The record · Transcript
Council Session — 2026-03-05
Transcript from the session's official auto-captions (29,127 words), shown in readable case and split into speaker turns. Speakers are not yet identified (colors just separate consecutive turns). Auto-captions can contain errors — check the recording for anything that matters.
Session summaryEditor-reviewed
The Portland City Council held a work session on March 5, 2026, focused on unspent Housing Bureau funds, with facilitation shifting to the Housing and Homelessness Committee chair. A Housing Bureau presentation described roughly $106 million in previously unbudgeted housing-related balances, explaining that most funds carry committed or planned uses, with about $20.7 million in Rental Services Office dollars considered most available for near-term allocation. Extended technical questioning addressed discrepancies between the $106 million figure and an alternate $137 million figure; officials stated the figures were derived differently and said further reconciliation work was needed. Discussion covered fund categories including short-term rental fees, construction excise tax, tax increment financing balances, and general fund transfer possibilities, along with audit history, solicitation timelines, and definitions like "preservation" and "maximum subsidy per unit." In the second portion, councilors discussed priorities including rent assistance, eviction legal defense, mortgage/rent buy-downs, affordable housing preservation, vacancy rates, homeownership models, social housing acquisition, general fund contributions, and specific projects such as Broadway Corridor and Williams and Russell. No final allocation decisions were made; participants indicated further deliberation would continue in committee. Votes, if any occurred, are recorded in the vote ledger.
AI-drafted from the session's auto-captions, reviewed by an editor — describes the discussion only; recorded votes live in the vote ledger. Captions contain errors.
Procedural markers in this session
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0 Keelan. I'm here. This is councilor Smith.
1 Can you hear us? Online councilor Smith.
2 Yes, I am.
3 We can hear you. Thank you.
4 Good morning. Calling to order the Wednesday. No. Thursday, March 5th work session of the Portland city council. Colleagues, this morning we're going to spend some hear a presentation from our friends at the housing bureau. We're going to have ample time for discussion about the unspent housing bureau dollars. I'm going to be turning facilitation of this meeting over to the chair of the housing and homelessness committee. Councilor Avalos. Take it away.
5 Thank you so much, council president. So good morning, colleagues. Thank you for being here. So we have taken a long, winding road to get to this point, but I'd like us to put aside any frustrations with the extended process and focus on the important opportunity in front of us. As many of you know, council recently identified approximately 106 million in housing related balances that were not previously budgeted for allocation. So today's work session is an opportunity for us to step back and ensure that we all share a common understanding of the funding available to us, the constraints attached to those funds, and the range of policy options before council. Over the past several months, council has had substantial conversations about housing priorities, including prevention strategies, housing production and longer term structural solutions. Today is not meant to start those conversations from scratch, but rather to build on that work and provide space for a comprehensive discussion about how these resources might best support our shared housing goals. This session is designed primarily as a working discussion among council, supported by staff to help clarify the technical details, and my hope is that by the end of the conversation, we will have a shared understanding of the funding categories and constraints. Clarity around areas where counselors may already have alignment, a clearer sense of where additional discussion or policy development may be needed. And this is also the time to surface new ideas or priorities. If councilors believe there are gaps in the options currently being considered, we are going to begin with a staff presentation to ground us in the financial details and then move into two structured discussion blocks. First, we're going to focus on clarifying the available options and then on policy priorities and potential allocation approaches. So my role today will simply be to help facilitate the conversation, ensure that everyone has the space to contribute and keep us moving through the agenda. And so with that, I'm going to turn it over to staff for the first part of our presentation. Come on up.
6 Brian. Okay.
7 Good morning. Council president, councilors michael buonocore, interim director for the Portland housing bureau. I want to start by saying thank you all for the time that you spent in the small briefings leading up to today. As donnie said, we used those conversations to sort of hone our presentation, get more clear on what kind of information is going to be most helpful for you and for the public to, you know, understand this issue as clearly as possible. So as I tee this up, just a few things in that realm, we tuned into terminology that we're using and clarity in how we present information. So you're not going to see references to nofas or rfps. You're going to see the word solicitation, which simply means any number of ways by which resources are made available to the public through competitive processes. There is one reference to contingency, and it's a very specific specifically used. But otherwise we're basically talking about these firm, these funds as held for future expenditure. The old deck referred to unrestricted contingency, which caused some confusion. You'll now see funds presented as having committed uses or fb proposed uses. And I'll point it out when we when we get there. The presentation of funds across multiple years wasn't super helpful. In some cases it was confusing. So we're now using rounded numbers that you can easily track up and down columns and across rows. And then at the end, we'll tie those numbers back to what was presented in kaylee's memo. So it's easy to track between the two. As a reminder, as we said in the briefings, federal grants are excluded from this exercise. Those are driven by approved grant plans and held by the sponsor, usually HUD, and distributed to us on a reimbursement basis, not held as cash on hand. And we weren't sure as we approached those those small group briefings, what your appetite might be for sort of context setting and information sharing about how fb manages its funds and makes long term investment decisions, how our funds are monitored. We heard back that you are interested in more rather than less, and so you'll see that as we now get into the presentation. And with all that said, I appreciate I know you all are willing to hold your questions to the end. I know you will have many. I'll be happy to start all the way back from the beginning of the deck, if that's what's most helpful to you all. So thank you for that next slide. So we'll be going through this presentation in three chunks. Some background, some information about how we have managed our accrued funds. And then we'll get into the detail of the sub fund balances. Next slide. So these first few slides of background try to get at some of the questions in the vein of where was the money? Who can see the money. How is money accounted for. Next slide. So first let's talk about the the achefer the annual comprehensive financial reports from the city's website, the the accounting departments of the city of Portland and prosper Portland prepare financial statements, also known as annual comprehensive financial reports and external financial auditor audits these financial statements every year and issues audit opinions. The ending fund balances for the prior fiscal year are displayed in the achefer, which is presented annually to city council, and it's published on the city's public website. Next slide. So all of the Portland housing bureau's funds are represented in the achefer, maddeningly misrepresented as after in the title. Apologies for that. So all of the funds are represented here, including those that were excluded from the forward looking budget. No funds have been found to be missing or misspent or in the wrong place. However, presenting funding in this way requires translation for council and the public to understand how these ending fund balances carry over into each new fiscal year budget and what is proposed to be held for future expenditures. In other words, the money is all there. But you can't you can't just look at that and understand how that translates into our budget. And fb's responsibility is to present that information clearly to council during the budget process. So it has information for its deliberations and decision making. So said simply, as you've heard me say before, that is not how fb has ever presented its budget in the past. That is a process that we are going through now in collaboration with cbo and with jonah's. It is a really significant transition process and it is still underway. Once that change is made, it will be made forever and you will be able to look at the full picture of our finances in a way that has not heretofore been available to you, and therefore limits your ability to fully understand your your decision making authority in the budget process. So we will fix that. In addition to the achefer process, fb also goes and undergoes an annual audit of its federal HUD grants through the city of portland's single audit, which is also published on portland's gov. Link is there. And then finally, an external audit of the Portland housing bond is required every year until all funds are fully expended. Between these three processes. Fb has been audited 14 times since 2020 with zero financial findings. Now, it's also important to say that in this process, you all have asked for a comprehensive audit of the bureau and and that is not the same as these. So I want to acknowledge that difference and that we are committed to going through that process and making those findings available to you all. Next slide. I think we all understand this now. But the the public, I think, does not yet fully understand that there is not $106 million to spend. It's important to be honest, that the 21 million in unspent rental services office funds is a specific issue. Those funds should have been put out into the community. Those are operating dollars and they should have been deployed, not held and accumulated at that level. The remaining amount in the total of 106 million is largely committed, so they are tied to specific commitments or proposed plans for future housing related priorities. However, you all have the opportunity to make different choices than what fb has proposed, and we look forward to having that conversation and potential trade offs with you. Next slide. So a bit more background, a lot of which you have seen, but we'll review especially again for the public's benefit along with some new information. Next slide. So as you've heard me say, we typically wait until we have at least $20 million to put out in a solicitation. Often it's a larger amount than that, but at least that amount allows us to fund a few projects at a reasonably significant level to do some important work. On the left side of that sunburst, you look at the different sources of funds and see how long on their own it would take for them to accrue to those amounts. And so the way that the bureau manages those solicitations is to braid those funds together and get them out on a, at a sort of a regular cadence, and then on the other side of the sunburst is the development process and the disbursement of funds, which typically lasts anywhere from 5 to 7 years. Next slide. Some information. We hadn't broken out for you in the past, but the sort of the value of a solicitation process is that it gives us the opportunity to define what kinds of goals we're trying to achieve with the money that we're putting out into the community. Things like the number of units, bedroom sizes, permanent supportive housing affordability, population served, and geographies. It gives us the opportunity to determine whether to release properties along with cash. So there are fb controlled sites that we can pair with available funding to sort of increase the impact of of those projects. We're on the verge of releasing a no. A production nofa, in which a property in mount tabor and a property in gateway will be made available. Along with funding. This also gives us the opportunity to articulate funding requirements and restrictions. So things like our own internal policies around maximum subsidy per unit, cost containment priorities and funding source parameters. So each of those funding types that we looked at comes with its own sort of sets of requirements and parameters. And parenthetically, you see early investor very often we are an early investor, if not the first money in. And that gives us the opportunity to have more ability to define some of these issues, such as cost containment. That may be important to us once a project is farther in the development cycle, those things are already baked in, and there's less leverage for us to sort of get the kinds of impacts that we may sort of have defined earlier on. If we were, if it was. If we were early money, and then importantly, the these solicitations allow us to conduct outreach and provide information sessions before the solicitations are released. And that gives makes sure that there's a fair opportunity that that folks in the community know this money will be coming available and have the opportunity to put forward their eligible project projects for consideration through a public competitive process. Next slide. So here's a look back at the last five years of housing production. Sort of reinforces the idea that we braid funds. And if you look in each of these years, the combination of funds, types of funds that were put together are different in each of the years. Currently, there are about 40 projects at various development stages. And as we get to actually go ahead next slide. So when you look at this slide, this sort of talks about the process from beginning to end. And fb staff are engaged in that process throughout the entire life cycle. So from the beginning where we're defining what the solicitation is and then managing that selection process, assessing eligibility and qualifications of the projects to predevelopment construction and lease up. There are roles that technical experts in the bureau play to sort of help guide and support the projects in the development life cycle. So as we think about. You know, how we're pacing, the release of funds into the community, we're also thinking about how all these projects stack up and the bandwidth of the staff to manage all of them. Next slide. So this is a slight variation on a slide we talked about in the briefings. I had said verbally that if you imagined looking backward from 2627, you would see, you know, bars that are of a significant height. And when you look at them, you see just sort of what a stark contrast these next five years will be as funding declines. In particular, you can you can see sort of the stark decrease of the bonds and the diminishment of tif. And so as we think about, you know, what the what the future looks like and understanding to that, the forecast is simply a forecast. We don't know if there could be another housing revenue source that becomes available. We don't know if the federal government will step up differently than it has in the last few years. But based on what we know, we're expecting these next few years to be not resource rich in the way that they have in the last several years for us. Next slide. And again, this is just a snapshot of that work over the past five years, which has resulted in over half $1 billion of economic activity and renter support and housing production in the community. Next slide. So now we get back into the presentation of the fund balances and sort of how those are either committed or what the plans are for their future and how you might want to consider those next slide. So this one falls under the inclusionary housing umbrella. And if you look at the third column, you'll see the phrase committed uses. And in the next column you'll see the phrase planned uses. Hopefully those feel intuitive. In the committed uses column, you'll see specific projects that we have made commitments to or ongoing program operating costs. And then on the planned uses side, you see where we have where we have plans for future solicitations. And those are, you know, policy trade off conversations for you all to have about whether you do, in fact, want to hold those funds for future solicitations or do something differently. I'll note that while the $6 million contingency is arguably a planned use councilor, here's a legit contingency for you. The idea here is that every pretty much every project that is going through and has recently gone through our development project faces because of increased interest rates, you know, construction costs, gaps that the housing bureau sort of negotiates helping to fill, and that ensures their viability to get to the finish line. So there's some jeopardy for actually having those projects make it and having, you know, gaps come up that we wouldn't be able to fill in the absence of that money. Next slide. So in this in this table for short term rental, the two types of short term rental funds, you see only php planned uses. There are no specific commitments that have been made with these funds. The intention is to do a preservation solicitation next year with them. Unless council decides to do something different. And the note here is that given the wind down of current tif districts and the lag in revenue from new ones, these two funds figure more prominently in our ability to fund preservation and or new development in the next few years than they have in the years prior. Next slide. So this table is our housing property funds. These are these represent revenue generated from rents essentially at the properties and our funds that need to go back into for, you know, sort of capital needs at the properties. Next slide. Here's a little bit of a ragtag collection of funds, all of which have very prescribed uses for them. And I don't think I need to necessarily talk through each one of them. I think they're they're labeled pretty clearly. And, you know, this isn't a huge amount of money, but they're all in, you know, funds that have very defined uses for them. Next slide. A couple more here. Housing investment is another fund that will cover staff costs and general fund overhead. This one in particular mitigates the projected decline in program income, including the suspension of sdcs. So with those funds not coming in as they have been, now that there's a suspension of sdcs, this becomes sort of an ability to backfill that. And then the risk mitigation pool is designed to reimburse landlords of permanent supportive housing properties for eligible damage claims. Next slide. So this is our last big one. This is our last one. And it's a big one. And these are the tif districts. So on the left side you see committed uses. Those are for specific projects. And for our home repair program. On the right hand side you'll see some some of the districts have money that is not currently allocated to specific projects. And so that is typically work that the bureau does either through solicitations or as primarily through solicitations or as opportunities become sort of made known in those districts. And again, our developed according to action plans that are developed with the community. Next slide. So finally, we we heard from you all that you wanted to be able to understand how what we're presenting to you today ties back to the information that you were provided on February 6th from city administrator lee. So the six tables that I just talked you through total about $93 million. There is an additional 8.9 million of so funds under council consideration, plus 1.8 million that are that were appropriated in the fall to just to be super clear, the whole 20.7 is there. And for your decision making. And then there's another about $6 million that were backed out based on having been budgeted in fy 2526. So if we go to the next slide. So this is the table on page seven from city administrator lee's memo. If you add up the column, the big column of numbers, that totals to 112 million. And if you subtract out the tif and the inclusionary housing fund line items as we did on the prior slide, then you get to 106 or 105.9. That I think is the presentation. So we are now happy to take your take your questions and conversation.
8 Thank you so much.
9 There we go. Thank you so much. So colleagues, what we're going to do now is we're going to enter a period of technical questions. And then after that we'll take a quick break and then we'll come back and do the facilitated discussion with the prompts that you received over email. So we'll go ahead and kick it off with councilor Morillo.
