Recommendation to receive and file a report on the development of an incentive program to encourage landlord acceptance of subsidized tenants through the Housing Choice Voucher Program.  (Citywide)
Great. Thank you. And thank you, Councilman Andrews and your team. Let's move on to item 28. Report from Health and Human Services recommendation to receive and file a report on the development of an incentive program to encourage landlord acceptance of subsidized tenants through the Housing Choice Voucher Program citywide. By Sam Richardson. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I'm pleased to see this report come back this evening as chair of our housing authority. I've had the opportunity to work with Ms.. King and her team, as well as a number of landlords, property owners, members of apartment association on ways to modernize and improve our housing choice voucher program. And it wasn't it wasn't particularly easy, but we were able to put together a package of things that we think we can we can support as a city. And and and the hope is that it will increase participation and adoption to increase our Lisa Lisa up rate. So at this point, I'd like to just hand it over to staff and ask for a report on where we are. Alison King, bureau manager. The Housing Authority has been working on this for quite some time. Alison. Thank you. As part of the incentives that we'd like to roll out, we are, first of all, grateful to the County of Los Angeles for the measure h money that is forthcoming. We have not yet been made aware of the exact amount that we would receive, but we are replicating the program that the County of Los Angeles Housing Authority is currently doing, and they are rolling that out to other housing authorities in the county that are choosing to participate with this effort to incentivize owners and to house the homeless. It is a three prong incentive that provides, first of all, a holding fee for owners. That holding fee would allow an owner who has a unit to turn their paperwork into the housing authority and have it inspected. And we would then provide them a fee while we are forwarding and referring homeless applicants over to these owners. It prevents the time that they generally have to wait for payment. They are still going to be allowed the opportunity to vet clients as they see fit, and there is no requirement that they select a tenant, but they would use their own criteria for that. In addition to that, there will be a damage mitigation fine a fund that will be set up should a client within the first two years of their occupancy create any damage to the unit that would exceed the security deposit? The third prong of the incentive is for needed items for the participant themselves, whether that would be a security deposit assistance with getting utilities turned on or the required appliances. That program for the first year we have requested to house 220 homeless persons in our community and we are getting additional funds for subsequent years. 429 Fiscal Year 2019 and fiscal year 2020. In addition to that, the Housing Authority is setting aside some nonfederal funds to be able to assist the first 75 clients that also have been searching for units for a significant amount of time but are currently holding vouchers. They do not indeed meet the HUD requirement for homelessness, but they have been displaced for some time and are unattached to a unit. They too would be able to access funds that will come from the Housing Authority for the first 75 using those same incentive strategies. Thank you, Ms.. King. And I like it because it addresses the folks actively searching for housing who are holding a voucher, and also individuals who are facing homelessness and dealing with homelessness. And one thing I don't know that I heard mentioned was we were able to talk with both housing authority and development services about coordination on the inspections to make sure we reduce the burden on landlords and tenants. So thank you so much for your hard work on this. Councilwoman Mongeau. I have really enjoyed working with your department. I think that the things you are doing are really exceptional. So thank you so much for your partnership and I look forward to continuing to work together on the amazing things that each and every one of you put a lot of thought into. And I can tell that you really run this department from your heart. Thank you. Councilmember Pearce. Yes. I just wanted to thank Vice Mayor. I was happy to be on this original item. Do we have a timeline on when we expect these incentives to go into effect? Ms.. King. Frankly, no. The county fiscal year did start as of July one. There are still some final details yet to be determined. So we are hoping to hear and we are one of a few housing authorities at its request to roll out the program before December. So we are asking for first quarter funds. Great. And I did want to ask just briefly, I recall creating the incentive package, which I think was a great idea, as well as waiving some of the permits and things that we've sat down with some of the apartment association. Has the discussion been brought up around rental insurance yet? It has not. Okay. That's fine. We'll save that and make sure that we bring that back. Okay. Thank you, guys. Thank you, Councilman Andrews. Yes, thank you, Mrs. King. I'd just like to take just a moment to thank you and your staff, because I know how hard you guys work, because you guys do give me a chance to come back every now and then. But the work that you've done in this situation, I think, is going to open a door for so many people out there trying to get them a place to stay. And I want to thank you again and again, you and your staff. Please keep up the good work. Thank you. Any public comment on this item? Please come forth. Good evening. I would like to thank Vice Mayor Reg. Richardson for all the work that he's put in over the last few months in putting this program together. I'm a firm believer of this program because I do believe that it helps a lot