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Segment 1

Okay, hello everyone.
Good afternoon.
It's 4.06 p.m.
so I'm going to call our meeting to order.
My staff.
So I'm going to order this special meeting of the Berkeley City Council.
Today is Tuesday, September 30th and we have a special presentation but we're going to start with roll call.
All right.
Council member Kesarwani? Here.
Taplin? Present.
Bartlett? Is absent.
Tregub? Present.
O'Keefe? Is absent at the moment.
Blackabee? Here.
Lunaparra? Here.
Humbert? Present.
And Mayor Ishii? Here.
All right.
So today we have a work session on social housing study and recommendations so I will allow you all to take it away.
Thanks so much for being here.
Hello council and the mayor.
Thank you for having us here today.
My name is Mike Uberte and I'm a project manager with the housing and community services division.
Today we're going to talk about social housing and what that could look like here in Berkeley.
Before we start I wanted to recognize my colleague Anna Cash who can't be here tonight.
She's out on parental leave but she was a project manager for this and did a great job shepherding this along and we appreciated her thoughtfulness and leadership on the project.
So in 2023 staff started working on a referral from council to examine social housing opportunities for Berkeley.
City staff partnered with a consultant team to conduct a needs assessment, review social housing models from across the country and internationally, and develop feasibility and implementation strategies tailored to Berkeley.
So this presentation and the accompanying report provide an overview of the study's findings and layout strategies for how we can advance social housing here in Berkeley as part of our broader affordable housing efforts.
The city selected the housing workshop and urban math through a competitive process to lead this research and I'm very pleased to introduce you to our partners today.
So joining us are Janet Smithheimer from the housing workshop and Jessica Hitchcock from urban math who will walk us through the study.
So I'll hand it over to them.
Thank you so much and thank you for having us here tonight.
We're excited to present to you.
My name is Jessica Hitchcock and I'm from urban math and this is Janet Smithheimer from the housing workshop and I know this report has a lot of detail so what we're going to try to do is give you some high-level points and then any further information we can address during Q&A.
Janet and I are affordable housing consultants.
So Janet was the founding principal at BAE urban economics.
She has done multiple studies for the city of Berkeley including studies for your rent stabilization board, previous iterations of your inclusionary ordinance and other studies and I'm a housing policy affordable housing policy expert.
I've been doing it for about 15 years and I was formerly an affordable housing developer and so tonight we are presenting the Berkeley social housing study.
I'm going to pull it up and share my screen so that you can also see it on your screens.
Let's see.
There's always a technology piece.
Is that visible for you? Okay great.
So social housing is a topic that has garnered increasing attention across the U.S.
over these years especially as cities look for new approaches for how to address the affordable housing challenges.
The first question is what is social housing? We did an extensive extensive literature review on this topic and we boiled it down into four principles.
First it's owned by public agencies or other mission-driven organizations and permanently protect it from transfer to for-profit entities.
Secondly, it's permanently affordable and protect it from market speculation.
Third, social housing serves a wide range of incomes reflecting the right to housing for all and lastly it protects tenants rights, offers meaningful tenant governance and supports long-term resident stability.
I'm going to pass it to Janet who will set this look the stage for the local housing conditions here.
Okay thank you.
Just very briefly since we know you're familiar with a lot of these statistics.
What is affordable housing? So affordable housing is usually described as housing meeting certain income levels and they center around area median income for the county in this case for Berkeley it's Alameda County.
The graphics you see there show the 2024 maximum income by each category affordable housing and the maximum rent for rent and utilities to pay for housing for each and I just wanted to point out for example that the low income which is covering 50 to 80 percent AMI this is for a family a household of two which is closely related to the average household size in Berkeley.
The income was almost a hundred thousand dollars between 50 and 80 percent.
We're talking tonight this afternoon about that income level and the ones below it primarily and that's pretty much all we wanted to introduce there.
I'll go down thank you.
Just one more slide on the same topic.
Here the graphic represents some data showing the cost burden for Berkeley renters from 2020 by AMI for all households fitting those AMI levels.
You can see and I know you've looked at this data before that the lower you go on the income categories the higher the rent burden which makes a lot of sense.
The red bars are the households that are severely impacted so they're paying 50 percent or more of their income for rent and the lowest category there is quite large.
It might include some student households.
We talk about that later in our recommendations to collect some more data on that.
Also a key point that is important to keep in mind is is unhoused people in Berkeley.
The last 2024 count the point in time count showed about 844 unhoused people both in shelters and on the street.
That was a drop from the previous count which was slightly over a thousand but there's more work to do in the context of what we're talking about this afternoon.
And finally loss of black households.
Berkeley has been experiencing this issue for a long time between 2000 and 2020.
City of Berkeley lost almost 40 percent of its black population and also that meant homeownership rates for black households in the city dropped from 40 percent to 32 percent for that 20 year period.
That's it for me.
Quickly on some housing.
Thank you Janet.
So I do though amidst all of that I want to highlight some successes because not all is doom and gloom.
Berkeley has achieved some important successes so through historic and continued investment in affordable housing.
If you look at the last three rena cycles and I don't know if you can.
I don't.
Oh right here.
There's my mask.
If you look at the last three rena cycles from 1999 to 2023 Berkeley met.
Here we go.
Almost 60 percent of its VLI rena targets and 52 percent of its low income targets.
And you smashed it I guess in the in the market rate.
It was 185 percent and all of these metrics exceeded you know the rena production in Alameda County.
So at the same time while you were producing all of these all of these units if you look at renter households between 2000 and 2020 Alameda County saw a 22 percent increase in VLI households that were experiencing cost burden.
In Berkeley that metric only increased by 5 percent.
So I want to emphasize the important takeaway is that a historic investments in affordable housing paired with rent stabilization has had a very meaningful impact for Berkeley residents.
At the same time there are challenges to your current housing delivery system.
So here are a few.
First LIHTC is the primary source for affordable projects.
And while it has a lot of strengths there are challenges too.
First it serves a narrow income band.
There's limited availability compared to need.
And it's expensive and hard to implement specifically because you also you often have to layer multiple subsidies together.
In addition inclusionary production is market dependent.
So when the market stalls you don't get units either on the market rate side or the affordable side.
Rent controlled units go to market rate when new tenants move in and also home ownership is out of reach for many.
So on the right you'll see the example of the Modell Miller Chirac project on Ashby.
This project when it opened received 9,700 applications for just 87 units.
So this just highlights how much need there is out there.
So with those challenges I think part of why social housing is so interesting to so many people is that people have begun to look to other places for inspiration drawing from Europe.
So we profile three cases two European models and one U.S.
example Vienna Denmark and the Montgomery County Housing Opportunities Commission.
So tonight I'm just going to high level a few key points for each case study.
So first here we have the European model.
Social housing is owned by both the public sector and by nonprofits.
Social housing accounts for 20 percent of Denmark's housing stock and 43 percent of Vienna's.
In Berkeley the share of restricted affordable units is about six percent of your housing stock.
In addition there's a broad range of income served.
So in Vienna incomes can go up to 180 percent AMI and in Denmark there's no limit.
In Vienna projects are interesting.
They're actually two thirds affordable and one third market.
And lastly Denmark has true tenant governance where residents participate and approve the building's budget every year.
So it's effectively a form of participatory budgeting and that happens annually and they serve on the nonprofit's board.
