County Council - workshop

All righty. All right, as you can see, Chairwoman Cox is not here, so I've been given the gavel for the night in the absence of Tom Ardette, who's our vice chair. So this is a council workshop, and I'll defer to my colleagues if we want to start off with a prayer. If anybody want to lead us in prayer real quick, we can do that before we get the meeting started. So since I'm looking at Watts, I guess I'll just turn it over to Watts.

All right, that sounds good.

Everybody can stand, please. Dear Heavenly Father, I just want to thank you for this beautiful weather we've enjoyed today, the low humidity. We thank you for bringing us all together tonight for this very important meeting to talk about workforce housing. and affordable housing. We thank you for all the leaders in the room, those that sacrifice for the areas they represent. And just look over us and give us wisdom as we listen tonight and we plan for the future here in York County. In your name we pray this prayer. Amen. God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

All right, I'm sure there's a couple more people maybe trickling in from upstairs. As I look around the room, I see a lot of familiar faces. I see one of my high school classmates I hadn't seen in a while. I see some friends from the neighborhood, Chad Williams, a former county council member is here, some county staff, and people from all over York County. We're ecstatic to have everyone come in and present us with the study. I think it was fitting to have me lead the meet tonight because workforce housing and affordable housing is one of the things that I've talked about for a long time, and it's good to see that we're getting some traction and getting some conversation around this topic. Looking forward to what the study says and how we can take action as a council to implement it over the coming days and months. I see the mayor of York is here with us tonight as well. Chamber members and some other partners throughout the community. So again, welcome to our chamber. And I've been told to turn it over to Mr. Randy Emler, who will kind of get things kicked off and lead us in the meeting tonight.

Thank you very much, members of council. It's a pleasure to be here. I would like to recognize we do have a lot of elected officials here with us this evening. So if you don't mind, if you are an elected official or a member of the Catawba Regional Council Government's Board of Directors, the Development Corporation Board of Directors, or the Catawba Regional Workforce Board of Directors, they've all played a role in this. Would you please stand and be recognized? Thank you very much for being with us this evening. It's our pleasure to present the findings of our study. This has been going on for almost a year now, and we're very excited to have Jeff Souzer, who is a principal with Community Scale, a leading workforce housing consulting firm that We were fortunate to attract to this project. Jeff's going to go through the findings specific to York County, but also as may be applied across the region. After he speaks, we'll have a period of Q&A. And Mr. Chairman, I know I think this is the only mic, so if anybody does have a question, it would probably be easier for them to come to the podium. ask the question, then maybe return to their seat, or however you want to run this. I'm not exactly sure. And then Jeff can respond in like kind to whatever questions we may have. Or if there's another way you prefer to run that. But without further ado, I'd like to get into the study results as they apply to York County. And Jeff, we welcome you.

There you are.

