Thank you very much for coming tonight for this joint meeting, this joint housing meeting. Today, if you're thinking of official, I have a two-legged, official chair, mayors set, and townships, to the right and the right side. If you can, we'll call you to board a set board, mayors from the community members.
First, how about we have an honor to see it up?
So, everybody is from the United States.
I'm just going to say that we'll call this,
so we're all going to call off the roll.
All right.
Thank you.
All right.
Thank you.
All right.
Thank you.
All right, and both of you are planning to meet over and out.
Thank you very much.
I know that both of you would like to get some of your information on the board.
So if you'd like to come up here, thank you very much again for coming to our housing workshop.
Just a couple of cool things.
We anticipate this to go to about a matter of fact based on a little comment in the presentations.
I do anticipate a small five-minute break after Mr. Kilpatrick's presentation case.
Anyone has two directions, which will be located out to this quarter and middle of the hallway.
Thank you again for coming here.
We are going to be talking about a detailed positive plan.
Mr. Kilpatrick has prepared for our two communities, the city of Southay and the Southay and South Georgia.
We will be discussing what is in that plan.
And we'll also be just discussing a number of options and barriers that are facing our communities.
And I know another you may know about an over-tune site.
This is not necessarily the focus of over-tune tonight, but we keep that effect in your head
if you know our relationship with the habitat is no longer.
This city will have to explore what our options are next to the over-tune site.
Also today, we have a planning commission chair for Township,
our island up here to kind of go over some of the township projects that are outlined
or in the case of a shoot, and some of you may have known what those are, so I'm glad I was
getting a brief fight in the presentation. Anything else Mayor Smith or Supervisor Stein?
Okay, what's that? I'll have one. I'll put it up in a given short presentation. Thank you.
Thank
you. Thank you. I've been asked to do a brief high level overview of what's happening
in self-saving township right now in terms of different levels of housing that we're working on.
And I do want to let you know that our focus in the township is broad.
We look at it from the perspective that we need housing at all cost levels, and that's
the focus where we are, and as I go through this, I think you'll quickly see that that's
what we're doing.
So we're going to start with a project that's already in the works that has been approved.
20 acre site, 12 parcels, six are sold already.
This is the Woodcriss subdivision on 77th Street.
There are three completed homes, 200 construction, and another one in the phase of developing the plans for it.
So, this one is on Doctors' Road, 77th Street,
and some of those lots have late views.
Some of them are at Forest and Blueberry Hill views.
Coming soon is a property that we have re-sold,
and we have approved from the Planning Commission
in public hearings, and we'll be going
to the top ship border next week.
This is a 10-year parcel immediately next to the Holiday Inn, just east of the
Holiday Inn in Southeast. Two acres, commercial ten acres, multi-family housing.
There will be 100 market-grate housing units, apartments, one to bedroom.
There are four 16-year buildings, two 18-year buildings, total 100, 227
parking spaces and 48 graduates and you just get a look at the site plan here it's pretty
efficient use of space these are market rate so the market will determine really what these are
we are hoping that this is the type of project that teachers, teachers, school teachers, police officers,
others that other lines cannot find housing in South-Aid and we'll find a
tractor. So that one is ready to roll. Happen next week. Very
recognizable developer that we think will do a good job for it.
The next one that
I want to talk about is it's called trailside but it's not to be confused with
the trail site subdivision in South Africa.
I'm not sure why he chose that name or whether he will leave it that way.
But what this is is a total of 18 tiny homes
of no more than 600 and 80 square feet.
Most of them will be less than that.
They are detached.
There are 25 toy barns.
Somebody asked me just a few minutes ago.
It's a toy barn.
It's a story game for folks, RVs, stuff that you otherwise don't have ready for.
Seven of those toy barns have a loft with just a bathroom.
Seven of those toy barns have a 472 square foot residence within the unsightly story.
That has gone through a public hearing preliminary site plan review.
We're waiting for the developer to come back and offer us some information about some of the requests that we have on that project.
The next one is really another interesting project.
What makes it really interesting is it's rural.
part of it is in Geneva Township, part of it is in Sausage, in the township, it will have its own private
subject, subject, and sewer system built on the private land. There are a total of 15 rental
units on this property, 20 storage units, more toy farms, 30 RV sites, and 80 camping sites.
Again, this has gone through preliminary public hearing and we're waiting for our back
from the developer on the request that we had in this program.
Next, I'm going to spend just a couple of minutes talking about master plan considerations.
We are working on that right now. We're working with the same firm for the city used.
And we've had several meetings including an open house back in May.
we've done a survey. What we're seeing so far is population has been
steady and continues to show a slight growth pattern. More than a third of the
timeshift residents are between ages 50 and 69 and the median age is increased.
South Haven and Township may have a need for additional assistive living
skill nursing and senior living. If you know what it was, senior living, assistive
is living a project in the township approved and built
or looks within the last year.
And that is a beautiful facility.
And I guess it's another one that you would consider
housing for seniors.
Developmental pressure in the township is growing.
There's no question about the number of requests
that we're getting.
And so we're being cautious, very cautious about working
on a master plan in such a way that we
We encourage certain types of housing, but we also want to preserve the rural nature of the township to the extent possible.
Let's talk a little bit about affordable, attainable housing provisions.
And this is really part of what is permitting these projects to take place to the township.
First, we have a special use provision that provides for micro-housing developments in the township.
The micro housing development is between 5 and 10 acres, it's served by water and sewer.
The maximum square footage of any house built is 600 feet square feet and there are no
opportunities for additions to that home.
So you're maxed out at 600 feet square feet, you can build less.
the main level has to be at least 12 by 24, 280 square feet so you can go on in each unit must have two part of the spaces.
The next provision that most people are not aware of, that's unique to South David Township as opposed to your zoning partners in the city,
is all of our zoning districts permit multifamily due to places to family residences
in township, and that is creating some opportunities for us to begin to look at, perhaps expanding
that even, into four plexes, Ryan has shared some really good information with us, and
many of these are very attractive, and they tend to fit well into rural areas, so we think
opportunity is already there but we're looking at densities and height limitations of those as well
we want to make sure to grow up in the opportunity possible. The next one I wanted to share with you
with us will be the last one is the public utility residential overlay district. This is a new
district in the last two years. What it does it reduces the lot size down to 16600 square feet,
66 feet minimum on a roadway. It must be served by water and sewer and so these are really areas where
they're underdeveloped, water and sewer is available and the opportunity is there for us to
improve some smaller lives, smaller residences as well. So that's a quick overview of what's happening in the
And with that, Kate will turn it over.
Do I have to get it done environment?
Good, thank you.
All right, thank you so much Mark.
And at this time, I think we'll ask Ryan,
we'll pack it, come on up, and talk about our detail housing plant
for the city of Southgate and Southgate for sure.
As you know, Ryan has been a consultant here with the city
for some time.
He has had a vast experience with housing,
working with, I think, any U.C.,
another housing that has something on it.
So he has a pretty big history,
and is well known for its efforts in housing, so with that,
I'll bring them back.
Can I use this?
Thank you so much.
Yeah.
Is that a little bit?
Yeah.
Thanks.
Oh, sorry.
You guys were pulling that up.
Great.
So thanks, everybody, for coming out tonight.
It's a gorgeous evening.
And you chose to spend it here with us.
So, appreciate you doing that.
Again, my name's Ryan Chilpatrick.
I have a little consulting firm called Flywheel.
Our goal is really to work with local communities to help build momentum around their vision.
So our intention is to really spend a lot of time in the community, understand where
you're headed, work towards incremental progress, but those incremental games turn into big momentum
over time.
So we've been working with the city of South Haven for quite a while, a couple of years
and I'm really thrilled that we've got more South Haven charter township members and residents here tonight.
I think you all need to be applauded for working together collaboratively as a region.
One of the things that's really important to keep in mind is that most residents of a community
don't care very much about the political boundaries.
