Presentation on the CASA Compact; and Recommendation to Direct the Interim City Manager to Incorporate State Legislation Introduced to Implement the CASA Compact into the City’s Legislative Agenda. (City Manager 2110)
60 is a presentation on the COSA Compact and a recommendation to the interim city manager to incorporate state legislation introduced to implement the cost contract into the city's legislative agenda. Good evening, Mayor Council. I'm Debbie Potter, the city's community development director. At the January 2nd, 2019 City Council meeting, Council member Jim Odey provided a copy of the cost compact to the City Council and the community and requested that staff work with Bay Metro, the new Bag and MTC organization on a presentation of the cost of compact . We are fortunate to have Mr. Brad Paul, the deputy executive director of Bay Metro, with us this evening to provide that presentation. The Costa Compact was prepared by a blue ribbon task force of elected and civic leaders convened by a bag. And T.C., the task force, worked on the compact for over 18 months and published its results the compact in December of 2018. The compact is a 15 year emergency policy package intended to address the Bay Area's housing crisis. A key strategy for implementing the compacts recommendations is to introduce state legislation addressing the ten elements that Mr. Paul will present. Bills have now been introduced at the state level to address each of these elements, and staff is recommending that following Mr. Paul's presentation, council directed staff to incorporate that legislation into the city's legislative agenda and to track and comment on these bills as appropriate. And with that, I'd like to introduce Mr. Paul. Thank you. Hello. Hello. Thank you for that introduction. I am assuming this is the advance, sir, here. Yes. It's actually nice to be here and have this is the council, which is the committee to house the Bay Area. And it's not the only cost you heard about tonight. I thank all the people who worked on the other costs. It's probably a little less controversial than this one is. So what I wanted to talk about is where we are today in the process more than anything. Your staff has put together an excellent memo in your packets about how costly it was created, what it was meant to do, and the elements themselves. So I wanted to just go back one. This is interesting because this is one of these places where Alameda really stands out in a good way. As you probably know, one of the reasons that we have the crisis we do today is in the last few years, we've created 700,000 jobs in the Bay Area, but only 100,000 units of housing. And we refer to that as the job. Housing is the ratio of seven jobs to one unit of housing. This is county by county. How bad it has gotten. And in San Mateo, it's 17 jobs for one unit in Sonoma, 12 jobs, but in and 20 jobs per unit in Marin. But here in Alameda County, you're closest to the ideal, which is about one and a half jobs per unit of housing. You're at 4 to 1, so you actually get the best score. County going the. Wrong way. So we talk about often the three P's in Corsa, and that are the three things we're trying to do to make up for the fact that in the past we've failed to protect the current residents from displacement, failed to preserve some of the existing affordable housing, and failed to produce enough new housing to really meet the needs of the region. The way it was set up, we had a leadership team, three co-chairs, a developer, a nonprofit housing advocate, and someone from philanthropy Michael Korver, Ruby DMG, Leslie Consiglio from Silicon Valley at Home, an advocacy group, and Fred Blackwell from the San Francisco Foundation. And our up until recently executive director Steve Hemminger was our lead at MTC. A big yeah he has since retired at the end of February and again we had three co-chairs, a steering committee of 18 members, a technical committee of 32 members that broke down to three working groups around production, protection and preservation. The CASA Compact is made up of ten elements. It was finished in December of 2018. And as you all know, dealing with the press, the press loves short headlines. So the headline was that MTC approved CASA, that a sport gave it a thumbs up. And that's not what happened. What happened is each of those boards empty in December and a bag in January voted to allow their chair to sign it. They authorized the chairs to sign it with several caveats. First caveat was they didn't approve everything that was in the contract. The second caveat was they didn't approve any of the specific revenue ideas that are in there. And the reason they did this is they wanted to stay at the table and engage with the state legislature in the process we're in today, which is all these bills you've been reading about, some of which relate to causes some don't . Even before Costa started, the state was really going to work on housing. They did a lot of work on transportation in the last few sessions. They were going to focus on housing. So let me just go through the ten elements very quickly. The first one is just cause eviction policy. This would be to protect tenants from arbitrary evictions. It