All righty.

Well, Mayor, Commissioners, this is a the update of the housing steering committee and the policy work that we've been doing.

You recall a couple of years ago, we put the housing policy in place that had about 42 recommendations identified from a variety of working groups and conversations with the broad contingency of stakeholders, citizens, institutional engagement.

And this work session is to update you on the work that has been achieved today and to share with you the 2026 activities and with Emily Crowe this morning is also a couple of key partners, and you know them well, but they will also be sharing the work that they are helping to lead that aligns with the housing steering committee.

So I'm gonna turn it over to Emily to take myself on.

Great, thank you all.

I haven't spoken before you all very often, but um I'm Emily Crohn, the deputy director of neighborhoods and development.

Um so I'm happy to be here this morning uh to talk through kind of what we've been working on with the housing policy.

Uh so today, really what I want to be able to share with you is where we are in terms of the policies implementation and talk to you about the structured coordination model that we're using to make sure that all of our partners remain involved over the implementation and um talk through a little bit of the major initiatives that are currently underway.

Basically last year in 2025, um, we were kind of in a repositioning year to get the different subcommittees and partners working on things in alignment with what the commission's um goals and actions were.

So we've got a 12-month work plan laid out for us with the various subcommittees.

So I'll just go through the structure.

So the steering committee was established, I believe, in 2021, before I joined.

And this was an initiative that I believe the city recognized a significant need to start developing policies around housing that helped address kind of those gaps and how housing was being provided in the city.

Um, but it also reached out to our regional partners as well.

That steering committee worked over a period of about 18 months and presented the 42 action strategies that were guided by a series of goals.

Let me just make this direction because I don't I don't want the historical context to use.

Okay, and we know you work very covelling.

So the steering committee was a result of is an implementation body.

The 42 recommendations came out of those 70 plus people that we engaged in this conversation in three different committee committees that were led by one by the city, one by Miss DeMassy, and one by I don't remember.

So there were three working committees that those 60 to 70 people filtered into.

They spent the year and a half coming up with the 42 recommendations.

Part of that policy we brought forward was we need an implementation body to coordinate across these 42 recommendations because as you know, we don't control all things in housing, and we wanted to make sure there was strong integration and coordination.

And so that steering committee was established by the city manager to be able to support the integrated implementation of the 42 recommendations.

Yes, and so then in 23 with the adoption of the policy, that's when the steering committee really um that was when it was formed.

Yes.

Um, at that same time and towards the end of 23 into 24, there were originally four subcommittees designed to carry out some of the implementation.

And they did meet throughout 24 a couple of times, and then last year what we realized is we needed to expand that.

And so what you see here are the five uh recommended subcommittees for the work plan in 2026.

So we still are focusing on data management between the various organizations and making sure that we have access to housing data as we need it to make decisions.

We have a capital strategy group, which was formally titled, I think the housing investment fund steering committee.

And they are they have done quite a lot of work, and we're going to talk about that today.

Karen's going to share that with you.

So we are in the process of updating that Bowen study.

So this market conditions group will kind of act as the steering committee for that work and then make recommendations about what we need to be considering in the realm of affordability and market cohorts.

One of the things that we added is an outreach and education subcommittee because there are a lot of programs that are coming out of these efforts and making sure that both our citizens are aware of how this all will work as well as sharing all of this information that comes out of this endeavor in a more transparent way.

So that group will be working on those things.

And then we have what has been the tenant groups.

So all of that is kind of guiding how we are looking at implementation.

And then underneath that, you have city staff that are participating in all of these endeavors.

And we are meeting internally also to make sure that things are moving forward and are coordinated.

So for 2026, our work plan focus areas are on kind of four classifications.

We're looking at the capital infrastructure, building those funds to help support the gaps.

We need to have a program development.

And this is looking, we're looking at this on a regional scale.

Also, how do we pull in our other programming and financial obligations?

We are looking at some significant home repair expansions in 2026.

We have several new rental health initiatives.

So looking at abatement of things like lead and/or the energy efficiency that Leela and Hoda are going to talk about with the pilot program there.

So I'm going to share with you some of the accomplishments we've already reached, but we have in the pipeline some permitting and other pre-approved plans, things like that that will help fast track housing development and building over the next couple of years.

Since the adoption of the policy, we have tackled about a third of the action recommendations.

We had a classification of governments and implementation.

Under that, we did establish the policy steering committee and subcommittees.

We have integrated policy actions into the departmental work plans.

That's how you're seeing things coming out of the sustainability group, out of PND that follow these directions.

We have done ongoing recording in our KPIs on an annual basis since the plan was adopted.

And we're working every day to increase the amount of data and indicators and metrics that we can report out on.

A lot of these have been research work just because none of this stuff is things that just happen overnight.

We have to look at best practices and then work towards implementation to see those changes.

But we are starting to see those things.