of people who might otherwise be homeless, and it might help some homeless people come into housing. I want to especially thank Alice and King because I've been working with her over the last several years to try to put programs together and understand the programs a little bit better. You have worked tirelessly to. Do this, and I appreciate the outreach that you've had to the community, the housing provider community and all the people in the community. But I want to thank Vice. Mayor Reg Richardson for putting the organization to it and reaching out to the community and making the progress more progress than I've seen in quite a while. And I'm very excited about that and I appreciate it. So thank you very much. Thank you. Next speaker, please. Good afternoon, Mr. Vice Mayor and members of the Council and Staff Gary Shelton's. My name is a couple blocks from here. You might know I've been following issues of housing and homelessness for a lot of years. Thank you, Mr. King, for all your work on this. I've known you for some time. I wanted to direct your attention to item number two or paragraph number two, whatever you want to call it. It's the waiving of the fees, which I somehow missed in the in the staff report. It might have been there, but I'm sorry if I missed it. And I I'm wondering if know a couple of things that you might ask Mr. King. Number one, did Los Angeles waive the fees as well? And if they did, how were they able to afford it? Because it seems like an unaffordable possibility here under under the way it would work for us in Long Beach. So if Los Angeles did do it. How did they manage to do it? And I hesitate to use this word, and I use it in the most positive sense. It looks like there's a couple of perhaps false assumptions in the in the calculations that are used in this in this part. I'm not positive whether $57.50 is a per unit fee. If it's a four unit building, a six unit building or a ten unit building, or if that's only if it's at a $230 base price for a four unit building, it calculates to 5750 per unit. But is that actually 57, 50 and a ten unit building as well, or is it the $23 that we might expect it to be instead of 57, 50 if it's less. The larger the the the number of units in the building, then, then the loss is the less and the number of FTE ees that would be unavailable to us would be less. So maybe the impact isn't all that great. Also, the inspections are over the course of a five year span. And so even though it appears that there's an annual fee for the inspections, I'm not sure if that is every five years or if it really is every year at 57, 50 or $230, wherever the annual fee is per apartment. Finally, even regardless of that amount, if we were able to afford to give a landlord $57.50 back or whatever it might actually be or not, charge him that for a for an inspection. That might be a small amount, but actually the perception is very great and the incentive would be very great, I would say. So I appreciate your finding a little bit more out about the waiving of this fee and whether we really can afford it or not. Thank you. Thank you. Next speaker, please. Good evening, City Council Robert Fox, Executive Director of the Council of Neighborhood Organizations. I had the privilege of sitting down with Ms.. King and having lunch and going over a lot of issues. And I'm gratified to find that she's a good woman and she's done a great job. And I admire the proposals in front of you. In fact, I admire them so much that I'd like to expand them a little bit. We're dealing with only the homeless population in this particular proposal. We have at present 4980 vouchers rented out. However, we are able to take 7398. And the problem that Ms.. King and I talked about was how do we get landlords into this program? So I've been trying to do that, and the incentives that are here in front of us seem really pretty good. I would encourage waiving the fees because again, it's more psychological than $57. But what a landlord is looking for, if we really want to rent up that 30%, which is not rented up in vouchers at this point in time, if we could incentivize landlords with a damage mitigation fund, I know that it's we're proposing $200,000 here in this particular thing for a very limited number of people. But I would like you all to consider the idea of taking this incentive program beyond the homeless and beyond the 75 to make it concurrent for the entire department, even if it were on a temporary basis. So because if we lose the federal funding, because we didn't rent everything up, that's a significant chunk of change that we will have a difficult time getting back in the future. So I want us to think about that particularly I'm not as concerned about. The fee is, as I am with the damage mitigation fund, which is really important to landlords, whether we use it or not. It's just psychological more than anything else that we're there to help you make this thing work. And I like the holding fee idea because it does take a certain amount of time when you're taking a Section eight tenant or a housing voucher tenant before all the paperwork is solidified. And that gives the landlord an incentive that they're not going to be losing rent over a certain period of time, as Alison and I had talked about. It's a great idea. I guess my suggestion is, is there a possibility somehow with the money that's coming in from Proposition eight, Measure eight, to expand this program, if maybe this will be an experimental program, but maybe expand it in the future so that we can move this to all housing voucher program participants. Thank you so much. Thank you. And it's open to both homeless and non homeless at this point. Next speaker, please. Good evening. Vice Mayor and the City Council members. My name is Johanna Cunningham, executive director for the Apartment Association, California Southern Cities. I first want. To thank the vice mayor for including. Us and having the collaborative spirit that he's had since the beginning of this project. And I greatly appreciate