They have a seat there.
Moving on to Montgomery County HOC this is a public agency that combines a housing authority a finance agency and their public owner.
So in some ways I think of them as either kind of like redevelopment agencies or public housing authorities with bond issuance capabilities.
And because they have an ability to issue tax exempt bond financing they created something called the housing production fund.
So this is a 100 million dollar revolving loan fund and what they do is they use that money to jumpstart stalled market rate projects and they and by injecting effectively public money where private equity would have been usually comes in.
And so what's unique is that once this building is complete the HOC taps their tax exempt bonds for takeout and so that frees up the money that they put in through the housing production fund that they can use to recycle into another project.
The thumbnail which is small is an example that's it's the sage.
It's a 413 unit project a hundred percent publicly owned near Metro with 30 affordable units and sustainable design.
So this slide captures many of the features of social housing and from the case studies.
It's a long list but one thing I want to point out here is down here demand side supports matter.
I want to highlight that the housing problem that we're facing is not just an affordable supply problem.
It's also an income problem and in Europe tenant vouchers are also a very important part of the solution.
Moreover I think another feature that's important to highlight is that the European models have a universal life stage approach.
So effectively there's there's a promise depending on which life stage you're in you need housing and that support you need when you come out of college and you're just starting a new job when you're when you have a family and when you're a senior.
And I think that universal approach to talking about housing need rather than thinking about it as something that's income based in Europe is very powerful.
Emerging U.S.
initiatives that are also considering this include in California SB 555.
The Turner study is doing that study and we've been in contact with them about that.
The state of Rhode Island, Seattle, San Francisco, Chicago those are all examples.
Moving on as you may recall one of the principles of social housing is a diverse mix of incomes.
So in this study we ran financial models to test the public subsidies needed for different income mixes.
We ran models for both acquisition rehab and new construction across tenure.
So both for rental and home ownership.
So here were the takeaways.
This is a high level summary of the takeaways for acquisition rehab.
First is that acquisition rehab costs were about $470,000 per unit compared to $725,000 per unit.
And that's generally for market rate projects especially I think more recent projects that have reached Berkeley especially for the affordable ones have come close to a million.
There's also an opportunity through acquisition rehab to deliver units faster and you can engage smaller non-profits like CLTs.
There's recent legislation that was passed that can count preserved units towards your arena as well.
In addition there are opportunities to purchase larger relatively new apartment buildings at discounted prices similar to what bridge housing did for the Avalon property at 4th Street.
Converting existing buildings into ownership also only requires about $150 to $250 per unit because generally AAMIs are higher for home ownership and there's an equity contribution from owners.
So this can be a path effectively for a wealth building.
However acquisition rehab faces funding limitations.
There's no federal or state source to match small sites so generally a higher local subsidy per unit is needed although there are opportunities to package LIHTC for scattered sites.
This report recommends conducting pilot ownership project through future funding measures in addition to other suggestions too.
I'm going to move to new construction next.
So as we noted earlier new construction is costlier than acquisition rehab and right now the current economic conditions limit cross subsidy from market rate units because the market rate projects just aren't penciling well nowadays right.
We have high interest rates and costs are high through tariffs and other reasons.
However there are several paths to reduce the local subsidy needed including CalHFA's mixed income program MIP which allows project to serve households earning between 30 to 120 percent of AAMI using four percent tax credit.
So you don't require as much local subsidy for that for that program.
Cost containment can also help reduce the public subsidy and this report recommends using low cost land and the MIP program to pilot a new construction social housing project.
So there is an ongoing debate about what income social housing should target and I'm going to walk you through this vigorous debate.
First I want to point out we have currently two delivery systems for affordable housing and here's my mouse.
So on this end this is market rate production right.
You have a 20 percent inclusionary ordinance and so you get affordable units through your inclusionary and on the far right this is the LIHTC model right.
This is what's used by affordable housing developers like RCD and SAHA to build 100 percent affordable projects.
So some of the discussion in social housing boils down to can we expand the delivery methods for affordable production like for example the HOC which we show here as rental option A and we tweaked it because we want it to deepen the affordability and test that.
So this is 50 percent market and 50 percent affordable rental option A or then the question is that good enough.
Like can we move towards a Vienna style model where we have like equal split across incomes and so that's where you see the four different bands.
So we ran both options through our financial pro formas and here they are.
So the HOC model works and like it's hard to get my mouse to move.
Okay so bar the first bar is current inclusionary that's just a typical market rate project and those as you know are stalled oftentimes now because of high interest rates and high costs right.
So what the HOC does it injects in lieu of that private equity it pumps in the public subsidy into the project and you know and the Vienna model as you can see going further to rental option B that one requires even more public subsidy because with the mix of affordability and serving deeper incomes in the Vienna model you can't take on as much debt you need more public subsidy.
And so in running these models what we also wanted to do was throw in those European principles of social housing to see how enhancing these projects via kind of European principles would change the public subsidy needed.
So on the far right you have the enhanced rental projects.
So what we did there was that we assumed that if we could tap no cost land we were able to bring down construction costs by nine percent.
Think about it through creative mechanisms modular etc.
Finding ways to help pay for infrastructure to defray the costs borne by the individual affordable developers.
Berkeley could replace an HOC like a replicate an HOC model and potentially unlock projects that are entitled but stalled.
And so for example in rental option A under enhanced 100 unit project could move forward with 17 million in public subsidies in that scenario.
And in the enhanced rental option B that is more difficult because given the size of the gap that is a 30 million dollar gap.
So it's doable and you reach deeper affordability and those are the trade-offs.
So taking all of this together here are high level recommendations for short-term actions in the next one to three years.
There are details in each of these but I'm just going to highlight the high level.
First is to strengthen local partnerships.
Next is to promote tenant voice and transparency by piloting tenant governance and rent transparency and pilot projects in the city.
Next is to prioritize cost efficiency.
And then finally launching a social housing pilot.
You can issue a NOFA for the MIP program or work with the San Francisco Housing Accelerator Fund's BAHIF financing.
In addition you can pilot an affordable ownership using an acquisition rehab project and then also actively engage with the state's SB 555 study to position Berkeley for future funding.
I'm going to pass it to Janet to talk about long-term recommendations.
So in the longer term we recommended that the city might want to consider doing a strategic affordable housing strategic plan and that has several overarching benefits.
As Jessica mentioned and we've mentioned the Turner Center is working on a study.
We are hoping it results in some new state funding options for this kind of mixed income housing.
They should be done in about a year.
Don't know what's going to come out of it.
We've been in touch with them but that you could envision working on this for a year or so co-terminously with that so that when the state has more of a social housing approach set then Berkeley could be ready locally at nearly the same time.
And we thought to do that of course you would need advisory committee and council input and planning commission input but we outline here some of the items that you would want to look at under that plan.
The first one would be to set long-term goals defining income targets.
Jessica did a great job outlining some of that so there's plenty to talk about there.
Clarify the city's role in housing development and ownership.
That's kind of at the core of the social housing housing model is that it's public or mission-driven only.
Formulate a funding strategy.
We've sort of talked about some of that.
Establish formal cost containment standards.
That's a big area that a lot of people are working on and Berkeley might be able to contribute some really strong standards there.
Identify strategies for permanently decommodifying housing.
