CM Brewer Q&A: Garcia on land bank project types and eligibility

Thank you very much.

I've been listening on my cell phone, so congratulations.

It's my bill, so I have a lot of positive feelings about it.

My question would be within the lean possibilities of DEP, even past or maybe even what you might think happening in the future,

What kinds of projects do you think might fall under a land bank?

Ages and what do you think perhaps could happen?

Is it a building?

Is it an institution?

Do you have any sense of where those lean sales, which could have been lean sales, hopefully will be land bank and nonprofit.

Could be taking place.

In other words, within the portfolio, obviously you have lean sales possibility in your portfolio.

So I'm just wondering what the world might look like.

So I think that as we've been talking about, there is this ability in creating the land bank to really think of where those flexibilities and where those opportunities lie.

And I think it's really incumbent as we're designing this, again, not only the community engagement and listening to what some of the stakeholders'concerns were, what the council's purpose of the law was, but also...

also figuring out how we improve the process.

So if the process is right now,

lean sale, it's sold, and then goes into a private trust, that we really think of what are those other opportunities

that we can take into account, like thinking of abandoned properties or reuse for open space or affordable housing, of course, is one that everyone's talked about.

So that's the, as I said before, that's the remit of really designing it with those questions in mind and those opportunities.

How many properties do you have any sense might be eligible in the next year or so, or is it hard to tell?

Oh, it's really hard to tell, especially since we at DEP have also put into place

new kind of, not new, but thinking about homeowners and water and sewer bills that we need to collect on, really thinking about how to be more sensitive to the homeowner.

So we've activated things like going out and doing more door knocking, speaking to the homeowner, trying to get them into our affordability programs.

We've increased our affordability programs and expanded them this year.

So we're, on the one hand, trying to make sure that maybe a homeowner never gets to that point, and so we can't really predict which ones or how many would go into it.

Thank you, and congratulations on your Daily News editorial topic today.

Thank you.

Thank you, Council Member.

Seeing all the members have questions, Commissioner Garcia, your excuse, and we also are joined by Council Member Lee.