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Q&A
Improving the Fair Share process for facility siting and housing
1:25:52
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154 sec
Commissioner Carl Weisbrod asks Howard Slatkin and Jessica Katz for suggestions on improving the Fair Share process, noting its historical shortcomings, and potentially applying it to encourage housing.
Slatkin cautions against relying solely on formulas, emphasizing the need for robust political decision-making processes to balance competing factors and subjective views of desirability.
Katz notes Fair Share is currently a disclosure mechanism and warns against making it a decision tool that could discriminate against protected classes (e.g., in siting supportive housing).
Carl Weisbrod
1:25:52
I'm I'm sorry.
1:25:53
I do have we heard from council member of Elis and, I think, others about fair share.
1:26:04
And the I think what we would all recognize is that fair share as envisioned by the 1989 charter has not lived up to its expectations, put it mildly.
1:26:17
Do either of you have suggestions on how fair share can be improved and to what extent it can be applicable, Not only to the kinds of uses that neighborhoods don't wanna see, but the kinds of uses that we would wanna see including more housing.
1:26:38
And I'm not necessarily asking for you to respond now, but if you can think about it and and let us know.
Howard Slatkin
1:26:46
Yeah.
1:26:47
I I would I I will do that.
1:26:49
But I I would just add that as some of the other speakers have have alluded to, there's not a a simple objective way to construe what fair share means.
1:27:02
You know, what what is the ability of a neighborhood to support one thing or the other.
1:27:07
And and and with certain types of facilities, I don't think that it's even easy to say whether a facility is desirable or not in an objective sense.
1:27:16
I think that there is a lot of texture to that.
1:27:20
So, I think for for that reason, I think it's important, and I will consider the question in more detail as well.
1:27:27
But I think it's important to look at the political decision making process and the the procedures for decision making in which all of those issues are going to be considered and balanced, rather than to look for formulas that are going to substitute for the judgment of of the people acting in that process.
1:27:47
Yeah.
Christie Peale
1:27:48
I would
Jessica Katz
1:27:48
I would add that FairShare, as it's currently written, is primarily a reporting process and a disclosure process rather than a decision making yes or no tool.
1:27:58
I think it should probably remain that way, particularly when viewed through the lens of, say, a supportive housing or a social services kind of service where you're dealing primarily with people who are disabled, who have a mental health issue, who have a substance abuse issue.
1:28:13
And these are all protected classes.
1:28:15
And you really can't, or we we shouldn't and we can't create a system that says, no.
1:28:21
There are too many of those kind of people here the same way we would not do that for other kind of protected classes.