You know this means things like it's permanently affordable.
If there's any public money it can never go to market rate.
Things like that.
Formalize tenant governance structures which we talked about a lot in the report and is really key especially in the European models.
And design a human-centered housing system that would hope to be the overall outcome.
And with that I think it's going back to Mike to talk about what the HAC thought about all of this.
Sure thank you.
Yes well we presented to the housing advisory commission in June of this year and they formed a subcommittee to make formal recommendations which are included as attachment one of your agenda packet.
So I know Commissioner Debbie Potter is here tonight and I really wanted to thank the commission for all their thoughtful work and discussion around these ideas.
And I'll briefly summarize them for you.
So they wanted to reframe our existing programs with social housing principles specifically our housing trust fund and BMR programs.
Really focus on tenant governance.
A tenant governance framework as part of our program delivery specifically with transparency and accountability built into management practices.
Focus on identifying a funding strategy for the near term specifically around bond issuance for 2028 to follow measure O.
Focusing on cost containment specifically with development and operating costs and identifying sites.
And really setting realistic targets.
So you know their idea there was starting off with a pilot that would be achievable and demonstrate early success to really build credibility and buy-in from the community.
They also recommended piloting affordable ownership programs an affordable ownership project I should say through the acquisition and rehab model and using preferences to advance equity for any pilot project.
So with that we'll open it up to Q&A.
I also wanted to recognize Margo Ernst here the housing and community services manager.
My apologies for not introducing you earlier.
Thank you.
Thank you all very much for your presentation and for all the research that you've done here.
I want to see if my colleagues have any questions.
Excellent report.
Thank you.
Thank you again.
Looking at the number of the slide here.
Our successes regarding arena production rates versus us versus the city versus the county.
So for very low income we're at 59 percent.
So we're at a very low income.
We're at for very low income we're at 59 percent of our numbers.
Low income which is 80 percent is 52 percent.
The moderate at 14 percent.
And then we jump way up to above moderate 182.
So it looks as if this the same I guess tax credit scenario is not facilitating development of this kind of middle income housing.
Is that the conclusion to draw from this chart? Generally speaking tax credits go up to 80 percent AMI.
And the state when they're doing moderate it's 80 to 120.
So that's what the arena thing is.
And tax credits can go up to 80 but have to average 60 in the project.
So they're really in that 50 to 80s now.
Okay.
And then a question about the the recommendation to do the the ownership pilot.
Can you describe what that would look like just as an example? It's an acquisition.
We had an example building that was pictured there but we didn't talk about it.
Would you like to hear about that one? Yes please.
Okay.
It was profiled in the report.
We skipped a lot that's in the report but you know one of the things that we did do during this process was look at all the available sites of city owned.
We really wanted to get to low cost or no cost land.
That's a long story.
I'm happy to talk about it but we couldn't find a site that would yield more than 10 or 7 or 11 units among the ones the city owned that didn't have other constraints.
And so we pivoted after a while and we said oh but there are inexpensive privately owned older buildings.
Maybe that's another option.
So it's not free but it's much lower cost than new construction.
And we looked around.
This one had just sold.
So we had all the sales data.
It was a 2023 sale.
We were doing this in 24.
It's rent stabilized so we had the whole rent roll.
We showed it to you in the report.
The just for information's sake out of 21 units at that point in time it was roughly a 92 percent AMI average in in this building.
So you know some move out some move in.
It's not income controlled anyway.
It's just rent stabilized.
Anyway we had a design firm as a sub and they did new renderings to show what it would look like on the outside.
These are all one bedroom and in the courtyard.
These are all one bedrooms.
I think 600 square feet if I remember correctly you know could make perfect one bedroom condos.
They had relatively new appliances.
It looked like it had a lot of modest remodeling that had already been done and they had it had sold for what was it Jessica 250k 250k unit.
So if somebody bought that in 23 at 250k unit instead of building that one bedroom for 750k right away you can see the opportunity there.
Of course you have to phase work with tenants give them right first refusal you know there's a lot that would go on.
Some of those tenants would probably if you offered a good robust purchase program converting it to ownership would buy those units and other tenants may choose not to and then you could open it up to a preference list that would create that opportunity and you would set those sale prices related to the incomes that you chose to target.
So you could do it for 120% AMI households or 80% probably somewhere in that range and that's the kind of AMIs we were modeling in our models.
I hope that's that's great.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.
Thank you and we accounted for the rehab.
I mean you're seeing cosmetic we want to show you but you probably do a little more inside too but really it didn't need much.
I think Jessica maybe overestimated even the rehab in that case because when I looked at this building it was it was in pretty good shape but we wanted to be conservative.
Oh wonderful.
Thank you.
So that's how that could work.
Did you want to add anything to that Mike? No.
Thank you.
Council Member Trageb.
Thank you so much for the presentation.
I have I think four questions.
I was curious on the slide around renal production rates.
If you could speak to why moderate income is the only category where Berkeley is somewhat behind the rest of the county.

Segment 2

Janet mentioned it earlier, and so if you think about the two delivery systems that we have right now, we have Inclusionary and we have LIHTC, right? So to take the LIHTC component, to be..
LIHTC is very competitive.
I want to say, you know, in the SIDLAC world, only like 45% of projects that request funding get it every year.
And then there's a long waiting list of projects that line up over and over and keep applying.
And so the state has written the tiebreaker formulas in a way that tries to address the acute affordable housing crisis in California, which is really at ELI and BLI levels.
So the deeper you target your building, then the more competitive for financing you are, right? And so I would say that in the past few years, LIHTC buildings really support projects that have a high ELI and BLI concentration.
And as Janet mentioned, tax credits go up to 80, really, and so that 80 to 120 is not really addressed in the LIHTC model.
You could address it in your Inclusionary, right? Because I think Berkeley's Inclusionary is a 20% you can mix and match between units, and then you get your whatever density bonus associated with that from the state.
And so it's possible that people could choose to produce moderate through that.
So that's why it's underproduced, if that makes sense.
Can I add? I think the question also is why are we a little behind accounting? Yeah, that was the question.
My understanding is you couldn't mix and match beyond low income and very low income.
I think there's a simpler answer.
A lot of the growth in the county that has Inclusionary is Livermore, Pleasanton.
They all have Inclusionary, but they go up to 120 AMI, and so they're going to be producing a little bit more.
And you were very active in market rate in your current cycle, too, as you know, which is why that bar is so high.
But other parts of the county that I'm mentioning are as well.
So, yeah, you're even more active than the county.
That's the main reason.
Thank you.
You partially answered the question I had about the Dwight property.
It's really interesting.
It is in my district.
I was very, yeah, I appreciated the report looking at it.
Can you just confirm it is still under, like, technically it's still market rate.
This is a, is there an actual rehab being proposed, or is this a hypothetical illustrative example? I missed which property you mentioned.
I'm sorry.
Oh, the one we're talking about.
No, it's not a proposal that we know about.
We picked it because we knew the sale amount, and we wanted a smaller example project kind of in the middle of Berkeley.
It wasn't too fancy, wasn't too, you know, needing a lot of rehab, and it was a sale that we had information on.
So it wasn't because there was a real project being proposed there.
Yeah.
Okay.
And then my final question for now is just a lot has happened since the study was first commissioned, including the passage of Measure BB, which is cited in your report, but also just the overlay around, you know, the small sites program.
