Speaker 0: Okay. Thank you. We're now at our time certain for our study session, a little beyond that. So we just need a minute or two to just get the presentation and everything ready and cued up and we'll start the study session. And then once that's over, we will go back to the regular agenda of the city council meeting. So just give us one minute. We'll begin in just about a minute. Think we are. All set up here for the study session. And again, if you're if you were here for the council meeting portion, that probably won't happen for we won't restart that part of the meeting probably, I imagine for for a little while. So we're going into the study session right now. Okay. Well, I'm going to go ahead and get started. I'm going to make some opening comments and just kind of give everyone, since we're doing a study session about what the process for our study session is tonight, we will have I'll make some opening comments. I will be then turning it over to staff who will make the presentation for tonight, which they've been working on pretty extensively. And then I'm going to invite Assembly member Bonnie Lowenthal to make a few remarks, who headed up the study group for the housing study. And then we're going to go to the city council. And of course, like we always do to ask questions and to make any comments. And then, of course, we'll be public comment like we do for all items of study session or any items before us. And that is the process. We have a draft report in front of us. So as you all know, the the process is that draft report, once comments are received tonight, will become a final report to the city council, we imagine, in the next couple of weeks. So in the next few weeks, that draft report will be final report and it will be presented to the City Council for recommendations to adopt the report as as policy. Okay. So let me go ahead. So we'll go ahead and get started. Tonight, we're having a study session on affordable and workforce housing. It's certainly a topic that has been discussed much, not just in Long Beach, but we know across the country, but especially here in California, we know that California in particular is having incredible demands when it comes to housing, whether it's for working families, whether it's homeless veterans , whether it's students. But we know that there is a housing crunch that's happening across the state. That housing crunch is also very real here in the city of Long Beach as well, because we know that this has been a challenge. The city has been embarked for many years on affordable and workforce housing policy. A lot of people don't don't realize this, but cities are actually mandated through this, through state. Ask that we build affordable housing every single year. And so the state actually sets numbers for the four cities, Long Beach included, to build affordable housing every single year. It's it's safe to say that Long Beach, along with most cities, normally fall short of the targets that are set for the state by the state of California. But we are expected to build affordable housing stock year in and year out. And we have obviously done some of that work in the city of Long Beach. At the same time, over the course of the last year, there's a few things that happened, which I think I think we're very good for the community. One was we hosted some community citywide conversations. These community conversations were organized with the help of the Affordable Housing Study Group that we put together through staff and through a lot of folks that were involved. And so I want to thank everyone that participated in those three sessions. There was included in those sessions was one session where we had the public and public comment and advocates from across the city that weighed in on the issues. In another session we had developers and so we brought in both public and private developers, both those that develop affordable housing and those that develop only market rate and private housing. Also at our roundtable to get input from the development community on what is what's happening and what is what are the latest policies happening across the country. In addition to that, we also had a conversation with housing advocates and that also happened in the course of last year. So all three were well attended, they had a robust conversation and those concluded towards the end of the last year. Picking on that topic, picking up on that, we had the study group, which was also health and staff by Mercedes Marquez, who's here with us today, who is a national expert in this area, as well as our staff. We were able to produce the report that you will that you'll be presented to in just a few minutes. The report is a comprehensive look at what the need is across Long Beach. It's a look at what we're already doing. So what has the city of Long Beach actually done over the course of the last five, ten years? And then a look at what are some of the best housing policies that are happening right now across the country? And what are some opportunities for us here locally as well? I want to say, just as we as we begin the report, that about two, maybe two or three months ago I was having a breakfast at one of my favorite cafes, and I. Most of you have probably been to this place. It's very well known in Long Beach, and there's a cook there who's been working there for eight years. He lives in our city. He's probably made breakfast for most of us at some point in our lives. He's a very hard worker and him and his family have been living in our community. They make our community strong. Him and his family are great contributors to our city. And he's been working at this place now for almost 20 years. You know, it's difficult for him to be able to get to a point where he can reach homeownership. And I think that as a community, we should want for folks like him and others to be able to be in a home, to be able to purchase their first home for him and his family. And so I think part of that conversation tonight is ensuring that Long Beach, for all the amazing things that are happening in our community and we see what's happening with home values, which are going incredibly, incredibly well for for most neighborhoods across the city, we see what's happening with development. We've got to make sure that the cooks and the folks that are cleaning our parks and the workers remain an important part of our community because they have made our city strong. And I think that they're important part of who we are as a city. In addition to that, and I've said this before as well, we need to ensure that we're building housing for the thousands and thousands of professional graduates coming out of Cal State, Long Beach. Every single year we have and I attend almost I try to turn almost every graduation and I get to shake the hands of these amazing teachers, engineers, nurses, young architects then that if you're a teacher and your graduate going to Cal State, Long Beach and you marry another teacher graduating at a Cal State Long Beach, you cannot buy a home in Long Beach. And it'll it will be highly unlikely that the two of you are have no support if there's no parental support or no other support. It's very difficult for those two to be able to purchase a home or have a dream of homeowner homeownership in the city of Long Beach as well. And so that's also a challenge. We got to make sure that we are we are building and of housing for our graduating students that we're building and of housing for our workers, and that we continue to build all the great marker rate housing that we're already building. And we're building some incredible quality housing that is providing folks of all levels with opportunities to enter the workforce. And so I'm excited about tonight's presentation, and I'm looking forward to obviously to the comments of the of the council and its course and to the comments of the public as well as we've been having this conversation for over the course of the last last year. Again, thank you to the group. We're going to hear from them, I know, later on today. But with that, I want to thank city staff and to turn this over to Mr. West, who's going to think open and open things up to our planning staff. Mr. West.
Speaker 9: Thank you, Mr. Councilmembers. This is a long time coming. I'm going to turn this over to our Director Development Services, Amy Bodak, and our Director of Housing, our senior housing manager, Patrick Ray. Amy.
Speaker 7: Mr. West. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Members of the City Council, thank you very much for your attention today and for scheduling this study session on such an important topic. You know that you have a a few agencies within the city family that work on housing, but today is our opportunity to recognize their work and then also expand that conversation with the community. So first, I want to acknowledge that the board members of the Long Beach Community Investment Company, which is the city's wholly owned nonprofit, is your production and rehabilitation entity for the production and rehabilitation of affordable housing. And we do have Vice Chair Diane Arnold here in the audience. I also want to recognize you in your role as of the Housing Authority, play a very important role in providing affordable housing to many members of our community. And we also have housing authority staff in the audience. Kelly Collopy, Alison King and Keesha Nathaniel are also in the audience for questions that you may be having. What you may not know is Patrick and I. You usually see me up here for planning issues, but Patrick and I also serve the lby CIC as the president and vice president of the city's Affordable Housing Development Corporation. And in that role, we work with them to utilize our resources for the production or rehabilitation of that affordable housing. But our resources are limited. And part of today's discussion is to talk about opportunities where we may be able to expand those resources, but then also constraints. So our big question is, with the public funding dwindling, how are we going to move forward in invest in affordable housing as a legitimate infrastructure investment? And what policies can we implement to stimulate housing development, both affordable housing and market rate housing? How can we incentivize developers? And what's new? Revenue sources may be available that we can capitalize upon. So one of the big questions is what is affordable housing? And everybody has a different definition of what they think affordable housing is. There is the definition that is in state law. There's the definition that HUD uses. There's the definition that a constituent might use because they don't believe that they have the ability to move into a bigger unit or they're facing or for affordability issues or overcrowding. But here are some types of affordable housing that exist that we have all been a part of. Either developing or rehabilitating special needs housing for certain segments of the population that have special needs. Certainly Section eight is a huge component that is now called housing choice vouchers. We have emergency shelters, transitional housing, senior housing, supportive services. We have large family housing, group housing, and then, most importantly, covenants that go along with the protection of those houses. There's two ways, basically, to develop affordable housing. One is providing special financing that underwrites the market rents for those units in exchange for underwriting those market rents. We we achieve covenants that that require that the affordability of those units remain in place either for 45 years or 55 years. The other way we do that is through direct rental subsidies, most commonly through the housing choice vouchers. As you probably know, emergency shelters typically provide temporary shelters on a very, very short term basis. Transitional housing is more of a 3 to 6 month type of housing environment where you can stabilize an individual or a constituent and then get them into permanent housing. Supportive housing is where you combine different types of services to that individual community, whether it is additional child care, additional job training and computer training or work readiness training, or whether it's actual counseling that can be provided on site. This next chart demonstrates the housing need for the city of Long Beach. If you look on the left hand side where it says Long Beach households, we broke the city out into population based on their average income or average median income, which is am-I. You can see that the majority of our individuals, 38%, are above moderate income. We do have a moderate income of about 17%. But if you look at the low, the very low and the extremely low, those are very high numbers that we have in the city of Long Beach. On the right hand side is the state's regional housing needs assessment. These numbers are assigned to us by the state on a semi-regular basis. We get these numbers handed down to us every time we have to update our housing element. And so I'll go into more arena numbers later. But what this does show is that our greatest need for housing units is both in the above moderate category and then in the combined low, very low and extremely low category. So our arena numbers generally do reflect our income for our Long Beach households as well. That's the good news, that there is consistency between our need and who our population actually is. So clearly we've heard quite a bit about what the housing issues are that we're facing in the county, as well as the city of Long Beach . Low paying jobs and poverty, rising housing costs both at a regional and a statewide perspective. Housing cost burden, which I'll get into. And then clearly the reduction in financial resources for the production of these units, rising housing costs. This chart should give you an example of the rising housing cost that we have seen since January of 2012, both for L.A. County and for Long Beach, both for one bedroom and two bedroom units. So you can see that there is a clear pattern over time of trends and housing costs increasing. This is our renter versus ownership rate. This is something that we look at quite a bit and really does impact the type of communities we are developing within the city. We have generally been for the last 15 years a high renter proportion community that is inched up over the last five years. It used to be about 58%. Now we're inching up to 59. 60% renters. You can see that that is not too much higher than the county, but certainly higher than California and certainly higher than the United States in general. It could be because of our immigrant population. It could be because of our ethnic breakdowns that we're much more diverse.
Speaker 2: Or it just could.
Speaker 7: Be that housing costs are much higher in California than nationwide in general, and that could affect the ability to create homeownership opportunities. I wanted to compare housing cost burdens for all households. Housing cost burden is when the federal government defines a burden as when you or your family are spending more than 30% of your income on rent and you are considered severely overburdened if you're spending more than 50% of your income on rent. So we did a comparison of several cities that are both comparable in size or in our diversity or our housing stock to see where we stood within California. You can see that for cost burdened perspective, about 40 to 47% of all of our households experience paying more than 30% of their income towards rent. Of our entire households, 24% of that, those total households spend more than 50% of their incomes on rent. Compare that with Los Angeles. We are slightly lower than Los Angeles and we're slightly lower than Anaheim, slightly higher than Oakland. But interestingly, San Francisco gave us quite a pause because we weren't quite sure how such a high cost city could have lower cost burdens. But that is, frankly, because the incomes are so much higher in San Francisco that they're able to actually afford the high cost rents in San Francisco. And we're not too far off on San Jose either. Four renter households. We did the same comparison of the same cities. And you can see across the board where we're kind of in line again with Los Angeles and Anaheim, Oakland as well. San Francisco, great difference. And then San Jose. You know, we're also sort of in that range as well. So really, this is not a Long Beach specific issue. It's not an L.A. County specific issue. It is a California issue that contributes to the issues that we're facing in Long Beach. This chart should be a little bit telling for for those of us in the business. This shows the decrease in revenues that are available for funding of affordable housing. It's a very expensive proposition to develop affordable housing, and the resources that used to be available have frankly plummeted. The green, which represents the smallest amount of cash, represents a local and other state funding that we can get, usually through CAL Home grants or other state grants there. They tend to be competitive one time grants. We've been successful in getting them, but the money's just really not there for us to do anything worthwhile with it. Federal home funding is in blue. You can see that there was some high points in 2009 and ten, but again, those revenues have expired, have decreased greatly, and we probably only get about 2 to $3 million a year in federal home funds as opposed to the peak of $5 million that we used to get several years ago. And then clearly, the red represents redevelopment. And in 2012, those dollars went away as an ongoing funding source. We still did have revenue coming in 2013 through 2016 through debt repayments of the redevelopment agency. But you can see that from a high of $35 million in 2011 to a low of $7 million in 2013. We just don't have the resources that we used to have to produce affordable housing within the city. So I mentioned this earlier, but there are several entities, two entities besides the city council that play a key role in the development of affordable housing. One is the housing authority, which the City Council sits as the governing board. They focus on the disposition of housing choice vouchers, VASH vouchers, which are focused on veterans programs. They focus on homeless assistance programs, and then Hoppa, which is housing opportunities for persons with AIDS. And then the Long Beach Community Investment Company, which is the city's wholly owned nonprofit, they focus on new affordable housing production, rehabilitation. They also have the ability to focus on economic development. And then they're the ones that make recommendations to the City Council on the use of our CDBG block grant dollars. So here's what we have within the city for existing affordable units. This focuses on our stock of publicly assisted rental housing. This includes multi-family rental units assisted under federal, state and local programs, including HUD, state bond programs, density, bonus and redevelopment. The Public Housing Units in Green 713 that represents the County of Los Angeles Carmelita Project, north of Delano. Publicly assisted rental units represent in the light blue represent those units that we have 45 or 55 year covenants on and that have been funded through home KAL home or redevelopment dollars. And then the housing choice vouchers, the dark blue, 6600 units are supported through housing choice vouchers through our housing authority, totaling approximately eight and a half percent of all of our housing stock is either covenanted or has protections for affordability covenants on them. This is an interesting slide because this shows how we're able to leverage our dollars and we work the Long Beach Community Investment Company and the city works extensively with developers who are experienced in the production or rehabilitation of affordable housing. I want to make it clear that the city of Long Beach itself does not produce the units ourselves. We assist in the financing of units, and with our dollars we have been able to leverage developer dollars for a 3.8 times ratio on all of these dollars. So the L.B. CIC in the city put in $141 million. In the last ten years. Developers contributed $401 million for a total investment of $543 million in affordable housing investment since 2006. This includes actual units produced or preserved, rehabilitated and newly restricted or first time homebuyer assistance where we offer mortgage assistance through some of our programs. And as you can see, over the last ten years, 4500 households have been directly affected and influenced by this investment. I just want to spend a few moments going through some of our completed projects and planned projects so you can see what the face of affordable housing looks like in the city and what we've been able to accomplish. This project Gallery for 21 is a market rate project, but 26 of those units are affordable units with covenants that were achieved through a density bonus project process. And so while it may look like a market rate project, it is a market rate project. But there is mixed income in this building, which is a great ability, a great use of the density bonus program. On this page. We've got the Long Beach and BURNETT Apartments on the upper left hand corner in District six. That's a new construction that was recently completed. 46 units on the upper right is the Puerto Del Sole on the third street in District one. New construction, 62 units. The family comments at Cabrillo is in District seven in the lower left hand corner, 79 new unit construction project there, and then Pacific City Lights at 1643. Pacific Avenue is also new construction in District one, and there are 41 units in that project as well. A couple more examples. The Decora apartments are scattered sites throughout North Long Beach and District six. This was a significant project, 308 units that were rehabilitated. Bellwood arms in the upper right hand corner District nine for 34 units for rehabilitation collage apartments was also a rehabilitation in the lower left hand corner in District six. And then Evergreen Apartments were also rehabilitation. So you can see where we we take a project, we increase unit sizes, maybe we decrease the density in the neighborhood, and then we put a lot of money into it to rehabilitate those units, bring them all up to code, and then put covenants on those buildings so that those affordability units remain affordable. A few examples of some senior and ownership housing projects. The top left corner is the Ramona Park Apartments. They opened up a few years ago in North Long Beach on Artesia Boulevard for 61 units of new construction. The senior arts colony, which is on the upper right hand corner that's at Anaheim and Long Beach Boulevard, new construction for 200 units. Those are senior assisted lower left is all of court in District six, 44 units of new construction, and then the Coronado Project, also on Atlantic Avenue and District six, 48 units of new home ownership construction. Special needs. Housing is very important. We spend a lot of time working with our partners, century villages at Cabrillo. We've got the Cabrillo Gateway at the Villages at Cabrillo, which is 81 units of disabled and supportive housing. The Palace Hotel, which is in District four, which was a rehabilitation of a historic building for transitional aged youth. Those are youth who are transitioning out of foster care and may not necessarily have life skills to be able to survive on their own. And they are extremely link income limited. And then also the Long Beach and 21st Apartments, which is a senior slash special needs project on Long Beach Boulevard. This last one is just opened and will be having a grand opening in the next couple of months. This is an adaptive reuse of a historic church building in the second District at Obispo and a third obispo or Zama Obispo in third. This is the Emmanuel Senior Housing Project.
Speaker 4: Well.
Speaker 7: I wish we could show you before pictures. This was an incredible project. But they we the city put in two and a half million dollars into this. Total development costs was about $13 million. We also have a number of projects that are underway or have been approved. You can see Anchor Place again, that's another project at Villages at Cabrillo. This is new construction for veterans and that is underway right now. And then we have 612 units pending or on the books. So they are either in negotiation or under construction. So we've got about 337 units under construction with another 275 that we are negotiating the financial package with various developers. You can see that the type of housing unit ranges the gamut from homeless to disabled to family to family with special needs. So we do run the gamut of how we assist projects. This is the new construction at villages at Cabrillo. An example of that project, again, $4 million and getting $42 million worth of investment. New construction. This will go next to the senior arts colony on Long Beach Boulevard in Anaheim. This was a little bit more pricey for us. $12 million in assistance to get $80 million. Different unit mix with very low, low, extremely low income residents, disabled veterans and seniors in this combination as well. We've done a lot of preservation. You just recently held a tough for a hearing for this very project. This is the preservation of units to keep affordability covenants in place. Century Affordable Development is doing this project and we did put money into this project as well in order to assist them in upgrading it. And in exchange for that, we do get covenants in place that previously did not exist. Habitat for Humanity. This is a four unit project. They are moving into density instead of just single family homes. So this is their first attempt at a at a multi-unit project. So this is a townhome project that we worked on with Habitat for Humanity, and this is a proposed project at Long Beach Boulevard and PCH. It is a vacant site right now. It used to be the old King Taco building right near the blue line. We are in negotiations with Amcor for this development project and are already committing three and a half million dollars to that project where we would get potentially 100 affordable units out of that project.
Speaker 0: Just a quick correction, because I'm trying to. I think you meant that. Is that the guy the guy or hero on the corner? Is that not.
Speaker 7: Talking? Sorry. Yes.
Speaker 0: All right. I used to go there.
Speaker 6: Tacos.
