rent um so can you do that in a regular in any of our built to rent neighborhoods we could come in and help subsidize one of those houses sure and I really think we should try and get some of those um and we need to talk to some of our development Community about participating with us I'm sorry my my buil to rent Community went away because the funding went away so I wanted to be the guinea pig in the county um but it's it's it's somewhat easy to do when you're doing a rental Community under one management because you have a rental office because you have to income qualify whoever's running those hous hous but that seems like the loow hanging fruit to me that we could come in and buy down some of their costs and put them into a rental pool that's managed by that company yeah we can do that okay um um when you're talking about all the ship and cdbg funds does this include all our cities do we manage it for every Everybody in the county we manage it for everybody but Newport Richie they opted out and why is that because they uh thought that they could get more money directly from the state and manage it themselves is that working out for them no you all need to ask them okay I don't know maybe maybe it has but I I will say I've driven around Newport Richie a lot and they've got triplexes quadruplexes all tucked in in all their streets all mixed in with single family and just seamlessly mixed in um okay another question um okay on your when you did that list of completed projects I didn't notice the one that's behind the M the McDonald's I think it is or behind the um Southeastern Southeast it's that big tower with where they um it's on the west side of 19 and it's a it's a it's a Workforce housing project it's really nice anyone who went on my drive-thru before you were Commissioners I took you to see that love that lowincome project that is right next to an old like Section 8 income project it it might have been before six years before my time maybe that's it yeah cuz it we we have a beautiful one there one off 19 it's right off of 19 kind of by SouthEast Personnel Leasing I find there I I didn't go all the way back okay it's got um maybe 250 300 units in there and it has a range of Amis it has is IT Park Place I don't remember the name I'll pull it up but I want to make make sure you add that to your list uh but they they participated the state lottery and they got some money all right let me see if there's another question any other question no that's it ju on what you've done so far okay thank you Marcy oh this is the tag

team so Marcy's doing a fantastic job um but he's got limited resources and so what David and I said okay what can we do on a going forward basis what's kind of some of the lwh hanging fruit that we can do to eat into this deficit and we still have a deficit if you remember I showed you the shimberg numbers rep before in the below 80% range we clearly still have a deficit so we thought David and I put our heads together um he's got a little more hair than me um um and we try to come up with some quick things that we could work on to to start the ball rolling on addressing this deficit one of them you've already done so this was kind of our Carro approach to live local we did this last year we we reduced our mobility and impact fees for affordable housing we created 100% reduction for housing below 80% of Ami and a 75% reduction for nonprofits that are below 120 so the reason for that second one is you might have a nonprofit like habitat that's doing primarily 80% but they may have a few homes that are in the 80 to 100 range and we didn't want them to not get some kind of benefit for for providing that housing it's less of a need but there's still a little bit of a need in the 80 to 100 range um however that one's important because we made it clear that you can't do that we won't give those reductions if you invoke live local so that one's already done um that's the easy one second easiest one this is the one that you want to talk about commissioner starky commissioner Morana you raised this as well adus um I do think this is probably the easiest thing for us to to accomplish very fairly quickly um we probably have about as Elizabeth mentioned about seven or eight muds currently that allow for accessory dilling units but it's really only allowed in mudds so commissioner Stark you texted me at the last Planning Commission a meeting and said I did I'm going to bring that up and said why don't why aren't we allowing an Adu on that on that lot um five acres he wanted to build a home home for he wanted his parents to be able to live on his five acres and So my answer to Is Well we have to legalize adus on other on these kinds of lots which we currently don't have so I do think this one is fairly easy um it's just simply a matter of amending our zoning code to allow these adus we we already have standards that we came up with mpds in terms of how they generally have to be subordinate to the principal structure um but those standards are fairly easy to put into the code so so I think this one is something I'm guessing we could do in the next 6 months is it tied to the original house there is it t yeah you need to have a principal building right before you can have an accessory dwelling unit but in generally the accessory dwelling unit tends to be a smaller unit than the principal building and so in the mpds that we've approved we have required that it be a smaller structure than the principal building right and there may be some really small l you know I can't guarantee you that every 40ft lot you've approved you can