Thank you, Randy. Thank you, counselors, and apologies to everyone back here. The microphone is pointed this way, so I'll try to turn and address you guys as well, because I think the audience for this report is everyone in the region, everyone who contributed and participated, so I'm very excited to share the results. So again, my name is Jeff Souser with Community Scale. We're a planning firm that specializes in housing studies market analysis uh... we operate at the regional scale frequently so this is really in our sweet spot to think about these issues at a multi jurisdictional multi-county Now we've divided the work we've started at the regional level and then have zoomed down to the county level. So we're going to each of the four counties that are part of the report. The study to present the findings will then later produce in the next couple of months reports for specific jurisdictions and areas within those counties. So there'll be more to come. The report is going to be posted next week. The county reports will be posted next week on the COGS website along with a link to a data dashboard that we've built to support this effort. So you'll see a lot of data. In the report, we've got that data available in interactive format. You can download the graphics, you can download the data for the county, and also those sub-geographies as well. So you can drill down into the data and share that with other folks so they have access to it. Also, what you'll see now in this report is a snapshot in time. It's a static report, so it's showing the latest data as we had it now. That data dashboard will provide ongoing updates so you can track some of these trends moving forward to support planning efforts across the region. at the draft to say that report as a draft on it as randy said we're we're wrapping up wanted to keep the draft stamp on there because we're still sharing it with the county's we haven't released it everyone yet we're still finalizing uh... these reports for next week and then we're still working through the subject reports later so it's worth it final stretch i said what you see in front of you is the report itself uh... we have executive summaries distributed around the room so that all the world has been most my time talking about the executive summary which summarizes the findings and they'll get into the other sections of the report uh... which i think you'll be listening to screens you have copies up here we'll see it up there as was introduced before uh... the focus of the study is is to understand the workforce housing story in the Catawba region and also in the four counties and the sub-geographies from there. So we asked ourselves a series of questions as we got into this. How does housing and workforce work together? What is the relationship? I think a key perspective we're bringing to this study is that there's an economic development dimension to housing. That jobs and housing are integrally related and you can't have one without the other and in fact housing is really the piece that needs more focus to keep up with the job growth that we've seen in the region. So we'll think about demographic trends and housing development trends. We do some market analysis. We think spatially about where in the four counties it makes the most sense to build different types of housing given the strength of the market in different locations, access to infrastructure and other things like that. And then we'll conclude with a policy or a strategies toolkit that suggests ways you could, the different communities could consider addressing some of these through policy and investment. That was a component we added to the project because through our stakeholder interviews, we got a lot of questions about, well, what could we do about this? Not what should we do, that's up to the local governments and citizens, but what could we do to respond to some of these issues? So we've laid that out in a menu of options. It's certainly not a mandate from the COG, it's very much just a reference as different counties and municipalities and jurisdictions think about how they'd like to attack this problem, what are their values, and how do they want to apply those here. So to start, as I said before, housing and employment are very integrally related, especially as the region grows. It's just no longer tenable for people to commute from one end of the region to the other to get from home to work. So you really have to start to co-locate those things more than you had in the past. So this map shows the typical commute times In this case, the number of residents that commute over 45 minutes to get to work. So the darker the area on the map, the longer people's commutes tend to be. You can see York County has some of the shortest commutes, especially because, as we'll see, there's a fair number of people who both live and work in York County. I don't think, I mean, a lot of people drive out, a lot of people drive in, but different parts of the county have different mixes of housing and jobs. We want to think about to what degree do the jobs that we have and the housing that's available nearby align, and are they meeting our economic development goals? At the end of the day, we need to have the right mix of housing for the jobs that we have now but also the jobs we'd like to attract because employers are telling us, and we asked through a survey, they're looking at the housing supply when they're thinking about where to invest as much as they're looking at other incentives and infrastructure and workforces and a piece of their infrastructure too, and they're less likely to invest in places that don't seem to have the housing that would support the workforce they need to hire. uh... the report focuses on the uh... middle-income brackets are familiar with area median income and i much of the analysis focused on eighty two hundred fifty percent and i we look at lower incomes and higher incomes as well but the reason to start there is because below eighty percent uh... there are a lot of programs and funding streams federal level for example that support reading workforce housing below that income level. When you get above 150% AMI, and that's market rate housing, the market's delivering housing those people can afford. In between, many of those folks are left behind. They don't qualify for programs that support housing, and they can't afford the housing that the market naturally produces. And this is also the sweet spot in our workforce. the different industries that already exist in the region, and that we'd like to attract more of, they're paying salaries in that range as well. So I think that has been an under-analyzed segment of the workforce, we wanted to focus on that. As I mentioned before, we divided the county up into a number of sub-areas, and we'll highlight many of those throughout the report, and many of them will also get their own report to provide data that digs deeper. So in general, York County, the region overall, but especially York County, is seeing a lot of job growth and has for some time. In fact, the jobs are growing faster than households by about 20% since 2010. So that's a great thing. It's a great economic development story. But it also means that you need to catch up with the households and the employers, the employees. And so as job growth outstrips household growth, you start to rely more and more on importing workers from elsewhere in the region. And the further they are, the less likely they're going to want to make that commute. So we've heard stories about job retention struggles with employers where the employees just couldn't handle the traffic anymore to get to where their job site was. Or people working in one location preferred housing farther away, and it made them less likely to take that job. we really try to get the balance right between housing production and job creation. And more and more employees, 43% told us they're seriously looking at this as a critical factor when they're thinking about investment decisions, where they're gonna invest next, and whether or not there's housing available for their workforce. A demographic trend that really stood out to us, and this is one that we see nationally that we certainly saw in other parts of the region as well, is that the population is getting older. So the graph there, the red line, shows the share of the population age 65 plus. These are people that are aging out of the workforce. That's rising as a share of the total population. And then the share of the population age 25 to 34 is stable or declining slightly. And we'll break that out by community later. So that's not necessarily a sustainable pattern as you start to see fewer people, more people aging out of the workforce than an agent into it. And furthermore, for that 65 plus population, South Carolina in general, but especially Lancaster County and York County are seeing a lot of in migration of seniors moving from the north, moving from higher cost markets. They're attracted to the weather, to the taxes, to the quality of life. So that's adding a lot more. Senior population, it's also creating additional competition for housing across the county. So we've seen more of that in migration than is typical nationally, but not as much as we're seeing in places like Asheville, Hilton Head, and Lancaster has a little bit more than New York does. So as we