Mobile video apps or online, cspan. Org. Next, aboutarp of governors discussing solutions on availability challenges. Ensuring workers in the communities they serve. From the National Governors association in washington dc, this is about an hour. [silence] [silence] [le please welcome nga vice ■7■6 chair, colorado governor jared polis. Thank you. Welcome, everybody, to our third, final, and in many ways nearest to our hearts and most important number one issue int got to be number one or number 2, at best, the high cost of housing. It is a challenge people face. There is a national dimension, not under our control, at the national level. What we can do to re t when governors get to gather no matter what the topic, we end up talking about housing get. Housing is our roman empire. Doesnt mean we talk about it several times a day. At this time we wanted to dedicate a time to talk in this state, a top issue. Our states do such a great job, to start a business and when successful, makes it harder to live in our great states. We know the stories of our states, 27yearold kids, who want to be able to have an hour commute in each way to afford to live. People who are the backbone of the communit teachers, dont afford to live in communities they serve in, businesses power their growth. We are focused on making progress in colorado. I signed a bill that banned growth caps with several municipalities, we are moving forward aggressively to increase supply of housing looking at additional Family Housing in communities, accessory dwelling units, tackling Liability Cos easing government mandates like parking requirements. Im excited to hear what others are we all face. We have a National Expert on this with us. Someone whos deeply involved, working with the ngos across the country, give us an overview of National Housing trends. Charlie anderson is executive Vice President , before he joined arnold ventures, served with us as a special assistant to the president of the economic council. ■ review, which is, we are reducing red tape and bureaucracy, time and treasure to be able to build the Housing Stock we know we need to. He is focused on solutions to help america build faster, better, and at lower cost. That is something you, please join me on the stage. Welcome. Thank you for joining us. Appreciate it. Those are sweet notes for governors when we say we want to build things faster, better at lower cost. I think you were already warmed up and would love to hear your thoughts, the trends that are occurring and advice as governors and listen ■ thanks for having me. The governor said theres a philanthropy, focused on nonpartisan evidencebased solutions that address americas most challenging problems. On the infrastructure team, research, policy development and advocacy to build faster, better and lower cost in the united states. It is all domestic. That means transportation, Energy Infrastructure which is why we are here today. Ortant moment, folks are hearing about this all over the country. I appreciate the bipartisan support for this issue for a decade ago, acute housing costs were concentrated in places like San Francisco and new york city. It spread and Housing Affordability as an issue all over the country for people at most income levels, urban, suburbanrural, workforce, seniors, everyone is struggling with the affordability of housing. And it is really stronger more restrictive zoning and regulation leads to fewer homes, the housing shortage leads to higher prices and we are millions of homes short of where we need to be based on population growth. That means half of renters ■r month and 22 million households and even worse, million of those hoeholds, Home Ownership increasingly out of reach since 2020. Some are rise in four years. Used to be 29, and out 35. That arent even making that purchase at all. Want to move their stuff and because theres enough inventory. Seniors award places without engaged in this fight too. Basic story, cost burdens are challenging people, what do we do about it . If you look at places like houston, they built many more homes in similar cities and have much more lower prices. Minneapolis is an example, theyve seen a ton of apartments built, rents have declined as theye risen, more homes at lower cost. Most cities and towns, with housing voices and frequent city hearings, or farunp with workers that cant afford to live there. States have an obligation to step up and we see a lot of states do that around e table. You see many of these things. With Fund Services without tax ratee Regulatory Burden makes more costly. With opportunities for Home Ownership. To paraphrase governor cox its about ensuring they live near us rather than with us. ■w theres no silver bullet. A lot of this is on the policy menu. Realizing accessory units, middle housing, to een banned because it was traditionally allowed. Transit, limiting parking requiremenon and on. These are popular things across the aisle. As you saw in your state to address it. Who give the affordable units and subsidize. ■ it comes up with real solutions, to get big thgs done. Its called the montana miracle, thats why many folks are eager for that. They are stepping up to lead this year. I want to go to governor gianforte to talk about what he got done and how he got it do thank you. We worked with the problem in montana. Everybody decided they wanted to move to the most beautiful state. They are the most beautiful in my own minds. They wereil it is all about it in wyoming. Wyoming. We recognized moving on that this is the number one issue. Moving into the communities, there wasnt enough supply. It is primarily a supply what we did. We have the incredible blessing, power of legislature meets for 90 days every two years. We had a tight window. In august, prior to that legislative session, a task force on housing, it was a really broad section, folks from the building industry, realtors, county commissioners, city officials, state