Speaker 7: Do you know what? King Taco used to be there and then it moved. So it's not the current King Taco. It's where King Taco used to be 15 years ago. So it's still there. So this one is a new project that we're working with, Link Housing Link is based in Long Beach. This will be their first project with us outside of the Palace Hotel project. We're looking at 95 units on Long Beach Boulevard at the 1900 block of Long Beach Boulevard. We're looking at $3 million in assistance for a total development cost of around $40 million. So I wanted to get into our resources. As I said earlier, we our resources are diminishing. We no longer have the ability to receive ongoing payments from the redevelopment agency. But we did get a number of loans repaid through the redevelopment agency, including something called the SERAPH, which was the. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Fund special education, revenue, finance, something or other fund. It was a fabulous state to take away of redevelopment dollars to augment education back in the early and mid 2000s. The redevelopment agency borrowed money from the housing fund. We did have to pay that back upon dissolution. So that's $8 million. The downtown project area, also back in the 1970s and eighties, deferred some housing payments to the housing fund. Those were also required to be repaid. So those were repaid to a tune of about $16 million. And then here and there we get other loan repayments that come in, but we can't really guarantee when those those happen. They're sort of like early Christmas presents for us when we find out we're getting a loan closing and getting a little bit of money from a loan repayment. And then as a as debt that the redevelopment agency owes, the city is repaid. 20% of that debt now goes to the housing fund. And so we are starting to see a couple of dollars coming our way into the housing fund. This is the first year we've seen it. It's less than $900,000. So it's not a very sustainable source, but it is still something. So we started the year with $35 million. We expect to get another $6 million in debt repayment, but we've got pending commitments of about $28 million, which leaves us about $14 million. Sounds like a lot, but that could be two or three projects and then that would be about it. We also, as I said, get home dollars and then our housing choice vouchers program through our housing authority is a substantial resource at about $70 million. So all told, if we net out our pending commitments, we have about $86 million that we have available to invest either through our housing choice vouchers or through additional production of affordable housing. Some of the other things that we do that may not be known and that get talked about as great ideas, but we do it all the time. Are developer impact fee waivers for affordable housing projects. We actually do this all the time. Are affordable housing. Developers know about it. They do the paperwork and we grant them fee waivers. It is in the municipal code to allow them to do that. So you as a city council have already taken that step to waive developer impact fees for affordable housing projects. And I gave you a couple of examples and the dollar amounts of those that assistance. We also offer density bonuses. We have had something on the books for quite a while. The state has recently adopted a new density bonus law that we will have to revise our ordinance to match the state law. But it allows you to it allows any developer, particularly a market rate developer, to add units, go above the height requirements if those units that they're going to construct are going to be dedicated and covenanted for affordable projects. And so this really results in a mixed income project where it might have started out as a market rate project, but because they asked for a density bonus, it becomes a mixed income project. And I gave you an example early on of Gallery 421, where we have 26 units of affordable housing, we have 26 affordable units in there. And those were achieved through a density bonus. Density bonuses do require us to reduce some of our requirements, most often a reduced parking requirement. So we do look carefully at where those density bonuses occur because they do have the ability to impact parking in certain neighborhoods. We also are required by state law to relax certain development standards as well. And so we also have some new state law that says if you are developing an affordable housing project within a transit area , which we consider to be a half a mile from a transit stop and you are requesting a density bonus, you can also really reduce your needs as well.
Speaker 0: Just to clarify, when you say transit stop, you mean a rail stop.
Speaker 7: I do not mean.
Speaker 0: Any transit stop.
Speaker 7: Correct. Okay. Yes. We traditionally think of it as light rail, but state law does define it as any any transit stop. That has a headway of less than 10 minutes. And most of our city has a headway of less than 10 minutes for transit. So that theoretically could be anywhere in the city. We tend to focus on light rail because that is fixed and transit routes do have the ability to change over time. But our next focus after light rail is on corridors because we know that transit typically remains on corridors over time. So as the mayor said, this discussion really started over a year ago with a call to action at the mayor's State of the City address and focused on convening a group of individuals and communities, stakeholder leaders to really explore this issue in detail. And that was led through by former Assemblywoman Bonnie Lowenthal. And there were a series of meetings that have occurred over the last year with the Informal Housing Study Group. Those meetings also culminated in three specific roundtables and a resource fair that that staff participated in in the fall. And then that led to the assembly of the report that you have before you. A lot of the issues that we heard in the public were not a surprise to us who have been here working for a while and who understand what some of the community needs are. There is clearly a lack of developable land. We have very high we have very low vacancy rates in our housing stock. We have aging housing stock. We have rising rents. We have density that is focused on one side of the city as opposed to the other side of the city. We need to address mixed income. We need to address seniors, special needs, disabled veterans, low income, large families. I mean, all the different population types we have heard from and and we don't have the ability to accommodate those in the need that that we need to. We also heard from the study group who participated in these roundtables and who participated in these community forums, that that there really needed to be three branches of our focus, if you will. One was to plan and prioritize. The second one is to protect and preserve, and the third is to produce and promote. Planning and prioritizing is really focusing on making sure that this this discussion about affordable housing is, is community wide and that that there is an education piece to it and that we understand that housing needs are are that those are the needs of the community that we're trying to address. And if you can resolve housing needs, a lot of your other needs in the city tend to diminish as well, protect and preserve where we're kind of good at that. We do a lot of rehabilitation, but we do have an aging housing stock and we do have programs that have been put in place by this city council like Prep in order to protect and preserve those units. But those tephra hearings that you sometimes hold are exactly that, where we are protecting and preserving affordable units that may go off the market if we're not able to do those those tax equalization hearings and then produce and promote production of affordable housing is extremely expensive, both for the affordable housing developer and for the city, as you've seen, but promoting the need of affordable housing, promoting the ability for landlords and the willingness of landlords to accept housing choice. Vouchers throughout the city is extremely important as we promote the the need for housing. And then once the need is there, once the need has been identified to actually produce units to address that need. We did hear from the study group that there's a number of data points that they would like us to address. We've not been able to get all of those addressed for this evening, but these are important conversations that we want to have and turn anecdotal discussions into data. So we would rather have a discussion about the facts surrounding utility shutoffs as opposed to the anecdotal evidence on whether it's increasing or decreasing. So these are some of the questions that the Affordable Housing Study Group has posed to the city staff, and we are trying to address those and those those data points will be addressed in the final report. So getting on to tranche number one, the strategy of planning and prioritizing, again, building the case for affordable housing, also celebrating the successes which are part of tonight is to celebrate the success of those units that have been produced or purchased or protected, and then mobilizing broad based community support about the need to provide quality, affordable housing. Synthesizing is making sure that that all of our requirements line up. You know, we have obligations under our housing element. We have obligations under our various housing action plan, our consolidated plan that we do for HUD. All of those documents need to speak together and they need to be, frankly, focused in in the same direction, since they are all housed in one department in the Department of Development Services . We do have the ability to synthesize and make sure that those documents, goals and objectives all speak to each other. And then we also need to look at what everybody else is doing to make sure that we're not missing the boat on something. There may be some very unique way of financing or producing affordable housing that is foreign to us and Long Beach. And so it's it is our obligation in to make sure that we're up on those trends and that we can capitalize on those opportunities when they come up. Strategy again, number one, ensure that, you know that this affordable housing plan is the centerpiece of an entire system of community investment, so that when we invest in housing, we're also investing in the surrounding infrastructure. That includes the traditional infrastructure of parks and roads and libraries, but it also includes education. And education is a is a huge infrastructure component that we need to really pay attention to as we're developing our affordable housing. And then also, of course, maintain a database of opportunities, opportunities whether it's city owned land or publicly owned land owned by other entities. Where can we where do we have opportunities to increase density or to produce affordable housing? And then accountability. Make sure that there's continual accountability by the city council, that staff is held accountable, that the city council is accountable to the residents, and that we continue to pursue affordable housing as a legitimate tenant of of a safe and healthy city. Strategy number two for the affordable housing group was protect and Preserve. I talked about that a little bit, but we do have ideas that they've presented and we would like to consider in order to reduce displacement and protect the the investments that people have made in affordable housing. This includes potentially limiting the ability to convert apartment buildings to condos when there is very low vacancy rates. This could be a one for one replacement of all housing units that are lost, and then certainly preserving the stock of affordable housing, which we try to do as much as we can. The third strategy is to potentially look at a local bond measure, certainly encouraged mixed income housing through the adoption of an inclusionary housing policy, and then addressing zoning and regulatory impediments that may be serving as barriers for the creation of affordable housing. As you know, we have recently adopted the down the Midtown specific plan. We also have the downtown plan. Those two came with program year that reduce the requirements of developers for having to do standalone secret documents. It reduces time and it reduces the dollar amounts that they have to spend on that. And so that's an example of a regulatory impediment that we've been able to reduce. Again, continuing to partner with our developers and other community stakeholders continue to frankly go through all the state resources and see if any of those are applicable to us. Encourage project based basing of housing choice vouchers. This is a way for us to capitalize on the ability to put housing choice vouchers into a project to create long term financial stability for the project as well. Adopting an ordinance that paves the way for the development of accessory dwelling units, which we'll be talking about later. And then also addressing the needs of college students, because those are sort of an an unheard from population. You know, you see students, you think they're busy going to college, but there is there is significant homeless issues and affordability issues related to students, college students in this city that frankly aren't addressed. Again, communicate our policies to the state. Focus on streamlining state issues that may be impediments to the local development of affordable housing. Explore new financing opportunities through enhanced infrastructure financing districts. And then providing staff resources. Other staff recommendations that we also came up with was to moderate modify the moderate income definition, to expand it to folks who are earning 150% of the area median income. That was brought to us by our fabulous consultant Mercedes Marquez, support seeker reform at the local and state level. And that would be a dream. And then reduce parking requirements to reduce the cost of affordable housing development citywide. So with that, what we'd like to do is turn it back over to the mayor, get feedback from the study group, the council members of the public conduct additional research, which we discussed, that there was still some research data points that we need to address, finalize this report with recommendations, and we come back to the city council in the near future with housing policy recommendations and then see if we can move this conversation forward. So with that, we've got a number of people here who can answer any questions you might have. But at that, at this point, I'll conclude my report. Thank you.
Speaker 0: Thank you very much. And I want to thank staff. You guys did a phenomenal job of putting together some data and information. And I know on behalf of the council, the study group and everyone, just thank you for for all that information and for your work. The housing team that we have at the city is the group of unsung heroes. We do a lot of work every single day, and some of them are here. So we can just give a round of applause to all of our housing team because they really do a great job. Thank you. This time we're going to keep going into our study session. I can mentioned before we had different components of this process. We had the roundtables, we had the discussions with developers, with housing advocates, with the community. But we also had this study group led by Assemblywoman Lowenthal, who is, I would say an expert in this area, has done a lot of work on her time on the council and certainly in the legislature and has the relationships in the legislature to hopefully, as we look for resources in the future to help to help have those conversations as well. And so she's going to make a few remarks on behalf of the study group. I want to ask you, as she approaches, I'm going to go ahead and mention them here as a group, and then I'll turn over to to Assemblymember Lowenthal. I want to thank of course, I know part of the group. We have Renee Castro, who's here. Thank you, Renee, for your service. We have Andy Kerr from Housing Works. Not sure if Andy's here, if I see him here yet. I know that Brian D'Andrea from from Century Housing, who does more to help house veterans than almost anyone in the city. So thank you, Brian for for for your work Christine Pettit and James Scalzo from Building Off the Communities. Jenny Chang from the California Endowment. Josh Butler from Housing Long Beach. Porter Gilbert from the LGBTQ Center. And Professor Moore, Willie Moore from California State University, Long Beach. So I want to thank them for numerous meetings, a lot of work and for us and for being an important part of this discussion as well. Thank you. Give them a round of applause. Sally member.
Speaker 6: Yes. Thank you so much, Mr. Mayor. We all want to thank you for this opportunity that we've had to discuss the issue. We've met over the past year. We've talked about every possible idea in the world. And I think Amy has done an amazing job of putting it all together in the most comprehensive report about affordable housing that I've ever heard in this city. And I think I've been listening to these reports since the eighties. So I really want to thank you, Amy, and your staff and Patrick, who worked with us, as well as the team. We all worked together on this, and I think everyone is equally passionate about this subject. So hopefully, as you saw in that report, we've worked to incorporate the input from the community, from all of those community meetings, the housing advocates, the developers, the apartment owners and other constituents into the report that you heard just now and that you have in front of you. So it's our hope that the majority of their sentiments are included in the report that you're going to be reading. Their recommendations were vetted by us in our many, many meetings. You saw that we had three major steps. Prioritize and plan affordable housing. Protect and preserve affordable housing. Current housing and producing and promoting new housing. So let me highlight some important context for tonight's discussion. As Amy said, it's an extremely difficult time to find funding. That indeed is your biggest challenge. And we hope you're going to dig deep into every possible source of funding. We have some thoughts about what they're looking at in Sacramento, which is a real estate recording fee, a transaction fee. And that seems like a real potential, particularly an opportunity to fund the housing trust fund, which, you know, has been on the books since I was in your shoes in the 2000. So I'm hoping that something like a real estate recording fee has great potential, as it does in the Pacific Northwest, as it does in the city of Philadelphia. And we look forward to hearing your discussions on that. We also believe that we can leverage funding from state and county sources, you know. City of L.A. passed a measure H, H, H. And we have an opportunity you have an opportunity to consider doing that here in the city of Long Beach. So while we hope and I know you hope because you voted on it, that the upcoming measure H would pass for support services. There's a potential for the city actually passing its own bond measure. We'd also like to encourage a deeper partnership with the Long Beach Department of Health and Human Services because of their integral connection between health and housing. Housing is one of the social determinants of health. They have a501c3 Long Beach Cares, which could potentially receive moneys that the city itself cannot. And it's pretty clear that tonight we weren't able to discuss the issue of renters rights. That was a decision that we felt comfortable with, despite the challenge that so many people are having with displacement. But that's a separate issue that has to be discussed at length, at length, at a separate time. So that's really it from our point of view. We want to thank you for this opportunity. We look forward to continuing to work with you. We are available both to city staff and council members as we go forward. And again, Mr. Mayor, I want to thank you. It was such a timely task force and hopefully we've been helpful for this city. Thank you.
Speaker 0: Thank you. Assembly member. And I'm going to turn this over today to the council in just a minute. I want to thank, of course, her for for her service. And so just so that I can just explain kind of the process. So essentially, I hope most people have I know you saw a presentation, but there's actually a pretty detailed report. And so I would encourage anyone that's interested in this topic to please download this report. It's available on the city website. It does say draft on the front of the report because it is a draft. And of course, we're hearing input from the council tonight. These everything that's being discussed tonight that was discussed by by staff are ideas, suggestions, conversation and any change that would happen to any sort of housing policy from a built from a building more workforce housing or affordable housing would happen at the council level. And so that would be discussed when the report comes back here in a few weeks after tonight's discussion. So I just want to make sure everyone's aware that this report is online, it's in draft form. I encourage you to download it and please, please read the report. And again, let me go ahead now and turn this over to to the City Council for questions and input. Staff is looking forward to hearing from all the council tonight so that this can come back, hopefully with your input and then council can make any decisions that they would like moving forward on this too. On the on the topic of revenue tools and incentives for the production of affordable and workforce housing. And I'll start with Councilwoman Gonzales.
Speaker 2: Yes. Thank you. I want to thank you, Amy and Patrick and all of your the members of your team for this hard work, as well as the task force. I know many of you and I know you've worked very hard with the mayor to make this all happen. And so I really want to thank you again as well. And so just a couple of questions. I'm really glad we have a comprehensive report on all of these items. Kind of gives me personally a good idea of where we're at here in Long Beach relative to the county and other cities, and also just looking ahead to the years ahead. So first question is the Neighborhood Stabilization Program, what is the current status of that program and what type of outreach have we done? I know it was a very successful program, but I haven't really heard much about where it's at currently.
Speaker 7: Correct? The Neighborhood Stabilization Program was a series of three different funded grants from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. We got a total of approximately $25 million for three different stages of that. We've expended all the money and we've benefited approximately 100 different households. Essentially what we did was during the foreclosure crisis, we were able to either purchase homes ourselves, rehabilitate them, and then put affordable families in them, or we were able to assist those individuals in buying homes through the foreclosure and then working with them that way. Essentially, the program is wrapped up. We do get some program income from that program, but it's essentially wrapped up.
Speaker 2: Okay. Thank you. And is there any other type of program that could be? I mean, I don't know what HUD will look like, you know, as it's formulating right now. But is there anything else that we can do statewide, locally, any other programs that we can get creative on that are similar to this?
Speaker 7: You know, that was a really good stimulus program that we were able to capitalize on to stabilize our our housing stock as well. Patrick and I and Elm Hugo's our grant administrator for HUD. We're actually at a hog conference last week. So the timing of it was really interesting. We are hoping, frankly, that HUD just keeps our budget stable. If HUD is not able to have a stable budget and the United States goes with adopts a different kind of budget, that that results in cuts to HUD in particular, that will clearly impact the resources that the housing authority gets and then that the resources that we receive. We do understand that housing choice vouchers have a higher priority for HUD than home dollars or other grant programs. So if their budget is cut, it is likely that the L.B. CIC would see less money and they would try to preserve the housing choice voucher program to the extent that they can. But that is clearly an ongoing concern. Is the federal budget and how that's going to impact us locally. We did do a bunch of research that we have some of that detailed in the report about potential innovative solutions and how other cities were looking at policies from a land use perspective as well as revenue generation. I'm always careful about impact fees because I want to make sure that we do not unduly burden one half of the house in order to achieve revenue and the other half of the house. So we are trying to find programs that would not create an undue burden for development to occur as well. So some of those ideas are detailed in the report.
Speaker 2: Thank you. And a couple more questions. So SB 744, obviously, you know, will basically state that parking requirements could be lessened if we are near transit stops. So now that we've clarified which stops means exactly is there a way that we can and I know we do this anyhow, but how can we push it a little further to be able to provide or work with our developers to provide more bike and pedestrian friendly infrastructure within the the buildings and around the buildings because. Yes, we see that enough, I guess.
Speaker 7: Yes, actually, that is a that is a follow through of the adoption of the bike master plan is to actually implement a modern ordinance citywide that would increase the bike infrastructure both on site for new development and then also offsite infrastructure as well. So that is a to do list with the Department of Development Services and the Department of Public Works to revamp our ordinance for those types of requirements.
Speaker 2: Okay, great. And I think I'm done here. The only other thing that I'll mention is it's great to see I see so many amazing projects in the first district that I've I drive by and I'm excited about because they are you wouldn't even know that they have affordable housing components in them, which is exactly what we want . I would like to see that we can permeate that same thing throughout the whole city, whether the east side, north, wherever that it isn't just in specific pockets that we're really permeating that throughout the whole city and ensuring that the infrastructure around, just like you've mentioned, is up to standard. So thank you very much.
Speaker 0: Thank you. Next up, we have Councilmember Pearce.
Speaker 5: Okay. I just want to say, first of all, that I'm very thankful for the time that staff spent on this, very thankful for the year that the community members and the committee spent on this. I know that as a member of the community that's worked on access to affordable housing for the last decade, that this is a critical time for us. And so, above all, I want to thank the mayor for your leadership and making sure that we're having a really thoughtful and thorough discussion around our housing market. That bird's eye view, I think, is so important where sometimes we we struggle to really grapple with project by project. But looking and being able to redo our bureaucracy in a way that really is supporting affordable housing overall is really important. And to say that the situation of affordable housing is becoming urgent in California is just simply an understatement. I think the report outlined that through 2025, there's a shortfall of more than 1 million rental homes to extremely and very low income households in Long Beach, along with 46% increase in rents for one bedroom apartments in the last five years. The highest cost in my own district. That today is very timely. And so I do have several questions, and I'm going to try to go a little slower than I typically do. So I don't miss any things that I have to come back and talk again. So wait with me for just 1/2. I think that strategy one, strategy two and strategy three are all extremely important. And that most importantly, whenever we talk about in strategy two, could you explain to me what we already do with limiting condo conversions? Because I believe there's already something on the books on that.
Speaker 7: We do have something on the books related to condo conversions. It's frankly antiquated and it's something that we need to address. We talked about it briefly as a work item of the housing element, where, first of all, the process to convert to condos and then also the fee that is assessed for condo conversions is is antiquated. So we would like to modernize our condo conversion ordinance, potentially put controls in place where condo conversions would not be allowed if there are high, vacant, low vacancy rates in the rental market.
Speaker 5: Great. Thank you for that.
Speaker 0: Can I just add one thing, Councilwoman, and one thing that I think is important on that conversation is one thing I heard loud and clear from seniors across the community is seniors that are living currently in housing that is affordable to them are really terrified about what's happening in other other parts of the country and the state in losing the ability for seniors to stay in their homes. And so I think part of that conversation, Councilwoman, we also have to involve and I know that our senior commissioner and others are very interested in ensuring that housing for our seniors across the city, there are an incredibly low fixed income that that we can retain that housing for for seniors across the city.
Speaker 5: Great. Thank you for that, Mayor. I think obviously some of this conversation I know today, we're talking mainly about housing stock and how do we increase and preserve existing housing stock. I think that conversation goes along with the renter conversation when we talk about the fluctuation and making sure that there's stability for our seniors and those that are living on a fixed income and so on. The other question coming up on the one for one replacement, it says one for one replacement of all housing lost to redevelopment. Is that only redevelopment projects or does that include any affordable housing that we have in the city? If a.
Speaker 7: If A, it's in the coastal zone only, is that correct? It's currently we only have the one for one replacement currently right now in the coastal zone. So if a developer buys a unit project and the income levels of those residents are very low and that developer decides to demolish that housing project and build a 12 unit project, they are supposed to replace those units one for one and make eight of those units affordable. But that is only limited to the coastal zone right now. And so that is, again, is another antiquated rule on our books that we'd like to modernize.
