Housing Commission - Regular Meeting

So it's a 535, August 13, 2026. We have a quorum, special meeting of the housing commission in session. Do you want to do a roll call?

Commissioner Cunningham? Here. Commissioner Sripathi?

Here.

Vice Chair Jones? Chair Narayan?

Here.

For the record, Vice Chair Jones is absent.

Okay, I don't... First agenda item, approval of minutes. We have a motion to approve the minutes from May 28, 2026.

I will move that we approve the minutes for May 28, 2026. And I can second that motion.

Okay. Commissioner Cunningham?

Aye. And I would say that they were very well done. There was no problem at all. Thank you for that.

Mr. Repati.

I didn't attend the meeting.

Oh, sorry.

This is just approval minutes.

Yeah.

Turn her in.

Aye. The motion carries with Vice Chair Joe Zapson.

Okay. There's no old business No new business. The next item is the study session.

That's correct. And I can start the staff presentation.

Oh, I need to go to oral communications before we do the study session.

Good call.

Yes. Oh, I'm sorry. Oh, yeah. We don't have any speakers, Chair.

No speakers. Anybody from public? No. Okay.

All right. Yeah.

Okay, so then let's move on to the next item, study session.

Awesome. And I can start the presentation. Now you show me. Okay. So good evening chair and members of the housing commission. and I'll be giving tonight's staff presentation. Just as a reminder, this is a special meeting. This was requested by the Housing Commission when we were doing our annual work plan back in March. Talked about how one of the agendas items later this year is gonna be talking about updating our below market rate, inclusionary housing requirement and fee related to this. Both of these things are kind of set in the code as part of the housing mitigation manual. It's a document city council passed that kind of governs our blue market rate, kind of production of housing and how we collect fees. And it was requested that before we get into that meeting, where we update what we have, let's first have a study session to understand what we currently have and how it's currently worked. The purpose of tonight's meeting is basically gonna be purely educational. We're not making any decisions tonight, but we will open it for discussion later so that commissioners can have their chance to ask any clarifying questions they want. And also just kind of discuss amongst each other what you think, with what kind of changes maybe you think you want to see, right, amongst each other. So before we do, let's get started. The Housing Mitigation Manual, also known as the Below Market Rate Housing Mitigation Program Procedural Manual, was adopted by City Council back in 1992. It's part of the general plan. The goal of this manual is to generate affordable housing through market rate development. This is the mitigation idea. It does this by two ways. The first is called the inclusionary housing requirement. This is the industry term we use for that, which is whenever there's a market rate development You know, this is privately owned, of course, by a for-profit, you know, entity. We require them to set aside a certain percentage of their units to be made affordable for the below market rate program, right? So it's inclusionary, included within the private development. The other thing we do is that we have established the below market rate affordable housing fund through the manual, and it is funded essentially entirely through fees collected on building permits. We're going to get into the structure of how those fees are calculated and collected as part of this presentation. So first, let's start with. Once this loads, the inclusionary housing requirement, like I said, it requires developers to set aside a percentage of their full profit development to either be sold or rented to the income qualifying councils and designated. And just talk about what does it mean to be, you know, low income and what level does that mean? There are currently 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 recognized income levels within the low-income housing menu. At the very top, you have moderate-income folks. They make between 100% of area median income, so the middle income for Santa Clara County, up to 120%. So they're close to the middle, slightly higher. But then inclusion hasn't required, we require ownership development. So that means anytime there's single family homes, duplexes, triplexes, townhomes, things that are meant to be individually sold with a deed, right? 10% of those are required to be made available to moderate income households. Next income bracket in income households. This is from 80% to 100%. So very close to the middle again, but slightly below area median income. That's also part of our ownership inclusionary requirement. 10% of any ownership development has to have their properties available to median income households. So in together combined, that means 20% of any ownership, any ownership at the level is made to be affordable housing program. And you might be asking, what if that percentage is only one unit, right? So like, let's say there's like six houses in the development. We go to median, right? We go to median instead of model. And once we get to two, right? Then there's one median, one model, and so on and so forth. Now let's go to low income. Low income is from 50% to 80% area median income. And we require 6% of all rental developments to be made available to low income. So anytime there's an apartment complex, anytime there's something for rent, That's typically part of the requirement. Also, we have our very low income inclusionary requirement, which goes in between 30 to 50% area median income. We require 9% of all rental projects being made available to very low income. So combined, that makes for 15% of the total development, right? We do not currently have a requirement for extremely low income, which is 15 to 30%, or acutely low. This is a very, very new one that was just established this year by the state, which is anyone below 15% area median income. Another way to kind of visualize what these kind of mean is essentially you've got middle class, working class, The very low is, generally speaking, where the poverty line hits. And then extremely low and acutely low, you have people that are either unstably housed or essentially homeless. Okay, so below market rate affordable housing fund, this is the fee that the city collects to fund our kind of affordable housing activities. Our planners are responsible for collecting this upon issuance of a building permit. And so people cannot get their final inspections without paying this fee, right? And some eligible affordable uses of our Belong Rock Urban Housing Fund are, number one, acquisition, so that means buying land strictly for affordable land. Construction of affordable housing. We've actually had this come to the Housing Commission this March. Preservation. This means if you have a property that already is affordable, but you want to extend the life of the affordability, you can give them an additional grant or loan. Rehabilitation. That's when older units, they start falling as a disrepair. So maybe you say as an exchange for repairing these units, you agree to restrict them into the program. Affordable operation subsidies, so sometimes affordable housing projects, they have a gap. their operations, maybe not necessarily at year one, but maybe year three or year four. So sometimes you can see people using these kinds of funds for an operation subsidy to kind of fill that gap. And then BMR program administration, this is kind of portfolio management. We recently did this for the Rice Housing Contract. And typically that contract is funded out of the BMR fund, although this year and for the next three years, it will be funded out of the general fund. Fair housing, this is about enforcement and prevention of housing discrimination. Housing discrimination based on things like race, ethnicity, sex, religion, religious identity, sexual representation, things like that. Um, then finally other low income housing activities. Uh, this 1 is kind of intentionally vague. Um, but the idea being that, like, anything that can basically help prevent. Even though we don't typically use this fund for that, we can, it's also enumerated in 1 of the eligible. So, um. To set kind of the context for this update of our inclusionary requirements, it's important to remember that right now we are in the midst of our kind of six-cycle housing element that includes the regional housing needs allocation for the arena, which is something that HCD assigns to each city and county for each to provide their own fair share of affordable housing at various income levels, right? To meet equitable, immensely affordable housing, to meet population economic growth, This was part of our housing element. And if you remember, we previously had a study session about trying to find, you know, more strategies for how we can make more low and very low housing, right? And so kind of updating this kind of inclusion and requirement will be kind of like one of the goals will be to help us kind of further our ability to meet this statement it required really, right? To meet our very low and low income housing needs. And then, so speaking of the housing element, this action that we're undertaking, it will be addressing two of our community housing element strategies that is listed in the housing element as a required study and implementation action from now in between like 2027 to 2029-ish. The first one being HE 2.3.3, where residential housing mitigation program, which requires us to regularly analyze and update the inclusionary housing program. And the other one being HE 2.3.9 is when we analyze and update the BMR fees. So both two and one. All right, now let's move on to the fee structure and how that works. It's gonna get a little bit mathematical. So there are two components for fee collection. into the BMR AHF Fund. There's one that, fractional fee, one that we call the commercial linkage fee. So the fractional fee is collected on residential building permits. Your town homes, your apartment buildings, right? It's calculated to represent the remaining fraction of a unit provision requirement. So going back to like what I was talking about before, what if the BMR requirement for 15% of a rental unit project, for example, becomes 2.4, right? They can build two units, but what represents the 0.4 is the fractional fee, right? So we require them to build two, we collect a fee on the 0.4. The next component is called the commercial linkage. This is collected from commercial building permits. And the idea behind this is it's calculated to ensure that job age growth in the city to commensurate affordable housing supply. The idea being when you have the same amount of housing stock in the market, if you increase the number of jobs, no matter what, that's an increase in demand, which means rents have to go up by a certain amount. And if you have high income wages coming in, right, you have higher wage income people competing with the same people for the same apartments, meaning there's a larger jump, right, in the amount of rent that potentially could be charged. So it's going to be different depending on the type of commercial growth that you get, right?

