Informational order - Affordable Housing Trust Fund Board Update

Transcript (~41 min @ 8:25)

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▶ 8:21 Devin Romanul: Up next, I know that we have some overlapping meetings tonight. We're doing well. Everyone's dance card is full, so, as a professional courtesy, I wanted to make a motion by unanimous consent to take item number 2026-749, an informational order on the Affordable Housing Trust, out of order. Seeing no objection, we'll take these items out of order. So up next, we have ID number 2026-749, the informational order on the Affordable Housing Trust Fund board update. And we have assorted members of the board here before us. Feel free to introduce yourself. Yep.

▶ 9:02 Speaker 2: Hi.

▶ 9:04 Speaker 6: Good evening. Thank you, Chair Romanul and City Council for the opportunity to speak tonight. We're excited to talk to you about the work of the Affordable Housing Trust, some of the housing challenges that we see in Melrose, and how we can partner moving forward. And we'll do brief introductions. My name's Amy Tierney, and I am the chair of the trust. And joining me tonight are my colleagues on the trust, Vice Chair Jim Oosterman and Treasurer Joe Viola. Our clerk, Helena Wetfeld, had to go away on an unexpected business trip, so she sends her regrets and is not here tonight. I know you have the presentation, you have our guidelines, so we just want to run through it and leave some time if you have any questions. But we just wanted to start with what the trust is and why it exists. Whoops. Okay, so here we are. So the trust is a statutory body that was established by the council in 2020 in accordance with the Mass General Laws section. There's over 100 communities in Massachusetts that have affordable housing trusts. The trust is a volunteer board, appointed by the mayor and confirmed by the council. We have four board members that are volunteers, and then a designee of the mayor's office, which is currently Ms. Mesa from the Office of Planning and Community Development. We spent a lot of time in the last year, since we've all been kind of up and running, thinking about what our mission is and trying to be transparent and thoughtful about guidelines and next steps. So I just want to kind of take a moment and think about what the mission of the trust is. We

▶ 10:54 Speaker 2: want to work to create, preserve, and support diverse,

▶ 10:57 Speaker 6: affordable housing to meet the needs of low and moderate income households in Melrose over the span of their entire lifespan, in collaboration with both municipal and community partners. So that's kind of our overall mission. And so why is this work so important right now? I think you can't read a newspaper or turn on the news... We have a housing crisis in the US and in Massachusetts. You see that at the state level with a lot of state priorities. Along with, it's been clear in our last housing production plan that affordable housing is an issue that's important to the city.

▶ 11:40 Speaker 2: So we look

▶ 11:44 Speaker 6: at Melrose, and we're not immune to all of that. Housing affordability in Melrose is becoming increasingly out of reach for many residents or people who would want to move here, particularly young families that either want to move here or

▶ 12:01 Speaker 2: stay, our local workforce,

▶ 12:05 Speaker 6: and our seniors who are looking for continuity of housing over their lifetime, whether they want to stay in their house or we don't have enough... housing stock if they want to stay in Melrose and age in place.

▶ 12:23 Speaker 6: So, I thought we'd just ground it in, affordable housing gets thrown around a lot, and what we're talking

▶ 12:32 Speaker 2: about as affordable housing with a capital A for our trust purposes is,

▶ 12:37 Speaker 6: in Massachusetts, affordable housing is generally defined as housing where a household spends no more than 30% of the income of the household on housing costs. Let's see. I don't know why this keeps doing that. But in Melrose, the inclusionary units that are de-restricted, they serve households earning up to 80% of the area median income. And you'll see in the chart,

▶ 13:07 Speaker 2: HUD sets the Boston metro area,

▶ 13:12 Speaker 6: and these are the 2025 income limits. And so, what this really means is, in Melrose, for a family of four people earning up to $132,000, they would generally qualify for affordable housing based on their income.

▶ 13:30 Speaker 2: So, just to look at a little bit of what's happening locally.

