City Council Work Session

Melissa Shinaberryclerkby voiceyou. Our next item is a presentation on the Affordable Housing Strategic Plan. I'm going to recognize Jamie Ergus, our Housing Program Manager, for the presentation.

Jamie ErgisstaffGood evening, Mayor and Council. As Melissa just mentioned, my name is Jamie Ergis. I'm the city's housing program manager. pleased to be here this evening alongside my colleague, Human Services Director Leslie Bashian, as well as the city's consultant, TPMA, who will be presenting on the city's first affordable housing strategic plan. We're excited to share this work with you and discuss how it can guide the city's efforts to address affordable housing needs in the community. And now I will turn it over to TPMA to get started.

Speaker 10Good evening, Mayor and Council. On behalf of TPMA and my colleague and I, we would like to express our gratitude for allowing us to take part in developing the Affordable Housing Strategic Plan. And over the last several months, we've worked closely with the staff to analyze current housing conditions, identify emerging trends, outline strategies to ensure that the city of Fairfax remains to be livable, inclusive, and economically vibrant, a community for all. I'm going to share just a background of the project with you. TPMA was contracted in July of 2024 on building on the experience established in 2023 with the housing assessment and strategy report focusing on Fairfax as a place to include the housing supply housing mix housing

affordability and senior accessible housing to include a five-year demand model in a 10-year demand model. The five-year demand model for sale was about 1,024 units, and for rent the demand was 1,252 units. The 10-year demand model for sale was about 2,062 units, and for rent it was 2,528 units. Also, as we continue to deeply evaluate the City of Fairfax, that 2023 report included the demographic and housing market analysis, stakeholder and public engagement, and an identification of five focus areas, as mentioned before. This particular affordable housing strategic plan also included engagement and outreach. The activities included focus groups, interviews, community-wide surveys, public open house, a public open house, and the key stakeholders that were involved included city residents, which include individuals that were currently experiencing homelessness, city staff and leadership, service providers, faith communities, and nonprofits.

Ashley Sharpleywho are making policy but the people who are directly impacted by it. We really wanted that. So again, starting with these themes, I think the headline really for everyone that we spoke with, whether they were residents or city leaders or staff members or nonprofit leaders was this combination of optimism and concern. Optimism because they are excited to see their community placing an emphasis or focus value on really assessing the affordable housing situation in the city and trying to learn, you know, make a plan of what to do and how to approach it, but also concern that it's really easy for something like this to fall by the wayside, to put together a strategic plan, to study it, and then for it to, you know, pardon the term,

and service organizations in our communities to bridge that gap. And so it's really essential that those partners are kept in the loop, that they have a seat at the table and that collaboration that's functioning is continued to be developed and invested in and where it's not that those problems are identified and addressed. So that is where we'll pause our key findings. and we're going to get into the actual strategic plan. So what you've all been waiting for. So I'm going to present the first kind of, or the first two categories, and then I'll hand it back to Melanie to finish this out. I'm just going to take a question.

Speaker 10And it's good to mention on page 40 of your plan and noteworthy that it's about five properties that would be categorized as affordable housing. They do not receive any subsidy. And the last property was built in 1978. that it's been a while since an affordable housing property has been developed in the city of Fairfax but with this strategic plan and with strong partnerships and newly established partnerships the city can move forward in addressing the housing needs inclusively for everyone now if there's any questions or comments we'll be happy to entertain them

Anthony Amosno thank you this is a this is an excellent report look through the state strategic plan already but definitely some exciting things in here as one of the residents of one of the Noah's in the city specifically over at Layton Hall that's something that's of great interest to me in preserving that property so it doesn't become million dollars something something down the line it should remain fully affordable stock so how can we incentivize that moving forward I also want to thank our HCAP members who were here and some of my more detailed questions I know will probably come at that meeting instead of this one one thing I did want to ask about specifically is with the state level and then also the county's recent initiative on reexamining housing zoning policy and

Stacey Hardy-ChandlerI too want to thank you for all of this work and how comprehensive the plan is and I'm so proud that you're bringing forth this first strategic plan so thank you for all of that. A couple of things, you know, those income numbers are phenomenal. They would make people be okay in other locations so there's sort of a geographic financial risk that we have here that, again, in other places would not be as much of a struggle. So I think that locational poverty in some cases, but locational financial risk and paying attention to that is really important because the numbers alone don't automatically communicate stability. The second thing that I just wanted to highlight and hear a little bit more about is strategy

Jamie ErgisstaffYeah, so HCAP will be coming back in December, and as Melanie mentioned, there is a list of partners. There's also references to best practices woven into the strategic plan, and as this is the city's strategic plan, it will involve housing, it will involve human services, community development and planning, economic development, and it will include the surrounding partners. It needs to be a collaborative effort to move some of these initiatives forward.

Speaker 18process, we want to make sure we also keep in mind some of the qualitative city goals and the queue goals. So these goals for the transit system were developed as part of the transit development plan. really trying to make Q a reliable, convenient, and welcoming experience for its riders. Fair policy is not explicitly stated as a goal or an objective in the TDP itself, so that's why it's kind of being addressed separately here as well. The city also has these goals were identified in the previous strategic plan of making a helping the city of Fairfax And you know one of the things it's important to address that just by providing Q itself That helps to support many of these goals that already are happening

Melanie Zippstaffnot our delegation for the city of Fairfax is Senator Saddam Salim for the 37th district and our house delegate is David Bulova for the 11th district and the way that we build our plan is using the council goals the values that staff has created and then our strategic plan any regional projects and programs that are going forward and then obviously input from next slide all of our stakeholders partners owners um vml Virginia Municipal League their legislative program we usually incorporate that into ours Fairfax County we lean heavily on Fairfax County because we contract with Fairfax County for majority of our human services our library our jails and other programming our schools obviously so a lot of those sections of our plan come from fairfax county because we want