fit an Adu you may or may not be able to but most of our Lots in the county are not 40 foot Lots they're they're larger lots and so I suspect that they could fit adus on them the one the commissioner starky texted me about clearly could have fit an 8 AC um so I think this one's fairly easy to do and many other jurisdictions have done it I know it was fairly successful in California they had a lot of Adu permits when they loosened up the regulations to allow ad use so I think this one could be done fairly quickly and it's an easy easy way to increase the supply of housing the next one um do we have a lot of calls for that that time um I I don't know how many we're getting currently I I do see it a lot in BCS that's one thing that we do reject particularly on the larger size Acres they may want to bring another structure in right okay um and if you drive through long leaf if you go through you you won't notice that them on the main streets but if you go through the alleys there's quite a few way to use them and some people use them just for when their kids are visiting from out of town but some people um rent them out I one we we one of my AIDS has has a one-bedroom that sh I can't see you putting them on 40ft Lots cuz you can hardly put a lot more on 40ft Lots well it's if it's rear loaded it's that's a different story because you have a garage in the back and a separate access above the garage but I think the thought would be to allow them County Wide but there may be some lots that they're just too small to allow them right yeah Mr chairman yes sir yeah the summit meeting they had for housing um it was very popular in California but it didn't start out that way because it had so many restrictions yeah so I think we need to look at what California did at first find out how they throttled back and then maybe to take a look some other areas and and bring back it could be it could be a whole separate meeting I think a presentation on just that alone but there is some great opportunity that you could help a lot let's say seniors that may have a home or poor family's got a home that want to either bring a parent back or bring parent out of out of a place or a child that wants to stay by so there's a lot of opportunity but I think we I would take a look and see what others have done yeah we'll look at what California did but I think my understanding is in California they started thoroughly restrictive but then they loosened it up and then they got a lot more Adu permits so um we'll use that as a starting point but we want to get moving on that one fairly quickly I know David Engel has expressed an interest in getting that one moving pretty quickly um the next one requires a little more effort and that's what Elizabeth referred to as gentle density or kind of infill density and it's basically the concept of allowing single family homes to convert to duplexes quadruplexes now this is one clearly you're not going to get a quadruplex on

a 40ft lot okay but there could be areas of the county where you've got larger Lots where the conversion of a single family home to duplex or quadruplex could work but this one requires a little more study because you got to make sure you got the right lot sizes you want to make sure there's adequate infrastructure to support that the conversion of single family homes to to quadruplexes or duplexes so that one's going to require a little more study on our part that's why we want to start with adus because that'll kind of be the trial balloon to see how that's working but we think the next step would be to allow start allowing more duplexes quadruplexes in some of the single family neighborhoods the last one I want to cover probably requires the most work um and that's inclusion Ariz zoning and linkage fees so David actually started this um he he he actually had a few projects where he said hey if you're going to be increasing density you should be setting aside some of those units for affordable housing and so he started it but then Liv local kind of derailed that effort so he kind of tabled it um but the concept is basically when you're approving a new development you're allowing additional density or even non-residential development that you require that development to set aside a certain percentage of their units to be affordable housing um typically these regulations require you to have a fee and lose so if the developer says I don't want to provide affordable housing at least they have a way of sort of buying out of the the the mandatory requirements so they can pay a fee in lie of that which then Marcy can use to help provide affordable Pro housing projects elsewhere um it can apply to both residential and non-residential and I think David will tell you that it's kind of important to also look at non-residential too because a McDonald's is generating the need for affordable housing I mean it's it's generating low-wage workers that need affordable housing so it's it's something you probably need to look at both from a residential and non-res non-residential standpoint I would do want to point out that we actually used to have a requirement like this in the county Wiregrass actually the Wiregrass Di and there were a few others actually the starky DR had it originally um vop had it central Pasco employment Village they all had affordable housing requirements similar to what I'm talking about the problem we had was that at least in wiph we said we're going to pursue something countywide well we never did and so wiass said you never pursued what you said you were going to do so we want out of the requirement because we're the only ones doing it and I agree with WIS it's not fair if they're the only ones that are subject to this requirement affordable housing is a CommunityWide need and so wire grph shouldn't be the only one that's having to deal with that need so I think if we did something on a countywide basis it would be more