What they're really thinking about is, do I have access to jobs and do I have access to good schools?
can I get where I need to go, and can I afford where I'm going to live?
And so those are the things that people are really thinking about,
and if there's a better housing opportunity on the other side of
a political boundary, most people will take it.
So the fact that you're working together is really important.
Okay, I've stalled long enough that this is okay.
Talked about what flywheel is.
Oh, can we adjust this?
Yeah, let me work on it.
Do I need to pull the screen down a little bit?
No, it's, okay, they're lacking a program
that makes it work better.
Got it, okay.
So housing is regional.
Housing is also highly indicative
of the regional workforce, right?
So I'll talk a little bit about this today,
in your housing plan.
Some of our interventions that we recommend
are really specific to housing related strategies.
But a couple of the recommendations are really specific to workforce development because all new housing is going to have a minimum price, right?
There's the cost of construction doesn't get below a certain threshold. Right now, we're seeing average costs around $220 a square foot to build new residential housing in West Michigan.
And so the township should be commended for allowing the tiny home village 600 square feet
and less.
So that's easily bringing the price of that housing down.
But there's still a certain floor there.
And so when you have households that are earning less than $25,000 a year,
what we really need to focus on is workforce development.
Is how do we get those households connected to higher paying jobs?
or where they have a disability or they're aging seniors, how we get them connected to the
federal benefits that are available. So it looks like we're up.
To kind of level set baseline
expectations, some of the things that are really important to keep in mind is that our current
The housing market is plagued by these three shortages. We have a shortage of land available for the types of housing that are needed in our communities. There's no shortage of land, right? We are still the great American open space community. There's lots of land available. But land that has access to infrastructure and that is zoned to allow for the types of housing that people can afford today is highly limited.
And I'm not particularly picking on South Haven or South Haven township across the state of Michigan.
A roughly 78% of all residentally-zoned land is owned for single-family only on lots
that are a quarter of an acre or larger.
So when we have to start with a quarter acre log and we can only build single-family homes.
Again, when we know that we have to spend $220 a square foot for any residential product,
we automatically are setting the floor on the cost of the house.
So the second shortage is labor and materials.
Since the Great Recession, almost half of our Michigan labor workforce in the construction
trades have either migrated south or into other employment opportunities.
We didn't get all of those residential contractors back after they left in 2010 and 2012.
In 2018, 2019, 2020, we had significant material shortages, partly due to COVID, partly due to tariffs, partly due to a really blooming housing industry that wasn't really expected at the time.
And then lastly, the thing that we've been talking about a lot for the last year is rising interest rates, which means we have a shortage of available capital
to build the kind of a residential product that we need.
So there are constraints, right?
I'm not here to promise you an easy path forward,
but I am here to promise you
the incremental steps that should work.
So in light of those shortages,
even before we started to experience shortages,
what this graph is trying to depict,
there's read it like a comic book, right?
Left to right and then top to bottom.
These are starter home sales.
You can see 1999 to 2006. We were up at about 350,000 nationwide on an annual basis and
then fell off a cliff in late 2006, early-tech 2007. Again, that was the mortgage crisis.
Those mortgage-backed securities, the financial scheme that really failed in 2007 had a huge impact
on starter homes. And at that time, starter homes were typically homes that were priced
around $150,000, maybe $175,000.
They used to make up about 42% of the overall housing
construction in the marketplace.
It then dropped down to about 17%
of the overall housing construction in the marketplace.
So if we think about, if we used to build almost half
of the new housing was for young families
that were just coming up, or first time home buyers
who were just entering the housing market,
price very affordably for the middle class if we stop that if that amount of
housing declined by more than half we begin to understand what has happened
over the ensuing 12 years right now all of those middle income households who
could have afforded that $150 to $175,000 loan are forced to continue renting
because there aren't other good options in the marketplace and because they're
forced to continue renting but they earn enough to potentially buy a house just
not a super expensive house. They're now crowding out our middle and lower income renters.
And so what then happens is those lowest income renters get crowded out of the market entirely,
which means they're forced to double up with other renters, they're forced to double up with
family or they're pushed out of the community. And oftentimes it's those lower income workers who
are essential workers, our grocery store clerks, the folks who are cleaning every place,
keeping us clean especially during pandemics, those really important people, our nurses,
age, our preschool teachers, all of these folks starting less than $18 to $20 an hour
are getting squeezed out of the marketplace. And it's largely due to the fact that in 2006 and
2007 we stopped making starter homes one of the largest product commodities in the housing
market.
So this slide, I'm going to skip it because it just repeats what I just said for
the most part. So what we have done is we created a housing plan but embedded in this housing
plan is a housing needs assessment where we looked at the census data, the changes in census
data from 2010 to 2022. You'll actually find in the report when you read it most of the census
data is 2011 to 2021 because those of the years we have the best most consistent data across
census years there is an acknowledgement that the population of the township has gone up between
2021 and 2022 and yet you'll see most of our data is rooted in the 2021 calculations so quick
to caveat so in that plan we've made a series of recommendations and we've made those recommendations
based on household income so there are different solutions depending on a household's income
to the extent possible we want to encourage people to move toward homeownership but as I said
there's a minimum cost to get into homeownership. We don't want to push people into that too soon
when they don't have dollars available for maintenance or taxes or insurance. So some of the solutions
are early on are more rental product and then as people gain more income we want to make sure
that those runs on the economic ladder of opportunity are low enough that they can get on the ladder
and start building equity and wealth over time. So tonight I'm going to give you a high level
overview. The full document is available I think should be posted online later on this evening.
There's also a little teaser document, a flyer that is kind of a one-page summary
in infographic form that will be available for all of you. But real quickly we're looking at both
city of township and all of Sally and charter township as our study area. We did include casco
township in this one, maybe sometime in the future we'll kind of expand north or south or east.
But for today, I think this is going to be really helpful.
If you've looked at the census data, you will have noticed that the population across
the South Haven community, both city and township, has declined among most of our generational
cohorts, except for our baby boomers, baby boomers are up.
And our youngest generation, generation alpha, and these are our kids.
These are typically kids under 15 years old.
So they actually grew by 100% over the last 11 years.
Interesting, given that our millennials and Gen Z have declined.
So I think that there was a number of years there where we had families
where their kids were growing up and growing up and moving out of the house.
Actually just watched this happen in my neighborhood.
When I moved into our neighborhood, I think it was 2016.
And I was my wife and I were almost the youngest couple in the neighborhood.
at the time our boys were nine and five.
And over the last five or six years,
we've become one of the older couples, weirdly enough,
right, I'm in my mid-40s.
And suddenly I feel like the old guy on the block.
And it's because a lot of the older generation
that had lived in our neighborhood
have decided that we're moving to Florida or Arizona
or maybe South Haven.
And so there's lots of younger Gen Z and millennials
who are moving in.
And so I can see how my neighbor could probably look similar to this community being that the oldest generation has moved out.
We've got some younger families moving in and lots of those younger families are having kids.
So what we'll start to see is recommendations specifically for that baby boomer generation.
But also recommendations to be thinking about how we bring millennials and Gen Z into town because that's your workforce.
course, that's the future of the employment base in the community.
And then as was mentioned by Mark earlier, median age across the two communities is 56
years old compared to Van Vieren County, which is just 40, it's like 40.7 years old, so
we rounded up.
Okay, so the other important thing is we're thinking about housing stock is what is the size
of the household in the community, where's our average household size?
And we talked about this in previous presentations and it turns out it bears out actually quite in alignment with state and national numbers here.
You're roughly a third, a third, a third.
27% of all households in the South Island community are one adult, no kids.
37% are two adults, no kids at home.
And mind you, this is no kids at home.
So remember all those baby boomers whose kids have grown up and moved out of the house.
They have kids, they just don't live in the classroom.
Another, a little over a third, are households with kids.
So, as we start to think about,
what are our housing solutions for these households?