▶ 13:37 Speaker 6: It's been more than since 2020, but from 2020, the past few years, you can see we have a sharp increase in both home prices and rents. Single family homes are approaching $1 million, and rents are nearing 3,000 a month on average. So, this is creating real pressure, as we said, for our seniors that are trying to age in place, for families, for people who work in our community. And, for people who may have grown up in Melrose and want to come back, we're hearing that's not possible. Just as an example, the Melrose Emergency Fund this year, it disbursed over $11,000 in one-time rental or mortgage assistance, and I mean, that's a lot of money for people, each individual, up to 11 grand. So it's a real issue here, and I think we just want to bring light to it, and try to help collaborate to

▶ 14:42 Speaker 2: have some better solutions.

▶ 14:47 Speaker 6: Obviously, these numbers change all the time. I mean, they're dynamic numbers. But these are the numbers from the census website, the latest census. And as you can see, the median home value is at $970,000, yet the median household income is 133, which is not much above the 80% of the AMI. So, it's a real issue, and that's borne out by the data. I think this is an interesting slide. It was taken right from our housing production plan, and I think it just shows that over 30% of Melrose households are cost-burdened, which means they're spending more than 30% of their income on housing. And nearly 14% of that are severely cost-burdened, which means they're spending more than 50% of their income on housing costs. And if you look to the right-hand column, that's the light green, I guess, blue.

▶ 15:51 Speaker 2: It's hard to read, but that's the renters.

▶ 15:52 Speaker 6: And this affects renters.

▶ 16:00 Speaker 6: We have 30-- Over 30% of residents are renters here, and 50% of renters are severely cost-burdened, meaning they're spending over half of their income on housing costs. We also see large numbers of older homeowners. Over 3,000 homes are owned by households of over 60, who may be house-rich because their houses are worth more, but they're cash constrained because they're hard to keep up and their income is set or

▶ 16:39 Speaker 2: static. So, this just shows that this is across the

▶ 16:42 Speaker 6: community. This is a broad community issue. It's not just about seniors. It's not just about commuters into the city.

▶ 16:49 Speaker 2: It's really

▶ 16:50 Speaker 6: everybody. And no single group can do it alone, solve it alone either. This work is about collaboration. The trust, obviously, we want to be a mover on this, but we need to collaborate across city government, with the housing authority. I see Mr. Corona here tonight, through non-profit partners, developers, as well as state and federal programs.

▶ 17:20 Speaker 2: So, where does Melrose

▶ 17:23 Speaker 6: stand today? Oops. Oh, how do I go back here? Am I back? Oh, shoot, what did I do here? Let me see.

▶ 17:37 Speaker 6: I don't know how to-- Here we go. Here we go. Sorry. So, this is today.

▶ 17:41 Speaker 2: We have just over 12,000 housing

▶ 17:44 Speaker 6: units, and 941 of them are affordable. So, that's just about 7.5%.

▶ 17:56 Speaker 6: So, the next slide. What is this? There we go.

▶ 18:01 Speaker 2: This just kind of shows those 940 units, you see that

▶ 18:06 Speaker 6: 731 of them are senior housing. So, it's

▶ 18:11 Speaker 6: disproportionate in terms of the type of housing stock. There's not a lot of family or units for single people. And on the side, just talks about which monitoring organizations areResponsible for monitoring those. And then enter wise. Sorry.

▶ 18:34 Speaker 6: Okay. Affordable housing is all across the city, located in multiple neighborhoods and housing types, which is important for creating an inclusive community.

▶ 18:46 Speaker 2: They should be, in our view, spread out throughout the community,

▶ 18:48 Speaker 6: and this is a heat map of where they are now.

▶ 18:54 Speaker 2: To support this work,

▶ 18:56 Speaker 6: we need to rely on many tools . This includes Chapter 40B, inclusionary zoning, state and federal subsidies, along with tax credits, and the trust itself is a flexible local funding tool.

▶ 19:16 Speaker 2: So that brings us to what is the role of the trust, right?

