Okay, it's 1 30, and this is the community and economic development committee, and we are in session.

Would you take the role, please?

Looks like we're missing a couple people.

Here.

Thank you.

Okay.

Moving through the agenda, we have no work plan to review and we have no consent calendar.

So we will move to the first report, which is the housing catalyst team work plan status report.

And we have a whole team to present.

Thank you, Chair.

Committee, good afternoon.

Jared Ferguson, principal planner with the Department of Planning, Building and Code Enforcement, joined today by Chris Burton, Director, Planning Building and Code Enforcement, and Eric Sullivan, Director of the Housing Department.

We're here today to provide you with the status report on the housing catalyst work plan.

Jared, the microphone's a little fuzzy, so can you get sure?

Is that better?

Yeah, that's better.

Thank you.

Okay.

So first.

Sounds really loud now.

Okay.

So first some background.

So prior to our current housing element, we established the housing catalyst team to work on the growing housing crisis in 2018.

To have multiple departments come together to work on the complex policy items to deal with uh housing, housing production, housing uh sorry, housing policy.

And as we look moved into development of our current housing element, which was adopted in June of 2023, we wanted to continue the work of the housing catalyst uh team and also created the first housing catalyst work plan.

Yes, it's sorry, that goes on.

Um the first housing catalyst work plan, which was meant to continue the work of the housing catalyst team, and also to um continue uh to work on the policy and strategy policies and strategies contained in the new housing element.

In January 2024, the state certified the city's uh housing element, and then following that in February, we provided uh in February 2024 and February of 2025, um, staff provided annual status reports on the catalyst work plan to the community economic development committee, and then following that a status report to the full city council with the uh via cross reference from the committee, along with the housing element annual progress report, which is due to the state April 1st uh each year.

And uh now I will pass it to you, Eric.

Thank you, Jared.

So Eric Soleil, director of housing.

So just as just place settings, as we look at the work that CED does, it primarily focuses on sort of our R and spaces within the continuum from unit preservation and the work that we're doing around soft story all the way through our production work and the work that we do across departments, run in center programs on the market rate side, and then the gap financing and the work that we do on PSH units.

So when we think about uh housing catalysts and the work we do in CED, it falls within this area.

And in particular, as we think through sort of our focus area work, one of our areas and goals is really looking at market conditions.

We just came off in December, the uh cost of residential development study, pass forth additional incentive programs.

So, where do we also then further ground this analysis in thinking through some of the challenges for those projects that are underway?

I'm gonna talk through here just a few slides of the beginning part of an analysis that we're gonna be wrapping up here in the next couple of weeks that takes the broad overview set forth in the cost of residential development study, then the work we're doing around incentive programs, and then where does that sit in terms of linking capital and land for trying to identify more additional barriers to get into more production?

And so those market rate conditions then speak to sort of the data analysis that we've done.

Let's look at where pricing is.

Let's look at the affordability challenges grounded within the data analysis of the projects that are coming through our processes, and then how our incentive programs can hopefully move those forward.

And so the first phase of this analysis that we've done is looking first through everything that is entitled.

So there were 31,000 units entitled, over 103 projects, and this slide just breaks them down across council districts, which is obviously three encompassing the Google project and its initial commitments, drives a lot of this work forward.

So, with this broader analysis, we then looked at the next level.

How do we overlay that against the cost of residential development to see what are probabilities of projects for moving forward, projects that are feasible and infeasible?

And then the next round of analysis that we have going on is going to be where can we dig a little deeper into a subset of these projects to better understand some of those challenges as we're trying to catalyze more housing production.

And so this next slide does the first overlay, which is looking at the feasibility of projects and looking at the affordable versus market rate breakdown, which is our slide graph on the left.

So of the 103 projects, 31,000 units, you see the majority of those are coming up on our market rates side, just over 60%.

Then the graph on the right shows what is that unit breakdown in terms of the types of developments.

Again, sticking within the framework provided by the cost of residential development.

So we have towers, wraps, podiums, stack flak town homes, and single family.

So this takes the global 31,000 units and starts to categorize them as affordable market rate, and then the types of build.

With that type of build, we then looked at feasibility.

So based on the findings and the cost of residential development, we know that your towers are very infeasible in the current economic environment.

Now, across that whole set of tower projects, could there be a few that can go?

Yes, there's always an exception.

Gateway is an exception, but gateways also heavily publicly subsidized.

But in general and doing an overlay of the cost of residential development study across the 31,000 units, we became with these categories of feasibility and infeasibility.

And you can see across those different types what that breakdown is between the two and how that disperses across market rate and affordable units.

And that's what the slide on the right speaks to.

So this initial study has really gotten us to a place where we're better understanding some of the more categorized challenges within housing production and beginning to sort of get through some of the layers of the challenges to see how we going forward can more directly tailor the different tools that we have, like the incentive programs for getting more housing built.