And I was curious if you could speak to how your, maybe if you could address the gap between what Berkeley is currently doing under its existing programs.
So what are the things that we are not currently doing that you're recommending we look at? And actually, as part of that, you did emphasize in your modeling, you looked at some federal funding.
How is the picture different now? We are going into a shutdown in six hours, just as an example.
So, you know, the first thing to clarify is the graphic you saw, where it showed the amount of public subsidy.
That's the gap between what the debt, the rents would support and any public subsidy.
It's before tax credits or anything else.
I think we did look at that.
That's the gap between what the debt, the rents, would support and any public subsidy.
I think we did show in the report what happens after you inject tax credits.
It's not quite as gloomy and it's not all Berkeley money on those bars that are labeled public.
It depends what program, rent or owner and how you're doing the mix.
I don't think I can come, I'm gonna go to the end of your question.
It's very hard to comment on what the outlook is for affordable housing funding at the federal level.
None of us have a crystal ball.
There have been some changes recently to the federal tax credit rules that people that build that kind of housing are happy about.
It's a complex technical change that might free up a little more tax credit money in California than it does in California.
That will then be competed for again by everybody in Berkeley and everywhere.
So there's a little more that way.
There have been proposals to change more rules and try to get more tax credits flowing.
There's other proposals from the current administration and some changes that have already happened around opportunity zones, which Jessica and I are not expert in.
That's a whole nother kettle of fish, as they used to say.
Let's see, what was your question in the middle? The question in the middle is a good question.
What is Berkeley doing and not doing that they could do? We were coming at this through a social housing lens.
That is one particular lens.
It happens to be very trendy right now.
Everyone's looking at it.
Everyone's talking about it.
We tried to highlight some of the principles underlying it and how they fit within the current system.
I think the key one that gets us really excited is the mix of incomes because it's the debate in my whole career, and I'm pretty old, has been every time I'm doing affordable housing for a city, should we look at ELI mostly? And those are the most in need, which is where my heart tends to lie.
But there's always a component saying, but I want to own, too, and that's important, too.
Social housing tries to strike a balance in all of that, sort of being tied together by the idea that housing is a human right, which is really a strong feeling of ours.
I think it's hard to answer your question.
You're doing a lot of things right, but are you doing them in a sort of holistic way? And it's very hard to do because you've got, this is our whole career, multiple layers of funding, different development types, different elected official tenures that might want to focus on different aspects of housing need.
I know it's hard to hear, but I've spent 45 years in this and related work, and sometimes I feel like my work only made a dent.
I did the inclusionary study for the city of New York and Luthi for the city of LA, so two biggest cities in the U.S.
I had a lot to do with trying to advance those programs, and still, I don't know if I'm in a debt.
And now Jessica's going to get less emotional.
I'm equally emotional about affordable housing, and so I think I want to reiterate the question, which was, what are we doing now that we're not doing that we can continue to do? The question is also, how is the picture different now? I want to, I think, frame this thinking about Vienna and Denmark, right? Denmark is 20% affordable.
Vienna's 43.
And I think people who go to Vienna, it's like, oh, it's mad.
This is Disneyland.
This is wonderful.
I think people need to know that it took 100 years to do that.
But I sit on the local school.
Yeah.
So, I mean, I sit on the school board where I live, so these facilities are much nicer than ours.
But I would say that, you know, you are in a position of governance where you can set the stage for the long view, right? So I would encourage you to do that.
And so when you think about what you can do, so here are the things, just quickly, I would say thinking about long-term funding commitments.
You continue to have bond measures, right, and to continue to renew those and maybe think creatively about how else you can do it.
And I don't, within the parameters of California, right, Vienna has a 1% payroll tax that's ongoing and that's how they pay for it.
We have different mechanisms and have to think about that.
Number two, I would say cost containment innovations, right? I think that everything adds on and it gets continually more expensive.
Is there a way to be more creative and push the envelope there? Because that is another way to effectively help your public subsidy because you're trying to push down the cost as much as possible.
Resident and tenant governance is a big piece, especially when you talk to the folks on the ground in Berkeley and your residents.
I think what happens now when prices just keep soaring for regular folks, it's like they feel they don't have control.
And when I go to CLT conferences and I go to these places, that's what I hear.
I just hear residents wanting to have control of their lives in some way, right? And I think being able to pair the delivery and affordable unit with some sort of tenant governance, and that means tenant governance in tandem with good management, property management, is really important.
And cracking that nut will take, I think, collaboration with your groups, your CLTs and folks on the ground here and your tenant unions and all of those.
So I think that's an important thing.
And lastly, I would just tack on a Janet's comment about housing for all, right, is that resident stability.
And so that's what I would kind of try.
That's how I'm going to try to answer that one.
I would add, too, you know, what we're seeing in practice is the majority of the pipeline, both affordable and market, is focused on rental.
And so ownership opportunities aren't moving forward in the same way.
And I know that from working with commissions and doing community engagement, more ownership opportunities is what we hear from the community a lot.
Okay, thank you.
Moving on to Council Member Lunapara.
Thank you.
And thank you so much for the report.
In the medium term in that report, you mentioned under decommodification tools, the community and tenant opportunity to purchase.
I'm curious if you could talk a little bit more about how you think that that plays in to all of this.
Yeah.
So Janet and I have done a lot of work in COPA, TOPA, OPA worlds.
And I would say I was just in Mountain View or like reading Mountain View's current strategies in that.
And so I would say and I would actually bring this back to our work in D.C.
And so we did a just cause for eviction study for Portland once.
And we were looking at the TOPA equivalent.
We looked at D.C.
because they've had theirs on the books for a long, long time.
And when we talked to the folks on the ground there, my takeaway, key takeaway from that was that if you want TOPA, you have to have the money.
Right? Because it doesn't make sense to just have the requirements and the process if you can't back that up with funding.
And so I would say that if that's something that you want to move forward with, if you are able to find a way for a bond measure or whatever dedicated funding source to support a small site in a vigorous way, then I think TOPA works really well.
In Mountain View, they have a community ownership thing that they're pushing forward, a program.
And it's related to their kind of smaller sites initiative.
And I think they came to the same conclusion when they considered whether to kind of deploy a TOPA in tandem with that.
Thank you so much.
I appreciate that.
I'm also curious if you could talk a little more about your ideas to get more student information or data.
So it's a tricky subject because, you know, for a long time, policy discussions around students would revolve around students are temporarily and by choice, quote unquote, poor and don't always qualify for all of the kinds of housing programs that are out there.
On the other hand, now we have a whole for a whole bunch of reasons.
Students who are unhoused.
We have students who are not necessarily doing a four year degree or a two year grad degree that's stretching out because it costs so much.
You have a whole many more dimensions to this challenge.
You know, we recommended doing a survey, a statistically rigorous survey so that you have some better information.
UC knows how many students there are and they know where they live, but they don't.
And if they apply for financial aid, they might have a sense of incomes during the school year.
But, you know, it's still not robust enough information, even if you could get all that from them.
I've worked for the UC system in my career and done these kind of surveys in other cities.
And, you know, that's usually the best way is to go on the ground, do it the other way and really find out the data you need directly from the students.
And Mike and his division had a great idea about, you know, working with one of several research institutes at the university because they might be able to do that kind of work.