▶ 19:21 Speaker 6: You see in the guidelines in our application, there's different types of funding we can provide. And through application, we can provide gap financing, enable acquisitions, and rehabilitations that create or preserve affordable housing. There's an opportunity to support pre-development costs to unlock potential projects.

▶ 19:46 Speaker 2: And really to leverage other private and public

▶ 19:50 Speaker 6: financing. A lot of these types of deals have many different facets of financing. Mr. Vella is more adept in those types of issues, but a lot of the state funding or federal funding requires local. They want the local community to have some skin in the game,

▶ 20:09 Speaker 2: and that's our hope, to be able to kind of bridge

▶ 20:12 Speaker 6: the gap on some of those. We can do grants, loans, forgivable loans types of funding from the trust. And we do have in our guidelines, we've tried to create pretty transparent guidelines, with clear selection criteria that would emphasize the feasibility of the project, the affordability of the project, and also to align with the city goals. So,

▶ 20:45 Speaker 6: this is what we've been up to. We all came together only about a year ago, a little bit over a year ago, and we were lucky enough to hit the ground running. We got a technical assistance grant, and we worked for about six months, with MHP, which is a housing partnership, to kind of thoughtfully develop our mission statement as well as our goals. And I want to stop here. We don't want to spend a lot of time on the slides, but I really want to let Jim talk a little bit about, we've made one grant since we've been in existence, and I think it's a good example of what we can do.

▶ 21:27 Speaker 7: Yeah. So let me talk a little bit about that. So, I was a founding member of the Melrose Affordable Housing Corporation. And we were founded a number of years ago by citizens of Melrose who just really wanted to make a difference. So that is a private, nonprofit organization, run by its own board of directors, not affiliated with the city or in any way. They contract with Melrose Housing Authority to be their management agent, but that's the connection with the housing authority. And so properties that would come up available for sale that the Affordable Housing Corporation would think about buying, and then use federal funds from the North Suburban Consortium to hold those properties on the city's housing inventory. So those would be in perpetuity, listed as affordable housing rentals. And so an opportunity came up for the Affordable Housing Corporation to acquire a three-family building in Melrose. It happened to be adjacent to one that they already owned. But, through their years of being in business, they didn't have a lot of money. So they were able to leverage the properties that they had, along with some traditional bank financing, and got financing from the North Suburban Consortium using HOME funds grants, but they were still short. And they were very anxious to be able to tap into the most affordable housing trust fund money. And for many years, that money had been sort of lingering out there, that it was there, but there was no trust established. And so when we got the trust established, we sort of knew that this organization was going to be waiting for something. And so we were really happy that we were able to put some guidelines together with the assistance of MHP, and came up with a very formal plan to be able to fund them and be able to give them $140,000 of our limited funds, which enabled them to be able to finalize that purchase. And now there are three rental units, family rental units in Melrose that are now deed-restricted in perpetuity as affordable, capital A, affordable units. And so us being able to be nimble and be able to provide that financing relatively quickly, is still not as quick as what cash-paying investors would buy in the open market. But it was really important that we be there for them. But you might see that that's not a big amount. We don't have a lot of money. We never had a lot of money to start. I think we had about $650,000, which was a combination of payment in lieu of units the developers had paid in. I think there was some old free cash money that was in there, but not a lot of money. And so to give $140,000 out depletes almost 20% of our assets. So we can't do that very frequently. But we were glad that we were able to do it, at least for the Affordable Housing Corporation to start. So, it's an example of sort of where we've worked with a local organization to collaborate on creating more affordable units.

▶ 24:30 Speaker 2: Thank you.I mean, a good value too. We have three for $140,000 of our

▶ 24:35 Speaker 6: money, and that we now have three units in perpetuity. This is just our goals for the next five years. They're detailed in our guidelines, but we want to aim to expand community outreach. We think it's an important issue that sometimes isn't talked about or understood. And so we really want to be out in the community. And we've started to do that in different ways. We've had listening sessions with the affordable housing trusts, I mean, the housing authority and the corporation to try to get their input. So we look forward to engaging the community. Probably our most important goal is to find sustainable and diverse funding. And to create in five years, it's a big number, but we hope to create or support the creation of over 150 homes or more for rent or for ownership.

