Recommendation to request City Manager to direct the appropriate departments to review the existing process for individuals entering the permitting process for apartments and Accessory Dwelling Units and design a program that would both incentivize acceptance of vouchers for housing and educate landlords on how Housing Choice Vouchers work; and Request a letter outlining potential incentives related to the Water Department be sent to the Water Commissioners for consideration.
Okay. So now we move on to the regular agenda. We have item number 19. Item 19 is a communication from Councilwoman and Mongo recommendation to request city manager to direct the appropriate departments to review the existing EDU permitting process and design a program that would both incentivize acceptance of vouchers for housing and educate landlords on how housing choice vouchers work. Okay. Is is as. And I see you. Councilman Price. Is Councilman Mongo here? Yes. Okay, great. Did you want to log your motion and some of the second. Okay, great. Okay. You recognized. Thank you. In working with the. Many different departments of the city, we recognize that there are opportunities to improve the way in which we address our housing shortage. Many know that there are approximately 2000 homeless individuals in our city. And those homeless individuals. There's a report or a statistic from one of our department heads that says between 20 and 30% of those individuals actually have housing vouchers. So if we were able to better incentivize landlords to take the housing vouchers, we would potentially get an additional 600 people off the street. This motion is to encourage the city to come together with many different departments. I've talked to individual department heads about potential opportunities. I'm going I look forward to seeing what they will bring back so that there's an incentive for more landlords who are either modernizing or building additional units and or use to take housing vouchers. Thank you. Thank you. Councilman Price. Um. Thank you, Mr. Vice Mayor. I want to thank Councilwoman Mongo for bringing this item forward. This is a fantastic item, and I think it's really important for us to work with our local housing providers to do everything that we can to increase our affordable housing stock. Our office will be hosting a workshop on August 11th. We've invited our housing authority team to be there to educate landlords, all landlords throughout the city. Anyone who wants to come is welcome to come to the workshop on August 11th. I'll make an announcement with the with with the specifics at the end of the meeting. And I think it's really important for us to think very clearly about where our affordable housing options lie in the city and do everything that we can right now to make existing housing stock more affordable. That is something that I think we have a lot of landlords that have very positive experiences in working with the city on the vouchers and that program. And I think it's important for us to educate them and make sure they have the opportunity to participate in those programs with the help of city staff. I think that's a a key issue here with our city staff. They're willing to sit down and educate people on the process. And it's just we don't have enough opportunities for them to do that. So thank you, Councilmember Mungo, for bringing this item forward and allowing us to have that discussion at the city level. Thank you, Councilman Alston. Thank you. I'll be brief. I just want to thank, uh, maker of the Motion Councilmember Mongo, for bringing this item forward. I think it's innovative. It's an innovative way to utilize or to utilize a program that that is actually seems to be pretty popular since we adopted it a couple of years ago. Staff report says it has over 400 applications in for a to use this year. Probably 250 have been built in the last couple of years. And so clearly there's an opportunity for a to use to to help meet our housing needs, particularly for low income households and those with the housing choice vouchers. And so I applaud the innovation and I'm happy to support this item. Thank you, Councilwoman Zendaya's. Thank you very much, Vice Mayor, and a big special thank you to Councilmember Mungo for bringing this very important item forward. I think that we are living in special times, especially right now as we're recovering from COVID and a lot of our residents are finding themselves in need of vouchers. And I have also spoken to a lot of other property owners, too, who would like to take these vouchers. But the time that it takes to get approved, to be able to take these vouchers sometimes is not ideal. And that's one of the things that holds them back from accepting to take these vouchers. Is there anybody in staff that can maybe speak on that a little bit more? Yes. I believe we have Kelly Colby on the line about the voucher program. Well, she may be unmuted or not on the line. Okay. I mean, you can get back to me in regards to this. I just am very supportive of this item and look forward to to supporting this item. Sorry about that, Councilmember. We'll make sure we get your answer. Thank you. Councilwoman Mongo might be able to help with an answer for Councilman Zendejas. You are correct. There used to be significant challenges in the approval process and therefore landlords were incentivized. But several years ago, a few of us on the council worked with the Housing Authority, and they actually will pay you to hold your unit open for one of our members. So you actually could theoretically get rent for holding the unit for about your members, so there's no disadvantage to the landlord. Further, I did want to thank. A couple of my colleagues. I know that throughout the journey of our time together, we had many different versions of what we can do to help our housing voucher community. And I think that the workshop on Friday is going to be very, very, very beneficial. I think that I'll also just mention a couple of quick things that I was thinking when writing the item that many people don't know. But when you add either an EDU or an additional unit, you're not required to add any meters if your property is already metered. And one of the things that's an incentive for the water and gas department is they want to know each and every customer, and they also want to incentivize conservation. It's difficult to incentivize conservation when you have a dozen people on a meter or even two or three people on a meter because no one knows exactly who is using how much and if the things they're doing are working. When you go to build an Adu and or a an additional unit, meters cost upward of 1500 dollars. So if a person wants to add meters, it can be a quite an expensive experience when they're already paying thousands upon thousands of dollars for permits. And the cost of building right now is high. And so I look for opportunities similar to what's possible than water and gas to find ways to incentivize landlords to get something that the city already wants. That helps us all in our environmental