We might ask you a question at this time, or do you want to save it until the end there?

Let's save it until the end, because I might answer it in the next slides.

Okay. First, we have the, let's go into how to calculate the fractional fee.

We're going to run through an example, right? So, as I said before, the city's inclusion housing program often results in a non-whole number, right? It's very rare that it's exactly four or exactly, you know, a certain number. So, in the example of a rental project that's got 22 units total, they would be required to provide 1.98 very low income, which is the 9%, right, of a project, and then 1.32 low income units, right? If the fractional portion of requirement is greater than 0.5, we ask the developer to round up, right? So for the 1.98, we would say, please just provide us two very low-income needles. If the fractional portion is less than 0.5, then we ask them to pay the fractional fee. The formula to calculate that fee is as follows. So we're gonna kind of break that down. You have your gross employee area of your proposed project, right? Multiply that by the fee amount per square foot of development type. So there's a different, this has got variable, right? So it's different for whether it's single family, multifamily, duplicated or whatever. All of that multiplied by each other divided by the low market rate inclusion requirement of either 15 or 20%, as we previously mentioned, and then multiplying that by the remaining fraction. And that's how you are going to calculate your remaining fraction. So therefore, for this kind of project, we will require two very low-income units, because we're rounding up, one low-income unit, because we're rounding down that one. And then they would have to pay that much money, $145,163, the BMR-AHF fund to represent that 0.32, that only goes for BMR kind of requirement. Next, let's talk about the commercial linkage fee. Again, it's also based on the square footage and use type, right? And as I previously mentioned, lower wage use type have a lower fee. Because if you're bringing in more jobs, yes, but they're generally lower wage jobs. So the demand impact is not going to be as high as if you were to bring in like an office, which you're going to have people who think a lot of. So we have currently five categories of different use types in our commercial linkage fee. One is office of research, which is the highest, right? And it goes down to hotel, self-storage, warehouse, and the lowest is commercial retail.

I would make a comment, not a question. When you look at the exhibit B, the highest one actually is Warehouse. It's full, $39.29. And the research, which you would think would be the highest, is actually $10 or more less than that, at $35.48. So those are both high. So I just wanted to, because that was such a surprise to me that... I wanted to just mention it because I'm sure it's probably surprising to everyone because I don't understand what warehouse is. But you don't have to answer that. Just I want to point that out so everybody's aware that that was a little startling when I read it.

So let's talk about the goals of this update. So number one, we really want to be current with state law development. Current with state law being like, because the state of California, they produce so many of these housing laws every single year. We want to make sure that our program is consistent with state law. We're not missing out on anything. And the other is that we want to be current with the current development environment. We want to, and I really reflect what kind of development we're seeing, so make sure that we're capturing that, okay? So we're not missing out on any kind of, you know, use case that isn't being covered in our category. The other thing we want to do is we want to be compatible what we call best practices. It's been some time since we've updated some of these. And what we don't want is to be missing out on something that makes Cupertino sort of like incongruent with development outside anywhere else that possibly would entice people to do their housing development somewhere else. We wanna be equitable for affordable housing, right? We want this requirement to be accurately capturing enough funds or enough requirement that we can do producing enough affordable housing to be adequately mitigating the effects of the market rate development. But mostly we wanna be legally defensible, whatever we wanna do, right? We want this to hold up under scrutiny. We want it to be financially feasible, meaning we don't want it to impact development But you could take like the only 100% of but. Now, they'll release it. They saw all the right. And then finally, we want to be able to read or read it goals. Whatever we suggest, we want this to somehow be a positive effect for our city's ability to meet those low income and very low income housing. So let's talk about the next steps. So we actually did release the RP. Um, we're going to bring in consultant to study this. And, um, sometime in the fall, we haven't set up on a date yet. They will be coming back, right? And they will be best basically presenting. The options to the housing commission that we will be looking for your recommendation on. Um, your, your feedback also, you know, now we'll kind of play into, um. perhaps it can give us an idea of some of your priorities as well. But you'll be making that recommendation in the fall. And of course, everything has to be brought back to the city council for final application. We anticipate that to be in 2027, early 2027. So I think at this point, we want to open it up to commission to kind of ask any clarifying questions and also just kind of start the discussion because this is a study session.

So I have questions on the study, on the information that you mentioned, a few questions. The income levels that you shared, right? The table that showed the different income levels. So that's based on the county or the city?

It's based on the county. Each county is kind of given its own sort of area meeting income and then income brackets. Okay.

Yeah. And how would the percentages, how would they determine, you know, like the requirement, like 9% of rental and 6% of rental, how would they determine?

So that was determined based on kind of inclusionary studies of the past. where they were trying to figure out what is kind of the financially feasible way to include, you know, to make an inclusionary requirement essentially, right? And the prevailing notion, the longest time has been somewhere between 15 to 20% of each kind of market rate development. And so that's when each city kind of like adopting their own, it varies ever so slightly from city to city. And the city of Cupertino decided to do 15% for rentals and 20% for ownership. Yeah.

So this is like a general by the city itself. This was developed by the city itself. Yeah. And this is not based on that 1992 thing. No. More of a current. Okay. No, yeah.

This would be, I think the latest time this was updated, it was like 2015-ish. Yeah.

The entire thing?

The last time this manual was updated was in 2020, I believe.