think about these shifting demographic trends, I mean, if you think about we're seeing more smaller households, we're seeing more seniors, we're thinking about how to attract more young people and early stage workers. We look at the housing stock to understand to what degree is it offering the full range of workers and residents the type of housing they would be looking for. And so in York County, 69% of the housing stock is detached single family, so standalone homes. And nearly three quarters of the housing stock is three plus bedrooms. So generally larger homes. It's great for families with kids, growing families, but it's too much house for a young professional or someone who hasn't started a family yet. And it might be too much house for a senior that's interested in downsizing potentially. The number of single person households has increased by 4,000 in the past decade, and 3,000 of these are seniors living alone. So again, a growing market for a new type of housing that is not all that prevalent at the moment in York County. And the fastest growing age cohort is that 65 plus population. So not everybody wants to downsize. In fact, most seniors don't want to downsize. But for those that do, providing that opportunity within the community would help them stay where they've lived their lives. And so the market, I mean, we've seen lots of housing construction as we've traveled the four counties. We all know about a lot of the housing starts that are on the books and coming out of the ground. And so the market is delivering some of the housing that's serving families. We're seeing some apartments in certain places, lots of single family homes. But there are certain segments of housing that we would that would be attractive to this these segments of the workforce that the market doesn't provide naturally at least at affordable rates because missing middle housing types of these are the duplexes or townhomes or smaller apartment buildings often that make a lot of sense as infill if you're in an established neighborhood that already has access to infrastructure and amenities adding some more housing into the mix that provide some of those smaller units is a good way to add more options for more housing type of more household types. But to do that today, just looking at the cost of construction, it could cost as much as half a million dollars to build a house just from scratch on a single lot somewhere in an infill lot in New York County. We can work that down through regulatory changes and other strategies to get that to be more affordable, but it can be out of reach without partnerships with governments, with zoning, with cities. To unlock some of these other housing types that the market's not naturally producing requires some policy attention and some careful thought. When we think about York County, just like all the other counties in the region, it's certainly not a homogenous place. There are different types of communities. There's rural parts of the county. There's much more developed parts of the county. And so in each case, we would expect to see different types of housing being built. Not one size fits all. But in general, certain themes are that we need, just across the board, we need more housing choices, more options built in ways that fit into the communities that they're added to. acting with his infrastructure available to an unincorporated your county where there is an infrastructure their ways to to add housing types uh... that are served by septic might be lower density but you can still at their and some of the the downtown areas like this try to build, you could add some of those housing types in and around downtown areas. We'll talk about amenitized areas, places with services, things to do. Those are the kinds of environments that a lot of the young workforce is really looking for. And so adding housing in those locations takes advantage of much of the infrastructure that you have and helps parts of York County compete with other parts of the region that would otherwise maybe be more attractive to some of these folks. And then there's a longer list later we'll get to, but one question we were asked is if you wanted to start somewhere, you can't do everything all at the same time. You've got to prioritize. You've got to get going on solutions to this. Some of the themes, some of the areas to focus could include thinking about zoning and regulations. Does the zoning in a particular area support the type of housing that we would like to see? The comprehensive plan process as a way to analyze that in more detail. transportation and infrastructure as we add more housing and jobs we start to see traffic problems are we locating new investments in housing where there's capacity are we thinking about adding capacity in places where we'd like to unlock additional housing opportunities Are there enough options out there? Can we help people? So one thing we've talked a lot about in some places that are already built out, some of these downtown areas where there's existing housing, is let's make sure we are taking care of the housing that we do have. So in addition to finding ways to add housing, we also want to take care of the housing we have, help renovate, help people stay in their homes and not be displaced, and that becomes particularly important as housing costs rise and people don't want to move if they don't have to. Then on the household side, It's harder and harder to qualify for a mortgage. It's never been harder to buy a home. It's the first time home buyer these days. But thinking about how to help prepare people to become homeowners when they're ready is a good way to help local folks in particular make that transition to homeownership. And then continue the dialogue. public sentiment, public communication. I think this process has been very helpful, getting a diversity of folks in the room from all across the county, and we've had meetings like this in the other counties too, bringing together the different jurisdictions and municipalities and the county leadership to have a conversation and think about what you would like to do about this. Like I said before, these are some options to think about, but it's up to you to make the decision about how to act. Okay, so that's the overview executive summary. I won't go through every slide in quite as much detail, but I want to go through the data section and a couple of the other sections where we went a little deeper on some of these questions to help illustrate what the points are and how things vary from place to place across the county as well. So, York County is the job center. for the the region their job centers throughout the region but most of the jobs are located in your county we've seen twenty percent job growth over the past eight or ten years but it continues to be a fast growing county that we think about the jobs in terms of different sectors as well every job is different so these are these are themselves still summaries of still more sectors and occupation types but it can be helpful to think about Service sector jobs, blue collar, education, knowledge sector, these all connote different job types, and in some cases might be different income levels, different types of households and workers, and so we need to think about each of those. To the extent we want to grow these sectors, what are the distinctive types of housing and price points and locations that those workers would like to live, and make sure we're providing that. So each of those sectors or groups of sectors has a different pay scale. So this is showing generally what the salary levels are for the jobs in York County by sector. So knowledge sector jobs tend to pay a little bit more. There are higher and lower paying jobs in every sector, though. So every new facility has a range of income types and needs a range of housing types and price points to support it. And then each sub-geography within the county has a different mix of jobs. Some are major job centers like Rock Hill, Fort Mill. The North York County area includes Fort Mill, TK, and some unincorporated areas. So we've constructed a few areas that don't perfectly correspond to municipalities but represent certain market areas as we understand them, just to help think about trends that might spill over across multiple jurisdictions. Where other communities like TKK, Clover, and York have fewer jobs, but different growth profiles. So the story is very different from place to place in terms of how many jobs, what the job growth story is, and what the distribution is by sector. here in more detail is that demographic on the left projected historical projected share the population age twenty five to thirty four overtime you can see the lines are all headed down or kind of flat Different places are in very different positions on that chart. So TKK has the fewest folks aged 25 to 34. The York area has the most, and that line actually is trending up a little bit. So it's a slightly different story in each of these communities across the county. But on the age 65 plus side, nearly everyone is trending up and to the right. Although again, it's slightly different slopes, slightly different patterns. But I would say in nearly all communities across the region, this is one of the headline demographic stories to think about. As we think about demographic trends, changing household structures, that