A third are households should be oriented towards kids, right?
Families and kids in the school district,
and maybe we can even grow this to be closer to 40%
if that's a goal for the community.
But it's probably not going to be more than half
of your community, as families with kids.
And so as we think about what are the housing types that are most appropriate for the demographic groups in the community,
you probably don't need a ton of single family homes on large lots.
There are definitely people who prefer single family homes on large lots.
It's an important part of the marketplace and the ecosystem and where there's demand.
We want to satisfy demand.
But I think you're also going to find a lot of demand for smaller homes,
A lot of demand for attached homes, sometimes demand for stacked flats for condominiums closer to the walkable amenities.
So what we really want to be thinking about is how do we serve all three of these groups well?
Because for the most part in Michigan and in most of the US, we've really focused all of our housing attention on this group.
We are kind of stuck in the 1950s mentality that everybody is a nuclear family, mom, dad,
two kids and a dog, and everybody wants that suburban dream of, you know, white pick
offense and a nice house with a two-star garage.
And I think many people are still aspiring to that, and it's an important product.
But it's not the only thing that we should be building.
And to illustrate that, it's not the only thing that you're building here.
South Haven community compared to the Van Buren County community at large.
You've got greater diversity of housing product in South Haven than Van Buren as a whole.
So as a whole Van Buren County's housing product is 78% single-family detached,
whereas the South Haven community is only 64% single-family detached.
So you're already in moving in the right direction.
I think finding more ways to build in more opportunity of housing choice in diversity
is going to be valuable, but kudos to you for already being creative and innovative in your
housing solutions. Now this graph even though the bars look the same, now what we're talking about
is housing 10-year, meaning is it owner occupied or rent or occupied. In South Haven about 67 and a half
percent of all households are owner occupied, whereas about 33 percent are rent or occupied.
In
And this is important because I think for a long time we have maybe over-mythologized
home ownership, it's a really important opportunity for people who want to be
homeowners. And I think being able to build wealth in your home is definitely
something that should be available to as many households as possible. And there
are maintenance obligations that come with home ownership. There are cultural
obligations that come with homeownership. There are time-oriented obligations that come with
homeownership. And not everybody wants or needs to be a homeowner. If we look at how
things appreciate over time, if you were to invest the same $20,000 either into a down payment on a home
or in the stock market, you will see a much what's the word I want. In the stock market, you're
see dips and valleys on a greater basis, right? And it's less likely than in a home that
you will always see growth. But over time, over a 30-year investment horizon, you end up
at close to the same place if you continue to invest in a stock market than the way that
you invest in your home. And that's not to advocate for one or the other. It's just to say that
people can build wealth if they're making the same kinds of investments year after year after
year after year. In other financial vehicles, as opposed to always making your only investment
in your own. I spend a lot of money trying to keep up my yard and replace the driveway
and my windows need to be repaired. I've got a 92 year old house. And so to me, it doesn't
always feel like, gosh, is this the best place for me to be putting all my money? Know that
some people don't want to be owners. And the reason this graph is important is because
because I think sometimes communities set goals where they say, hey, we don't ever want
to fall below 60% when we're occupied housing.
And I think the more appropriate goal, I think what we're actually trying to drive towards
is the number of people who take great care and pride in their neighborhood.
We don't ever want fewer than 80% of households to take great care and pride in their neighborhood.
And oftentimes, home ownership is a proxy for that metric.
And the real question is how do we get more renters to take great care and pride in their neighborhood?
How do we build a cultural expectation that, hey, we're going to really care for this place together collaboratively as a community?
And oftentimes that's done through a partnership but it doesn't have to be.
Oh, so this graph is illustrating the number of households who are cost-brewed.
It's showing you how many households are spending more than 30% of their income on a house.
Now, 30% is kind of a rough metric.
Some families can afford to spend 40% of their income on housing.
It would be just fine.
Some families, when they get over 20, 22% of their income on housing gets to be really sticky.
Nationally, the federal standard is more than 30% of your income on housing is cost overburdened.
Guys like Dave Ramsey tend to say the same thing. Your mortgage broker probably says, hey, we don't really lend to folks that are spending more than 28, 30, 35% of income on housing.
So, it's a fairly standard metric. But what you can see here is our renters tend to be more cost burden than our homeowners. So, plus one another ownership category.
When we look at in Bearing County, we have fewer households to our cost burden than South Haven.
And so this is illustrating what you already knew, is that housing prices have gone up more quickly in South Haven than they have in Bearing County as a whole.
And middle and low income households are struggling more in South Haven than they are in Bearing County as a whole.
We'll talk a little bit about that going forward.
Now, the other thing here is vacancy rate, and this is going to be a fun way, it'll be
interesting to talk through this.
So the total vacancy rate, depending on how we calculate it, is 30 and a half percent,
however, the way the Census Bureau thinks about vacancy is any home that is not occupied
year-round.
And so, when we think about second homes, and when we think about RV parks, and when we
think about all of the other places campgrounds, all of those things are considered vacant,
if they're not occupied your rent, but they are considered housing, they're included
in the tally of total housing stock.
So even though 30% feels like a giant number, when we go down, when we eliminate vacation
homes, either second homes or seasonal rentals, the vacancy rate is actually 8.6 percent across
the community. Your effective vacancy rate is about 6.2 percent. So now this is still compared
to a lot of other communities that are high demand scarce housing neighborhoods or communities.
6.2 percent is still a somewhat high number, right? What that tells me is there is opportunity
to go find some of those vacant homes, figure out who the homeowners are.
It's probably in the absentee landlord that decided,
oh, it's not really worth renting this thing out anymore,
or maybe they got an inspection and realized,
gosh, I need to invest a bunch of money in that,
I'm just going to let it sit vacant for a while.
I think there's going to be an opportunity to start to explore
what are some of those vacancies that are non-seasonal non-second homeowners,
and how do we get those back on the market,
especially for our low and middle income household income distribution.
This is another interesting one for the community.
When we compare to Van Buren County, the overall share of households earning less
than $50,000 in South Hayden is greater than Van Buren County.
But our combined households earning $100,000 a year or more as a percentage
is more than Van Buren County.
So you've got sort of a barbell in South Haven where you've got a greater number of high
wealth, high income households and a greater number of low, well, low income households.
And you all experience this all the time, right?
We can see the income inequality in South Haven more readily than we see in other communities
because of that wealth differential and proximity.
So then, if we really just look at the cost burden by price point, we can start to see
how many households who can afford a housing payment of $250 a month or less.
We've got 324 of those households.
These are basically zero income households.
So think about an individual who's on social security benefits is probably over the age
of 65 is on Medicaid or Medicare, unable to work, right?
These are those households more than likely.
300 households, who can afford rent or mortgage
of 250 to 500, and so this is 500 to 850 to 1250.
This is what helps us understand, all right,
if we were gonna try to solve for our housing equation tomorrow,
where do we need the most housing
and what kind of housing do we need?
This is a snapshot in time of what we would need today.
So we'll talk a little bit about what all those numbers look like.
But in the meantime, this actually, this should have been the previous to the last slide.
This comes from a company called AirDNA.
AirDNA scrapes data from Airbnb, VRBO, a couple of other short-term rental missing agencies.
And it compiles it all into one place.
so that we get a pretty good picture of how many short-term rentals do we have in the community?
How much revenue gets created? How many unique stays do we have?
What's our peak listing count? You can see peak listing count of a third line and it says 921.
The greatest number of listings on any day ever in the South Haven community was 921.
total units. And that creates a market place of more than $50 million a year. Right? So the good
news is you've got $50 million a year being spent on short-term rentals. And that's adding to
the local economy. The bad news is on any given night you could have as many as 900,000 units that
are occupied by one of these people who are contributing $50 million to the community. So there is no good or
bad here, right? We're not going to villainize short-term rentals. We're also not going to
praise them. They add value to the community and they create problems, right? And so what
we have to do is understand where do the supply and demand mechanics that are at work here?