Equitable instead of just targeting projects here and there um David yes and can we go back to um the drri days when when we had dris River Ridge was a drri um we have a lot of developments with dris and when 10% of the housing in a drri had to be affordable and that that was the origin it actually originated because Tampa Regional planning Council as part of that Dr process was saying was pushing for us to have a certain percentage of housing that was affordable there was a 9 J2 rule a while yeah so so yes so yes so that's why the larger projects like the wire grasses the starky DI and others had that requirement but when we didn't do it countywide then they also why are we the only ones having to deal with this problem and I tended to agree with them why why we singling out just a few large projects and saying you're the only ones that are responsible for dealing with affordable housing when it's really a CommunityWide need so the thought process of this is that it would be a CommunityWide program we have now there is a statutory requirement that you offset the cost of that housing to the developer so you have to create other incentives whether it's additional density some of the impact fee waivers we talked about you have to give them other incentives to offset that additional cost and so that's something that we've already started looking at we actually prepared a scope that we sent to the Florida Housing Coalition I think they've given us a price already to do that work um so we want to start that initiative as well that one's going to take a little more time because that's not an easy program to do because you've got to do that analysis about how you're offsetting the costs and come up with the right fees and Li and so it's that one's going to take a little more time and so I think that's a good direction for us to go yeah so look into that we I I personally think so too I mean to me I view affordable housing like any other piece of infrastructure I mean it's like parks and libraries and Roads and fire stations it's a it's a needed piece of infrastructure and so it's not to say the development Community is going to fully solve the problem but they should be part of the solution in other words use what we do with this combine that with some of the money that Marcy's talking about I think we can come up with a comprehensive program that actually addresses our affordable housing needs but there there's no one Silver Bullet when it comes to affordable housing that's why we're giving you multiple strategies so that we're not putting the burden on anyone particular group and I think problem the Avenue going out to the whole county is is looking at it everybody has to do that um we got we've had I've been in office now I'm in my eighth year so I've been here seven years and we've had to look at not having an affordable housing the entire time I've been here and I always feel like we need there's 40% of our Workforce 40% of all of our citizens that need affordable housing and we need to do something about it and we can't

just keep turning our backs to it we need to take care of that and that will be a start but then we need to figure out other projects will come along at the same time the other reason I think this is important is we saw what happened with live local not a good way of attacking this issue we all agree on that but there's still a need we know there's still need in that belowed 80% range so if the legislator is not going to solve the problem I think we need to take steps to solve the problem so we can help ourselves and we're not getting a top- down mandate to try to solve this problem we have people that haven't even moved here yet that need affordable housing hav want to be here but Elizabeth pretty much told you that that you're going to have a lot of new correct lower wage number was 43% well just look at school teachers School teachers were in the the group that need affordable housing and we're not we're not providing it yeah currently sure yes sir thank you you we're talking a lot about rental right there's different I wasn't talking about rental well there's okay to be clear the the need at below 80% of Ami is there whether it's rental or yeah or home ownership we we need both I don't think anybody's suggesting I suggested that the need can only be met with rental I was going to speak to that in a moment okay go I uh welcome commissioner jger uh my name is David Engel I'm the planning and economic direct growth director and as a planner we don't just take snapshots in time we do projections and forecasts of the future and two weeks ago Zillow issued a study showing a tremendous gap between the inflated cost of housing and salaries not keeping up so our our need for housing keeps growing organically on top of the people that are moving in and the jobs are being created and to support Marcy's discussion about the jobs we're creating here in the county so we track in our office the jobs creation incentive payments that go out the door for board approved economic projects and many of them because they were approved just two or three years ago are basically the average wage is well below 80% of Ami and those are those are things that we can even incentivize because we incentivize by average pay example Gary Plastics Gary Plastics I believe had about 125 150 incen incentivized jobs but their payroll is 525 and uh the the Delta on that are people that can't afford to live here in Pasco and our job creation in uh our our our office of um Dr bis's office he he's committed and has initiated three business surveys here in Pasco County and the three drivers are uh available Workforce affordable housing um and traffic and blight and Redevelopment those are what our businesses are telling us they need to grow and be successful So to that end we have uh big opportunities here affordable housing just doesn't have to be just you know a new singular development whether it be apartments or tow houses it can be many things but the area that I think is the

