Current affordable housing programs and funding

33:21Good afternoon, Commissioners for the Record. Marcy Esberg, Director of Community Development. And I'm going to take it from the point of the things that we are doing currently with the limited resources that we have, and then we'll go on to take some of the suggestions that Dr. Strom uh came up with from the report as a way of suggesting.

33:47Mm-hmm. So uh the Dr Strom ended with uh looking for a healthy housing market. And really what we're all looking for is a place where Every person in Pasco County can live, work and play here. And so I like to always start with this slide, which comes from the University of Florida Schimberg Institute. And I like how the fact that the last time we were talking so much about the University of Florida

34:17and another name, there was all this competition. That was at the tourism banquet. But I like how the USF and the Schibberg Institute UF have worked together and really providing really good information for us. And this slide talks about the housing types that We need for the market. And what we are primarily looking at are subsidized housing that's below 80% of the median income. So we start off on the left hand side

34:48with supportive housing, and those could be affordable units, but also the type of wraparound services to help people stay housed. These can be people that have been experiencing homelessness homelessness, older adults, people with disabilities or special needs. So we want them to be housed. It's healthier for them, it's less expensive for our community for them to be housed, but in order for them to stay housed, they need services along with their housing. From there, we

35:18move into the affordable rental housing, and we heard a lot about the statistics of what type of rental housing we needed and the cost burden. Rental housing could include housing from the public housing units, also the units that are subsidized through Florida housing, the Department of Housing and Urban Development. USDA, and then vouchers that come from the Housing Authority, and as mentioned earlier,

35:48the naturally occurring affordable housing, which could be housing that some of us right here in our in right here today are living in. And then we go into in our continuum affordable home ownership. And we started with David Lambert talking about the Family Self-Sufficiency Program and how those people were looking to buy homes and they couldn't find homes to buy. So, what do we need in our community for that affordable home ownership?

36:19And it could be something like a community land. trust, but it could also be the programs that we're already doing, like down payment assistance, low interest loans, affordable construction, like our work that we do with Habitat for Humanities and Home Rehab and Weatherization. So we are doing a number of things in the county with our limited resources. And for those of you that maybe not know that our department is completely grant funded, and I'm gonna do

36:49just an overview of the funds that come in to the county, to our department, and I'm going to specifically focus on How we use these funds for housing. So there's sometimes there's other uses for them, but today we're just gonna talk about housing. So the Community Development Block Grant, the Home Investment Partnership, and the Emergency Solutions Grant are the three grants that come from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and that's because we are in an entitlement

37:20community. So Pasco County gets these grants every year.

37:24And why why are we in the entitlement community?

37:26Because we have over five hundred thousand people, a certain amount of low income people, and the age of our housing.

37:33We've earned it.

37:34We've earned

37:35it.

37:36So for C D BG, we get about three million dollars a year plus a little bit of program income. And in addition to public services, we can do some affordable housing activities. Oddly enough, we cannot build housing with C D B G, but we can buy housing, we could buy land, we could clear land. And get it ready for housing. And we could do access modifications or infrastructure. An example of this is those of you that know

38:06that Vincent House, we helped them build the beautiful facility that they have there. And now they're getting ready to build 39 units of affordable housing for their members. And we put $1.1 million. dollars of infrastructure money in so that they could be prepared to build. So we could do that with C D BG. Our home money is strictly for housing. So we could build new housing, we could renovate housing, we could do homeownership, we could do rental housing.