Speaker 5: Great. I want to just say, I support making sure that we modernize. Not only that.
Speaker 0: But hold. I'm sorry, because I know this clarified, but isn't that a statewide. Isn't that a coastal statewide regulation?
Speaker 7: It is. But the issue is whether or not that should be a city wide.
Speaker 0: I understand that. But yes, but currently, just from my days on the coast commission today, the state of California requires one for one replacement up and down the entire coastal zone in the state of California, correct? Yes. Okay.
Speaker 5: And or that in lieu fees on the Melos Act, is that determined at the coastal zone? I mean, at the Coastal Commission?
Speaker 7: No, we can set those as well. And that also needs to be modernized.
Speaker 5: Great. So I show that we're around 10 to $30000 per unit. Yes. And so as we bring this back, looking at if we can increase that to a more, what does it cost to build versus just a $10,000 a unit that obviously isn't enough to build a a new affordable unit. Correct. Great. Thank you. Okay. Then the other thing on one for one replacement and having the conversation about how do we expand that to city wide outside of the coastal zone. I think before we can even have a discussion around a policy on what that might look like, we go back to the conversation around data and looking at something around a registry. We're able to see how many people are either deciding to move on because they're out of cost. So looking at a rent income survey and potentially looking at a renter eviction registry where we're not necessarily tracking who the landlord is, but we're really tracking how many people are moving on and that why are they leaving so that we can identify the actual housing needs. So I want to be really clear on that one because I haven't talked too much about that. But as I looked at this, just trying to really think about how do we know what housing we're losing if we have individual owners that might decide to convert , which is their right. But knowing what we need to fill in the gaps on, I think is really important. And then the last, I have two more things. There was a conversation around our schools, and I think Assemblymember Lowenthal brought up a great point around the fact that we have so many college students that find themselves couch surfing or sleeping in their cars and that there's a great need for more housing for our students. I'd be curious to see if we could use the Joint Committee to explore using school property to do joint use agreements for college and high school students. And so want to make sure that that was in the report to see if we could explore some of that opportunity, because there's so little land, as we already know, in our city. And then finally, I would like to just talk a little bit about one of the things that we've been doing is talking about the shipping container and knowing that we haven't built any, you know, homes in Long Beach using shipping containers. But knowing that there are a lot of cities throughout the U.S. that are and looking at a program where we're able to ease maybe the permitting process or talk about what we're doing to incentivize some of that use, because we know that while a standard unit, you know, at the Villages might cost anywhere between 150 or, you know, $350,000, to build that, we can do shipping, container housing anywhere between 50 and $200,000 to build, depending on the type of model it is. And obviously, we're here at the port with a lot of shipping containers that are left over from a bankrupt company. So there is a. A unique opportunity for us. So I'd like for us to explore what we're doing to incentivize creative housing opportunities there. And I just want to echo what my colleague said. Councilmember Gonzalez If we are looking at reducing parking requirements, I obviously a second district councilmember could not be very supportive of completely doing that. I would need to make sure that we're talking about biking infrastructure and what we're doing to incentivize all of that. I will end on talking about the importance for local funding. I think that you guys have put together a great program here and research for us, and I definitely have read this thing through a couple of times. And looking at the let's see, looking at the Philadelphia model is something that I would like to ask the city staff to to dove in deeper as we bring back our next report. I think there are some great opportunities there to really fund, you know, our housing trust fund. So, again, I want to thank everybody for your work and thank the mayor for working on this. And I know that, you know, we have had a lot of discussions as a part of the downtown plan. We were able to incentivize development in downtown, and that's been really great. But the fact that we weren't able to develop one affordable housing unit in that downtown plan means that we are in the crisis mode that we're in today. And so as we look at funding sources, I want to make sure that we're not looking at funding sources that are projects that can happen in ten years, but projects that can happen in three that can happen in four. So thank you very much again, everybody, for your work.
Speaker 0: Thank you, Vice Mayor Richardson.
Speaker 8: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. And thank you to my colleagues who already spoke a number of questions that were raised, the thoughts that were raised. I can strike off my list now. Thank you, Chair Lowenthal, on the whole task force for taking on the least controversial issue in our city. Congratulations to you. Good job, city staff. Fantastic job on this report. I got to tell you, I love the images. I, I, I, you know, I think and I use this pretty commonly, I show that Bellwood arms project directly next to a market rate housing apartment complex. And I got to tell you, the, you know, I wouldn't say right next to I don't want to single out individual apartment owners, but in that area there are some really bad apartments in really bad shape and the Bellwood arm stands out and it looks great. And sometimes when I speak with residents and neighborhood folks, I'll say, Which one do you think is the affordable housing? Which one do you think is the market rate housing? They can't tell which one is which. And when I tell them Bellwood arms is actually affordable housing, they're blown away. And these are single family homeowners. These are these are homeowners who really care about their community and they're turning their entire perspective around about affordable housing. That's a good thing. And we have to continue to look at imagery like this. So thank you, Amy, and the whole team who put this presentation together. So my my perspective here. And so I grew up as a renter and when I was 25, I bought my first home. And for me, it was it was like achieving an American dream. I was able to really set roots and focus on what I wanted, you know, my next steps in life. I knew where I lived. This was my community. I made a real a deeper commitment to that community. And arguably, a lot of the things that happened since then likely would not have happened if I didn't have that opportunity to purchase that home from being married. When I got married, having my children, when I had my children and making the commitment to serve the public may not have happened if I was still a renter. And I'm concerned and I want to, you know, just shout out the mayor. I'm concerned that that opportunity is slipping away for a lot from a lot of people. They may not have that opportunity to go and pursue that that that dream of owning a piece of property. And so it's important that we do address this and we're open minded and we keep all our perspectives together. And we take we we really look at perspectives. And I'm going to use the example of the balcony in the dance floor. Around the dance floor. You know, if you're like me, you're paying attention to the person who's right on the dance floor, which if and you probably spend a little bit of attention not falling over, tripping over anybody, and when you get off the dance floor, as people may tell you, you may if you ask, how was the party? So it was great. DJ was great, had a lot of fun. My dance partner was great, or if the deejay was terribly so, it was a terrible party. Not many people there wasn't fun. But if you were standing on the balcony looking down, you see the changes on the dance floor that are impacted. When the deejay changes music, you'll see the impact of those changes on the dance floor. Other trends are people leaving the dance floor? Are they joining the dance floor? I think both of those perspectives are important and that means we have to bring everybody to the table. The the you know, not just policy makers on the balcony, but people on the ground. You're talking about renters. You're talking about it's small property owners, large apartment owners. You're talking about renters, you're talking about realtors, you're talking about homeowners and folks in the market searching for home. All of those perspectives matter in order for us to get this right. And so and an example of that, I'm chair of Housing Authority this year. And, you know, I learned a lot about the challenges that housing authority is facing with the lease up rate. And we had an opportunity to start beginning those conversations with apartment owners about why is this happening, aside from the fact that, you know, we know that when the market when there's not a lot of vacancy, when rents are up, it. It impacts our housing authority. We know that. But we sat down with them to begin a conversation and we found there wasn't a lot of, you know, a lot of current information about the housing towards voucher program or what we call the Section eight program. People didn't know that you can receive up to a 20% market rate on that program. People had issues with navigating the process. They want more a more streamlined process, more hand-holding with the city. And by sitting down and having that dance floor conversation with the department owners. There's a lot of productive activity and movement happening. So I do want to acknowledge Alison King on the knowledge, the apartment association, all of the apartment owners have been at the table for these conversations. We're going to continue those conversations like as of right now. And that was a big number on the screen, but that represents about 600 families that we can place in housing today. We have the resources to, but we can't find the units to place them. And it's difficult. The stock isn't necessarily all there, but there's enough for us to move the needle a little closer to the touchdown line if we can, you know, just get more people into into housing. So I know. So just a couple questions. I want to get into the context of this presentation a little bit. So I noticed on the slide listing existing funding for affordable housing, the number 86 million in total available funding. But of that amount, almost 70,000 or 79, 70, 80% is the housing choice voucher program. Have we ever in the past used that funding for construction of affordable housing.
Speaker 7: Not for the construction of affordable housing, but when you project base a number of those vouchers, it does assist in the in the construction of housing. So we have worked with housing authority to provide a specified number of vouchers specifically for a project. And they that helps those the bottom line numbers of that project. It's also my understanding that when you project base, it's not necessarily coming directly from your overall allocation, but that you can get an allocation from HUD directly. And Alison says sometimes.
Speaker 8: Okay. So so as of today, we haven't. But there may be a path to either leverage it or use it directly.
Speaker 7: There is definitely a path for leveraging housing choice vouchers, for helping the pro forma of an affordable housing developer who is looking for secured rents.
Speaker 8: Great. Okay. In the slide that refers to rising housing costs. I noticed that the median rent, it said one bedroom was about 1202 bedrooms, about 2000 based on Zillow. And, you know. Zillow looks at a picture over a set period of time of people actually looking for houses, looking for an apartment. They look at listings of people actively searching in the marketplace. But what it doesn't take into account is those folks or those units that haven't had to go into the marketplace because they have long term tenant tenants. Is there a baseline of data that's that's more a more accurate perspective on what rent actually is in Long Beach ? Because, you know, that's one perspective that sort of drives a narrative that rents are at this level and does create a little bit of a demand on. Someone mentioned grandma who who's had that apartment for a long time and may not be willing to go anywhere. It creates a perception, more of a perception than it might that might even exist that, hey, if I boot grandma out, maybe I have a I can collect this rent. But I mean, that may not be the truth. Do we have have we conducted a study? Is there more accurate data than zero in Zillow on what the actual picture is in terms of our median median rents?
Speaker 7: If you're asking if there if we know of a database that provides existing rents of units that are not necessarily on the market, the answer is I'm not aware of any database that does that. But if somebody out in the audience knows of that database, we are happy to.
Speaker 8: If anybody knows.
Speaker 3: You're.
Speaker 9: Here.
Speaker 7: You can talk to us later. But we could certainly explore that as part of our additional research.
Speaker 8: Okay. Well, thank you. I think that's important to understand. Basic, you know, concrete data, what the real landscape is if we're going to use that as a foundation for a public policy conversation. So let's talk about vacancy. So what is what is. I heard it mentioned the low vacancy rate, but I didn't see it in the presentation. What is the vacancy rate in Long Beach?
Speaker 7: It's about two and a half to 3% right now. So that means that in any given day, of all the units that we have in the city, which is approximately 160,000 units, 160,000 units, 2 to 3% of those may be vacant.
Speaker 8: Okay. So and what is considered a healthy vacant rate? Vacancy rate.
Speaker 7: Anything over 5% is much more tolerable. If you get more in the 8%, 10%, that's too high of a vacancy rate. So something between five and 10% would be much more tolerable.
Speaker 8: So we so it's safe to say we have, you know, between two and 4% gap and where we want to be.
Speaker 7: Yes, we are constrained.
Speaker 8: Now, what what does that mean for an apartment owner? What does that mean for a renter when there's low vacancy? What does that what does that mean for them?
Speaker 7: Well, I'm sure that there is apartment owners who will be able to better address that than I would. But what it means for a tenant is that if you are looking for a place to live, you are in competition with with everybody else who's looking for a place to live. The vacancy rate does not necessarily mean that all of those units are available either. Some of those units may be vacant because they're being taken out of production to be rehabilitated or, you know, somebody's daughter is moving back in and, you know, a family member is going to take it over. So it doesn't necessarily mean that that unit is available for rent. So it increases competition and puts pressure on folks who may need to make very quick life decisions on where they're going to live.
Speaker 8: And so in a no, we're not focusing so much on on, you know, renter protections in this. But I think it does make sense. And I know that someone mentioned it here today. I think we do need a picture of those who are actively displaced or, you know, under threat of displacement. So we have an understanding what we're dealing with. And the other thing I think we need is like that 3% that 4% of housing. Like, it would be good to me if I understand not necessarily the arena number, but what is it? How many units have to be built for us to be within that vacancy rate within our goal? Right. So how many units is that? 2000 units. That 3000 units. How many units we need to build to bring us into a healthy vacancy rate position?
Speaker 7: Certainly we can calculate that.
Speaker 8: Okay. And so and so I'll end with, I think with the conversation, the recommendations on on affordable housing and more housing development. I'm supportive of a lot of the things that I've seen specifically in terms of having a real conversation about density, supporting some of these things that we've we've learned about today with density bonuses. I thought transit oriented development was limited to light rail. I didn't I did not know that those incentives also extend to transit lines, basic, you know, bus lines. And so and, you know, I would like to see us figure out a real strategy around that. So I'm supportive of those things we can do to really incentivize affordable housing. Thanks.
Speaker 0: Thank you, Councilwoman Mongo.
Speaker 4: Thank you. I like Vice Mayor Richardson was very young when I was able to afford the American dream. I worked full time through college and saved my money so that when I graduated from college, I was fortunate enough to buy a condo. And one of the things about this that that is really striking to me is how low our home ownership is. And so when I look at the condo conversion owners, the condo conversion, I see it as an opportunity. But I also see that we need the occupant to have the first opportunity to buy the unit, and we need to look at down payment incentives and incentives to allow them to transition from being a renter to being an owner. Had I not been able to purchase that first condo, I might not live in a home today because I was able to afford that build up. Sell that property and then move into the home in the community that I had desired. But but part of this is also that there there's not any inventory. Those that I know that want to buy a home are still stuck in the rental market because people are holding onto units. There's a woman in my neighborhood. She owns multiple homes in both Long Beach and Lakewood, single family residences. And she cannot fix up those homes in the way that she wants to to put them on the market. There are lots of things that would get called out in an escrow process. And she's inherited some of these properties from her elderly mother and she doesn't have the resources. I would love to see a program where we incentivize people to sell their properties so that there is more inventory. So young people and people who have lower incomes will have. There'll be greater competition among the sellers and that thus those prices will be a little bit better. Specifically, I'd love to see programs that incentivize and provide down payments or down payment assistance or zero interest rates for police officers that want to transfer and be a part of our police force here in Long Beach. And we go across the country and there are some cities in the United States where police officers make less than $30 an hour. There's a particular city. I think they make $22 an hour. And so so there are incentive programs where whether it's the Police Officers Association and Partnership nonprofit programs, they come together to find a way to reduce that that down payment in the same way that veterans can do a zero down payment with no mortgage insurance. And we also need to not only look at police officers, but we have a high shortage for preschool in child care teachers that are preschool and child care certified. We have a shortage of preschools. We have a shortage of preschool teachers. We have a shortage of people who are credentialed teachers in our child care programs. Let's look at those incentive programs for them as well. First time homebuyer grants are very valuable. I feel that they are a huge component of our ability to be successful. I'd also love to see low income down payment assistance programs. Low income down payment assistance programs can help people move into that dream and pull them out of the rental market. It's supply and demand. The more people we can move from rental ship to home ownership, the more control they have over their expenses for the rest of their life. Page 23 of the report. Which I want to thank development services in the task force. This is an exceptional report. It's a lot of data. Also want to thank the city staff for the amount of time they've spent with all of our council officers going over the report so that we could be informed, coming to council today and and bring information and have dialogs with our community. On page 23, it talks a little bit about the program allocation for home funds. In the first category, it talks about owner rental. Does that mean that we're still giving these programs to owner occupied units?
Speaker 7: So let me first explain, Toto. When we get home dollars from the federal government, we are required to spend allocate 15% of those dollars towards a certified housing developer organization. And so that's what each photo is. Each photo is an entity who has been certified through HUD regulations and that they are eligible to achieve these dollars. A TOTO organization can either acquire and rehabilitate or build new. And so they can do it for owner or renter units so they can build condos for low mod or they could build apartments for them as well.
Speaker 4: I think that there's a great opportunity in when we do use the home program, which I know is very limited that we use it on. If we use it on single family residents, which I know are not currently in our plan, but if we do that, they are rental units, rental units with a timeline for sale so that there are opportunities for the people who live in those units to either do a wraparound program or other types of opportunities for financing where a low income person could afford to buy that single family residence. For those that don't know, a wraparound program is when you sell your home over time to the person who lives in it. And without bringing down that that one time cost to a reasonable rate where they be able to qualify in a future year. And I think that those are some great options as well. Additionally on page. 30. 24. I have an item on the agenda tonight. Item number 24, coauthored with Council member Austin related to Granny Flats. We have a large inventory in our city that is off the books and the state of California has already determined that we need to bring it on the books and there are opportunities for us to do that. And we need to make this process easy and convenient and incentivized. We need to know where those units are and we need to make them available. I would even go as far as to say that we need to partner with our open data portal so that people similar. Well, I don't want to claim Zillow for this because as many know, if you look at your actual home value in an appraisal and in Zillow, you'd think you are rich. But people can take ownership of their home and say, I live here. And through our open data portal and a partnership with perhaps the county regional planning, L.A. County Fire, who also does address assessment and verification, and then also the assessor's office. We might be able to find a way where Long Beach homeowners could state. I'm an owner occupied. I have a rental property and here is what I rent it for or I'm a renter and here's what I rent it for. So we could start creating that data ourselves, young people, college students, if we provide the platform. And if our open data portal data be was where we need it to be. And this would be a great opportunity for us to put that into the market very quickly with partnerships through the Apartment Association, better housing for Long Beach and the other landlords in the community. We would be able to have a wealth of data, especially if we incentivized it. There's a property that I was talking to the property manager and in January 20 units became available and she's using standard marketing and paying for rental websites and all of those things. But if we had our own portal, it would make it more affordable for both the landlord and the renter. It's so expensive as a renter to go on and pay the fees to get your background check and all the different components. And it's expensive and so we need to bring that down. I have a serious concern for real estate recording fees that they'll be passed on to the renter and or the home owner or buyer, and then that makes it even more out of reach. There is such a stack of fees when you buy a home, it is shocking. Your closing costs and fees are astronomical. We need to find a way to partner with the state of California and build that fee into the property tax increment that comes in in that first year. So if you have a home that was originally purchased in, let's say 1990 and then. It has been incrementing through Prop 13 and now goes to the new value which will again be protected by Prop 13. Somewhere in there we should be able to find a way to to subsidize this program. And I look for that to be a a policy that we pursue at the state level. I think that that would be very helpful. With that. I want to take a moment to appreciate all of you that came here tonight. I look forward to your feedback and comments. I think that this is a great start and I know it could not have been possible without the lift of many volunteers and a staff that is already hard, hard at work on 17 other priorities. So with that, I want to thank everyone for that. And I hope to hear support for our accessory dwelling item that I think is is long overdue. Thank you very much.
Speaker 8: Next we have council member going to.
Speaker 9: Take us back to what I had my voice to welcoming everybody here and thanking you for being here. And I want to especially thank the task force for tackling this very complicated issue. There's a lot of moving parts, obviously, to this, where we're talking about affordable housing. You're talking about affordable rents, and we're talking about land use and we're talking about just land that we know for a long time that Long Beach has been built out basically in terms of there's very few opportunities now where we could have an empty plot somewhere and put in a housing development in there that would address all the important issues that we're dealing with tonight, such as affordable housing. One of the most important things of any family or any one individual is to own a home. I mean, it's one of the this the the the point of that to establish a status within our society. If you own a home, you you own the world basically, because you will have something to sustain yourself with, you know, something that you can go back to, to talking about putting your kids through school, you know, taking a second, owning your house to pay for for tuition or paying for childcare or buying a car. Housing is one of those important issues that affects all of us in one way or another. And unfortunately, as I say, writ large, which is built out there, there's not that that opportunity. So we have to look at other ways of making affordable housing in Long Beach that would create that opportunity for our citizens and residents to get into that dream of of home ownership so that they could do all the other. Uh, things that are important to them. And with that, I had I had a bit of a bit of an issue with some of the verbiage that was being used earlier, because I, I just it just, it just was that this newspeak that we're into nowadays where we talk about protect and preserve. Protect the preserve what? Depends on what you mean. Because you're talking about protecting and preserving, you know, affordable housing and real rents were also me protecting and preserving those areas that are high rent and and and unaffordable for other people. So we I want to be careful with that because if we say, you know, protect a preserve, let's mean protect and preserve low rents, low cost housing and those areas there. And let's not confuse that with a an area that eventually becomes gentrified, because that's what that's what it means as well. And I have a question about that coming up to that. But, you know, gentrification is a big issue. I'm seeing that everywhere. As a member of the Coastal Commission, I see many properties that developers buy and it becomes gentrifying. And that's a big issue because then you're pushing people out from from where they were living before in terms of affordable place to be. And then a developer comes in, changes the model, and before you know it, nobody can live there anymore other than those with with the with the incomes to be able to support that. So having said that, I have a couple of questions that I want to that I want to come to here on pages 30 and 31. When you talk about the density bonus and assembly bill 744 Um. Are these is this bill in terms of, you know, providing those breaks, we're talking about, you know, increased density, obviously reduced parking and relaxing some development standards. Are these options for a developer or are they are they permanent in nature? Are there in perpetuity or are they just for that owner? What happens is happens often. You know, a person buys a property, gets the benefit they want from it, and then sells it, and then another person comes in and then what happens to that property at that point in terms of the density bonus or the the the application of a bill 744 comes in to that property at that point, what happens there?