officials, nonprofit leaders from habitat for humanity and i give them a charge to cast a broad net and we went in and o october, into the legislative session in january and essentially ran the tape and got great results. In year weve seen average rental prices come down 20 in our largest communities. Average vacancy rates just over one which is not healthy market. Its too tight, over 6 in the same marke what did we actually do. Let me hit a few things quickly. First thing we did is cast comprehensive land use planning, master planning. It is easto a ater quote planned to decide how they want the communities to grow through a public process. Everyo when someone seeks a building permit, it matches the growth plan no public hearing. That speeds up the permitting process. The second thing we realized for states that are seeing growth, there were no water and sewer infrastructure programs for new development. They focused on urban developments. Out of our surplus, we put over 100 million into revolving lo fund or municipality so water and sewer, we put an extra requirement on it that any subdivision qualifying in the low Interest Loan Program has to be at least ten, it is oriented towards workforce. We authorized a vus statewide in any community that allows singlefamily homes. We allowed statewide basis we authorized apartments in commercial areas that got retail and upstairs apartments. We ended exclusionary zoning, which essentially if you big lots with the big houses with more density, that is bette Design Review boards. A lot of these are capricious. They like certain species of trees, certain colors of siding, other things based on personal personalities of individuals on local design boar. Said they would be staff no longer with volunteers, they have to be staffed with professionals and local municipality and to be relate Public Safety so you can require a sidewalk, you cant tell them what kind of trees to plant and recognizing the supply problem we ao reasing t number of people in the trades. We created a tax credit scholarship but will pay 3000 a year per employee to anyone that will send somebody to trade school. This goes through the local employer. It will get spent on jobs that are in demand, we change our apprenticeship ratios while dribbling the number of apprenticeships in the state and as i mentioned weve gotten good results. You and i have had this conversation, how did yoge that done. Every time i got pushback from the left or right in the legislature, i would say do we want our nurses, teachers and Police Officers to live in the community where they work and will this measure allow that to happen . In in the end that commonsense logic won the day. Great su that many of us are looking to implement parts of. Appreciate your thougs on the tactic, talk a little bit about what is happening both in oregon and the city of portland for fordability but other areas of your state. Excited to hear about what is going on. Lot of the same t oregon. I want to start by sayi facingt now, end of story, we need to figure this out. Governors have to lead the way. And its not an oregon problem. Its a national problem. Suburban, urban, rural. My first year in office big state, not just lower income, workforce housing, all types of housing, decades of underbuilding in oregon, all kinds of reasons to drive up the rents, the home prices, the most stark reminder of our housing supply, levels of what we are addressing. Oregon needs to produce 440,000 Housing Units in the next 20 years to keep pace with demand as well as make up for lack of supply. I set a new standard last year with emergency order saying we would build 36,000 units a year in the next decade. That was double our convention. We have a lot of work to do. We cant just focus on folks who are unsheltered. We are doing that with immediate prices in oregon and the biggest challenge in serving folks on the streets, we know how to build more shelter, how to keep people by helping them with rent. When someone has experienced that and move them into shelter we dont have enough units. I have been working on this for the last six years. Weve done everything from authorizing statewide which means a certain size have adopted plans to now allow townhomes, duplexes in the communities where they built single families, single id use first time, oregon has a huge planning system, to fight sprawl and protect our forests but we havent done a good job, we will now have under a couple pieces of legislation regional and local housing analyses, what is available, what needs to be built, we dont know where we are going and wont solve the problem and one of the things i did last year was established housing ais are doing in montana, 20 plus individuals, housing producers, engineers, local government leaders, they gave me a report of 59 recommendations, still going through those that is everywhere from financing to construction, codes, permitting, all the things we know our issues in our state and yours as well. With some of those recommendations i have one bill in the current legislative session. I asked for 500 million to d a number of things, the two bigticket items negotiating right now is money for infrastructure, wet some money in there. We need more financial incentives for workforce housing, a be involved and we have been deeply subsidized housing funds, we are hearing from our private developers that they need extra help■ to get more workforce housing. We are establishing for the first te office at the state l Technical Assistance in terms of grant and ta, it provide other things t takes place to get more production in the pipeline. And we are dealing with land supply. Oregon has 50 years of the most fabulous land use when it comes to houng v we have said some cities if you can show a need for land and affordability, you should have a 1time expansion tool to build more housing and 30 of that new development, my hope is they passed that and havent jumpstarted