38:37We get a little over a million dollars a year from that program. And then for the emergency solutions grant, that is strictly for people experiencing homelessness. You see, we only get $250,000. Hard to build anything for $250,000, but we can do rental assistance with that money. And we could also do temporary shelter with that money. The biggest pot of money that we have for affordable housing is using our state funding,

39:07which is the State Housing Initiative Partnership or SHIP. And uh this coming year we're getting $4.6 million from the state for this. Uh since I've been here, we had a year where we got no money for this and one for $700,000 and $900,000. So it's only been the last two years that that amount has gone up. But again, this is strictly for housing, and again, we could do a myriad of activities. We could do new construction, we could do single-family, we could

39:37do multifamily, we could do rehabilitation, we could do rental housing new. The key with SHIP is there's a lot of pockets that we have to do. So we have to do a certain amount for homeownership, a certain amount of So sometimes that limits us. All of these funds are used to build or to do affordable housing, and it's all strictly by income. So people will often call me and say, Do I

40:08qualify for this? And this is the chart that we use. So if you were to look at this chart and say, person, one person household If they earned $53,500 or less, that would be 80% of the median income. And everything is adjusted for household size. So a family of four would be 76,400. It really depends on the household size. This amount

40:38changes every year right around April or May. So that's the newest cost, income costs. So now I what I did was I took the report that Dr. Strong gave us, and I basically are I'm going to tell you some of the things that we are already doing and that we can do based on her recommendations. Yeah. So uh we work very hard in preserving our current housing stock. And

41:08so with our SHIP funding, we do owner-occupied renovation and we run about 40 of those a year. We could do anything from roof repairs or new roofs, new AC units. Access modifications, we put new showers, we put new kitchens, replace flooring. So we do a number of owner-occupied rehabs. We help, as was mentioned, people stay in their homes by paying their taxes

41:38if they are behind in taxes. We do rental assistance for special needs. And we can do rental rehab for developers and not for profits. With C D BG and home, we can do acquisition andor rehab again to keep the housing stop we have to preserve them. That's that's how we use the funding. But we can also do more. In the report, Dr. Schwamm talks about doing an assessment of our

42:09housing conditions, and that is something that we can do in our with our team. She also suggests that we can uh extend our um our ship requirements so we could help more people. So uh we can do that with raising the assessed home value and also raising the amount of of money that we can give. Uh the other thing that we're looking to do is everything in our office is done through

42:39uh loans. So uh those years when we got no money or 700,000 or 900,000. We were getting also paybacks from people who who previous years, maybe ten years ago, fifteen years ago, benefited for those programs. That money helped keep the whole team hired and employed, but also helped us to continue to help new people. So generally speaking, everything is done that way. But we can

43:09go into a program where we offer grants or for forgivable loans to special populations, especially those on fixed income, like those that are elderly and disabled. And then one one thing that was mentioned earlier was the mobile homes in our county. So with our SHIP funds, we can only help mobile homes that are built after nineteen ninety four. I will tell you that at least once a week, if not more than that, we get a call from

43:40somebody in one of our mobile homes looking for assistance because of their roof, because of their AC unit, and we can't do it. So one of the things that we're hoping to do is to start a program with our C D BG money to help those that are in mobile homes that that are under that are that are older than nineteen ninety four and those could be over twenty-one thousand homes. So that's what we could do to preserve our stock. Uh

44:10now let's look at how we could work with or what we do with assisted housing stock. Uh so currently we have partnered uh a number of times with the Pasco County Housing Authority. So if they need renovations in their properties, uh we use those grant funds to do that kind of renovation. That leaves their money to to be used in other instances. But what we can do, and I've seen this in other communities, is when we have those assisted

44:40units, and according to the report, we have just under 5,000 assisted units in the county. When their contract for affordability becomes close to being due, we can go in with those. grant funds and purchase those units or purchase those units with one of our nonprofit partners so that they continue to be affordable. And that's really important because

45:11when we get into the type of housing market that we're in where it's really hot, those m those units go market rate. And I've seen that in communities. I've seen them go condo.

45:21Can you say that again?

45:22So uh there are assisted units that are in our county, about five thousand of them, and that means they have federal or state money in them. But when that when they got that money, they were told they need to stay affordable for X number of years. That X number comes due. And at that point those units can go market rate. They could sell them to be condo, but we could come in and purchase them and we could use that we could use those grant

45:53funds to do that and keep them in our affordable housing stock.