Yeah. Okay. So does the requirement come from us? Yeah, the city decides on its own inclusionary housing requirement.

And so what you'll see is each of these different, so like Sunnyvale actually recently did a study for their Nexus study, and they looked at all the different cities' requirements, and they also looked at financially what's the maximum they could feasibly start charging before it starts impeding development. And then they kind of make a recommendation through their housing commission about what they want to do with their housing requirement and how they want it to change.

How then can we measure how effective this below-market-rate manual has been since its inception. And the reason I ask, I only have the data for, of course, the last few years, and we haven't made much progress at all in using the below-market-rate manual mitigation theories. So I don't know if between 1992 and 2019, it was better or not. And I don't know if you have Any information on that?

Part of the consultant study will be kind of looking at the trending patterns of development to see where, if there was something that was entirely impeding development, I mean, it's generally pretty obvious, right? We wouldn't be getting any applications at all, but also like seeing like where we get more or less, you know, that's kind of like included in sort of like their economic analysis. So that's not something I readily have, but that would be something that the kind of consultant bases some of their study on.

Okay, I would like them to look at this then because two things. One is that we do know what homes have been built recently, like Ventana and the one on Main Street that was built for homelessness and a few other low-income folks. And then we've got the one on Westport. That was 19 homes and this was 48. And compared to that, we have an update to how many homes from our base of the low market rate homes are going to be lost in the next three years. That's 93. That's 93. And that's That's assuming that's the only houses that have been built and these are the only houses that are losing, but it's just a tremendous disparity. So I don't know if somehow before that we were building some more houses and it just isn't captured right now because that's just devastating to be losing 93 homes in the next three years. And then after that, there's another seven years, and you're going to lose the next 20. But the thing is that in this next coming three years, and we aren't building, as far as I know, the two, well, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to interrupt your answer, but I was going to just finalize. The only two that I'm aware of, the affordable, the Mary Avenue, it was approved and funded, but it's in litigation or something. So still sticks not on the ground, right? We don't have that. And then there's the teacher housing one. And they have been sort of semi-approved, but they still have to go through a whole long process. So anything other than the rise and stuff, we just don't have much.

Well, I should point out, though, so those ones are the 100% affordable projects that have been brought to you guys because this is the commission that deals with the 100% affordable. The inclusionary housing requirement is going to be a requirement that affects market rate developments and puts in a requirement for them to provide us with affordable housing. So we do actually currently have... pipeline market rate developments.

How many houses do we expect from that? Do you know? Is there a number on that?

There is a number. I don't remember how many of the eight in total on top of my head, but their names.

Because aren't they all the 10% ownership kind? They're not the ownership kind, right?

They're pretty much all townhomes.

That's what I thought. And so that's part of the reason that we're not meeting our arena number. Part of the reason is because we have been... approving. The city council has been approving some townhomes. But those companies are refusing to build above two stories or three stories because they can't fund it, they say. They can't get loans and so it doesn't matter. We've got several that have been approved, but the housing is so low, the numbers of housing are so low, that we are not meeting our RENA numbers. And so it's a big concern of city right now i know that last time we had our meeting um they were talking about the arena itself and how they might modify going back to the state and saying hey give us time we can know we're going to have this problem with funding um can we extend not extend but make some changes and add some sites so that's where we are right now right now and so i'm just I've been wondering, like, it doesn't seem like it's awfully effective unless somebody finds something else somewhere. And so that's why I was so concerned. And I started going through and going, OK, what else can we change in this low market rate manual to be more effective? Right. And have the questions for the consultant. I'm not meaning that I know everything or anything. Just they're all the questions I have. And I'm sure that other folks have some too.

I still have questions on the study itself. Oh, that's fine. Yeah, that's good. Proposals and thoughts. The same table that you had before, Nikki? Sure. So before this, there's another table. This one? Yeah, this one. So the acutely low and extremely low. So we're not considering them at all. Well, we currently just don't have a requirement for that. So, okay. So, I mean, does that mean that, that doesn't mean that there aren't any acutely low or extremely low residents, correct?

Yeah.

It doesn't mean that there aren't. So there are. So, and then you were talking about this inclusionary housing requirement. So why aren't we explicitly producing extremely low income units to this inclusionary housing?

It could be something that we ask our participants to look at and see like, how can we make that feasible, right?

Yeah. I mean, so it could be, it doesn't have to be rental or even ownership for the other two. It could be temporary housing, transitional housing, shelters, anything, right? So there's a possibility that we could kind of include. I don't know, it's too common. It includes the resale. It needs to form on population. There are some sources for that, yes. That was one of my comments. You also mentioned, sorry, one more comment. You mentioned about the fee that's collected, right? And it's going towards, yeah, this one. Can we include... Say, for example, like helping somebody pay mortgage down payment.

Like rental assistance.

Yeah. For rental, you have, right? Rental assistance. So for ownership, can we do that? So then you help more people. Or like mortgage down payment.

Like a mortgage down payment assistance.

Yeah, some help towards down payment, you know, I don't know yet. I'm not sure that it's feasible, but it's a thought. Why can't we think of that? So you increase more owners in Cupertino.

We previously did have a mortgage assistance program. I found some historical files for that. I could explore and ask why, what happened to that program? You know, we had to get some...

There's lots of things.

No, I definitely found records of, like, an ancient, like, knowledge assistant.

Okay. Yeah. That's common. Sorry. You talked about the categories of the commercial linkage. Yes.

Commercial linkage fee? Yeah. Oh, yeah.

Okay. All we hear now is data centers for AI. You know, so don't we want to think about, because this is for the future, right? So in the next 10 years, say, we may have data centers. So is that some like R&D kind of thing? What that would do? Because these are going to be humongous developments. I'm not saying it's going to happen. There is a possibility it could. But preparing for that, yeah. So... So there's a land and then what it's going to do to housing, increase in housing, decrease in housing. So I think that would be a nice thing for the consultant to look into. So the percentages, can consultants do modeling based on different percentages? Yeah, yeah. And see what that would do?

It would ideally produce basically prototypes of different modelings of different, yeah, exactly, different models. Like what kind of like, it's almost a pencil out, right? Yeah. By different inclusionary requirements and with different fees, right? And at one point, we start hitting breaking points where suddenly things are no longer feasible. So we can calculate where's that sweet spot between like where we can increase things without essentially hampering development. Yeah. And so, yeah, we would be asking, that would be essentially what the consultant brings to the picture. Right, right. A bunch of different prototypes to kind of, yeah.

