ORDER-2021-61 : Housing Production Plan Update

Transcript (~42 min @ 5:20)

Speakers identified by voice; unnamed voices are numbered within this recording. Auto-caption text — verify against the video.

▶ 5:17 Jeff McNaught: Good evening, Ms. Gaffney, Ms. Schnurr, and Mr. McCartan. Thank you for joining us. Ms. Gaffney, I'm assuming you'll take the floor and discuss with us. The first order of business, which I should have said is Order 2021-61, a housing production plan update.

▶ 5:40 Denise Gaffey: Good evening. Yes, I'm going to just start this off. And my name is Denise Gaffey, I'm the director of planning and community development, and with me tonight is my assistant senior planner, Emma Schnur, and our consultant with MAPC, John McHarton, and we were here, oh, gee, I don't know, maybe less than six months ago to talk about the housing production plan and to ask for your support with this project and the grant that we received to initiate this effort. And we are about halfway through our effort at this point, and we thought it would be a nice time to come and check in with the council and share with you some of our early findings. We've had an opportunity at this point to meet several times with our advisory committee and also to hold a community engagement effort this past fall. So we've reached out to the community to get a sense of their Your knowledge about housing, their concerns about housing and understand or understand what the needs are around housing in Melrose. So, we thought we would take this time to provide a little bit of a snapshot of that engagement effort. And, and then share with you some of the results. And talk about next steps, what we expect to be doing in the coming months. And, um, and get some different feedback from you as a reminder of this, the housing production plan. Well, eventually be presented to both the planning board and to the council and. In order for us to apply to the certification of our plan, it will need to be approved by the council. And by the planning board, so, um, so we thought this would be good to keep you in the loop. Um, and I appreciate that. Several of you many of you have actually been participating in our. Our survey and our other and our webinar meeting. So, um, thank you for that. Look forward to sharing sharing this information and engaging in a discussion with you. So, I'm going to actually turn it over to John McCartney.

▶ 8:00 Speaker 2: And he's going to share some slides. Thank you, Denise. And thank you to the Council for having us here tonight. I'm going to see if I can share my screen. How does that look? Is that visible?

▶ 8:19 Speaker 2: All right, so, yes, as Denise said, we've been working on our housing production plan since, I would say about August or September. The 1st portion of that is really kicking off the planning process of planning our. Our engagement for beginning to do our data analysis and in November, we were sort of sufficiently ready with our data analysis to bring that to the community and begin to have this.

▶ 8:51 Speaker 2: Public conversation around housing this plan has any housing production plan is about sort of taking control. of the city's housing um part of that has to do with chapter 40b and requirements around affordable housing but it's um affordable affordability and other housing concerns so it's um can be really uh anything the city wants it to be and i'll say in my time at map city uh housing production plants are really driven by the community and the community's needs so this first engagement push was about learning what those needs are. So I will share with you some

▶ 9:32 Speaker 2: of what we found. As I said, the purpose of this engagement was to introduce the HPP to the community, explain what it is, how it works, what our goals are for the process, provide data to

▶ 9:47 Speaker 2: to inform that community discussion. So we did a whole data analysis on housing stock, population and affordability, and we wanted to share that so we could all have this shared language around housing. Learned what information the community needed,

▶ 10:03 Speaker 3: so what was missing from our analysis, and then learned about the housing needs and challenges.

▶ 10:11 Speaker 2: We did this through two methods, beginning in November and then moving into December. We had a live webinar where we had 60 participants, 44 of whom answered live polling questions.

▶ 10:23 Speaker 3: So we had a little polling activity.

▶ 10:25 Speaker 2: I know some of you were there. So you surely remember how fun that was. We also had an online open house, which is sort of like a survey, but with a lot of contextual information and opportunities to learn as well as provide feedback. We had 175 participants for that. 134 of whom answered questions and the remainder just read the information. So from a purely like top line numbers perspective, this was a really great push. You know, I would say our normal public engagement event,

▶ 11:01 Speaker 3: you know, you might get 60 participants,

▶ 11:03 Speaker 2: that would be a pretty standard turnout. 44 of whom might, you know, put dots on the board, you know, with us as pre-COVID times, we'd probably been in high school or something like that, doing a dot exercise. So we sort of got those numbers on the webinar, And then we also got this additional feedback through the online open house. So if we had a gym event with 175 participants, we would be singing in the street.