10 Thank you, councilor Avalos. Thank you all so much for this presentation. I had a question about the housing beginning fund balances. So on Tuesday, the city budget office sent out the beginning fund balance information for all funds in the city to city financial analysts to reconcile. And from that information provided the total beginning fund balance across all housing funds. General fund not included is 145 million. We know that 8 million of that has been budgeted, leaving a net beginning fund balance of 137 million. So right now we've been having a discussion of 106 million. And I'm wondering if you can explain the discrepancy there, because we have not been talking about 137 million. We've been talking about 106 million.
11 Thank you, councilor, for the question. And yeah, this was highlighted. And I'll I'll give a sort of a partial answer that may not be super satisfactory. I'm honestly struggling to track those numbers. I know I've seen numbers that were provided to your office that track somewhat, but it's a little unclear. And so I'm, I'm. Hesitant to to acknowledge that because I need to, frankly, do a little more due diligence to understand the source of those numbers. I've also looked at the cbo email from Tuesday, and I'm not coming up with that same math. So I'm not saying it's wrong. I just haven't been able to sort of independently verify that. The other thing I'll note is that the act for ending fund balance, we're talking about a 2425 balance. The numbers we've been talking about now are for 26, 27. And there's kind of a gap fiscal year in there in which expenditures have been made. We know there's at least 8 million of that that was budgeted as reflected in the memo. And so we're trying to identify if that delta is a. Nuance of sort of the accounting accrual for determining that fund balance amount. The ending fund balance in 2425. Is there something that was budgeted as perhaps a transfer that wasn't showing up in the programmatic budget? And so we're looking to identify that as well. So I just appreciate the additional due diligence. We will have it corrected and transparently reported. The reasons for that in the spring. Tao, I just want to be really cautious that we're not continuing sort of a legacy over the last few months of providing information that isn't perfectly accurate. So I just wanted that's to be clear about that. And and I don't mean that facetiously. I mean that absolutely, honestly, that we're trying to figure out, you know, how is that math work? And so we can be really clear about what those numbers are and be really clear for council about the reasons for that, that delta.
12 Yeah. And I appreciate that you're trying to get us to correct numbers so that we don't have misinformation or misunderstandings going out to the public. I will say my staff first reached out about this at the beginning of February. So we are a month out into getting that information. You see how that.
13 I understand and I will also acknowledge.
14 That I'm not done. Sir, these numbers are also published in the acfr. And the cbo sent those numbers out to the analysts to reconcile. So I'm curious as to why bureaus are being asked to match published beginning fund balances. If you don't believe that those are real numbers.
15 Thank you, counselor, that's not my suggestion. I appreciate your analysts had provided this. I appreciate that this is a complex situation that we're all working on. Many of us who are doing this work, myself included, were either out of office, working on other work, and so it's not neglected that that was provided a month ago. We are in a very. Resource constrained environment with very, very high expectations. And we're busting our trying to get this information accurately to the public. In an environment where misinformation is continuing to be shared in the media and otherwise. So I appreciate your analysts work. I appreciate the staff at the cbo and in our accounting team who are doing this, and we are working as hard as we can to get those facts to you, and we will provide that answer to you as soon as we have it.
16 Right. But this is the work session where we're supposed to be getting those answers. So we do actually need those answers in this discussion so that we know the dollars that we're working with. Because if there is a difference between 100 and 6 million versus 137 million, and the number keeps changing, we are dealing with a big issue. And council can't talk about it, and we can't figure out exactly what is going on.
17 Councilor let me let me pause that for a second and back up, because we do know things that council can decide upon today.
18 Yes, the 21 million.
19 Correct. We know that the so has 20.7 million. We've talked about multiple proposals for many weeks about about deploying that into the community. We director baer just talked about buckets and tlt. And I know there's proposals about realigning that. We know that there's other funds as just described that have restrictions around them that are much more difficult to redeploy. And we know that we have work to do to figure out where that delta, that technical delta lies. So I hear you and we're working on it. And I also just would acknowledge that that doesn't have to slow down taking action. I'm equally as frustrated that this is complex. It's a multi year legacy. I'm frustrated that we don't have resources to commit the 10 or 12 hours that I and my staff are spending six days a week working on all of the city's priorities, that we can't commit all that time to doing just this work. I'm frustrated, and I would like to see us be able to start making progress on the things that we can make progress, while we're also addressing those other bigger concerns. And. Adjacent analysis.
20 Okay, how often does your office coordinate with the accounting manager to get us accurate numbers?
21 I'm not sure I know how to respond to that. The city comptroller reports to me, so that is my office. We do. We have some processes in place to have connectivity between what is reflected in the audit, what's reflected in the city's sap system and what's used by the bureaus and budget office staff. So I'm not sure. I mean, that's a. Multifaceted question. There are many. There are moments in time where there's specific actions. The budget development, for example, the the budget manual directs doing that connectivity at the point of doing specific budget actions. There are also daily conversations that can occur between between staff, between the accounting team and other offices.
22 Yeah, I just think when we're talking about capacity, the accounting team is being underutilized because if they're going to have those accurate numbers and I'm not asking gotcha questions, jonas, like, I truly am not trying to, but we are not getting accurate numbers. You know, this feels like it keeps changing. This is the work session for us to discuss it as a body. This is the day that we're all here together to do that. And I don't think I'm asking complicated questions. We need those accurate numbers.
23 Yeah, I understand it just would be cautious about suggesting that the numbers are not accurate. I think. I think that the numbers you're receiving are accurate and there's context around those accurate numbers that we that we need to do a better job of, of due diligence and being able to describe. So I want to be really careful in continuing the narrative that there are inaccurate numbers. There were certainly an environment where things were not budgeted the way they should have been. And that's why we're here talking about this today. That is not the same as producing inaccurate numbers. So I just want to be really cautious in continuing that narrative that frankly, is I mean, it's true. I mean, it's true that it's an important piece of conversation, but is also continued to kind of have a stumble over our feet in getting to some resolution on this specific item.
24 And, you know, my staff informed you this was something they were looking into. I informed you yesterday that this was something I would ask about. I'm not catching anyone off guard, so let's not pretend doing anything totally. Councilor just just.
25 Appreciate your grace and recognizing that we just haven't had time to fully vet that.
26 And we've had a month, and this is the work session to clear up the narratives. So we need answers when we ask questions. That is the expectation, frankly. But I'm done with my questions for now.
27 Thank you. Councilor councilor Novick o o you. Just thank you.
28 Madam chair. So one of my priorities, frankly, is to see how much we can get to the general fund of all of this. And so I'd appreciate if you could tell me, for each of the funds you've talked about, what potential might there be to return some money or to give some money to the general fund?
29 My good friend adrian delgado is in the audience, so I'll ask adrian to come up and give us some guidance.
30 Thank you for the question. Adrian delgado, city attorney's office, for the record. So I don't know that I'm going to be able to match up those funds, but I can just go through the memo that.
31 Adrian, your microphone is not on. Hold on. Just a quick second. I don't know if you can turn it on or if we turn that on. Now.
32 Do you want to take my switch?
33 Okay. Thank you.
34 Oh, now it's on.
35 Well.
36 I'll get.
37 Your teeth.
38 All right. So I'll go through the memo and just identify funds for you. They're not going to necessarily match up to what was presented, but hopefully we can figure that out. All right. So unrestricted general funds we've got the local housing trust fund is unrestricted general funds. The risk mitigation pool.
39 I'm sorry I should clarify. What I'm talking about is of funds that are aren't already allocated some to the general fund. What could be sort of be shifted to the general fund. For example, councilor Smith's proposed amendment has 5.4 million back to the general fund from the short term rental 2% category. So that would be a new thing. So I'm just sort of wondering how many opportunities are there for new things where the general fund gets money.
40 So I can speak on that proposal, that 2%, the short term rental 2% fund can originates from general funds. So it could go back to the general fund.
41 So does that mean that theoretically, all of it, all 8.6 million could go to the general fund?
42 That's the short term rental amount eight point.
43 Okay. And actually, yes. Okay. That's and I'm sorry I don't understand these as well as I should, but that's there's the short term rental 2% from Smith one and short term rental 0 to 69. We're talking about the short term rental 2%.
44 2% can go back to the general fund, right. That comes from the transient lodging tax okay. Just consulting my notes. Yes. So that's a general fund tax that's unrestricted. But short term rentals 0 to 60 nights is a restricted fee. It's restricted for affordable housing and homelessness. So would not be able to go back to the general fund.
45 Thank you. And then speaking again of those two funds going back to table two, I think that.
46 Can we can we take the presentation back to table two please.
47 So it looks like my understanding is the bureau has was planning to use up all that money through a preservation solicitation. And can you explain what preservation means? Does that mean things like doing mortgage buy downs or other things to stabilize the existing pool of affordable housing?
48 No. If you well, I don't know that that's that's precluded here. But what we mean by preservation solicitation is that we would put a solicitation out for public competition. And what typically happens is affordable housing providers bring significant capital. Rehab needs to us, and we assess those and then make awards.
49 So that's that's existing affordable housing providers to address their needs for their existing properties.
50 That's right.
51 Yeah. Okay. So this is that's what you plan to do with this money. Yes. And so this is this is an example of it's not really new money. It's money that you already had plans for. And that was the plan.
52 Yes.
53 So the. I mean, looking at councilor Smith's proposal, she's got under under short term rental 0 to 60. She's got the broadway corridor project, the williams and russell project that those are actual are those some things that left your own devices? You wouldn't have done that because you would have had it all, you know, in these preservation solicitations for existing affordable housing.
54 I mean, objectively, the the councilor's proposal is not what I've, what we've presented so that there are differences there.
55 Okay. But theoretically all of that money could, you know, could be spent as you planned it to help to help the existing affordable housing providers deal with issues they have and surviving and keeping their units full. Yes. Okay. Another question about those specific projects. I have heard that the broadway corridor and williams and russell projects, there's some indication there's interest in those projects at the state level. There's no commitment, but there's the possibility that we get state money to help complete those projects. Is that right?
56 Well, I can tell you my understanding is that the state is skeptical of a need to invest in our projects because they believe we have $106 million.
57 Okay, so my information is outdated, apparently. We would not necessarily expect the state to step up and pay a share of those projects.
58 We would hope that they would. But I think we're we're not in the position that we would hope to be in those conversations with them. Okay.
59 And another question. This is not necessarily directly related, but you talked about the maximum subsidy per unit rule. What is the maximum subsidy per unit rule?
60 Again, that has been an internal policy in the with the housing bonds for new production, there was a max award of 100,000, 150,000 per unit and for preservation projects, 100,000. And I can't say that that, you know, that there wasn't some wiggle room depending on circumstances, but that's generally what what the bureau has communicated to folks in the solicitations for new production versus preservation.
61 Okay. Thank you. And. Let's see, I just want to be sure I mean, assuming you've looked at Smith one, are there any. Are there any concerns about the legal challenges to any of the ways that Smith one would spend the 20.7 million?
62 Yeah. Councilor donnie oliveira for the record, I I'll just chime in to say, generally speaking, they're doable. The details will matter, especially for that second tranche under the the short term rentals that are 60 night tranche. How we do those, they have to align with existing code. But at a high level, yes, there would be ways to fund those projects. Again assuming they meet the the standard.
63 Okay. Thank you.
64 All right. Counselor clerk.
65 Thank you. Councilor Avalos. I really appreciate that. We're getting more excuse me, transparency and clarity regarding a very complex set of buckets, basically, which has led to so much misunderstanding and really unfortunate. So I appreciate getting a better understanding. I just have three little points to make on the production slide. I think it's slide 11. It would just be helpful to know the number of units that correspond with these investments. I don't I don't think I've seen that anywhere, but if you could follow up with that, I'd really appreciate it would help me understand what we're really what the benefits really are, what we're paying for. Secondly, on slide, the following slide on slide 12, it seems to me that there's a missing slide here at the very end after the loan closeout. It seems like we should have some sort of tracking or follow up or accountability, or how do we know that we're getting what we paid for? Is there a is there a follow up in in our investments in units? And I would really like to see what the follow up is, if there is any. Presumably there's some so that we know we're getting what we what we wanted. And then on table six, I think it's slide 21. I have a question on the tif on the south park blocks. It says 7 million. Can you tell me what that's going for.
66 What we what our planned uses are on the, in the, in the column is that it's unidentified. So there's $7 million available in the south park blocks for acquisition, new construction or preservation.
67 Okay.
68 So there's nothing nothing is committed yet with that.
69 I've heard in the rumor mill that that's money that may be going to PSU for their their cultural performing arts plan.
70 Councilor. Thanks for the question. Those. So this is just the fb allocation of tif. So this is focused on that that 45% set aside. So this would be targeting projects related to housing. If you're talking about something related to the PSU project that that perhaps could come from the proper allocation of of tif.
71 Okay. Thank you for the clarification, I appreciate it. Thank you for the presentation.
72 Thank you. And, counselor, I can give you a couple of answers to your questions. The units represented on slide six total about 3600 units. That that includes new production and preservation. And then when fb loans funds to projects, they enter into a regulatory agreement with us. So there is a there's a compliance component post lease up into operation.
73 What is that like a quarterly report or how.
74 There's an annual report.
75 An annual report. Okay. And on the 3600, how does that divide up between new and preservation? What's the split?
76 My team hears these questions and they're they're getting them to me. So I'll come back and answer that.
77 For you. Thank you so much I appreciate it. Thank you. Councilor Avalos.
78 Absolutely. Councilor Green.
79 Thank you, councilor Avalos. And these are just we're still in the technical questions. Okay, great. So my team did we had that nice presentation with with your with your team that walked us through the the big spreadsheet here. And our takeaway is that there's really only about $55.9 million of money at council's discretion, with degrees of discretion of that, $20.7 million is very much at council's discretion. There's no other planned uses for it. We can spend it without any trade off, essentially, except for the trade offs between the different decisions we might make. Yes. So then if you take that number out, you're left with 30.4. And I'm sorry, I'm making everyone do math here. But $33.4 million in what I would say is conditional discretion, because we already have some planned uses in the Portland housing bureau that come from the short term rental sub funds, which is 19.7 million, and the city inclusionary housing fund, which is 10.7. And so if we were, we could consider different uses of those funds, but then that would sort of call into question the existing nofas and some of the other stuff. Is that a correct way to characterize that bucket?
80 I would say it doesn't jeopardize existing nofas, just future planned solicitations.
81 Thank you for clarifying that. It's important for folks watching on it. Just any nofas that are in the pipeline that we might want to do as a future thing that those funds would support. We would be saying, we're going to go a different direction. Yes. Okay. And then there's you've included a number of the tif balances, just I think, presumably just for the sake of the full presentation of information, understanding that in those balances, some are very much restricted. But then there's also some, it looks like in particular the tif river district, which is a district that no longer exists, which has been rolled in to capitalize the old town tif district. There's a sum of $4.8 million. That has, to my knowledge, no project identified. It's just it's for acquisition, new construction or preservation. So and all that adds up to 55.9 million. If council were to consider that $4.8 million of the tif river district, we would have to. We'd be amending an action plan because we would be directing prosper Portland. How to spend that money? Is that is that a correct way to think about it?