would set up a regional just cause eviction. It just says that landlords have to give an actual reason when they evict someone, both for cause, which is not paying your rent, destroying the unit or a fault, I mean, or no fault, which is that you had. The landlord wants to use the unit for a family member or for some other use. And I should say that if jurisdictions already have ordinances related to any of these elements in place, what's in the CASA Compact does not preempt what you do locally. Number two is establish a Bay Area emergency rent cap. This would be for 15 years, and where the cost to group landed was CPI plus 5%, which is about 8% in today's numbers. This was to have increases be a reasonable amount. Now what is reasonable people can disagree about that. And what they were striving for is a number that would protect tenants from what we're reading about where their rent goes up 30, 40% in a year, but also not make it so low that it made it impossible for developers to go out and build housing, get the financing they needed to do that. The state of Oregon just recently passed something like this rental assistance and access to legal counsel. This started off as a discussion about providing free legal assistance to low income tenants that were being given eviction notices. But the group came up with a better idea even, and that is that if there's some way for people that are facing an emergency, whether it's a loss of a job or a medical emergency, where they can't pay their rent for a couple of months rather than evict them and spend money on a lawyer to help them in that process, why not just give them emergency funding for a few months as well as other services they may need so they can stay where they are? So this is now about both remove regulatory barriers. Number four, to accessory dwelling units and number of cities in the Bay Area have done some excellent work around Adus and Junior Adus. The idea is to take the best practices from the region and have them apply to every community. One of the problems you probably heard about is cities may have fees, but some of the water districts were doing hookup fees that were the same as if you were building a new single family home. And this is when you were doing an Adu within the footprint of your building. So part of this would deal with impact fees being charged on a per square foot basis. Number five, minimum zoning, near transit. This is one of the most controversial. It talks about setting minimum height and zoning and density standards around high quality bus service and major transit stops. Your staff report has pointed out that the high quality bus service does not apply. It has to be busses that run on a 15 minute head away during the week and a half an hour headway on weekends. We did a map for this. It really only applies to San Francisco, Oakland, San Jose, parts of Berkeley and San Leandro for the rest of the region, including your city. It would not apply. And it has. Has to do with making housing an eligible use on a large, commercially zoned parcels. What does that mean? You're probably all familiar with the Hilltop Mall in Richmond. It's not doing well and hasn't been doing well for a while. A developer I ran into out there when I was at a car event with my son on a weekend, told me that the city had just approved Richmond just approved about 8000 units of housing over a period of time there. And they're going to repurpose the mall for a safe way or some sort of shopping or grocery store in there for residents. And those are the kinds of things that make sense because of the land that's there and the fact that they're not being used as much anymore for mall use, good government reforms to the housing approval process. This is actually done in many communities throughout the Bay Area now, but not all. And it just requires that local jurisdictions create a publicly accessible format online where people can read about the rules, codes and standards that apply to residential applications. And when you decide now places deem complete, it also would strive to say that once you decide an application is complete, the rules, fees and historic designations are set in place. At that time, I'm sure all heard developers say that what they really don't like is when the rules change throughout the process. That's what the last thing is about for zoning compliant residential projects. No more than 310 oval public hearings. I didn't used to know what de novo meant, but I went to a lot of planning commission hearings and learned from the lawyers that it means how many you have before you start over again. So if you have a project and it doesn't change at all, there would be three public hearings. But if you're planning commission, the developer and the community got together and said, You know what, we should make some changes. That starts the clock again. And there's three more hearings after that. Number seven, expedite approvals and financial incentives for missing middle housing. Missing middle is usually referred to as housing. And the 82 either 120, 150% of AMI. In this case, it would accelerate approval for zoning compliant projects that provide on site affordability for a missing