▶ 11:31 Speaker 3: That would be the best thing that ever happened to me as a planner.

▶ 11:34 Speaker 2: So we do have silver lining to some of the COVID horrors

▶ 11:40 Speaker 2: is we do get to have a lot of this really quantitatively robust engagement. I'll talk a little bit later about who was at those events

▶ 11:46 Speaker 3: and how that's gonna affect our engagement in the future.

▶ 11:51 Speaker 2: By way of illustration, here was the webinar.

▶ 11:54 Speaker 3: Said someone's over there.

▶ 11:57 Speaker 2: And here's screenshots of what our online open house

▶ 12:00 Speaker 3: looked like. So you see there's a presentation of data and then there were questions following that.

▶ 12:06 Speaker 2: So in each activity, we provided the data. We asked if each data point was surprising. You know, surprising or not surprising. And then we asked what data was missing. Then we did a sort of visioning exercise where we asked participants to give us five words, their vision of an ideal future for Melrose. And then we provided a list of potential priorities for the plan. These are sort of things that we know working around the region, that housing challenges that some communities face. So we gave that a list, it was about 20 items, and we asked, which should be high priority? And then we asked what was missing from that list.

▶ 12:49 Speaker 2: So substantively similar to both activities, just one was live, one was a survey.

▶ 12:56 Speaker 2: So some big takeaways from that, data points that the community found surprising included Households by income status, so who's low income,

▶ 13:07 Speaker 3: moderate income, middle income, so on.

▶ 13:11 Speaker 2: Households by housing cost burden, so this is whether you're paying too much for your home to be financially sustainable for your household,

▶ 13:22 Speaker 3: and that's a breakdown given by the federal government

▶ 13:25 Speaker 2: using a 30% standard.

▶ 13:26 Speaker 3: So if you pay more than 30% of your income to housing,

▶ 13:28 Speaker 2: that's housing cost burden. Household types was surprising, so families versus non-families, often that's individuals.

▶ 13:37 Speaker 2: Households by tenure, so the homeowner and renter breakdown, people found surprising.

▶ 13:45 Speaker 2: The pace of population growth, and then the housing units by number of veterans. So all of this is to say, these are points that maybe we need to do more education around. are finding these own stats about their community to be surprising it means like maybe we need to push those data points more whether it's through flyers or our public communications or social media we can we know that the community could use

▶ 14:20 Speaker 3: some more learning around this that's part of our plan moving forward so

▶ 14:25 Speaker 2: moving on to the visioning here's a word cloud of words that came up in the

▶ 14:34 Speaker 2: online open house so you can see we have diverse there's also diversity some are bouncing around here inclusive inclusion is another element affordable coming in really big welcoming walkable sustainable vibrant community these are some of the big words we heard in the online open house. Very similar themes coming up in the webinar. Diverse, inclusive, affordable, vibrant, accessible.

▶ 15:11 Speaker 2: So yeah, moving on to the priority rating. So here's our list of 20 items that could be priorities for a housing planning process. know this is greatest hits of the Boston region these had actually a little more explanation in the activities themselves but this is their shorthand on the online open house the top scoring items for high priority so the items that people ranked high priority were racial and ethnic integration in housing housing near transportation options housing affordable to low-income households

▶ 15:51 Speaker 3: housing near amenities and so on. So here 65% of respondents saying that racial and

▶ 15:59 Speaker 2: ethnic integration in housing was a high priority for this planning process and

▶ 16:04 Speaker 2: so on. In the webinar it was a similar but not exactly the same list. A range of housing types came up as high priority. I guess I'll pause real quick and say we in the online open house the technology allowed us to ask high priority medium priority and low priority so that gave us a little more detail and nuance that we could work through in the webinar the technology only allowed us to ask what's a high priority so that's why you see these grabs look a little bit different but we see a range of housing types actually coming in at the top with more than 80% of respondents to our live poll saying that that was a high priority for the planning process. Mixed-use development, transportation options, housing affordable, low-income households,

▶ 16:56 Speaker 2: and so on, also scoring high. To try to make sense of how this all fit together, we did a sort of quick exercise where we ranked the priorities or the potential priorities by

▶ 17:12 Speaker 2: their high priority rating. All right, what potential priorities fall in the top 10 ranking of both the webinar and the online greenhouse? This is just a way for us to try to condense