▶ 25:36 Speaker 2: And so

▶ 25:38 Speaker 6: how are we doing this?

▶ 25:41 Speaker 2: Today, it has to be collaboration.

▶ 25:44 Speaker 6: In this last year, I've been lucky. I've done a lot of research and listened to a lot of how this happens across the state, and these are kind of complicated financial packages. It's hard for affordable housing to compete in this market. And so you have to be nimble, and you have to be willing to

▶ 26:03 Speaker 2: collaborate with whoever you can to get things done.

▶ 26:09 Speaker 6: You say today, you can see, I think that's our current balance, just over a half a million dollars. And

▶ 26:15 Speaker 2: as Jim said, so far I think we've just had one, I

▶ 26:20 Speaker 6: think when Mayor Broder established the trust, he had one free cash, and then the balance is from

▶ 26:30 Speaker 2: payment in lieu's. So we look to see...

▶ 26:34 Speaker 2: Oh, I went forward. But I wanted quickly, one of the opportunities,

▶ 26:37 Speaker 6: the biggest opportunity we see in terms of creating our pipeline of financing is the CPA. So, Joe has more experience in that, so I just wanted him to high level, and we're happy to take some questions after, just kind of what the CPA could do for the trust.

▶ 26:56 Speaker 8: Sure. And we've had this discussion at the committee level, talking about sustainability, and now that we have a housing trust and we want to fund these programs going forward, how do we capitalize it? And essentially, the CPA allows communities to enact a surcharge against your tax levy of no greater than 3%. That funding is able to be used for affordable housing. It's able to be used for open space and recreation and historic preservation. We would have to work with the council to get it on ballot to see if the citizens of Melrose would be in favor of adopting the CPA. But, again, one project using a reasonable amount of funding to deed restrict housing into the future, it's a great use of the funding, but how are we going to be able to fund those kinds of projects in the future? And just to do a very back of the envelope and rudimentary calculation here, using the assessed value of the average tax assessment at 1%, the average household at the average assessment would pay $97 a year in surcharge funds. Broken down by quarter, that's about $24. So that's at 1%, and again, I'll caution, it's very rudimentary back of the envelope. But you could see that trying to extrapolate and say what that means to the community, we would add... Sorry, I'm consulting my notes here. But

▶ 28:49 Speaker 8: we could add upwards of $600,000 a year in CPA funds. And again, CPA is there's 10% for housing, 10% for open space and preservation, and 10% for historic preservation. But you could see that any portion of that could help us to come up with a fundable sustaining mechanism for the housing trust. I didn't want to do too much of a deep dive. I know you probably have all these facts at your fingertips, but it could mean a lot to be able to capitalize the affordable housing trust with CPA funds going forward in the future, and the many programs that it allows you to fund.

▶ 29:34 Devin Romanul: Well, thank you very much for this encyclopedic information. I'm sure we're just scratching the surface, but I want to entertain any questions from my colleagues. Up first, I have Councilor Jamaleddine.

▶ 29:45 Maya Jamaleddine: Thank you. Thank you so much for this. It's amazing. Not to mention the amazing work that you guys are doing.

▶ 29:52 Speaker 9: So thank you for all the work and

▶ 29:56 Maya Jamaleddine: hours that you framed to make this happen. How many families currently is benefiting from?

▶ 30:09 Speaker 9: If you have that.

▶ 30:11 Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean, we don't run the affordable housing, all

▶ 30:13 Speaker 6: of those in that chart, those partners. So right now, there's 941 units, so that's households. Some are seniors. Some are either the housing authority and such. So it's 941 units right now. We

▶ 30:34 Speaker 2: didn'tWe can't take credit for any of that. We helped with three. We helped with three, yeah. But I think we just wanted to level set where we

▶ 30:44 Speaker 6: are here. There's a lot of work to be done, and housing's expensive, so we get that. But, we think we need to try as a community.

