TESTIMONY
Lucy Block on the Need for More Affordable Housing and Policy Recommendations
1:59:59
·
4 min
Lucy Block emphasizes the critical need for more affordable housing units and presents data-driven policy recommendations.
- Block presents findings on the severe mismatch between available housing units and the needs of rent-burdened populations, highlighting a deficit in affordable housing.
- She reveals that 7.5 times as many units are needed for rents below $24100 per month compared to those above, to meet the 5% vacancy target.
- Block stresses the importance of vouchers, extending rent stabilization laws, fully funding the right to counsel, and focusing affordable housing development on units renting for below $24100.
- Specific policies are suggested, including defending the right to counsel, supporting the Community Land Act and COPPA, and targeting public resources to meet the lowest income needs.
- Block also highlights the need for a variety of strategies to reach extremely low levels of affordability, including updating term sheets and relying on income averaging and vouchers.
Lucy Block
1:59:59
Hi.
1:59:59
Good afternoon.
2:00:02
I'm Lucy Block.
2:00:03
I'm a senior research and data associate at A And HD, the Association for Neighborhood And Housing Development.
2:00:10
So I'm going to skip over what was covered in detail earlier, which is that the vacancy is terrible overall, but is also really concentrated at high end of the market and on the low not just the low end, but the middle of the market, we have just a few thousand units.
2:00:29
So what we did, which is in our testimony, is we calculated based on the HBS, how many units would be needed each rent range in order to get that rent range to 5% to see kind of be able to compare that among the different ranges.
2:00:44
What we found is that you would need 7.5 times as many units renting for below $24100 per month versus above 24100 dollars per month.
2:00:55
So we're really concerned about, you know, as you are the affordability of new units that are coming online, units that are called but are renting for well above $24100 and certainly large influxes of market rate units that are at $3000 such as HPD pointed to earlier, the recent controller report said that the median new unit coming on the market was $35100 or more for most of last year.
2:01:22
So new units coming online aren't absolutely not meeting the real affordability and where we need it.
2:01:29
And we want to make sure that our policies are all really concentrated on meeting the need.
2:01:35
So we also looked at the rent burden population.
2:01:37
We used our our MI cheat sheet to look at what percent of the rent burden population, yes, the 10 of 4 different rents.
2:01:47
And so you can also there's a chart in our testimony with the mismatch between the availability of units at each of the HBS rent ranges and what that translates to in terms of the rent burden population.
2:01:58
So you can see that 64% of available vacant units are renting it over to $24100, and that's only 12% of the rent burden population versus on the low end.
2:02:10
7% of available units are less than 1100, which is 36% of the rent burden population.
2:02:17
And we'd be happy to and we plan to break this down in further in coming months.
2:02:23
So some of the solutions, you know, we really appreciate everything you were bringing up earlier.
2:02:27
We also think that vouchers are incredibly important to meet some of those lowest income needs.
2:02:33
And thank you for asking HPD about that, about the income levels and the rents of what their existing programs provide.
2:02:42
Thank you to the council for working on expanding vouchers and their flexibility.
2:02:46
We think we need to continue to do that.
2:02:48
Keep investing seeing and making sure that those vouchers can be effective, stop source of income discrimination, obviously extended rent stabilization laws.
2:02:56
I think that's very clear.
2:02:58
We also wanna make sure that we are defending and fully funding right to counsel and that all of our development and preservation of affordable housing is really focused at that level below $24100.
2:03:10
I'd be happy to elaborate more.
Pierina Ana Sanchez
2:03:12
Thank you.
2:03:12
Are there other policies that you believe we should pursue?
Lucy Block
2:03:16
Yeah.
2:03:16
So just to be a little more specific, I think right to counsel at the city level is an important focus to keep tenants in their existing homes, make sure that they can access all of the available options to stay in their homes.
2:03:29
And that should be fully funded.
2:03:31
That asked this year for $351,000,000 to make sure that right council is fully functional because it's incredibly successful.
2:03:38
In addition to that, we support the Community Land Act and Coppa.
2:03:42
And just in general, making sure that all of our public resources, our capital dollars, public land are all being very hyper targeted and focused to where the the need is So, you know, it we should really be focusing on below 24100.
2:03:57
But as you know, we need to be getting to extremely low levels of affordability that even 30 percent AMI doesn't necessarily get to.
2:04:04
And there's a variety of ways to do that, and we should be pursuing all of them.
2:04:07
Some of them are updating our term sheets.
2:04:10
Relying more on income averaging project level operating subsidy and vouchers.
2:04:15
There are a lot of means and they're all really important.
Pierina Ana Sanchez
2:04:19
Thank you.