Speaker 7: Councilmember We do have density bonus laws on the books right now. 744 does increase the allowance for the density bonus up to 35%. But in answer to your question, in exchange for these waivers of development standards like parking or open space requirements or a unit size, the developer does have to covenant those properties to remain affordable for 30 years. And we do have someone on staff whose job is to focus on every single covenanted property in the city and do annual inspections and income verifications to ensure that those units remain affordable. So when a developer does get a break from providing parking for those units or whatever that that development waiver was, there is a expectation that those units would remain affordable for 30 years. Now, what happens at the end of that time is they can convert to market rate units at that time unless they have sought additional funding from us or, you know, which we saw very recently, was a naturally occurring affordable housing project that was going to be sold, and it was purchased by an affordable housing developer that we worked with that we're providing additional resources to. And in exchange for that, they will be permanently covering those. And when I say permanent 45 or 55 years, depending on rental versus ownership, so we do get something in exchange for the waiver of those development requirements.
Speaker 9: Is there a number is there data information about how many of those units are there now? Are there some? Yes. Is there a a a listing perhaps? Can't find the words right now of of those housing that are maybe at the 30 year limit or this is fairly new that that we're still right in the middle of that 30 year term for individuals to be able to qualify for converting the property.
Speaker 7: We actually have a listing in the housing authority and excuse me in the housing element of all of those that were achieved through density bonuses and then all of the covenants. And when those covenants expire, we also have a program in the housing element that call for us to monitor those properties where the covenants may be close to expiring so that we can intercede and try to create future protections on that. A recent example in your district was Springdale Apartments. So Springdale Apartments, those covenants were expiring. The developer went through a refinancing process in order to reinvest in that building, and in exchange for that, they agreed to extend their covenants for that reinvestment. So that did protect those units, which could have converted to market rate units. So we do have the data on those units. We also have data on the number of density bonus projects that we have within the city of Long Beach and when those covenants expire.
Speaker 9: Thank you. As I was mentioning earlier about the. The land that's available. I noticed during the presentation that many of the projects that you put up there were. West of Cherry, to put it lightly. Are there any efforts to incorporate Siri as a whole? I mean, we have we have other you know, we're 55 square miles. But it seems like a lot of these properties that we're looking at being affordable and these projects that are up and coming are in specific parts of the city and don't address other parts of the city. Are there be are there efforts currently being pursued that might incorporate a city as a whole to make affordable housing, say people, individuals who would be interested in living in the in the third District or in the fifth District or in the fourth District, in other areas other than the usual suspects by seven, six, nine.
Speaker 7: The short answer to that is yes. It's called the land use element. And where we encourage density is where we would like to see development of all types of housing units occur. So there are certain resources of land that were owned by the redevelopment agency or by the Long Beach Community Investment Company, which do make it easier for us to offer that land up. Land is also more expensive in certain parts of town, which do increase development costs. But it really comes down to density and zoning. And where we can encourage density and zoning throughout the city is where we'll be able to see housing developed.
Speaker 9: Okay. On page 38, I see that you put it here, the working through a voter approval or a local bond measure to establish a one time source of capital raising the city's housing trust fund. I recall that there was a trust fund back in the 2000. That money would. Me mention to, of course, because you were in council at the time. And I recall that at that time there were there was a significant amount of housing trust moneys that were helping to address this housing issue back in that day. What is the status of the housing trust fund now, and is there a history of how those monies have been expended, where it is coming up again? Mean, I would think that we would have wanted to keep that fund healthy. And apparently it it's not. So what what's what's the status of that?
Speaker 7: So the housing trust fund exists is it needs to be modernized as well as from an ordinance perspective, it is narrowly defined so that we do not have the ability to place all of our housing asset money in the housing trust fund. So the housing trust fund exists. It has approximately $160,000 in it. It's very, very limited in what it can do. Instead, we like to focus the conversation on the housing asset fund, which is a very specific fund within a sub fund within the cities accounting, where all of our affordable housing dollars reside, whether it's home dollars or housing trust fund dollars, etc. That's what we get when we talk about the $28 million. The Housing Trust Fund is a subcomponent of that. But really we should be talking about the housing asset fund. And it is our hope that one day the housing asset fund and the housing trust fund will be one in the same.
Speaker 9: What what would be a projected amount of money that a local bond if we were to put one on generate for either an asset bond or the trust fund or in this case you're talking about combining for both. But what would be what would be a guesstimate as to what we could do with that? Should we put something in the on a ballot at a future time?
Speaker 7: I sit next to John GROSS in the department head meetings on Wednesday mornings. I have not answering that question. I really need our CFO of the city here in our Treasury Department to be able to answer that question. I couldn't even take a wild guess because I don't want to set expectations. We can certainly research that and get back to.
Speaker 9: You if we're if we're going to be asked or we're going to have to we're going to have the need to address this issue through a bond measure. I think it would be important for us to know.
Speaker 7: Understood.
Speaker 9: Thank you. That's all questions I have for now.
Speaker 0: Q Council Member Austin.
Speaker 11: Thank you, Mr. Mayor, and I want to thank my colleagues, first of all, for an answer, asking most of the questions that they actually had. I want to thank you, Ms.. Bodak, and your staff on your team for an excellent presentation. I think we all learned something this evening. The the eighth District, where I live and represent, is home to a few very large of our affordable housing communities. I'm not sure if they were mentioned or in that data. But you know, obviously, the Carmelita House is a county housing facility with over 700 units. We have Gresham 94 units, Northpoint, which was recently refurbished and renovated. They have over 528 units. They're all six and eight. By the way, Seaport Village is right next door, another 200 units. Most of our SEC are Section eight, managed by abandoned. And the we're also building as we speak, over 200 market rate units in my district as we speak with three development projects underway. And so we've been focused on housing quite a bit. There was one question that I did have regarding the housing choice program data from other housing authorities. Um, are the Section eight vouchers currently being utilized in the City of Long Beach exclusive to our housing authority? Or do we share with other housing authorities in the county and city?
Speaker 7: We do not share our vouchers. So we are a direct recipient of vouchers from U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. So the vouchers that we receive are expended by the city of Long Beach Housing Authority.
Speaker 11: So we're. Vouchers from, say, a COLA. The County Housing Authority allow four properties in Long Beach to be utilized under the program.
Speaker 7: Only on a portability basis.
Speaker 11: What does that mean?
Speaker 7: What does that.
Speaker 1: Mean?
Speaker 3: I'm going to.
Speaker 7: I'm going to ask Alison King to come on down. She is the manager of the Housing Authority.
Speaker 9: Okay. I mean, those are from the county to the city. That's it.
Speaker 6: So a housing voucher is issued based upon the jurisdiction of the housing authority where they have been assigned or allocated. It does, however, allow for any voucher holder to move about the country to any other housing authority with a program. So, for instance, a person from the Long Beach area can decide to move to the Antelope Valley utilizing that voucher and taking it over to the county. They can actually even put it to Hawaii anywhere. There is a program. An individual may use their voucher in those programs.
Speaker 11: Thank you so much. That clears quite a bit up for me and I was actually going to my next point was regarding data from those housing authorities and are those reflective? But it sounds like if they're portable, they have to report to our housing authority anyway. And so we would have data for all six and eight or anybody using a housing choice voucher in the city of Long Beach. Would that be correct?
Speaker 6: Absolutely, because our utilization is down based on the low inventory. We are what you call administering the vouchers. So for the most part, you get a choice of either having that voucher absorbed by the housing authority that they put it into. And right now, because our lease up is down, we are absorbing. So the county is fairly leased up because of Measure H and some of the programs that they've done to incentivize owners to participate. And so they don't have a they ability of additional vouchers. And so they administer our vouchers when they go from Long Beach to the county. But if they come from the county to Long Beach because our lease up is down, we absorb that voucher into our allocation.
Speaker 11: Thank you so much. So I moved to Long Beach a little over 20 years ago. I rented I had an opportunity to purchase a condominium. I took my realtors in here somewhere. I bought a home a few years later where we have been for the past six years. And I've got to say that having a home, having a place to call home, it makes makes all the difference in the world in terms of vesting in a community. And I think everybody that that is the American dream and everybody should have that opportunity. One thing that really kind of jumps out at me is this rental ownership rate. And I'm curious in terms of data, how that or has that changed and where the changes has occurred? Right. Like, is it was it ten years ago that did we see a shift? When did it shift? And where has Long Beach always been at this ratio?
Speaker 7: We can do a deeper dove into the data, but ten years ago it was approximately 56, 57%. Now we're at 58, 59, almost 60%. So it is creeping upward, but we can certainly go back further using census data to see what that breakdown was.
Speaker 11: And oftentimes talking to some some of the residents. On on an intimate level. Many of them really, really want to progress. They want to change their conditions, even if they are in low income housing. They want to have that that American dream. They want to to one day own a home. And whatever we do here, I understand. I mean, there is a need to create affordable housing. But I need I know we need to also think about families who are looking to progress on and on and on. Obviously, that is improving our our college promise to our our public school system and making education available. But I also don't want to lose sight of the importance of of us creating great jobs here in this city, because I think that has been something that has been missing. And there may be a real correlation to the the issue of affordable housing and the lack of good paying jobs here. We've lost a lot of jobs over the last 20 years. Shipyard Aerospace. I mean, and I'm not talking a few hundred jobs. I'm talking thousands of jobs that were great paying jobs here. And that has really, really, I think, impacted this, the DNA of this the city in a lot of ways. And so, you know, we had a big debate about the minimum wage of last year. And, of course, we all support that. We want to make sure that residents are being paid for what they paid a decent wage for, for what they do. But obviously, the minimum wage is not going to address our affordable, affordable housing. And so we need to be way more creative in terms of creating great jobs here in the city. I like I said, I was going to be very brief here because most of the the points that I wanted to cover have been covered already. And I'm really looking forward to hearing from the public. So thank you very much for your time.
Speaker 0: Thank you, Councilwoman Price.
Speaker 2: Thank you. I just have a couple questions on the report. Can you talk a little bit more about a covenant and how that comes into play, an example of one and what the standard covenants might be?
Speaker 7: Sure. A covenant is a restriction that is recorded against the property that in one way or another restricts the ability of the property owner to utilize that property. In the case of an affordability covenant, those are recorded through a regulatory agreement with the city of Long Beach and we and the property owner agree that in exchange for financial assistance from the L.B. CAC, they will comply with the covenants. And those covenants are set the term of the affordability. They also we also agree on what affordability level they will be covenant those units to. So when we talk about specific projects and we say 29 units are for very low and 15 units are for low , that is because we have agreed on what the financial value of that of that unit is and what the rents they will be receiving from that unit will be for the life of those covenants.
Speaker 2: And so that that amount to that determination is basically based on the market value of the property, other properties in the same building and that same location.
Speaker 7: What amount? The amount of subsidy, yes. We try to subsidize as little as possible is the short answer.
Speaker 2: How about the amount in terms of the number of units, whether they're very low, moderate, that amount.
Speaker 7: So that really depends on the availability of additional funding sources that the developer is able to acquire. Typically, what we are seeing right now in this current environment, and I'm going to say right now, is been the last five years is a typical development project for affordable housing will have upwards of six.
Speaker 2: Eight.
Speaker 7: Ten and even 12 different funding sources layered together in order to make the project work. Some of that assistance is through the city of Long Beach. If they are awarded tax credits, they are. It's a competitive process to receive funding through the state tax credit process. They are specifically earmarking their project towards a specific population. Some housing developers specialize in veterans supportive housing. Some developers specialize in family housing, so they will go after funding sources specific to those those categories, if you will. They then come to the city and say, we have a gap. Here's our pro forma. We have a gap of X millions of dollars. Can you assist us? We basically review their performance, determine whether their rents are acceptable per per all the standards. Look at what their other funding sources are. Look at what we our needs are. Do we need more veteran housing? Do we need more senior housing? Do we need more family housing? What is going to be good for the neighborhood? This neighborhood? Maybe we shouldn't have families, additional families in this neighborhood because the schools are already impacted. So we look at that as well when we talk to the developer and basically structure and negotiate financial packages that way. But the developer is the one that comes to us typically and says, here's my income breakdown. I know I can get money for these income levels. Here's the project I'm pursuing. Are you supportive of that? Yes or.
Speaker 6: No? Okay.
Speaker 2: Okay. And then in regards to the density bonus, where there is a density, where can a density bonus be offered? So if there's an area that is operating under a specific plan, let's say. Could there be variations in the specific plan in order to offer a density bonus, or would the density bonus be already encompassed in the specific plan?
Speaker 7: The density bonus is not encompassed in our rezoning or our specific plan. So a developer can come and say, I'm no, I'm only allowed to build a three story project here, but I want to build a five story project because I'm going to do 80 additional units and they're all going to be affordable. We say, thank you very much.
Speaker 2: Okay, I can you explain what a micro unit is? We hear that term a. A lot, and I would love to have you explain it for everyone once and for all.
Speaker 7: And Micro Unit is essentially a very efficient, small unit that has the standalone bathroom and has some kitchen equipment in it, but can be as small as 250 square feet for the entire unit. Our current code does not allow for micro units in the downtown area. We do allow units to be as small as 450 square feet, but that is only a small percentage of the overall total of the units in that project. So we are average size of a unit in the downtown must be 600 square feet. You can deviate, 15% of those units can be as small as 450 square feet, but the overall average within the building must be 600 square feet.
Speaker 2: Okay, great. Thank you. And I want to thank my colleagues for their comments. I heard a lot of great answers to questions that I had as well. Staff really has done a tremendous job with what I consider to be a very comprehensive overview of the issue, and it's supported by data, which is very valuable. I know that senior housing is a major issue that I hear about repeatedly in the city of Long Beach quality senior housing. And so I think for me, that's an area that I have a lot of passion and interest in in terms of what options we're providing our our residents who are on a fixed income, who don't have or choose not to live with family and who still want to have independence as they as they age. And so I think that's an area that is definitely worthy of further exploration. And, of course, Councilman Austin's comments regarding homeownership and those of Councilman Mongo are also very important. I think those are areas where we want to be focused on incentives and assistance to the extent that we can to assist our residents in achieving that great ultimate goal. So thank you very much for the report and thank you for the team and the collaboration and feedback that you provided.
Speaker 0: Thank you, Councilman Gonzalez.
Speaker 2: Great. And I think what Councilwoman Pryce just said kind of Segways to what I had forgot to mention, and it was I failed to mention the California Energy Commission has currently a it's called the Energy Innovation Challenge. And I think it's a local government challenge that was derived from Kevin Dellums, Senate Bill 350. And I'd like us to look into it a bit more. From what I'm understanding, it's an energy efficient mortgage that provides 5 to 15% off a loan for low income residents. And so this was derived from leftover refunds. That was just that was just voted on in the legislature this past year. So it'd be good to look into what we could do there. If there is any program that the the city of Long Beach could connect with the state on, I think that would be worthy. Thank you. Thank you.
Speaker 0: Councilmember Pearce.
Speaker 5: Yes, I had. One more thing. I also left off my list. And I do want to echo on home ownership as someone who feels like there are lifelong renter, definitely support everything on increasing homeownership and the micro units. I think when we're looking at downtown and we're looking at some of the unique buildings that we have, reevaluating the need for micro units in a place where we say we want to live, work and play without a car, that those micro units might be an opportunity for us to get more housing for people like in the tech industry. I have several startup companies in my district and probably four of them have come to me and said, You're taking away our parking and we don't have access to affordable rent in in a walkable area. And so really making sure that when we're thinking about energy and that is really important. And then I did have some questions about the recommendation, the last recommendation that says to go to 150. Hold on 1/2. Let me make sure I call this on other staff recommendations and modify the moderate income definition from 82 from 80 to 125. Am I to 80 to 150? Who is the city the one that defines what that is? Or is that at a state level?
Speaker 7: So we can try to broaden that at the local level where we have discretionary dollars. So we can start at the local level, increase our definition of what a moderate income resident and their earnings would be in order to assist moderate income residents with specified programs. And then I believe the discussion is to start having those discussions both at the state and federal levels as well.
Speaker 5: Okay. For me, I guess sort of at a first glance, you know, on the fourth slide, you said that we had the greatest need in between low, very low and extremely low, and that it would seem, you know, to try to increase that AP to 150 isn't really addressing the deepest need that we have for low and very low housing. And so it's I know that it's in here. It's just an area that I guess I have a lot of concerns about. So I wanted to just go on the record and make sure that legally that's something that we could do and that we would continue to be able to get funds for for that . Am I. So I'm putting that out there. Thank you.
Speaker 0: Thank you, Councilwoman Mongo.
Speaker 4: Just something to think about, Councilman Pearce, as we do increase the wages in the city and we do work towards those additional jobs that will be created. One of the things that I think we've done really well and I didn't realize we've done it as well in this report, is the balance between the percentages of people in each income category and the balance of percentages of the units in each of those price points because as we have those individuals. Break those income barriers as they grow their income if they get priced out of a plan. That's where we have a lot of interesting components of how a person who was housed for a good amount of time can then become homeless and cycle into that process. And so I would just caution us against overinvesting in any one income category that that balance has been very healthy for us and successful in allowing our community to grow themselves out of poverty. Just a thought, but I need to add in and I know that our staff will continue to work on that.
Speaker 0: Okay. Thank you. I'm going to a couple of brief comments here that were not in the report. And I'm going to go to go to public comment, just staff, just some things to consider as we move forward on finalizing this report. One is I'd love there to be some additional focus around our veterans initiative. I think the discussions around Measure H and the funding and I think the Assemblymember brought up Measure H, H, H, which also is a huge veterans component. I think what's happening at the villages at Cabrillo, as reminded today when we were there on the campus and housing veterans, has been incredible. So if there is more conversation about veterans housing, what we're able to do, I know there's some restrictions on that. I'd love to see a little bit more of that. It's an opportunity also to think, I know that the apartment association is here. We we housed in Long Beach in the last two years, 700 veterans that were experiencing homelessness, 700 in the city of Long Beach. And a big part of that was thanks to a lot of the work that's happened here with the villages of Korea. But also, I want to thank the apartment association, because you helped us out and reached out with your members to house a lot of these veterans as well. And so I wanted to mention that areas that we could also I think additionally add is Metro Transit has incredible opportunities now with grants around affordable housing. I know we're just beginning to look at that now. Now that I know that I'm on the board, if there's opportunities to maximize some of those dollars around transit nodes, I'd love for there to be some exploration. Miss Bodak around whatever system we come up with of pushing the envelope when it comes to what we can develop up and down the blue line, I think that there's incredible public opportunity for us to do to be, I think, have a really robust program when it comes to getting those density credits from Metro and getting funding. So I just want to see a little bit more on that, which I know that we're we're working on as well. I am very supportive of micro units. If you read, there's a lot of research and data out there about these micro units. This is an ability for for people to be able to. I know for most of us are crazy. You know, we wouldn't live in a 300 square foot unit. That sounds nuts. But at one point in my life, I would have and I think there's a lot of people out there that would be willing to, if they're able to, to go into that first their first home and be a micro unit that is, you know, 300, 350 square feet and be able to live there, be able to be at a price point they can afford. And I think that's very advantageous to some partnerships with the university and some of these tech startups that are looking for that micro unit support. Let me also just add, and this wasn't mentioned much, but I just want to I want to mention as we get comments as well. I'm a big believer and I support this report. Building housing across the board is important because we know if you're if you're if you're reading what's going on right now in the housing conversations and in the kind of academic studies and in what's happening across the country, when you because we have such a housing shortage and we're in a crisis of actual housing of all types. When you build more housing at for low income folks, you're providing opportunities, obviously, for them to get into the housing market. When you're building more housing, workforce housing or for or moderate income housing, you're allowing folks that might be in substandard housing or in housing that maybe is more low income housing to then move into that middle income housing. And you create space which then incentivizes other folks to move into some of the other housing. Same thing happens when you build market rate. And so I think for Long Beach, it's important that we have a robust program that we we have been building market rate housing in the city. I have supported that effort. That effort will continue. But we also need to look at ensure that we're building all types of housing. And this type of housing affordable in particular right now is where we need the more resources when it comes to state support and a consistent support of revenue so that all the seniors and working people and veterans and others that need that additional support are continue to be part of our of our community. And the last thing I'll say, as a reminder, I want everyone to keep this in mind that what I've been telling folks is over the weekend, the state what I believe we've got to build housing because it's the right thing to do. The whether or not people think it's the right thing to do or not, it's a requirement of the state. And so we have to continue building this housing and we have to continue having this conversation that it's what every city is grappling with. But it's important that we also follow the mandates we're getting from the state of California. And that's an important part of this conversation as well. With that, thank you to everyone for their comments. Please. The mic is open. Come forward. Please say your name and and please give us your comments about today's report.