▶ 30:57 Maya Jamaleddine: And if we're reviewing our numbers, we see that it's increasing, the people that are impacted by the burden and that are joining this population. It's increasing over the years, especially the last year with everything that our country is going through now. My question is, you mentioned about the CPA, and to put it on the ballot, have we explored, or have we proposed it, or how do we go by that?

▶ 31:36 Speaker 6: Well, I believe, from my research, and there's two ways. People can petition to put it on the ballot, residents, or the city council, by a simple majority, can put it on the ballot. So it has to come from you guys? No, obviously there would need to be some support from the community and our hope is that

▶ 32:00 Speaker 6: it's not just affordable housing, it's parks and rec. It's

▶ 32:06 Speaker 2: the people- It's parks

▶ 32:07 Speaker 6: ... in historical, there's a lot of different things the CPA can be used for. So we would be happy to support it, but I don't think procedurally we need to put it on. Yes. Yeah.

▶ 32:20 Maya Jamaleddine: And, I'm sorry. Yeah. My last question is, do we know how many city or neighboring cities are adopted already, and joined this program?

▶ 32:31 Speaker 6: The CPA. I did have that.

▶ 32:33 Speaker 8: How many cities have adopted CPA? I think statewide it's over 200. Yeah. It's over 200. It's like 50, well, I don't have the ex- Yeah. I have- 200. Over 200.

▶ 32:42 Speaker 6: Yeah. I have 201 municipalities in the state. And nearly 73% of the communities that have trusts- Mm-hmm

▶ 32:49 Speaker 2: ... have CPA. It is by far, because it's

▶ 32:53 Speaker 6: sustainable. These projects take a long time to design and build and put financing before. And if you don't have a sustainable pipeline, it's hard to

▶ 33:06 Speaker 6: count on that. So, that is by far the biggest revenue for most of these trusts. But it's not only for the trust- Yes ... is I guess what we're saying.

▶ 33:16 Speaker 9: Yes, absolutely. Thank you.

▶ 33:17 Devin Romanul: Yep. Up next I have Councilor Williams.

▶ 33:19 Ryan Williams: Thanks. Thank you for an informative presentation that laid a good amount of groundwork and also got into what the trust does, because I think that's really important, and I really appreciate the amount of work you put into this. So, I wanted to talk just for a moment on CPA. I'm super excited. We talked about this. I'm super excited to hear that you guys are bringing this up. I think whenever we mention CPA, I like to call out that CPA has different ways you can exclude certain groups of people at the ballot. Yes. So one of those groups is low income families, and one of those groups is seniors, and that's a great tool to balance the additional cost, which is modest, as you said. But some people, they don't like any additional cost. It's a good way to balance that with the benefits that we get. Interestingly, of the 200 and some communities that have adopted CPA, we live in a bit of a drought bubble. The immediate northern communities of Stoneham, Saugus, Melrose, don't have it. Boston and a lot of the Metro West and South communities all have it too. So it would be great to see Boston be a leader in that. I'm all in. I would be excited to do something like this. I'm excited that the affordable housing folks are on board. I know the historic preservation folks are on board, so I think it's a conversation that we can have, for sure. Even though the state, I don't know if we mentioned this, the fact that the state provides a matching grant for all of our CPA contributions. It used to be quite generous. It's a little bit less generous these days, like 20%, 23% now, instead of 30% in the past. But, it's still great money, and it's free money that we can put towards our parks, our playing fields, historic preservation, purchasing properties, purchasing conservation land, et cetera. So, thank you. Appreciate your presentation and your comments on the matter.

▶ 35:22 Devin Romanul: Up next I have Councilor Carm Treti.