82 Councilor in this particular case, we're talking about the housing bureau money. You're right that we would want to amend. But in this particular case, that's an older action plan. But yes, we'd want to maintain the spirit of that action plan. We'd ask council to get clearer clarifying direction on that. If there was a movement away from something not contemplated, but this would be again towards housing dollars and not necessarily dev that process. But the answer is, I think to your question, yes, council could direct the bureau to more discreetly direct those dollars in that tif district.
83 I appreciate that, and the way that I think about it is kind of complicated because the river district doesn't exist anymore. Now it's the old town, but the old town is sort of over as well. And so the new thing is the west side tif district. And so any project that's in the west side tif district, presumably one could make the argument at this body that that $4.8 million could go to things like maybe, say, the broadway corridor project. Right. Okay. That's that's helpful for me stacking all this up. And then colleagues, the there's $58.1 million in tif balances that is extremely restricted. I, I would suggest, for the sake of our discussion that that's just not in the table. It's not on the table for us to talk about. We don't want to muddy the water. Is that a fair characterization?
84 Yes, yes.
85 That's fair.
86 All right. Thank you. I think the last question I have is in the very last slide on slide 23. There is I'm sorry, it's slide. Slide 22, page 22. It's there's a line item that says $18.9 million. So dash under council consideration plus 1.8 million from fall town. I don't understand that. Can you please help me understand that?
87 Yeah. Council. We just wanted to be transparent to show this is that that 20.7 or so that you're contemplating as a reminder or just for daylighting for the public in the fall to 1.8 of that was was moved into the operating budget this year as just a normal function of how the bureaus manage that fund. Any unspent dollars just rolls over. So 1.8 has already been activated, unspent, unplanned, but it's already in their operating budget. And so the next action council takes on that. So dollars would remove would move the 18.9 into the budget to make it 20.7.
88 Okay. So it's still 20.7 20.7. It's just you're crosswalking it to the fall tor action correct for us okay. I think that concludes my technical questions. Thank you.
89 All right. Thank you, councilor Councilor Kanal.
90 Thank you, chair Avalos. Thank you everyone for being here. So I'm going to start with slide nine please. And I just I want to understand the timing here a little bit. Is it is it correct for me to interpret this as saying the first dollar in the door could take 7 to 17 years to result in a physical building that someone could be leasing up, or a preservation effort being completed, and then re reoccupied. I'm seeing the 5 to 7 on one hand, 2 to 10 on the other.
91 Oh sorry. Those should be sort of thought of separately. So on the left side, what that's attempting to illustrate is that if each of those funding sources needed to accrue over time to get to 20 million on its own, that's about how long it would take.
92 Right? So, so that first dollar could be sitting there waiting for the other dollars to get to 20 million for up to ten years.
93 I mean, it's sort of yes, it's a it's sort of a hypothetical because as we said, we we braid these funds together and combine them in a way that, like, they're not really sitting that long, but that that helps illustrate. I think that the, the act of braiding, which is, you know, adds complexity to the process is necessary in order to, like, arrive at these larger solicitation amounts.
94 Has anyone done a comparative analysis with other jurisdictions as to that 7 to 17 year figure? And if it takes longer here or shorter relative to other cities.
95 I'm not aware of a comparative analysis. I would say very informally, if our jurisdiction were moving at a dramatically faster or slower pace in the context of the all the bond activity that has happened like that would get compared, you know, like we would be hearing that Clackamas county was moving two years faster than we were or whatever the case may be. But no, specifically to answer your question, I don't believe there's been a comparative analysis done.
96 Thanks. Going to table one, I have three questions on these tables. And then one question after that. Help me understand the line of city commercial. My understanding is this is a tax. That is the construction, construction, excise tax on construction of commercial buildings. But what are the uses that are allowed to use it? What are we allowed to use that fund on?
97 I can answer that. So construction excise tax can be used for affordable housing. It is restricted. It's a tax that is restricted at the state level. So it's statutorily restricted. The city when it adopted the tax, restricted it for 35% to be transferred to housing bureau for affordable housing production and preservation at unit of units at or below 60% median family income. The state allows the city to define affordable housing. And that's just the way per ordinance right now and in code that it's restricted.
98 And so this is just the 35%. The other 65% is somewhere outside of the housing bureau.
99 15% goes back to the state, 4% is administrative fee retained by permitting for the city, 50% is transferred to housing bureau to fund finance based incentives. Programs that are related to, like development incentives. Sdc. I think the bureau could speak more on on that restriction.
100 That adds up to 104, though.
101 Okay. That's that's try again. We've got 5090. It does add up to 104 I will I'm just going from the memo I can check. Thanks.
102 But the fact that it's called commercial is the funding stream. The the the collection side of it. It has nothing to do with what we're allowed to spend it on. In the context of this 9.7 million, correct? Okay. Slide table two, I want to follow up on councilor Novick questions around the str short term rental funding. So I just want to understand you're saying the the $11.1 million has to remain within the 0 to 60 day first line here, has to stay within the restrict. It's much more restricted. Whereas the 8.6 does. Does the short term rental fee have anything to do given its collection, given the activity that it is collecting money off of? What are the limitations in terms of spending money on tourism promotion?
103 Good question. So it is it is from the transient lodging tax. And it's an unrestricted tax. So it's just a general fund. It can go back to the general fund for any use.
104 The city that's the 2%.
105 The 2%. Yeah. Correct. The city has a resolution where they've restricted the funds and give a specific like the 2% going to the housing bureau. But as council, you could do something else with that. So the source of the fund itself is general fund.
106 And then the 0 to 60 days that's restricted in a different way.
107 Correct. That is a fee. And it does have that restriction that you were just mentioning, I believe, where it has to be related to the collection, like the imposition of the fee, and it's restricted for affordable housing and houseless homelessness initiatives.
108 And is it restricted by state law or by city code?
109 It is restricted by city. It is restricted by city code, but it also has the fee restriction because it's a fee. And we wouldn't even if council decided to extend the code. It's one of the situations where it would still need to be related to the collection, the imposition of the fee.
110 Right? That's exactly why I'm asking about tourism.
111 Exactly.
112 Okay. Table six the river district funds as well. I just wanted to to clarify the $5 million that are here for the broadway corridor project, the 2 million for parcel for a and the 3 million for parcel six are completely separate right from what has been discussed about other uses in the previous council discussions. Right?
113 Yes.
114 So that's 5 million. That doesn't that's 5.7 million proposed has which has been proposed. That would be additional to this 5 million.
115 Yes.
116 Okay. That's helpful to know. And then the. Let's see we the last question and this might be something that that let me know if this is more than just technical. It's on slide 13 and it's about the forecast forecasted decline in revenue. It appears to me that the three big buckets that are being reduced here, the largest reductions are in federal grants, which is a whole other conversation tiff, which is already authorized. And then bonds, can you speak to the bonds part of it and just give a little more insight into how that will, how that came to be projected this way?
117 Sure. I mean, we're just we're we're spending down the Portland housing bonds and the metro bonds, like those have all been, you know, there's, I think 5 million more that's committed to hollywood hub from the Portland housing bond. And then still some you know you see over the next couple of years still some metro housing bond funds to deploy. But they're both they're both at the end of their.
118 And there's nothing new expected is I guess the question.
119 Yes that's right okay. Yeah.
120 Thank you. Chair Avalos.
121 Thank you, counselor Smith.
122 Thank you, madam chair. Michael, you talked about the acra earlier. The $106 million in funds. Were those funds reported to moss adams or baker tilly? That's their new name. That's our auditor. Did they know about those funds? Were were those put in our audit?
123 Councilor. Yeah. Good question. They were I mean, we're talking different fiscal years, right. So we're talking future budgeted balance versus historical audit. But yes, the audit reflects those full amounts that track to what the future, future fiscal year.
124 106 million. You reported it to the auditor. So there's no modifications that need to be made on that audit that we received in 2526.
125 Yes, that's our understanding.
126 And so were those funds also reported when we got our credit rating? Yes, we had that. So so basically everybody that needed to know about it except the people who authorized it were informed. And I agree with you that they weren't lost. They were just hidden from us. But you shared it with everyone else, correct?
127 Including council, who also sees the backwards looking financial audit when it's completed.
128 No, no, no, I'm talking about in the authorization of the new budget for 26, for 25, 26, when we were supposed to see those dollars, we were not made aware of them. They were not put in our authorization. Yes, but yet and still you shared them with the auditor.
129 Let me be clear. So the auditor looks at the prior year. So the information the auditor is looking at is the prior year, which is not the budget that looks at the upcoming year.
130 Okay. So let me back up because moss adams and baker baker tilly, that's their new name. They look to see if the numbers are within $1 million from each year. And if there are, there has to be some some sure, sure, up the budget. But what I'm asking you, and I'm trying to get to the point. Did they see the full authorization as we presented it when we voted on it in may? In June? That's what I'm asking you.
131 So the information that the auditor would have had, would have seen is what the same information that was publicly presented in the budget.
132 Okay. So they didn't see it, just like we didn't see it. And so that's a problem. That's a problem. The auditor didn't see the full authorization. And that's what I'm asking you. Question michael. Thank you, councilor Novick for going over my 40 million. And I went over that with with ruth prior to this to ask if the ideas that we had in our Smith one, if they could be used without code changes and she said yes to the 20.7, yes to the 8.6, and yes to the 11.1, that those uses were accurate. But the reality is we can't begin to plan for a nofa that's happening in the future. If you're the only ones who know about the money and we didn't know about the moneys. So to suggest that you had plans for it and it was going to be in a future nofa those plans don't exist because those funds were not authorized and so no one knows about it but you. So it was hidden from the council and the mayor. It was hidden from our auditors who didn't know about it. And so now when we go back for this year, our auditors are going to have to look at it in our audit is going to be wrong. You may have a different way of doing things prior to this new council, but Oregon budget law hasn't changed. You are supposed to. When you said to me a few weeks ago that yes, you knew you were supposed to report it to us, yes, your staff knew they were supposed to support it. You know, report it to us. And yes, it was over a multi-year. Surplus. So for me to come up with all these magical plans and say that you were going to do this and do that, you were hiding that from us. And that is a lie, sir. That is a lie that I don't like because we have to know about all monies. Now, I came in on the tail end of councilor Morillo and she is absolutely right. There are some things that you all know about. I'm going to ask you this question, and I'm going to ask it very slowly and clearly. Is there any other monies in these pots that you have not told us about that we should know about? Above the 106 million? Michael.
133 What we presented today is all of the unbudgeted fund balances that I'm aware of.
134 That you're aware of. So I know that ruth is aware of maybe possibly 137 million and that she's been working with murillo's office to kind of reconcile that. So you don't know about that money?
135 No.
136 Do you know about it, jonas?
137 So, counselors, I think you caught the tail end of the conversation. There's I think some. Gaps in information about the 137, for example, that's, I think, reflective of last year's audit. What's in the aquifer, which is also different from what will be projected in the budget. So it's kind of mixing a couple of things. So I'll say it another way. If it were 100, that's a comparison of ending year to ending year. And that math works. That's accurate okay. It that does not include, for example, amounts that were budgeted in the current year. And so let's take that out. It does not include what I believe is a large payment for related to the housing bond. And so that number gets smaller. There are some deltas in individual amounts that are around that million ish that we're looking into. Understand. Is that a nuance of the way that the accounting rules around the aquifer are developed, or is it.
138 Whether it's.
139 It's or is.
140 It cash or accrual?
141 And so and so we're still doing that work. It's not I wish it was as simple as just asking a question and turning a switch and spitting out an answer, but I just it's it's particularly challenging to talk about in this environment when we don't actually know the reason.
142 But, you know, there's something there.
143 There is something we know there's we know there's a delta. But again, those are two, you know, it's it's not exactly apples to apples. It's maybe two different flavors of apples. And so we want to make sure that when we communicate that to council, we don't, for example, suggest that there's money available to repurpose when that's not true. Because what we what we really would not prefer for council is to encourage you to make a decision based upon information. That's not that's not.
144 It has not been validated. But it's some apples that we don't know about right now.
145 Well, we know about them now.
146 We know about them now. So there are some apples out there that we have not included to the 106. Right.
147 I mean, again, I would just answer it's, it's it's a difference. I want to be cautious that we're sometimes conflating what's in the audit, which is different, a different standard than what is in the budget. And so it may be true.
148 Councilor is it. So. Yeah, it may be true and it's likely to be true.
149 I just want to be really cautious.
150 I, I won't mess with that. Jonas, don't don't don't try to protect yet. It's okay, it's okay. But when we give information to our auditor, we have to give them the entire amount. And it appears that we did not give our auditor the entire amount. I'm concerned and I'm troubled, and I have just. And you're going to get one of these? I have to go back to my foundation, Multnomah county. And my staff is going to give you one. I just gave all the councilors one. This is so simple. It gives you a snapshot. And you remember when I always tell you, give me a give me a spreadsheet, jonas, give me a spreadsheet. Spreadsheet. This tells every piece of money in the local government, and it has a number on it. And it it shows if it was funded the previous year and for what? And it tells how much general fund money is in that is in that particular program offer how much other funds and how much restricted funds. It's just real easy. It's real simple. I would like us to go to this format so that we can clearly see if there are things that are taken out, and we can see from one page, did the bureau use all their money from the previous year? And we can see they only used xyz. So we have that money. That's going to be part of our beginning working balance. It is so simple. I don't know what kind of accounting we use here, but it is not working. And so for me, if we could go to something like this, that would be so much more helpful. I don't need a storybook of 20 pages. If you give me a story of this money and that money, that's not clear to me. I only know how to deal in numbers. Numbers are so important, and I appreciate you admitting that there is some more apples out there, but we just don't know how many. And I am going to give back my time to the chairwoman so we can go forward. But I would have never had this meeting for the note before we had our oversight meeting, because this doesn't make sense to keep beating a dead horse on this, but we do need to know all of those numbers. Dca oliveira. We need to know that.
151 Okay. Thank you counselor. We are at 1039 what we have and we were ahead of schedule, so we've had a lot more time to discuss. But we're going to go until 11 for technical questions, take a ten minute break and then come back for the rest of the discussion. Councilor pirtle-guiney.