will inform how we think about what types of housing we need to add more of or where should we focus. In York County, we're seeing about a flat-lined number of married couples with children. We're seeing a little bit more seniors living alone, as we've talked about. Generally, the younger households have higher incomes than the older households. So as you get older and you're aging in place, you might be more vulnerable to displacement and it might need more support staying in your home. But younger people also, many of them don't have enough money to get into a home. So we need to think about each of these household profiles and what is their story and what sort of support do they need to land here in York County and find employment. As we think about that, so thinking about those demographic trends, trends towards smaller households, trends toward older households, the housing mix that we're working with, the bottom section of this structure type, most of the housing units in the county are detached single families. So standalone homes, as I said before, And there are a growing number of multifamily units, fewer of those missing middle kind of one to two family or two to four family multifamily units. So there's not enough alternative to detached single family, especially if these trends are likely to continue, which we expect that they would. On the housing size side of things, there's a lot of larger units and not quite as many smaller units. Our general take is you need to think about adding different types, alternatives to single family, and adding smaller units in particular. And then there are not so many rental options. And we also look at that as well. So if you look at multifamily, you look at smaller units, there's not as many ownership options there. So can a senior that's downsizing buy something that's smaller? And then are there rental options on the other side of the coin? Making sure that all these are provided so the different people we're trying to attract to our workforce have options within the county to move. So this is that commuter map again, showing across the region where folks are gonna be more or less likely to find housing near their jobs. So Rock Hill has a lot of places with pretty short commute times as you get out to rural areas and between cities, those commute times stretch. So this chart, I'll just summarize the main point. What we try to do here is compare how many people live in the county and work in the county, and where are they coming from and headed to on both sides of that. So in terms of the people that work and live in York County, Most of them work elsewhere, but not an overwhelming number. In other counties, there's a much higher number of local folks that commute out for work. So you have a reasonable number of people that both live and work in York County. And then of the people that work in York County, in fact, most of those people are York County residents. This is good. I mean, to say it's good just means your jobs, housing balance is Within REACH, I think there are a lot of people that have been able to find an opportunity to live and work in York County. I think you want to build on that, because to the extent that jobs are growing faster than households, for example, the balance might start to shift if you don't keep up building the housing types that the growing workforce is looking for. But there is some level of balance in York County, especially compared to other parts of the region. So the way to keep score on this front is to track job growth alongside household growth, which is just growing population, and then building permits, which can be a leading indicator of household growth. And as you can see by this chart, those three lines are largely converging over the past 10 to 15 years. And to keep one growing, you kind of need to keep the other growing too. So this is not the case in every part of the country, but you seem to have a relatively balanced growth trajectory, although the jobs are accelerating a little bit faster than the households. So the balance is not going a little bit out of alignment. And then as we think locally, what is that jobs to housing balance? And is that in line with what we'd like to see from an economic development standpoint? So we think about a jobs housing ratio. So for example, in Fort Mill, there are 15,000 jobs and about 11,000 housing units. You have slightly more jobs than units. And by contrast, just one row down, TKK has 2,000 jobs and 5,000 housing units. And so in other parts of the county and the region have somewhere in between. There's no magic jobs housing balance that everyone should strive for. It depends on what your goals are, what your community's role is in the regional economy. It's perfectly appropriate to have more jobs or more housing units. But to the extent that the balance is way out of whack, you can start to be vulnerable to maybe being overly reliant on a certain type of housing. And that's your whole economic base. And if something destabilizes, you're in trouble. So from just diversifying your economic tax base, that's one perspective to think about finding a balance there. But again, this is a local decision. We just want to show the data and let people think about how they'd like to grow in the future. Thinking about affordability relative to the For here, the people that already live in these communities is one barometer. So in general, like other counties in the region, the median income in the county is about enough to afford a typical home. So if you're spending about 30% of your income or less on housing. So that's good in some parts of the country that those lines have diverged long ago. COVID, as you can see by that gray bar, As we all know, scramble the housing market a little bit, but it's relatively stable by this measure. But when you drill down from place to place in that chart below, some places are more or less affordable based on the incomes that are within them. So some of the higher priced markets like the areas in North York County or the Lake Wiley area, for example, have a high median income. And so the people that live there can afford the high housing prices. Other areas have housing prices that are starting to outstrip what the local incomes can afford. So the story varies from place to place. Some places are feeling more pressure than others as the housing market tightens up. We look at vacancy rates, a little bit all over the place. But in general, in most places, the vacancy rates are lower than you might like for homeownership and also for rental, just suggesting that the market is tight. There's not quite enough slack. And that can start to drive up prices over time. So as vacancy rates go down, it signals that the inventory that exists has been saturated and we might need to build more. So just one of the ways to track the health of the market over time. And this is a measure of what's been built or at least permitted based on the data available to us in this process. And so one notable trend is leading up to COVID, the single family development across the county was really continuing to track up more and more rapidly. Since COVID, it started to trail down a little bit. It seems to have, the decline seems to have potentially stopped and maybe we're stabilized there, but we're at a lower level of production than we were pre-COVID. Whereas On the multifamily side, the dip that happened during COVID seems to have reversed, and now we're starting to see a trend for more multifamily permits moving forward. So this suggests that the market is starting to respond to some of these trends that the demographics would be pointing to. We talked about the different income brackets that we analyzed for this process. This breaks down what the income levels are that correspond to those three middle income groups, how much those groups have changed over time, and what is a home price and a rent that they can afford. And the prices include utilities. These measures are usually including things like utilities, taxes, basic housing prices in many cases. Looking at this chart, each county has a different story that comes through. What we saw in the data for York County is that the growth is really higher at the higher income levels. And the 150% and higher AMI group is growing at 24% since 2021, fastest growing group in the county. And the households earning below 80% AMI are only growing 7%, so among the slowest growing. So whereas in some counties we see a bit of a disparity where there's growth at the top and the bottom, in York County it feels like it's largely just an income growth, more or less across the board, and the lower income folks are growing more slowly. So as we try to put some of these pieces together, this chart in yellow shows the distribution of wages. It relates to the chart we showed earlier. And then the blue bars show the cost of housing, just looking at recent listings over the past several years. And the lighter the shade, the more bedrooms, the larger the unit. And like other parts of the county, but not every part of the county, a typical home, the home prices are higher than what the wages, for a single job anyway, could afford. Now we all know that many households have multiple earners and your household income is different than your salary. And so if you start to put multiple jobs together, that brings your