▶ 35:25 Manjula Karamcheti: I didn't think it would be my turn already. Thank you so much for your presentation. I really appreciate it. I am so happy that you exist and appreciate the level setting that you've been doing over the past year, thinking about goals, present tense, but also how we might move forward in partnership together. So I'm just curious about, and if you haven't, again, you've been around a year, so I'm curious what you're thinking about in terms of big picture and strategy, particularly around being proactive when properties are coming on the market before they get to the private developers. Are you thinking about a strategy with that, and how might you think about working with the city, and sort of rallying folks so that we can be proactive in our housing production plan, but not have to wait for proposals where we're very reactionary. Mm-hmm. Which I think we've fallen into in our current situation. So I'm just curious how you're thinking about that big picture.

▶ 36:34 Speaker 7: Because we're not developers, we're not in the market for acquiring properties. But we are interested in finding those opportunities and helping those developers, for-profit and not-for-profit developers, find those and perhaps navigate a system. Part of our funding could be used for pre-development costs, for expenses incurred with finding out how can I put units in here that I can set aside as affordable and still be, if I'm a for-profit developer, it's still a profitable business decision. So we can do that. So we think we can help with some of that. Again, our funds are limited, but some people have asked us if we're going to do rental assistance, down payment assistance for first-time home buyers. Well, that's a great lofty goal, which we think would be fantastic for low and moderate income first-time home buyers. Those units that they purchase are not necessarily deed restricted. And so while the initial buyer may be low or moderate income means, that doesn't add a unit to the housing inventory that we'd like to have. We'd love to get to that point. And one of the things that our technical assistance consultant pointed out to us early on was, we should set a goal as a trust fund of having $5 to $6 million. And wow, where do we get that? But when we get to that point, those funds invested in the right place can be sustainable to provide rental assistance, down payment assistance. I think right now our larger long-term goals, which is probably in the next three years, is having enough funds to support developers navigate a system where we can provide some funding, and we can provide some resources so that we can get actual units on the ground. So I think there's some big long-term goals that we'd love to get to. Yeah. I think we're really feeling right now that we're sort of a bit hamstrung on funding. And so let's not go down that path yet. When we get there, we'll love to have... When we've got $10 million in our Affordable Housing Trust Fund raised from a number of resources, yeah, then I think that we could do all kinds of stuff.

▶ 38:48 Manjula Karamcheti: But I think what I'm hearing you say, to build that foundation and that ability to be proactive, and really plan the investment that the city makes, will allow for that to happen. So us thinking about how city council partners with you, how the mayor's office partners with you, how we try to move forward with something like the CPA really matters in terms of us kind of having control of our approach to affordable housing in a way that is planned and purposeful, and does what it's supposed to do, allows people to move to and stay in Melrose.

▶ 39:25 Speaker 2: Right. I think there's a lot of

▶ 39:27 Speaker 6: nonprofit community affordable housing developers.

▶ 39:33 Speaker 2: But for them to come, it has to be worth it, and they have to see that the city is- Right

▶ 39:39 Speaker 6: ... supportive and has supported the City and can help with some local funding.

▶ 39:45 Speaker 2: Because like I said, a lot of these fundings are,

▶ 39:46 Speaker 6: we obviously aren't going to fund an entire... It depends on it. If it's a smaller, some trusts do, they can help purchase a single-family home or a duplex. But you know how much a single-family home costs here on the market, and so it's all about being nimble, but we need to have enough capital and sustainable capital to be able to have those conversations.

▶ 40:09 Speaker 3: Appreciate that. Thank you so much.

▶ 40:11 Devin Romanul: Thank you. Up next, I have Councilor Vandiver.

▶ 40:13 Kimberly Vandiver: Thank you. Thank you so much for your presentation. I really appreciate it. I wanted to ask, kind of drilling on a couple of the slides with graphs.

▶ 40:22 Speaker 6: I don't know if I can get back to them. Ooh.