▶ 17:24 Speaker 2: what we've learned and see what is coming out from the community. So racial and ethnic integration and housing, housing near transportation options, housing affordable low-income households,

▶ 17:35 Speaker 2: housing near amenities, so things like retail, parks, etc. Housing types, housing affordable to moderate income households, smaller housing options, and more mixed-use development. So on both exercises, these were really high things that many participants felt were high priorities for our planning process. And I just want to say that this list is more of a gut check for the future as we begin to proceed crafting goals and eventually strategies for how to address housing needs in Melrose. We will sort of use this list to say, all right, are we hitting these desires in the community? But it's not an exclusive list of what we're pursuing. And I want to make this point. The example I always use is housing accessible to people with disabilities. I think from a value perspective, most in the Melrose community would say that's important. from just a numeric perspective, it's not going to rate as highly in a community's response. It's

▶ 18:39 Speaker 2: something that seems important to a large number of people. So from a value perspective, it's something that is important for this plan, but there's just fewer people who are going to rate

▶ 18:47 Speaker 3: it as a high priority by nature of how many people have disabilities. So I want to say this is not

▶ 18:53 Speaker 2: like an exhaustive list of everything we're going to be pursuing in the plan

▶ 19:00 Speaker 3: and we'll be ignoring everything else that's not what this list is it's just

▶ 19:08 Speaker 2: a what's the mood in the community right here we have sort of qualitatively what

▶ 19:11 Speaker 3: are other priorities that the plan should pursue so things that came up I'm

▶ 19:16 Speaker 2: sort of bucketing a lot of comments into different categories here so funding issues. You know, we may want to pursue particular programs or, you know, grants or something like that, but where do we get the money? So a lot of people were already moving into that implementation

▶ 19:35 Speaker 2: mindset of like, how do we do this? Homeownership was something that was discussed. We had one potential priority around homeownership options, but people also brought up, you know, financial

▶ 19:48 Speaker 2: burdens to homeowner or barriers to homeownership housing discrimination um you know broadly energy efficiency of housing um various architectural and aesthetic priorities and then various issues

▶ 20:01 Speaker 2: related to infrastructure that's impacted by housing so people bring up traffic parking uh

▶ 20:07 Speaker 2: water waste water schools etc so you know the housing we know touches on everything and

▶ 20:11 Speaker 3: and everything that was on housing.

▶ 20:14 Speaker 2: So people were bringing in those other concerns into this.

▶ 20:19 Speaker 2: So there's a lot of information on what we got out of this engagement. All of that is available on our website, mapc.org slash malrose dash housing.

▶ 20:32 Speaker 2: And some of the specific fall engagement related materials we have is we have the presentation from the webinar, a video of the webinar if you wanna go and watch it. So the long form version of what I'm giving you here with all the data that went into

▶ 20:49 Speaker 2: that. And then some appendices. This includes the survey instrument. So if you want to reference that at some later time, that survey instrument has all the data

▶ 20:58 Speaker 3: just like the webinar presentation.

▶ 21:00 Speaker 2: And then the written comments. There's about 50 pages of qualitative feedback you received that's included in that appendix. a lot to read. I don't anticipate many people will read the whole thing. I just useful nuance

▶ 21:20 Speaker 3: and sort of granularity that I think can help understand these issues. Some of the next steps

▶ 21:29 Speaker 2: we'll be looking at. So targeted engagement. So one thing I noted we had like for our fall engagement. We also asked who showed up. So we had a number of demographic questions at each of

▶ 21:41 Speaker 2: those events. And we found that we were missing a number of demographics relative to the, you know, percentage of people for various subpopulations that lived in Melrose. So, for example, seniors, fewer seniors were involved in our engagement than, you know, live in Melrose on a percentage

▶ 22:02 Speaker 2: basis. So this is actually pretty strange for a planning process. Seniors are usually very good at showing up to the high school gym. But since we're in this sort of COVID digital world, it's clearly a barrier to entry for a number of seniors. So moving forward,

▶ 22:23 Speaker 2: we're going to be doing some outreach to seniors to make up for that. Similarly, youth and younger adults. So really, let's say 34 and underrepresented in our engagement thus far. People of color, particularly black people. So it was interesting both events had a representative proportion of white people to people of color overall, but the mix within that people of color group was not representative of Melrose population. So particularly proportionally fewer black people

▶ 22:59 Speaker 2: participated in the engagement than live in Melrose. Renters, low-income residents, and people who don't live in single family homes we're also all underrepresented in our engagement

