This meeting was an information packed discussion of Community Development Block Grant programs that will disburse over $420 million dollars in Oregon over the next few years.
Panelists
Alex Campbell, OHCS
Larry Florin, Burbank Housing
Jennifer Gray Thompson, After the Fire
Margaret Van Vliet, Trillium Advisors, Sonoma and Oregon
Caryn Wheeler-Clay, JCC LTRG
Questions Addressed
CDBG – Disaster Recovery/Mitigation Grant Program Overview (20 minutes)
Hosting our normal Collective Impact and Housing meetings
You can see the complete overview of what I’ve been up to on the R3V Dashboard for this week. Caryn works with me as a tiny fraction of her work to support the recovery.
If you missed the Collective Impact conversation on the Community Re Visioning opportunities before us with the SR99 Traffic Growth Management study, the Greenway Re Visioning, and the Community Rebuilding Plan, you can see the recording here.
These projects represent a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to re envision what our fire-affected communities will be like to live in. The fires were a terrible reset for the Greenway and SR99 between Ashland and South Medford.
Outcomes of the meeting
Our discussion resulted in some interesting opportunities for the project leads to share information on community values, priorities, and ideas across the projects. It was agreed that the community recovery plan could serve as connective tissue between the limited scope and technical focuses of the TGM and Greenway projects. This connective tissue would extend out to address some of the larger issues like economic and tourism development and the larger Community goals of resilience, inclusion, and equity. R3v and LTRG will follow up with the project leads so that opportunities for community input can be publicized and made as accessible as possible to a representative variety of stakeholders.
We’ve been a bit quiet, but we’ve been busy so far this year!
In December, the R3V steering committee decided to explore supporting the LTRG executive director, Caryn Wheeler-Clay, as she builds what will be a key organization in our recovery from the Alameda and Obenchain fires as well as our resiliency from any potential future challenges.
Backbone Organization
To step into the work of exploring how we might support Caryn and the LTRG, we had a series of meetings with the LTRG executive committee and full board to discuss in detail how we can support their efforts.
I now meet three times per week with Caryn to support her work and help build the organization. Together, we are working through the details of hiring, the grant writing function, meetings and rationalizing committee structures, board strategic planning, IT infrastructure, and community relationship building.
We have contracted with Sequoia Consulting to begin grant prospecting for the LTRG. This will be invaluable support for Caryn and her teams’ work in the coming months and years. We think OCF for allowing us to use the community rebuilding funds they made available to R3V in a way that will support the recovery of our community.
Housing
The R3V project work on land availability for housing continues as I reach out to the leaders of similar land campaigns in Colorado and California. We already have one deal in the preliminary contract stage and are in discussions with a local institution about their excess land and how we might support converting some of that into housing.
Community Rebuilding
Carrie Turney-Ross of the Jackson County Library System facilitated our last Spanish adult literacy conversation and has agreed to lead the program forward.
Our support of the Zone Captains program continues in a variety of ways and now includes community leadership training, see the course outline here.
Please reach out if you have any thoughts on how we might support the recovery further,
This week we had a panel discussion how we as a community might help support more attainable and affordable housing development by identifying land that might be made available for socially-purposeful building.
Our panelists included
Greg Holmes, 1000 Friends
Margaret Van Vliet, Trillium Advisors
Jason Elzy, JCHA
Anne Marie Alfrey, RVCOG
Daryn Murphy, Developer
Josh LeBombard, DLCD
The questions addressed
The challenge with land availability – JCHA, urban renewal agencies, developers
Other communities – How do others solve for land availability?
Community involvement – How can various sectors and citizens support the project?
Identify possible lots and their owners to project leads
Encourage owners to discuss the possibility of making their land available
Who leads – What team should lead the project to develop a land bank or list?
RVCOG, urban renewal agencies, SOREDI, LTRG, or ?
Securing land – What form of transaction could work? Right of first refusal? Land lease? Fee simple? Cities leasing surplus land.
Housing as infrastructure – What would be different if we thought of housing as community infrastructure? An expert, Jacqueline Waggoner and her testimony
Investment?
Maintenance?
Our key takeaways were:
The challenge
Because buildable, well-located land is so valuable, it’s important to find sellers who have a patient, community-oriented approach to making it available for affordable and attainable housing development.
Medford has done a good job of rezoning to support housing and inventorying their unbuilt lands. Other cities can still do that work.
Daryn Murphy: In a market like Jackson county and all over the state, for that matter, a lot of property owners don’t want to wait that that timeline out so you’re hopeful that, when you initiate conversations with a property owner that they have a an altruistic mindset and maybe you can convince them that this is the right thing to do, and that waiting is going to be beneficial to the Community, but not everybody unfortunately has that has that outlook so it’s it’s often very challenging to get owners to to cooperate.
Actions underway
Commercial and religiously zoned lands can now be used for affordable housing development. For attainable housing too? A policy update?
HB 2001 aims to make more missing middle by upzoning all single family lots to multifamily, ADUs.
HB20918 – inventory all surplus lands made publicly available.
Margaret: Sonoma County created a Council of Infill Builders and coordinated what the jurisdictions could offannexing some urban reserveser in terms of land and incentives to build housing.
In Colorado the Congregation Land Campaign worked to inventory and make available faith-based organization’s land for housing.
Community involvement
Could we look at how we could offer landowners a capital gains tax credit if they sell to an affordable housing developer? Could the state offer a credit equal to the federal capital gains tax on the sale?
How to incorporate and finance utilities to marginal agricultural lands that could be repurposed to housing?
Who leads
Should be a nonprofit organization, not a government agency.
Outreach to landowners is the key to success
Securing land
Purchase is often best for everyone, but leases can work
Leases create an issue with lien seniority for lenders and the lessor. Can we find models for how this can work and statistics on the true scope of the issue?
Housing as infrastructure
How to include this and the related systems development work into the jurisdictions’ capital improvement planning processes? Without tying to this, there’s no funding for housing as infrastructure.
How to create prohousing community understandings that stable housing lowers healthcare and law enforcement costs. Housing is far less expensive than prison and ER visits. Educate the public on social determinants of health.
We need more innovation around housing product types – smaller, built offsite, more density – and around finance – how public investment can set the table for private investment (systems development, land acquisition and entitlements, low income tax credit, public assumption of some risks that cause lenders to increase rates, appraisal practices to support innovation rather than hinder it because of the “no comps” problem.
What can we do now?
LTRG/R3V Housing Working Group to host a conversation around which organizations might hold this effort. SOREDI? LTRG? UnitedWay? Cascade Builders’ Association?
Design what structures and processes will be required to do this work in consultation with the Congregation Land Campaign
Support LTRG in hiring a dedicated housing advocate who can lead this effort.
Begin outreach via our community connections to faith and fraternal organizations. Mapping suitable lots and reaching out to owners, etc.
Experiment and learn to build a process that really works.