Okay. Because I've had a thought about that. AI as well, because I looked this up on Google when they said other categories. And it was amazing. They said, oh, are you trying to build a new Nexus report for your city? And I went, oh, well, not exactly. And so they had like four different categories. They said you have to modernize. You can't use square footage. And just to note, this business about level of wages was not in this chart. So it doesn't really explain how level of wages and square footage work together to come up with this particular thing. But that's a separate question. The thing was, I was talking about, you know, use square footage. You use something like megawatts for electricity, how much electricity is used for whatever you're getting economically out of it. And then also water, because AI uses a lot of water as well. And so, I mean, it all starts blending together, making it crazy. I have to look at it for a while. But in our housing element, one of the things we're looking at in here is electricity. Three, I think, but four specifically talks about water and electricity usage for homes. Okay, if we're caring about that for homes, you know, well, the city's gonna be caring about that, right? For all of our business. We have, as a matter of fact, a environmental handbook. And one of them talks about new companies coming in, building green buildings, you know, using solar panels and things like that. So that's one aspect of it. And then there's landscape, different lands altogether. But those two things, specifically water and energy. So I have to admit, I went a slightly different way in talking. I was thinking about an idea. Can the city just zone in such a way that you don't, get proposals from ai i mean i know that we zone all kinds of things right we zone zone zone zone zone so i don't know about that it makes a lot of money but it destroys it can destroy the environment you're living in and i know that our city cares about the environment so it's just a question is there a way that the city can take action maybe not even wait till this whole thing plays out but is there a way to um Not sure, Zoni, so that we don't get those kind of proposals at all because they know they're not welcome here.

Planning Commission question now. I'm not sure how Zoni interacts with this, but to the question about should we consider a data center as a use category, That's definitely something we can ask, you know, our consultants to look at and see, like, how does that, you know, the development of our data center affect, you know, cost of housing in an area? And how does it particularly raise, you know, cost? How do we accurately mitigate for that? So that's definitely something we can actually factor into that.

Well, I'd like to bring up then the other three that they said. They said AI data centers, you use per megawatt of power or peak GPM. water flow. That's for AI data. And it said the outdated classification was warehouse. And that's when I went, warehouse? We've got $49 is the fee that we charge for warehouses. And that brings the question up, which at some point we need to answer to, what kind of warehouses do we have that we charge this kind of fee for? And how on earth is it even in the same thing as heavy industrial slash warehouse. So that was the one, the AI data centers. That's where it grabbed my attention, this warehouse thing. But anyway, the other things are like professional office, all outdated. Now what it is is life science labs. Okay, that's per square foot with specialized HVAC and biosafety level, all this stuff of multipliers, every time you get into an algorithm, right? Then there's last mile logistics, like say you were getting a, not REI, but Amazon. Say Amazon were to come to your town. And so that takes the place of regional distribution warehouse because the last mile logistics, trucking, use of river roads and all that stuff, per daily delivery van trip, right? what is your peak hour and where are all these trucks going and all that stuff. I mean, studies that, of course, consultant would probably already thinking about. And the point was, and I didn't read everything, but this was in this particular one, micro hospitals, don't know that we have such a thing, but they said, that means you need to do per bed unit or peak hourly outpatient transaction count. And I don't even know what that has to do with anything.

This is all energy consumption, right? Yeah. So here's the thing, right? The data centers, the new kind of... Yeah. a building type that has been thrown out. I do know that there are some architectural firms, I mean, taking my professional thing. I know like firms, because the energy consumption is just ridiculous amount that is required. So I do know that the firms that are designing AI data centers are looking into how they can generate more power. Right? This is so that the existing power doesn't get depleted. So I do know that there's a lot of technology being developed for that. So, you know, I know that the profession is gearing up to deal with this big monstrosity of building. That's going to come up. In terms of what the city can do, I do know like some, they have acquired lands in like, I don't know, like where there's nothing there right now, right? But there are opposition to that because of what it's going to do to the natural resources and so forth. Yeah, it's a question for the city if they want to

uh take such an action before it comes into right before even but you know it's just uh something that you want to think about yeah another thing that's interesting i want to ask you because you're talking about knowing a little bit more about it than i do my understanding was that these um ai buildings really don't have a lot of employees is that

Yeah, it's just a data center. It's just a storage. It's all like storage.

But that's sort of my point. If they don't have any employees, and what we're using is square footage and salaries of the employees there. If they don't have any employees, I don't know how we're going to algorithmically much than, anyway, that was my question. I just don't understand how that factors into how it's currently.

It's a tough question. Resource usage is probably a better way of

And that would be something then we'd want to be considering because that's what we right now are using is square footage and the wages of people. And if you only had one person there, no matter how much they earn, probably wouldn't do much. I mean, it doesn't do much for how many houses you need, right? One person. Let's put one person. Okay. They can live just about anywhere, but anyway, yeah. Yeah, I just wanted to, yeah. Go ahead.

There's something wrong. Well, those companies can.

The companies can, but then, you know, are they willing to spend so much money? Well, that's true.

They're building in San Jose, just for the record, right? They've got the mayor all That's true.

That's true. Well, maybe we don't have that problem. Okay.

No, but it's good to address it.

I think they should at least be aware of it. And if they do the study and find out, yeah, no way in heck anybody would do that here. Well, that's good. Cross your fingers. You know, it's fine. I would like to ask other questions, which is the whole below market rate manual. One of the things we said about our study session was to examine And so I was examining more than just these two items, like on page 19 of it, should the applicability and the payment rules, because there's all kinds of, that's on page 19. And there it talks about what it's applicable to, the housing mitigation program, the non-residential So I was just wondering, maybe these categories need to be, because if it's not been updated in a while, do we have other kind of buildings and things that we need to look at? But the payment one was even more interesting to me, because I understood that it's talking about when you pay your fees. The first paragraph A says you pay them when you get your inspection permit. But B is in the event that you're allowed to defer that, then you do it at first occupancy unless there's a negotiated development agreement. And then if it was something else. And then if it was C, all fees be deposited into the BMR fund. Well, that's, of course, that is. But anyway, I just thought that was interesting, like, Does it matter? I mean, because that's something that I know our city cares about is when does the money come in? Why don't we have more in our EMR, AHF fund? You remember all those questions, right? And I'm like, so this is like, oh, well, this would make it even more iffy. Like, well... That one is going to give it to us on the date of construction permits. That one's going to give it to us on the date of first occupancy. And this one's going to give it to us, well, look on their development agreement on page 10. It tells you when they're going to do it. So it's just getting more easy to compute, of course. But anyway, so these kinds of things, I'm thinking, are perhaps impactful. You can't tell on the surface whether they're impactful, right? It has to do with the timing of when we get the money and when we want it for something else. If we ever have it, can we ever use it for anything else? Because we don't know when it's going to be landing in our pocketbook. So I just wouldn't like to have somebody look at that piece of it. And then I've got others, so I will defer to another question from somebody else at this time.

Go back to the previous slide where they said 20% right. Another one on the table where they said Sure. Yes. This one. This one, right? Is this, if 20% all that's allocated for below market rate to nobody buys it, what happens to those 20%? Oh, good question.