45:59So I'd like to tell you that we're doing a lot for affordable housing. It's not enough. But we are doing some really good things. On the left hand side you could see and and I just went back to since I've been here in October it'll be six years. So I didn't take the whole history of this department. But in the past six years we built a hundred and ten units of affordable housing in Dade City, thirty units in Newport Ritchie, another five in Newport Ritchie. We

46:30Purchased uh Rosalie Rendeau, which was a multifamily, small multifamily uh units, and we turned them into permanent supportive housing housing beds for the homeless. And just recently uh finished leasing up eighty eight units of affordable rental housing in Tanager Square, which is right off of Old Fifty Four. That is a low income housing tax credit project. But look what's happening on the right hand side. Um, and that comes to over eight hundred units

47:01of affordable. Housing that's in the pipeline, including our veterans project with the Housing Authority, June 17th. June 17th, 77 units of rental housing. Uh Spear Village is going from five to fifty units. Uh Ozanam 4 is going to be 33 units of affordable one bedrooms for people experiencing homelessness. The Vincent House housing I I mentioned. And then the

47:31two Dominium projects that you all are familiar with. One in Newport Ritchie is a senior housing of 300 units, and Cobia Cove in the Enclot is 225 units of family housing. And then lastly, just recently approved as a low-income housing. Tax credit ECHOS at Bayonet Point, which is 114 units of senior housing in Hudson. So we've got a lot of good things happening. We're well on our way, but

48:01we definitely need more things to do. So what can we do to build more affordable housing? Uh One of the suggestions is to work with development services under your direction to identify the land that is suitable for missing middle and multifamily projects. We can take the funding that we have, which is uh SHIP funding and home funding. We usually put that out to request for proposals, and you can decide on

48:31some new incentives, and along with your incentives, we can add money to it. So you have the incentive and you have the funding. That's a nice pairing that doesn't often happen. Um And then we can we are doing this and we will continue to uh attend all the pre-app meetings. Uh our our team does, myself or Jeff McKittrick, our assistant director. And uh I think sometimes we feel a little bit like used car salesmen, but we're

49:02always pitching the idea of affordable housing to all the developers that are coming through on their pre-app meetings. So that's what we're doing. Uh now let's make this a little bit more granular.

49:16Granular, thank you. Uh uh and I think this um will really hit home for you all. Uh I want to thank the uh HR department for this uh information and just thank all the county departments. We really all work together. It was a great team effort. Um so uh the the question is how much can a Pasco County employee afford to pay for housing each month? Okay, so the These are my fellow employees that are working here for

49:47you and I together. So we have on the first column 92 full-time employees that earn less than $2,800 a month. And these are divided up into basically 50% of the median income, middle. Is 80% of the median income, and then in the right hand side, 100% of the median income. So that's kind of how we group these. So you've got 92 full-time employees, your

50:17library assistants, customer service specialists, equipment operator trainees, custodian, animal care techs, park rangers, park attendants. Okay, and and they're coming from all different branches, right? Uh ninety-two of them that can afford between five hundred and eighty th eight hundred and thirty-five dollars a month. Then we have those that are at eighty percent of the median income, earning between twenty eight hundred and four thousand four hundred and fifty-eight dollars

50:47a month. Almost fifteen hundred employees. Your firefighters, EMTs, bus drivers, project coordinators, again library associates, admin secretaries, equipment operators, utility workers. All earning um Uh eighty percent of the median income, they could afford less than thirteen tho thirteen hundred thirty seven dollars a month rent. And then we have at our 100% of AMI, those

51:18are 1,070 employees. Our corrections officer, paramedic, field inspector, plant operators, planner two, program coordinators, they could afford up to $1,838 a month rent. So the bottom line is forty-three percent. of the county employees can only afford less than thirteen thirty seven a month or they they all qualify as eighty percent or less of the

51:48median income.