▶ 23:08 Speaker 2: so you know a lot of this isn't exactly a surprise for an urban planning process these are the historically underrepresented or historically marginalized groups in urban planning processes it's been our motivation from start to be reaching historically underrepresented or marginalized groups but we found we even through our efforts

▶ 23:34 Speaker 2: we did not hit exactly as we where we wanted to be so moving forward we're going to be doing some more phone based one-on-one or small group conversations that can be more targeted and we can you know it might be smaller or fewer numbers of people participating but we'll have a

▶ 23:58 Speaker 2: a richer engagement experience with which to build on you know just to put you to work a little bit if you know of people who might be good for us to talk to so people who have a lot to say about their housing story or the housing needs

▶ 24:13 Speaker 2: and who might fit one of these demographics please let us know we're sort of working other angles as well to try to recruit people to talk to but that you of course have your life doing constituent services,

▶ 24:26 Speaker 3: so I'm sure you know a lot of people who know us.

▶ 24:29 Speaker 2: So yeah, if anyone comes to mind,

▶ 24:33 Speaker 3: please reach out to Denise, Emma, or me.

▶ 24:37 Speaker 2: The next big content thing we're gonna be doing is vision and goal setting. So as we've collected this input on people's housing needs, we're gonna be collecting more through that targeted engagement. And so we're gonna use all of that material

▶ 24:52 Speaker 3: to set visions and goals.

▶ 24:54 Speaker 2: So vision is a broad statement of where we want the city

▶ 25:01 Speaker 3: to be in terms of housing,

▶ 25:04 Speaker 2: what we want Melrose's housing to be like in the future. It's really aspirational. Some might say unattainable in five years, but it's sort of that we wanna set the direction

▶ 25:13 Speaker 3: where we're going.

▶ 25:16 Speaker 2: One step more specific, they're still broad, but they're still aspirational, but they say, all right, we want say more affordable housing or we want more integration racial and ethnic integration

▶ 25:35 Speaker 3: in our housing stock or we want a range of options so it's a little specific um or here's some more

▶ 25:38 Speaker 2: info and goals so it's really the the what and not the how and that's important you know we can say we want to have more housing options um for seniors looking to downsize that could be one hypothetical goal um we don't see how we're going to do that we're not proposing a legislation or

▶ 25:58 Speaker 2: um or some sort of you know new funding source to make that happen but that's that's for the more

▶ 26:07 Speaker 2: specific strategies um but it's important we see the goals first and really get those right because that's going to guide all of our work moving forward so how we choose strategies to

▶ 26:18 Speaker 2: recommend in the plan we're also going to be doing a constraints and opportunities analysis and in

▶ 26:23 Speaker 2: fact this has already been started but this is particular development constraints and like our data analysis and like the engagement this is wired in chapter 40b for a housing production plan so looking at development constraints and development opportunities constraints we'll look at include things like you know physical things like wetlands or you know hazardous materials

▶ 26:51 Speaker 2: that you wouldn't want to build anything on top of, legal zoning constraints to achieving housing goals, institutional constraints, infrastructural constraints, you know, things like water, sewer,

▶ 27:02 Speaker 2: school facilities, something like that. And then when we talk about development opportunities, we're talking about specific locations. So again, this is required for a housing production plan. We need to sort of name places where we think housing could go, specifically the type of housing

▶ 27:22 Speaker 2: that would meet melrose's housing needs then ultimately as once we do all that sort of further down the line we're going to be developing strategies for how to achieve those goals so these are policies programs regulations things that the administration will have to do things

▶ 27:41 Speaker 2: that um you all might want to take up on the city council um you know potentially could be zoning potentially could be um you know new funding or sort of a new institutional effort class so

▶ 27:53 Speaker 3: um these are really the the meat and potatoes of the plan um and that that's going to be closer

▶ 28:00 Speaker 2: to the end of the planning process so that's all i have for you in terms of the presentation um i'm happy to go back to any slide or answer questions about um or the engagement or sort of

▶ 28:10 Jeff McNaught: where we're headed thank you mr mccartin before we move on anything else i just want to make sure i want to give council mcmaster a chance to just check his sorry volume um he's been having some

▶ 28:23 Speaker 4: issues council mcmaster are you there thank you mr chairman can you hear me we can okay thank you

