Oh, and there's the commands to those things.

So, the tackle.

So when they have the colours to the thumbs print, yeah.

Thanks everybody for coming for the work session, and I will turn it over to uh Emily Sutton with Housing and Neighborhoods to talk about affordable housing.

And I want you to say I have my laptop for humanity shirt on.

Love it.

Everyone deserves affordable home.

So we need those.

That's awesome.

Good morning.

Uh mayor, council.

Uh I'm here today to talk about our new roadmap for increasing housing affordability and ending homelessness in Raleigh to save taxpayer dollars downstream and to create a safe, vibrant, and healthy city.

My name is Emily Sutton.

I'm the housing and neighborhoods director for the city.

So today's conversation will start by reviewing the state of housing in Raleigh and the work we've done up to this point to address affordable housing and homelessness.

We'll also preview a home for every neighbor, which is our new affordable housing plan, along with a subset of that plan, which is our unsheltered homelessness response plan.

So now we'll talk a little bit about the state of housing in Raleigh.

So that includes people who are in shelter or transitional housing, living outside, in their cars, so places that are not meant for human habitation.

The way that the school system counts is a little bit different.

That is includes people who are at risk, also includes people who are doubled up, couch surfing, kind of things like that.

So their number is much higher.

Okay, thank you.

So while we've made a lot of progress in creating affordable units, in fact, we've led the state and much of the Southeast in building units through leveraging the low-income housing tax credit.

There's still a long way to go to meet the demand for housing and to ensure that everyone can actually access and stay safe and stable in housing.

At the extreme, the lack of affordability leads to homelessness.

In 2020, the U.S.

government accountability office found that nationally, for every $100 increase in rent, it equaled a 9% increase in homelessness.

And this is because at its root, homelessness is a housing problem.

It sounds obvious, but in practice, many of the strategies employed to address homelessness are actually temporary backstops that are in fact more expensive than focusing on housing focused solutions that we know are sustainable.

There are also concentrations and responses that look at symptoms and comorbidities such as substance use rather than focusing on housing solutions along with services.

And research shows that places with higher higher rates of homelessness don't have higher rates of substance use or mental health issues than the rest of the country.

It's that they have lower housing supply and lower housing costs.

So on the other hand, many places with exceptionally high rates of substance use and mental illness, like West Virginia and Tennessee.

They in fact have below average rates of homelessness because they just have softer housing markets.

Homelessness is like a musical game of chairs.

This is how we talk about it quite often.

If there are nine chairs and ten players and one player has a broken leg, when the music stops, the person with the broken leg will probably have no chair.

But the broken leg isn't the cause of the homelessness.

It's the fact that there are only nine chairs.

So if there were 10 chairs, the person with a broken leg and their disability would not matter.

They would still have a place to sit.

So we are at an important inflection point in the city.

What we do now can send us down one path or another to ending homelessness or continuing to manage the problem at extraordinary taxpayer expense.

There's also no zero cost option when it comes to homelessness.

Doing nothing costs people and the community actually more than it does to address and provide a sustainable solution.

And in Raleigh, unsheltered homelessness has doubled in recent years, and there has been a visible rise in the number of camps where people are sleeping outside.

The Raleigh Parks Department, along with the North Carolina Department of Transportation, reported spending more than 200,000 in a one-year period each just to clean up camps.

And none of that went towards permanent solutions.

It's just the cleanup.

Last November, the City of Dallas reported taxpayers pay more than 200 million dollars annually on homelessness-related costs like medical treatments, emergency room visits, emergency shelter, mental health care, incarceration.

And that's a $96,000 per person experiencing homelessness costs per year to taxpayers.

Local first responders, so our police, fire, and EMS are often in the front lines of homelessness, responding to calls from people in crisis or distress.

And these repeated calls place a strain on the emergency response system and divert limited resources from other public safety priorities.

A housing-focused response can ease the burden on first responders by reducing preventable emergencies and calls for services related to unsheltered homelessness.

By contrast, housing someone and connecting them to case management along with support services costs just 24 to $36,000 per year, which is less than half of what we currently spend managing homelessness.

And that $36,000 number per year is something we put together that's looking at paying actual market rent or above market rent.

So that puts folks in those units that are vacant right now.

So we can reduce the public cost of homelessness and lessen the strain on first responders by investing in housing solutions with ongoing supports.

So what are we doing?

Since homelessness is a housing problem, we're focusing on expanding affordable housing as a primary goal.