We have a lot of people that want to be in South Haven for five months out of the year.
And then we've got another whole group of people that want to be in South Haven for 12 months
out of the year. And we've got to figure out, in part of the issue here, many of you know
this better than I do, is 10 years ago before Airbnb and VRBO existed, it was a lot harder
to rent a house out on a 90 basis. Today, I could log on, make a profile for my own house,
stick it up on Airbnb, and I might get a rent or tomorrow. It's gotten super easy to
do that. Some people might say, hey, I'm just going to rent my house out for three weeks
because I'm going to be traveling the other way. That's a great tool, honestly, if you're
a homeowner on a fixed income and you're like I just want to make a few grand while I'm
away and then I'm going to actually live in my house for the rest of the year.
But there are other folks who are using the market to their advantage.
They don't live here full-time, who knows where they do live but they have a property here
that they're making a lot of money off of and it's reducing the availability of housing
supply for folks who want to live here year round.
And so we've got to figure out solutions to that that balance the economic benefit with
the social costs. And so a lot of conversation has to be had. There's no easy solution.
So when we think about our overall housing needs today, if we're going to solve for those
needs, our current affordable housing needs, meaning housing that has to be subsidized in some way
because the cost to create it is greater than what the renters or homeowners can afford.
A little over a thousand units between the city and the township would be needed.
Average price would be about $850 a month.
Some of those units would need to rent for less, some would rent for a little more.
In order to do that, we would need a typical subsidy of between $60,000, $75,000 per rental unit.
Or if it was homeownership, it would probably need to be more, more like $120,000, $120,000, $150,000.
So, this starts to just, like, break this down into easy math.
Very often I'll go to communities where they'll say, gosh, we need a whole lot more housing,
but it has to be affordable. We don't want more housing if it's not affordable.
And I feel for that argument, I want to be on that team and say, we don't want more housing if it's not affordable,
but somebody has to come up with the 60 to 75,000 dollar subsidy.
Right now the federal government has some programs, there's the low income housing tax credit,
there's affordable housing voucher programs, there's HUD financing them to the 221D program.
There are tools out there, but the federal government puts them in a big square box, right?
You have to follow their rules, you have to comply with all of their regulations.
In many instances it works very well, but it's always the same size box that needs to be
fit on different size properties and in different flavored neighborhoods.
And so sometimes that kind of product makes a ton of sense.
We can go get the federal tax credits, we can get the federal loan programs and it works
really well.
Other times it doesn't make as much sense.
And so we need to be able to communicate with constituents who say, hey, we want the housing
but it needs to be more affordable than that.
Somebody has to show up with that subsidy in order to make it more affordable.
We can't just say, hey, developer, will you take a loss on this one?
I don't know any builders or developers.
Frankly, I don't know any business owners are entrepreneurs who will say, sure, I'll build it and lose 30% on the product.
A quick side note here, 92% of the housing stock in the United States is privately owned and privately funded.
I think there's a strong argument to say we need more federal funding for affordable housing.
I would say we also need more flexible federal funding for affordable housing.
But keep in mind that 92% of our housing stock is financed and constructed by the private sector.
It is an entrepreneurial business.
And so again, we're not always going to be able to find somebody who wants to underwrite
the cost to subsidize affordable housing if we're not using one of those state or federal
programs.
That was a long diatribe, thank you for sitting through it.
So if you wanted to use federal financing resources, the tax credit program is the simplest
to use. Often times you typically want 40 to 60 residential units in order to make the tax credit
process worthwhile for the investors who make the tax credit program actually work. So usually five
acres is about the minimum property size, unless we're downtown, unless we can compete for the
really competitive 9% life tech program, then you don't need anywhere near that one city bridge. But
but if we're out of the neighborhood or in the township
using the less competitive program, we need more acreage.
A tenable housing.
Now, a tenable housing has this ever elusive definition
where we love to talk about it as a euphemism,
but we don't clearly define it.
I like to define it as housing that is affordable to households
and be earning between 60% and 120% of the median income.
So think about your middle income resident,
which is typically in Van Buren County, somebody who earns about $55,000, $56,000 a year.
If we take 60% of that, we're probably looking at $35,000 a year if my math is close.
If we take 120% of that, we're probably looking at $68,000 to $70,000 a year.
So if we're going to try to serve households earning between $35,000 and $75,000 a year,
I'm going to say they need a attainable house.
doesn't need to be subsidized and affordable, but it's got to be attainable.
In order to do that, it's still possible to do that with private sector,
entrepreneurial, business oriented, construction companies and developers.
You need today, if we were to solve today, you need about
370 new attainable housing units.
Those would be priced in the $1,000 a month to $1,400 a month price range.
It could go higher, right? We've got some attainable households who can afford up to $1,800 a month, but that feels a little bit out of balance for South Haven in this moment.
What it requires is a little bit more flexible zoning, probably less parking. Keep in mind that parking consumed land is expensive, especially in a community with high demand.
And don't forget, roughly a third of households in the community are single adults, no kids.
So not every apartment unit needs two parking spaces.
A lot of your apartment units will only need one parking space.
Same is true for smaller houses, those little cottages.
Many of them will only need one parking space.
But thinking about infrastructure that accommodates visitor parking,
overflow parking, right? How do we do parking on-street in some instances?
How do we have a little grass lot maybe that is overflow parking?
those things make a ton of sense. But to build a parking space, just an
asphalt parking space is typically about 8 to 10 thousand dollars per space. So
know that for every parking space you require your adding cost. The other
opportunity we talk about this in the plan is an impact investment fund. And we
haven't explored this yet in South Haven, but I think considering who are some of our
top employers do they have a significant housing need? Do they make annual
philanthropic or impact investments? And if all of those things are true, would
they be willing to make an impact investment into a fund? And what that means
is they could invest through a CDFI fiduciary at a low interest return
expectation to allow financing for the kinds of attainable housing we need for
the workforce at a much lower cost of capital. So to break that down even more, if I'm a developer
and I go get a commercial loan today, I'm going to spend probably six and a half, seven percent
on the commercial loan. So at six and a half to seven percent on everything that I borrow
for the entire period that I borrow it, it's going to be tens of thousands, if not hundreds of
thousands of dollars of additional costs to finance. If I have impact investors that say, hey, we'll
participate in this deal with a loan through fiduciary it's going to guarantee it and we'll
come into that loan for an agreed return of 2%. You take the administrative fees in addition
to that now we're talking 2.5 maybe 3% debt. The difference between 6.5% or 7% debt and 3%
debt is significant over a 10 year period of time especially when we're talking about a 10
to $30 million deal, right? Think about $20 million financed at 6% versus financed at 3%.
So, we have opportunities. We want to start talking to some of those larger employers who might want to help solve for this. Now, we talked in the beginning about starter homes and how many starter homes we didn't build and how many we need to build.
At the top, I've underlined and italicized at least. So, given today's data and the cost to build a starter home in today's market, knowing that we probably can't
feasibly build a starter home for less than $225,000,
just because of the cost of construction.
Given these numbers, our data says you probably need
at least 83 starter homes in order to satisfy
current market demand.
I think it's probably a lot higher, right?
I think what you're probably experiencing right now
is a lot of your workforce can't currently afford
to live in the South Haven community,
and so they're driving in.
And so if we spent a lot of time looking at
the existing workforce and where they're commuting from, this member could probably triple
or quadruple pretty easily, but it wasn't readily available in a census date.
So the idea here is, how do we allow for more compact homes, attached homes in some instances,
as I mentioned, condominiums, townhouses, stack flats, all of the things, right?
It's got to be context sensitive, it's got to have access to infrastructure and be in the
places, honestly, it doesn't ever need to be super tall, right?
Maybe downtown, supporting taller buildings is a great idea.
But every place else, two or three story buildings
are as tall as you need to go.
They can be very much in character with your existing neighborhoods.