152 Thank you, councilor Avalos, and thank you, council president, for setting aside time for the conversation today as well. Jonas, I really appreciate the answer you just gave on the 137. I believe it is million. There are clearly still gaps, but you started to explain to us why some of those gaps exist. I'd like to see that on paper, on these charts that we have here as soon as possible. I know that we need to develop a relationship whereg us early information that might not be complete. But if we get the follow up and that's a piece that has not been totally consistent here. So thank you for the start, I appreciate it. I recognize that we're inserting ourselves not just in some cases at the project level, but also in directing funds to specific programs different from your normal course of action. And we're not giving you broader policy guidance beyond these dollars about whether that's a permanent change or a right now, these dollars change. We're here because there was incomplete information and broken trust and some budget and accounting inconsistencies that I know we are in the process of correcting. And, jonas, I know we've talked about making sure those are corrected in every bureau. But for better or worse, at this point in the conversation, we have a lot of interested stakeholders and a lot of programs on the table that for each item in councilor Amendments, at least one person up here cares about greatly. So what I want to try to understand better are the 30.4 million in uncommitted funds, because I think our decisions are threefold. What are we going to do to avoid a situation like this in the future, so that we're not digging into the work that we generally ask you to do, mr. Bonaparte? And with the funds before us, whether we want to dig into that 30.4 and uncommitted dollars or any of the other funds outside of that, and if so, what our priorities are. So I want to look at tables one and two. We've talked a fair amount about table two. I fully understand the 8.6. I think the last explanation about the 11.1, that there's a fair amount of flexibility there, as long as it is tied to the fee, helps to clear up the final questions I had there. But on table one, I don't think we've spent as much time understanding the planned uses and the potential uses. So under planned uses, there's a fair amount of money here. Listed for a 2028 new construction solicitation, and in 2028, why are these funds set aside to use in 2028, when we know we have a housing crisis now, can you explain the thinking at the bureau in waiting an additional two years to even talk about those funds?
153 Sure. So, you know, given the decline in bond funds and in tiff, we just, you know, going forward, unless there is new revenue, are not going to be able to accrue money at a pace that allows us to do annual solicitations. So I think this is just a projection of we do one for preservation next year and do a new construction in 2028.
154 Are there reasons not to spend it sooner, given the housing crisis that we're in right now, other than just looking out and knowing that we won't have additional monies in the next few years?
155 Yeah, I mean, entirely a policy, you know, and strategic debate for you all to have. I completely understand the question. I would say, you know, we've we've been in a crisis, and I think we anticipate in 2 or 3 years we will continue to be in a crisis and very far behind in our, you know, housing production needs. But again, as I've said, you know, there's a there's a very real timing strategy question for you all to have. And I, you know, completely appreciate that.
156 Thank you. And I understand that sometimes there's a need to balance staff capacity and things like that. I do think that waiting because we will still be in a crisis when we could start building more housing sooner, is difficult. On the construction excise tax buckets. It looks like there's 10.7 total in funding in that planned uses but not committed uses category. What are the full restrictions there? I know we heard the breakdown. There's 35% for affordable production and preservation of 60% ami or less. It sounds like that provision is in code. So I guess a couple of specific questions. Is the affordable production piece of that also tied to 60% ami or less? First question. Second question, are those restrictions in our code or are they in an agreement with the state? When we started levying these taxes? And third question, are there any other restrictions around how we spend the funds in terms of a breakdown between production and preservation, or what counts as preservation that we should know about as we think about that bucket of funds?
157 I'm mostly going to defer to adrian. I think on the last part, though, I don't think there's anything that defines a certain percentage has to be spent on new production versus preservation.
158 Okay.
159 Yes. So, okay, catch me if I'm not answering your question, please. And redirect. But. I think we're just talking about these funds being in that 35% category. And we're going to do a check on the exact breakdown, but yes, correct that they must be used. So statutorily they must be used for affordable housing. When the city enacted the tax, it adopted an ordinance and it defined the use as affordable housing by the housing bureau, affordable housing production and preservation of units at or below 60% median family income. So right now that is the city's restriction. It would the city could amend the ordinance and amend the code to redefine affordable housing. So if you wanted to use it, you know, you wanted to allow it to go up to 120%, because for city, that is the use the city wanted, the way the city wanted to define affordable housing. That would be fine.
160 And on the preservation option, is there a definition for preservation attached to this or. Is preservation here meaning solely? New roof things that keep things in production, things spending money to re-up? The length of time something is under restrictions around affordability? Or could preservation of affordable housing also mean things that would fill units that are currently unfilled in affordable housing complexes?
161 I'm not aware that preservation is defined in code by the city, and so we would just go to the general dictionary definition, which is I'm going to assume, I'm sorry, I don't have my computer in front of me to look it up relatively broad. So I'm not I'm not sure I understand what you mean by filling units, but I think michael could probably speak a little bit more on how preservation has been interpreted by the housing bureau in the past.
162 Director.
163 Yeah, sure. I mean, primarily in the ways that you've that you articulated. Can you say could you say more about.
164 We've had a lot of conversations as a council about the unfilled units in some of our affordable housing complexes around the city and what we might be able to do, what tools we might have in order to ensure that those units are filled. And I'm wondering if preservation dollars as defined here could be used in those cases or not. And I'll return to the fact that I understand that what we're talking about is getting into the weeds in what we normally direct your bureau to do, and later I will talk about whether that is a good thing or not. But I'm trying to understand all of the parameters for what I consider the only pot of money we should be, or pots of money we should be looking at, which are the original 20.7 in sos that we've talked about, and then the 30.4 identified in planned but not permitted uses on tables one and two.
165 I think conceptually, yes. It really, I think just becomes a question. I mean, I know you you have given some thought to security enhancements at properties. Is that the sort of thing you might.
166 Security enhancements, mortgage buy downs that allow for rent to be lowered for targeted units, support with turning over units that have been heavily damaged. Those are three examples of things that I have heard from providers and have had conversations with colleagues about.
167 Yeah, I think, you know, depending on the on the specific intervention, we'd want to just check in with legal. But I believe those are all in the spirit of preservation.
168 Thank you. Thank you, councilor Avalos.
169 All right, councilor Ryan.
170 Yes. Thank you, chair Avalos. Clearly it was needed to take a collective breath on this today. First of all, I know that each housing project is very complicated. There's multiple revenue streams which ask for different reporting guidelines. Looking at looking at the entire bureau and cleaning it up to improve standards. It's a lot of work, and I want to thank you, jonas, and for working with your boss, city administrator lee, and your team for the many hours you're devoting to this at Portland housing bureau and for the entire city. I'm looking for additional clarity as I struggle to achieve that. When councilor Novick was asking questions, and I apologize if this is repetition. Yet, as I always say in the education space, it is the key to learning, and I have found that adults need it even more than children. So let's stay with trying to get to the bottom of how much we really can spend on general fund. When first when I when. What is the annual operational budget for Portland housing bureau? The entire bureau, not each program. The total that is needed since it's not legally available from restricted accounts to function as a bureau. I think that number is 36,554,000. Based on an email dialog that we've had. Is that correct?
171 My team will get me an answer.
172 Jonas, I think I'm just daylighting. What the dialog that you've had with my chief of staff, and I thought it was important to make sure we all heard that.
173 Yeah. Thank you. And I don't know the number either, if that's the question. Councilor. So.
174 Okay. You want to hear the question again?
175 Sure. If you're, if you're if you'd be willing to thank you.
176 Sure. The entire bureau, not each program. And I understand, adrian, you're kind of breaking it down with each line item in each program. That's a lot for us to churn, and I would advise that it's better to digest that for us in total as we go into budget season. And so the question is the entire bureau, not each program, the total that is needed since it's not legally available from restricted accounts. Again, that's very complicated accounting practices to function. The housing bureau and the number that we had in dialog with our office with you that I thought would be a softball, to just get out to the whole council, is 36,554,000.
177 I'm waiting for an answer from my from my team. Yeah.
178 And while we're waiting for that, where I'm coming from is just about operational survival for the entire city as we wrestle with the upcoming budget. So I'm trying to use this opportunity to know if we can allocate some of that as we go forward legally into the 2627 budget. And I know that you, donnie, and legal counsel are working on it, but I need to know the total number of dollars that that could be eligible, that could be transferred to the general fund going into the 2627 budget. And I'd like to, before decisions are made on how we do the budgeting for next year.
179 I'm sorry.
180 I don't have that today. Let me just finish it.
181 I'm sorry.
182 If not for today, that is fine. But I hope we have clarity on this amount as we go into the 2627 budget deliberations.
183 Yeah, and I apologize. I may not have understood. I may I may not understand your question, but there is about $12 million in general fund total in the bureau. Is that your.
184 And that's, that's the money that you can use that's legal that that that that is restricted accounts are trued up, but you still need that much money to operate your bureau in general. Fund money, because we know that we're in a general fund operational crisis in terms of revenue. So I'm trying to get to the bottom.
185 Yes, we need the $12 million in general fund.
186 So it's 12 million, not 36 million.
187 Believe I'm not totally positive. Councilor we can follow up. I believe part of that includes maybe some of the pass through money to the to the county. So but we'll need to.
188 That that is where the a larger number would come from.
189 And I can live with this moment that we have a gap here, but I hope that there can be some focus on that sooner than later, because I think it will be very helpful for the big picture. Does that make sense?
190 It does. Yeah. So there's a there's about $31 million that passes in general fund that passes through the bureau to homeless services division at the county. So that doesn't stay in the bureau. And then apart from that, there's about $12 million in general fund.
191 That's that's a past practice, the money that's transferred to the county. So I would for me, it'd be more helpful to know what you would need without passing money on to the county. Because to me, that doesn't do much for our operational budget for 2627.
192 Are you asking if we need the 12 million in general fund that we currently have?
193 I'm asking because of the very complicated accounting structures. When you have multiple restricted accounts and each of them government foundation, wherever they're coming from, has different reporting requirements. Some will allow you to use general, some of that funds for general funds, some have different requirements. That's what I have always discovered. So I always found it challenging to get to the bottom line of how much money you need in the general fund. As we go into the budget season 2627. And I'm hoping that all of this truing up and cleaning up will give us some clarity on that. So we could perhaps use that money for 2627 since we have a general fund crisis. I'm glad I'm looking over there now so that this could help us as we build our budget for 2627. That's where I'm coming from. No gotcha here. Trying to be helpful. You understand what I'm asking? Thank you sir. Administrator. And then technical question number two. It's my final one. Going forward, we can either accept the previous allocated amounts that have been provided for us today. Because today I think was a little bit of air out of the balloon, like, oh, all of this was already mostly accounted for. So I need to know what what we're doing today and what we're doing going forward is we can undo and seek a different focus. Or we live with what you have. In this document that I just listened to earlier in the session, where in fact, oh, there's not as much as we thought because it was allocated, in fact, planned expectations for the following reasons.
194 Yes. I think the conversation, as I understand it, that I've heard from you all, is that there's clarity that the 21 million, $20.7 million in so funds needs to be allocated by council, and then a decision needs to be made about whether proposed uses, particularly in city and short term rental, will be. And I think it's.
195 Helpful not to use acronyms. So public listening.
196 Sorry in construction excise tax or in short term rental buckets that are proposed uses but not committed. Whether council wants to make allocations of those funds.
197 Very helpful michael I appreciate that. So those are technical questions there. Now over strategic questions start to get us into the next step. And I'll stop. Thank you.
198 Thank you colleagues. So timing wise we have three more minutes. Technically I'm willing to give it a little bit more time. We've got a couple of folks here on the list. Everybody is on their second round. So before I move to second round, folks, I want to ask if councilor Koyama Lane or council president Dunphy have anything you want to ask? Just making space for you if you need it. Okay, so why don't we aim to go until about 1105? If that's okay? Just get this last round of technical questions and then we'll take a break. Councilor Novick.
199 Thank you, madam chair. So what I think that what council is sort of considering in broad strokes is choosing between rent assistance, preservation of existing affordable housing, building new housing and the general fund. And I'm glad that we've sort of highlighted today that if council did nothing, 19.7 million would go to preserving and presumably maximizing the use of and occupancy of existing affordable housing. So if we decide to reduce that amount below 19 million, reducing the amount for that purpose, intuitively, to me it seems like maximizing our existing affordable housing is pretty good bang for the buck. But could you give us some thoughts as to how we would go about evaluating the relative bang for the buck of preservation of existing affordable housing, providing rent assistance, or building new housing?
200 I can take a shot. I think maybe one one clarification that may be helpful is that I think a lot of the consideration that's being given to the 21 million is referred to as rent assistance. The bureau itself has even used that term, and I think folks often think of rent assistance as an ongoing subsidy. And I think a lot of what is being contemplated is, is really around eviction, legal defense and sort of short term interventions that could include some amount of financial assistance to cover back rent, but not ongoing rent assistance, like what folks think of as the the sort of programs that the county or home forward runs. So. If we're torturing for analogies, I think we're, you know, we're apples and oranges and bananas. It's there there are lots of different considerations that go into sort of immediate term interventions that respond to the precarity of of renters today and sort of the longer term needs that are understood in the affordable housing portfolio. And I think that's I'm not trying to duck it, but that's a really a debate for all of you to have. You know, in terms of how to, you know, sort of assess the value of of bang for the buck, that would be an exercise. We'd have to put some thought into.
201 I'd appreciate that exercise. I mean, just looking at councilor Smith's proposal, rent assistance for tenants is 3.9 million rent assistance and rapid rehousing for tenants facing eviction is 2 million rent assistance for individuals experiencing homelessness. Sheltered housing. That's the mayor's thing is 3 million. There's the right to counsel thing. That's 1.9 million. But most of it is just what councilor Smith is testing. And I think what we've talked about before is rent assistance. And I to me, if you could have used that 19 million for rent assistance before, but you decided you wanted to use it to preserve and expand the increase the use of existing affordable housing, then I would hope that you gone through sort of an exercise of concluding that preserving and maximizing the value of existing affordable housing is preferable. So if somebody in the past I know you're you're new, but if somebody in the past has gone through that exercise, I'd like to see it. If you could try to come up with some justification or withdrawal of justification for spending that money on preservation, rather than rent assistance, I'd like to see.
202 It, and I apologize. Councilor I, I don't think I had the right frame. I think in councilor Smith's proposal and the slow the flow in flow, there are proposed uses that are very consistent with how. So the renter services office would deploy those funds and then in these in the construction excise tax and short term rent assistance buckets that are available, those are the ways that in the normal course of business, fb would, you know, would deploy those funds. And so that's not to say that other, you know, I mean, we're we're in a position where we're trying to not put our finger on the scale of what council might propose and what we think of it or not. We're just sort of saying these are the ways that we would typically deploy the resources based on the, the category of funding that they come from.
203 Okay. But I would be careful about avoiding putting your finger on the scale because you guys are the experts, and I want to hear what the experts have to say. And I want to clarify that I'm sort of thinking of this as what councilor Smith has put on the table is a $40 million pot of money, 19 million of which would, if council didn't move, would have gone to preservation and maximization of existing affordable housing. And what factors we should be looking at if we're trying to decide whether to reduce that amount?
204 Yes. And I would say this, this presentation of our planned uses is our proposed, you know, consideration for you all.