▶ 28:27 Jeff McNaught: we can proceed and uh clerk uh madam clerkfoot um if we could pull down the if we're not going to look at the presentation any longer mr mccartan we could pull that down just so i could see everybody who may have their hands raised that would be great sure

▶ 28:48 Jeff McNaught: okay so far i have no one in queue so if um and i shouldn't presume that we're done with the presentation is there anyone else

▶ 29:00 Denise Gaffey: Yes, we're done. Okay. That's pretty much it. Yep. We just, um, and it's a lot of information. Um, I apologize for that. We did also attach, um, the survey results and the appendix that Mr. Martin spoke about and, you know, absolutely feel free to, to use those, um, in your free time and, um. And as a reminder, I want to just point out, I will thank Councilor Eccles for joining the committee and participating with us on the committee. And he is certainly a perfect person for you to to speak with further about this effort or to to send questions and comments along to in the future future discussion. I just want to remind the Council with that.

▶ 29:46 Jeff McNaught: Thank you, Ms. Gaffey, and thank you for the full presentations. I just want to let the- Mr. McCartin, thank you. I just want to let the council know, so far, I have Councilor Eccles or Vice Chair Eccles, sorry, and Councilor Jamaleddine in queue. Am I missing anyone else? Okay. Vice Chair Eccles.

▶ 30:07 Jack Eccles: Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you to everyone for being here. it's been a pleasure to serve on the committee's thus far and looking forward to your meetings I just have a few questions some might provide clarity so it's kind of a two-step process if we identify any housing barriers because we've approved the housing production plan that doesn't actually change the zoning ordinance right so if there were specific ordinance to be changed that That would be if we can just kind of go through that process.

▶ 30:44 Denise Gaffey: Those might be strategies that are recommended in the plan itself, say, to amend our zoning regulations to allow for maybe, you know, in-law apartments as of right, or accessory dwelling units, something like that. But the plan itself is not zoning.

▶ 31:13 Jack Eccles: And voting for the plan doesn't make that change. Oh, absolutely. Um, and then I kind of just wanted to talk about, you know, our strategy of getting to. 10% in sort of what, um, for adopting a housing production plan does as far as, you know, 40 developments. I know we talked a little bit about that in the advisory.

▶ 31:32 Denise Gaffey: Meetings John, do you want to speak to that about maybe are you talking about, like, the safe harbor provision? Yeah, exactly.

▶ 31:36 Speaker 2: Yeah, so I'll answer that in a couple of ways. So we will be, as part of the HPP process, we're required to set a target number of housing units to develop and specifically the affordable housing units to develop. In a community like Melrose, where the city has not met that 10% threshold, where it sort of automatically falls into safe harbor, typically set that housing affordable housing production target to where it would you would meet your 10 threshold uh within you know the five year span of the the plan so that that's um

▶ 32:16 Speaker 2: you know we're going to be realistic in how we frame that and hopefully our housing development opportunities analysis will um point you in the right direction in terms of like where where housing can actually go so you can actually build those units um and ideally get above 10

▶ 32:41 Speaker 2: and meet your safe harbor now um before development takes a long time so you know it goes in cycles uh particularly affordable housing development it's tough to do hundreds and hundreds

▶ 32:50 Speaker 2: of units at once um so many communities once they have the hdp they look for safe harbor through certification of the housing production plan so um all right let's say we get a plan we all like uh the city council approves it planning board approves it uh then it goes to dhcd um and dhcd will sort of say all right you this is a uh meets our regulatory requirements and because the city council and planning board have approved it you're sort of we we approve it as an official hpp um and so that's a good step but you're not actually at safe harbor yet at that point so um in the following one or two years you need to begin actually building those affordable units um and showing progress towards meeting that target so even if you haven't actually met that target of 10 if you show your progress towards meeting that target in number of units permitted then you can apply to the to DHCD for certification so and at that point if they say all right you're making progress towards this goal we will grant you safe harbor for now as long as you continue making progress so it's a way to reach safe harbor before you actually hit that 10% threshold but it's not automatic with you know if the city approves the plan it's not an

▶ 34:17 Speaker 3: automatic thing. It's still going to take a couple of years and the permitting of

▶ 34:21 Speaker 2: numerous units for that to actually become a possibility. And just to define