You know, very inexpensively for the city.
Thank you.
Okay, Council Member Blackaby.
Thank you, Madam Mayor, and thank you to each of you for the presentation, giving us a lot to think about this afternoon.
One question I just want to start with, because kind of the context for me is really important in thinking about this, which is, you know, give a sense to kind of meet our arena targets and just sort of our growth targets as a city.
You know, putting this in context is like how much more do we need to build affordable housing wise in the next 10 years, 20 years.
You know, is this a thousand years 10,000 units.
I don't have the data at hand, but I'm curious, you know, as you've been looking at this.
Because it also helps us think about is this five projects, 10 projects, 20 projects, how do we get there, how do we piece it together.
Do you have some of that at hand, just to put it in context for us? I mean, we don't really know, but I should point out, you know, ARENA is the state filtering down through the COG to you about your goals in an eight year cycle.
Until recently, they didn't account for any rent burden existing residents.
It was all around growth.
This last cycle, there are some adjustment factors to account for some of that, but it still doesn't line up with that graph I showed you.
So the first answer is it's never enough because you have, if you really wanted to serve everyone, it's a huge lift and it's bigger than ARENA.
I don't know the answer to that, but we probably could run some numbers and figure it out.
Jessica's going to do that right now.
I mean, I could just say, first of all, Janet's slide on slide four.
I think it was then just if we looked at cost burden renter households and you just looked at ELI and VLI, we have 10,000.
We have 10,000 households that are cost burdened.
Some number of students may not fit in a definition, depending on your type.
You have pent up demand from homeownership for people who want to have access to homeownership.
Right.
And so it's a lot.
Right.
And if you think about it.
Right.
And so if you think about, you know, right now you're on your restricted rental stock is six percent of your total inventory.
And of course, total inventory includes, you know, your Berkeley Hills homes.
Right.
So there is a way to parse that a little bit finer, I think.
But I think it's clear if you have 9,700 applicants for 87 units, maybe, you know, 9,700 minus 87.
There are some state numbers.
I just don't have them memorized about the order of magnitude and the billions of dollars at the state level.
You've probably seen them.
Yeah.
And they're just they just become sort of mind boggling.
Yeah.
So for me, I mean, just moving forward as we think about it, and this is kind of beyond the scope of your particular study, but just I think to guide us is like putting together the plan that says here's where we're trying to go.
And here's how we build the plan with the various components to get to the target.
You know, that's the kind of thing that kind of I ultimately would kind of gravitate towards.
How do you how do the pieces fit together to kind of get to the to the end goal? I know it's, again, beyond the scope of what you were asked, which is for us to think about.
The other thing, again, I think about it.
And again, this is simplistic.
This is the management consulting technique, but kind of the two by two matrix.
Right.
The and if you put scale on one side and cost on the other, I mean, certainly the thing we're looking for is what's the thing that scales the quickest? That's the cheapest to build.
Right.
And anything in the box that's low cost and high scale, we'd absolutely go for.
I sense there's probably not many things in that box.
It would be interesting to know money there might be.
Yeah, I think that the the bridge housing acquisition of Avalon is a really interesting one.
And I think that kind of project should be pursued more.
I say that because a lot of market rate developers, you know, for a while, because interest rates are so high and they can't get their equity investors have actually been buying distressed, distressed market rate deals at a deep discount.
Right.
I've approached housing California and a lot of the advocates groups.
And I'm like, why isn't there state funding to do the same thing for affordable? It seems to make a lot of sense if you can acquire a unit at 250.
Why would you do that instead of building at 750? I think that should be part of the state strategy.
But if you look at the bridge acquisition, that actually required no public subsidy.
Right.
And how that worked is that they were I think they partnered with CM, CMFA to get some sort of agreement.
Right.
Where there's some sort of regulatory agreement that allowed them to qualify for the welfare tax exemption.
So they were able to take half of the market rate units and turn 50 percent of those to be affordable at 80 percent.
Am I at no cost to the city just through a welfare tax exemption? Right.
And so if you look at there are there are investors.
Right.
No property tax or property tax only on 50 percent of the building.
So that is a no cost scalable way to do it.
There are groups that are starting to.
So the Vistria Group is a national organization.
They do have like a representative here in California.
And that's what they do.
They help.
They kind of pair pension funds, insurance companies, kind of patient capital with this model.
But they're one to do that.
Right.
I know certain affordable developers who have the balance sheet to do it are shifting to more acquisitions.
So bridge housing is an example.
But not all developers do that or nonprofits can do that.
But I think that's a really important scalable thing that we should be thinking about is utilizing preservation.
We're in, you know, arguably we're you know, I've done this a long time.
We're real estate market rate real estate goes up and down, up and down like this over time.
And we're in a period where, you know, values are stable or falling.
This is why you see.
So Avalon sold a 10 year old building to bridge for three hundred thirty five units.
That's very cheap for a 10 year old building.
And, you know, there's going to be more opportunities like that.
I mean, the new construction we showed you was you guys entitled that building and then it's been on the market.
So that owner that landowners trying to sell the entitlements to someone else because they're not breaking ground.
You've seen it on Center Street, other places.
So that's where we're at.
Got a lot of sort of pause building new sort of some investors leaving.
There may be some very good opportunities.
And then these older rent stabilized buildings.
It's funny because I've done all this.
I've looked this so many times.
But, you know, the investor can be outside of Berkeley, tends to discount those buildings like a lot.
That's why a sale price we're telling you was like that, even though it goes to market when they leave.
Even though, you know, a lot of things are just kind of a aura around older rent stabilized buildings that tend to get discounted on the national investor market.
Yeah, there's opportunities, but it's very hard for a local government to sort of move that in that direction quickly enough.
But right now, it's a good time.
Yeah, I wanted to add that bridge has a two hundred and fifty million dollar revolving loan credit from Morgan Stanley Bank.
And that's a way they can really facilitate these sales quickly on the market.
And that's a really important financing tool.
That's different from what we're seeing with our traditional affordable housing finance.
And so going back to your question, council member Lunaparra about Topa or Copa.
Similarly, the city is more set up to develop a traditional loan for a new construction project.
And acquisitions like this need really vast money.
Essentially, that's kind of different from how our loan process operates.
And which I think is appropriate because, you know, we have public funding.
We want to make sure it's secure and a good commitment.
So working with a bank partner like Bridges doing is a really great, exciting strategy that we're seeing.
And then there's the Bay Area.
That's called now Bay Area.
You know, that's the accelerator fund that they were designed to inject money like that quickly, whether it was Topa or a nonprofit that didn't that weren't residents.
Right.
One more question will be done of the two models for the acquisition, rehab and then the new construction model.
Obviously, you identified that, you know, lower costs and faster unit delivery on the acquisition rehab model.
Especially if you do the ownership conversion because the subsidy gets reduced substantially at that point.
But there are real funding limitations because there's a lack of dedicated state and federal funding for that.
Given kind of the relative attractiveness and the cost effectiveness of it.
Why do you think that is and is there a potential for that to change and for more sort of state and federal support to maybe not federal support, state support to materialize? But like I'm just I'm trying to I'm trying to unlock that a little bit because it seems to make sense that for local jurisdictions, if this is the if this is a path, it's more attractive.
Why wouldn't there be more subsidization of this path? I mean, in some cities, it's been an ongoing debate.