middle, where at least 20% of the units are between 50 and up between 80 and under 50% of EMI pays prevailing wage and uses apprentice labor. Now, you see here a list of incentives that were thrown out by the Castle group as examples. The first one, which is very controversial, is a 15 year property tax increment abatement modeled after New York City program. We learned recently that this is unconstitutional in California, so it's off the list. Others would be lowering impact fees, creating extra density bonuses and reducing parking minimums. Unlock public land for housing, promote increased utilization of both surplus and underutilized public land for affordable housing. Now, this is also a little bit controversial. I'm doing this now two, three or four times a week around the region doing presentations in order to get feedback. And what people say is in the East Bay, what we'd like to see is more jobs. Right now, one of the big imbalances is you get lots of jobs and not a lot of housing built over the last ten years in the West Bay, in San Francisco, San Mateo and Santa Clara in the East Bay, you've done a much better job of building housing, but haven't gotten the jobs. And so what we could do is sit with the number of things we do. But one is to set aside some of your surplus land for creating new job centers and new places where jobs could move to. But where it's it makes sense. We like to figure out ways to help you use surplus and underutilized public land for housing. Number nine, and this is again, one of the more controversial ones. This is how do you finance it? This chart just shows you how they came up with a $1.5 billion goal for how much they'd like to try to raise. And what you see in the upper left is if you were to average 24,000 households a year, that you would help with rental assistance and legal assistance that would cost $50 Million. Trying to fund 14,000 units of new housing a year affordable at 150,000 per unit would come to 2.1 billion and of subsidizing or preserving market rate and subsidize affordable housing at a little bit less, 100,000 a unit would cost 4750 units $376 million a year for a total of 2.5 billion. The cost groups came up with trying to figure out a way to raise 1.5. This is the chart that both MTC and the ABC board said they do not support. This is a menu of potential sources of funding. If every sector, property owners, housing developers, employers, etc. contributed something. There used to be twice as many on here. Then there were half as many. Now this is what is a menu of just potential ideas. A menu to to look at. To give you a couple of examples of what I hear when I go around is people hate on the left for property owners regional parcel tax. We just did this recently for the Bay Area and people say that parcel taxes are one of the only ways that local government has to raise more. Money to pay for housing, infrastructure, schools, parks. So to the extent that you go and take something that is one of the few sources local government has, that's a problem for a lot of local governments. On the far right, where you see half cent regional sales tax. Same response that I've gotten as we've gone along around here all but are worried about hitting up against the 10% sales tax. And so the closer we get to that, if we use it for this, it gives you less leeway going forward for schools, for open space, for all the things that you need to fund as a little community. Now, I will say there's a lot of support for the 1% vacant homes tax on the upper left, because we're seeing more and more homes in the Bay Area that are being kept vacant as investments not being used as housing. And this is being done now in Vancouver and in in Paris. There's also a lot of sentiment that we should have the people who are causing the problem during the most jobs help pay for that. That's what the developers variable commercial linkage fee does. And on the only employers side, the gross receipts tax, both of those are arranged again, if you do a range where you charge a higher amount in the West Bay, where there's lots of job development and charge a lower rent in the East Bay where you're trying to get the jobs to move to, it helps make that happen as a policy matter. Again, these are just rough numbers. But for whatever amount of money is raised, up to 10% would be for local jurisdiction incentives, up to 10% for 1010 and protection services for affordable housing preservation up to 20%. And for affordable housing production a minimum of 60% of the money raised. But we've heard from people that we should probably combine the last two so that in different times in the building cycle, in the economy, you might want to switch to preserving existing affordable housing and other times switch more resources to building new affordable housing. 