205 Thank you.
206 Okay. Councilor Morillo.
207 Thank you, councilor Avalos, I'm going to ask one last question. I'll try to be as clear as possible. I think it's important to get it on the record. So if the acfr balances are not accurate, then why was the guidance provided by the city budget office to the city financial analysts to reconcile their budgeted beginning fund balances to those numbers? Because you've suggested that the analysis that me and my office have done is incomplete, which is okay, but you are also asking bureaus to use the same numbers in the spring tau. So I'm just not understanding the difference there.
208 Councilor the balances in the aquifer are accurate as audited by the external auditor.
209 Okay, well, I guess we'll see. We'll see who's right in a few weeks regarding the 137 million, but. There. I'm telling my colleagues now, I think that there is more money there. And we will have to take a look at that. So I will hold off further questions. I know we're at break time.
210 Thank you. Yes, we are at time. So I'm going to give you the last word if you want to take a couple minutes okay.
211 Thank you. Thank you, madam chair. I just want to go backwards and and talk about Smith one, which is $41 million. It puts $20.7 million into rent assistance to help folks who are facing eviction. And it also puts rent assistance in for folks who are in shelter. And the other $8 million, I put actually $5.1 million back into the general fund. And the balance of the 8.6 goes to a project. And as you said, michael, the short term money, we have identified projects that could be used and none of these require any code changes at all. They're not outside of the restricted areas. So we did a good mix. But to to really close this with the point that councilor Elana pirtle-guiney said, we are in a housing crisis. You all failed to identify purposes for the monies and we weren't shown it. So at this point, we need to deal with the housing crisis and some of that housing crisis should be dealt with in terms of homeownership, keeping people in their homes who are actually getting ready to be evicted from their homes. And if we don't do that, they're going to be out on our city streets. It's going to cost us more to serve them. If they're in a homeless shelter, as opposed to serving them while they're in their homes. So those dollars, we try to put them in the right buckets. And if there's something that you see that's in a wrong bucket, I just like to to know what that looks like. Because I worked on this with ruth from the city budget office, and we tried to make sure that we didn't have to have any additional code changes to that $41 million. But if there's something wrong, if we have it in the wrong bucket, let us know and we will change it. But we know we're in a housing crisis. We passed the slow the flow to homelessness, which identified that we should be putting some of these resources into rent assistance, in addition to building additional affordable housing and affordable first time home buyer projects. Doing gap funding. I don't know about the 62 million. I'm only really concerned about the 40, about the 41. I think those dollars are dollars that we can actually mark up and get on the streets before June 30th. If we don't get that on the street before June 30th, it's going to be it's going to be impossible for us to meet the need of people who are being evicted after July 1st. And that's why I'm really pressing and urging my colleagues to make sure that we get this on the streets really quickly. Thank you.
212 Thank you to our panel of experts here. We appreciate your time. So we are going to take a quick recess. It is 1108. Please be back at 1118. And we'll begin the second half of our discussion. Thanks.
213 Do you have any concerns.
214 Lingering out there?
215 I mean, I put.
216 It on.
217 Mr. President, something.
218 In the poll?
219 All right. We are going to return to our discussion. Let everybody get settled here. Okay. So before moving through these discussion prompts, I want to briefly frame this portion of the work session. So over the past several months, council has had substantial conversations about housing investments, including prevention, prevention strategies, housing production and longer term structural approaches. And today's conversation is meant to build on that work. The goal is not necessarily to make final decisions. Thank you in this moment, but to surface where there may already be alignment and where councilors may have additional ideas or priorities that we should consider. I'm going to walk through a few discussion prompts, one at a time, so we can move through them in an organized way. And so you councilors all received these questions ahead of time, the way that we have it timed out. I mean, it's like about ten ish minutes per question. So I'll do my best to keep us moving. But also feel free to use your time to speak on on any question if that feels appropriate. So we don't have to be super structured, but we will start with question one. And so what we wanted to do, because we have again been building this conversation, wanted to provide the essentially all of the amendments that were being introduced to see if your understanding of our current options or constraints currently before council is what we see here. So and if not, I want to hear what might be missing from the framework. Are there categories or constraints that you believe should be clarified before we move further into discussion allocations. So we're just going to kind of get grounded on what's been in front of us and get some feedback about that. And then we'll go through each individual bucket. We have it broken up to talk about what should the rental services type investments be? What should the development projects investments be? What kind of money do we want to set aside in contingency or perhaps set up for social housing? And then lastly, what kind of money do we need to set aside for general fund? So with that, let me look at my cue. I see we've got councilor Green first. Go ahead and kick it off.
220 Thank you councilor Avalos, about how much time do I have?
221 We're going to do about ten ish minutes each question, but we'll just kind of go from there.
222 Okay. Colleagues, I've actually passed out a brief write up to help kind of organize my thoughts in advance of this session. My staff. As well as staff from councilor Murillo's office kind of helped put this together. And so I've handed this out. But I think the way I want to enter this discussion today, just speaking for myself at this juncture, is that I want to hit the reset switch a little bit on where we've been in this conversation the last couple of months. So I don't I don't really want to start from any particular named amendments or any previous set of proposals, but really think about what are the salient themes that came out of all those discussions and try to divide it between. Both demand side interventions as well as supply side interventions, because those are both critical to the housing problem. I want to think about approaching this discussion in terms of two tiers of council action, tier one being a sort of immediate requirement to act. Now on the $20.7 million, because I think we all understand that that's probably the area where we have the most council discretion and the the intended use of those funds are very much about helping tenants not be evicted. Right. And making sure they stay housed or get rehoused, they have access to a lawyer and so on and so forth. And then there's this second tier, which is more of a call for strategic programing and councilor Pirtle-guiney you had you got you got on to a number that I that's consistent with my number, which is $30.4 million. And we had confirmed previously that if we were to consider 34, $30.4 million, we would be engaging with a, a sort of intervention in a sense of staff planning on what we think the outyear notice of funding availability buckets are. And I think we need to be honest about that. And then I finally have this like last category, which is we've talked about the broadway corridor a lot in these previous discussions. And as we went through this, I wouldn't do this for any other tiff line item. But I think in the context of the broadway corridor, I think it's appropriate for us to sort of contemplate earmarking the $4.8 million of unallocated housing, set aside funds, expanding our use of those funds to make it available for gap funding for that project, which we can get into that discussion. And so I think in tier one, I'd really like to see us think about dividing the $20.7 million as follows $9 million for sort of short term demand, side rent assistance could could help. 450 to 4500 households stay stabilized. We can have a discussion on how to condition that bucket, but I really didn't want to get into the weeds. I want to keep this pretty high level. $1.9 million for eviction defense. That's a number that we've floated up and kind of tested a couple of different times at each different moment. We've come together as a body to talk about this. To me, that's that's going to be another demand side intervention that I think is the most humane way and also the most cost efficient way to to keep someone housed and, and provide and provide meaningful legal defense dollars for that work. And then finally, $8.8 million in what I, what I think is actually a supply side solution, which is rent or mortgage buy downs. We've talked about it in two different ways here, which gets to the stabilization question and and the reason why I think that that's a really important intervention, colleagues, is that it's really tough to be a member of the public and hear all these headlines that say, okay, $21 million today, $40 million tomorrow, $106 million the next day. And then read another headline that says, there's 1800 units of housing that are lying fallow. That's really tough. And it's our job to to close the loop on that. And so I think if we step up and say, look, we we're taking action to correct a failure to allocate these funds and we step in and say we are going to preserve what we have because it is the most cost effective way to make those units available. And we've talked about different ways to preserve those those units. I've had some conversations with reach. I've had some conversations with home forward. There's a universe in which we can be very effective in this intervention. Then I think we can show voters that at roughly $60,000 a unit, we can bring those those units back into serviceability. And that's that's very cost effective. And then we can move into I'm probably burning my clock down, but we can move into tier two. And this is where I actually really do think we should step in and talk about what our priorities are. I think we have a generational opportunity with this one time money, and it is one time money to to maybe do some pilot social housing acquisition, you know, let's go out and buy something from the market while it is on sale because we will not have that opportunity again. We have a short window of time where we can step in for pennies on the dollar, acquire an asset, call it social housing. And then I think that if we're talk about there's been a lot of really good proposals for good projects that have, you know, specific names attached to them for gap funding. I think we can allocate some money to, to provide soft debt capital for that gap funding. So create a pool of money to say for basically, you know, 0% or 1%, something less than 1%, we can loan a long dated loan to you to close your capital stack so you can actually get the shovels in the ground, as opposed to just a grant that goes out and we don't get it back. So that's how I would like to approach this conversation. I'm willing to kind of answer any questions as we get into this, like cross dialog, but I was really hoping to to reset the conversation about high level prioritization, two tiers and and really make sure that we're talking about $55.9 million or slightly less than that if you don't count that tif district stuff and not the full 106, because that's just not at our disposal. So I'll I'll leave it there for now and look forward to the conversation.
223 Thank you. Councilor love this. I think that's a very good place to start. Councilor council president Dunphy.
224 Thank you. Yeah. Councilor Green, I really appreciate this. This is really sort of boils down to me, some of the the conversations we've been having and the universe of ideas that have been out there and then sort of tries to bring it back based off the information we heard today. I just want to verify, though, in this scenario. Well, I like the the, the two tier approach, just to be explicit, you would not envision returning any dollars to the general fund.
225 I don't have that programed otherwise.
226 I mean, like beyond that, this all really feels consistent and interesting. Also the the river, the tiff, I gotta say the tiff, the river district tiff reallocation makes a lot of sense to me. Those are supposed to be dollars that are used towards creation or acquisition of housing dollars. River district doesn't exist, and there's been obviously a lot of conversation on this dais about the future of the broadway corridor parcel six. So I think this is a a really great framework to, for us to to be thinking about this and to start moving towards some consensus around. So good job. Thank you.
227 All right. Councilor o councilor Novick.
228 Thank you, madam chair. One preliminary question I have is all of the various proposed rent assistance categories. Is that short term rent assistance? How many people does that do those pots envision giving people rent assistance for how many years?
229 Maybe I can start to answer that. And then I don't know if maybe you want to add to it. I think ultimately the way that we programed it originally was trying to fill these short gaps. And there's actually lots of different ways to do rent assistance. So it definitely is not on the far end of we're providing rent assistance for years and years to come. It's more so that there are a lot of people that are about to be evicted, or they're a couple months behind and being able to help them fill that gap and get stable so that they can stay in their house and continue. Because often a lot of times it's not that people have no income, it's just that, you know, life and other things, right? They get behind. And so the way we structured, we had it in a couple of different ways because, for example, we made sure that we were ensuring dollars would get to immigrant families in particular, since they have been cut off from federal resources, things like that. So overall, to answer your question, the intent is kind of like gap financing for buildings. It's like gap financing for humans so that they stay in their home.
230 Okay. Thank you. So. I would like us to have an extensive discussion about temporary rent assistance versus what councilor Greene is focused on, which is stabilizing existing affordable housing, because having affordable housing is itself rent assistance. It's long term rent assistance. It means that their units that are available at a lower rent, and if there are units that are not being filled and we could do something that helps fill them, then that is a form of rent assistance for the people in those units. If some of these affordable housing providers are at risk of collapsing, then that means a whole bunch more people are evicted and the properties theoretically would be picked up to be used for unaffordable rents. And I also just want to underscore something I said before, which is that we do not have a short term crisis that we can expect will end in the next couple of years. We have an ongoing crisis, which we can't anticipate is going to end in the next couple of years. And in the context of that ongoing crisis, the county has spent tens of millions. In fact, I think hundreds of millions of dollars on rent assistance. And that has not been sufficient to flow the inflow. So I am worried about our adding a $9 million additional to what the county has done, which has not been sufficient to slow the inflow. And my. My belief. And it'd be nice to see some more like testimony on this, is that we get more bang for our buck by preserving and enhancing the use of existing affordable housing. I also want to say that I'm going to vote no on anything that only allocates the 20 million. I think that councilor Smith is doing the right way by looking at all 40 million at one time, and plus maybe this 10 million in city money that they haven't focused on. So I think that we should focus on the big picture rather than debate just 20 million and then figure out later on what we're going to do with the other 20.
231 Thank you, councilor Pirtle-guiney.
232 Thank you, councilor. You know, I'm looking at this sheet that councilor Green handed out. And I do think, councilor Green, that you are looking at the right amount of money, the right buckets of money. And as we have the conversation today, I hope that we're not focused on the 106 million, but we're looking at the 20.7 and the 3.4, perhaps that 4.82. I have some questions about that. I don't think that means we need to spend all what is that, $41.1 million. And there is a conversation we have not had about whether we should be allocating that 30.4 or not. If we're going to allocate some of that. I agree. Councilor Novick we should do that today. We should have a packed well, as we do the 20.7. This is a work session. We won't allocate anything today. We should have a package that looks comprehensively at the needs in our community and what we are going to do with that. Spending that there's a lot of things on the list. We've talked about colleagues that I'm really interested in, us funding, projects that I think we need to get going, work on the mortgage, buy downs that I think is critical. And I recognize that every dollar we spend out of that $30.4 million pot is us saying to our bureau, we're turning your processes upside down. Maybe we do that one time because there were these accounting variances that led to some different information. And we say this is one time where we're willing to go in that direction. I can be comfortable with that, but only if we're being clear about this choice that we're making to turn our normal funding processes on their heads. I am wondering about the 4.8 million, because the first that I had heard about us using those dollars was today. And I know we're talking more than debating councilor Avalos, but I'm wondering if we can ask our administrative team who's still up here with us to talk about whether there are other projects that the 4.8 were being considered for? Not necessarily things they've been allocated to, but are there 2 or 3 things that that has been in the back of people's minds for that we should know about, so we understand the trade offs? Or is that truly money that has no trade offs at this point?
233 I think it's totally fine to ask those questions if you are prepared to respond.
234 Yeah, I will have my have my team message me if I get this incorrect or if there's something I'm not aware of. But I believe we represented those funds as we did, because there really is not anything that we would otherwise recommend. So there there are often, you know, sort of opportunistic opportunities that happen. There's a there's the possibility of making making that available through solicitation, but there's not a known project that this would be.
235 They're not tied up in any conversations with PSU or any conversations with the diamond project, or any conversations with any other speculative development that we're having with other folks.
236 That's correct.
237 Correct.
238 Okay. Thank you. That's really helpful. You know, I know we're on the first question, but a couple of other people have talked about question number two.
239 And feel free to go ahead and just talk through all the questions. I don't want to. It sounds like we want it a little bit more fluid. So you can answer any of the questions. Go ahead.