I alluded to it before.
You know, you're filling a bond in 1995 in San Francisco.
Do you do it for ELI or ownership or both? Yeah, you know, that's a whole discussion.
Go to Oakland, you're doing the same thing.
It really has a different outcome.
I think right now, also, there are a lot of federal and some state programs that used to exist that don't, you know, that don't anymore on the ownership side.
A lot of the policy has been directed towards the buyer.
So there are programs, first time buyers that are statewide.
Some cities do that.
There's down payment assistance.
We don't really talk about the buyer side very much in our report.
I don't think.
Right.
But I think that's where a lot of the policy has gone.
I don't know, Mike, maybe you have more answers.
Yeah, I would say that in terms of new construction versus acquisition rehab, you know, the tax credit program really flows from the feds is focused on new construction and the state partners kind of adds on to that.
And so it kind of creates a pairing system, essentially.
And so our dollars are used to leverage those dollars in that system.
And those funding streams just aren't set up to support acquisition in the same way.
So it's kind of like a larger systems issue.
So the taxpayers only run.
There have been proposals for ownership tax credits, which would be a great idea.
I would add that there was a moment where the foreclosure intervention profession program was proposed.
That was a half a billion to kind of acquire existing buildings.
But that got cut when there was a budget issue in the state of California.
I know the 20 potential 2028 California housing bond.
That one also has a half a billion dollars for acquisition rehab specifically.
And so hopefully if that one passes, then there's a there will be a pool of state money to tap to.
Great, thank you.
Thank you.
Council member Taplin.
Thank you, Madam Mayor.
I want to thank the consulting team and the housing advisory committee.
This referral was among the first I introduced in 2021.
I'm really excited and grateful to see the study and received his presentation.
I had the opportunity to ask questions in advance and thankful for responses.
I just want to say for my part, I strongly support income integration for cost subsidizing and creating equitable pathways of ownership, cost containment, as well as the principles of tenant governance and housing to accommodate resident life cycles.
I think acquisition of rehab and new construction are both valuable.
I look forward to the day when Berkeley can can transition to more of a Montgomery agency model, public agency development, ownership and taxes and bond financing.
I'm especially interested in financing strategies like a revolving loan fund and potential pilot projects.
I look forward to working with my council colleagues and with the hack to move social housing forward in Berkeley.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Council member.
Did you have comments you want to make or questions? Thank you very much, Madam Mayor.
And thank you for the presentation on the report.
Thank you to our staff.
I want to thank council member Taplin for bringing forward this item, because I think it is important for us to state our values.
And I do want to be clear.
And I hope my record shows that I do believe that housing is a human right.
But I just want to be clear that I don't think that the models that are proposed in this report make sense for our city at this time because of our fiscal situation.
And I want to be really clear, because this is something I talked about during the budget process.
I want to repeat what I said.
I don't think we should be spending our scarce public resources on acquiring old apartment buildings that are already subject to rent control and just cause for eviction.
And there are three reasons why I do not think we should be doing that.
First, those acquisitions, as you noted, cannot leverage state and federal sources of funding.
Second, those acquisitions do not create a single new unit of housing.
And finally, I think this is most important, the tenants in those units are already subject to rent control protections and just cause for eviction.
So even if the owner changes, because we often hear the land trust, I believe there is a representative of the land trust here, we often hear about ownership changes.
But guess what? If that is an old apartment building that is subject to rent control, those tenants are protected.
I'm very grateful to live in a city that has such strong tenant protections.
We need to realize that and put our scarce affordable housing dollars into where they can go the farthest.
And we've seen that.
We saw the beautiful building here, the new affordable housing building right across from Ashby.
That's the kind of work we need to focus on.
New affordable housing, and I have to say, I don't agree with using local public subsidy for people who make more than 120% of the area median income.
That's middle class workers.
Again, we have scarce public resources.
We have people who can't afford to buy food.
They stand in line at the Berkeley Food Network.
Those are the people I want to create low income affordable housing for.
I just want to be honest.
We can't print money.
We have to focus.
So we have to focus on the people who need the housing the most.
But guess what? I believe that housing is a human right.
We do need to help the middle class.
That is why I worked with colleagues on this dais.
That is why we unanimously passed a middle housing ordinance.
So that we can actually use our land.
We can rezone and make better use of the land that we have.
There's no reason why we should have spent 50 years only allowing one single family home on a parcel, right? So we have changed that now.
And I heard the desire for ownership opportunities.
That is why I put forward the referral around subdivision.
So we can actually take that huge 5,000 square foot parcel and turn it into five parcels where we could have five ownership opportunities.

Segment 3

And that's why I put forward the referral to actually allow the sale of accessory dwelling units.
So we are trying to create ownership opportunities that are entry-level for middle-class workers.
I think we should be doing that, but I think we have to be realistic.
It doesn't make sense.
We can't afford to be subsidizing housing for middle-class workers.
Look at our budget.
It's a $28 million deficit.
So, you know, so I had to get that off my chest, and I want to be respectful.
I had no, you know, I understand the council asked you to do this report.
You're telling us about Denmark and Vienna.
You know, it's not realistic for us.
I need to be the one on the dais to just say that.
But I think we are doing a whole heck of a lot.
I think we're already pursuing everything that we can reasonably pursue.
And I also want to say we have to continue to advocate at the state level, because there's a lot of dumb laws on the books.
One of them I just want to point out, you know, the construction liability law for condos.
That's why we can't get condos.
And I don't understand the politics around that, why we can't change that law at the state level.
But that's what we have to do.
We have to keep advocating for those changes so that we can make better use of the opportunities that we do have.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
So, Council Member Humbert, I believe you have some comments or questions.
Yes, thank you.
Thank you, Madam Mayor.
And before I thank everybody, I want to say I largely join in Council Member Keserwani's comments, and she's going to be a hard act for me to follow.
But I want to thank all of you.
I want to thank Vice Mayor Taplin.
It's his last day as Vice Mayor.
For pushing our consideration of social housing.
And I want to thank Director Gilman, Margo Ernst, the HHCS staff, and the consultants for their work on this effort and the resulting report.
It's kind of a massive piece of work.
I do have some quibbles with the study and the report, but I want to focus on key questions and elements that struck a chord with me.
At the end of the day, I'm likewise not persuaded that acquiring existing units is the best path forward for providing affordable homes, regardless of whether that is part of a broader social housing model or not.
Acquiring existing units fundamentally does not increase our housing supply.
In some cases, it does remove rent-stabilized rental units from the open market permanently.
This is something we've really tried to endeavor to prevent through other of our municipal policies.
It's true that some acquisition models do give sitting tenants even more stability than rent control alone.
But the trade-off is that these homes are no longer potentially open to everybody, squeezing folks who don't win the housing lottery to get one of these units, or whose income disqualifies them.
Acquisition is less expensive per unit than construction, but at the end of the day, construction means we actually get another home into our housing supply.
That's, from my perspective, just critical.
We've all heard a lot about how acquisition funds don't leverage new construction.
Creating new homes also helps meet our housing, health, safety, and environmental goals by creating additional homes that are more disaster and fire resistant than old homes.
They're more energy efficient, and they have modern amenities.
More new homes also expand our tax base, and they mean more customers for our local businesses, and that's a good.
