Mayor Donna Deegan's affordable housing transition subcommittee makes draft recommendations

Developers, non-profit leaders and representatives from Mayor Donna Deegan’s transition committee agreed Tuesday to their first set of recommendations to address the affordable housing crisis.

Once finalized and turned into the full infrastructure committee, the goal is to quickly turn the recommendations into legislation, the chair of the housing subcommittee said.

“I really believe that the majority, if not everything, that we have in our report is going to be ready to be implemented on day one,” Joshua Hicks, committee chair and Deegan’s affordable housing director, said in an interview prior to the vote. “We just need to, to hopefully, have the political will and also the community want to actually do it.”

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The recommendations themselves range from establishing financing partnerships with private companies to renovating existing, vacant commercial buildings. The final recommendations will be solidified at Friday’s meeting – which will also be the last time for the public to comment on them – and submitted to Deegan’s office as part of the larger infrastructure committee report in September.

In an exclusive interview with the Times-Union, Hicks said he hoped the subcommittee report would do what last year’s City Council special housing report has not yet to accomplish: be widely accepted and largely passed.

Hicks wrote the report with Chris Crothers, from the Jessie Ball duPont Fund, and Alex Sifakis, vice chair of the committee and a co-founder of development, management and rental company JWB.

The committee largely took a middle-stance, hearing from nonprofits pushing for more inclusive policies as well as large for-profit firms pushing for landlord-friendly recommendations.

What resulted was a mix of recommendations that the committee did not “rubber stamp,” committee member Irvin Cohen, of LISC Jax, told the Times-Union.

“I think it would be one thing if you came in here and you got everybody's rubber stamp, a process or the information that presenter are presenting, but I think what you witnessed today is our capacity to ask ourselves some really hard questions, regardless of where you sit on the housing continuum,” Cohen said.

There are three overall goals: to improve the “housing ecosystem” through efficiency, coordination and oversight, increasing attainable housing and strengthening housing and resident stability. Within each goal are the short and long term recommendations.

What are the short-term draft recommendations?

The committee defined “short term” as being started within two years, and recommendations ranged from the creation of new offices within city government and supporting eviction prevention programs to more closely examining laws that could impact housing supply.

For Hicks, the paramount issue was to address the lack of attainable units available for renters.

“So it's a scary fact that with all these people looking for a place to live, we don't have available inventory for them, and what are we going to do about that?” Hicks said in an interview prior to the vote. “I mentioned we're behind the eight ball. We’re 15 years, really, behind where we should be.”

The short-term goals addressing the inventory include streamlining the permitting processes, expanding local and recurring funding opportunities for the Jacksonville Housing Authority and Community Land Trust, and incentivizing developers through tax breaks and gap funding.

The group also addressed city zoning code and made the recommendation to promote construction of duplexes, townhomes, quadplexes to increase density. Currently, over 90% of Jacksonville is zoned for single-family homes, so the goal would be to have City Council approve diversifing the types of buildings to allow for more units.

Sifakis added a recommendation to address the supply issue at the Tuesday meeting to “greatly scrutinize and likely discourage” any legislation that could negatively impact the housing supply. The committee altered it to encourage such legislation to simply be “scrutinized.”

Sifakis told the Times-Union after the meeting he did not have specific legislation in mind with the recommendation but gave an example of rent control, which has been preempted by the state, negatively impacting the market.

“I just think that's really important that whoever's in charge of housing for the city of Jacksonville has that lens that they're looking through that the solution is supply,” Sifakis said. “So we don't want to do anything that will negatively impact it, but I wasn't targeting that in any specific policy.”

The report will also recommend the city create a chief housing officer based in the mayor’s office, a Housing Oversight Committee and a Housing Resource Center. The officer would work to oversee programs, while the committee would bring together community organizations to continue finding attainable housing options. The center would be a space for renters and homeowners to find resources.

What are the long-term draft recommendations?

The long-term recommendations look beyond two years, potentially even into a new administration.

“This isn't going to be something that we can solve overnight,” Hicks said. “It's going to take the full eight years of this administration, hopefully eight years of this administration, and then after and then we're setting it up for future administrations to continue to build on that.”

Some ideas, such as to work with the Jacksonville Transit Authority and reform code enforcement procedures, will take longer to expand.

The committee also recommended the institution of a landlord registry, which was also included in the City Council report. It did not commit, however, to recommending a structure for such a registry or whether it would be mandatory for landlords to join. Depending on what City Council were to decide, it could theoretically require rental units to be inspected by the city to ensure livable conditions, as required in cities like Omaha, Nebraska.

What’s next?

Deegan allocated $25 million in her first budget to address the recommendations of all her transition committees, as well as an additional $7.5 million for homelessness, housing and health initiatives, creating an opportunity to put dollars behind the group’s recommendations.

Hicks said he hoped it would be an opportunity to move the issue forward.

“We don't need to study it in my opinion anymore,” Hicks said. “We have the studies. We have some of the brightest minds in Jacksonville telling you we have a problem…Let's stop spending money on studies, and let's actually start putting that money towards action.”

The public can attend the final affordable housing subcommittee meeting Friday to provide input before the recommendations move on to the full infrastructure committee.

This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Mayor Deegan's affordable housing subcommittee makes recommendations