pursuit of excellence and finds housing opportunities once again. And thank you, Councilwoman Price. I know that I didn't have time to have you sign on to an item with our restrictions at City Hall and COVID. But I just wanted to thank you as well for being second door on the item. Thank you. Thank you. I'll just offer my support I think is a great item. And, you know, I'll just also just say that, you know, over the years, the group of landlords, it changes over time. And there are always stigmas with the housing choice voucher program. And a lot has changed about the program. Like what Councilwoman Mongo mentioned, the standards have changed. We can, you know, put down additional deposits to hold the unit. And there are a lot of things that people don't know about. The Modern Housing Choice voucher program is very different than the Section eight program of the nineties or the eighties. And so the more we can do outreach, last time we did this was a lease up Long Beach initiative that we worked on together, the workshops and things, but we didn't have to use at the time. And I think this you know, I think this is really, really smart because this is yet another way for us to have a higher lease up rate, because if we don't use all our vouchers, you lose them to the federal government. So we have to continue to identify ways to utilize the vouchers that we have, particularly given there is a long line of people who are who have vouchers in hand and don't have a place to go. So I really like this item. Is any public comment on item 19? If there are any members of the public that. Would like to speak on item 19 in person, please stand up at the podium in Zoom. Please use the raise hand feature or dial star nine now. In person. Thank you. Your 3 minutes begin now. So I can't face success for president. This is a very rare occasion. I'm both a product of public housing here, specifically Section eight housing here in the city of Long Beach. And now I'm a provider of nine units in my neighborhood in a central area where we use Section eight vouchers to house people in the neighborhood. The only problem is not one of them is through the housing authority of Long Beach. They're all Heathcliff. And I'm going to tell you why. I was not incentivized to take a single voucher from the city of Long Beach. The process was strenuous. It was months and months of delay. Um, there's only a percentage of the, uh, units that's covered, not the entire amount. So I just want to say that. And last but not least, another reason why a lot of landlords are not incentivized is because the price points are antiquated. Um, you know, I live nine or 813, uh, the, the median is $1,595. That does not cover a one bedroom apartment right now. So, you know, you take the capital ES aspect, that side of it, right. I just don't know that many people that on real estate that are doing charitable work in relation to the properties that they own. So it's just not working. If you look at, um, currently what we do, we are, uh, we have because of COVID this incentivize the greatest voucher recipients in the city of Long Beach. Those are motel friends. They no longer are taking these vouchers because we're incentivizing them, because we've given them all this COVID money. So now they don't want to take the vouchers because they would rather take the COVID money and the millions and millions of dollars in contracts which we've repeatedly renewed and given to them. And the homeless people continue to be homeless because they're holding vouchers. And when they go to the provider to give them the vouchers, there's no need to, you know, save. Long Beach is one of the few metropolitan major metropolitan cities in America that has more vouchers than public housing. I want to commend, uh, councilwoman. Mango for bringing this up. I think it's a great attempt at solving something. The problem is this is a bandage trying to patch up a gunshot wound. A shotgun, arguably. I think that if we want to have really radical positioning with respect to. You know, getting rid of the 2000 plus people. As Councilwoman Zendaya said, these are special times and we need special efforts. We need to expand, expand public housing. You know, we have under 5% of the city. That's public housing. And if we really want to do more like room for error, we need to just buy up. We need to have the housing authority instead of spending so much time on these Section eight vouchers, you know, open up a conversation with hope and try to buy up, you know, all these antiquated buildings. You know, a lot of these buildings I living in in their time in the last 1960. I just want to finish this point. The building I live in is old. So the apartment, the amount of rooms in it doesn't fit the current families. The current families have to separate by gender. So you can't if you have a boy and a girl, they can't sleep in the same room. Under section eight. We need to update that. If we want to use these vouchers. Thank you. Thank you. I saw one more speaker. Was there another speaker on this? Okay. Our final speaker. Good evening. I just want to clarify something. Is the microphone on. Okay. Maybe speaking to the microphone. Hello? Yeah. Good evening. I just want to clarify written opposition to this as written not because I'm against housing choice vouchers, section eight housing Section eight rental assistance, the need to incentivize uptake of the HCV program to reduce the number of potentially homeless people that are still waiting. None of those things are things that I'm opposed to. It's just as written. There's a bit of a missed opportunity, as the previous speaker mentioned, not only. To incentivize better construction, but to frankly investigate existing aid use not only for environmental, health and safety, public safety compliance, but also just for efficiency. And I made a comment specifically because, you know, when it comes to where we're in human history, but also where we're at in this city, we do not need to pipe in natural gas into any of these homes, frankly. I would love to see more incentives for not only the kind of green building construction we have, but frankly, the kind of building stock that we're going to need to house as many people as we do. And there are other ways to incentivize, frankly, more public housing and more affordable housing construction. You know, this is I mean, you know, just as one one final point. I mean, you know, it'd be great to see if there was some data on not only which landlords, but which landlords have, which situations that are constraining them. And for future projects for new construction, you know, which which properties are kind of waiting for, for these to house these populations. Thank you. Thank you. That satisfies for the comment. Let's have a roll call vote, please. Councilman's in Dallas. Hi. Councilman Allen. Hi. Councilwoman Price. Hi. Councilman. Super or not. All right. Councilwoman Mongo. Hi. Councilman Zoro. I council member younger. Hi, Councilman Austin. Hi. Vice Mayor Richardson. All right. Motion carries nine.