And I'll show you some examples of how that can.
So in the future, I just shared with you
what are your current housing needs.
In the future, you're going to continue
to have growth in the baby boomers sector.
You're also going to find all those baby boomers
that are here today, love it, and they want to stay,
and they're going to become others, right?
Over the next 10 or 15 years,
we're going to be needing to think about
senior housing opportunities.
And I'll bet you, if my parents and my grandparents
are any indicator, they're not going
to want the same assisted living options
that my grandparents took advantage of
and that their parents took advantage of.
They're going to want a more independent lifestyle.
They're going to want more privacy.
They're going to want more activity.
So thinking through senior housing options that are more ingrained in the community,
rather than isolated out off the highway, thinking about senior housing opportunities
where they can be ingrained in the downtown or ingrained in neighborhoods with access to nature,
those are going to be really important elements for senior housing going forward.
But then we've also got this critical element of our workforce.
Our teachers, our firefighters, our nurses, all of those folks who are earning
great middle class wages but can't afford to stay in the community right now in order to grow the
economy and even keep the economy stable making sure that we've got housing options for those folks
as well. So our housing plan elements, the three S's and this is borrowed from an author Shane Phillips
who wrote a book called The Affordable City. There's like 122 proposed strategies that you can mix
and match, always recommended this book. Stability, supply, and subsidies. We've got to recognize
on the front end that our housing commendium right now is based on scarcity. And while we have
scarcity, we've got to be thinking about how do we keep those households who are vulnerable,
stable. And so that's things like your nonprofits, the Salvation Army, Habitat for Humanity,
Goodwill Industries, all of those organizations help to keep residents stable. We've got to continue
to make philanthropic investments there so that we don't lose households because they're
being priced out. But we simultaneously have to build supply. You're clearly short on
supply today by at least a thousand units probably more since we're not factoring in the workforce
that doesn't live here. And in some instances we've got to explore how to use those subsidies
to your advantage. It's got to, again, be context appropriate. You've got to think about which
which subsidies work in which environments,
and how are we optimizing those subsidies
to satisfy the desires and the needs of the community?
But those three things together
make up an equitable housing environment.
So as we talk about things that you have local control
over zoning and economic development inside of policies,
these are the things that should be relatively easy
to do in a short period of time.
Thinking about narrower minimum lot with area standards.
There's also a lot of financial importance to a lot withs.
So especially in the neighborhood that are served by public infrastructure,
I wanted to think about when the local municipality gets pricing to install new infrastructure.
They get pricing based on the linear foot.
So for every linear foot of pipe that goes in the ground,
and every linear foot of asphalt that gets laid, the cost goes up.
right? That's how the contractors are going to build it. And so for every linear
foot that you require in lot with, the cost of your infrastructure goes up.
Depending on who's financing the infrastructure, that might add a lot of
costs to the homeowner, or it might add a lot of cost to the municipality when it
comes time to replace that infrastructure. When you've got to repave the road, or
when you've got to rip out all of that old sewer because it's now 50 or 80 years old,
Those minimum lockwood standards essentially dictate how much you've got to spend on a per-home basis to replace that infrastructure.
So, as a thought experiment, think about it, if we've got 100 feet of infrastructure, and you say we've got a 70 foot minimum lockwood,
well, we're going to get 1.3 homes per 100 feet of infrastructure.
But if instead, and so if that home on one 70-foot lot with, if that home is valued at $350,000,
we need enough tax increment from that home to pay for all 70 feet of infrastructure that they're using.
Whereas if we have homes that have a 40-foot lot with requirement, suddenly we can get 2.2 homes per 100 feet.
And now, each of those homes, which are probably still valued close to $300,000, they're going
to net more tax revenue than your 70-foot lock width on a linear-foot basis, right?
So that was a super-long way of me trying to explain that when you have narrower lock
widths, it's actually easier to pay for your infrastructure.
It gets even better when we attach things, right, when we do townhouses.
Now, when we do townhouses or duplexes or fourplexes, design standards are important.
Looking at any duplex from the early 1970s through the mid-1980s, we built a lot of
bad duplexes.
You can go all over Michigan on a bad duplex hunt and find a ton of them.
But it wasn't because it's a bad product type, it wasn't because those aren't good opportunities
for housing. It was because we were sort of in this area where design wasn't a huge
stop consideration. And so if we make design a big part of the thought consideration and
we don't, we don't make design overly burdensome, but we do think about simple, proud structures
with good façades, they're compatible with neighborhood character. We can build a lot
of good housing products that is affordable. And we've got to think about usable community
degree space. Not everybody needs a big backyard, a lot of us like big
backyards, but if we don't have a big backyard, where is the community
backyard? Also, keep in mind, not every development has to have their own
community backyard. Sometimes we can have a park that's down the street or around
the corner that can serve as the green space for the development. And so
sometimes we'll have lots that are going to develop a majority of the lot
between the housing and the parking.
As long as there is good adequate green space nearby,
that can be okay.
In other instances you're gonna say,
actually no, there's not a good
adequate green space nearby.
You've got to integrate usable green space into the development.
It's context sensitive.
So this is one of my favorite examples to use.
I think it's a great building technology.
This is actually a fourplex.
This has four apartments in it.
This is about a 950 square foot one bedroom apartment.
On the other side, it's about a 980 square foot two bedroom apartment,
and then you get a mirror image upstairs.
From the street, you would never know, right?
From the street, this blends in beautifully in most neighborhoods.
I would gladly have this across the street for me and look at it every day.
This kind of housing product, this can cost a little bit more than
a traditional single-family house, the most expensive things in a house are
kitchens and bathrooms. So we're going to have more kitchens and bathrooms in
this than we would have in a traditional single-family house. But otherwise
the cost is relatively on par. So if we could build that for, let's say, $455,000.
But we can get four households living there, four smaller households mind you
because most of our households are single adults or two adults with no kids.
You
and then a couple of singles and couples.
This consumes a lot less space, a lot less infrastructure.
It's more affordable.
There are all kinds of benefits
to allowing this kind of housing technology.
The more we can make it easy to build this,
the better.
Again, good quality design standards.
Some communities that we're talking to now
in the Michigan Municipalities promoting this
are adopting pattern books, where they say,
hey, if you built this exact thing,
we'll permanent tomorrow.
Right? They essentially will hand you this plan. They'll say, build this, we like it. You can build it tomorrow.
You don't have to go through a special land use process. You don't have to go through six months of the administrative zoning review.
We've already decided that we like it. You can build it.
During more of that is valuable.
These are other examples.
The note being that roughly half of the housing market today will pay more for less square footage if it's in a walkable amenity rich environment.
We have a lot of people that are really hungry for small town charm, and it just so happens
that Saturday that's full of small town charm.
And so thinking about how do we create more neighborhoods that are walkable, a metady
rich, that are compact, that allow people to be closer together, and closer to the things
that they really value, which are probably going to be things like downtown, the schools,
the libraries, the lakeshore, the more opportunities to be close to those things we can build into
the neighborhoods that are. Smaller cottages, these are sometimes called cottage
cords or pocket neighborhoods. These fit great in rural environments. There's
one of these in the Sleeping Bear Dunes Lakeshore area in the village of
Empire that is on a shared community septic system that actually sits underneath
the green space, right? So instead of everybody having their own drainfield, they
have one larger drainfield. But these are smaller cottages, they're not your typical
1500 to 2500 square foot house, they're closer to that 850 to maybe 1400 square feet, meaning they're more efficient.
There's less land costs, shared community green space, but you can see here's the thing that's really important that sometimes gets overlooked.
Everybody here has this beautiful little sitting porch, which allows them to have kind of this permeable space that is semi-public, semi-private in between their home and that green space.
So, it allows you to kind of look out and watch the grandkids or the kids who might be playing
in the green space to see your neighbor, but also to be back a little bit from that shared
green space.