75% of the money spent would be spent within the county of origin. Under what was proposed, 25% would go to a regional program for revenue sharing, and this would be subject to ongoing performance and policy outcomes. And again, number ten, regional housing enterprise is one of the more misunderstood ones. It would be to establish a regional leadership entity to fund affordable housing track and report progress in all of these and provide incentives, direct incentives and technical assistance to cities and counties. It would not have direct land use or zoning authority or play any regulatory or enforcement role. It would have an independent board made up of people from MTC and air bags, boards and some other key stakeholders and be staffed by the MTC, a big consolidated staff. There were several other calls to action in the report that they couldn't get to. One is redevelopment 2.0. Is there a way to bring back tax increment financing? Lower the voting threshold for housing fund measures to 55%. Address the fiscal ization of land use with which is what Prop 13 do with some Prop 13 reforms. If you preserve and build more affordable housing, it helps prevent homelessness. But you're all dealing with homelessness now. And so what can we do about that? And finally, grow and stabilize the construction of labor force on a on the schedule. The CASO was the document was signed by the participants, including a representative of AIRBAG and MTC in January. The legislative packets that are now being talked about in Sacramento have some or to do with parts of the cost ten elements. Others are totally different. And so what we're going to be doing now when we get to the last slide. There are over 200 bills in Sacramento. As I said, the two boards that empty and bag authorize the chair to sign it, but did not support everything in it. Didn't support those revenue numbers I should put up there. They are taking this action to stay at the table, engaging the legislature there. Each has a legislative committee and they will take every bill and every piece of this and debate it and decide whether they want to support it, oppose it, support it with amendments or oppose it until amended. They've instructed staff, myself and a number of the people to go out and talk to all of you, to city and county organizations, to tell you where things stand now and to get your input and a bag established. An ad hoc local government committee to directly advise both the air bag and MTC legislator legislative committees on these bills. And Madam Mayor, I understand you're a member of that committee, along with the mayor of Fremont for Alameda County. I am. And then finally, the cities and counties are already engaging with the California League of Cities, which is very involved in this. And the legislators are going to be making decisions about these bills as they come up. So that's the end of my presentation. I'd be happy to answer any questions. Thank you very much. And do we have any clarifying questions from the council? She'll get our public speakers come back to the council. Okay. So thank you and nice presentation. We have an increasing number of public speakers. Okay. Thank you. All right. I have three have. Speakers in this order. Catherine Pauling. Brian Maguire. William Smith. Ms.. Pauling. I gathered calling Dear Mayor, Vice Mayor and council members. Forgive me. I'm going to read this for my phone. On behalf of the Alameda Renters Coalition, I'm submitting this brief statement and response. Tonight's Agenda Item six B on the Classic Compact, our exposition on the classic compact alliance with the Regional Tenants Together position. We send you a letter. There is going to be an attachment so you can read it yourself. While we appreciate the attention paid to tenant protections. Like just cause eviction and rent control. We deeply disagree with CASA on the following points. One Their last minute change on just cause to omit relocation assistance for owner move in evictions and to leave out tenants in their first year of tenancy. Second point the recommendation of regional and perhaps statewide rent cap that far exceeds the Regional Consumer Price Index. We and Alameda know that 5% each and every year is unsustainable. This is even higher. Their lack of insistence on tenant protections and new revenues for affordable housing before applying zoning and streamlining changes and the relatively low amount of funding 30%. And actually I think it's even lower now for tenant protections and affordable housing preservation, while very low income and low income price points remain the furthest behind and housing availability. For these reasons and others outlined in the Tenants Together article ARC urges the City Council to do better than the CASA compacts and adequate recommendations and move to implement the twin pillars of an essential local rent stabilization policy. Basically rent control, at least an annual cap of 4% or less, and a three year cumulative cap of no more than 10% and have true just cause evictions protections without any emissions. Thank you very much. Thank you. Brian Maguire and Bill Smith. William Smith. Good evening. I think I generally agree with Catherine sentiments on the tenant protection side. I think Alameda can push for this compact to hopefully have the strongest, viable, you know, passable tenant protections in it for the region. I think Alameda hopefully soon will be enacting stronger protections than what this compact calls for. And on the production side, I think this also is an opportunity for us to hold our neighbors accountable. I think Alameda is doing a