240 I just want to second the questions that councilor Novick was asking about rent assistance. When we have one time dollars as an entity that is often tasked with providing infrastructure and does less not none, but less on the service provision side, and we have one time dollars before us. I am not excited about spending any one time dollars on ongoing program needs. They will leave us with a cliff down the road. They will leave us with those budget holes that we are looking at right now. Down the road. We will make promises to community organizations that are helping people day in and day out that we cannot fulfill a few years from now. And while I understand the importance, the critical importance of rent assistance. I don't think it is the right use or best use for these dollars. And I hope that we focus as much as we can on things that have long term effects for one time purchases like construction, constructing new infrastructure like those mortgage buy downs that I think can be used for not only lowering rent, but addressing the other issues that make units rentable. Some of the turnover and security issues as well. I hope that that is a focus of our conversation. Thank you councilor. I'm sure I'll address more of the questions as we move through.
241 Sounds good colleagues. Without objection, mayor wilson would like to insert the discussion. Is that all right? Go ahead mayor.
242 Thank you chair. Thank you, councilors, for this opportunity. I'd like to make some recommendations for your consideration. We're making these decisions that are all good. There are no bad decisions here, but they're being made underneath the umbrella of a fiscal crisis that our city is facing this afternoon. You're going to be presented with the spring towel and the budget deficit that we have right now. Today, it's about $18 million. The first recommendation that I'd like you to consider is taking a portion of these funds and addressing the immediate concern that we have to reduce service impacts and employee reductions. Let's first the second and only my second request, other than a few comments, would be to also focus on rent assistance for those currently experiencing homelessness. We've had a really good year, and we've worked very hard to bring people from the street into shelter. I hope you join me in to work as equally as hard to help people from shelter into housing, and what's good news is that we have available housing. We have thousands of affordable housing units that are available today. We can house individuals within five months versus building housing, which will take five years. So I hope that you join me in that immediacy of using these funds and looking at that one particular line item and seeing if you can, plus up if you see possible. Two other points I want to make regarding williams and russell. The state just passed legislation yesterday to bring $10 million into williams and russell. And so anytime we can share and add funds to get that project going, that just allows us to move faster, to build housing quick for those in need. And then the last and final is broadway corridor. While the government did not pass funding to partner on that, I had a conversation with the governor earlier today regarding broadway corridor. It is one of her single most important priorities to do two things build affordable housing and then take that space in our downtown core and get construction workers moving and getting that housing moving as fast as possible. So I just wanted to convey that priority to you from her. So thank you for this opportunity, chair, I appreciate it.
243 Sounds good.
244 Councilor Kanal. Thank you. Chair. Avalos. So much good stuff in here and I appreciate the conversation and I appreciate the having something to react to. So thank you to councilor Green and I think councilor Morillo and teams for this, I want to start by saying I think I agree on what the scope of the dollars are that we're looking at, not necessarily. I'm not as concerned about the idea of. Adjusting what was penciled in because of the fact that it was penciled by by bureau staff, but I do think that the ones that have specific projects are better left alone in this moment. I'm not necessarily making a broader statement there. So looking at the 58.1 as, as already committed is something I'm comfortable doing with a couple of questions I have around city, but I think that's the part that I'm interested in is already in the 30.4, I believe. So I'll verify that later and update. But as we get into what is good to look at, there are a few things here that I wanted to to talk about. First, the thing that I think has been missing this whole time is activating our spaces through the use of some of the short term rental dollars for in-house economic development. On the tourism side, I'm not talking about millions and millions of dollars. I'm talking about helping events that are coming to Portland to be more successful, be larger, and help occupy more of those rental units, both in terms of airbnb type rentals and in terms of hotels downtown. I think that's an investment in our future that will yield more money down the road. I have been an event planner in Portland. It is not always easy to do and it's not always easy to scale here. So I do think that that's a piece that's missing. I'm not talking about tens of millions of dollars here, but I do think that that's a part of it. And I think that's a good way to pivot into the general fund conversation, because I think that's the mechanism. And I'm very comfortable with that request from the mayor, given that we're looking at this larger group. If we were just looking at the 20.7, I think there's a the universe gets so small that it's harder to look at the general fund. But I think if we are talking about the the 54, $55 million, 55.9 and I think it makes sense to look at the general fund as well with relation to these tiers and what has been proposed. I'm a big supporter of rent slash mortgage by downs. I think a permanent 18% reduction is a really valuable thing to look at. I believe that was the estimate we looked at for a couple hundred units there, and that would help us when we looked at the math for 60 to 120%. Ami, I think it was yesterday day before there was a a time where we were looking at tables and just seeing how big of a difference that is in the affordability and how. How frankly, some of what we consider affordable housing is not not only not different from the market in a substantial way, but not affordable at all. I think it really drew attention to that big supporter of of eviction defense. I agree with the mayor about the rental assistance piece. For those trying to get from shelter into housing. I'd also like to look at the original purpose that councilor Avalos has been beating the drum on this whole time, which is slowing the inflow. It is, I would put, preventing someone from becoming houseless always as the highest priority there, followed by what the mayor requested of trying to get someone who is currently in shelter into into housing the piece I wanted to to talk about here from the tier two, the social housing acquisition. I'm very, very, very supportive of. I'm actually okay with the $4.8 million going to to broadway corridor. Given the tif district restriction, I am surprised to be saying that as much as anybody else might be hearing me say that just because of that restriction, but given that it already has $5 million, I think 9.8 is is more than enough, for one thing. And I would like to see that other $800,000 be looked at for some of the other priorities we talked about, including that tourism piece, and I'll leave it there.
245 Okay. Thank you. So what I'm going to do, I'm going to keep going with first rounds, if that's okay. So councilor Green, I'll come back to you. We'll do councilor Koyama Lane councilor Morillo. And then I'll do the second round with Novick or Green and Novick. And then I'll open up the next two questions when we go there. Councilor Koyama Lane.
246 Thank you chair. Thank you for this work. The teams of councilor, councilors, Green and Morillo. I am wondering if it's since we're all kind of looking at this, and I don't think members of the public get to see it. Can it be something that is put up as a great meeting materials? Great. I, I have heard in different conversations in community that some different explanations of rent buy down. And so for me, I think it would be helpful to just have on the record and clarify. I don't know if it's you all or even if councilor Green, you want to clarify. I'm hearing folks talk about using the funds to lower rents going forward so you can do some sort of restructuring of debt. And then I've also heard it being talked about. As for some of the affordable housing providers that are kind of underwater, helping them out with their debt, which might not lower rent. And so if someone wants to clarify, that would be helpful.
247 Yes.
248 Go ahead michael.
249 Okay.
250 Sure, sure.
251 Councilor. As I as I've said, rent, rent, buy downs as a strategy is something newer for the housing bureau. We've described a couple of recent specific projects that were in the development pipeline. And so we had the opportunity to restructure debt and get those buy downs before the property went into operation. And when. When, when something is in development and in that state, it's a little bit easier to sort of do that restructuring it is possible to do once a building is in operation. And I think you you get to the question of, are you simply buying down debt to help stabilize operations versus buy downs is a question of how much you're investing, essentially. And so we've got definitely a lot of providers who need who would need debt buy down, who would benefit from debt, buy downs to sort of stabilize the financial performance of their portfolio and could also, you know, tenants could benefit from rent buy downs. And the reason there's not sort of a comprehensive answer for this is because we we haven't really had a full strategy developed, and we haven't had sort of like a big pot of money where we could make this available. So we're relatively young in our experience of of making it work. And there are, I'm sure, approaches that we haven't even, you know, we haven't tried yet, but but that exists out there.
252 Okay. Thank you. Thanks for explaining that. We might want to get clear on that. I think for me, in supporting that, I would I want to see. Like rents going forward, being able to be lower to be part of that. Did you want to add on to what you were thinking, councilor Green?
253 And I'll just wait until I come back around and just just know that I'm going to respond to that point, too.
254 Okay, great. And I know that we're still working all this out, but if we were to be talking about more of the short term stabilization, giving bridges of of rent assistance, is that something we can do in-house? We would be doing it as the bureau or is it something we'd be contracting out to others to help us do?
255 There are approaches to eviction prevention and eviction legal defense that are that exist in house. And so we could we could do that as long as council didn't sort of prescribe something that was outside the scope of what we're already doing. And I will just offer as well, councilor, on that, on that last question that I said that there's sort of a universe of possibilities for rent buy down, but if you all sort of appropriate this money and say, you know, we want this to go towards this specific thing like we can we can make that happen.
256 And does it need to be you were saying it needs to be a certain amount of money to it has to be depends how large the chunk is for you.
257 Yeah. And that's really a question from project to project. I mean, if we're looking at a number in the 8 to 9 million range, I would anticipate we could probably do 2 or 3 projects and get maybe in the realm of 150 units.
258 Great. Okay. Thank you.
259 That's very soft math.
260 Yeah. And then I, I just want to point out that we are talking about 40 ish million, which is a lot. And you know, it's seeming like we don't actually we don't have to choose between one time rent assistance and helping affordable housing providers. It sounds like we can be able to possibly do both, which is great. And at first glance, and what I'm hearing a lot from constituents is I am going to be making sure that legal services are part of the package that I support, and keeping tenants housed, and also getting people into housing, too. Okay, thanks.
261 Thank you. Councilor Morillo.
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262 You know, I put my hand down because I honestly think councilor Green and I are saying the same thing. And in the spirit of us leaving at some point, I will just not repeat people's points.
263 Sounds good. Well then, with that, why don't I just open up the next two questions just so the public knows what we're responding to, and then we'll keep the conversation going. So the next two are to talk about these two particular buckets around rental eviction prevention, all of that and development projects. So question two is about the question is which of these programs would you prioritize retaining at their current level? Are there any programs that councilors believe should be scaled up either because of demand impact or urgency? And are there any modifications or new investments related to rental services that councilors would like to raise for consideration? And then the second question is which of the development projects currently identified would you prioritize retaining? Are there projects or development strategies that councilors believe should be scaled up or expanded, and are there new ideas or approaches related to housing development that councilors would like the group to consider? So go ahead and pop in the queue if you'd like to talk to those questions. But we'll kick it off with councilor Green.
264 Thank you, councilor Avalos. And conveniently, my response to Novick is right on, on in the spirit of the question. So I think you're posing the right question, councilor That we need to start to test these trade offs here. Rent assistance on the one hand and and these other kind of more maybe perhaps long term sorts of interventions. But I but I must I do have to say that we don't have to make a binary choice. I think what we need to do is we need to figure out what is the right blend here. Because again, rent assistance is a demand side intervention that works alongside those other supply side interventions. This is what we get from the. The practitioners with with experience in this space. You can you can help keep someone stabilized with rent assistance. Not everyone is in an affordable housing unit that can benefit from debt financing. So let's have the discussion. But but but but I wouldn't I wouldn't would not support sort of zeroing out of a rent assistance bucket to the mayor's proposals. I appreciate you laying those on the table. Helps me see where you're thinking. And it's very close to how I'm thinking. So when we drafted this, I took a step back and got up to a higher level of resolution. When we think about rental assistance, let's just let's just have a bucket for rental assistance and let's give direction when we allocate this to say it should be in line with the priorities of folks who are trying to serve right now. I think that we should make rent assistance available for folks who are unhoused, who need to get into housing. I think that's critical. That's crucial. We can adjust how we use that and who's the right recipient based upon how the conditions change. I think I want to respond to councilor Pirtle-guiney. You know, earlier on you had sort of raised up the bigger philosophical question of we need to determine whether or not we're going to ask the bureau to change their existing nofa plans and whether we think that's appropriate. I'll just make the case that I think it is appropriate, just because while I understand the need to smooth out your resources over time so that there's something there 2 or 3 years on the road down the road, that's a sort of like planning practice in the absence of shocks and sort of emergent conditions that you don't necessarily know about ahead of time. I think we're in one of those crises, shocks where we have we have opportunities to seize on investments right now that are probably going to be lower cost than a few years down the road. And so we might be able to stitch together some solutions that get some things in the pipeline or convert. You know, I had a conversation recently with the folks who were involved in the co-op, the co-op discussion space. They're well organized. They're ready to turn apartments into co-ops. They just don't have capital. So we could enter in this space under the broad banner of social housing and say, one of the first things we could do is provide renters an opportunity to now have an equity stake in their building. That's something we can do right now. And so, you know, that's kind of that's so I'm making the case, I guess, for us to think about intervening on those plans. And then finally, councilor Koyama Lane I had started this conversation was inspired by the rent by down presentation at the finance committee, I think on the 12th of January started on the rent by down implementation of mortgage buy downs. But then I had broader conversations. I met with reach cdc. They made the case that there's actually so the challenges facing these providers are different depending upon the building depending upon the institution. And so some flexibility might be desired. We could have a prioritization schedule I'm going to share. I'll forward you an email that I got from madison moskowitz who said let's look to seattle. Actually seattle has a program like this. They have an intake form where you fill out kind of what your purpose for the request for funds would be, and that could be a way for the bureau to develop a program around this and engage in prioritization process. So I thought that was interesting to share a best practice or an existing practice from seattle and just kind of lay that on the table there. So I'm not dogmatic. I guess what I'm saying about how to use this category of debt buydown I just want to use it. Frankly, I would like it to be for rents lowered though. And that's how if like if I was advocating for something, I'd want it to be like the priority. Like we can have scoring matrices. We have that on our grant making all the time. So I'll leave it there.
265 Thank you. Councilor Novick.
266 Madam chair, if you'll forgive me, I want to clarify a couple of things. Might not be directly responsive to these couple of questions. Okay, so first of all, councilor Pirtle-guiney I hear what you're saying about we don't have to allocate the second the 30 million pot. Now, my concern is that, for example, I mean, I like councilor Green's idea of spending 8 million of the 20 million on rent, buy downs, etc. But I worry that if we do that, people might think of that as a ceiling rather than a floor. And the assumption might be that we don't use any of the 30 million for that, but I'd actually probably like to see the number higher. So that's my hesitation. And let's see, I sort of along the same lines, I am not I actually rather like councilor Greens and councilor Morillo proposal. I might sort of want to tweak it and say, let's have more flexibility for more affordable housing, buy downs versus social housing. But I sort of like the mix of long term versus short term in it. One. So I mean, again, by saying that I don't want to vote on councilor Greens initial 20 million proposal, that doesn't mean that it's an objection to the proposal overall. The other thing I wanted to say, though, in terms of urgency, is that if we're going to get money for the general fund, then my understanding is that has to come out of part of the second bucket, which is the short term rental 2% part. So if we don't, I feel some urgency to say we're going to spend a chunk of that money on the general fund, which is another reason I'm not totally comfortable with the idea of saying, we'll just vote on the 20 million and not vote on anything else.