So, when you want to be seen and kind of out in the open, you're out in your yard or you're
out in the green space, what you just want to enjoy your neighbor and having that covered,
semi enclosed porch is a really important element to be weaving into these kinds.
The other one is accessory dwelling units.
These are really important opportunities to be thinking about for homeowners that are
trying to take advantage of opportunities to generate a little bit of passive rental
income.
There are some households that can just barely afford to live in the community but can
almost do it and if we give them the opportunity for that passive rental income they can actually
afford to live in the community.
And then, when we think about all of the young teachers and firefighters and police officers
and nurses who were trying to attract into the community and who just need a simple one
bedroom apartment, either above the garage or next to the garage, and they're not going
to live there for 25 years, but they might live there for two years while they get a foothold
while they establish their career, while they think about what's their next move.
They may get married in the meantime and move into a single-family house or an apartment down
industry, but these are great options for young adults to be able to move into that can cost
a well under a thousand dollars a month.
And then again, multi-family can be great. Lots
of valuable attributes to multi-family. This is a great design. It's a company called
Humphries and Partners that does a lot of these in the Texas market around Austin and Dallas.
They're doing more and more nationally. We're seeing good products like this now creeping
up into the Midwest. And so thinking about when we're allowing for multi-family, what are
our expectations? How does it relate to the public realm? How does it relate to the street?
How does it integrate into the fabric in the neighborhood? And some instances this isn't as important
because you don't have a built up neighborhood that's already close by. And so the multi-family
development can kind of set the new pattern. But in instances where you already have kind of
residential character, thinking about what are our design standards and how do we expect
this development to integrate into the design of the community. That can be an important
thing to think about.
Can
you advance this? Almost
wrapped up here. This is a case study. This is a development
project that we've completed in the city of Grand Haven. A number of important things, I
I don't want to start with our price point.
So, this was...
This was built and we started working on it in 2019 just before the pandemic, so I couldn't repeat those prices today. But we could get not too far from that. So if you're in all the way back, these are single family detached homes that we priced starting in $139,000 up to $290,000. This was an extraordinary partnership between the City of Grand Haven, Ottawa County, Land Bank Authority, the Grand Haven Brownfield Authority, a nonprofit developer called Michigan.
community capital in housing next. And essentially what we did, the city said hey we've got six acres,
it's over near the airport, it's been zoned industrial for a long time but there's residential
on one side, there's a blueberry field on the other side. We think maybe housing can go there?
And we said yes, housing can go there. And so we called up a friend at Michigan Community Capital,
which is a nonprofit developer based out of Lansing, we said hey help us design a neighborhood.
And we looked at a number of configurations.
I was heavily advocating, hey, let's do lots of different
building types.
Let's do little cottages and most two townhouses.
And they said, we love your thinking,
but we just want to prove that we can do this
because we've never done it before.
So they said, let's start simple.
We're just going to do basic single family homes.
The smallest home in this neighborhood is 900 meters square feet.
The largest home is 1,150 square feet.
So the small one is too bad to run back.
the largest is three beds to that. 30 single-family homes in total and what we did
this was at the behest of the city of Grand Haven because they essentially gave
the land away. The land was probably worth half a million dollars and they
sold it to the development entity for 30,000. Because they did that they said hey we
want this to be affordable for a long time, right? It's great to build it for
$139,000 but if the first home owner lives there for a year and then puts it on the
market for 250, we kind of lost the value of all of our property and didn't get a
affordability as a result. So we created a community land trust. We spent about
six months doing all the research that we could to understand how
community land trust should be formed, what they should look like, create some great
volunteer help from a couple of retired interns in town. The community land
trust owns the underlying land. And essentially what they do is they have a long
long-term lease agreement with each individual homeowner.
The homeowner pays a dollar for their lease to have the home on the land.
They have a traditional mortgage for the house.
Nothing changes about the house.
They just don't own the underlying land.
But when the homeowner goes to sell the house, essentially what happens is the land trust
buys the house, and then they sell the house to the next buyer.
And what that does is it allows the subsidy that was put into the land to begin with to remain
in the land.
So, for as long as these homes exist, and for as long as the community land trust exists,
that land subsidy will continue to run with the project, and will continue to subsidize
those homes long into the future.
But the benefit is, the homeowner gets to take the equity that they build in the home
when they sell the house.
So if they buy it for $139, and then it sells for $189, they still earn some equity.
But there is no land value basis in that, so likely, and I'll tell you, in Grant Haven
right now, the lowest home value that I have seen available on the market is $480,000,
maybe $5,000.
And that's where an older house that means a lot of work.
So these folks, if it were a free market enterprise, they could probably turn around and flip these
for $400,000 more.
But the land trust ensures that they're going to remain relatively close to what they were
originally sold for.
while still allowing for some of that equity appreciation to go with them.
All right, so now we're talking tools. What can we actually do about this?
This is the list of tools that you have in your toolbox at the local level.
We've got tax increment financing,
labor and enterprise-owned residential facilities exemptions. That's a new one.
We just created that with the legislature last year.
You can use your publicly owned land. You can create land trusts
or just impose D restrictions.
And you can use those state and federal financial programs.
I'm going through these quickly because they each could take an hour to explain if we
really wanted to get into the weeds.
So we'll definitely have follow-up for things that are interesting to all of you if you
want to get more into the weeds, I'm more than happy to come back.
So how do we actually make the math work?
And I say for the middle class, because that's where the market still is possible, right?
Making the math work for our low and moderate income households, as I mentioned, requires
We just have to accept, we're not going to go to affordability for low income households without deep subsidies.
And so, where that makes sense for all of you, we're willing to run the distance to ensure that those subsidies are available.
But just getting the market to work for the middle class means we've got to recognize that housing scarcity is what's driving housing prices up.
And so we've got to find more ways to get more supply into the marketplace.
and use some of your tools, tax payment financing to subsidize the
infrastructure costs is a great way. And those time-limited D
restrictions are completely land trusts to ensure that when you are
allowing public dollars to go into a deal, you're getting as much value out of that
for as long as possible while not upsetting the apple car, right? It's got to make sense
for the development entity to actually do the project, but you can also have clear
expectations about how long do we want this to be affordable if we're going to put a bunch of taxing
in the inventory.
So what I'm recommending going forward is to first now that we kind of understand
the data. We know we need to build at least a thousand more units between the township and the
city to kind of catch up with where demand and supply are right now. Let's get clear on understanding
the tools that are available, both in terms of zoning and economic development reform as well as the
of the subsidies and the other programs
that are available to offset costs.
Then we'll define which ones are most appropriate.
The township might want to use different tools
than the city, and that's going to be totally okay,
because you have different contexts.
And then we want to craft local policies
to set guard rules, right?
Because each of you as decision makers
are going to say, hey, you know,
we don't want this to get out of control.
We can't give away all of our tax economy.
We can't obey everybody's taxes all the time.
We can't subsidize all of the housing and so we want to set clear targets.
We want to say here's what we're willing to do for what?
What is the public benefit that we're expecting to get out of the tools that we're willing to use?
And put that in a policy so that even after you retire from your positions and you allow the next
to take over. You have left a legacy not only of the ability to use the tools, but some
guidance as to how they should be used.
Lastly, this is a plug. I hope to draft a statewide
zoning reform toolkit. There are 15 tools in the toolkit we did with the Michigan Association
of Planning. These are all of the relatively simple things that you can do with your zoning
code. And it probably doesn't make sense for any community to implement all 15 of these,
but picking out five or six to do in specific neighborhoods where you feel like, yeah,
we can reduce minimum lot sizes here, or we can allow two family by right, which by the
way, I love that the Township Relay does that. I think that's great. It's a relatively simple
guidebook to the extent that you want someone to help walk you through it. We've got a team
who can come down and really talk through, okay, how do we actually implement this in
York code here for this location. But beyond that, I would say I think we're ready for
comment cards. If you haven't already started to fill out comment cards, I would do that.