Speaker 10: Eric Garcia Councilmembers Don Darnell. I'm a commissioner on the Senior Citizens Advisory Commission. And first of all, I think Amy Bodak and Pendleton Services and Bonnie Lowenthal and her committee really deserve a big, enormous star or something. I mean, they've done such a terrific job. They've given us an encyclopedia on housing. I tell you, it's great. So anyway, I want to thank them. And also, I'm very impressed with the engagement that the council members have here, showing your interest and your really sincerity on things. This is something that I've been overwhelmed with, and I really applaud you for it. The senior services excuse me, the Senior Citizens Advisory Commission has involved in a lot of things, including housing. But for instance, the low income nutritional lunches at this community centers, especially at Chavez Park, we're trying to develop and expand the passport bus for seniors to be able to get better transportation. So that's what I'm really concerned with right now among the housing issues. But for as far as housing, seniors are the fastest growing element of our population, in case you don't realize that. And also, they're probably the most vulnerable for displacement in housing because they're where they're living is it's they wanted to live their lives in place. And a lot of them been there a long time. And when something is renovated, who's getting kicked out? Mostly seniors. So that's something that you should be thinking about. The seniors not only are the fastest growing population. But their being the displaced most. So I think that they're suffering the most then. And I want to bring that to your attention. Also, the LGBTQ community is suffering from housing issues also. I just want to make sure that's included somewhere in our studies. So I just want to bring those forth to you. So include those in your considerations. And I thank you.
Speaker 0: Thank you, Don. Thanks for being here. Next speaker, please.
Speaker 6: Good evening. That was certainly a very informative report and congratulations to all of you for all of your input. There were just a couple of things that I that came to mind. Now, I was not able to come to the last meeting, but I do understand that you passed something on the East Side, which was on Norwalk Boulevard, which is a very easily accessible place by transportation. And yet you put in here, we're talking about having affordable housing and creating more housing. And yet that project ended up being an R one very expensive housing element. And I was very disappointed to see that. So it sounds like you're saying one thing, but you're doing something different because that could have, you know, it was a large piece of land in that could have been used for work on the East Side. Roberto It could have been an East Side project. So I encourage you to look at that. You know, the disparity there not to forget the law of economics, supply and demand. If you don't destroy incentives to build or to, you know, create, and that, of course, ends up being a return on money, then you destroy the incentive to build. Please do not forget the cracker boxes that were built in District two absolutely destroyed those neighborhoods. So be very please be very cognizant of density. Something else that could be used. I really like the idea, which I know is coming up in a minute, the granny flat idea that could really go a long way for students and for for the seniors. I mean, you know nice little place in the back of somebody's are one lot. I very highly encourage that micro unit so very much support. I think that's very possible. I've been to Europe, in fact, 85 countries and they do have those kinds of things. And one other thing that no one has brought up is grandfathering in some units that may be illegal, but that, you know, haven't been permitted. So maybe if you could create a process to allow those permits and there's lots of room on the campus for more student housing, I hope you encourage that. And I love the housing project on the Emmanuel Church. I think so. So I think there's some good things that you haven't thought of but continue going on the same path. And certainly we want to be inclusive in our housing. Thank you very much.
Speaker 0: Thank you. Next speaker, please.
Speaker 10: Hello. Bill five, Council District three. Thank you for giving me a chance to speak here. A lot of my questions or what I wanted to say have already been addressed by council. So thank you for having the foresight to know what I was thinking. What I wanted to say is about the medium income. So as a current jobseeker, I see opportunities out there for $11, $12 an hour. So based on that high definition, somebody earning that would have to pay $520 a month for rent. So we obviously don't offer that in our city, but something to put in the back of your head. The other thing to address is extremely low income for those people who make extremely low incomes. I don't know who they are, but again, a knowledgeable peer is something to consider, especially what Mr. Downer said regarding LGBT persons. Trans people earn the lowest and have the most difficult time securing a fair paying job and housing as well without suffering from other tenants who don't like their personal identity. What I'd like to address, though, while I was sitting here listening to the study session, was what if you would go across the ocean and we look at Japan where they have, you know, 20 storey tall apartment buildings and this is the way people live all their lives. We've never consider this. We look at studies across the country and maybe in Canada, but never like Japan, where we have a city at a major world city that's actually houses on a daily basis and it is a family generation after generation lifestyle. I'd kind of like to see that kind of explored. And maybe as Mr. Tauranga addressed people's ideal as to home ownership, we may have to think about home ownership if we become a Japan or I mean Tokyo, or if we come to New York where we're stacked up that high up, you know, home ownership may have to be redefined. And how we live our lives and the residences that we choose may have to be redefined. Right. Thank you for your time.
Speaker 0: Thank you. Next speaker, please.
Speaker 9: Hello. I'm Myron Woolen. I'm the president of the Long Beach Gray Panthers. And as the Great Panthers, we're concerned about senior housing. And I want to echo Don Downer's report or comments, rather, about how housing affects seniors and how seniors become homeless. And we talked about homelessness as an issue within the council, and this issue of housing affects homelessness and affects homelessness of seniors. I several of my concerns have been echoed by council members and just want to repeat what council members have said. Council a former council member, Lowenthal, talked about HGH and how we should support a bond issue. And I would echo yes, let's support bond issue, but also passed by the L.A. City was. Jay and that was also an approach to trying to find resources to to create money that would be used for housing. And J.J., if you know, if you remember what it was said, that if there any developer would come before the city and ask for a change in zoning laws, then they would be affected by rules that would say that they would have to have certain percentage of the housing that they were planning to create would go to affordable and low income housing. So this I would urge the council members to think about passing something similar to JJ. Now. My other concerns were also echoed by council members. That is the strategic goal number two of protect and preserve. And I would think about is protecting preserving affordable housing. I would echo council member Council member Pearce's comments about how do we know what is there, what is available. Whenever a affordable housing unit is removed because it becomes market rate. The council member should pass a resolution that they should then be it should be known and as part of a database that the council creates, that when the housing is lost, the council member knows about it, the council knows about it. They can use this information then to figure out what what housing is needed. Finally, I would like to talk about something that council member Urunga talked about. What is that is how do we know what our needs are? We need to create some kind of a see a database, a way of figuring out one. How what kind of housing do we have? What kind of housing do we need, and what kind of a plan within take ten or 20 years that had how much money we would need to eliminate or go for a goal of removing or pardon me, creating affordable housing within within the city of Long Beach. So I would echo council members concerns. And if there are concerns of of the Long Beach Gray Panthers.
Speaker 0: Thank you so much. Next speaker, please.
Speaker 9: Good evening, Mr. Mayor. Members of the city council, Gary Shelton. I'm the president of the West Gateway Community Association, which in which we are right now the civic center and 50 square blocks to the north and east and west of here are West Gateway Community Association. We are also concerned about affordability of housing. In fact, that's on our agenda. It's been passed as a as a as an item of interest and concern and activism for us. What I wanted to address this evening, and I hope you guys can make note of this somehow I had trouble shuffling through my copy of the report , which I got from the city clerk today because it was not in sync with the presentation on the screen. But I didn't do too bad of a job. But on page 15, we talk about affordable housing and maybe can just make some kind of a note about that. Whatever affordable housing is and it doesn't say affordable to whom, and I express that more precisely. Talking about on pages 23 and 24, the arena documents the regional housing needs assessment, where the various income levels are expressed in the numbers of people and the numbers of housing that are needed for those people, but not in the dollars that they earn. And it's very important, I think, to understand that median below, median above median low income, very low income, extremely low income, have specific definitions that I think could be included in this report for clarity. For example, I believe that the median income area, median income for a family of four right now is about 62,500 , which would make 30% of that for very low. About 18,000 people who are making $18,000, less or less a year may not think of themselves as in the extremely low income category, but they are. So knowing that could help them. Pages 20 and 21 have a chart on there that shows on the bottom line of the the chart shows that the net available housing asset fund, that's the housing asset fund that was spoken of, where all the money reside is about $14 million. Well, earlier in the document, it expresses the average amount if you do the math of what a housing unit costs. What this means is that we have enough money to build about 180 housing units out of the. What we learned on the rent document is a need of about 2860 unit. So I don't know. I can't do the math on that 180 houses over the next five years into 2860 more needed. I don't know what that really means, but it's going to be, I think, decades before those houses are built. Finally, I wanted to point out that on the list of the current and and in-progress housing units, there's five or six pages of those that if we break that down into new housing, which is going to expand the housing accessibility to people, only 75% of those units that are listed are new units. The rest are rehab units. And that itself equals only 28% of the arena numbers. Now, I have 8 seconds to make my last point, which was I'm concerned about the classicism that I believe I heard related to home ownership compared to renters. And I think if we were to ask the people out in the community, about 60% of them watching tonight would say, I'm a I'm a renter, I'm not a homeowner, but I'm invested in my community. Thank you for hearing.
Speaker 0: Thank you very much. Next speaker, please.
Speaker 6: I'll try to make this as quick as possible.
Speaker 4: Good evening. My name is Dr. Johnny Rick.
Speaker 6: Soda, and I'm a resident, a proud resident of the ninth district. I read the current affordable housing report with great interest for a couple of reasons. I'm a property owner and thus am always interested in the city's efforts to address the issues of housing. Additionally, I work for the University of California as a statistical consultant, and I'm always.
Speaker 4: Very interested in the data presented in these types of reports.
Speaker 6: After reading the part, I had some concerns about the types of data sources used in the background, as well as some of the statements in the report that I feel are unclear and lacked the references to support some of the conclusions. Let me list some of these tonight with the expectation that these issues will be appropriately addressed before the final report is submitted. I have some concerns about.
Speaker 4: Using data from Zillow as one of the main sources of information on median rent for one.
Speaker 6: And two bedroom apartments. I noticed that if you examine the zip code level data, you will see that it includes very few Long Beach zip codes with the main zip codes being that you see being 90803, which is the Belmont Shore. I think we can all agree that we don't want policy based on data that may be skewed to over represent higher income.
Speaker 2: Areas of the city. So I would ask the commission to contact Zillow to.
Speaker 6: Verify what zip codes are included in their data and then include those zip codes as part of the report. So with that in mind, I would encourage the Commission to additionally verify these estimates with at least 1 to 2 other independent sources. Two I also want clarification on the choice of comparative cities use when discussing housing cost burden. Is there a reason why we don't compare our housing cost burden to other direct neighbors, including Carson, Compton, Paramount and Bellflower? In the report, the commission references L.A., Anaheim, Oakland, San Francisco and San Jose. My question is, are these cities presented more comparable to Long Beach and other metrics that make them good standards to compare ourselves to above.
Speaker 4: And beyond our regional neighbors?
Speaker 6: I think some explanation of necessary is necessary.
Speaker 4: On why these and other.
Speaker 6: Specific cities were chosen. Third, the report also discusses issues related.
Speaker 4: To overcrowding, stating that.
Speaker 6: Overcrowding has become increasingly prevalent. The long these statistics cited in the report are sourced from a publicly available census data. If you go to the website, there was a report called Measuring Overcrowding in Housing, and this report discusses the fact that there are several ways to measure overcrowding, including people per room, people per bedroom and people per square foot. They acknowledge the fact that depending on the measure used, the extent of overcrowding may be under or over estimated. Additionally, they say the prevalence of overcrowding has actually decreased, not increased over.
Speaker 4: Time as people standard of living and home ownership has.
Speaker 6: Increased. It's important for this report to both cite what metric of overcrowding is being used, as well as provide some longitudinal data on estimating overcrowding in Long Beach. And why do we observe the same decreases over time? Fourth, sometimes the report makes statements that need factual support but are presented to the public as or they may be taken at face value. An example of this is under the multifamily rehabilitation section. It states a great deal of the city's existing multifamily housing stock is older and in need of repairs and upgrades. No supporting documentation, reports or statistics are cited here, even though it makes a very strong assertion. I would ask that the statement and others like it only be included when appropriate research can be presented to substantiate the claims. I thank you for your time and listening to my concerns and I look forward to these issues being addressed in the amended version of the report.
Speaker 0: Thank you very.
Speaker 10: Much. Thank you.
Speaker 0: Let me actually just go up to Ben Rockwell, who's up there. Ben, go ahead.
Speaker 9: There is no microphone down here. Okay.
Speaker 0: Actually, we'll wait to get my copy. We're going to go to the next speaker and I'm going to make for you. Okay, Ben, please go ahead. We'll get your mic. Someone up there, okay.
Speaker 9: Thank you.
Speaker 4: Good evening, Mr. Mayor. Council members and Assembly Member Barney Lowenthal. My name is Linda Lander. Sorry, I am with Long Beach Affordable Housing Coalition, and on behalf of our Board of Directors and our Executive Director, Jonathan Newsome, Long Beach Affordable Housing Coalition would like to state our support for the recommendations for the Mayor's Affordable Housing Task Force established in 1993. Long Beach Affordable Housing currently offers 109 affordable housing units in the city of Long Beach. Long Beach. Affordable housing strongly realizes much more affordable housing in need. It is needed in our city. We are committed to work with the city and other non-profits and for profit developers to address this need in the in the coming years. Long Beach Affordable Housing will be seeking to develop new award winning, innovative, affordable housing to help address this critical, critical need. Thank you for the opportunity to comment on those important on these important recommendations.
Speaker 0: Thank you very much. Someone getting a mic up to Mr. Rockwell. Okay, let's go, Mr. Rockwell.
Speaker 9: Okay. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Ben Rockwell. I've been living here in Long Beach for 29 years as of this May. We have been just told that the building that I'm living in, Beachwood Apartments, has been just now approved for another 55 years on the very low income, affordable income for persons with disabilities as well as those that are seniors. I thank God that I'll be able to live there until I'm 126 and I plan on loving that full time because I don't plan on dying very soon. As most of you know, I am endeavoring to remain active in keeping this community going strong for all people of all different disabilities and levels. And those of us that are aging and have disabilities, many of us are able to keep strong and advocating for others within the community to help make it go. I thank God for sentry housing and what they're doing to make my apartment units and my apartment better and bring it up to a better standard than what has been. And I thank God for all those of you who have been supporting the affordable housing here and our city. And I thank God that we have the best affordable housing for persons with disabilities of any city in their state. And it was much easier for me to get in 29 years ago than what I could get in to any of the other cities around here on Southern California because I was homeless for two weeks and I got into the apartment building that I'm in. And so I'm still here. And I'm going to remain here, and I'm going to remain active and helping others to have the housing that is needed, especially those of us that are on the very low level of income and need to have a place that is comfortable and affordable. Thank you.
Speaker 0: Thank you, Mr. Rockwell. Next speaker, please.
Speaker 1: Good evening, Mr. Mayor.
Speaker 5: Council members. My name is Shana Llewellyn. I work for AME Living Service. We have been here in Long Beach for 27 years and we have 85 clients. Our clients come from Harbor Regional Center in Torrance and I am a supported living service provider as well as a housing specialist for our company. I work with individuals with developmental and physical disabilities. We try to help our clients to become more independent, and this may include assistance accessing affordable housing options. However, this has been a great challenge lately. Most of my clients live on SSI of eight 8940 a month. The average rent for a studio apartment is $1,000. There's no rent control here in Long Beach, and that needs to be changed. So does the requirements for renting to low income people. The criteria for writing today is too high for my clients to reach. Landlords expect you to make two and a half to three times the rent, have a 600 an over credit score, and have all the money ready to move in. My clients do not meet any of these requirements. The average wait time for the low income housing is anywhere from 2 to 10 years on a wait list, and no one can sign up on those waitlist right now. You have to apply for more than one at a time because there is a great competition out there and a great need for the housing. So each apartment that you apply for, you have to pay a credit check fee of $30. So therefore, if you decide you want to go for five. To see where the numbers are, all you're talking $150. And most of my clients don't have these funds either. The ones that have saved and scrimped and saved enough money for some of the security deposit, that money comes out of that. So, again, putting them in a position where they don't have enough security deposit. No one will accept anyone else's report either. Each apartment building has to do their own, which again takes away from our clients money. If you have someone to cosign their requirements or even hire and many don't even accept cosigners. Another issue is Section eight Housing recommends a website called Go Section eight dot com. It is not run by them or monitored at all. The listings are old and it is an outdated source of information for anyone on section eight. Also, there are quite a few landlords today that don't even accept it anymore. Delmar Properties has moved into downtown and bought up many of the buildings like Beasley Investments and have begun injecting our clients out into the street, telling them they have a relocation expert to help them find a place which is simply not true. I have two clients right now that need immediate housing within a month or they will be added to the homeless population. One is a 68 year old man.
Speaker 0: Thank you, ma'am. Just please wrap up. Time's up.
Speaker 5: Your client, Shannon, is here to explain her problem that she is now facing.
Speaker 0: Thank you very much. Next speaker, please.
Speaker 6: Hi. My name is Shannon Ryan. Okay, I'm living I was living at 545 Linden Avenue, apartment 21. We found out around Christmas time that Domo Properties bought our building. They promised to help me find a place. They said they lied about the how they are. They now say there is nothing they can do. On January 22nd, my ceiling room caved in from the rain. And. From the rain. But due to the heavy rain we had the new owner Domo properties. But no. I'm terribly sorry, my worker, for me to deal with, not the owners of the new the new building. Gohmert told my worker to tell me to deal with it because the roof caved in. And after the after she spoke to him, he came over to the assess the damage and said that I would not stay there. It was not safe. He graciously put me in a hotel. I've been there for most of February. He only we went to the hotel room one week at a time. We told him we were hoping to find an apartment. We haven't had any luck. So once the course of the first week. We had an inspector come over and he said. Janet, can you come help me, please? Was. Unsafe and it was contaminated due to black mold and the cockroaches that came down with the ceiling. I lost all my belongings, clothes, pictures, furniture in my apartment. There are only gave me three days.
Speaker 10: 3 hours to get all my belongings.
Speaker 6: I can't.
Speaker 5: Can I finish reading for her? Okay. She's on. She works part time on air and food stamps. She has no credit, no money saved. And we've been looking for over a month and no one wants to rent to her. She can't afford high rents like DOMA's that they were going to do. Once everyone was out of the building, they will get it and raise the rent as of the 28th of this month. She will be homeless. She is not asking for a handout, just a hand up.
Speaker 0: Thank you very much next week and please.