▶ 40:25 Kimberly Vandiver: So you had one graph showing the breakdown of units by household type, which I- Mm-hmm. There we are ... think is really striking that so much of our affordable housing is concentrated in the senior population right now, and so little for single room or even families. So I'm really glad to hear that those three units that you did were family units. And I wonder if you could speak to if that is where you see the need or if the need is still with the seniors because they're in a really tough position. Not to pit one group against the other, everybody's struggling with housing costs, but if you could speak to where you see the most need right now and how you could focus on that with the funds.

▶ 41:13 Speaker 6: Yeah. I mean, I can't. I don't want to... I would be surprising. I don't know all the data. I know that we've had many conversations with the housing authority, and they have a huge backlog for government-owned affordable housing, six months to six years. And I think a lot of that is senior housing that they monitor. So that certainly is still, there's just not enough. But I don't have the data on the breakdown of who, in terms of, obviously, if there's families, there's only 150 units that are deed restricted. That's not very much, given we have almost 30,000 people here. So I don't have the data.

▶ 42:06 Speaker 8: I was just going to add, we talked about being nimble- Mm-hmm ... and being able to leverage funding. A lot of affordable housing is opportunity based. As part of our effort to make funding available to the development community, we could have an RFP and have developers tell us what they would do with the funding and make policy decisions on what kinds of programs we wanted to fund. So in addition to the nimbleness and allowing developers to To leverage resources from other state, federal sources of funding, it also would allow us to sort of-

▶ 42:56 Speaker 6: Control it. Yeah

▶ 42:57 Speaker 8: ... yeah, control what kinds of projects we're looking to fund based on the review of a proposal. Mm-hmm. So let the development community tell us how they would use our funding best.

▶ 43:12 Kimberly Vandiver: Thank you. And, I also was wondering about the slide before that, the pie chart showing, I divided those numbers, so it looks like 7.5% of- Mm-hmm ... affordable housing units in Melrose today. And I know we have some things in the pipeline, so maybe another percentage point or two is kind of possibly in development to get added to the sustainable housing inventory. I know our goal from the perspective of Chapter 40B for that percentage would be 10% to be filled in. But, I guess I was also thinking about what would that chart ideally look like? It would probably be a lot bigger than 10%, right? Given, we're talking about 80% of the median income, meaning, I don't know what percent of the population is at or below 80% of median income, but like- About 30%. 30%. So, I just wanted to ask for that number and kind of emphasize how different that chart ought to look and how great that really shows that the need is.

▶ 44:19 Speaker 7: Yeah. I guess I'll add to your comment, question, is that the chart can be a bit misleading as well, because one of the things that we're charged with is building affordable housing, capital A, capital H. There's naturally occurring affordable housing in the city. We know that. There are people who rent below market. There are people who have low housing costs because they paid off their mortgage many years ago, so their expenses aren't that high. So there are people that live in the city that have naturally occurring affordable housing. So we're focused only on the portion that is deed restricted, part of that inventory. The other part is, we talked a little bit about 40B, is that I think collectively, our committee has talked a lot about 40B and about this 10%, this magic number of 10%. Keeping in mind that when the city reaches that safe harbor goal, for a project that's a 40B project, not all of those units might be at an affordable level. And so we gain units to the inventory to reach that safe harbor, but we're not necessarily gaining units that are satisfying the needs of those people who are making 80% or less of the median income. And so we look at this chart and say, "Do these numbers really mean a lot? Where is the number? Is it greater, is it less than?" I think what we keep coming back to is, wow, this is really not enough. Mm-hmm. And our goal is to get more. And is 20% the magic number? I'm not sure. We haven't talked about that. Mm-hmm.

▶ 45:56 Kimberly Vandiver: Terrific. Thank you. And last comment is thank you so much for bringing up the importance of the Community Preservation Act and to my colleague for including some details about that, I think really important. I'm also in favor and hope that we can move on that soon. Thank you.

▶ 46:10 Devin Romanul: Thank you so much, Councilor Vandiver. I just want to note we've got a couple of other items on our agenda, and we got about 10 minutes until our scheduled full council meeting just for PIF purposes. But up next I've got Councilor Fernald-Quero.