So In the rare case, and I don't think this is actually what happened in the history of Cupertino, but if there was ever a low market rate ownership unit that for some reason just could not be sold, the developer, they have like six months or something like that to market. Even after then, there's no bites. The developer is allowed to sell it at market rate with no restrictions. However, the city We'll get the proceeds of the sale and the difference of that market rate price and the assumed BMR price. Meaning the developer would not see any windfall, right? So they would sell it to the market. They would sell it on the market and it would become an understated unit, but the city would get the proceeds of that.

Oh, that's nice.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So that's how we can make sure that people make a good effort to market that unit the right way. Yeah. Yeah.

But I don't think that there's an excess, right? I would think there is actually like, isn't there like a big waitlist?

Yeah. Of not finding a buyer. I think the only time when there's been like issues with actually like getting it sold is sometimes developers like to play this game where they say that our unit is so special. The windows are so nice and the lights are so pretty. So can we please, please increase the price? more and more, and I have to tell them, you know, you're selling it to people that are low income, so you can keep doing this, but you still don't have to sell those people eventually. And yeah, so yeah, kind of shooting themselves in the face.

Yeah, the DMR application, I saw some, it closes like in October of every year.

Yeah, yeah.

So, which means somebody who, a new, a resident who becomes, loses a job or their family situation changes. Yeah. like in November. So they have to wait almost the entire year to apply and get their claim processed. So is there a possibility for this to become like a year-round application process? And say maybe if people go through like a pre-qualification Whenever they can, they want to. And then get onto the list. And then if somebody's not eligible, they can just remove themselves from the list. But if some unit becomes available, you know, so it's like on a rotating basis rather than start and stop. Like if it's just one time application for a year, would it be like on a rolling basis?

This is a great question. I actually recently wrote a council information memo basically on different structures of VMR programs and the pros and cons. I think that we'll be publishing it soon. So we can wait when I get to publish it to talk about it more if you want. But the gist of it is there's pros and cons to that system as well, right? So on paper, yes, someone would be able to apply during a year-round system at any time.

And potentially if they had it.

really, really, really high priority. Let's say they're like, they already live in Cupertino, they already work in Cupertino, they're, you know, very, very low income and they're like a positional and perhaps they could. The thing to remember is with a waitlist that's open year round, those become like thousands and thousands and thousands of people long. So that's not necessarily a guarantee that they'll quickly get in. And then the structural difference in a year round system actually does kind of add administrative steps for applicants, right? So they will apply once to qualify to get on, and then they've got to apply kind of a second time to each individual property as the unit comes available, as opposed to having one single wait list that we can maintain for a year. It's really depending on policy-wise, which one you prefer to do. The one month one, it has a built-in refresh, so we don't have to do any purging. And generally speaking, people who are low income apply to be on it anyways, regardless if there's been a change in their income. But yeah, there's pros and cons to both. Actually, we should probably table this discussion as soon as the info mail comes out.

Yeah. Yeah. So for year-old one, you could have three windows. Maybe a shorter cycle. Four windows. Yeah, like every quarter or something.

Something so that it's more readily accessible to people who are qualified.

Yeah, so there's different ways to do it. So there's year-round. Where it's just always open. And there's one where it's like San Diego.

I think San Mateo does that.

It's like every three months. And then we do it once a year. Some places do it as needed. They only do it whenever the villas is completely run out. There's pros and cons to each one of them, to be honest.

You mentioned the San Mateo. They have the lowest homelessness rates, right? So there is this article in here that my boyfriend said. If there are tried and true systems that promote less homelessness in a house set up, then are there ways that we can look at what they're doing that we may be able to emulate and still feel like we have to bring it back to school?

We can. That's kind of what the study is doing. They're looking at best practices of other cities to see which ones have seen the most success in developing more affordable housing. And then they're trying to align that with the market, but also with our kind of state housing goals to see where's that middle sweet spot, right? What's still friendly to developers, but friendly to the city for our goals.

Yeah.

And part of that is looking at other cities and seeing what works. This is a great article. I'll pass it on. Oh, thanks. Yeah, sure.

Yeah. I came across this term, field option. Yes. What is it? I mean, you didn't mention that in your presentation.

Yeah. This kind of goes to alignment with state law. So a new state law that was passed is that cities need to have an option for if a developer wants to entirely fee out, meaning not provide any market rate levels, and instead just pay a really, really big fee instead, right, to our market rate fund. And we currently don't really have a separate calculation for that because this is a new state law, right? And so part of this update will be creating a fee out option because we are legally required to have one.

So this is mandated by the state?

Yeah, we are mandated by the state to have a fee out option.

Does that sound crazy to anyone besides you?

Yeah, I know.

If they fee out and they pay money and they would all do that, right? Many would. We don't have so much land that then they can just say, well, build them here. I mean, what you're not supposed to do, you're supposed to be having them throughout your outtown. They would never build any.

So perhaps for our methodology, we might ask a consultant to also look at land value costs, right? If they do decide to do a fee out and say, realistically, what will we need to do to acquire, right? So that would be something we could ask a consultant to kind of factor in.

The fee out cost can be high, right? So that it doesn't, it's pretty just them.

It is, but then still, we talked about this last time when we had the Who was there?

I don't know, somebody else was there. The legal, maybe it was the legal? Oh, Luke. Was it Luke? He's our assistant director.

So, we're talking about the state is telling us we need to increase more housing, but they're also giving them all these loopholes that the developers can get out of. So, why are they doing this? This is, again, another way out for the developers, you know?

So I heard someone say that, you know, like, they're a loose collection of people that all have different priorities. And so if it seems like they're doing consistent, that's because it's not consistent, right? That's because Yeah.

And I have learned a lot about that in the recent past that the laws don't, they don't always you know, merge with each other. This one is exactly the opposite of that one. And that's how we keep running into problems with our housing element. And the rise did that. They had SB 35, which is a different kind of wall together. And they were going to make 50% of their houses were going to be, excuse me, below market rate. And then they, The law got changed so that then they could reduce it, and they reduced it, and they reduced it. Now, the nice thing about it is the ones they are going to build, they say they're going to build first. So therefore, all of that construction that's going on right now maybe will be below market rate homes. But there's a whole lot of market rate homes that are going to be built instead. And so that's when I first understood completely how the laws don't really mesh too well with each other. Like density rules don't really help get density apartments. You get parking or not parking or whatever, but they can ask for all kinds of things, not houses. So it's, yeah, thank you. It's really not a, oh, yeah.

It's not easy at all. The last thing we also talked about how ADUs actually add to the, number of housing, right? Yes. But that's another loophole. This is something I'm hearing from contractors who are building additions to homes, extension of homes. They're applying to the city. I'm not talking about this. It's not in Cupertino, by the way. So this is a different city around the peninsula, you know, that They are building homes with additions, making the homes larger, but they are getting it as a ADU permit, which means they have a lot of leave-in, like, you know, the setbacks are less and all this stuff. So they're getting the proof as the ADU, but it's in fact not an ADU. It's just an addition to the existing home. So this is all, this is happening. I don't know.