Speaker 9: Good evening, Mayor. City Council staff in Long Beach Community. My name is Walker Rivera. I am a volunteer program director for Labor Day. Long Beach. Residents Empowered. But I'm also speaking to you as a very low income renter, and I'm impacted by the housing crisis that we're experiencing last year. Leveraged launched with the housing crisis bus tour. We shared stories of rising rents, unjust evictions, displacement, overcrowding, unacceptable habitability issues, harassment, discrimination, as well as all the impacts that these issues have on our health and overall community. Leveraged directly is in support of creating more affordable housing. Yet we want to ensure that you are creating it for those people that are most in need. The extremely low and the very low income people, not just the moderate income or workforce housing. As we learned through the Developers Forum, not only do you need to dedicate a permanent source of funds for them, you also need to work with them in order to give them the time to put these projects together for a more immediate solution. You need to consider policies such as inclusionary zoning and again making sure that you're making it available to extremely low and low income communities, not just moderate income. I hope you can even agree that there is no way that we're going to build ourselves out of this crisis. One reason is because of stories like you just heard. People and families are losing what's already affordable to them faster than you can even build it. For example, four, four, six Linden Avenue, about 20 units, corner of 16, Linden, probably her building about 20 units, all issued 30 to 60 day notices by Mike Dunphy Group of Donor Properties 744 Pine about 20 units, seventh and Pacific Avenue, about 20 units all issued 30 to 60 day notices to vacate. That's approximately 80 units in less than six months that we've lost that have been affordable for families. And these lives have been uprooted, disrupted and communities altered. And for what? For profit. This is an injustice and a downright tragedy. We understand that this study session is about creating affordable housing, but let's not forget that we desperately need resident retention policies to keep people in their homes. Now, we also understand that the solution to our crisis is not is a complex one, but it's an achievable one in order to achieve it. It will require us to have creativity, ingenuity, commitment, responsibility, and most importantly, courage to do right by the people of our city. I'll leave you with one of my favorite quotes by Edmund Burke. All that is needed for the triumph of evil is for good men and women to do nothing. This is your opportunity to do something with equitable, equitable benefits for us all. Addressed the need and not the greed. Thank you.
Speaker 0: Thank you for it. Next, the police.
Speaker 10: Good evening, Mayor and Council. My name is Sarah Schoolcraft. I have lived in this town for 30 years as a renter. I am a transgender female. I am a student at Longreach City College. I'm an active member for his congregation, Congregational Church of Longreach. I participate in various activities like MLK and Long Beach Pride. I am speaking as a recent member of Libra, Long Beach Empowered. Up until recently I was reading 97, my primary 16. The building was being sold late last year. The sale closed January of this year. When I found out that the building was being sold and Dome a copy was involved, I feared what happened to the tenants of London was going to happen to me. That's when I contacted Libra because I read in the paper. They were. They were trying to help. I've been living there for two and a half years. I pay my rent every month, even though some months I struggled just to put groceries in my house. Even though I am on a fixed income. The rent was paid and it was affordable to me and I was able to pay it and continue going to school. All that changed when so when the property was sold and Mike Dunphy management took over. During the sale, I experienced harassment, intimidation, threats of being evicted or having my rent raised the point where I couldn't afford it. My neighbors and I formed an association to fight looming displacement, either by eviction or rent increase. We were living there with many health and safety issues, like heaters that were not being or not working. We asked for repairs to get done and we got little in return. We called city code enforcement into those days. Heaters have still not been fixed. One by one. Jim Tamara, who works for Mike Duffy, offered cash for key settlements. People. Out of the unit so they could rehab an increase in rents. We are told the rent would be increased 300 and we were first promised a right to return. But who can afford an increase of 300? When you're on a fixed income, not me. I was a victim of constant pressure and to settle and I just couldn't take the stress adding to my life. Now I find myself homeless. Not being able to find an apartment that is affordable as that one was not only the victim of owners putting profit over people. I am also the victim of gratification of a giant gentrification happening in here due to the downtown plan, because there's not a single affordable housing unit is in it. I'm sharing my story because I am one person out of hundreds. This is happening to. So when the city is considering building affordable housing, you need to build it for people like me. At the same time, you need to create more resident retention policies that will protect good renters for me from being displaced and our homeless population
Speaker 0: . Thank you very much. Next speaker, please.
Speaker 9: Good evening. My name is Nikolai Russia. I live in the First District. I'm actually in the West Gateway area, and I am a resident of one of the properties that was highlighted here tonight, which is the gallery for 21 apartments by me and my spouse. My husband moved into the area in 2012. We chose to be downtown urban residents and currently I am a member of a neighborhood organization. I have been part of other organizations that have dealt with housing issues. I've also been a co-chair for the First District Participatory Budgeting Committee, and so I have been involved in my community. This report and this discussion has been very illuminating. It has been able to provide a lot of the fragmented pieces of information that are given, disseminated and provided to the public. I've attended a lot of meetings over the course of the last two years of being involved within my community. And only now is some of this sort of coming to the more understandable. But there are components that are sort of missing. One of them would be that and I have to read from this piece because it's in for referred to be included into the report that. The information that has been provided is based on the density. The encouragement of urban density and being partnered with policies such as the downtown plan, the Long Beach housing element and adaptive reuse ordinances, all of which are intended to provide a sustainable road map for growth, is the reason that I understood that efforts to streamline both permit processing and development for construction of projects have promoted other projects containing commercial and residential units. One of them in which I live in. These these are resulted in some notable changes. For example, the rent was raised $380 when it was time for my lease renewal, along with other tenants at that time. Since we have a monthly community meeting, we tend to sort of talk about these issues just months before the opening of the Current and the Edison, because these are now at the fair market pricing of quotes. This year, the stated increase for this year's renewal are $600, which reflects fair market pricing for rental units in the downtown core. This city has lost some very talented young professionals which have chosen to reside in Long Beach and enjoy the quality of life of living in an urban area. This may account for the drop of average household income that of 69,091, which was reported in 2014 with 59,709 in 2016. As stated in some of the documents provided by the deal being, the housing burden for moderate income households has a direct impact and effect on all of the other categories within this report the low income and the very low income. So this effect is not actually put into the report of keeping track of the rent increases and how this impacts quality of living as well as the spendable income to be used for the relations that are built with neighbors as well as with merchants and patrons in this area. Thank you for you to consider that, please.
Speaker 0: Thank you very much.
Speaker 10: Next speaker, please. Yes, my name is Hollis Stewart and I live in the First District and I'm proud to be here. I'm a member and one of the leaders in the North Pi Neighborhood Alliance and an activist. And I want to say a couple of things here and on other people have covered all the issues of affordable housing, I think, fairly well. Now, since I live at the corner of Fourth and Pine, I'm very much part of the downtown community. I also walk through the West Gate area and I walk up through the will and are in different things like that. And I see a lot of the kind of people who are being described as though they're not. Though they don't need the housing. The low income people, the very low income people, they need good housing and they need housing that is consistent where they're retained able to retain your house. I grew up poor. It's important that poor children have the same school from one year to the next so that they get a grounding and an education that makes them feel like they're important. That's what takes people away from being in things like gangs and stuff like that. It's when you have a lifestyle and a way of living so that in fact, you have some pride about yourself and your family. And if you get pushed out all the time and forced into lower and lower and cheaper looking housing, you feel like. I'm not very worthy. And that's a very bad thing. A very bad thing. I was a psychology major at one point. Nothing is probably worse for people than to feel like they are worthless. And we can't have that Long Beach because all of our people black, Latino, gay, lesbian, transgender, everybody here is a person of Long Beach . Our mayor came from another country as an immigrant. And we have to take in respect and honor all these different variations and make sure ours is a place of love. And that's what I came up to talk about. I also wanted to share with you, though, that somebody put up leaflets up on the front desk outside the look that was put out by the city that refers to outside agitators and people looking for. I am not an outside agitator. I'm not looking for a cushy job. And I'm insulted that my city would have this out there or I felt like I was put down before I spoke. I live in a fairly good building there fourth.
Speaker 0: And I hope the city didn't put that out there.
Speaker 9: I don't know.
Speaker 0: I think I would be surprised if we put that out there.
Speaker 10: Good. Because I got a group that I want. I won't use their name because I heard people being yelled at a couple of weeks ago. I won't do that. But it hurt because this is my city and I love all of my representatives. I think we have a great city council, a great mayor, good people, and this city is here for all of us, all of us, the landlords, the tenants, everybody knows that's we have to keep nothing we have to build on so that our children.
Speaker 9: Grow up to be the best they can. So thank you very much.
Speaker 0: Thank you very much. Next speaker, please.
Speaker 9: My name is Rudy and I live on district and the third district. I get very emotional because this is something that is I'm just going through. I have lived in my current address for five years and a total of 26 years and Long Beach.
Speaker 0: Would you mind? Tell me what lived on? What? Around where? It's good for me.
Speaker 9: Okay. Third District. Okay. Belmont and ninth. To be precise, I am speaking today as a renter, a resident of Long Beach and a member of Liberate. I became involved with Libera because of the injustice that I'm personally experiencing. My building was sold a year and a half ago.
Speaker 8: Since the new owner took ownership. My experience.
Speaker 9: He changed the whole arrangement of the building and put a lot of pressures and on on us.
Speaker 8: And raised my rent 270 with a 60 day notice.
Speaker 9: Um, these. It's a two bedroom. This caused me to lose the roommate that I had, which this.
Speaker 8: The only way that I could afford.
Speaker 9: Where I'm living now. I pride myself on being a good tenant. I pay my rent on time every month because if I don't, I get charged $150 plus, he says, $50 thereafter.
Speaker 8: For each day. So I've never been late on my rent. A He raised my.
Speaker 9: I a about a month ago, which is in less than a year and a half. He raised more than twice a last month. He raised my rent again, $75, and I lost the second roommate that I just acquired. Okay. So I had to quickly find another one so I could keep the place.
Speaker 8: When I submitted to.
Speaker 9: Him the name of the prospect, he said, he told me, Do not get another roommate. I call him up. He did not answer my phone. Two days after that.
Speaker 8: He served me a move out. A 60 day move up notice. I understand this is I understand this session is to investigate.
Speaker 9: Options to develop more affordable housing because we are in.
Speaker 8: A. Housing crisis.
Speaker 9: I agree with the building.
Speaker 8: I agree with building.
Speaker 9: More affordable housing for very low income.
Speaker 8: Families.
Speaker 9: Not just for moderate income people. In order to accomplish.
Speaker 8: Is, the CD needs to consider secure.
Speaker 9: Impermanent source sources of funds.
Speaker 8: And policies that are inclusionary zoning.
Speaker 0: Thank you, sir. Thanks. Thank you. Next speaker, please.
Speaker 9: Good evening. My name is Neil Richmond and I live here in Long Beach and I'm active with Lee Bright. And I want to make my comments short to the point. I want to reinforce the importance of a dedicated source of funds that will support affordable housing development. Because, as you know, local, local subsidies, local funding is the foundation on which you can grant tax credits and state and federal and nonprofit funding and really build these complex structures that some which take four or five years to build. And it's really what it's a match. It's a critical match. And the type of funding, whether it's inclusionary, whether it's in lieu, whether it's a bond, those require a deeper level of analysis to look at their feasibility, their economic feasibility. But I want to reinforce the conversation and congratulate the staff for focusing on that issue. There's been a lot of discussion here about purchase and rehabilitation, where people's units get transformed. But for another group, non-profits and other affordable housing providers can come in and purchase buildings, make them affordable, do rehab, use project based Section eight. And the most important thing is therapy one for one replacement in the units. And the other most important thing is that is the right to return for people who live in those properties. And then the final point I wanted to make was on this 150% of AMI for moderate income households, it would be $90,000 for an individual household. So I really want to encourage us to target the resources, as Councilwoman Pierce said, to those who are in the greatest need. Thank you very much.
Speaker 0: Thank you very much. Makes me completely.
Speaker 12: Hi. My name is Evangeline Ramirez. I have been living in this community for the last 24 years. I have two kids in college. One is in UC Santa Barbara, the other is in Cal State, Long Beach. And it has been involving my community working like volunteer with different organizations, gladly helping communities at children's clinic helping and the district one for almost 17 years now living on the sixth district. But right now, I'm the community organizer for Long Beach Residents and Power Labor and Europe. You are saying that you bill about affordable housing. But my question is affordable housing for who? We need affordable housing. Yes, but any affordable housing that is built must be built in the most impact that any person families who are living with extremely low, very low and low income people like me, I'm working every day, 12, 14, 16 hours. My it my payment is 10 to $15 by our. And it's really hard for me to parent that. Right now, it's almost 1600 a month. Between 2009 and 2000. We advocating for at the time plan had to include mixed income housing with at least 10 to 15% housing units developed for lower income families and at least 10% of the unions and uniper and new apartments and condominium developments should be set aside on site as affordable to long working families. We also, as the city, to ensure that displaced residents have priority preference for affordable units built within the downtown plan area. We love the campaign to include community benefits in the downtown plan. And now exactly what we said was going to happen is happening. The downtown plan is causing large scale or direct and indirect displacements of low income communities of color. We have long resided in downtown. The downtown plan include approvals for 5000 mark and rate the units. Millions of squares fit commercial and retail uses, and a hundred hotel rooms did not include a single unit for affordable housing. Now the renters, they try to take bachelorettes. Every time that I am looking for an apartment, I have to pay to 25 to $50 for applications and I have to do an application for each one of my kids. It is crazy. I have three kids and for each one I have to pay $25. I cannot have found a place where to live because I cannot pay the place where I'm living. I ask you. I ask you. I really ask you to. Keep people like me in Long Beach because if I don't find a place, I have to move in. It's not fair that I have been living in this city for 24 years, working in the community, giving hundreds of thousands hours. Volunteer and I have to move. That's not fair. Thank you.
Speaker 0: Thank you very much. Next speaker, please.
Speaker 11: My name is Wayne Murchison, second district and affordable housing, especially low income or extremely low. My business ended in July, on January 1st in 2011, and I became an active activist by the end of that for social justice. At that time, I became homeless. I was living in my office.
Speaker 9: There's a lot of people living in offices that you don't even know about.
Speaker 11: Got to tell you anyways. So I've been essentially homeless for the past last 5 to 6 years. Section eight. It's a long wait, five years, they say, and the voucher is only good for a certain amount of time. And as has been mentioned, a lot of people don't want to rent for that. I've been they've been denied this a disabled status both as a US vet and a regular disability. So my income would be classified extremely low at this time. I basically have no hope of a place to call my own and in the future there'll be an even greater number of people becoming extremely low income homeless people. For many reasons. Somehow income is never tied to. Outflow or market rate costs. It just doesn't work. The numbers.
Speaker 9: Don't mix. They don't clash. They don't go up. Income just doesn't go up. It doesn't stay commensurate with the cost of living. That's kind of.
Speaker 11: Horrible. There will be more homeless.
Speaker 9: People coming out for various reasons you've heard.
Speaker 11: Here, as well as job losses and everything. Fourth generation robotics. We've got to address reality.
Speaker 9: Thank you.
Speaker 8: Thank you. Next speaker, please.
Speaker 4: Good evening. My name is Suzanne Brown. I'm a senior attorney at the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles in the Long Beach office. And we want to thank the city for dedicating so much time this night, tonight for this important discussion. We haven't had a meeting dedicated to housing in a very long time in Long Beach, and we're excited to engage.
Speaker 2: In this dialog with you.
Speaker 4: As you've heard from the speakers before me, our housing crisis is incredibly complex and unfortunately there is no silver bullet to solve our crisis. We need a multi-pronged approach to fight this battle. We need tenant protections. As you've heard, people like Eva passionately share her story. To protect against displacement, we need affordable housing creation strategies to build more affordable housing. And we need affordable housing preservation strategies to preserve affordable housing, whether it's a covenanted unit or just an older unit that perhaps a low income family can afford. We also really need better data to capture the magnitude, the massive displacement that is happening across the city as people quietly disappear with 30 and 60 day notices because they're too scared to fight it and get eviction on their credit report. If we could have this data, particularly to show the displacement in downtown, it would be incredibly compelling to help you as policymakers. We're currently in the 2014 to 2021 housing element planning period, and SCAD has calculated that Long Beach needs to build 4009 affordable units, not affordable to 150% of AMI, but to the lower income levels by 2021 to meet our existing affordable housing needs since 2014. In the first two years of this planning period, the city has completed 160 affordable units. So we are nowhere near the need that we need to be at. The city's focus on creating high end residential development, particularly in the downtown plan area, has created enormous pressure on our city's residents. This is why resident retention strategies have become so critical for our population and why it's something that's been repeated so much tonight. Again, we thank you for your time this evening and we look forward to tackling this housing crisis with you.
Speaker 6: Thank you.
Speaker 8: Thank you. Next speaker, please.
Speaker 4: Good evening. City Council members and Mayor Garcia. My name is willing to go. Yeah, and I live in zip code 90 310 District seven. I have been a resident of Long Beach for 25 years. Most of my life I have resided on the west side of Long Beach. I am currently a student at Colby Master's in Social Work, and I'm here speaking in solidarity with liberty.
Speaker 6: Most importantly.
Speaker 4: I'm a single mother of two children whose ages are six and nine years old. As a parent, I have a duty to ensure that my children have a roof over their head. I currently work part time at a nonprofit agency making $16 an hour, and that is not enough to secure my own housing. I work with homeless families and every day I am reminded that homelessness is always knocking at my door with all of my responsibilities. I am currently working six days out of the week, not to mention the time I have to make to complete school assignments. I have the energy to help my children with their schoolwork. I personally pay 57% of my income towards rent in addition to having to pay for childcare and transportation. When my daughter comes to me and asked me, Mom, I wish I had my own room. It kills me to tell her that I can not provide a space of her own. I will be graduating in May and I'm still fearful about not making enough money to rent an apartment for my children. The average rent for a two bedroom apartment on Long Beach right now is about $2,000, and even if it was less , there still wouldn't change my situation. This means that I will have to make.
Speaker 6: About $6,000 a.
Speaker 4: Month to meet the criteria of making three times the rent. This is my reality and the reality of so many other residents in my community. As part of my graduation requirement, I'm assessing the needs of the city of Lumberton, and I have been able to connect and communicate with many families who have been frustrated and fearful of possible displacement. I hear stories of insecurity with being able to make rent, having a hard time finding affordable apartments, and even having to double up with another family to make sure that children have a place to put their heads. This is the reason why I wanted to share my story and let the city know that when you're thinking about building affordable housing, consider building it for the low and the very low income families just as mine. And please consider affordable housing for mixing in communities. I currently have to travel seven miles to take my children to Mark Twain Elementary because I want my children to get a good public education and be in an environment of mixed ethnic groups and cultures. Please hear my story because it reflects many others. Thank you for your time.
Speaker 0: Thank you. Next speaker, please.
Speaker 13: Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Alberto Munoz. I am a member of Livre and also the managing attorney at a nonprofit by the name of Basta. I lived here about when I graduated from law school. I came to Long Beach. I loved how diverse it was economically and ethnically. You could go to a bar, a restaurant, meet a teacher, meet a longshoreman, meet an attorney, and meet somebody who's in a garage band all in the same place that is being lost in the city. And the reason it's being lost is because people are being displaced. I asked to today's meeting. I want to congratulate the City Council in the efforts that you guys are doing to help future Long Beach residents. But nothing is being done to help the residents are living here and who are in the process of being displaced in the framework. In the report, I believe Vice Mayor Richardson mentioned something about a database allocating and keeping in. Keeping in place or just keeping the data of the people that are being displaced out of our communities? I want to make sure that that's included in the report. Another thing I believe that there is a covenant database.
Speaker 9: Where.
Speaker 13: People are developers that are getting financial incentives for the city are to comply with with that with those covenants. We want to know whether those developers are complying and what the numbers in that database are like at the end of the day. As many of you know, 58% of Long Beach residents are renters. I congratulate the council members that are not renters and have been able to escape this this area. But if you are if you truly care about what's happening to the displaced members of our community, I invite you to go to the apartment s13 across the street . Any morning of the day, you'll see around 30 to 40 people being evicted from their homes, losing their homes with nobody to protect them. And that protection should be you members. Thank you.
Speaker 0: Thank you. Next speaker, please.
Speaker 6: Good evening, Mayor Garcia. Council and city staff. Thank you for bringing us all together tonight. That's what we all need is to come together. The city, the nonprofits and the individuals in.
Speaker 4: The private.
Speaker 5: Sector. All of us working together because we.
Speaker 6: Do have a housing crisis. I think we all agree on that. And so we're all saying to ourselves now, having heard all this good information, and I commend you on what you've already done, but we all know we need to do more. What can we do? We all are asking ourselves that. Well, I jotted down a few things that make sense to me. I hope they will. To you as well. I think we should all get.
Speaker 5: Out there and vote on Measure H.
Speaker 6: That will.
Speaker 5: Bring in $355.
Speaker 6: Million.
Speaker 4: Annually.