▶ 34:26 Denise Gaffey: safe harbor for anyone who might not know and is listening from home, that 10% threshold that we're required to meet for an affordable housing target, if we are below 10% we are subject to a 40B development that would that could that potentially could supersede our local zoning and other regulations and so the safe harbor if we are approved by dhcd give us a year um the safe harbor is generally speaking a year from any from um of protection while we continue to work on

▶ 35:13 Jack Eccles: leading that goal thank you both and then actually can you just define what the 10

▶ 35:20 Speaker 2: percent actually is i know that's helpful sometimes yeah so it's um the 10 is you look at two numbers so first is the number of affordable housing units on the subsidized housing inventory so this is dhcd's official list of affordable housing units um in each community and so these are affordable units we're not talking about that happens to be inexpensive um you know because it's

▶ 35:48 Speaker 2: and disrepair or some something like that it's deed responsible housing which typically means subsidized housing only it also doesn't include section eight you know people sometimes want to

▶ 36:00 Speaker 2: plug that in but it's not on there so that's your your numerator your denominator is the total number of housing units on the last decennial census so um you know every 10 years the us

▶ 36:13 Speaker 2: does at census so you know we just hit our 2020 that number will be updated soon so we'll get the per housing units in melrose in 2020 and that's the denominator so you take your number the shi which gets updated every two years divided by the number of the total number of units in town in the city uh that gets updated every 10 years and that's the percentage you're working off of so if you have above 10 percent then you're sort of automatically in that safe harbor below it

▶ 36:44 Speaker 5: and you're subject to those 4dp developments and we are at eight percent which is uh close enough

▶ 36:49 Speaker 2: that you can really do something about it uh but still it will represent a real commitment

▶ 37:02 Jack Eccles: for the city to achieve ten percent thank you thank you for answering my question thank you

▶ 37:07 Speaker 6: Thank you, Mr chairman. Thank you all councilor.

▶ 37:13 Maya Jamaleddine: Thank you chair and, um, thank you all for this valuable information on such an important topic. Um, I appreciate this presentation. Um, I wanted to ask, would you like to give a specific email for folks that would like to reach out to you to have these conversations? like individuals or a specific phone number?

▶ 37:42 Speaker 2: Yes. I think either reaching out to me or Emma would be appropriate. Our emails are on that, our plans website. So mapc.org slash Melrose DAP housing. And so the emails are on there

▶ 38:00 Speaker 3: and either one of us would be fine.

▶ 38:02 Maya Jamaleddine: Okay. And my other question, mentioned that we are currently at 8%. Do you have any information of what population is this 8%?

▶ 38:18 Speaker 2: I don't have the specific numbers on hand. I know they're within the SHI, I believe there's a significant number of elderly disabled units. So typically affordable housing will break down into one of two broad categories so-called family housing which is sort of units that are appropriate to any household and then um elderly or disabled house housing which that's sort of a technical term and it's often people uh 55 or older and or or people who have a

▶ 38:57 Speaker 2: um physical disability can can apply um so they're restricted to those groups i believe Melrose has a high percentage of those elderly disabled units versus family units but I'm not

▶ 39:11 Maya Jamaleddine: I don't have the numbers off the top of my head here okay last question I'm sorry do you know what's the specification do they have to have in terms of if they have to be of course like u.s citizens and have all the papers um uh for um in terms of applying uh i i'm actually not

▶ 39:38 Speaker 2: sure on the details and i wouldn't want to overstep my my knowledge here um what what

▶ 39:46 Speaker 3: the requirements are around um you know citizenship or eligibility okay thank you

▶ 39:57 Jen Grigoraitis: counselor Grigoraitis thank you chairman mcnaught and thank you all for being here and i just wanted to say to miss gaffey never apologize for giving us information it's fantastic to have so much put before us tonight on such an important topic um i just wanted to quickly circle back on the issue of our lopsided engagement numbers which i know has been a theme for i think every public entity during this pandemic that we're expanding access for some groups while really losing others in this virtual format um have you thought about engaging with some of the specific groups within the city that might reach out to some of these populations like the human rights commission um the milano center okay i just wanted to make sure that that was something we thought about great thank you

▶ 40:37 Denise Gaffey: thank you all right we're just we're getting ready to embark upon that effort um this month to get to sort of drill down into some of these populations that we've had a hard time reaching but um we have thought about i've already spoken with the seniors with um stacy michelle for mobile and then we're coordinating with the human rights commission now as well but any other suggestions you have greatly appreciated great and let us know what works

▶ 41:05 Jen Grigoraitis: because i think everybody's trying to figure it out when there's no end in sight to remote

▶ 41:18 Mark Garipay: meetings so thank you for the creativity council garrity thank you mr chairman um counselor that asked one of my questions regarding the engagement. But going back to the priorities that was brought up, is this a, are the priorities a work in progress or are they based on the engagement that we have so far?