biggest opportunity is our west side of Pasco County called the West Market area in the harbors because we have older um neighborhoods unfortunately that are in Decline they were built in the 1970s they were designed for people that were retiring now the housing has been recycled through several home ownerships and now there's people living there because that's our affordable housing stock here in the county the preponderance preponderance of ownership is they landlords most of those units occupied off a us9 in our older neighborhoods are renter occupied and using you know and and I didn't have a lot of slides today and a lot of granular discussion because I wanted to give time for the board to give us some policy Direction but um this Redevelopment area we could use transect zoning form base zoning do quadruplexes and different types of Innovative techniques and what that does is it elevates the property values it also um creates um a proof concept where where these uh renter occupied units the landlords are selling land there's consolidation and it really economically upgrades the entire area not only to the gross County product but also into our general fund so in the west side we have uh we have the infrastructure we have the best coverage for public transportation along us19 we're going to redevelop that we have activity centers where there'll be employment so we we have a lot of opportunities to work in the US1 19 area and the peripheral neighborhoods land values are less and there's a lot of lot of lots that have been acquired through tax sale and other you know or County owned because people didn't pay their taxes so I I believe that if the board gave us that direction to move aggressively towards affordable housing because not only the current need but the growing need um I will come back with some land use and Zoning recommendations and that'll provide um the re the the the the the resources for Marcy to apply her tools to fill that housing with people in need and I I just wanted to say um when we talk about the need of 880,000 or units of housing right now our our employment pipeline is over 111,000 new jobs in the projects that are under design or the board is approved uh those are are those are office those are Advanced manufacturing and those type of activities and they're going be coming here and and just to show you the scale now mafit has announced they're going to create 14,500 jobs at the speos project but that's only their jobs if if you look at the totality of the mafit development and their business plan there's going to be joint ventures Partnerships other activities there's going to be over 30,000 jobs in there and you know if you go over to I75 and 5 and all the other things I mean we even have job creation going on now in commissioner Mariano's District up in the the the Luchi area and down by the airport we're going to have a tremendous need for housing in the future and it has to be receptive for the workforce thank you let me just add one thing to answer commissioner

wait's question so yes I definitely think that fee simple housing can be affordable the problem we have today currently and that's not usually for ENT that's for sale the problem have is that the market on its own is not necessarily resulting in an affordable town home product so and I wish Mr Lambert had given his story about his search for housing for his daughter but he went searching for a town home or something and he couldn't find anything less than 300,000 is that right okay so even our our sort of highest density single family or or fee simple product which is a town home is not necessarily affordable today and I think that's the issue is that there's kind of a misconception that town homes and 40ft lots are just automatically affordable they're they're not and so you probably need something like inclusionary zoning or linkage fees to encourage developers to at least provide some percentage of their town homes or their 40 foot Lots or whatever the smaller product is to be truly affordable otherwise Mr Lambert's daughter still can't afford anything um I I have some I have some photos that I sent to Sonia Sonia just like the last five or six not the ones I sent you earlier um this is a project that Dave and I went to look at when we were in Cincinnati this is a duplex um I was trying to find the one that's a quadruplex it looks very similar to that so I think there's one door uh that's a quadruplex there's four units in this and you know right next door is a regular house and then and then next door to that a townhouse so I mean that's that's very nicely fitting into a community um I think there's a few more I just I just went online here and I put in duplex and and this came up so um you know a lot of our neighborhoods are regular NE regular neighborhoods not rear loaded the kind that I like walkable communities um what do you what are you show me there oh well that send that to Sonia um and so I think I think it's really it's not that difficult to ask our builders that for every that's another duplex you know just throw in a few duplexes in your single family neighborhood um and and this is a Triplex there's three in this building one two three um so uh you know I'd love to talk with the building Community about be you know seamlessly putting some of these houses in their neighborhoods commissioner my opinion you're not going to have any difficulty getting the builders to put more duplex duplexes Villas quadruplexes Town Homes but I'm just telling you that currently they're still selling them at at at prices that are probably not affordable to most of your employees yeah I'm just being honest with you there there's a that's I think six unit that's that's six units yeah this was uh outside Louisville yeah no I do think that a duplex or quadruplex or town home is more likely to become be affordable it's easier for them to get it to an affordable level but currently it's not

