Chair Sherman responds on fair housing and displacement concerns
He thanks the council for the Fair Housing Growth Strategy, says they are sensitive to displacement, and mentions state laws protecting rent-stabilized housing and tools like MIH.
Okay.
So thank you for your questions, Council Member.
I'll kick things off and then I'll turn over to my colleague.
I want to thank the council for your leadership in creating the fair housing growth strategy and requiring it.
It really requires the city to be able to complete an assessment of the housing need that we have and really sets a goal for us to achieve.
A lot of the work that we plan to accomplish through block by block starts to get us there, but with a commitment of building over 200,000 new affordable units and a number of the strategies that we've outlined in the plan sort of speak to that level of implementation.
Before I turn to my colleague to speak a little bit more about the methodology, I do want to address your question regarding rezonings and the potential for displacement.
This is a very important question.
As we are looking for opportunities for rezoning, we are certainly very sensitive to ensuring that we're not disrupting existing housing and particularly rent-stabilized housing and our deeply affordable housing that exists.
We know that there are a number of laws at the state level that make it very difficult to demolish, unilaterally demolish rent-stabilized housing in our city, in addition to tenant protections.
And a lot of the tenant protection work that's been happening in this administration has also been built to ensure that we're bolstering that.
And so as we're looking at opportunities, particularly in neighborhoods that are dense, where we know development is happening, right, we're trying to find opportunities to use tools such as MIH to really pair affordable housing requirements with development activity that's happening.
There's also opportunities for office to residential.
as well as tools that the city has through its LIFT task force and other sort of subsidy tools that can be utilized in some of the development that's happening.
And so ensuring that we are approaching our planning and our rezoning efforts with a clear eye towards tenant protection is important, and that's sort of certainly captured in the block-by-block plan.
It's two very important strategies that go hand-in-hand.
I will turn it over to you, Michael, on the methodology.