▶ 46:22 Cal Finocchiaro: Thank you. Thank you so much for the presentation. It was very helpful for me to kind of understand what you guys do and how it interacts with the city and- Mm-hmm ... affordable housing. So, sounds like the CPA is really kind of an important piece of this. So I'm just kind of trying to think if that wasn't, say that we brought that to a ballot and it didn't get passed. So which it's like, all right, you don't want to think about that, but I'm just saying, are there other housing trusts or I don't know if other cities around us have them- Mm-hmm ... I'm not really- Yeah, no ... aware of them, but do they use CPAs? How do they fund themselves or-

▶ 47:03 Speaker 6: Yeah, I think over 73% do have the CPA. But I do- Over 73%? 73%- Okay ... of the communities that have affordable housing- Okay ... trusts have CPA. Mm-hmm. But if we don't get it, we'll try to continue to support projects that come up. We'll look for other ways of... Another way is city-owned parcels. I know, I participated in the... They're having a study on the two parcels that are becoming online. That is a way to move affordable housing along. Mm-hmm. So, we will continue to push, and I know that the CPA and bringing something to ballot is not done without some thought and some risk. But I think it outweighs... The benefits are so clear. I think it would be really important to get out to the community what that is. But yeah, we'll continue to try to do our work and educate people and work where we can- Mm-hmm ... until we have enough money to do more. Yeah.

▶ 48:12 Cal Finocchiaro: And as far as the CPA, and this might be something that I have to look into, is it a fixed percentage that lives kind of... Is it 1% for the life of the-

▶ 48:22 Speaker 8: More than 3%. Okay. You can elect as a community to do 1%- Okay ... 2%, 1.5%.

▶ 48:28 Cal Finocchiaro: And that stays like that or does it have an out?

▶ 48:31 Speaker 6: You can change it. Okay. I think you probably have to put it back to a ballot- Okay ... to change the percentage. So yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

▶ 48:38 Cal Finocchiaro: More of like informational if people are listening-

▶ 48:40 Speaker 6: Yeah. No, it's important ... today.

▶ 48:42 Speaker 3: Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Thank you.

▶ 48:45 Speaker 6: You're welcome

▶ 48:45 Speaker 1: Up next, I have Councilor Chen.

▶ 48:48 Speaker 5: Question's already been answered. Thank you.

▶ 48:49 Devin Romanul: All right. Fantastic. And second time around, I have Councilor Williams.

▶ 48:53 Ryan Williams: Have you guys talked to the Community Preservation Coalition?

▶ 48:57 Speaker 6: I have not talked to them yet. But I have-

▶ 49:00 Ryan Williams: They were very helpful when I was researching this several years ago. The staff was very helpful. They only have a few staff. Mm-hmm. But they're very responsive, and they have a ton of information on how to create a committee, et cetera.

▶ 49:10 Speaker 6: Yes, I have seen their information online. Yeah. Same.

▶ 49:13 Speaker 5: Thank you.

▶ 49:13 Speaker 4: It's like first source for doing it- Yes ... getting it done.

▶ 49:18 Speaker 1: What is the will of the committee?

▶ 49:20 Speaker 4: Is that motion placed on file? Second.

▶ 49:22 Devin Romanul: Motion made placed on file by Councilor Williams, seconded by Councilor Karamcheti. On discussion.

▶ 49:29 Speaker 1: Do we require a roll call or

▶ 49:32 Devin Romanul: this can just be... All right. All those in favor? Aye. All those opposed? The ayes have it, and this will be reported out to the full council meeting. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. I appreciate your time, and thank you for all that you do for our community, and for taking the time to volunteer for our city, and being here tonight. All right. Up next on our agenda, ID number 2026-773, acceptance of FY26 firefighter safety equipment grant in the amount of $12,375.87. Joining us this evening is Chief White. Thank you, Chief. Good evening. Good to see you.