I don't know about Cupertino. The ones that are across my house, they've been sold as four or five bedrooms with an ADU Yeah, and the idea was part of the house.

Yeah, so this is like, you know, so maybe the planning department was giving the permit for the, you know, they need to tighten up these things. I don't know.

The intersection of local and state law plays into account for this, right? I think it's called S.B., I don't remember. It's been a long time since I was a planner. But the gist of it was when I was a planner, they said every single family home by state law has to be able to do either an ADU detached or a JEDU attached. That is by right. And so, yes, there are some developments that are going on where it's like a single family home. It's like a really, really big . That's their JEDU. Right. That's the .

But then the city can just say, hey, I have an extra unit.

Then it's not actually an extra unit, right? And then they might be using it, right? It's just like another living room.

Because another interesting thing about the is that even notwithstanding that particularly awful problem is that even if they were all regular ADUs like they're supposed to be, They are counted for below market rate in the arena by a percentage. A percentage of them are considered below market rate and a percentage of them are considered market rate. When in fact, since none of them are actually income. They're not income. That means that anybody can rent them, not below market rate. So even though we get credit for them, and I guess I'm glad we get credit for something that we don't actually have. below market rate homes. Because in New York, you know, they pay for a closet and willingly pay a whole bunch. And I'm sure we could do that And that's why that's a little bit disingenuous, I think, on the part of the arena people letting us do that. But that's beside the point. I don't want to get into that too far because there are so many other things. Like when we talk about these big issues, I go, oh, well, but I do want to mention that within the below market rate manual itself, where you're talking about design requirements. I was going to add something. I just wanted to wait for you to be done. Okay. Within the market rate manual, it talks about design requirements. And that I think we might as well go ahead and change them because developers aren't doing them anyway. And they're using density bonuses to get out of them. Things like unit sizes and how many bedrooms you have. And the size of the building itself and then the shall be dispersed throughout the project. Shall be dispersed throughout the project did not work for Westport. They have a lovely 48 road building, but it's standalone. All the townhomes are separate from that. I'm going to assume that happened at Rise because their stuff is going to be separate, and they're building them first. That's not dispersed throughout the project. The time I really noticed it for the size of the bedrooms and the size of the units was with all these new townhomes that are being reviewed. At some point you go, oh, those are really big. really big houses, those townhomes. Oh, but oh, these are, they're still awfully big, but they're smaller. They're smaller than the, so all the townhomes that we've just now approved have different sizes for the median and moderate homes within, period. They do. And so it's like, why do we have that in our, we might as well strike that out of our manual because Partly you can't use it anyway, and because it's a little, I think it's even, back in the day when maybe they didn't have all those density bonuses, it's disingenuous to think that you can build things that are exactly the same size, and yet people are going to pay less for them, and somehow the government is going to subsidize the whole rest of it. It gets to defy your rational thinking about how people actually make their money when they're building things or how cities, I mean, how much do cities actually want to backstop people? Anyway, so that point is just this one here about the design requirements. And feeding into the how much do people want to, how much does the city want to backstop? How will the city backstop the payment for BMR owners when fire insurance prices exceed a reasonable limit? Now, one answer that I received was, oh, the HOA takes care of that. Like, oh, yes, have you ever dealt with an HOA? They're just people, right, in a housing complex and all that. And now you've got this many that are regular and this many that are the low market rate, and fire insurance rates, as we all know, keep going up every six months, or every year, however often you do it.

Do HOAs cover? I don't know if HOAs cover insurance.

HOAs, they don't cover insurance, right? I was told. when I ask the question. So I can't, don't dig deep on that, because I don't know. My question is, who pays for that fire insurance for below market rate homeowners when they start skyrocketing, which they are. And State Farm, for one, stopped even selling insurance. And then you have to go on the Fair Act, you know, to get your insurance at all if you live in any fire hazard kind of area. Just asking the question. Fire insurance, otherwise known as homeowner's insurance, which I think you usually have to get in order to get a mortgage, and there was a whole big write-up in here about you're going to consider this and this and this and this and this, and then you'll do this to it, and then you'll have the fair market rate. Mortgage for these folks. And I said, well, where is the home insurance in there? Because I had heard that the HOA would be negotiating that. And I brought it up because that's what they told me. By somebody. Not Nikki. Somebody said that. So I just wanted to say that I think that's a huge issue. I think it's a huge issue for the city. I think it's a huge issue for our below market rate program. And that it has to be thought through if it would be. and thought through, more than me, thinking about it. But I think it's one of the future .

Are there areas in Cupertino that fall under the fire hazard area?

I'm sure, yeah. Yes. I'm sure.

There are. There is. Where, where, where? Oh, near the- Ebblet Court. Exactly, yeah. Ebblet Court. The Ebblet Court.

is a new do you know where court is yeah the one on the the other stuff okay that falls within the new high fire hazard risk and that was one a lot of people are against that particular project i think it got approved that being said

No, I don't think so.

I don't think it's been cancelled yet. I mean, maybe somebody knows more than I do.

I couldn't comment on that one, to be honest. I'm on the loop for Avalanche.

Yeah, and that's fine, because we don't need to know all the answers. The thing is that we need to know. They were asking a question. I know that that one is a part of it, and I know that there was city council after city council. Yeah, I thought it was a window. it was i thought that was i thought it would prove too but that doesn't mean there isn't say maybe a lawsuit going on or like that lots of stuff happens after things are approved sometimes they never actually get bit yeah anyway but because of other things that go on so but these fire hazard area will need an approval by the local fire department it wasn't pretty any development in a fire hazard absolutely and it was

So it's been approved, which means the fire department has determined that in a time of fire, they can safely evacuate all the residents. True statement. I'm not saying that there's a lawsuit against it.

I'm just saying that it could be.

I think that area, I remember, like, I think one of the points that the neighbors had raised was, oh, they can't exit, but all the streets go out. I don't know. Anyway.

It's beyond our scope. We don't even answer, I just, yeah.

Questions, are there other cities in the fire zone? Yeah, I'm sure there are other cities. And there's more.

There's more that always have been in the fire zone.

Can we go to the public comment period?

Oh, yes, we can.

Looks like we have no speakers.

Okay.

Can we let the chair of those two

I have a question. She has a question.

Yeah. With respect to the different tiers, is it income adjusted? Are the BMR rates income adjusted?

Yes. You're talking about like rental rates that are charged?

Yeah, right. Like for the very low, it's a lower number versus the moderate.

Yeah, absolutely. So rental rates... There's a formula component, but the idea is housing is affordable to you if you're not paying more than a third of your monthly income to your housing. So they would make that an income bracket basically based off the AMI. So 30% to 50%, for example, for a very low income, that would constitute... Just off the top of my head, I think like up to like $71,000 in Cupertino. So you would take that number, divide it by 12 to get monthly, and then divide that again by three. And that's the maximum of very low income rental, for example, could charge.