income up and you can afford a house that's on this distribution potentially. But an important part of the workforce, and in fact the part that we're not growing enough of right now, the 25 to 34 age group, they're gonna be less likely to be married, to be partnered, to be multi-income. So they're trying to make ends meet on a single income. And if that's the case, many of them will be left behind. They'll have to find a different place to live than York County because a lot of those jobs are not paying enough to afford much of the housing. So here's an example of some of those jobs. So on the chart on the bottom, this shows some typical jobs that are important to our community and society in different ways and what they pay. And typically, those pay scales are not enough to afford many of the housing types that are available in the market today anyway. The chart on the top shows cost burden by income level. So the lower incomes at the top and the higher incomes at the bottom. And the red is households that are paying 30% more or 50% more, 50% of their income on housing. They would be considered cost burden, severely cost burden. They're really struggling to make ends meet. And those are the folks at risk of displacement. That's a much more prevalent story below 80% AMI, but it does start to happen above 80 and 100 as well. Okay. Throughout this process, we ran multiple rounds of stakeholder engagement. We did virtual meetings throughout the process. We were here two times for rounds of focus groups. We visited all four counties in that process. We talked to people representing a variety of perspectives from municipal workers and staff, economic development agencies, employers, real estate professionals, service providers to get the ground truth of our data and try to find what stories were resonating with them through their experience on the ground. So this section, and we'll go through it in great detail, summarizes what we learned, focusing in particular on what we heard were some of the barriers to producing some of the housing we're talking about, maybe some of the consequences of not having enough housing, and also some of the opportunities to build from across the region. And so we sorted that information into seven different categories. which structure the way these notes work. So we looked at zoning and development standards and to what degree does the regulatory environment not allow the types of housing that the demographics would suggest, the employers would suggest we need more of. And this is something that as communities are reworking their zoning, doing their comprehensive plans, it's an easy way to think about how we might make adjustments to unlock more of the housing types that we would like to see if that's the community's choice. The development economics in general are making it more and more challenging to deliver housing that people can afford at all income levels. It just has never been more expensive. The cost of construction, the cost of land, different fees, impact fees, permitting timelines. We heard a lot of stories about the ways that these influence how much it ends up costing to sell a home, for example, how they trickle into that final price point and suggestions for how to move some of those. And then on the demand side, so from the perspective of the households, are there enough options out there? We've talked a lot about that. Is there a place to move up to? Are there choices for each stage of life, from a starter home up to what's called a move up option, options for seniors? Do we have housing that represents the full range of ages and household types that we see in the region, in the county? is the household finance story uh... it's harder for homeowners to harder for us to buy homes uh... there are more financial challenges in people's lives today than there have been in the past that compromise their ability uh... to get approved for a mortgage for example they're contributing costs such as child care transportation that can squeeze people's ability to afford housing heard a lot about that from multiple perspectives Transportation and traffic, infrastructure are making it harder to reach job sites that you need to be living closer to work or you might not be able to keep the job that you've got. And that's complicating employers' ability to hire and to attract the workers they need. And then we talked a lot about just how to communicate this. What are people saying out in the community? What are different stakeholders' perspectives on this? And the need for, if not, we're never going to have total consensus on these issues, but can we get aligned? Can we have coalitions that start to move in a direction that everyone feels is the right direction to try to move the needle on some of these issues? at the employer survey that release we really wanted to get the perspective in detail employers and how they think about housing workforce for their workforce and many of them reported candidate job candidates and employees have a hard time finding housing that work for them some have lost employees or candidates we heard some some employers have scary turnover rates that that are in many ways tied to how far they have to reach across the region to find employees and those folks just can't bear the long commute that's required forever interestingly we we forty five percent of respondents So we asked people to what degree did they provide housing assistance. One common option when people are relocating a worker to the region is to give them a relocation grant or something, some kind of signing bonus that helps them buy a home. We asked how many employers did things like that, or if they felt that was appropriate for them. And 45% did not consider providing housing resources. They might agree that it's important for someone to do it, but they didn't feel like it was their responsibility. These employers are not developers. They're building company housing, necessarily. We saw this as an opportunity to engage some of these employers more, not to say that they need to be building housing for their employees, but many of these problems will take partnerships with folks like them, and maybe they aren't at the table yet, and that's why they have that perception. They haven't been engaged about potential partnerships, ways that we can work together to try to create options to support their workforce. So to try to make this a bit more tangible, we did some household profiles. So we looked at six different hypothetical workers in the community. These are jobs that we have here in York County and across the region. We calibrated the typical wages to what you would see in York County specifically here and gave these folks a few household characteristics to just illustrate how well the existing housing market does or doesn't serve these people. So the first one is someone, so this is an electrical power line installer, blue collar worker earning $106,000 a year. They don't have a lot of debt. That 30% of their income is more than enough by their measure to afford housing. They can afford quite a few options across the county. So the pink dots are for these maps. listings that have come up in the past two or three years that meet the criteria this person is looking for. So if you're trying to attract this worker, those are the options that are available to them. It's quite a few choices. So great. They're looking for a three to four bedroom home they want to buy. They have a high income. There are many choices in York County. uh... by contrast i think we all know that not everyone's also budget is is so clean and low-cost we wanted to just reflect what happens when you start to have some real world competition on your household budget so this is an example of in this case a registered nurse ninety one thousand dollars a year so similar to that previous income but here with two children trying to buy a smaller starter home uh... but when with children comes child care costs Typical expenses like car payments and student loan debt and utilities, groceries. You start to add these up and try to make an actual calculation of what's left over when you've covered all your obligations to actually afford the housing that you pay for. If we were to just say, well, this person makes $91,000 a year, if they could afford 30% of their income, that would equate to about a $330,000 home. There are a lot of those available, no problem. This person can only afford maybe more like $180,000 home because of all these other competing costs, many of which the bank sees too, and won't give them a mortgage for more than that. if they could afford it. So when you start to factor in the real-world constraints, things get tougher. And when we talked to employers, they said that the three costs, the three most expensive factors in their employees' lives were child care, transportation, and housing. And so there are indirect ways to support people's ability to find housing and employers' ability to attract workers that might address making transportation more widespread and affordable. And same thing with child care, just recognizing those costs factor into people's comes to pay for housing as well people looking to rent we heard it talking to employers a lot of times there bringing someone in from somewhere else maybe that person's coming by themselves for a year and then they're gonna bring