happening and that's why we have a deficit well I think we're going to have to pitch in on the cost too I think um I don't I don't know how we do that in a for sale home home because it has to if we're helping to subsidize a for sale home then how do we ensure that the when the person who got that benefit when they go to sell that goes to someone that also is income restricted so then we need a land trust so Marc's team has very good at this they have mortgages or deed restrictions or land use restriction agreements but we don't have a land trust in Pasco County I don't know we have a land trust but we've done plenty of projects where we've restricted their affordability for a period of time and if they don't sell it at an affordable price they have to basically repay us that subsidy so you've done that yeah so there's Tools in place to ensure long-term affordability but we just have to put them in place and there's also funding tools as well U for redevelopment since you're trying to elevate the property values in an area that's deess so there there are many tools and for redevelopment if you're trying to redevelop and Revitalize an area that's depressed and use affordable housing as one of the mechanisms you can you can establish a tiff and as the property values Elevate um so the the general funds getting more money and you can take some of the increment of rising property values and recycle it back into affordable housing so there's a number of self- sustaining Financial mechanisms you can use and we sawell models of those at our conference yeah I think commissioner had a question thank you chair I said Jack was Sam but any what's that correctly where's your little I didn't touch it l oh ca an issue over there done he can't talk right now go ahead wait thank thank now we're getting extreme what uh I talked to JJ Murphy about this and I've talked to car I'm pretty sure I talked to carbal but what about the have have we done any further exploration on if you if you're at least on the Public Employee side since we're using them as example the uh impact fee credits and to have that the formula set to whatever it needs to be to where that they wouldn't have PMI recall us talking about that Mike I do recall that conversation I'm trying to in J day where his past life I talked with him about it first and they actually did this commissioner we are uh meeting I think uh later this week or next week uh with HR to talk about uh employee incentives in the future for Corrections and uh I think that was going to be a topic that was going to be discussed looking at ways to get our employees to live here in Pasco County especially our correction officers were listed you know on the list there yeah the basic the basic Crux of the conversation was and

it's just another piece of the this story that we're talking about today was as long as the public sector employee you know they want to build a home and live in Pasco they receive a certain level of impact fee credit over time and if they were to move or sale then obviously it would end but the formula be set to where they wouldn't having to pay be paying that $15,200 in PMI or whatever it would be uh on their mortgage which should also be a savings so so I can address the impact Fe part of that because what you did last year already allows us to wave the impact fees if it's below 80% of Ami which is most of what our employees need so but the mortgage part of it is not something we typically handle through fees I don't know I think what what what the commissioner was striving at is you know the impact fees are a significant portion of of of the cost of a of a new home for example and so is there a way for example a program is really what what was being suggested to kind of help buy down uh the down payment I mean it's really tend to amount to down payment type assistance to where you get it uh to a certain level so they wouldn't have to pay a PMI insurance right which could be a couple hundred bucks a month depending on depending on the mortgage so it it would be an it would be an employee benefit is really what it would be so there's a cost Associated to doing that it would have to come from probably General Revenue or or somewhere else but it's it's an idea that's being floated around as as an incentive to attract and retain a Workforce but also to encourage a home ownership so it's something that's getting vetted as Mr Murphy had pointed out I think Marcy has something to add yeah so so we do have a down payment assistance program uh with our ship money and we could help people that earn up to 120% of the median income and is it 3550 $25,000 for the higher income 25 35 or 50,000 and that can also be paired with the state's Hometown Heroes down payment assistance so there could be consider considerable amount of down payment assistance going to people who earn 120% or less of the median income okay uh Mr Mariano thank you Mr chairman you know there's a bunch of different things as far as that can be done um we've approved a lot of apartments and just blanket them coming in they kind of build what they want to build we've never pushed the buttons to say I want to see a bunch of one bedrooms I want to see a bunch of affordables I want to see a bunch of under the 80% Ami so I think that's an opportunity we've got and we should be implementing for the future um as far as duplexes and neighborhoods I think it works great uh duplexes even for new neighborhoods could work well the benefit is someone who can afford a duplex is you they can buy the duplex they can rent out part of it live in part of it that can be part of your thing if you want to tie into ownership to get an extra discount of some sort uh the town home same type of way uh I think the adus were a big benefit that's going to be that can be

