Chair Sanchez questions on J51, electronic registration tweaks, and Housing Connect reforms

Look forward to that so that I can go back and have good answers because I did not have one yesterday.

J51.

Are there any concerns that the administration has with Intro 1015, which is my bill to reauthorize the J51 tax abatement for the next 10 years?

Not at all.

Only that we move quickly to pass it because we do think it will be a very important tool.

Love to hear it.

And then with respect to Council Member Banks'property registration legislation, online property registration bill, are there any tweaks that you want to see there?

Yes, actually.

So we have, as I said, already been working towards figuring out how to digitize property registrations.

And so I think we've sort of made progress on...

Moving that forward, but I think there are some other issues related to property registration that our E&S team has been thinking about for some time that would make the system just generally work better.

So I think since we have this bill now with Councilmember Banks, we would like an opportunity to explore whether some additional fixes to that system could happen at the same time.

Thank you.

Housing Connect, the plan commits to reimagining the entire lottery process from the ground up and sets a goal of cutting median lease-up times in half.

So what specific changes is HPD contemplating to achieve these goals?

Yeah, so I think we laid out with some specificity in...

In speed, the sort of three sections.

So we're thinking about short-term process changes, then slightly more complicated, like medium-term.

by the end of the year, and then ultimately a transition to a different system, which we are now working with the OTI PIC crew on what a new sort of more agile technology system,

which is really only needed in order to keep adapting all these process changes.

I'll just name a couple of things that were sort of highlighted in the report.

One is, and this one is coming quickly, is shortening the lottery period from 60 days to 21 days.

A second new initiative is to simplify the waterfall for income documents, which I think is really critical.

So if you have like proof of a SNAP benefit, why should you, you know, you don't really need to upload any other documents than that.

You are by definition income eligible.

We are also looking at reiterating and clarifying our position on first-time occupancy inspections.

There seems to be misunderstanding, but we do not require separate inspections if we have the architecture sign-off on a new construction building so that you do not need to wait 60 days to get a unit inspected.

And then again, the longer term strategies have to do with potentially re-looking at the way we're taking paper applications, which actually slows the process down quite significantly.

How we are dealing with appeals, which also paper applications and appeals are both significant sort of barriers to moving more quickly.

And then finally, allowing marketing agents to move, not necessarily in chronological order, but after a certain number of days to be able to.

take applications from the pool that we send them in any order.

So these are the sort of process changes that we have sort of identified to get from that 210 days down to the less than the 100 days, which is the goal for the reformation of Housing Connect.

Thank you.