their family later they're not gonna buy a house when they first get here are there opportunities to rent in the meantime opportunities that that in some cases the issue is are there opportunities to rent that are a nice enough unit some other some parts of it the community have they have rentals but they're hard to find it might not be desirable they're older buildings uh... they're not advertised your county has highest number of options for someone like this is someone in about a hundred three thousand dollars a year facilities manager working at one of the manufacturing facilities for example uh... there are a number of options it would work for them so again your county does have some attractive rental options that meet the needs of some of the workforce. Thinking about downsizers, we know in the region there are a lot of purpose-built 55 plus or senior housing developments. Lancaster County has the most, but to the extent that someone doesn't want to live in one of those communities or can't afford to, what degree does the open market offer ownership opportunities for a senior that wants less house on less land than they had before so if you take all the listings over the past three years and start to filter just those that are three bed two bath just those that are less than 18 inches square feet quarter acre or less built in the past few decades so it's more likely to be accessible to them and we're down to four percent of the listings that are out there so no surprise that they would just stay in the house they're in rather than try to compete for the 4% that meet their needs moving forward. one important consideration especially for young workers and downsizers are looking for this as well is not just as the community have the housing unit that i'm looking for and the price point that i'm looking for but isn't in the type of place that i want to live increasingly young professionals for example i'd like to live in a neighborhood that has things to walk to amenities walkability cultural activities you don't need to be we're not trying to create a bunch of charlotte's everywhere doesn't have to be at that level of intensity But are there things to do to promote a quality of life that people are looking for so that this county competes with those other alternatives that these people have available to them? And then furthermore, is there infrastructure can we build in those locations as well? but here's an example someone earning hundred sixty two thousand dollars a year so the top of the income groups that they were we're looking at so they can afford nearly everything on the market today and in those places but they also want to be in a neighborhood where they can walk to a restaurant and when you add that constraint you eliminate ninety one percent of the listings on the market is turned out enough places to buy a home that are near those things. Now, York County has a number of great communities and downtowns and amenity locations, but that would be something to focus on, add more amenities, add more locations that are gonna be desirable to these types of folks, just to continue to make it a competitive and desirable place to live. If that person were renting instead of buying, the options dry up a little bit, although most of the rental options are already within reasonable range of some of these amenity centers, more so than the for sale options. So in our conclusion, we kind of put the scorecard together. Your county's doing well in providing certain types of housing, but it needs improvement, adding more that are affordable to people with complicated household budgets or looking for sale options or rental options, some of these monetized environments. So areas to improve. The last... analysis we have here just unpacking that missing middle question a little bit more and this relates to that idea of living near what we call stuff for lack of a better term things to do those are great locations to add slightly more dense housing not necessarily big apartment complexes but as you can see here maybe duplexes, smaller apartment buildings that are nestled in these attractive neighborhoods that people want to live. That would really help these communities compete for some of this young workforce with other parts of the region and the country that these folks are shopping around for. So the housing types that this includes are the small apartment buildings, ADUs, a variety of things that the market isn't necessarily turning out at scale like it is detached single-family homes and subdivisions. And one of the reasons for that is you can't do it at scale, and it costs a lot of money when you do it piecemeal. So we talked to some folks in the industry to try to gut check some of these numbers. And the cost of construction alone, $250 or more a square foot, and add the cost of land, add the cost of fees. We modeled impact fee or no impact fee. Things like that influence what the sale price has to be to justify that construction. And you can imagine if you're getting up to half a million dollars for a new home, You're making it difficult to get that house sold, and it's no surprise why developers might choose to avoid that complicated situation and go for something that they're set up to provide. But if you start to add incentives, if you start to work in your regulations, you can make it more approachable to do an infill development like this and start to get that price point down, and it starts to be a better proposition for a builder to consider and also for a homeowner to consider buying. things get better as you add density so here townhomes two bedroom townhomes on a very tight lot you might think of this in and around some of the cities in the county here because this is a strong market and a desirable market people can in a higher income market you can afford to make some buildings like this potentially pencil Certain middle infill projects are within reach in certain parts of York County in particular. Not everyone in the region can say that, but it is possible to make these types of projects work or at least get closer to making them work. And then maybe through some kind of public private partnership, you can bridge the remaining gaps to get some of this done. larger eight-unit building we tried to model. It was harder to make this one work. So certain development types are going to be more challenging or less. But I think you have to partner with developers, find sites, use public land. There are a lot of different options if you were to try to pursue some of these types of options that provide more of that messy middle housing. And then this suitability analysis considers some of those criteria I talked about before. Are there things to do? Are there amenities and activities? Is it a walkable environment? Is there infrastructure available? So the brighter the color, the more suitable these locations would be for housing. This is not, I mean, many of these places are already developed, of course. This is just to consider, you know, are those places to focus on more infill, for example, if there's already housing there. But not every place would support the same type of housing as we think about bringing some of these ideas down to the local level. but the last of what i will go through each of these in detail just leave you with the the menu here as i said before uh... we got the question to the process what are some things other communities have done about that's what i think that we consider and our local communities uh... not a mandate out of not a plan for you to adopt just as it is, but depending on where you want to start, we organize this in the same categories as I walk through the stakeholder feedback. So zoning and development, those development standards are places to go. How can you work on the development economics for developers through partnership to make Make the numbers work for more housing types that serve a broader range of the workforce. Thinking about transportation and infrastructure in coordination with housing and land use. I know a lot of communities are already doing that, but just keep that in mind. Adding more of those housing options, supporting household finance, partnering with employers in different ways. work with them to understand their needs and and support the work force there uh... looking for and just continue the the communication in the dialogue uh... with the public and with other stakeholders because it will take a coalition to get some of these things done and we organize these in three different levels of intensity so policy on the left these are things that might be lighter lifts places to start Just change the zoning, for example. It's not asking a lot of money, but it might require a long conversation in some places. A program is something that you're standing up that is not a huge expense, but maybe starts to make a bigger difference. And then partnerships might be larger, longer-term investments that you could get to if you were interested. So we wanted to just provide a menu of options that represent the range of types of strategy that might make sense, and also the range of levels of investment effort to pick from as you start to engage in these questions. So that's the summary. Happy to take any questions. As Randy said, I think we want folks to come to the mic so that the recording can pick up what you have to say.