For these reasons and others, I think that as much as possible, our focus in Berkeley should remain on creating new homes at all levels.
I think this single passage in the report sums up the biggest questions for us, and unfortunately, it doesn't appear really to the end of the bulleted list on page 5 of the agenda packet.
And I'm quoting here, there are two different strategies for new construction.
One, leveraging the market by including more market rate units to cross-subsidize lower income units with public funds filling the equity gap, or relying on larger public investment to serve a higher portion of the low income households.
Given this passage in our budget situation, I see two main options before the city, because we don't have any extra funds in our general fund.
That's certainly true.
If we really want to seriously pursue social housing, one, persuade voters to support a very large expenditure and attendant revenue measure to allow for a high proportion of subsidized units that will require ongoing support, or two, persuade voters to support a smaller expenditure, which would still likely require a significant revenue measure to allow for mixed income projects that have lower proportions of subsidized units but are more financially self-sustaining over time.
If we're going to move forward with some sort of social housing program, and I think this social housing is a really interesting possibility, the latter option is what I'd like to see, and I think we would need to focus on something that is simple, streamlined, and sustainable.
Maybe that means the city effectively becomes a developer of mixed income, but mostly moderate or market rate housing, or maybe it means that we become a source of low interest financing for counter-cyclical building.
I think these are more akin to the Montgomery Housing Opportunity Commission model that the report discusses.
The report also calls this approach option A, cross-subsidization half and half.
I'm not sure that half and half is actually the ratio that we should or reasonably could strive for, and maybe that a lower affordable percentage or maybe even dynamic ratio setting are necessary to support, to assure self-sustaining projects and funding.
I really love the idea of self-sustaining projects.
The report seems to indicate that a 50-50 split would only be possible with some significant cost containment, and as Council Member Kesarwani said, that's sort of difficult here.
We have a tendency here in Berkeley to want new housing, I'm pretty close here, to be all things to all people.
We want it to provide solar power, rainwater retention, open space.
Arts funding, job training, bird-safe glass.
All of these things have merit, but they're all really expensive.
Either way, I'm hard-pressed to see how we could financially and electorally move forward with any meaningful, large, and impactful social housing program without leveraging significant cross-subsidy from a strong market rate component.
We're only about a year away from the November 2026 election.
That's not enough time, I don't think, to do anything.
2028, where we would be considering a Measure O replacement.
So I think we ought to think of maybe about a 2028 measure.
I'm not sure what the next steps would be, but I would personally look forward to staff bringing back some more concrete options based on what we've seen in this report tonight and what staff have heard from Council this evening.
And so finally, I again want to thank everybody here for this report and Council Member Weissmeyer-Taplin for his efforts on this.
Thanks a whole lot.
Thank you.
I think that's it from my colleagues for the moment, so I will take public comment.
I'm grateful for this comprehensive, detailed study, including on homeownership.
It's very ambitious, and so I'm interested in how this can be developed towards a much more narrowed focus, given the uncertainties of our current federal administration funding.
It's very difficult to rely on external government funding or our own city funding, given the uncertainties.
Or our own city funding, given that we may be in the position of struggling with persons whose own current subsidies and vouchers may be lost.
So aside from other non-governmental partnerships which we could enter into, I'm inclined towards favoring self-sustaining models that would involve either extremely low-income and very low-income persons, because of the tax credits that would be available, I'm presuming those will still be available, and scaled-income housing of different incomes, from extremely low, very low, low, and moderate.
Tenant governance also requires oversight, such as a land trust.
And I do support small sites.
I live in a tenant-operated affordable housing complex.
Board governance seems to be generally based on a me-first model, evading affordable housing and other regulations, and people with higher incomes living off the backs of the poor.
So you have to have oversight.
And in this sense, I think we can use our land trust for oversight, but I do believe we have to be realistic.
I think this is a great study, and I think we have to deal with what's now, and then perhaps we can expand more in the future, but deal with the realities of what's going on now.
Thank you.
Thanks, Carol.
Matt and our smallest guest.
I promise this is not a prop.
This is child care.
Good morning, or good evening, everyone.
Mayor and council, my name is Matt Gustafson.
I am now the organizational director of the Bay Area Community Land Trust.
I think many of us have met.
I know a lot of you have come out to see some of our projects and meet some of our residents.
In Berkeley, of course, I'm here to pitch the vision of community land trust and how this fits with social housing.
I'm really grateful to Councilmember Taplin and to the council and you all here for having the vision to commission a study like this.
The state of California is also moving in the same direction with the statewide study.
I think about social housing.
This is not a conversation about tomorrow or next year.
This is a conversation about the future.
This is the future in Berkeley.
I think it's so important to be exploring these things.
There's a lot of talk about units, and we can talk about units and houses and new houses and preserving houses, but I don't want to lose the thread about tenant governance, which is the soul of the body of a home.
We don't just have units with slumlords.
That's not the future that we want for our city and for our residents.
I think when I see the principles and the pillars of social housing and tenant governance and decommodification and real power of renters, I think community land trusts, frankly, are the vanguard for this movement in California.
It's small but growing.
We have, across the state, 1,600 units across almost 60 community land trusts now.
In Berkeley alone, there's 17 properties held by two land trusts with 109 units.
Berkeley's been doing this for a while, and so I would urge and encourage the council to continue to invest in the programs that work.
We're really grateful for the capacity-building funds that the city has invested in our land trust, the small sites program.
As Jessica mentioned, the affordable housing bond statewide going up next year right now includes $500 million in matching funds for preservation, which cities like Berkeley could be well set up and positioned to receive if we continue investing in these programs that we already have.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Debbie's going to give me her time as well.
Hello, council members and mayor.
I'm David Scheer.
I'm on the Housing Advisory Commission, and I'm speaking tonight on behalf of the commission.
First, I want to thank the consultants for their work on this report.
It is full of fantastic ideas and analysis.
I learned a lot.
It is a meaningful contribution to the national conversation that is taking place around social housing.
Like Mike said, back in June, the consultants came and shared a draft with us.
We formed an ad hoc committee to go further into it.
I was on that committee, and you can see the output of that in your agenda packet tonight.
It was unanimously approved by the commission.
I want to draw your attention to just a few things as you continue this discussion.
First, I just want to emphasize what Berkeley has been really successful at building affordable housing, especially compared to the county and the region.
That is amazing, and I think we should be singing it from the rooftops because I'm guessing that most people don't know that.
I did not know that.
Second, Measure O is done.
The bonds are sold.
The funds are allocated.
It is over.
If we want to continue the success executed on some of these ideas in the report, if we want to take advantage of these matching funds, of some of these federal technical tax credit changes, we are going to need something to replace it.
It's another bond measure and or something else.
Council and staff should start the work on getting something together for 2028.
Third, I want to bring up the Berkeley Housing Authority and its nonprofit developer arm, Affordable Housing Berkeley.
We have an organizational structure in place today that is similar to what they have in Montgomery County, Maryland, similar in purpose.
This is a structure that we can lean into.
We can possibly scale, and we already have it.
I want to briefly highlight the opportunity of the acquisition rehab ownership model.
It requires, as folks have said, a lower per-unit subsidy.
I'll make sure it's clear, a lower local per-unit subsidy.
That's without any matching than traditional programs.
