Chair Williams discusses artist housing preference and portable insurance with panel

Thank you.

And similar to what I had mentioned about the insurance, we've gotten a lot of pushback around the preference for artists in housing.

And so if you...

Have a legal workaround that you want to offer for us to sort of push back internally.

I am all ears because I actually tried to, I'm working on a culture package of bills and I actually tried to like get that to be one of the bills, but we've gotten a ton of pushback with the human rights law, with the court.

The court case that happened around preferential housing.

I don't know if many of you know, like we can't really use preference for people who live in certain communities, which was something I knew.

So not for now, just, I mean, you can share it now, but I'm just saying like, if you have specific things you want to use to share for me to push back, because we've been told that it is, you know, very, very concerned about

how that law sort of,

with some other laws and court case decisions.

Yeah, I would just say, yeah, we're aware of the litigation and the demographic concerns, but we would love to hear more about what you're hearing and brief your office on workarounds.

Just quickly that, you know, that the...

Preference would go to, you know, white artists and not artists of color and, you know, and not being able to have like substantive pushback around that.

So that that's been like largely the issue.

But we can talk offline.

I just want to share that it is something that I've tried to prioritize as well as the portable insurance.

But.

You know, we deal with lawyers and they're looking at the charter, they're looking at the city's responsibilities versus mayor preemption, state preemption, curtailment.

I mean, we get so kind of constrained with the legislation that we can introduce and pass.

So, yeah, I'm open to any suggestions or workarounds to address some of the issues that have been flagged for me.

I just wanted to thank you for your perseverance.

One of the things that unites everybody in this room is we tend to do impossible things all the time.

And we are so grateful that you've joined our ranks and trying to do impossible things all the time.

I'm trying.

I'm like, help me.

If you have some suggestions on what I can kind of go back and say, that would be helpful.

Thank you so much for your testimony.