267 Thank you, council president.
268 Thank you.
269 I have two additional sort of points to this. And it's not so okay. I don't believe that we should be spending money of supporting units above 60%. Ami broadly, I think that it's been stated over and over again that roughly right now 60% ami unit is market rent. I think we need to be a little tighter about this. I understand that there are some federal requirements around lights and things like that, but I, I think broadly, philosophically this, that public dollars in the housing market should only be used to fill spaces where the private market won't meet. They're not building 30% units, they're not building 40% units. And that is the only reason why I think we should be investing in housing broadly. The other sort of philosophical point that I guess I don't know if we can I don't know if this is a policy thing or something to discuss now, but something that councilor Green started to touch on, which is that right now we are largely a pass through organization that when we are investing in housing, we take public dollars and we cut a check and we put it out into the public, but we don't have anything ten years later, we don't own any assets. We don't have that continued ownership stake. I don't know if this is a thing, but if we are going to buy down rents, if we're going to buy down the mortgages, is there an opportunity for us to have an ongoing ownership stake or an ongoing asset for the city to to be able to claim and also ensure over the long term? I guess, you know, we do. We don't do great over long term maintenance and things like that. But I'm just thinking more broadly, like if we have one time dollars and we're talking about maximizing the impact of those one time dollars, I just worry that it if we just cut a check, then that is the end of it. And I don't know how to I mean, like ultimately social housing is that is a core tenant of what we're trying to think about maintaining a public asset. And as a value proposition. But those are sort of like the those two points that like how affordable is affordable and what does the city have after we are done, are things that I'm just really continue to be concerned about broadly about our housing policy, but also if there's ways that we can reflect any of that in how we are doing this, or if this is an opportunity for us to start pivoting, I think there's a real I think those are those are really important considerations. Thank you.
270 All right. So we're at 1203. We go until 1230. And I was about to say I haven't heard from Smith Zimmerman Ryan great. Get in there Clark. So I'd love to start seeing you in the q councilor Kanal, I think, did you take yourself out to go after? Okay, so go ahead, councilor Smith.
271 Thank you. Thank you, madam chair. I agree with everyone. I think we need to spend some of those dollars on rent assistance. I also believe the 2% money that we have, the 8.6 million in in my proposal, it gives $5 million back to the general fund. I think that's going to be very important. And I also think that we need to support some of those projects that need this last gap funding, like williams and russell broadway corridor and self enhancement homeownership program. That's going to be great. I just want to address something that the council president said about having assets. I'm all about having assets. I think that's important. But with assets, just like the assets we currently have in our public works system, they require ongoing maintenance and ongoing money. So as we're talking about buying these assets, if we're not putting in the budget long term maintenance for ongoing dollars, that comes with the cost, it's not a one and done so. And if we're not planning to sell that asset, we don't really get a lot out of it. We're going to be putting more money into it. So that's why I really like the idea of helping the community based developers. We help them with their gap funding. They do it. We don't have to maintain it. But if we do buy the the social housing thing, we are going to have to maintain it. So that's going to be another bucket, and then we're going to have to figure out how do we maintain it and what do we take out of our current budget. And that's that's the other issue. The last thing that I'm concerned about and we'll talk about this later, is the realignment process for the city. They're being asked for 3%, 10%, I think 20%. I'm not sure what's going to become of that realignment. So not knowing that and seeing what we have forward, I think we need to to quickly support these projects that greene put out and get that done right now for 25, 26. The other question that I have, michael, I know we've talked before about the rental assistance and at this late date now, we talked about it in December and January. If we do the rent assistance, it's going to take until after July 1st. One of the proposals that I had put forward was to identify community based organizations like the sun school, groups who who do rental assistance to actually appropriate that to them so they can get it out on the floor before July 1st. So is your is your sense still that if we kept the rental assistance and kept it in the Portland housing bureau, that we will not be able to get it out until after June 30th?
272 I think for potentially for something like a new program, like an eviction legal defense, which we don't currently do, that will take longer.
273 Not that the rental assistance, the actual to help people who are being evicted that are in their homes and we want to keep them there. We had talked about that it would it would take a long time for you to put out an RFP for that. And it probably wouldn't happen until after the first of the year. I'm saying we have existing programs and that we work with with Multnomah county and with the sun school programs they're doing. They've all run out of their rental assistance money. And I've talked to a few of them, and they can put those dollars on the street fairly quickly in the realm of 250 to 300,000. So I'm saying if we did pass a rental assistance bucket and we sent it back to fb, would you be able to get it out before June 30th?
274 If what if what gets passed aligns with work that we're already doing and we can increase contracts, then we can get that money out. If it's something new that we're not doing, or we need to have a different scope than it would take longer.
275 So and we're not doing that because we're not in the business of rental assistance right now. We would have to do an RFP. We have old programs that we did during ARPA that we would have to to. We'd have to activate those folks, and that would be a process.
276 If we were running a rent assistance program that we don't currently exist. That's right.
277 Yeah. So that's why I was suggesting to directly appropriate these funds to programs who are currently doing it. They got reduced on the state level, and they can get those funds out before June 30th. If not, I mean, what's the purpose of us identifying rental assistance and the monies that we don't do here? It can roll over, but I think there's a certain amount of this money that needs to get out of the door before June 30th.
278 So I again, I don't have a lot of experience and the city doesn't have a relationship with son school. So I believe the mechanism here would be an intergovernmental agreement between the city and the county to move that money through their system.
279 But they would get it directly. It wouldn't come through fb, it would come from fb, but it it wouldn't be that they would actually be able to actually do this right now. Right?
280 I believe.
281 Once we did an iga.
282 If the county system can accommodate that, then yes.
283 Yeah. And they can do it directly. We don't have to give it to the county. We can give it directly to the school systems who are already doing it. Some of those programs are already in our system, like latino network or Multnomah metropolitan housing and family services. And then we also have self-enhancement, who also is a son school provider that provides for rent assistance in every district in the city of Portland. And that's the only reason why I didn't think about doing it with fb, was because of the conversation that we had. The second piece is that if we do carry over money, if there are dollars that we carry over, would you actually RFP those dollars? Because we're not going to do this after. This is one time only. And I've been telling people this is one time only money. This is not our book of business. Would you also have to RFP those dollars after July 1st? Those funds that we don't use before the 30th.
284 If there's if there's money that we move out before June, before July 1st, we won't have to do something after July 1st.
285 Okay.
286 But I think in the slow the flow we put money in for this fiscal year and next fiscal year. And so I'm just trying to figure out how we do that and what adjustments we make in amendments.
287 Councilor may I hop in for maybe just to help sort this out in the slow the flow proposal? There was money, you know, forecasted in multiple years each year. Those those resources would have to be budgeted in our budgeting process, even though they were committed to the program for the bureau to spend the dollars, they would still go through a budget action, have to be authorized to be spent. Right. So in that case, we would do that in the event that money was not spent, we would use the fall tor to true up the dollars to be carried, carried forward. Right.
288 So so that would be good.
289 And always be an action.
290 Yeah.
291 And so the purpose would be to put all the money for rent assistance in 25, 26 so that it can roll over and we don't have to reauthorize it.
292 Perhaps. I think that's I think that we want to let the bureau staff provide their best, you know, best guess of implementation for, you know, okay. Practicality.
293 Well thank you. Thank you.
294 Okay. Counselor Zimmerman.
295 Thanks. I think most everybody knows I'm probably in the camp of creating more units. Is is my number one priority. And so I think that this mix that's being discussed is generally I understand it, supportive. There's something I want to. Tap into a little bit though with your comments, council president, about what level of ami we should be investing in, because I think those are those are really salient points and they're easy to track. And here's the other part of that conversation when we talk about. So I'm a believer that mixed income buildings and mixed income neighborhoods are the healthiest type. Right. That's where I come from. The pearl district is one of those where lots of affordable, lots of middle and certainly some luxury balance has brought that community into a densely populated sector of our city. And if we believe that density is the future for urban planning, which I'm one of those people, we're in a situation right now where, you know, in northwest Portland, if you get into the numbers of northwest with the alphabet going, those are filled. Those buildings are filled with what would and should be naturally affordable units. But because our capacity is so stretched in our community, we have people who make perfectly healthy salaries, who are, I guess, renting or buying down in a way, because that's what's available at a high level, right? That what I would say is they should be competing with other units, but because they're not those owners of those, you know, four brick and I'm talking the old ones, right. And a lot of us as young people lived in them at different times. Those are now getting a rate that I would say has put us out of balance. And so that balance matters, because if you think about broadway corridor, which is an extension of the pearl district, it will be the next, I hope, mixed income, densely populated, mixed building income as well. That is where, at least in that district, where rents are higher than they are in other parts of the city. I think that there can be an argument in limited use, very limited use, that we want to incentivize, that some ami not a certain percentage of it, but just some average folks middle incomes are able to be there as well. What I think will happen in the broadway corridor, if we don't look at at least a little bit and it's we're talking one building is we'll have one highly subsidized unit, highly like the lowest ami. And then we hope on, on, on a, you know, a whisper, if you will. We hope that others will eventually pencil in projects, but those will pencil in fully at market. And we will leave out essentially families. Below the 150,000. I think even if we're really talking about two two bedroom areas, we're really leaving out families in large numbers that would fall into the middle class for families. So if we make those choices of of not putting a little bit of money to make sure that we have some, some restricted units in certain buildings available at what is right now, it's it's terrible that we have to talk about it, but we have to incentivize middle income units to be built in parts of the city. And that's where I would just ask that you be open to sometimes if we want to create a mixed income development. And I think that we do in broadway corridor as a planned community, that it might take us incentivizing some of that. So I just I offer that as a challenge, because at the same time, I think it's responsible that we make an estimate that if the market is not going to develop, because that was your words. If the market is not building well right now, the market in the downtown areas is not building apartments that can be afforded by the by the a middle income person or family. It's not unusual in district four to have a $3,000 rent for a rental apartment in slabtown, and that is that is a challenging number for a lot of income levels. So I offer it because I think we're a council, and I think we're a city whose urban planning believes in density. I think we're council. I think we're a city whose urban planning believes in mixed income. And there will be some places that that's going to be more expensive to incentivize. But we can make that choice. It's just that it may take longer to incentivize. It may take longer for it to come to fruition if it's not incentivized. Or we may create a canyon market rate, high dollar and the most subsidized very low dollar. And I don't know that that's the healthiest community that can be built in different sectors of our city. So I offer that up in limited scope. I think that we have to consider the zip code in which we're trying to incentivize development. In terms of the housing bureau's production. Right? I, I am in large favor of helping in concept, the idea of helping restructure a mortgage for an affordable housing building to allow them to reduce their rents. What I think would be helpful. Is why we collective, we allow a system to exist where you were subsidized to build it. You bring the rent in and it should be to maintain it, pay the mortgage and hopefully put some staff around it. The continual bailout is a concern for me because most everybody who can't get a renter at a certain dollar amount, they lower their rent so that they don't go six months with a vacancy. And so I'm having a tough time swallowing the six month home forward pill right now, because if we do this bailout, it is it is to a group who has six month vacancies. And for I think, a general person in the public, we go, excuse me, like lower the damn rent if you can't get a renter. So what are those structural things? Can we articulate some of those structural things? And it has been said in some circles that the way some of these organizations stay afloat is by floating the next construction project, that's how they keep their staff on board. So before we commit to buying down their mortgages, can we can we get an understanding that the system actually isn't rotten to its core? Because if if I have $100 million asset, a building and I subsidize the rent because y'all, the government helped me subsidize the building of that or the construction of that building, my expenses month in and month out should be the note should be building maintenance right in a in an ownership model we call that the hoa. But in a rental model. So what is the rent going to. Because as much as I want to get down with the mortgage adjustment stuff, I need to understand why they didn't do what everybody else would have done, which is lower the damn rent. Like what's going on with that system?
296 Sure, I'll do my best. Councilor. So, you know, I think when we think about the collective we, the collective we as funding jurisdictions, federal government have historically required underwriting criteria that are very tight. It's understood that in a number of years those projects will be underwater. And that's happening now faster. So I think one of the one of the critical things for us and for our jurisdictional funding partners is to revisit how we're doing the underwriting and building in things like, you know, expectations around security systems and understanding that operating expenses have have escalated in a way, particularly with populations who are experiencing acute behavioral. Health issues, that the game has fundamentally changed. And so we have to change our game, because if we continue to do it the way we have, we're setting folks up to fail and then telling them that they have that they've failed. So I think, you know, there's a.
297 You go on, michael, can I ask a clarifying question with that? Because that's very helpful. So let's say, you know, Zimmerman, cdc built a building, right? And 15 years ago, it was essentially, you know, it was affordable, it was restricted. But today I have a security concern. So I've got to have a staff on for that. I have a behavioral health acuity acuity issue. So now I've, I'm bringing in maybe case managers or social workers. And what you're saying is that because that need is there, that the housing the organization, the nonprofit is actually buying that instead of Multnomah county placing that service in that building? Is that what is when you say building expenses have gone up? Yes. Okay. So our social services agency, Multnomah county is not saying, oh, we have a concentration of acuity at this building. We're going to place a behavioral health specialist in the building. Now, it's just on the backs of those cdcs. I would be hiring my own. Is that kind of what we're talking about when we say that.
298 There are there are definitely a lot of unfunded, unsupported supports and expenses that the providers are bearing themselves.
299 And are I have heard from a number that they are. Forced, maybe as strong as a word we can go to, but they are having conversations about what type of client they can and cannot take on, and they are feeling like they've really got to lay that out now because they're not equipped. Is the language that's been used with me not equipped to take certain types of clients and that that has not. Bode well for them, I guess, in terms of how either the county or home forward treats them, works with them, places them. Okay, sorry I interrupted you.
300 Yeah. No, I I've heard that I've heard providers express that as well.
301 Okay, so. If we if a if a an affordable a subsidized affordable building has vacancies and they can't get they can't just because I guess I'll put it this way. Right. I've got a mortgage due every, every month and it's it's a certain number. And a lot of people have been in this position, which is yeah, most months I can make the whole mortgage on some months maybe I'm only making a portion of it, but the opposite is so maybe, you know, you come in at that point, but to take no rent is what I think people are not understanding. So why is the choice been not to take any rent on those vacancies, instead of just taking less than you had hoped to take from a business decision making? What is that math that goes on at an affordable project?
302 I'm conscious that the director of housing is in the audience listening to my answer, so I hope awesome. You know, I think I think there's that that issue of, you know, structurally, how are you setting yourself up to pay your bills. And so I know that folks are considering, you know, things like rent reduction. I think what's often lost is that the the literal vacancies are also paired with economic vacancies. So they have also a lot of apartments that are filled with folks who are not able to pay their rent. And so just the combination of these expenses and lack of revenue stacking up against each other just creates a really bad circumstance.
303 That's a very helpful answer. It makes me wonder why the cdcs don't fill the units and then come instead of saying, we need help, readjust. Why don't they come and say, hey, we're not going to make our note this month to come forward to the city, to the county instead, while those units remain filled, because I think it has been very difficult to be an advocate for helping a system who made choices to keep things vacant. But if they said all of our units are filled, but we're not going to make our note this year, and that's going to cost a certain number, I think that seems like, okay, let's rally. I almost feel like we're in upside down world in terms of the I don't know if it's chicken and egg conversation, but that's concerning. The vacancy has been the concerning umbrella since this money started getting discussed. But then you throw these home forward articles that have been coming out and they're very troubling. And so to this question of helping them out, that's where I go. Is, is this system to its core rotten? Because I have said multiple times on the record that I am somewhat in favor of an asset approach to this, which is I know how much it costs to maintain a building from one year to the next. That's a fairly common industry that exists. We could just do that instead of this strange system. I'm having a tough time wanting to put more money at that system, and yet it's the system we have right now to develop. So I'm struggling there a little bit. Thank you for helping put some light on some of those questions. I appreciate.
