City Council Meeting

Amy Ergasstaffaffordability the points that I'll go through are not necessarily new these were brought forward in the development of the affordable housing strategic plan so this is part of the research that TPMA had done but I think it's important to talk about it so that we're grounding the conversation in the why so as we're the need to have access to the existing funding, this helps frame that. So first, the rising home prices between 2020 and 2025, the median sale price of a home in the city of Fairfax increased by 34 percent. And during that same five-year period, incomes increased by 8 percent. So all of that to say is that home prices are rising faster than incomes are rising. is challenging for households earning less than $200,000 specifically for that median sale price

think dating back to 2013 perhaps earlier but i thought it might be helpful to revisit some of the more recent conversations that were had including the presentation from tpma to the council on the affordable housing strategic plan in November and then the HCAB presented to council in December the affordable housing strategic plan was adopted in February this past year earlier this year rather and then the guidelines conversation tonight is focusing on hopefully a way to use the funding that is available so to provide a regional context this is data that is reported localities this includes 17 jurisdictions in the metropolitan region this is data from the housing indicator housing indicator toll surveys this is done by

acquisition, or rehabilitation of affordable housing. All of these activities are in alignment with the strategic guiding documents, including the city's affordable housing strategic plan as well as the comprehensive plan. There is a minimum project threshold criteria that was established, so projects would need to demonstrate readiness to proceed. They would need to demonstrate financial readiness, entitlement zoning, site control. All of that is spelled out in the guidelines. So that would be what would be expected of a project coming forward. The scoring criteria is meant to ensure that there's a transparent process. And in the development of the application itself, we were really thinking through the questions.

We tried to, if we were asking a question, we tried to correlate it back to the points so that it was all directly connected. SO WE DIDN'T ASK ANYTHING THAT WASN'T SCORED AND REALLY TRYING TO THINK ABOUT THE CORE AREAS. AGAIN, THIS WAS LOOKING AT THE SURROUNDING JURISDICTIONS, THINKING ABOUT OUR COMPREHENSIVE PLAN AND OUR AFFORDABLE HOUSING STRATEGIC PLAN AND FIGURING OUT HOW TO ALIGN SO THAT WE CAN SCORE EFFECTIVELY AND FIGURE OUT WHICH PROJECTS SHOULD PROCEED

I think there are more uses for a housing trust fund than what we have listed here for eligible activities. I think this process focused on development and preservation, which does align with two of the three goals in the Affordable Housing Strategic Plan. We don't have the process for rental assistance. We don't have a process for first-time homebuyers' assistance. That was due to the fact that right now we're talking about $500,000, and it just doesn't go very far. We explored rental assistance and what that would look like when you consider the number of households that are renters and are cost burdened, which was mentioned in the stats at the beginning of the presentation. Even if you supported half of those households with a one-time payment of $2,000,