Speaker 6: To our area, to the long term, the Los Angeles County. That would be an easy thing to do. All right. And then I'm also hearing that it's easier and cheaper and faster to renovate existing buildings we already have here in Long Beach. So let's get together. Let's have some fact finding meetings. Let's meet with the development services.
Speaker 5: And the housing authority.
Speaker 6: Let's stop the sale of any more redevelopment property that could be utilized and use the surplus. Mayor Garcia, I commend you on all the roundtables and meetings that you have held.
Speaker 5: And at the developers meeting. I heard an interesting statement there.
Speaker 6: That I would like us to research further, and.
Speaker 4: Many of you may agree on that too.
Speaker 6: One of the developers mentioned that in San Francisco. It's also impacted in dense population.
Speaker 5: But in San.
Speaker 6: Francisco, they're buying up any parking lots. Then they're digging down. They're making parking six stories, all the ways under the ground. And on top of it now they can build more apartment buildings. Why don't we look into that, too? It's a good idea. Yeah. And let's look more seriously to into all those cargo.
Speaker 4: Containers we have at the port. They're available.
Speaker 6: To us. And it's possible that they may be a way also to to quickly get more housing, go down and take a look at Porter Lane in Orange County.
Speaker 5: There is a lovely area down there that we might want to, you know.
Speaker 6: Take a look at that, too. I think Councilmember Robert Garcia's statement that he made that maybe we could create our housing asset fund in our housing trust fund.
Speaker 5: We know that years ago Boeing contributed $250,000 and started.
Speaker 6: A housing trust fund. Let's just do some research. Let's see if we can combine those and make it useful. We need more funds to.
Speaker 4: Work with our.
Speaker 5: Landlords too, because.
Speaker 6: They're losing out in accepting section eight, usually by up to 60 days. That's two months rent. Some of this could be used to help them. Thank you. And let's all work together because that's the only way we're going to solve it.
Speaker 0: Thank you very much. Next speaker, please.
Speaker 2: Hello. My name is Elizabeth Waite. I am a junior.
Speaker 4: Transfer student at Cal.
Speaker 2: State Long Beach, and I am also a homeless college student. I want to speak a little bit on the issue that was touched on, which is college student homelessness. We are in an in a historically unprecedented state of affairs. We have 13% college student homelessness in this country, and we have even more students who are insecure in terms of their ability to access food. So that is insane, other than the fact that there is a blatantly obvious ethical imperative in front of us when we have people who are without homes that we must respond by addressing that need. It is economically unsustainable to have your intellectual capital that you're investing in not have a stable place to live because they cannot continue to attain a degree and attain education that makes them competitive and gives them an income if they're at risk of dropping out because of the risk to their physical and mental well-being that homelessness presents. I heard that housing in terms of home ownership was mentioned, which is a great goal. But for a lot of.
Speaker 6: Us, we've given up on home.
Speaker 2: Ownership and we can't even enter the renter market because it's so competitive. And even if we did enter into the renter's market, we there's nothing legally protecting us from being evicted for some erroneous or unjustified reason. Like somebody else came along and wanted to rent for, you know, more money or whatever, which that's a completely side issue . But what I am saying is that college student homelessness is rampant, it is unprecedented.
Speaker 4: And it is a.
Speaker 2: Threat to the economic viability of our city, because college degree attainment.
Speaker 4: Is so much more.
Speaker 2: Difficult when you do not know where you're going to sleep at night. And I would highly recommend going on National Public Radio. They recently published a study with the 13% figure in it saying this is an unprecedented issue and absolutely must be addressed. Another thing I'd like to bring up in terms of the scarcity of area provided are available in the city, I would highly recommend that we look towards school busses, repurposed school busses that could be converted into living domiciles because they are very easy to convert. They withstand the elements and it's a trend across the country in terms of where they would be placed. It's a separate issue. I'm sure something could be creatively worked out with people who have driveways or backyards or whatever, you know, means that they would feel free to rent too. But since we don't have so much space to work with, let's work with. The vehicles are actually at our disposal to create safe living environments for people. And yeah, that's that's basically what I have to say. A college student homelessness is it's horrifying. And you're not going to be an economically we're not going to survive economically in a competitive sense if we do not invest in our intellectual capital's basic security. Thank you. Thank you very.
Speaker 0: Much. Next speaker, please.
Speaker 9: Hello. My name's Ed White. I'm a.
Speaker 8: Retired machinist and also owned a little property.
Speaker 9: Up on Pacific.
Speaker 8: Avenue. You might know it as a couple of storefronts and some apartments upstairs.
Speaker 9: And but my best tenant used to be the city of Long Beach, you guys. And when it was the Wrigley Place Community Center and you asked about all the data points for average rents in Long Beach.
Speaker 8: I can only speak for myself.
Speaker 9: I've got one bedrooms I rent out for 780. I got a12 bedroom with a garage. I rent out that for 975. So, you know, I'm just a mom and pop landlord trying to take care of his family, trying to build up a pension pot.
Speaker 8: For myself and my family.
Speaker 9: You know, and I think most most of the landlords and landlady in this city is a mom. And pop deals is the same with small businesses. They're all mom and pops. I mean, they're the lifeblood of these of any city, of any community. And I don't like to be compared.
Speaker 8: With the.
Speaker 9: Big shots in places on Ocean Boulevard and God knows what. You know.
Speaker 8: I raise my rents in a while and.
Speaker 9: And I'm and I rent control.
Speaker 8: Because. You know, for various reasons, put it that way. But the main reason why I'm able to offer low rent.
Speaker 9: Is because of Prop 13. It's a life saver. Imagine if I was paying.
Speaker 8: If my building was.
Speaker 9: Reevaluated at today's market rates, I'd be telling my tenants, I'm sorry, I'm going to.
Speaker 8: Have to raise your right big.
Speaker 9: Time to cover my overrides. You know, I mean, it's common sense. You know, there's we need a balance. There's so many good, decent landlords and ladies.
Speaker 8: Out there who need respect as much as, you know, the people over tonight. You know, the renters.
Speaker 9: They they.
Speaker 8: Certainly earn the same amount and.
Speaker 9: Respect and, you know.
Speaker 8: Don't get don't mess with Prop 13 because.
Speaker 9: It will be.
Speaker 8: It's not a good idea. There's a lot of.
Speaker 9: I had a friend who was a landlady. She died recently.
Speaker 8: She was charging low rents. You know, the new owner boarded up and he had to raise the rents.
Speaker 9: Big time in order to pay off his big time mortgage. So it depends on the individual situation. And it takes you know, we've had an amazing crisis since. I agree with the mayor. Let's bring in micro units. Let's whatever up to single room.
Speaker 8: Occupancy that.
Speaker 9: Was supposed to be introduced in the late eighties, early nineties. I hope that they're still going. So there's a lot we can do and a lot we can get on with. All right. Thanks.
Speaker 0: Thank you, sir. Next speaker, please.
Speaker 1: Hi there. Good evening, Mayor Garcia. And, you know, I don't even know what district I live in, but I am a resident of Long Beach and I'm really glad I came tonight because I was kind of picturing a different crowd and different stories. And my heart goes out to each and every person here. And if I had a big building, I'd stick them all in it and I charge them 500 bucks a month or nothing. If they couldn't pay it, I would. And that's why I love this city. It's diverse. We've got an eclectic people here of.
Speaker 6: All.
Speaker 1: Economic levels, all different education. It's what makes our city so beautiful. And I really wonder, this housing crisis, somebody said it so beautifully. I think it was George. He said, you can't build your way out of this. And you know what? We can't. No matter how many homes we build, we'll never get out of it. I'm afraid we have more of this coming. But what I would like to ask the city council to do, each and every one of you is to please let's look at this in a different way. Who here has brought a new company into their district or entertained an employer to come here? I love it. That's great. I mean, we lost Boeing. We've lost lots of companies here. And that was really when our city started to slide down. If more people had jobs, that would really be the way to really alleviate some of this housing crisis. There's no reason people shouldn't make a decent living. Every one of them, they're all intelligent. Also. Why don't we? Why not educate people a little more on their rights as renters? I rented out my room for a very reasonable fee of 650 a month. I would love you to come and stay at my place if you want to. 650 I'll even maybe give you a better price than that. But my point is, I really I'm really serious. I love this city. I moved here from the shitty Alby, which was Laguna Beach.
Speaker 6: This is the real Alby. I love it. Woo!
Speaker 1: And I mean, I, I would like to see them get educated on their rights. Then they could really hold these people's feet to the fire and be protected, which they should be. And I nobody wants to put anybody out in the streets. But one more thing. Oh, I would like to volunteer. Anybody who investing another way to get ahead in this life is to invest not at the bank, but in the stock market. And I'd be happy to help anyone do that. And I kid you not. That was how I was able to buy my first place. You just buy, you know, stocks that are solid, that are companies. You know, you don't have to have $5,000 to invest in the stock market. And I can show you how to do it. If anybody wants to see me after the meeting, let's do it.
Speaker 6: Okay, that's. That's it.
Speaker 0: Thank you. Next speaker, please.
Speaker 6: Karen replied. I'm a resident of a had low income affordable housing building in the First District on seventh and Pacific Senior Building.
Speaker 0: And you're in a great building.
Speaker 6: It's one of the better ones. Yes. And this has been a great conversation tonight. And I think some real creative solutions have come out of this. I just wanted to mention a couple of things that I didn't notice were in the plan. The covenants that expire. When the covenants expire, the owners have options on what they can do with their property. We're experiencing this in the affordable housing. We found out due to a friendly realtor that our building had been listed surreptitiously on a real estate listing. Meanwhile, the management company and owners are reassuring the tenants that they have no plans to sell the building. Why was it listed on the listing if there were no plans? So this is a scary thing for a seniors on fixed incomes and we need to look at Airbnb and be. I didn't see that mentioned in the report. You know, Airbnb. There was an article on the front page of the L.A. Times that you guys that generated fake news were doing it from their Airbnb apartment that they rented in Belmont Shore. And, you know, we're not addressing that at all as part of our housing crisis. And I think it is contributing, particularly in the wealthier areas and also the empty properties. What's going on with the breakers building? What's going on? Rite Aid. Rite Aid has sat empty. There's five floors in that building and only one is occupied and there's numerous properties in the downtown area that are in that particular classification. Why can't we provide some incentives to the the owners of those buildings to create some creative housing there? And 300 square foot units sound really good to me that live in a 320 120 square foot unit. So thank you for this opportunity and thank you, Amy laughed. I just wanted to say what a great job that her department did and all of you on bringing forth this topic for discussion.
Speaker 0: Thank you very much. Next speaker, please.
Speaker 9: Good evening. Thanks for your time and thanks for having us. The report was very thorough and it was a really well well done report and so congratulations and thanks for the work put into that. I'd like to talk about a potential policy solution that I didn't hear about, so I thought I'd give it to you. And you're more than welcome to talk to me more or anyone else in public or any council members of the mayors more than welcome as well. One of the issues that we face when we talk about development and this is the catch 22 or the contradiction of gentrification, is that as we bring these nice projects, which I saw on the screen in their beautiful, is that the the public is doing everything they can. A lot of private landlords, they are doing everything they can to provide housing. All of this work that we're putting in to the city to make our city grow, to provide housing for people when we have a nice project that comes up in an area. What happens is all that investment and all that money that goes into that specific lot, it beautifies the entire neighborhood and all the properties around that lot go up in land value. And this is basically a form of theft, and most of that money makes its way to the banks. So this city, when it focuses, for example, on its bike paths, which is wonderful, that actually makes our city more desirable, that causes land values to rise, which causes the rent to rise, which causes mortgages to rise, which makes it more expensive. So the very good things we do and the good work that we put in and the hard work that we do to make this city great is also what makes it expensive. And that's because there's this giant wealth, this giant bank of money, which is called land values, which is what is forcing the housing crisis. The cost of construction for homes has not gone up in the last 30 years. It's easier and cheaper than ever to build a home. There's plenty of lumber, plenty of electrical wire, plenty of plumbing, plenty of plumbers, plenty of people with the skill and the knowledge and the assets to get the job done. It's just that the land beneath our feet is always going up more and more expensive. Anyone who's a landlord in this room will tell you that capital is a is a burden. If you own something, you have to maintain it. You have to fall under regulation. The other fold is laws. It's actually expensive to own a house and to try to maintain it. So it's not. The house that goes up in value is the land underneath it. And I have some policy proposals that would help us capture some of that land value, since that land is a product of all of our generative work, including the city and including private development. Like I said, that land value currently is getting sucked up mainly by banks in the form of mortgage payments, even though the banks did nothing to create that land value. That's something the city of Long Beach created, and it belongs to Long Beach and its people. There are policies that can be implemented that would not burden production, that would not weigh heavily on consumption, that could not be passed on to mortgage payers or to tenants. That would reduce mortgage interest payments, make it easier for people to buy a home, make it easier for people to rent, and the funds could be redistributed into schools, into parks, into housing vouchers to let people stay in their home or purchase the home for the first time. There's so much you could do with this money, and it would raise real amounts of money for the city of Long Beach again, without burdening consumption or production or weighing heavily on entrepreneurship. So I would love to talk to you all about that and anyone else in the public as well. Thank you.
Speaker 0: Thank you very much. Next speaker, please.
Speaker 9: Hi. My name's Kevin Yeager, and I live in the second district. Mayor Garcia mentioned that as we build more moderate and high income housing, it would allow people to move out of substandard housing and up into those creating more low income housing. And this sounds great, but I'm skeptical that this reflects reality for most workers. Real wages have remained stagnant for decades. Among young college graduates, they're actually in steady decline. So those who do have raises, I think they will be very happy to afford their skyrocketing rents. I don't see them moving up into better housing. I'd urge caution before assuming that all housing developments benefit our low income households rather than just accelerating gentrification. And I hope to see Long Beach acknowledged that we don't have the socioeconomic mobility that we once had decades ago and ensure that we're prioritizing our most vulnerable communities as we work through this crisis. Thank you for your time.
Speaker 0: Thank you very much. Next speaker, please.
Speaker 9: Good afternoon. My name is Robert Tornado. I was born and raised in the city of Long Beach. I love this city and I love its progressive attitudes towards affordable housing and all the other things that it does that other speakers have spoke about. I think that it's very important that we take in consideration the smaller landlords like myself. This is my retirement. This is what I've done. I have a small business and I don't have somebody funding my retirement. So my investment is my properties. Rent control is not the solution. Rent control would actually make me want to sell my property. And of course, you know what that's going to mean. I'll go sell and buy somewhere else. I have tenants that have been with me for over 15 years, and I think that's a testament to the type of landlord that I am . I take care of my property. I maintain the property. They're nice, they're clean. People want to live there. Not all landlords are the same. So don't think that they are. I know we've heard a lot of stories here that landlords are terrible, but they're not all terrible like that. Rent control is not going to be the answer to this solution.
Speaker 0: And rent control is not in this report. Just want to make sure they're pretty clear.
Speaker 9: Right. And I urge you to take a look at the real reason why the tenants on Linden were actually evicted. There is more to the story than they were evicted. Thank you very much.
Speaker 0: Thank you. Next speaker, please.
Speaker 9: Hi. My name is Gary Mikovits and I have some handouts I would like to have all of you have and be part of the public record. As I said, my name is Gary Markovich. And, uh. We already use 30 seconds handing out the paper, so I hope you give me just a few more seconds. I came to Long Beach 24 years ago with my husband of 33 years. He's an immigrant to this country. I am the grandson of immigrants. Refugees from Eastern Europe, war torn World War One. I certainly understand what poverty is. I grew up on the South Side of Chicago and I can only share with you. It's very disturbing to me to see what's been happening in our city, where certain organizations, where we have individuals paid to work for these organizations who've been using racial divisiveness and creating tension based on economic disparity that I find very intolerable. But that's not really what I wanted to speak about today, but I really wanted to talk about is the fact that my husband and I over the past 24 years since we came to Long Beach, we're small time investors and we've invested in our community and we've certainly been able to provide affordable housing. I think it's important for you to know that there are landlords that, like myself, have worked with families to keep a roof over their head. During the recession, we didn't raise rents and just recently we raised rents the first time in three years and the highest increase they had was 1.6%. My retention rate of my tenants is over five years right now and 70% of my buildings are minority occupied. And I guess why I'm saying this is because I found it a little bit disconcerting that somebody said earlier addressed the need, not the greed. I want to remind all the renters here that as a landlord, I have to pay a carpenter, a plumber, a tile guy, a roofer, a carpet cleaner, a gardener, an insurance I pay insurance taxes and these fees go up every year. They need to understand what we as landlords are challenged with, with the cost that we have to incur. It's not about greed. And it's very disturbing to me when I think that of the families that I have kept in their homes, when they would have been out on the street otherwise and worked with them. Today, though, what I really want to talk about and ask you to put that out. Oh. All right. Sorry. I had a tenant in 2008 who was renting from me with three other Cal State Long Beach Girls. And I'm speaking for her today because she's not here to come and speak for herself. The other three girls who were in the apartment with her had said, We're afraid of her boyfriend. We want her to move out. And if it weren't for the fact that she did move out, I would have had four dead bodies in my unit because three weeks after she moved out, she was found dead in her apartment near the university. Value the roommate that she currently had under just because of addiction. I would not be able to ask that person to get out. Would not be able to get them out. And I speak for her. Her name is Kate Sue. She was 19 years old at the time. I provided you the information on it. This is not something that is easy to even talk about because frankly, I had developed a personal relationship with her. She used to call me, struggle to pay her rent. I understood what a struggling student was going through, and I always worked to try to keep her in the apartment. But the bottom line is.
Speaker 0: We just try to wrap it up. All right. I'm giving you some more time, but just wrap it up now.
Speaker 9: As landlords, I have always felt the stewardship both over my buildings and my tenants. And I believe that it is both my moral and ethical duty to do everything possible to provide safe and well-maintained housing. And if Kate had refused to move out of my building under the policy of just cause eviction, it would have been impossible for me to have Kate move out. And it makes me wonder what might have happened to those young girls. Thinking closing, I will continue to fight for the cause for the cordial and respectful relationship that Henry and I have had with our tenants and will continue to speak out for people like Kate. Okay. I'm sure if Kate were here today.
Speaker 0: We have we have to wrap it at last sentence, please. I got to have the same time for everybody.
Speaker 9: Thank you. If she were here today, she would say just cause evictions are bad policy. Mayor, thank you.
Speaker 0: Thank you so much. Next speaker, please.
Speaker 10: I think. Good afternoon, honorable mayor and council people and.
Speaker 9: Certainly like to thank Assemblyman Lowenthal and Amy Bodak for that great report. You know, it's one thing, first of all, Malcolm and I am a realtor here and a business owner in the city and a member of better housing for Long Beach. You know, it's really one thing to talk about affordable housing, but it's another thing to really be involved into it. And I think this report really gets to the point.
Speaker 10: You have some positive things that you've put.
Speaker 9: In this report. These things are really actionable. There is no silver bullet, but we have to take one step at a time. And when we look at some of the positive things in this program that was so well talked about in terms of density, bonus, reduced parking, looking.
Speaker 10: At impact.
Speaker 9: Fees that have a nexus to the development, these are.
Speaker 10: The kinds of things that encourage and just like our governor has and it's the latest state of our redid his program in terms of looking at as apartment.
Speaker 9: Owners we're not developers but in order to develop housing we need to have some incentives for developers and instead to have an overaggressive legislation looking at incentives to move people in. And I certainly recognize a lot of the accounts. People like Vice Mayor Richardson put us in touch with the.
Speaker 10: Section eight housing. So we come together to work at better being able to.
Speaker 9: Utilize how to use those resources. And we look at Stacy mongers. I guess we'll come up later. Sensory housing signed on by Austin. These are all positive things that the council is doing in order to look at these. And obviously the housing crisis is not new to Long Beach. It's it's throughout our state, as so.
Speaker 10: Many people see. Land costs in California is high.
Speaker 9: Just what it is. So instead of complaining, we have to take positive steps, as you guys are doing now, and we look at what are the barriers to affordable housing. And that's what we have to address. We have to look at funding sources and all the other things that are available to us. And I think we could just commend the the council and the mayor for putting together this report. I think Assemblyman Lowenthal did a great job. And just one of the thing I'd comment about, there was been a lot of questions about our regulatory agreements. Our company, we manage a lot of properties. They have regulatory agreements. These things are so monitored by the state every year we have to put in all the income certification. These things are so well monitored that they're not going to slip through the cracks. So once again, I'd like to commend the council, the mayor, for taking a very proactive step in working on dealing with this housing crisis. Thank you very much.