what we need to do. The bottom line for me, people say what do you have to do . You have to do all of it. All of it. Particularly in our state where we are so short on supplies, we need to push hard. I look forward to working with my legislator to get it done. I havent asked for all of you today. If we didnt challenge ourselves theres attacks bill in congress right now that will be helpful and i want to thank the Governors Association for talking about the issues in the tax bill. Greater flexibility for public activity bonds in our state, we maxed out our threshold on public activity bonds because we are putting that ability into Affordable Housing so we need more. We all know low Income Housing tax credit is important for workforce housing. Right now th American Workers and families act, the tax relief Building Congress deals with strengthening threshold and private activity funds. Wga has also said that that is what we need to be doing now. It past the house, 357 to 70. There might be some things causing drama but i can tell you if we get that tax bill passed those things will be neutral in all o states. Pf if you havent talked to our centers, we need to pass the tax relief bill to get more public activity now. Thank you. In terms of our advocacy role anything that reduces financing costs which is one of the key drivers of cost would be good, that would include fiscal responsibility. It would include monetary policy. It would include tax credits, but these kinds of policies with lower Interest Rates, specifically lower targeted co would be helpful. Thank you. Thank you so much for taking time to be here with us. I want to thank my fellow governors for inspiring me as well. Greg grade montana, thank you. We copied what you are doing. This is the benefit of the interNational Governors association. To change this little bit. I will take a different approach if i could and share something with you that you ea hope it passes my legislator next week or i will be very embarrassed. We will see what happens here. I had any perfidy a few months ago. We have been doing a lot of the things everybody else is doing. Some of it is working for sure. What is happening, we take these ideas to the legislature. By the time i got something through, we got things through. They were always a little water down. None of us have experienced my local municipalities were good at watering these things down. We dont like the state telling us what to do. We have taken a shotgun. We have to do everything. The epiphany was of this. I needed to change my messaging. I needed something that the people, would resonate with the people. I needed to get with the simplicity on the far side of complexity. I realized we are doing all those things, density, building more Apartment Buildings, doing all of this stuff. Theres one thing we were not building anymore. We stopped building 15 years ago in almost all our states, singlefamily detached owneroccupied starter homes. Talking about homeso thousand square feet to 1400 square feet. How many of you grew up in a home like that or start your families at home like that. Almost all of us. Building those in utah and most places in the country and what i found was the starter home, that idea of a starter home, the american dream, Home Ownership resonated with everyone and cut through the and get us past nimby. People didnt want of an Apartment Building in their backyard but their heart went out that someone could own a s. We took that concept, went to need to build 35,000 starter homes in utah, we need all the other stuff too. We need 30,000 starter homes in utah in the next 5 yearse my m. We call them utah first homes. That resonates with people. Le and have these ideas. If you look at your state right now and i was surprised to see, our building start going down. Rt Interest Rates for sure but other reasons. What we found out a couple things. One, get because■d municipalitis were not offered smaller lots, the incentive is to build the biggest thing you can every time. We have to change that. The other thing i did not see coming is because of the bk failures that happened a yearr ago all over long ago that was come almost exactly a yearthe fe cannot of money banks can land. So many banks, many of our developers have projects on the books but could not get Construction Loans for those projects. Or they could get Construction Loans, theyre getting them it enters lake there were so high, ten to 1 they struggled to pencil it out. If you didnt vote at that height you not going to build starter homes, medium home price in utah is approaching 500,000. You have to make 170,000 to buy in median home 70,000 to buy a median he utah right now. 75 of utahns at the didnt own a home now could not afford omahony right now. Thats a thimble. Ill to this really quickly. This is the idea that just came out that it dont think anybody else is doing. I needed a lot of money and so we have eight treasurers fund, public treasurers, we call it the pti f fund, when you invest all ofr state until he gets spent bigots like the savings account for your state. Humanist values may participate in that as well. Right now forip u to get investd in shortterm like commercial paper, mutual funds, those types of things, securities, really secure things. We get about a 5 return on that every year and its kind of a liquid fund. So said wait a minute, were investing in china. When investing in new york. Investing inin california. That money our savings account but its not being investedah. What if we took some of that, what if we took right now looking at 350 million could go up to maybe 1 billion and sttterm Construction Loans for our developers to build starter homes . All right . So the bill has 350 million in it dollars in it with a 3. 5 return that would be mixed with, it has to be mixed with the financial institution. So the banks will lend this out, mix our with their many here for the construction loan. At 3. 5 . The