This will be considered affordable today.

And they're all kind of broken down by that. Yeah.

uh last comment i asked so the consultant you said there is a rfp out yeah currently so currently currently so do we know when uh we will have so what is the scope of work determined for the consultant the scope of work is going to be number one looking at

This inclusionary housing requirement, suggesting a bunch of different prototypes for maybe how we could update this to get more very low and low income housing, right? Or just maybe develop more in general. And then also, they will be taking a look at our fee structure, seeing if there is a better methodology to calculate our fees to make sure that we are getting a convinced certain amount of fee to mitigate whatever I cannot get. Yeah.

Are they going to answer the question of how effective has this particular manual been? Because I think it's important to know how effective is this one and then find out what gears within it.

As much as I'd like to, we have to consider that we are in an ecosystem of a lot of different things. I don't know if I can point to exactly the manual and say, like, and this is the point where we stopped having all the housing because of the manual. If I could extrapolate on that year and say, like, maybe that year was 2020. I can think of something that stopped development that year, right? Or maybe that year was 2008. I can think of something that stopped development that year. It's kind of difficult to pick a single year and say, like, this is where the manual really started helping or really started hurting because we we exist in a larger ecosystem of... That's a really good point.

Thank you. I had not thought about the fact that we live in the... This manual lives in a bigger world.

Yeah.

Can I then ask a separate question that also I care about, which is on page 30, alternatives to the big low market rate requirements. And the very last one, it says, provide a plan... One of the options under an alternative from the contractor, an alternative from the contractor, rather than any of the stuff we've got in our menu, they would suggest an alternative. And one of the alternatives that's in here is to provide a plan for completion of the off-site BMR development. Prior to approval of the market rate project, the affordable housing plan shall include but not be limited to the following items. Oh, maybe I shouldn't be reading it to you. I should just be trying to say what it is. What they're saying is that they are building their market rate stuff. And yeah, they're going to give you your below market rate stuff, but that's going to come over here. At a different time. Off-site. This schedule can be done after their market rate. And to me, that's like, no. When they make that plan, like when they make their contingency plan, talking about when they're going to do this, kind of like, but The rise is doing now, rise is doing now. They are building their below market rate first. I think it should always be built first because those market rate people are simply not going to do it. And I only know that because it happens in real life and it happens here in our city.

Yeah. We can discuss that one with the consultant. Maybe you want to remove the ability to do a contingency plan. Bye. The one thing of caution is, I know this one is also a state-mandated one, the ability to do off-site. And so we want to make sure we don't run afoul of state law by saying we can't, right? So I would say we can look at it.

Okay. Are we going to define what an off-site is? Is it within a one-mile radius, five-mile radius?

THAT'S PART OF THE AFFORDABLE HOUSING PLAN THEY WOULD SUBMIT. YES, OUR DEVELOPMENT FOR OUR MARKET RATE HOUSING WILL BE LOCATED HERE AND WE WANT TO DESIGNATE THIS OTHER SITE FOR OUR AFFORDABLE AND THE TYPICAL REQUIREMENT WOULD BE TO DO THE AFFORDABLE FIRST AND THEN ALSO I GUESS FOR SOME REASON. We'll ask. We'll see what's legally defensible.

That's right.

You didn't have that in there.

I understand legally defensible.

Do we have any other study sessions before the consultant comes on board?

This is the study session that I'm also in. Maybe you can't, but the

How do we factor in the level of wages in this Schedule B? This says, you know, for office and research, it's $35.48. Yeah. And what all it says is that the per square, it says per foot. It doesn't say anything about level of wages. So I don't know if there's an algorithm that exists by which that $35.48. Yeah. Or how many people? How many people are hired at that higher rate?

It's not by how many people are hired. It's assumed that a larger facility will hire more people to staff it. But the way they decide on the way a wage impacts the demand on housing, that's kind of their market analysis that they provide, that the consultant does. So I don't have the math in front of me, but it is a formula for when you introduce new renters into the market, how much that shifts demand. Right, but shouldn't we mention it then, that it's something that we factor in? On the fee schedule? Sure. We try to keep the fee schedule kind of concise for the people who are paying them, because that doesn't quite help the developer calculate how much they need to pay us. That's kind of left for the study.

What's a warehouse? A warehouse? Yeah, it's $49.29 is their fee that they pay to build a warehouse. Do you know what that is?

Well, per square footage, right? So they would be paying... No, but what is the warehouse?

What would be a warehouse? If we looked around our city, what would be a warehouse? Would it be the public storage kind of thing?

A data center could be a warehouse. A data center could be a warehouse. What did you say? A data center could be a warehouse.

No, no, yes. I'm talking about right this very minute because this is already... See, this is in our old-fashioned one, which is based on square footage as opposed to AI. Anyway...

So I'm just wondering. Currently in our, I think, Title 19 19.030, something like that. There's a whole section called definitions where we define each and every single use case. I I'm going to go on her and guess because we're Cupertino, we incorporate data warehouse under the definition of warehouse. Data warehouse. And that's why we pulled out a separate definition, right, for self-storage, right? So that's a different.

Oh, I see. Yeah. The building code defines data warehouse?

Yeah.

Building code defines every type of building, what they are, what the occupancy classification is for every building.

I was thinking it's just an example. Like, if you just go down the corner and around the street, you'll find it. But there you go. There's a warehouse full of stuff, whatever it is. But you're thinking that this might be a data warehouse?

I think it might include data warehouse.

It could.

Yeah, I'm thinking that. Because we do have. This might explain the highest cost.

Okay, well, this has been very illuminating.

Any questions? I have one last question.

When it comes to the developers, does this mandate, whether city, state governed, usually deter developers or they see such a tremendous car while it's profits that this is just a part of the business?

Ideally, the whole idea behind doing this Nexus study is to make sure that we're not just throwing out a number that ends up becoming a government constraint for development. Because that's the idea with running these prototypes, so that we can make sure that the kind of housing that we want to see is still penciled out, so to speak. So ideally, if we do it right, no, it shouldn't be.

We move on to the next agenda item? Wait a minute. No? That was Perla's question. Okay. Sorry. I can close, but at the same time, I spent a lot of time thinking of these questions. Our bowls right now under HE 2.3.3 that you mentioned, Greg, that's 200 below market rate units over eight years. Yeah. Okay. And this one, The next one, 2.3.9, facilitate the development of 500 units in that time period, I assume. Anyway, that's a lot. That's a lot. And so I guess your question does come into play, which is does this suppress people coming in and saying they want to build here or...