out there and you've got a lot of neighborhoods you can go to several different neighborhoods on the on the west side that didn't fully get built out so you get like one one-offs that are just simple lots of are sitting in I know C Pines is probably about 10 15 uh there's a place up across Sea Pines a nice little Waterfront Community the homes aren't just they just sitting I mean land just sitting there not not done there's trailers everywhere and frankly I'm not a big fan of spending a lot of money on rebuilding a mo mobile home I'd rather build something nicer and if you want to go that way give people a huge credit you know some sometimes they talked about you know different improvements could be done may maybe you make those things like tax free for like 15 years if you put a single family home in and go along that way we had one gentleman who was a veteran he was in that Leisure Lane uh voran area that he had a mobile home he went to go Improvement by the time he started his demolition which got a permit for he had to improve it more than 50% the gentleman lost his home town and country you can look at that whole area there you got all those empty lots of sitting there instead of doing something on on the one-offs you know there's potential there to do some other things but I think that mobile home product and even along the water you get chances to improve that dramatically as well from from all that's there and that will make it a lot safer because you know if that storm Ian had hit us direct all those things are wiped out you're starting over again anyway so I mean there's opportunities out there and there's a lot of good discussion we having here today but we got to keep an open mind to what can what we can bring back for these Solutions down our road okay M yes we wanted to wrap this up and bring this all Under One Roof so as David had mentioned rent and home prices are increasing and wages have not kept paced Florida is a hot spot' got population coming like mad and we all want to see um to have a healthy County where everybody can afford to live work and play so to wrap this up what direction would you like to go and are we missing anything we heard about adus we heard linkage fees if I could bring something up um this has been brought up at my last two aack meetings advisor affordable housing advisory Council um that um 80 that affordable housing is supposed to be fast-tracked through per the permitting process and um and they say that's one of the best um ways to help with affordability uh I know that habitat has had one heck of a time trying to build get their development go going over here across the street with I don't know what is it 17 units I mean we have some rules that prevented them from um moving forward that didn't make any sense when they're trying to build uh the little community that they were like um um subdivision stuff and I mean we really have put a lot of impediments in their way and they don't have that in

any other County but ours so um through in the regulatory process I think we should sit and meet and see what we can do to streamline affordable housing because we we can't make it so expensive for them in the development process JJ I'm sure you took notes JP I'm sure you took notes on that one okay what else anything am I missing anything from our aack well adus I'm I like because it gives people more flexibility to do something with their property that's just a general statement so I think that's that's something that's that's lwh hanging fruit as far as the the mandatory commitment piece and the the linkage fees and they apply to residential non-residential mix use I need more time to be educated on what this means cuz on face value I'm currently not comfortable with it um but that's just because it's new so um not saying I disagree with it I just want staff to help me understand what this what these inclusionary zoning and linkage fees slide mean David that's what the study will show I mean you're going to want to comment on that yeah so the the study um that Florida Housing Coalition would be doing would get into the details of that um but before anything like that could ever be adopted we' we'd have be having to sit down with you and explain to you exactly how it would work and oh yeah I'm okay and and the board has discretion about how stringent that is I mean the fee in wire grph my recollection it was like $100 a unit I mean we weren't talking about a huge amount of money I'm not saying that we're going to end up there but I think anything that we do will help Marcy get the kind of affordable housing that we need so I think you're going to even if we move in that direction going to have plenty of options about how how strong a program you decide to do we're Happ we'll be happy to sit down with you and go over those details um Mr chairman yes ma'am I I want to explore what some of the other counties are doing I know that Palm Beach County um has a requirement that if there's so many houses being built in a development that x amount has to be Workforce housing um and it's a sliding scale and they figured out how to make it work and I think there's some other counties that are doing that as well so um of course I want to talk to our development community and but I've talked to Metro about this when I told them what we were trying to do at our blueberry farm they they were all about seeing how they could participate so I don't you know some may resist some may not but let's let's get those dialogues going to see because this is a problem that's going to affect all all of us and um we we're just going to all have to work together and we have money um and so we need to get Innovative and creative Mr think commissioner starky brought someone trying to build a Adu on some on their property a 3 acre lot 5 acre lot um I've got people in my district that want to build with allows lots of five