▶ 41:39 Speaker 2: So this is not an official list of the priorities of the plan. I just shared with you the output of those specific engagement events we gave. So definitely still a work in progress. You know, we sort of threw out the kitchen sink on our engagement there and see what comes back. But there will definitely be more processing, more drafting. It's gonna be a whole process that will include the advisory committee and that ultimately will go to the public,

▶ 42:10 Speaker 2: you know, to share some sort of draft list of goals. But yeah, this is more just sharing with you the engagement results rather than like some official designation.

▶ 42:21 Mark Garipay: Okay, and yeah, because as I was looking at the presentation, I wasn't sure if down the road, it would be kind of like a weighted, it would be weighted if you were gonna write, like they did on the online, you had one, two, three, it looks like, because we do, I think, Ms. Gaffney mentioned that choices for downsizing for seniors is I think something that we all know, is one of the many things we need for affordable housing in our community um if it was a weighted choice that would uh based on that rating would probably be a little higher up um maybe in the top ten so i just wanted some clarification on that i appreciate that um i uh along with uh counselor Grigoraitis um would really like to see um some more community engagement um on this process as we get it's an important process um i think we all know we need uh we need we need affordable housing um but uh we need as much uh people uh for transparency and everything in the community to to be engaged in this process so i appreciate that um and one other question i had was um typically when when um housing plans are adopted did they see major i know we said it's kind of separate but typically are there major zoning changes that come with that or down the road do you typically see that or are other communities that have adopted these? It really

▶ 43:49 Speaker 2: depends on the community. I can't say definitively. I would say in a community like Melrose I'd be very optimistic. You know some communities are in it as a sort of chapter 40b stall tactic. That is not the impression that i've gotten from of course the staff here or or any of my interactions with counselors or anyone else in the community honestly so um it really depends on the community

▶ 44:23 Speaker 2: uh i have high hopes for norris it's not i just want to underline the point uh you you know we're not going to be hashing out specific zoning we're going to be um you know giving a statement of intention that will be followed up by a robust additional public process for robust additional analysis by staff and then a robust discussion amongst you all

▶ 44:46 Mark Garipay: I would imagine and I think on the presentation you had sent out you had a time frame for I think a plan maybe to be presented sometime over the summer was that was that is that still the time frame where we we want to get more engagement uh now um are we continuing to move forward with that i think we i'm glad you i'm

▶ 45:07 Denise Gaffey: glad you brought up the point about more engagement because i did need to mention that we have another round of engagement planned for sometime around march so we will do a similar type of exercise um we haven't we haven't it's not fully formed yet but we want to go back to the community once we're starting to talk about goals and strategies and um and get further input from the community around that piece of the plan and then later um i think right now we're still targeting about june for completion of the plan itself but prior to completing it we would put it out for comment so we will definitely be interested in getting more public comment on a complete on a draft let's say so we can um incorporate continue to incorporate comments

▶ 45:59 Mark Garipay: but right now june is our target thank you thank you for all the information i appreciate it

▶ 46:03 Speaker 6: Okay, any other counselors for the 1st time.

▶ 46:10 Speaker 6: Seeing none is the will of the committee.

▶ 46:17 Speaker 7: Motion place on file 2nd.

▶ 46:21 Jeff McNaught: Motion place on file by President, seconded by vice chair, Madam clerk. Can you please call the role?

▶ 46:28 Speaker 1: Chairman not yes. Yes.

▶ 46:39 Speaker 1: yes counselor yes counselor mcmaster yes counselor Garipay yes yeah council Grigoraitis yes council

▶ 46:51 Speaker 1: of Migliorelli yes counselor stewart yes counselor thomas yes councilor maladin yes president samela

▶ 46:57 Jeff McNaught: yes 11 yes the motion passes and that concludes our well first thank you all for coming and presenting uh we really appreciate it that was a lot of great information and we look forward to seeing you again at some point for another update but thank you for joining us and that concludes our our business for the evening for the appropriations committee i'll entertain a motion to