comparatively decent job on the production side, at least aspirationally trying to get housing built and supplied at all levels for the community. And this as the those numbers in the presentation show just how bad, you know, some of our peninsula neighbors and the incentives are all wrong, obviously, and they have been for a generations on how we fund cities and how we, you know, our tax structure and what we can do prefers job creation over housing production. And that's one reason is because one thing that's missing from this is so a lot of trying to capture fees from new things that happen. But the sort of the horse is already out of the barn, right? All the the land value the the value that this economy and this housing crisis has all are all that wealth has already been shifted to incumbent landowners. So this company should be looking as aggressively as possible at ways to capture some of that value back from from those who just happened to purchase property at the right time and then capitalize off the wealth that's been generated by the economy. And most most of that wealth has gone to, you know, something like 80% goes to incumbent landowners and not to the actual people in the economy that are doing the work that's creating that value and whether it's Silicon Valley or any other part of part of the economy. So I think we should definitely push for those items to be as strong as possible and support it, because we're trying to do our part. And I'm I'm optimistic that this council is doing its part. And this is where we can convince our community and that we are also pushing our neighbors to to do their part. Thank you, William Smith. Thank you. Thank you for this opportunity, Madam Chair and members of the Council. I'm William Smith, a resident of Alameda, and I've been working on housing in this city for a number of decades now. I'd like to say that the two semis that go right to the point that presented by the speaker, the housing plan is going to make the problems much worse. And it needs major reforms in these major changes. Urban habitat did not sign off on it because of many of the same reasons and more that were cited by my Catherine Pauling. So it's a problem. The fundamental flaw in the whole problem is the and Brian McGuire hit on this, too, is the emphasis on jobs creation. Yes, the East Bay has done a better job than the peninsula in producing jobs, housing, but we're still producing more jobs on the East Bay than housing on our own. So it's not going to help to minimize our housing and bring the jobs over here. So we just absolutely have to find more funding for housing. There is no question about it. And you'll hear more from me later if I mean, if it doesn't go to late tonight on a couple of the other later items on the agenda on that topic. But a lot of people are getting very concerned about this. And when you read the headlines, more jobs created in Santa Clara County last week and then in many, many years, I just cringed because that means more homelessness is coming, more people are going to be moving out and so on. And so that's definitely going to be a turn around in the next decade to job creation is going to be seem a pariah and not a not a good thing. Thank you, Mr. Smith. Okay. That's my last speaker. So of closing public comment, do we have council comments before we entertain in motion? Vice Mayor Knox Quite right. I guess a quick question. I don't know who whether it's for Andrew or somebody on staff, but I was a little caught by surprise and I missed it in our our staff report. But the presentation says that we have no high quality bus service and yet the 51 AA meets all the criteria. Plus we have ferry terminals, both of which meet the criteria. Is there something that opts us out? Because the presentation said we don't actually meet that. Who's taking it, Ms.. Potter? So I will start and then maybe Mr. Paul will have more to add. But MTC produced a map based on the definition of a high quality bus transit route, and that's a separate category than the ferries. We recognize that we have the ferry service here and the high quality bus service was defined as 15 minute headways during the week and a 30 minute headways on the weekend. And MTC mapped it for the nine counties. And so I just relied on the map that and Tsay prepared. Okay, said. Mr.. Paul. And that's the reason I'm here, is to see if we made any mistakes. We had the same comment in Contra Costa County the other night, but I found out from one of their planning directors that they have 15 minute during the week, 30 minute on Saturday, but on Sunday they have 45 minutes. So that may be why or if there is a mistake, just let us know and we'll correct the maps. The 51 A is I looked 50 minutes Saturday and Sunday in 10 minutes. All all peak period. Then it should then that should count though. Just want to make sure. I say. Thank you. And did I see whose hands did I see? You can go talk to Councilmember Dave. You know I a at some east bay league a city meetings I hear a lot of concern about the cost of capac being raised, particularly by officials representing cities from contra costa county cities. And I see some merit in a lot of the concerns about the cost of