Speaker 0: Thank you very much. Before we up next, Speaker, I'm going to go up actually to Dan who's up there. But I also want to make sure that I think Elaine is the last person. So she's the last person on the list. I'm cutting off the speaker's list. There's more people. Okay. I just. Okay, so then Brenda was the last person on the speaker's list, and then that's it. People need to be in line so that we're fine. Brenda is the last person on the speaker's list. Hunt Before you start, are there more people coming? Okay. I'm going to. We're going to cut it down to 2 minutes here in just a minute because it's going wait. The rest of the agenda is going to move forward. So please try to try to just be as soon as possible. So as is who's the last person that line.
Speaker 9: My name's Joni. Joni. Joni. Joni.
Speaker 0: You're the last person in line. Okay. Okay. Great. Please continue.
Speaker 10: Okay.
Speaker 0: My dad's going to go. And you're gonna go after Dan.
Speaker 10: Okay? My name's Dan Mulheron. I'm a councilor. I'm a resident of the eighth council district. I'm very active in a number of political organizations, in other groups and Long Beach. I'm also a landlord and homeowner. I've lived in Long Beach for over 25 years, raised two children with my wife, Beverly. My youngest is transgender, and through Oliver, I've had as many as nine transgender students stay in my house, and at present, his best friend lives there because she was kicked out of her house for being trans. I have been a landlord for many years and have always attempted to try to work with people and overlook some past problems. The proposed renter protections that we have right now would make me pause and not be able to do this. Tenants with past mistakes and lack of work history would give me a problem I'd have to consider after to consider marginalized people that before I would take a chance on them. I'd have to have a strong cosigner, and with these proposals I would have to. If they were to become law, I would be forced to take larger deposits, limit my liability, because like many small landlords, my rent is part of my retirement income. I believe tenants deserve a decent place to live. And but as a businessman and a landlord, I have to pay my bills. I personally am an advocate, as Al Austin knows, for low cost housing for seniors and transgender youth. But is this where the youth would work and get an education? And I know private and public parties can achieve this. However, as a long time housing provider and a homeowner in Long Beach, I believe that these proposals proposed onerous regulations will negatively impact tenants by exposing them to lawbreakers much longer than necessary, hurt homeowners by negatively affecting their property values and the city by adversely affecting neighborhoods. Thank you.
Speaker 0: Thank you program. Before we go to the next speaker, because I've had multiple council members ask me to clarify this. There are no rental protections that you're talking about in front of the council. So there are some things that are being brought up tonight that are not in front of the council. We're talking about building affordable and workforce housing. That's what's on the agenda. And so I know there's other discussions. I know that there's discussions on both sides on different issues. But this is a study session on that issue, not on either on on those other issues that are being brought up. So we want to make sure people know clearly what's on the agenda. I'm also seeing fliers and other things being passed out that have nothing to do with the study session. So I just want to make sure that we are focused on what's in front of us. Yes, ma'am.
Speaker 6: Good evening. My name is Vicki Nelson. I used to live in Long Beach. I'm an investor, landlord, caregiver and property manager. I have been president of Town and Country Homeowners Association in the eighth District. 5021 Atlantic Avenue. And I have to say I agree with Roberto Durango regarding the development of affordable housing. And I was wondering why the eighth and ninth District wasn't looked at. Or will it be looked at? I work very closely with Section eight programs. I have been with them for about 20 years. Have good tenants. I'm a very strict landlord and I am going to do my background checks just like I had to buy a house. My first house, my first home was a condo and I work with different programs. I was very poor. Coming up, had roommates. Any means necessary is how my father taught us. Any means necessary? Lived with five or six roommates. Roommates are good. Roommates are bad. Same as landlords and tenants. There's programs out there that help the homeless. I live in Orange County now, but I work with programs such as path topics, harp wa 211 weinger and they pay up to 6 to 1 year tenants rents. But there are guidelines. You can't be using drugs. You can't be moving people in the same guidelines as Section eight. And frankly, I love Section eight program because they monitor also the tenants. I just wish there was more affordable housing in the eighth and ninth District. And in order to clean up 5021 Atlantic, it took a partnership and it took a lot of time and money to get rid of a lot of drugs. I work very close with Long Beach PD. I put six or two's on the properties. You know, it's just I think some of the tenants don't realize what a landlord goes through. At all. And you have good tenants and you have bad. And I'm a grandmother and I am raising three grandchildren. And I have good grandkids. I have bad grandkids. Okay. So I love them. But the bad ones have to know you can't you're not going to rent or live with me if you're not going to keep a job. And do what? Needs to be done. And I always tell them any means necessary. Thank you.
Speaker 0: Thank you. Next speaker. And, ma'am, I just. Just to clarify, there actually is we have built and we will be building affordable housing in the eighth and ninth District. And both the vice mayor in councilmember did speak to that. And we're interested in that. And so just want to make sure we clarify that as well. So thank you. Next speaker.
Speaker 6: Thank you. Well, let's swing the pendulum tonight. Protestants and Catholics. I'm sure there are quite a few of us before me.
Speaker 0: Before we continue, I want to make sure I know where that speaker lives and it's getting larger. And so the gentleman in the green shirt behind Brenda is the last speaker. No. Joanne, are you going to you on the line? Okay. Raise your hand. Okay. Last speaker. That's it. No more. Let's go. Thank you.
Speaker 6: My opening statement was the pendulum swing both ways. When you see a appears if it's going to go north, it's going to go south, east to west. So in order to do something different, we have to do differently. So I know they are probably atheists or agnostics in the room, but I'm not going to speak to you tonight. Not tonight. But Protestants and Catholics, the next time you go into your parish or your church and those doors open at eight, 11, 9 p.m. am and Wednesday night, Friday night, Saturday night, look at the walls. Look around there. Look up at the ceiling and look down and and then know this. When you walk out of that building, it's going to be empty until the next time you walk in. Those of you who tithe, those of you who give, offering love offerings, peace offerings, wherever you name it, and you put that money in the plate. Write this down. This is your ownership. Deuteronomy 2612 and 1428. All that money that you drop in the plate, some of that belongs to the homeless and the poor and the widow and the orphan. Not just your priest, not just your pastor. And you're going to get mad when they buy a Bentley. But you can keep putting that money in that plate because you're not reading your own text. You're not reading your scripture. And then you come to these people here and you're expecting them to do something in faith that you should be doing. Now, we shook a hand shoemaker arm January 25th. Every year we do it every year. But this is where religion meets the road right here. You keep putting that money in their plate and some of it belongs to the poor. They're not going to tell you. So I'm telling you, I'm a pastor. The rabbi, next time you go to the synagogue, any of these places, the faith. You're putting money in those place. They belong to the poor and you think you play it and God doing it. And here's one. And when you going to read your own Bible, your own text, your own religious text. The pendulum is swinging the other way this year. You should know that by the type of president we have. These people appear can't do nothing beyond your own motivation. Landlords if you have people who are homeless. Why allow the city to keep taxing you when you can just say, well, I have a vacancy coming up, let me call somebody and get them in here. When are you going to keep. Start owning your Americanism. Owning your religion.
Speaker 0: They can next speaker, please.
Speaker 9: John dilatory address on file also have apartment complex in the second district. And I think you know and I appreciate all the work that went into putting together affordable housing. I think it's a great idea that we're finally looking at this and moving forward. And I just have a couple of questions I think that we should still be looking at as well. You know, when you look at those ratios, that 60, almost 60% rental. When I look at the development that's going on, we're still just putting in more and more rental housing and don't know if that's a good or a bad thing. And I wanted to quote from an article from Voice of America this kind of look at this from January 2017. And it looks at homes and why we don't see that many available anymore. This is one of the biggest reasons that young Americans are waiting to.
Speaker 8: Buy their first home is student debt.
Speaker 9: Millennials, who used to be considered the prime homebuying age, are an estimated 1 trillion in student loans, according to the U.S. government. So so I mean, it's great. And that's where we need to ask the question, are we looking more at rentals and increase in our rental base and affordable rentals, or are we really looking at affordable housing that people can buy? They you know, they go on to say that in their view that, you know, the millennials, they're buying nice cars, they're going out to dinner and they're staying in apartments. And one of the reasons is because they're moving a lot. The job stability that a lot of us grew up with is not there. We're not working for one company anymore. Most of us are going to have 15. The young woman, young person like her, they're going have 15 jobs in their lifetime. And that means you have to be moving.
Speaker 8: So really, we have to look at what is this affordable.
Speaker 9: Housing that we're going to be moving towards. You know, when I look at the college graduates that I rent to in the second District, and that's another thing you kind of have to look at, you got to break them up in different ways.
Speaker 8: You have people.
Speaker 0: Probably working.
Speaker 9: On their bachelors, their high needs, student housing. They've got zero money. They're the ones that are actually putting themselves in debt. When I look at those that are actually working on their masters programs, I get a lot of people like that. They're sticking around for two or three years. Usually it's a couple. One of them's working on their masters. The other one may afterwards, or they're moving for whatever reason after that. So there is affordable housing for our students. It just depends on where they are. And then I know you said you want us to talk about this, but since Councilmember Pearce and also Assemblywoman Lowenthal brought it up, that proposed rental restrictions, they both brought that up. I do not think that should be part of looking at.
Speaker 8: This affordable housing. They both said that it should it.
Speaker 9: Should not something totally different. And so I ask that we do not put that in part of this affordable housing. Thank you.
Speaker 0: Thank you, Mike.
Speaker 9: Good evening, Mayor Council. My name is Mike Murchison, and like everybody else, I'm proud to be from Long Beach. I'm born and raised here. Growing up in third, I now proudly live in the eighth. Thanks, Al. My comments are very short tonight. I represent a lot of business groups, everyone here this evening. I've worked with developer community for at least the last 15 years. And I can tell you this from an affordable housing standpoint, and that's all I really want to focus on in terms of new development. We have to start now. And what I mean by now is everybody's talking about, well, we've got to figure it out. We got to come up with solutions. I'm telling you, Mayor and council, having worked with Amy's department Development Services as fast as they are, it still takes time and it's going to take a year to 18 months to 24 months, depending upon if a property is contaminated or not. So if you want to try to get developers to work with you, whether they're affordable developers, if they're mott income developers, whatever they are, you're going to have to find ways to give them some relief to move things forward quicker, whether it's through development services , whether it's sequel relief seeked at the state, whether it's fees that are waived, whatever it is. But if you want to build housing, that's the only way that you're going to get developers to do it on private property. I will tell you one other thing. One of the most creative ideas I've seen today in Long Beach, I worked with Councilwoman Pierce on it was her idea about containers. I thought that was one of the most unique ideas that ever come across. I was happy to be involved in that. I think you have a ton of containers down on the port that are well worthwhile to pursue. There's plenty of land out there, just depends on how creative you want to be about it. So I would encourage you to continue working with her on. I think it's a fabulous idea. But as it relates to developers, you're going to have to really work with Amy shop to go figure out what you can do to get developers attracted, to want to bring their money forward, to put it in, build affordable housing. Thank you.
Speaker 0: Thank you. Next speaker, please.
Speaker 11: Good evening. My name is David Kinsler, and I was going to say something that was a rebuttal to something somebody else said. But since you asked us not to do that, I'm going to not do that. But I will take this opportunity for all the people in the audience that loved Long Beach. I am part of a community group called West West Eastside Community Association. For the last 17 years I've come out every fourth Saturday to pick up trash in the alleys in the area around Redondo and Cherry and PCH. So if anybody is interested in making Long Beach a more beautiful place this Saturday or use of a park at Arizona Avenue and 14th, we are going to meet at 8:00 in the morning and go clean. Somalis, you're all welcome to come and join us.
Speaker 0: Thank you for doing that, sir. Next speaker.
Speaker 6: Good evening, mayor garcia and members of the city council. My name is Elaine Hutchison and I am a resident progressive. And I have to say with third district and a housing provider and manager, I am here this evening to commend you, Mayor Garcia, for guiding the process that has resulted in this much needed and comprehensive study of affordable and workforce housing. Thank you for bringing this study and draft report forward. I also want to thank the Affordable and Workforce Housing Study Group, chaired by Assemblywoman Bonnie Lowenthal for your work and also for the consultant Mercedes Marquez for your investment of time and the expertize given by each member. I also want to thank Amy Bodak and her staff for the many and I know it is many contributions to this report. We are very pleased that the study is focused upon bringing increased affordable housing to Long Beach, whether newly constructed, reused or rehabilitated. Thank you for considering all possibilities. It was a delightful experience to also see reported and pictures of the good work the city has already done over the last decade. We believe this draft report with all of the research. And that it is the mayor's report. The top elected official in Long Beach puts a bright spotlight on the potential in Long Beach that will attract new development. This is the thing that will ultimately result in the solving the problems more housing. We in the housing provider community look forward to the opportunity for continuing our contributions on the housing issue as the report moves to its final report. Thank you, Mayor Garcia, for your proactive focus on creating new housing in Long Beach. We also thank in advance the Council members for your consideration and time. You will also invest on this report. Thank you very much.
Speaker 0: Thank you very much. Next speaker, please.
Speaker 2: Hi. Good evening. A mayor and city council.
Speaker 4: My name is Brenda. As many of you already.
Speaker 2: Know, I'm a not Long Beach native. Born and raised. I've been blessed enough to still be here in Long Beach. As you know, I.
Speaker 4: Know the councilmember around.
Speaker 2: There mentioned gentrification. I was definitely affected by it myself.
Speaker 4: And 3000, just about $4,000 into just move was definitely hard into doing. I definitely feel that you guys are heading into the right direction with with building affordable housing. I commend you guys for the tremendous work that you guys are doing to facilitate this. And I do want to echo a few of the speakers in terms of like this is a long term solution. This is definitely great and it's going to alleviate. But what we're dealing right now, the the housing crises that we talk about, I don't really think that you guys really understand or comprehend what that means. I do have the pleasure of working with housing Long Beach, and that has exposed my just my vision to as far as what Long Beach really is dealing with. I was there on the other side with you guys and I was never even a bit close to understanding what what people go through until now. I mean, just shy of working for months with the organization. I had two mothers of officers that worked for the city of Long Beach who their mothers were being evicted, and they came to us. And I say, why don't you address the fear? They were hush hush. They did not want to be identified. We are here. We try the much as we can do, but with no rent protections, there is nothing we can do. It is legal to to ask folks to leave in 30 to 60 days. There's nothing that protects these folks to remain in place. And just to.
Speaker 6: Answer, I.
Speaker 4: Believe was councilman Vice Mayor Rex Richardson, who asked he'd like to see the folks who have been displaced. Well, I'm kind of I hate to say it, but folks are fearful to come out here. The folks that call me every day, they email me. They're always constantly in our legal clinics on Monday nights between 530 and eight. Those folks don't want to come out. They're already either fearful because they're being retaliated against with or they're already in March of being out. And I've gotten.
Speaker 6: Referrals from you guys.
Speaker 4: You guys here help them out. And I like I hate it because it's like there's nothing we can do unless there's a renter ordinance that is passed, like a responsible renters ordinance in which we can all collaborate.
Speaker 6: Along with landlords, tenants and our legislators to work.
Speaker 4: Together to find a simple solution to help our renters to remain in place. We need to do something together. Otherwise, we can continue to build and find long term solutions. But what's happening to the folks now having to those children that are being pulled out of the schools and folks who have to relocate? I know it's not easy for you guys to see because you guys are it's not your reality. It's not what you're facing. But I would ask you to reconsider and passing a responsible renters ordinance. Don't be misled. I do have the materials that I'd like for you guys I believe you guys can have.
Speaker 0: Thank you. Thank you. Next speaker, please. Just the clerk. Thank you.
Speaker 9: Good evening, Mayor and City Council. It's been a long time since I've been before you. My name is Robert Fox. I've run for city council myself. I'm the founding president of Alameda Speech Jeanine, and I've been here rather a long time. I want to commend you all on having this wonderful housing study. I think it's really marvelous. I do want to give you a little input because I think it's important we're talking because I want our statistics to be correct. When we were talking about the rental housing of Long Beach being $2,000 for a two bedroom unit, if that's coming out of Zillow, that's not really reliable information because we have a lot of other sources like Craigslist, for instance. I happen to own property here because I was a renter for 25 years, although when I founded Alamitos Beach. But by the grace of God, of my hard work, I bought apartments, you know, and they're in the elevator speech. And I'm not a slumlord, and I don't charge a huge rent because this is my community. But we have to talk about what rents were when I moved here in 1984. I had an $850 apartment. I was making $2,738 a month working for details, Gene Shape and Patty Moore, God bless them. But, you know, that was 47% of my wage. And you know, as time went by, that didn't really change. I made a little bit more money, went down to 46%. But this idea that 30% of your wage makes you low income or something. That was a statistic that was actually brought out by Hubert Humphrey in 1972 when he introduced the first housing plan under Lyndon Johnson, which became Section eight housing. So I want to remind you all that we're using a we're using a pro forma that is very outdated, and we need to relook at that because the economy has changed completely. And let's face it, I have a house God bless in Hawaii and I have a house here and. Housing is not real affordable. I get it. So I want to bring another little subject matter up to you, and that is about this restriction on conversions. May I please include in this because of Alamitos Beach having so many own your own apartments, which we do. I think we need to encourage the conversion of own your own apartments into ownership. And here's the reason why nobody can mortgage and own your own. So how would you buy it? Except with cash for 125,000 or 150? If they were converted to condos, you could get an FHA loan with 3% down and that's how you get into homeownership. So I want us to expand our dialog in terms of how we're really talking about because I was a renter and alamy the speech at 1825, 28/2 Street, and then I bought my home on Broadway and it was a struggle, get me, you know, macaroni and cheese for six months. But I did it. And I want to encourage other people to be able to do that, too. So let's look at that conversion thing and maybe. Tweak it a little bit. Thank you very much for your time.
Speaker 0: Thank you, Robert. Next week, next, bigger but last speaker.
Speaker 5: Good evening. Thank you.
Speaker 1: Mayor and Council, for listening to me tonight. I'll make this very brief. My name is Johanna Cunningham.
Speaker 7: I'm the executive director for the Apartment Association, California Southern Cities.
Speaker 1: I just briefly want to thank Amy and Patrick for all the work that they did on this study. I appreciate the phone calls and the questions. When they called me and asked, tried to provide them with some information and some input. And I want to thank you for acknowledging the work that the Apartment Association has done.
Speaker 7: As we.
Speaker 1: Continue to work diligently and collaboratively with you to try and solve these very severe issues as we proudly work with all.
Speaker 7: The groups.
Speaker 1: In the city, we are part of the Hart team, so we work with Section eight, we work with the Housing Authority, we work with the veterans. We work to help housing. You acknowledge that we will continue to work with all of these organizations to help resolve and hopefully come up with solutions to these housing issues. So I wanted to thank the Council for their work on this. Again, I wanted to thank Amy and Patrick for their work on this. And we want you to know that we are here. We're willing to continue to collaborate.
Speaker 6: I live in the.
Speaker 7: Second district as well. I love Long Beach as well.
Speaker 2: And we're here to help.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much for your time.
Speaker 0: Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. With that, I appreciate all the public comment tonight. We're going to go and there's a motion on the floor and a second on the floor to receive and file the report, which is the motion as part of the study session motion by Councilman Gonzales and seconded by Councilmember Pierce. Members, please go ahead and cast your vote.
Speaker 1: Motion carries.
Speaker 0: Okay. Thank you very much. So now staff will be back with the final report. And thank you all for coming. We're going to just take a 1 to 2 minute recess just so we can all start the council meeting.
Speaker 9: Killed at night.
Speaker 0: Okay. We're going to go and start the council meeting. So I just need everyone to please exit the council meeting or take a seat, please. I can take a roll call, please, and have the council members back at their seats.
Speaker 1: Councilwoman Gonzalez. Councilmember Pierce. Councilwoman Price. Councilmember Supernova. Councilwoman. Mango. Councilman de Andrews. Councilmember Durango. Councilman Austin. Vice Mayor Richardson. Mayor Garcia.
Recommendation to conduct a study session to receive and file a report and presentation on revenue tools and incentives for the production of affordable and workforce housing.