And then Kate, do you want to dismiss for a short bathroom break? Okay, so I think what
we're going to do is five minutes if you need to get up and stretch or something else
write down your questions or comments,
and then a team of us will try to respond
to any questions you may have.
Nate, I'm going to also ask,
I'd like to invite you to join me, sir.
If you can come right up to this microphone here,
we'll take your comment and it'll be recorded
so we'll get you to comment on it on your team.
Sorry, please, if I could.
This microphone is directional,
so if you can point it towards you,
it will pick you up much better.
This might be better.
At least the VAC 879 Monroe Boulevard, I have two questions for you.
One question is, you're saying there's a lot of one in two household families,
and your name duplexes with four apartments, things like that.
Is there any, I guess, what I'm asking is people limit, you know, with the Habitat funds since they were
121 bedrooms, but the funding they couldn't have kids.
So if they lived there and they had a kid, there was no place for them to move.
So my question is, you know, I like the pictures of the 4D flexes and things like that.
Is there any limit, you know, the one person where they get married or they have a kid, do they have to move?
Great
question. So there are code requirements and there are funding requirements and sometimes
they overlap and sometimes they're different. So when the Habitat House national Habitat
sets some specific standards that your local Habitat affiliates have to follow, related
to ADA accessibility and occupants per unit and per structure. And part of the reason for
that is they want to maintain a really solid reputation in their communities.
So, at the local level, if you were to build a couple of one-bedroom units that were occupied
by a single adult, who then became a single adult with child, there is no requirement
that would say, well, now she's got to move out because she's got a child.
The building code, the zoning code, doesn't regulate number of occupants per bedroom.
However, most people would ultimately say, I'd really like my kid to have their own bedroom
right, to have a nursery or something like that eventually, right?
So you want to have, and this is the beauty of allowing for different housing types in the same neighborhood,
is ideally, what we would do is have some duplexes, some single family homes,
and maybe one or two smaller multi-unit buildings, all in the same neighborhood.
So that if a young person does either get married or has a kid,
and they say, you know what?
I think I'm growing out of my one bedroom apartment.
They don't have to move across town
away from all of the neighbors
and the community that we have encouraged them
to create in the neighborhood that they've been.
They can move right down the street into a townhouse
or into a slightly larger two bedroom apartment in it.
Or maybe even into the same building.
So having that diversity of housing choices
good for individual choice,
but it's not mandated by the building code
or by the zoning code.
But then those other options is they have kids, they have kids.
Yes.
If their family says it goes up but their income stays the same,
yes, like finding ways, okay, how do we make sure that you can afford the extra $250 a month for the other place?
So that leads to my second question is on the trust,
you said that they could make a profit, a reasonable profit.
But how do you keep that piece of base on inflation?
I don't have a conversation with one of the council members that said, well, it's based on inflation and maybe you make $10,000 and you say that for two years you might make $20,000.
But is there a limit, you know, or in two or three years can they sell it for $500,000?
Yeah. So the beauty of the land trust model is you set up a local board that will govern the land trust and how it works.
And so, at the local level, you would decide how much equity you can be taken by the first
homeowner.
Is it a percentage of the sale, is it just adjusted for inflation, is it an inflation
plus a percentage?
You can make all those decisions at the local level, and you can adjust it over time.
So you'll make a commitment to a homeowner, and that commitment will run with the land.
But if you have new homeowners moving in, you say, I don't think we ought to form you
on it.
exactly right, and you want to have a basket for the next homeowner, you can do that.
It's part of the bi-loss and the master deed within the association.
So there are a number of ways to structure it, and there's always this delicate balance
of trying to think about how do we allow households to build some equity so that ultimately when
they do decide to sell, we want them to be able to move up and have a down payment for that
and move up house, but not so much equity
that we're undermining future affordability.
Thank you.
On the next step,
the one you got is very easy.
I know your voice is more powerful,
but there's a difficult area to understand very, very difficult.
They really, are they coming through here?
Well, here, can you hear me?
Yeah, you can.
Ellen, if you have the closer to the megaphone,
as there is, if you have the closer to the megaphone,
the next is the one of the insdirectional.
And also that one.
There's also seats over here if you'd like to sit closer.
So Mary Hasley, some of you sitting in the North Shore Drive.
So one thing I've been asking since March of 2022, when MSU Extension came out with common
terms, is to start using common terms and some of them were used and some of them are not.
And I just think it would be very helpful to all have working in the same direction and
understand
So, you know, affordable is used frequently, and it is discretionary, it's 30% of your income. But subsidized housing, and I, my tax, has
sprints of cash to it, and there are limitations. And it would, I think that that lack of clarity over the past three years has been
detrimental to moving forward, and I would request that that be used. Also, especially in light of over 10, I would hope that we can at least agree that there are
recommendations. I know that there's been representations in city council recently that have detected
not re-applied because of mischievous having questions and that have a technical information. In fact,
if we go back to May 2021, there's enough from our environmental consultant to Griffin Graham saying
it would be proven for a habitat company to complete their due diligence including phase 20 ESA and
a minimum B.E.A. and the City Council waived environmental
and tax payment. So I think to move forward, we need to really be
truthful and painfully clear about what are the issues, what do we need to get and not
move with the car before the horse and make sure we have that information so we don't keep
having hiccups and losing three years' worth of work and having to start back at ground
zero.
And also, you know, for future projects where we're accepting bids, if a bid is just
a little bit late, like 12 hours, I would ask that that bid be presented to the committee
to determine whether we should extend the bid as opposed to a unilateral decision by
sitting manager and supported by the consultant, whether to accept it or not.
It would be a much more open process. Thank you.
I do think it can answer the environmental impact statement.
They make right and you're very aware of what they are.
They do not actually talk about contamination issues.
Those are for your phase one, your phase two, and your BEA.
The environmental impact statement is more cohesive or more expensive than that.
and it talks about traffic patterns and talks about
impact alien local housing.
You've talked a little about what you've seen
with environmental impact statements.
Yeah, so the Mr. Required Environmental Impact Statement
is really about what will the impact of the project be
on the overall community?
And it's an opportunity for folks to weigh in and say,
gosh, can we handle the traffic?
Do we need to install another stoplight or stop sign?
Do we have enough space in our schools
to accommodate the kids who might live there, right?
It's a super broad review.
I would agree that ensuring we have a very complete
and accurate understanding of any contamination
and remediation that's necessary
is definitely important before commencing development.
But waving the environmental impact statement
isn't saying we don't care about contamination
and saying actually we don't think
that the development, once we've remediated
and any contamination will have a significant impact on things like traffic and schools in those kinds of things.
Chair, please say sir, third.
Stinger?
Information, I hope I'm talking loud enough.
No.
Loud enough?
Okay.
We can adjust the date of the money.
That's better.
A question that I'm asking someone sitting now, and a question asked by a lot of residents, especially when it's two weeks,
is the following.
short-term rentals. When the money gets paid to the owner of a short-term rental, how much
is that staying in town? So here's my question. You had a number of there, 53 million, I think.
Okay, now let me give you an example. Let's say you have a short-term rental owner who doesn't
live in this town and are economic development manager, Jim Hanger, told us over 50% of the owners
of short-term rentals who live outside the state.
So now you get hypothetically a $5,000 a week rent.
So $5,000, you said 30% roughly covers a cost.
So now you got $3,500 left for the owner.
But the owner is in Illinois or Indiana or wherever.
So is it fair to say, there's a question, I don't know.
Is it fair to say that $3,500 then doesn't say
the community, most of it, and it goes out because you have to go to another bank,
it goes to another committee, versus if it was a homeowner or a local owner of a rental
property who listens to that pay, then that money would most likely say that they were
deposited in a bank and spent, is that thinking correct or not?
I think that logic is accurate, yes.
I think that there are qualifiers everywhere, right?
So we have created local economies that are dependent on national chains where we're all
spending money that ends up going someplace else, right?