compact. I would not want our city to make any decisions regarding the cost of compact tonight. For example, you know, the debate is still on about just cause eviction. You know, my my position on just cause eviction. I'm not supportive of just cause eviction. And if that's one of the arrows in the council quiver, I have to be very concerned about that. Strangely enough, Alameda Rental Coalition appears to be concerned about how just cause eviction is framed as well. So that's a concern. And this whole thing about what's a reasonable rent increase, you know, I like what we the city of Alameda had arrived at back in 2015, early 2016, as 5% as a trigger, a threshold trigger for dealing for implementing our local rent stabilization measures. You know, I if you're talking about the Bay Area CPI on top of 5%, I mean, we could be talking about 9% as being a reasonable rent increase or even 10% rate increase. So we're going to have to be clear as to what we mean by CPI. I mean Bay Area or Western regional CPI, very different from national CPI. So again, that's an area of concern. And frankly, you know, if 15 minute headways along Santa Clara Avenue as a result of the AC Transit 51, a bus line means that, you know, we would be subject to the cost of provision regarding minimum zoning, near transit line lines. I would be concerned about that. I would be concerned about that because of, you know, for a lot of the reasons stated by the Contra Costa County stakeholders, they're concerned about the loss of local prerogative. So for me, I think there still a lot of questions that are outstanding regarding the CASA this afternoon, the second CASA matter. So I'm not ready to to give any recommendations about this. You know, I would say this much, though. I think if we're going to do any recommendations, I think, you know, we need to know, you know, in what specific ways are we vulnerable as a city, vulnerable to, um, to the CASA Compact if, if it passes as presented, if, if the just cause evictions are there or if the 5%, 8%, I think, I think he need to go through I don't line by line analysis of of of of the regulatory effects to Alameda. And also, you know, maybe this isn't related to the COSA compact, but I understand that assembly member from San Francisco, I think his name is David Chiu, wants to create a regional housing body that has a taxing authority. And I understand, you know, why we pay taxes. But for many of the things that we put our money towards, our tax money towards our property, tax money towards you know, there is there's a connection between the service that we as taxpayers receive. We put our money and then, you know, we are potentially we can potentially take part. We pay we can pay taxes that goes to BART or we pay taxes that goes towards mosquito abatement. Well, you know, mosquito abatement people locally around town to help resolve I think if there's going to be a parcel tax on property, on homeowners for rental assistance, I think that has to be discussed a little bit more because I don't see the the the the nexus there. So I, I think I think there's a lot of people in positions of power who are running around like chickens with their head cut off, trying to come up with any solution and throwing it on the board and not really giving it the deliberation that it deserves. So at this point, I would suggest that we accept the presentation on CASA and do within our own City Hall, do our more of our own homework. So I'm actually going to take the next time to speak just because I want people to be clear on what we are being asked to do tonight and what we're not being asked to do. So this is simply we're being asked to direct the interim city manager to incorporate state legislation introduced to implement the CASA Compact into the city's legislative agenda. And I can tell you, incidentally, Councilmember Amelia Vella and I will sit on a statewide policy committee on Housing, Community and Economic Development for this League of California Cities. And next week, we're going to be in where are we going to be? Southern California, somewhere called Costa mesa, maybe. Anyway, we're going to be at our statewide policy committee and I'm sure we're going to be looking over a lot of the proposed legislation. It is proposed legislation. I think there's something like 2700 bills have come to the legislature. I was honored to be voted by the mayors of Alameda County to be one of two representatives on this legislative task force that will consider proposed legislation that would be needed to implement the CASA Compact, because right now it is just this collection of principles. I mean, some of them are fleshed out more than others. And one of the things and Councilmember Desai is right, this is not without controversy. Can anyone name any issue today? That is not without controversy, but it is. Housing in our state is such an important issue. And one thing we've learned from our housing policy committee is every city in the state has to do its part. But that's not to say that every city in the state has to do the same thing. And so one of the criticisms about the CASA Compact is it tended to be this collection of big city mayors who got together and they have