Any questions from the audience?

I'll start off. I've got a question. and uh... uh... you know we would hear a lot about we don't want any more growth but only more development don't need more people is the long-term impacts to the county if we don't make any changes and we continue on the trajectory for our deal in in the trajectory iranian genuine job growth you're going to be saved the consequence of

growing your job base extensively like you have been but not growing the housing base I mean it's it's a choice I'd like to say that growth is a choice and you can grow however you want whatever is true to your values but as you start to tip the balance, you start to get consequences like a lot of traffic because you're trying to import more workers from other places. Other places might be more attractive for some of these employers to locate. Employers are looking nationally and they're looking regionally for the next place to land their facility, their office, whatever it might be. And so you might start to look less attractive to those folks. It might be harder to staff some of the essential jobs within the communities. On the other hand, if you can tolerate some of that friction, because it's more important to preserve the character that you have, I think you can monitor some of these trends. And as long as they don't get out of hand, I just think that the balance is not necessarily headed in the right direction. So it requires some attention to keep that stabilized.

Yeah, I'll ask a question, comment and a question. So when I joined County Council, workforce housing was one of my three major initiatives. And I'm very thankful that our County Council agreed to commit the monies to this project so that we could get to this point. I read a lot, I listen a lot to people that are talking about affordable workforce housing. And a developer told me recently that they can build a three-bedroom townhouse for the same price as a two bedroom. And I said, help explain that. I need to understand this. So what he said was due to waste, because if you have a two by four, that's 10 feet long, 12 feet long, you don't have to cut it depending on what you build. So my question is, In any of your studies, have you looked at the most efficient way to build a 950 square foot unit two bedroom? Have you looked at an efficient way to build an 1150, 1200 square foot unit? Because when you go back to page 40, if you can flip back to 40 right quick, I believe it was. I think that's the page where you were showing... Yeah. Look at the demand of what we need. What we need is we need housing below $275,000, which is very difficult. And that depends on whether you have a single family or dual family income. So... Are you aware of the efficiencies that we need to pursue to build a certain size home, townhome, apartment, that maximizes the efficiency in the build? Sure, yeah. Okay.

