A bill for an ordinance approving a proposed Agreement between the City and County of Denver and the Housing Authority of the City and County of Denver, to provide assistance to low-income homeowners for the construction of accessory dwelling units. Approves an intergovernmental agreement with the Housing Authority of the City and County of Denver, Colorado for $500,000 and for two years to provide soft second mortgages of up to $25,000 to low-income homeowners participating in the West Denver Single Family Plus program to assist in the development of accessory dwelling units (ADUs) to serve as an income-generation and anti-displacement tool in Council Districts 3, 7, and 9 (OEDEV-201846549-00). The last regularly scheduled Council meeting within the 30-day review period is on 5-20-19. The Committee approved filing this item at its meeting on 3-27-19.
So do you council president. We can do the comment first if you'd like. All right. Let's go ahead and do that. Councilman Lopez, Mayor Secretary, if you put that one on our screens, Councilman Lopez, you want to go ahead with your comment on two, four or five? Yeah. Thank you, Mr. President. I just wanted to highlight this. This is something great. This is a great program. It's the West End for Single Family Plus one program. This is out of the out of a great office, an idea. Renee Martinez Stone had this opportunity. This is something that we've been working on with OED as part of the city. I brought this program, this funding for this program, asked as a request of council. The last time around, we weren't able to get it, but we were able to identify funding in the general fund for this program . What this program does is it identifies well, that's actually part of the West Denver Renaissance Collaborative. We started in 2016 as a partnership between the Housing Authority and and the city of Denver to really look at a solution involving involuntary displacement in West Denver and looking at a to use as a model, especially in this area. Right. In a lot of a lot a lot of area, a lot of land area and zone districts in West Denver is actually open to use now that we we still have need to use our additional dwelling units, converted garages, things like that allows folks to be able to stay in the community, live at home, or even rent out the 81, live out of the house or the other way around, and pay off that mortgage and those house payments. They serve about 65,000 residents and 25,000 households over ten neighborhoods and three council districts, three, seven and nine. There's a little bit of a little more background information, statistics, housing and affordable housing, involuntary displacement and use. And, you know, as two top priorities in this city, we had about 6000 residents that have been contacted, contacted about West Denver, single family plus one. There's been 60 series anchor inquiries about the program. Five are already moving forward in the process. Those moving forward are in VR Park in Westwood. Three out of five applicants moving forward are under 80%. AMI now the first three years of the program was the DITO funding was a third of was a third of the Westwood Renaissance sorry West Denver Renaissance Project budget. We've invested 600,000 over the last four years. And what time that the WDC has leveraged leveraged 2.6 million in additional project funding and outcomes on top of community priorities. Like I said last October, I requested for another 300 K to go to the West for a single family plus program to make sure that it was funding. Funding funded through the pilot phase. It wasn't. We were able to get 150 identified through the general fund. My ask of this council and folks who are here is to remember that this program works. This is a viable program. It's a program that we can really take advantage of in West Denver with all those own districts that allow for Adus. We purposefully did that back in the day because there there are a lot of folks that are living out of converted garages already that are not in code. There are a lot of folks that are still living with their families that can continue to still live with their families. It allows for like a multigenerational cultural exchange. And also it's a solution. It's a real solution. A part of the solution to our affordable housing crisis is. Now, I want to make sure that as we have these discussions in the future, that we look at models like this, this is viable. Yes, they are expensive. And that's why this is important for us to be able to step in to help with this program. I want us to see I want us to see light in the budget every year. We really have to invest our resources and innovative ideas like this, ideas that were born out of out of these neighborhoods and our folks that are on the ground in these neighborhoods. Yes, there are other tools and mechanisms that we're investing into. But this program in particular has proven to be a success. And I think it's going to be really, really helpful in some of these numbers. So you're seeing displacement with the threat of gentrification. So I just want to just highlight this, bring it out how these statistics are in front of us. And I hope that the administration and data will work and will continue to fund this industry extremely important programs. So with that, I just wanted to say thank you, you guys. I'm so not used to saying. Dito I feel weird saying it already. Dito So yeah. Economic development.