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Collective Impact Meeting Mar 23, 2022- Community Development Block Grants – Disaster Recovery and Mitigation

This meeting was an information packed discussion of Community Development Block Grant programs that will disburse over $420 million dollars in Oregon over the next few years. 

Panelists

  • Alex Campbell, OHCS
  • Larry Florin, Burbank Housing
  • Jennifer Gray Thompson, After the Fire
  • Margaret Van Vliet, Trillium Advisors, Sonoma and Oregon
  • Caryn Wheeler-Clay, JCC LTRG

Questions Addressed

 Agenda 

 Audio transcript 

Chat transcript

Thank you to our panelists for sharing their insights and expertise!

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Community Visioning Opportunities February 2022 Collective Impact Meeting

Goal of the meeting

How do we prepare ourselves as a community to meet these opportunities to re-envision parts of our valley?

The agenda is here

Why it’s important

These projects represent a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to re envision what our fire-affected communities will be like to live in. The fires were a terrible reset for the Greenway and SR99 between Ashland and South Medford.

Outcomes of the meeting

Our discussion resulted in some interesting opportunities for the project leads to share information on community values, priorities, and ideas across the projects. It was agreed that the community recovery plan could serve as connective tissue between the limited scope and technical focuses of the TGM and Greenway projects. This connective tissue would extend out to address some of the larger issues like economic and tourism development and the larger Community goals of resilience, inclusion, and equity. R3v and LTRG will follow up with the project leads so that opportunities for community input can be publicized and made as accessible as possible to a representative variety of stakeholders.

The panel

Questions addressed

  • Opportunities  
  • Who leads the projects?
    • Project leadership
      • Consultants
      • Government representatives
    • Public advisory committees
    • Technical advisory committees
    • Others?
  • Community involvement – How can various sectors and citizens support the project?
    •  Public comment
      • In meetings
      • In writing
    • Workshops and charrettes
    • Other opportunities
  • Challenges
    • How do community members miss these opportunities? 
    • Ways to overcome language, logistical, and cultural barriers?
    • How can we prepare ourselves to make the best contribution possible in these processes?
  • Next steps towards community visioning?
    • How might the community educate itself as to process and possibilities to envision?
    • Should community groups identify their key visions and concerns beforehand?
    • Should spokespeople be chosen, trained, and empowered by community groups?
    • How can the community help create the political will to implement the recommendations of these projects?

Video of the discussion

Video starts just after Steve Lambert of Jackson County Parks introduces himself (sorry, Steve!)

Laura Buhl’s slide:

Lauras Buhls slide on TGM project inputs

A couple of slides we presented in the meeting to offer context on the projects

Transcription of the discussion

Chat transcript is here

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R3V Collective Impact Meeting Notes – Land Availability for Housing – January 19, 2022

This week we had a panel discussion how we as a community might help support more attainable and affordable housing development by identifying land that might be made available for socially-purposeful building.

Our panelists included

  • Greg Holmes, 1000 Friends
  • Margaret Van Vliet, Trillium Advisors
  • Jason Elzy, JCHA
  • Anne Marie Alfrey, RVCOG
  • Daryn Murphy, Developer
  • Josh LeBombard, DLCD

The questions addressed

  1. The challenge with land availability – JCHA, urban renewal agencies, developers
  2. Other communities – How do others solve for land availability?
    1. Portland Surplus City Property
    2. Eugene buys suitable land and banks it – summary here
    3. Genesee County Land Bank, MI – buys all tax lien properties
  3. Community involvement – How can various sectors and citizens support the project?
    1. Identify possible lots and their owners to project leads
    2. Encourage owners to discuss the possibility of making their land available
  4. Who leads – What team should lead the project to develop a land bank or list?
    1. RVCOG, urban renewal agencies, SOREDI, LTRG, or ?
  5. Securing land – What form of transaction could work? Right of first refusal? Land lease? Fee simple? Cities leasing surplus land
  6. Housing as infrastructure – What would be different if we thought of housing as community infrastructure? An expert, Jacqueline Waggoner and her testimony
    1. Investment?
    2. Maintenance?