big problems and they implemented solutions that address their big problems. But it is also true that we have cities that are housing rich. We have cities that are jobs rich, and yet we feel the impact. And I would call Alameda more housing rich than jobs rich. And yet every time you try to leave the island to get to work, unless you're on the ferry, you're going to run into traffic congestion. But the point is, we need to look at this. Ignoring a problem doesn't make it go away, doesn't make it go better. Has the final solution been reached? Is this going to be without controversy? No, but we're rolling up our sleeves. And I think all. The. Points that Councilmember de SAC raised are fair points that need to be in a discussion. But tonight, we are neither accepting or rejecting anything. We're just saying we want to have a say in the legislation. And I just saw our state senator, Nancy Skinner, on Sunday, and she just texted me this evening to say, I want to discuss my housing bill with you. I think it's more moderate. So I mean, there's lots of lots of work yet to do, but we got to get started. So with that, who's next? Councilmember Vella. Madam Mayor, to your point, I think that of the thousands of bills that are being considered by the legislators in this session, a fair percentage of them actually touch on housing, housing in various capacity. It is. And I think it behooves us to to really consider the legislation that is being tied to this and to to play a part and to to really have a say in terms of what ends up happening. And so I think that that's really what we're trying to do tonight with what's before us. And I think that it's important that we do have our say in it and that we keep track of it, because when the state does decide to implement different things, we want to be able to know what's coming down the pipeline and we want to be able to advocate for Alameda and for all means when the time comes. And I also think that it's a regional issue and this is part of having a regional conversation and trying to work together on these issues . We may not always agree, but I think part of what this is trying to do is to at least identify the issue areas in the concern areas, we may not agree on the solution or the pathway to get there, but it's part of having that important dialog that's going to get us where we need to go. So thank you, Councilman Brody. Thank you, Madam Chair. I'll get to go next. I call. On you. Yes. I appreciate the presentation and the work, Ms.. Potter, you've done to to synthesize this for the council. And I was at the League of Cities meeting to where concept presented to the folks from the East Bay region. And, you know, I got a different take from it than my colleague. Respectfully, the controversy to me was a lot of the people that are not doing their share still are trying to fight this because this was a solution that would force them to do their share. So that to me tells me we're headed in the right direction. And I don't view this as the be all, end all. I don't view this as, you know, the ceiling on what we can do to help alleviate the housing crisis. I view it as a floor and then we can expand on it like and I think, for example, the fact that a regional body recognized that there is an issue with displacement and an issue with rents and an issue with evictions, enough to say that there needs to be a regional solution that includes just cause some type of rent cap for a temporary period, and this idea of rental assistance for tenants to help pay their rent so they're not displaced. I mean, that's something that, you know, I think is something that's worthwhile, that we shouldn't just shut out. I think it's something we really need to think about. You know, we've talked about here in Alameda the missing middle and how workforce we call it workforce housing, middle middle income, housing, whatever you want to call it. You know, it's nice to see that, you know, policy decision makers at a regional level and now at the state level understand that this this is a problem. And we've known it's a problem for quite some time. And the whole idea and I think this is, I think, instructive for us as a body and for our staff is, you know, public land for housing. I mean, we've seen one proposal to sell public land come to us that didn't include additional housing. I mean, we kind of had some restrictions because of historical the historical significance of the building. But we saw another one that was pulled off the agenda that didn't have any housing. So I think we need to think first. And I said this Saturday, you know, housing needs to be at the top of the list when when our staff evaluates potential projects, whether they're, you know, in Emacs or multifamily or in commercial zones . And, you know, we had to be part of the solution and transient aurion development. If we're serious about our transportation goals, about getting cars off the road and reducing greenhouse emissions, it's going to be with dense housing on transit lines or near places like BART stations and ferry stations. I mean, there's just no way around that. So I think to say that, you know, we shouldn't do that or we should like soft pedal, let her slow pedal