But generally, yes, roughly 30 to 40% of the revenue that comes in for short-term rentals
gets spent on cleaners and repairs and landscaping and all those kinds of things.
but the other 65% often goes to the owner.
Now, one of the things to be clear about is sometimes the property isn't paid for in cash
and so there's a bank intermediary.
And so a big chunk of that 60% that isn't going towards operating in maintenance could be going towards debt,
whether it's a local owner or it's out of state owner.
So this is a long way of saying we'd have to actually put
together a study to try to evaluate how much leakage is
in the economy in your short-term rental market compared
to if they were all owner occupied by folks who live locally.
But I think the direction of your logic is absolutely correct
that if out-of-town owners are owning and operating
short-term rentals, a majority of the rental income is not saying in the community.
Thank you so much.
You have to sweep up 614 baby animals out here.
I am here for seniors.
I have had so much compassion for seniors in many years.
I've worked with them.
I have seen we need more growth in South America for relief service.
What is happening, I have some dear crimes that they fall into the cracks, and they can't find
things in their housing.
And what happens is they've been born and raised to this area, and they want to continue
their life here, and they can't be anything else to move out.
And it's very sad.
And our seniors are being born and are coming up, seniors are living longer.
and they're all so weird active.
We have 70 and 80 people that are playing,
people ball, you know, and myself, me seeing them out.
I see this, and we need this so much in this area.
And I just, I just want this to happen,
and they really need it.
So thank you.
How are our escrow cards from Abram?
So
I just want to say something to township for being so proactive and putting the pedal
to the metal because this is just a huge step in the right direction.
You know, I've heard Brian speak before to come to these meetings and we see the screens
And the thing that we don't know about is the physics and putting a face on it.
If you stay out of the high school and you get a thorough soft wall across the street,
you're going to hit the house of a business owner in a self-haven who can barely afford her house.
So when I talked to her, I said, what do you afford?
And like your neighbor said, she said she could afford
a house for what she has to have $174,000,
or an apartment at about $700 a month.
So that's putting a face on this type of problem.
And it's bigger than a problem.
It is a crisis.
And I think that, you know, we're not emphasizing that we really need to be in crisis mode.
Recently, my arm of three kids had to leave her team.
That means her three kids are pulled out in her school district, which caused a loss of 25,000 dollars every year.
They're now moving to Bearing County, where are you out on Alzheimer's?
Because those visits, and I also speak for them on who could not be at the meeting tonight.
And she said, what about housing for bigger families?
And I know you are doing, you know, a few bedrooms.
Mistok Haven has three siblings.
So Mistok Haven has come from a family of six.
So there's a similar range of big families who need housing too.
So, thank you again and go self-paying the power ship and it's great to be working together. I really appreciate that.
Before I wrap it tonight, I wanted to talk a little bit, I had a round talk about some of the tools that have just recently been enacted before me for tonight.
And one of them is the Brownfield Law that is looking to be updated here shortly, hopefully, it's past the Senate.
And then you can also talk about neighborhood and immigrant cells.
Yes, so I've been part of an organization called the Housing Michigan Coalition, which includes the Home Builders Association and the Michigan Municipal League, the Grand Rapids Chamber Housing Next and Housing North, Housing North represents the Traverse City 10 County region.
Last fall, we got four pieces of legislation passed to include their residential facilities
exemption, which is a tax evading very similar to an industrial facilities exemption.
So where you have new rental housing that isn't federally or state subsidized, but you'd
still like to reduce the tax obligation in exchange for a reduction in the rental rates.
You can do that, both in the city and the township.
We also got a change passed to the Neighborhood Enterprise Zone program.
Previously, the Neighborhood Enterprise Zone was only available in communities that were defined as core communities under old legislation.
That legislation used communities' population from the 1990s to determine which communities were eligible for incentives today in 2023.
So we got that legislation changed, neighborhood residents are now available in all cities, villages, and townships.
They support both home ownership and rental product.
It allows a local community to provide up to a 15 year tax abatement that is equal to 50% of the tax obligation.
So when you're trying to incentivize new home ownership, it's one of the few tools that's available to offset their tax obligation to make the house a little bit more affordable.
The other tool that we have is the Brownfield Tax Agreement Finance Program.
That's been around since 1996.
It's been amended a number of times.
Typically, when it first started, it was only available to reimburse costs related to environmental remediation
or blight or buildings that needed to be demolished.
Over time, it's been expanded with more and more eligible activities.
and we have a proposal that has now passed the Senate.
It's gone through House Committee.
It should be on the floor of the House next week Tuesday.
That would allow for improvements to residential property for
affordable and workforce housing to be an eligible expense.
So what's really important about this is, as we think about building new housing,
whether it's apartments or single-family homes or cottages,
is the infrastructure associated with those homes
can be an eligible expense to be reimbursed.
So a good example is if we were to build a neighborhood,
the neighborhood I showed you, Robinson Landing
and Grand Haven had $1.2 million of infrastructure costs.
We didn't have to pass any of those costs onto the homeowners
because we financed them separately
and got a reimbursement via tax increment.
We'll be able to do that in addition
to financing some of the cost of the actual construction of the homes, whether they're apartments
or a single family home or something in between.
So that can be a really important tool, but Kate and I were just talking about, it's
also important to set guardrails, right, because we don't want to just say, okay, everybody
gets, you know, no taxes and we'll figure out how to pay for police and fire in schools some
other way.
What's really important is establishing, what do you perceive to be the public benefit?
What are you trying to get as a result of the utilization of that incentive?
And be very clear with developers about here's what we're after, whether it's households
earning less than 60% of the median income, or it's households earning all the way up
to 100% or 120% of the median income, defining what you're willing to offer in exchange for
that public benefit, and how long you're willing to offer it for.
under the brownfield plan act your-
You can provide a reimbursement for up to 30 years until their eligible expenses are fully
reimbursed. But you can also say, hey, we'll provide a reimbursement for only 10 years if
you're doing kind of the minimum level of affordability or attainability. But if you're
doing everything that we ask for, maybe we'll go all the way to the 30 years. You also have
the ability to think about a revenue sharing agreement, where maybe the city doesn't have
chips as, hey, we've got to get some revenue out of this, because we're going to have costs
associated with our infrastructure and our emergency response activities.
But we're willing to do an 80-20 split, so maybe 80% of the new tax increment goes to
the developer, and 20% comes back to the local municipality.
Anyway, that bill should move through the House next week.
We already have word that Governor Whitmer is supportive, so we would expect a signature
hopefully by the end of the month.
And then we'll be able to talk about new tools available to both South Haven and South
Haven Township to be able to do those kinds of creative financing.
And I also wanted to mention that talking to one of our guests tonight, I failed to bring
up, and this is in the plan, so when you read the plan, we'll see it.
I failed to bring up the opportunities for mobile homes and manufactured homes.
We have stigmatized those as housing products over time, in a lot of ways because they are
are not always the best maintained housing options
in the community, especially when they're older perps.
But modern manufactured housing,
modular construction, factory build housing,
can be very high quality and relatively inexpensive.
There are some large companies in Indiana and Pennsylvania
that are making really great high quality mobile home
and manufactured housing projects.
Again, they might not be the solution for everybody.
It's not a perfect way to build equity, but it is kind of a step between renting and full ownership.
It's another tool in a toolbox to think about where you might want to allow for that type of housing and under what circumstances.
Well, thank you very much for Brian, and this is a very good housing workshop. I hope you get a lot of information.
I am going to let you know that these presentations are a little more important to be on the city's website tomorrow.
Lastly, I'll ask Mayor Smith and Mr. Chairman Mr. Sine from the township to go ahead and close your eaves.
Mr. Mayor Smith, do you want to go for us?
Mr. Sine?
All right.
All right, thank you both for doing it.
Thank you everyone for coming.
I hope you had an information for you tomorrow.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.