Our key takeaways were:

  1. The challenge
    1. Because buildable, well-located land is so valuable, it’s important to find sellers who have a patient, community-oriented approach to making it available for affordable and attainable housing development.
    2. Medford has done a good job of rezoning to support housing and inventorying their unbuilt lands.  Other cities can still do that work.
    3. Daryn Murphy: In a market like Jackson county and all over the state, for that matter, a lot of property owners don’t want to wait that that timeline out so you’re hopeful that, when you initiate conversations with a property owner that they have a an altruistic  mindset and maybe you can convince them that this is the right thing to do, and that waiting is going to be beneficial to the Community, but not everybody unfortunately has that has that outlook so it’s it’s often very challenging to get owners to to cooperate.
    4. Actions underway
    5. Commercial and religiously zoned lands can now be used for affordable housing development.  For attainable housing too?  A policy update?
    6. HB 2001 aims to make more missing middle by upzoning all single family lots to multifamily, ADUs.
    7. HB20918 – inventory all surplus lands made publicly available.
    8. Medford has annexed some urban reserves to add more land for housing
  2. Other communities
    1.  Margaret: Sonoma County created a Council of Infill Builders and coordinated what the jurisdictions could offannexing some urban reserveser in terms of land and incentives to build housing.
    2. In Colorado the Congregation Land Campaign worked to inventory and make available faith-based organization’s land for housing.
  3. Community involvement
    1. Could we look at how we could offer landowners a capital gains tax credit if they sell to an affordable housing developer?  Could the state offer a credit equal to the federal capital gains tax on the sale?
    2. How to incorporate and finance utilities to marginal agricultural lands that could be repurposed to housing?
  4. Who leads
    1. Should be a nonprofit organization, not a government agency.
    2. Outreach to landowners is the key to success
  5. Securing land
    1. Purchase is often best for everyone, but leases can work
    2. Leases create an issue with lien seniority for lenders and the lessor.  Can we find models for how this can work and statistics on the true scope of the issue?
  6. Housing as infrastructure
    1. How to include this and the related systems development work into the jurisdictions’ capital improvement planning processes?  Without tying to this, there’s no funding for housing as infrastructure.
    2. How to create prohousing community understandings that stable housing lowers healthcare and law enforcement costs.  Housing is far less expensive than prison and ER visits.  Educate the public on social determinants of health.
    3. We need more innovation around housing product types – smaller, built offsite, more density – and around finance – how public investment can set the table for private investment (systems development, land acquisition and entitlements, low income tax credit, public assumption of some risks that cause lenders to increase rates, appraisal practices to support innovation rather than hinder it because of the “no comps” problem.
  1. What can we do now?
    1. LTRG/R3V Housing Working Group to host a conversation around which organizations might hold this effort.  SOREDI?  LTRG? UnitedWay? Cascade Builders’ Association?
    2. Design what structures and processes will be required to do this work in consultation with the Congregation Land Campaign
    3. Support LTRG in hiring a dedicated housing advocate who can lead this effort.
    4. Begin outreach via our community connections to faith and fraternal organizations. Mapping suitable lots and reaching out to owners, etc.
    5. Experiment and learn to build a process that really works.

Thanks to all who participated!

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R3V Collective Impact Meeting – Economic Recovery – December 1, 2021

We had a great panel discussion with updates on Economic Recovery this week.

We also discussed our Land Availability Project.

Our economic recovery panelists included:

  • Colleen/Terrill, SOREDI
  • Marshall Doak, SBDC
  • Jon Legarza, TURA
  • Tucker Teutsch, Remake Talent, Business Zone Captains
  • Marta Tarantsey, Business Oregon

Some questions we are asking our community leaders are:

  • What progress are we making in terms of economic recovery since 2020?
  • What’s coming next?
  • What have we learned about economic growth and recovery this last year?
  • What could we do as a community to spread and accelerate recovery?
  • What challenges and opportunities do you see around long-term prosperity in the Rogue Valley?

Some of the key takeaways for us were:

  • Overall recovery from the fires and Covid-19 has been slow. 17 of 104 companies affected by the fires have firm plans to reopen. Despite what feels to us like a slow pace, Jackson County is seen as an example of what an engaged, creative community can do to support economic recovery.
  • Affordable and attainable housing for workers remains an issue in bringing new talent and employers to the valley
  • Number one issue is finding skilled workers to hire for tradable sector companies (those who sell outside the local market) according to SOREDI
  • Childcare is an ongoing challenge for many working families. We lost providers in the fire and retaining staff is a challenge
  • Capture our learnings as a community into a Recovery Playbook – Legarza
  • Ways to support business recovery – Legarza
    • Expedite planning processes for companies rebuilding or expanding
    • Fund market studies to identify new opportunities for businesses
    • Continue to support high school and RCC vocational education in their efforts to skill up a new generation of workers
    • Shop locally, especially with fire-affected businesses this holiday
    • SOREDI focus on cataloging “employer ready” land in the county and promote the valley as a place to expand operations
  • Lots of resources are flowing toward the valley from Federal and State programs, summarized by Marta in these slides

Chat transcript Here

The meeting agenda is here.

Thanks to all who participated!

A sign of the times and bit of levity