working. With Allison King. I have worked. With her since I started working. Here in Long Beach. It's been four years now. And I appreciate that collaboration. In that partnership. Working on this particular project. I do like the current recommendations that have been brought before you. I think they're a good start. I appreciate working with. The Housing Authority and it's. Always they're always open to new ideas and to having a discussion and to really vetting different ideas. And situations around this. And we have a lot of work that we still need to do as we continue to work on this issue. But again, I just want to say thank. You for the work that's been done so far. And I appreciate. Look and look forward to continuing. Our work together. Thank you. Thank you. Next speaker, please. Josh Butler, executive director for housing. Ron Beech And I first like to think all the landlords for coming out tonight. Maybe they could all stand up. They're not here because tenants aren't asking for any rates, so they don't show up. But when they ask to step up to the plate and be involved in the process, I don't see them packing the house. If every one of them took one Section eight tenant, we might be able to do something. But they can't because vacancy rates are 2% in the city. There is nowhere for people to go. At last count, 1000 Section eight vouchers in the hands of residents who cannot use them. Our vacancy rate. There wouldn't even I don't even know if there's enough available apartments to put every single one of those people into. You'd have to start moving people out. And that is a real concern of your current renter population, is that they're going to get moved out. They're not going to get opportunities at units that are available. So you have a housing crisis here. It requires real solutions. And the landlords, you keep going to the table asking for landlords to solutions to these problems time after time after time. Yet they are not going to do it. Their job here is to make as much money as possible. And I think it's very ironic that we're going to use Measure H funds that were approved by taxpayers that those groups openly opposed that will now go into their hands that they can use. It's like, how is this even become a reality that we look at this situation that they can fight against all these measures, then turn around and take their hand and open it up and say, go ahead and we'll take that money now. And yet they'll turn around and send threatening messages to their tenants saying, You voted for this measure. So now I have to raise your rent. So not only are you taking the money from the taxpayers, you're raising our rent, too. So the landlord community will double dip on this. It's time for us to start talking about renter protections. It's time for us to start talking about building affordable housing in a serious way. And we are making steps forward. But the years of lagging behind have caught up with us, and we're now paying the price. Cities all over the state of California talk about Long Beach, and they can't believe that we're the largest city in the state of California, the largest population of renters on the entire West Coast, from San Diego, all the way up to Seattle. That doesn't even have basic renter protections. We want to be a world class city. Then we should treat 60% of our population like world class citizens and give them the same basic rights that they have up in Portland. You know, it takes more than crosswalks and microbrews and coffee shops. It takes a population, it takes a community to make a city. And it takes investing in your current base of residents to make that happen and not just continually outreaching outside of our borders to attract people in who yeah, they're moving here because it's cheaper than everywhere else. We have a lot of work to do. I'm disappointed that more landlords haven't shown up tonight. We're very hopeful that they can help us solve the problem because we could lose significant federal funding as a result of this. Thanks. Thank you. Next speaker, please. Yeah. The world's. Secret. Good afternoon. The Honorable Council. People are Malcolm Bennett. A proud landlord and property. Manager for. Over 42 years. And I certainly like to thank the council and thank Councilman Richardson and working with me. I think. This is a obvious sign of how. People can come together. Elected officials, community rental owners. We can come together and work on some positive solutions to a housing crisis that we have here. This is just an example of how we can come together, talk about issues, and collaborate and come up with kinds of issues at work that everyone, our property owners and developers in the building. We're the only ones that can provide housing because we're the only ones that either have housing or can develop it. So we look for positive incentives so that we can work together to make it a level playing field so that. We can create the kind of housing. And I commend Long Beach for the lead that they've taken. I just understand now you're looking at expanding the second unit, the Granny Flats, and these are the kind of things that really put people in housing. We can talk about it and all we want, but. Coming together, sitting down at the table and coming up and taking having the courage to take positive steps and move for it. So once again, I commend the council, thank Mr. Richardson, and certainly have been a pleasure working with Ms.. King. We work with a lot of Section eight housing throughout. The city, and I think Long Beach is really taking the. Lead on some of these issues. So you be commended for that. And once. Again, I'm proud to be a rental property owner, property manager into my. Fourth year of this. And I think now we've been. Coming together more. At the table. And talking about things and really making them. Happen. So, once again, thank the council, everyone. Thank you. Thank you. Mr. Bennett. Seeing no further public comment, members, please cast your vote. Councilman Mongo. Motion carries.