or 10 acres right they want the family to move in with them not in the same building but on the same property and right now the rules we have in place are just terrible to try to make that happen so I know we're working to change some of that right now but I want to say as far as like we saw the last hearing we had up in Hudson how we had really kind of work to make sure it's safe for the kidss to get there I'd rather take off the development pressure of having these big home builders coming in that are going to really disrupt the whole infrastructure there and let these families that own 5 Acres 10 acres yeah and and just let them build in as long as they're let's say home's on at least an acre property itself make it easy to subdivide it make it easy for that family to come in and stay there yeah and and that's a way to make affordable housing because now you're taking away the land cost yeah I've I've heard of many cases where adults want their elderly parents to move in on the same property one of them's passed or both of them are unable to afford something else or even rent because the rent so high but the fact of it is if they could build that U product on their five acres or their three acres or two acres a a one acre lot's a bigger lot than what most people realize is it's 210 by 210 there's a lot of room on a one acre lot if you compare that to a 40ft lot you can see how much room there is on one acre lot so um there are I I have seen um people one of my friend who's a realtor he sold a house over there on pla um to a actually he's a Hollywood producer I don't know what he's doing here um but um he wanted to have space for his family to stay when they come visit from California and um the county would not let him put an Adu or you know a pool house with a bedroom and they said for him to do that and this is if you if you're driving down PLA and you see that big gorgeous twostory you know Georgian house that it's that house and um and they said if he wanted to add a guest house in his in the pool house he wanted to build he would have to apply for a sub to be a subdivision what I don't know your terms but you have to go through plotting like a subdivision so what what the staff what they ended up doing was saying okay if you build your little building over there and you build a covered walkway that attaches your house to that house now it's one house and you're okay so you know I I I've seen this in aresa too we had people whose parents moved in or elderly mom moved in and they added on to their house and and it actually has a side door but they weren't allowed to put a kitchen in there because if you have another kitchen yeah then there's you know so impact and and that's kind of shooting ourselves in our in our foot right well it it shouldn't be you know so you can't have your elderly people come in and why do we care so I think we can work on those things too baby do you know how wrong the um linkage fee study would

be I don't Marcy did they give us an estimate on how long for completion we just uh that information for the study just came back this morning and I think that what we're going to do is is Phase it that that's what they recommended is is take it in phases um to to make sure that uh that uh we are covering every base so I they did not give a time frame but I would imagine that our next step is to go into negotiations and ask which phase you know start probably the first two or three phases so my prediction is that it's probably at least a year and a half process to to do that that's why I think we need to move on adus as soon as possible because those are that's a much faster easier thing to tackle than the linkage fees and Mar I got Arizona I I have a question for that's a direction I believe yeah and I I like that because I'd like to do something ASAP could you explain to us what exactly a land trust is and how it works and is that the same as a uh a land bank that same things so I I will explain it in my terminology but I'll look over to Dr Strom and if I really it she she'll come through and save the day so um and I I will say that when I was in Burlington Vermont I worked with the champagne Housing Trust which is the largest land trust in the world uh so basically a land trust is when uh the the person owns the building but the land underneath it is part of the trust and if it's home ownership and they're not all home ownership but this one in most cases it's home ownership then they're that appreciate appreciating value is limited um so so it's not like in a regular Market where you can buy a house um you know I bought a house six years ago in Newport Richie for X number of dollars and now it's doubled in value and I could go ahead and sell it for that you can't do that in a land trust now you brought up the fact that we don't have a land trust here which is true um I actually was in CER County when we started these conversations about land trust with the Florida Housing Coalition and one of the major problems was getting Fanny May and Freddy Mack to lend on land trust and they've since gotten over that hump um but uh there are models where rather than creating an organization that runs the land trust like the slide was the Hannibal trust or you know in Burlington it's the champagne Housing Trust You can actually create a model where um the the each house is on its own kind of land trust with um with its a not with zoning but with um now forgetting the word for it and I'm going to ask somebody in the back row of my team to say no a land use restricted a Lura and so um so you don't have to whole create the whole structure of a whole another organization with an executive director and you know Staffing and everything like that but you can within the structure there is a there there are models right here in Florida and as a matter of fact I think pelis County and some local that just land trust the houses the advantage to a land

