Welcome back to this weekly meeting of the Community Planning and Housing Committee with Denver City Council.

Your community planning and housing committee starts now.

Hi everyone.

Welcome to the community planning housing meeting on July 28th.

I'm Manda Sandoval.

I represent Northwest Denver.

We have a presentation in front of us.

Do we have any council members online, producer?

No council members online.

Alright, I'll start to my left.

Good afternoon.

Flor Alvidres, Lucky District 7.

Uh good afternoon, Diana Romero Campbell, Southeast Denver, District 4.

And good afternoon, Paul Cashman, South Denver, District 6.

Chantel Lewis, District 8.

Jamie Torres, West Denver District 3.

We have two briefings.

I think it's a combined briefing, right?

So they're all combined into a slide deck.

And I'll pass it over to the Office of Housing.

Lady, the floor is yours.

Well by introducing ourselves.

My name's Melissa Tati.

I am the director of Stability and Prevention with Hosts.

Okay, Ian Comb, program officer with host.

I'm Carissa Johnson, the housing policy officer and host.

So we have two briefings for you today.

One on the property tax relief program just to provide you all an update.

And then also an update on the Tenant Legal Services 2025 report that we sent out, I think around March of this year.

And we'll pause in between the two briefings so we can open it up for questions on uh the first topic.

And with that, I will kick it over to Ian.

Great.

Thanks.

Um, this slide is just a reminder of sort of where um in our spectrum of work our property tax relief program falls with our stability and prevention team.

It's just a little reminder there.

Um in a quick program background.

Um, host absorbed this program from Denver Human Services uh uh last spring of 2025, and we launched the program for 2024 rebates on May 1st with a new online application.

Um that program still provides a partial refund on property taxes paid or to renters, the equivalent of rent.

Uh uh our minimum rebate is $372.

That has stayed the same since uh DHS was running the program.

Renters can still receive a maximum of a thousand dollars and eighteen hundred dollar maximum rebates for homeowners.

Uh our average refund did increase slightly from the 2023 rate rebates to the 2024 rebates from um about 1,148 to 1,180 dollars, which I believe to be a factor of uh more approved rebates to households at zero uh income or um unfixed incomes receiving like social security benefits, which we don't uh consider to be a source of income, which will result in higher uh rebates for renters and for homeowners.

Um and this is just uh a bit of a breakdown of uh what our application volume received since taking it over from DHS.

So you can see uh for the 2025 to 2026 program year, which is rebates issued for the 2024 calendar year.

Uh we received almost 3,900 applications, uh and at least through July 14th had paid about 2600 applications.

Uh at that time we had about 475 applications pending.

I believe as of today it's about 375, um, the majority of which were from homeowners.

Um and our breakdown remains uh pretty similar to what DHS was seeing previously, where um about 46% of applications received were from homeowners, about 54% from renters, and uh year-to-date payments issued for 2024 calendar year.

Uh, the breakdown is pretty similar of uh 46% to homeowners and 54% to renters.

Yeah, next slide.

Um just a quick snapshot of demographic data, and this is of households served, again of all 2024 payments issued through about mid-July.

Um so this maybe has changed a little bit through the end of July.

Um but we are seeing as you can see the majority of households served have uh area mean income of zero to ten percent AMI.

Um so many of the households we serve uh do have income, but on fixed income benefits such as Social Security, we do consider that to be zero uh dollar income, which I think speaks to probably um the huge volume of of uh households at zero income.

Um with applicant and race two, we are seeing that uh majority of households served are white and the majority are not Hispanic or Latino.

We've done some comparisons recently of how that stacks up against um actually uh payments actually issued, and we see that to be pretty comparable.

That um excuse me, households served are payments issued.

We compare that to applications received, and we found that um the majority of applications received were also from uh non-Hispanic or Latino households, and the majority of payments issued are also going uh to white households at this time.

So um I think that there is some work for host to do on in terms of outreach to BIPOC homeowners.

Um we also uh are gonna try and pull some data to see if um more BIPOC households are applying later um and therefore make up the majority of uh applications that remain pending.