51:51So how does that translate to our rental market? Uh we just I just went across, used Zillow, Realtor.com, and on the top line, uh going right across the county, what is an average one bedroom in Newport Ritchie? You know, from the last time I did this, they actually went down just slightly. Uh, but you're looking at nine thirty-five to twelve twenty-five a month, Land O' Lakes, it goes from thirteen thirty.

52:20Dade City, fourteen hundred to sixteen hundred. Wesley Chapel up to eighteen hundred and Zephyrhills fourteen to eighteen hundred. Well, if you flip back and you remember

52:34That is uh a lot of people. Uh in our that we work with cannot afford uh to live anywhere except for in a one bedroom apartment in Newport Ridgeie. So if you look at the middle one, again, that's uh the 50, 80, uh 100, and 120% of the median income. And then in the last line, uh just taking the information from Dr. Strom's report, uh, not just our uh

53:05county employees, but having uh just under 18,000 cost-burdened PASCO households.

53:15ten thousand at eighty percent of the median income. So that's twenty eight thousand under eighty percent of the median income and then the uh the numbers go down as the median income increases.

53:31So I hope that this information helps you to see not only the need, but also how this impacts the people that we work with every day. Next we're going, well let me see, does anybody have any questions?

53:51Yes. Ms. Starkey.

53:52I missed that my first one. Um On the C D B G or whichever one of those um groups of money that you said we have Um How do we Oh you and I talked when when our family was gonna do a build to rent, um we were gonna work try and work with the developer or builder to buy down a cost of a house for someone to rent. Um So can you do that in a regular In any of

54:22our built to rent neighborhoods, we could come in and help subsidize one of those houses? Sure. And I really think we should try and get some of those. And we need to talk to some of our development community about participating with us. I'm sorry, my b my built-to-rent community went away because the funding went away. So I wanted to be the guinea pig in the county. But it's it's it's somewhat easy to do when you're doing a rental community. under one management because you have a rental

54:53office. It because you have to income qualify whoever's running those houses. Right. But that seems like the low-hanging fruit to me that we could come in and buy down some of their costs and put 'em into a rental pool. It's managed by that company.

55:07Yeah, we could do that.

55:09Okay. Um Um uh when you're talking about all the ship and C D B D funds, does this include all our cities? Do we manage it for every everybody in the county?

55:19We manage it for everybody but Newport Ritchie. They opted out.

55:24And why's that?

55:25Because they uh f thought that they could get more money directly from the state and manage it themselves.

55:31Has that been working out for them?

55:35Okay, I don't know. Maybe maybe that. But I I will say I've driven around Newport Ritchie a lot and they've got triplexes, quadruplexes, all tucked in in all their streets. All mixed in with single family. And just seamlessly mixed in. Um okay, another question. Um okay, on your when you did that list of completed projects, I didn't notice the one That's behind the Mc the McDonalds, I think it is, or behind the um Southeastern Southeast.

56:08Uh it's that big tower with where they um dwar and dwarf. It's on the west side of 19 and it's a it's a it's a workforce housing project. It's really nice. Anyone who went on my drive-thru before you were commissioners, I took you to see that low that low income project. That is right next to an old like Section Eight income project. It it

56:32might have been before six years before my time. Maybe that's it.

56:36Yeah, because it we we we have a beautiful one there. It's right off of nineteen, kind of by southeast personnel leasing. It's right behind there. I I didn't go all the way back. Okay. It's got um maybe two hundred fifty, three hundred units in there. And it has a range of AMIs. It has it pro Park Place. I don't remember the name. I'll pull it up, but I want to make sure you add that to your list. Uh but they they participated at the state lottery and they got some money. All right, let me see if there's another question.

57:05Any other questions?

57:07Nope, that's it. J on what you've done so far.

57:11Okay. Thank

57:12you,

57:12Marcy.

57:18Oh this is a tag team?

57:19It is a nation's tag team.