304 It anytime.
305 Thank you. I will flag for the group that one. We are going to have a very robust discussion about this last topic in the housing committee soon. We just couldn't make it happen before the committees changed over, but that will be planned in April. Timing wise, I have been given the Green light to extend us till 1245. There are a couple people here who have not spoken yet, so I'm going to get to them first. Let's try to wrap it up by 1245. So councilor Ryan okay.
306 Thank you. Councilor Avalos content setting real quick. Just remember that local governments received boatloads of one time money from both trump and biden ARPA. And we continue to be kind of haunted by that, not just in the housing bureau, but throughout the city. There's project work that was done. We knew there was a cliff. Providers were aware that this would be a cliff, and we keep moving the ball down the field. And so I'm in the camp of, when are we going to say that we're not in the business of doing housing vouchers and rent vouchers? And so I'll just end with that. I'm trying to be brief because of time. And, you know, when we met as a housing committee chair, Avalos, we had a presentation about the system from streets to stability. We went all the way to home ownership. And in that meeting was that rent assistance was accounting rules, not ours. Building infrastructure was more in our vein. And so I'm in the camp of build, build, build north northeast, yes, to the broadway corridor, etc. So I appreciate my colleagues that have proposals like that. I will say I think legal assistance is more bang for the buck at this moment to keeping people stabilized in their homes. I like that I want to talk about a systemic solution to rental buydown, which has come up several times when I would speak with the legislative priorities of the city. There's a big gap between 30 and 60% ami we all know that 45% is more of a sweet spot for workforce housing, and I hope someday that that becomes a thing and that we can see that. Until then, I could live with the rental buydown. But if you look at the data, it's around 45% for workforce and that's been needed. It's been talked about for some reason, Salem and in Washington, we haven't moved the needle on that. Mr. Mayor, shelter services are fine if the participants are seen, served and assisted a permanent housing, prioritizing those seeking recovery and engaging with the workforce. As such, supporting organizations like, say, ground score that connect the dots to the workforce and building their agency to thrive in the long term. And I don't understand why Portland street response can't help transport participants from shelters in the overnight when they close too early, but they close to day shelters. I hope to see that it's really hard to read the stories about people suffering, trying to get from the overnight shelter to the day shelters. Finally, there's a growing concern that's come up that we can't ignore. And that is as mentioned, I'm just going to underscore it, the vacancy rates due to slow turnaround, which we all agree is unacceptable. The turnover time is very unacceptable. And the other safety, the stories from elders on fixed income who don't feel safe in their own hallway is has to be the responsibility of the city with the providers. And I know I have been asking for this to be on the agenda. We've had emails about this exchange. I was disappointed that we haven't added on the agenda yet, and I'm happy to hear that you're going to get it on there, but I do believe we're denying that and we're delaying that too long. Just last night, I had two people in the audience when we had our forum come up to me and mention that they don't feel safe in their affordable housing units. It's hard to sleep at night when you keep hearing those stories. So let's just be let's just do a better job taking care of the affordable housing that exists in our market as soon as possible, and we can get more units back to service. So those are just some of my big picture ways of thinking as I make decisions. Thank you, colleagues, for the proposals you put out there. And I wanted to daylight where my thinking is at this time.
307 Yes. Thank you, councilor Ryan. And just to be clear, you sent me a request and I said that I was going to put it in the agenda. I can't make a request happen within a couple of weeks, especially when I have other people coming in. So I was not ignoring your request. We are working on it. We just couldn't make it happen on the timeline you asked for.
308 I understand, but it was weeks ago, right?
309 And I have my committee agendas planned out for several weeks. So just like any other agenda, you can't just do it the next week just because you want to.
310 I understand that you think it's an urgent issue.
311 I agree, I just would appreciate a little bit of grace of scheduling like we tend to give everybody else. So please do not persecute me for not doing something that I'm clearly doing. Councilor Clark.
312 Thank you, councilor Avalos, and I'm really glad to hear that this conversation will continue in your committee. That was one of my questions, that you will continue the conversation. Colleagues, I am not I haven't firmly made up my mind about anything, but I can tell you what some of my priorities are. I've been trying to balance the sort of clear and present danger, or the immediate dangers that we confront with future investments and ongoing needs for affordable housing. So under that clear and present danger, I would put the general fund. I mean, that's a high priority for me. I share that with mr. Mayor. I, I'm very, very concerned about what we're going to be dealing with in the next budget cycle. Mr. Mayor, may I may disagree with you on the no bad decisions. I, I'm concerned about what you've heard some of my colleagues say about the vacancy rates, the bailouts. I'm very concerned about where we invest dollars. And I've also floated the idea of do we have too many non-profits? Do we have too many providers? Should we be looking at consolidating some of these cdcs or some of these organizations? Because I think of all the admin costs that are that they're incurring. But I am concerned that there might be some might be some bad decisions and some other lenses that we should apply. I am very interested in the broadway corridor, because I see it as a game changer for the downtown, and I know I beat this drum a lot, but the downtown is our economic engine for the entire city, and it's going to link neighborhoods. It's going to have different levels of housing. It's a game changer. So I'm definitely interested in investing in that project and some of the other development projects I'm interested in. I don't have any questions. I'll just leave it there and look forward to the outcome of your discussion in the housing committee. Thank you.
313 All right. So now we're going to back to councilor Kanal councilor Pirtle-guiney. And we're going to close it out with councilor Green.
314 Thank you, madam chair. Quick round of what I've agreed with that I really wanted to bring up again agreeing with councilor Koyama Lane on eviction representation being a core priority. I know councilor Ryan mentioned that too. I agree completely with councilor Dunphy on ownership stake, even a small percentage in the sports world. They do sell ons in the contract. Even just something at that later stage where we've invested and then if the property is transferred, we get a cut of the sale amount. But I'd also like to talk about conditions associated with these sorts of projects, including vacancy rates being below a certain amount after a certain length of time, six months under 5%, something like that kind of framing, as well as unit density and type variation. We need to move away from studios in one bedrooms and start really forcing the conditions of our money being to three and four bedroom units. I agree with councilor Pirtle-guiney about not just rent buy downs, but also the security upgrades as part of preservation. I wanted to shout out the mayor's comment on williams and russell. I forgot to do that the first time, but also urban plaza and ci as well. I was really grateful to see those in here. And finally, the assessment of what councilor Green was saying about shocks and emergent conditions, changing our approach to some of our prior pencilings, I think is a really smart way of framing why some of these should change. Two slightly less rapid fire here. I want to start by saying I have a strong, strong disagreement about Portland street response being repurposed for something outside of its purpose. Portland street response is not a homelessness response program. It is a behavioral health public safety first responder. However, I agree with councilor Ryan that we do need to solve the day night time gap transport issue with starting with lobbying TriMet on transit for places like saint john's, where there just isn't connectivity and hours extensions so that there isn't a time gap in the first place with no service being offered. And then finally I and I'm building off of what councilor Zimmerman said. And I agree with what he said. Vacancies are a huge part of the problem. They are the enemy. They are much cheaper to fill a vacancy than it is to build a new place. We know that Oregon statewide has over 6 to 1 as its ratio of vacant properties, residential properties to homeless people. That is from a couple of years ago. The stat but it's it's a pretty well supported by by. Data from around the country as well as earlier stats in Oregon. I think you know, we put up a vacancy, a vacant property fee, I hope study. I hope that that is something we can do in time for it to be relevant to this year's budget conversation, but also the conversation around home forward and its vacancy, which relates to everything that councilor Pirtle-guiney said. And all that I think has to be its own topic that we it's adjacent to. It's related to this, but we're not going to be able to solve a lot of our of our other problems in this space. If we have a 14% vacancy rate at home forward. And I'm not blaming them, I'm not saying it's their fault and they need to do better necessarily. I want to understand the reasons for it. And if that requires some of these interventions are pretty basic, like fob entry, swiping when you enter the building so that there's some level of access control. And we can solve that with this money because it's not actually that expensive. And it is a one time cost. So I do really want to look at that. And because if we are able to bring some of these buildings back to 100% filled, we are going to solve a lot of the other problems or at least alleviate some of the symptoms of them. Thanks.
315 Councilor pirtle-guiney.
316 Thank you, councilor. I want to just flag a couple of things that haven't been a major part of the conversation and speak to money that we may not spend. The first is, I've heard a couple of people refer to councilor Smith's proposal, and for members of the public who are listening in, that's not on the grid before us. That grid just includes proposals that spent the original 20.7 million. There is another proposal that has been floating out there that is posted to some past meetings. I believe that that wasn't posted for today, that spends into that additional $30.4 million bucket, though not all of it, and includes some additional projects as it relates to the projects. I there's some really important projects on there. The urban plaza funding will help us leverage a necessary conversation amongst the owner and tenant there, and the self enhancement inc. And williams and russell projects both include homeownership pieces. We have not talked at all about homeownership today, but if we actually want to look at long term guarantees that people will have more affordability, homeownership, a mortgage doesn't go up over time the way that rent does, and that has to be a part of our conversation. If what we want to do is stabilize working families, and those two projects involve homeownership opportunities for low income families, I think it is absolutely critical that if we decide to fund specific projects, those stay on the books for what we're looking at. Councilor Novick I understand the confusion in what I said before. I was agreeing with you that we should spend all money at the same time, but pointing out that we may not want to spend the whole 51.1 million, that there there may be the $40 million proposal that councilor Smith put forward. That's a more appropriate level for us to spend at. And to that note, I just want to flag a couple of things, because I suspect that as we move through this conversation, we will say to the housing bureau, there's some of this money that that maybe we are not allocating specifically. And if we do that, colleagues, I hope that we do that and say, but housing bureau, we want you to get that money out the door as quickly as possible. I don't want to leave dollars going out in 2028 requests when we have a crisis right now. I also hope that when we do that, we start to address who those dollars go to, and I hope that at some point it's not this conversation, but it is related to these dollars. So I'm going to say it now we have a conversation about whether we should be giving money for new construction to nonprofits that have vacancy rates above a certain percent, because the only way that we start to bring down those vacancy rates is if we have some incentives for doing so, and we have millions of dollars of incentives. So I hope that as we transition from this conversation to what comes next, that that is something we are willing to talk about. There's a lot of other things that were said that I agree with, but I wanted to just add those new things to the conversation while we had the opportunity. Thank you. Councilor.
317 Great councilor Green.
318 Thank you, councilor Avalos. Thanks, colleagues. I've said a lot today, but I really appreciated this fluid discussion. I got back in the queue because I wanted to respond to some of what councilor Zimmerman was saying. I think it's important that when we agree on something, we we raise it up and highlight it because it's it's important to to recognize our points of agreement. It's going to be helpful when we do our strategic priority setting. I agree 100% that mixed income neighbor neighborhoods are the model, I think. I think that is the future. That's what I like about the potential of this broadway project. I just don't think ami is the way to do it. I think. I think you do it through cost base rent. I think you do it through things like limited equity co-ops. But I think on the merits of the what the outcome. Couldn't agree more on the mixed income neighborhood concept. That's what we learned in vienna, by the way. On homeownership. We have talked about that a couple times today. And I'll just say, again, limited equity co-ops are a form of homeownership that provide the same sort of benefit mortgage does. My mortgage goes up though because my taxes go up. So we just need to be clear on that. And so if we think about social housing, broadly defined, to include limited equity co-ops, that is in the same universe of that, of that permanency, of that sort of cost stability that you get from the traditional fee simple model of single family home ownership. And I just worry that if we focus on the old model in exclusion, I'm not suggesting anyone is we're just not going to stretch our dollars as much because you can't you can't provide that level of homeownership, access to as many people. If it's just $100,000 a shot or $200,000 a shot to a person versus underwriting the purchase of a building they already live in, to now have equity in that site. So I just I wanted to float that there. That conversation should mature as we have these conversations. But I just I wanted to close by saying that we've talked a lot about the Portland housing bureau today, but I just want to say directly, the Portland housing bureau, you do excellent work. And I thank you so much, michael, to you and your staff. You know, it's got a it has to have been difficult to think about what council has said over the last six months, what the public has said. But but I know I've met many of, of, of the soldiers in the trenches there and they're in this work because they're pouring their hearts into it. So I just wanted to say that.
319 Thank you. I was putting myself at the end, but I see that you're back in the q Novick if you want to take a minute. And then I would like to end with some of my thoughts.
320 I just wanted to note, for the record, that councilors Green Morillo have promised me that they will produce an actual social housing banner, and I'm looking forward to seeing the size and the color scheme.
321 Okay, good to know. Thank you colleagues. So we've got a couple of minutes. I'll just end with a couple of my thoughts. First, I'll just say I have been taking copious notes as well as my staff. We're trying to just collaborate and see where are the alignments, what what are new things that we heard. So I'll make sure that we report back what we heard. I agree with a lot of what has been said. I just want to put a finer point on the conversation around eviction prevention and rental assistance. I think let me start by saying yes, millions of dollars have been spent, but those dollars have not been spent evenly over time. Out of the 18,000, some evictions prevented with hhs funds across the region, two thirds occurred between July of 21 and and June of 23, and since then, spending has slowed significantly, especially in this last year at the state level, for example, Multnomah county, only 167 evictions were prevented with hhs dollars between July and and September of last year. So that's 55 households per month. And that is a fraction of the need, considering the county averages roughly 1000 eviction filings for nonpayment of rent every month. So, in other words, thousands of people each month are on the verge of falling into homelessness because they can't make rent. And that same trend is happening at the city level. And I think ultimately, you know, what I heard from the mayor as well, I agree that it's one thing to have shelters or all of these other measures that we're doing to get people out of crisis from the street, but if we don't have a way for them to go, we don't have a house for them to go into or dollars to help them get into that house, then it's kind of futile. So I think that it is critical in my view, that and it is our responsibility to help address that. And I think that we can do that with the rental services dollars, which is what they are made for. So that's the main thing. I think ultimately, I feel really good about what I'm hearing because I do hear a lot of alignment between us. It sounds like people want a braided, blended approach to these dollars. I'm also seeing that there's some discussion about how much of the dollars people feel is allocatable, if that's the word. And so I think that's something we'll need to suss out, but I'll just close by thanking our amazing staff who have brought great knowledge to us, thanking my counselors. I think that we had a fruitful discussion, and I will be discussing with council president how we take what we learned today and move forward. And with that, we will end the work session. Thank you.