So for context, that's from the housing element. Yes, it is. And we created quantifiable objectives for each of our strategies as a way to kind of set a baseline for what what we would consider the best implementation of any of these strategies. Theoretically, this is just an example, and of course we would never do this, but let's say we were to recommend a very, very minimal change to the program to the point where essentially nothing's different, and there are no additional low-income housing. Well, we would fail our own matrix that we set in the housing element, and so that would be an unacceptable recommendation. That's just to hold ourselves accountable, basically. Yeah.

Okay.

That's good.

Okay. I guess I will say, oh, let me just read this page. Okay. Thank you. I'm finished.

Thank you. I have no more questions.

If you guys are finished, you can motion just to close the session.

Okay.

I have a motion to close the discussion.

No, you don't need a motion.

Just kidding, no motion. Okay, no motion for that.

Next agenda item, staff and commission reports. I had one update. We had a mayor meeting on July 15th. We were supposed to go over all the updates from the previous commission meetings, but then it was decided to do just... the Crystal Award nomination. So there were a lot of nominations. We went over all the nominees and their accomplishments, and we all voted. Very excited. Sometime in October, I guess. In October, yeah. It's very exciting.

That was a fun one. I attended last year. It's so exciting.

So many volunteers. It's very inspiring. I know, it is. It's more inspiring than this. It's just amazing.

If you guys can, come out there. That dinner is basically thanking you all for your service. It's for you guys. It's for us. The commissioner's dinner? Yeah.

That's when that's when they give this to yeah, yeah, it's almost and I'm sober for the depreciation of course Yeah, we'll try to make sure Commissioner Jindy gets asserted.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, just yeah, you both know right? Commissioners in these design. Yeah. Oh, she's a boy. Out of practice. Yeah. Yeah. Commissary to resigning.

Oh, I'm so sorry. She's not here. I couldn't hear you. Sorry. Yeah, you said so.

That was copied to us, but not yet.

No, that's fine. Yeah.

So, yeah, she's coming out of that.

Are we nominated now, Commissioner?

You can.

Oh, you commission. So yeah, the recruitment, we've let the clerk's office know, and they'll be starting the recruitments once they've got the go-ahead, I think, from city leadership. Did I get that right, Lindsay? Sorry, one more time. You let them know that there's a vacancy right now in the housing commission and the recruitment will start pretty much once they get the go ahead. So let's see where you should. Yeah.

So hopefully could we have one by September?

I mean, I hope so. We'll see. We'll see. They have to get, they actually have to get vetted and confirmed by the city council. And I think city council is currently on vacation.

Yeah, that's right. Until September 3rd.

So maybe like, we'll see. Yeah.

But the four of us can do it.

Yeah. You guys got this.

I just want to talk about this one article. So it was in the Cupertino career on July 10th. And this is what I was referring to earlier with respect to Santa Clara, San Mateo rather, and Contra Costa having like the lower, lower rates compared to like the city of Oakland, right? So it's like the up to, opposite ends of the spectrum. And really, this particular one doesn't necessarily relate back to Pueblo de Chino specifically, but just talks about how the city draws more homelessness for various reasons and more access to public transport and resources and things like that, mobility. There's also more encampments. But what really stood out to me from this article is really the San Mateo example, which is they have more coordinated effort to prevent people from from becoming homeless in the first place. Yeah. And they allude to the county center for center on homelessness, which really consolidates all of these efforts that we hear talk about, but I'm actually not familiar enough to know whether we have something like that, which is, you know, that center on homelessness. Kind of, yes.

We attended that whole thing, Santa Clara County. They have a whole section. Yeah, it's called CRC.

Yeah, they continue.

Continuous care. Because, you know, it's not a successful care. Right, yeah. Because they talk about one centralized unit or governing body that does lower utility rate plan getting connected with the right legal services, health services, and, you know, and, you know, rental assistance, all of that. So I just, I wonder if we can maybe make our resources more accessible somehow. Maybe it already is. I just don't know. Definitely.

When it comes to, like, homelessness, definitely, like, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Like, something about, like, the retention rate for, like, a homeless prevention program It's so much better than it is when you bring someone back from the streets who's been out there for years. And definitely when we were talking about anti-displacement, something that was in the subtext of that is it's also homeless prevention. When you prevent someone from being displaced, you're also preventing them from becoming homeless. The good news is we tried putting that on the city work plan, and then we were also making capacity for those kinds of programs in our own funding program. So to be seen, it may be coming back. And yeah, we may have things to report on that. Yeah.

Am I able to just share? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. This cut part of the article, but at least it can give us a little glimpse. Oh, of course. And we can maybe like roll the article for the bottom part, that cut out? Sure, yeah.

Because I think the city of Cupertino has all these programs, right? Like, I'm going to be here for a while. People will come to this valley. Yeah. The legal. The question I've always had is, how many people know about it?

Yes.

Right? Yeah. So I personally don't know. I know about these things because I'm here, and I'm hearing about them. So that is my question. I don't know the answer to it. So if the city could do more outreach, maybe make it, you know, like, okay. hearing about all these kids, high school kids doing all this amazing thing, right? Put it out to the high school students, you know, hey, we want you guys to do outreach for the city, you know, this is one of the opportunities we can have, you know, go and spread the news, you know, to go to the senior center or knock on doors, I don't know, you know, some form of outreach. just so people know that this is available.

Yeah, that it's available. So that's why. I think you've been highlighting it in our local newspaper, right?

Yeah.

Some folks actually pick it up and read it.

But you're reading. Which paper is this? Cupertino Courier. Cupertino Courier, okay. Because there was also an Outlook. Oh, yes. An Outlook magazine that comes from Moncler or something. But I wanted to also... say that when that's why we're going to mislead her she had a brave lot of input um on the bull market right yeah because she was living in the bull market so she understood how that works and one of the things she mentioned um nikki was that um leading somewhere and it was a group that came together to talk about these kind of issues um and i don't now remember anything about it, I'm sorry to say, but I don't know if you do, because we, the city, apparently are part of making that happen, which is a form of outreach to various people who might need that. So yes, thank you for bringing it up, but it is useful to find out that not that many people, except those who are working may necessarily know Because it doesn't affect that. If it doesn't affect you, sometimes you read it and then it's gone and you're more back into what's affecting your life, whatever it is. I mean, there's lots of things going on in anybody's life.

So we want to avoid discussing this too much because we're starting to run up against a Brown Act issue because this item is not agendized. Oh, okay.

Okay, that's a good point. All right. Can we adjourn the meeting?

No, the setting.

Oh, okay. Should we do a future agenda setting? Maybe this is one of the topics we could set.

Sure.

A future agenda? Talking about outreach events. Outreach of city services for people who need them, low-income, extremely low-income people.

Yes, we can have a future agenda.

Okay. Do we need to have a motion for that? Sure.

No, no, we should be good.

Okay. For adjournment, do we need a motion or? No. Okay. Okay, so it's a meeting? Right. Time's at 7 o'clock. Meeting closed.