Then you can think about the possibilities in terms of advancing our equity agenda and when you place it next to our existing preference policies, which include a preference for people who owned homes and lost them to foreclosure.
So there is possibly something there.
Something else from the report that I thought kind of blew my mind, the idea of wait list coordination.
This is, I live in an affordable one-bedroom, and my family is growing, so do I have to get in the back of a line for a two-bedroom, or is there a way, because I'm already in the system, is there a way to make it easier for me to stay in the system, stay in Berkeley with my family? That is an amazing idea.
The report talks about convening our existing providers, and I think that that's something that we should look at if we can.
To tie it up, we should not think of social housing as a new program next to all of our other programs, but instead as the philosophical underpinning of our entire affordable housing ecosystem.
It is a set of principles and values that we can move towards and try to apply to all of our affordable housing work, permanent affordability, community control, mixed income integration, and public nonprofit ownership.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Sorry it takes me so long to get up here.
Hi, all of you.
And you, thank you, and everyone here.
You know I'm not a data or analysis or financial person.
I am a constructor, building homes and alternative building techniques, straw bale, cob, rammed earth.
And I'm aware of the fact that one of your good council people here said, housing is a human right, actually it's a necessity.
And whether it was originally in caves, or under trees, or lean-to's, or teepees, or whatever, we've been around for thousands of years, more than that, and we've always figured it out.
And I'm kind of amazed at how many financial contrivances we can come up with when we want to.
It's like, we can shuffle the cards here, and basically do whatever we choose to, and that's my concern because I've been in Berkeley for 40 years, and it sure has become gentrified.
It sure has become developed into these monstrosities of buildings.
And yes, housing is good, but we already have lots of housing that's going to waste.
And I'm a waste not want not kind of person.
I'm very sad that it appears to be that, I don't know, affordability is up for grabs, in terms of what, I laughed when I saw the figure.
I mean, it just cracked me up, right? It's like, people need places to stay, we can come up with a way, and Europe, taking a hundred years, well then we should be able to do it in five minutes.
It's like, they've already invented the wheel, and on the Great Panthers board, which I'm a member of, people are all over the world studying this.
I look forward to continuing this conversation.
Thank you.
Thanks, Maria.
Are there folks online? Thank you, Mayor.
Just triple checking, there are, oh, just had one hand raised.
It's for a public comment related to the item on the agenda.
If you'd like to provide public comment, please use the raise hand function in Zoom.
And we have currently one speaker.
Sarah, you should be able to speak.
Hi, quick check, is my microphone working? Yes.
Wonderful.
Hi, my name is Sarah Bell.
I am also on the Housing Advisory Commission, and I would just like to echo Commissioner Scheer's comment.
I think Berkeley is a wonderful place to be at the vanguard of a lot of these social housing experiments.
And I think we should leverage our existing housing authority.
We should also do what we can to get additional funding, hopefully through a bond measure on a future ballot.
And I'm really excited to see what our city will accomplish.
So thank you very much.
I'll be brief.
Thanks, Sarah.
Okay, and that was our one and only speaker.
Okay, thank you very much.
Council Member Trakop, did you have additional comments? Thank you, Madam Mayor.
I have comments before I have questions.
I wanted to thank Vice Mayor Kaplan as well for his leadership in moving forward this item.
I note that it was ranked number two in that year's RRB process.
And I think it is just as of interest now than it ever was given all the, not just talk, but movement around social housing framework.
I would also like to thank the consultants who did the study and the staff that worked with them.
I thought your presentation was excellent.
And I believe you have really hit home both the opportunities of social housing and what to look out for.
There is a tension that I think we will continue to talk about as a council between the realities of today, what is possible today, and what could be possible if we shift the paradigm.
I grew up in Europe.
I grew up in a mixed-income, government-issued apartment with intergenerational living opportunities.
That is not the reality for too many of us here in this nation and therefore in Berkeley as well.
However, and I will echo what some have said, I would like to shout from the solar rooftops about the work that Berkeley has done in that space, which I agree we should be very proud of.
And I think the whole thing feels less daunting to me and maybe others if we look at social housing not as a standalone thing that must be festooned on top of what we're already doing, but rather, to many of the speakers' point, as a framework.
It reminds me of sometimes arguments within organizations.
Should equity be a standalone thing? No.
It needs to be a framework that undergirds every other thing that we do.
And so, it feels to me that community land trusts and the Berkeley Housing Authority model currently come the closest to a social housing model.
And I know that we will have further discussion about the opportunities and costs of supporting these models, but I just wanted to say that I personally support them and the value proposition that they provide.
I also appreciate the HAC's suggestions.
I'm not going to go over them.
They are in our materials.
I think they're really helpful.
I would like to, if I'm still on this council, work with my colleagues to develop a 2028 ballot measure.
And I also think that at the state level, and I think we have a lot of alignment here on the council around this, continuing to look at opportunities to remove barriers to home ownership, both at the state level, but also looking at the local level.
For example, currently, condoization, we're working to, we have recently reduced some barriers to it.
I understand that there was a policy choice by past councils to make it more challenging to do tenancies in common.
I have a constituent in my district that has a tenancy in common that she and her housemates developed 40 years ago.
There are other models out there that work effectively and could be really leveraged towards a Berkeley that we can all call home.
So thank you so much again.
Thank you.
Council Member Lunapara.
Thank you.
Thank you.
I also want to thank Council Member Kaplan, staff, and the consultant team.
This is a great presentation.
And I studied urban studies in college, and it was just beautiful.
So thank you.
I also really want to highlight the Housing Advisory Commission's comments.
I thought that that was a really beautiful and succinct way to describe how to think about moving forward with these recommendations.
And in addition to what some of my colleagues have said about uplifting the work that Berkeley's already done, I want to take this opportunity to talk a little bit about something from the field of urban studies that I'm really passionate about.
I think that seeing these models of Vienna and Denmark and thinking about how it would be impossible to bring them here kind of misses the point of analyzing them in the first place.
It doesn't mean that we're going to be copying and pasting these social housing suburbs from Vienna in the Bay Area.
It means that we're going to adapt them, take some of the things that would work for our city, picking and choosing what is working and what isn't working, and what we as Berkeley in our very different financial situation and economic structures that we have, how we can apply them here.
And I think that this report did a great job of highlighting that and I am excited to continue to work on this.
So thank you.
Thank you.
Other comments from council members? Okay.
I want to thank you all again very much for the work that you did to put this together and comment on something that you mentioned earlier.
You said you felt like you had only made like a small dent or something like that.
I don't know what exactly the word was.
But I think that it's important because studies like this and this kind of work helps to plant the seeds.
And like you said, it took 100 years in Europe.
So, you know, it's important to start those conversations now.
I understand that, you know, folks have different opinions about this, but I really see this work as a both and not an either or.
And I really appreciate Council Member Linaparte's comments about taking what we can do here in our city and applying the research here.
So thank you all very much.
And thank you very much to the HAC, both for being here and also for your recommendations, for your work on this.
It's nice to get a chance to see our commissioners come in.
So thank you all very much for the work that you did.
And of course, to our city staff as well.
I think that that's all we have for this evening.
So I will entertain a motion to adjourn.
Okay.
And is there any opposition to adjourning for this evening? Okay.
We will adjourn unanimously then.
Meeting adjourned.
Thank you all.
Thank you.
Recording stopped.