it because that might be resistance. Well, I mean, the resistance to housing is why we're in this problem. And I'm really glad that somebody stepped up and kind of outlined the reasons. And I would be more than happy to make sure that we put this on our legislative agenda. We follow it and we make sure that we're part of the solution and that our neighbors are part of the solution. Because, you know, I think we've done a pretty good job, but a lot of our neighbors haven't. And we're not going to solve this problem on our own. We're going to need tools. And I think we need hammers for some of these cities like Lafayette and Walnut Creek and places like that to actually, you know, do the things that need to be done in order to meet this crisis. So I appreciate all the work done by. Our staff and buy a bag, an empty seat to bring this forward. Thank you, Mr. De Vice Mayor. Not quite. Well, first, I'm going to say Jim took everything I was going to say. So I got you back for the last time. No, I for for me, I'll be really short because I agree with the majority of the comments from from my colleagues. You know, we are in this problem because we have not tried to address it. Everybody has pointed at somebody else. And it's going to be uncomfortable when we get around to finally addressing this. And it's you know, it's a hard conversation and nobody wants there wants to see changes to their community. But at the same time, nobody wants to see their neighbors move out. And they are displaced through rents, displaced because of their commutes, etc.. And so, you know, former Vice Mayor Avella, Councilmember Vela, you know, said, you know, we we need a seat at the table. We need to be pushing on this. I said when Councilmember Odie brought this the cost fact sheet forward, our first member meeting in January. It may not be perfect, but it aligns very much with the work that we have been doing here. I think to say that 18 months worth of work on behalf of the cast of compact folks is just people throwing ideas at the wall to see if it'll stick. I think that's that's kind of unfair, quite honestly. And while I can see that some people don't agree with it or necessarily want to want to look at this more, I think also it's really important that folks here who have had to listen to us all talk so much also leave that they are these are these are very intelligent people who have worked really hard with in large groups to try to identify good ways forward. And hopefully what we can leave with is the idea that doing the same thing that we've been doing for 40 years is not going to solve the problem. So with that, I would like to make a motion that we direct our interim city manager to incorporate into the city's legislative legislation agenda, incorporate incorporate our incorporate the concept, compact into our legislative agenda. And I'll second that. Do you mind if I say a. Couple things, Madam Chair? Well, I don't know. Maybe I need to hear that. You know, was a brief. It is brief. I would just point out figure three on on page seven of the of the costs a compact or I think it's page 13 out of 40 and which shows the map of rent increases from 2010 to 2016. Or it kind of says two things 2010 to 2016 and 2011 to 2016. In either way, what's alarming is that increase greater than 30% is is a is a broad swath of Alameda. And I think that thematically that's what we've heard from our renters groups and things like that. And I do want to I do want to point out that that, you know, this is, you know, to Councilmember Otis point, this is about getting people to focus on on kind of problem definition and figuring out general solutions. It's not to say that we're planning to ignore that. And obviously different communities have been impacted differently by these issues. But I think some of these maps can be very visually helpful in terms of showing and reinforcing what we've heard from from some of our constituents here. Thank you. And so we had a motion second and we want to have some discussion. Councilmember So. Real quick. Point. I think what would help the city of Alameda get its ducks in a row as it deals with either of the regional CASA? And I want to say regional CASA to distinguish that from the local CASA or housing legislations coming from Sacramento. What would help the residents get our ducks in a row is if we, in a comprehensive manner update our general plan, because then that will really begin to have neighbors giving input as to what they see, what they want to have in their neighborhoods with regard to things like accessory dwelling units, etc.. So I think that's important. Thank you. All right. We have a motion. We have a second all in favor. I opposed one opposed to the motion passes with four eyes. And yes. All you have to do is ask for EIS in when? In opposition. All right, council, quick decision here. I am going to call a break before we hear the hotel item with 56 speaker subs today. And do you want to hear this next item? And then take a break you and take a break now. And let's not take too long to make that decision because the idea is to keep things moving quickly now. Quick break now. Okay. 5 minutes. No, it's 5 minutes. Don't go too. Far. Okay. Okay.