trust is you know to commissioner Whitman's point if we are invested in people becoming homeowners and with a cost of housing being 330,000 350,000 and up okay in order to make that affordable to somebody we might have to put 50 75 $100,000 in to make that affordable to that person and then five years from now they could go and sell it well now the next house we have to now give 150,000 to make it affordable whereas in a land trust or land use restriction that investment carries with the property so now I'm going to turn to would you like to it's basically um you know eliminating some of the ability of individual owners to make a profit Beyond a negotiated amount and so in some cases you're allowed to get back you know a percentage increase every year um but the idea is that you're basically keeping Pace with inflation and so you are accumulating Equity because you're paying off a mortgage and so you're taking Equity out with you when you leave but it's not that you're setting the the new price to market rate so so it's a way of making sure it remains affordable in perpetuity so Professor would that be based on like Consumer Price Index or a certain seg that's all part of the agreements I've seen different kinds of agreements where it may be based on consumer price index or it may be based on some other formula for appreciation but so that there are different models and um again the Florida Housing Coalition is really good they have a lot of guides for creating um a Community Land Trust I'm also I'm actually one of the board members on the a newly created Hillsboro County Community Land Trust where they're creating it basically to uh putting their Surplus land that they see as appropriate for affordable housing into that land trust and looking to develop it from from there and that that's what I about to ask is I and I had asked for for our Surplus land thing and I don't think I ever got it but is it is that one of the reasons why we look at our Surplus land to maybe put it into a land trust you could do that um but you could also so you the difference between a land trust and a land bank so land banking is basically uh putting your land aside in a bank just like you would put your money aside so you're putting land aside to say that at some future date you're going to use it for affordable housing and and just so all the Commissioners know and maybe you don't remember and for your for you um I worked with the Pasco County School District and asked them if they had any surplus land and they came up with those 13 acres next to ankot high school and so that is where that dominium family um 60% Ami project is going 224 units I think but the the county so the school district sold that land to dominium but at a good price okay we've got to end our meeting thank you thank you for your Mr cabala you have Direction I think we're good accessory dwelling get back be in terms of how how much time you need to come back to us I'll have to

defer to team here I haven't seen the information how much time for linkage fee study adus we can begin immediately I suppose that's a Land Development code change I say adus we probably could bring back to you in the next six months or less it's fairly easy change that's ready to go I mean I'm not saying it's ready to go I'm just saying that it's not difficult to prepare and get to you get through this process it's just the process but any land ofel code Amendment needs to go through at least three public hearings so there there's there's a little bit of time associated with okay Mr chairman just if they could too as far as the subdividing of properties to make that easier and then as far as if we have an existing neighbor that doesn't have HOA prohibits rules about doing duplexes in residential areas that we should take a look at allowing those to come back to us as well look at that at the same time we can but I as I mentioned earlier duplexes and quadruplexes are a little more difficult than adus only because okay not every lot in the county is appropriate for a duplex or quadruplex possibly just give us an answer toward that but there are many that are yeah there are many that are but I'm just saying adus I think we probably could just do across the board the whole County I I don't know that we can do that with quadruplexes so we definitely need to do something I think my preference would be we bring that back to you in two different stages cuz I don't want to slow down ad 's because of quadruplexes and duplexes we good meeting adjourn