Yeah, and I'm glad he pointed that chart out. So that's the, when you ask the employees, employers what kind of housing their employees need, That's what they told us. And the highest ones are affordable rental apartments, small starter homes, single family homes under $275,000. uh... yes i mean it did that the sizes that you talked about nine hundred fifty square feet that's a lot smaller than the market is is currently producing right in some cases it's not legal to build that size dirt zoning that's below the allowable building size in a lot of cases the like the lot with requirements make it such that you can only really build a big home because that's the only way you can justify the cost of the land. So I think from just a construction cost standpoint, especially if you're under a thousand square feet, you can get the price point down considerably if you can solve for the cost of land too. There's a lot of modular construction types and there's a lot of new technology in the market that can also help I mean, it's not just people building them piece by piece. You can bring in modular components, maybe not in the past, but moving forward, these houses look just like any other house. They're built on a slab. I think integrating some of those technologies helps bring down the cost, makes it faster to build, and time is money in these situations. So I think that that's perfectly doable, and that's one of the strategies that we recommend. I mean, a smaller home is going to be suitable for a two-person household.

All right, let me ask this question. If you'll go back to another slide that you had, this slide was showing the amount of money an individual was spending on their home today, and some were in the 50% category, which meant they were having a financial issue living in the home they were living in. And I didn't write down what page that was on. I apologize. Yep, here we go. So if you look at your AMI. So my question is, not only do we need to build homes for individuals to purchase that they can afford to purchase, but we need to build smaller, I'm asking if you agree with this, we need to build smaller, more affordable homes for people that are living beyond their means, because over 60% of America lives paycheck to paycheck. It's no different in York County. So some people have worked themselves into a situation where they can't afford it anymore. Their rent's gone up. The mortgage payment's gone up. Maybe they had a variable rate on their loan, or they didn't qualify for a 2% or 3% rate. So there's a demand for us to build these houses to help those people buy or rent a less expensive home as well. Would you agree? Yes. So that becomes a focus to take a serious look at this in York County and to fix this issue. And then would you agree that... possibly as York County continues to grow and we continue to look for the right types of employers to come into our area, that having an adequate supply of affordable places for people to live makes it more valuable to the employer to choose to come to York County and have workers that can afford to live here and live close to, not drive 45 minutes to where they work, then that actually gives us an advantage in attracting the types of businesses we want in York County. Would you agree to that?

Yes.

Okay. I do want to ask this question too. So you mentioned early on about, I think this is what I heard you say, That unincorporated York County, that means the areas outside of the municipalities, right? Unincorporated York County has an opportunity to take advantage of building affordable housing. But two things we don't have, and I'm gonna use this as an example, and we're working on this with county council, thank God, and that is take Lake Wiley as an example. Lake Wiley is not an incorporated area. It may not ever become an incorporated area. Andy Litton would have to lead that charge. But what Lake Wiley's missing is a town center. They're missing that place where people come to congregate. The picture you had on the screen was Baxter Village. It was a great example. But the problem is, in these unincorporated areas, we don't have town centers and we don't have water and sewer, well and septic. So my question is, when you go back to the page you had, you had a block basically with duplexes, quadplexes. Can you actually build that with, and I don't know the answer to this, I haven't researched this, but can you actually, yep, that right there. Can you build something like this or even the complexes using wells and septic, you can? You can generate enough water for 40 units in an area, multiple wells.

So we're looking at this in other places. So we're working in Vermont, which is very different from South Carolina. One thing that it has is extremely high construction costs, $450 a square foot or more, and very stringent environmental requirements. And it gets really challenging. But they have an extreme housing crisis there, too, in an aging population. So one of the solutions that is being explored up there is to create just what you're describing, a cluster, maybe a little village center around a green with some gardens that is on septic. And it has a shared septic. And it needs to be sized to accommodate those units. But you can get chunks of units in eight, 12 batches, as long as you have the space to put the septic and you have a good well. So you can definitely get, you might not be able to get hundreds of units in a tight location, but you can definitely change the paradigm. in a place like that, at a scale that's appropriate for a rural environment like that.

All right, one more question, then, since you answered that one. and I appreciate you answering all the questions, but in a residential area, are you seeing in certain areas, and I've seen this in Greenville with Homes of Hope, which was an entity I support, but nonetheless, do you see a quadplex being built that looks like a home? It's 4,000 square feet, it's 3,000 square feet, but it looks like a home assigned to other single-family homes. Are you seeing that happening as well, Some of these are being sprinkled into open lots or areas where you can get away with building this creative look.

Definitely. You can use the architecture to make it look like a house that fits in. An ADU is an example of that. ADUs are not always a freestanding building out in the backyard. They could be attached greatly on the side. This is an example. This is an older building, but you can see there's two front doors, but it looks like a small house. So this is a historical example, just to prove that this is something that people have been doing for a long time. So using good architecture, you can definitely make a variety of housing types fit into neighborhoods of all types. Like in these Vermont examples, the existing housing is very small, and yet you can add a two-family, a four-family that fits in. Just be careful about the architectural style.

So if York County were committed to this, we may have to go back and take a look at our zoning laws and rewrite those to accommodate the acceptance of affordable housing. Would that be correct?

If you're pursuing strategies like that that do not currently, like the zoning doesn't support, that's a great place to start.

Okay. Thank you.

Okay. We have an issue on... in the northern part of the county in Fort Mill that we have impact fees. So for us to have affordable housing, a developer has to come in and think about even for apartments, town homes, what that's gonna look like with their impact fee. And so that's an extreme challenge not only for the affordable housing, but also the fact that being on the border of Charlotte, technically we're the bedroom community of the area, there's a tremendous competition. It's a fact for jobs. And I mean, even our services, such as our fire department and EMTs, we're having a real struggle keeping those because of the competition that we have with the Charlotte market. And they don't want to live there, but they will work there. Hence, 77, the parking lot on 77. So that in itself is a whole problem area. And the land is unaffordable. So that adds another layer to the situation.

Yeah, we... and i know my steam colleagues at t k we have lots of those facts out there too i'm sure can say did i did i did and to everything that i've seen yeah i think it's a movie describing this is for a reflection of how attractive it areas it's it's close to jobs as a lot of job growth informal to another base going across the line as we as we on the carpet the challenges that there's a few challenges unpack their one the market will pay it in many cases. It makes the price tag higher, so you have to be okay with that. But also, when do we pay for those services that are necessary to accommodate growth? Is it paid for by the taxpayers over a period of time? Is it paid for by the developer to cover the impact of that new person? Is it balanced somehow? typical ways to approach that, and each has its consequences, I think. So we heard that, and you can see in the math, that an impact fee makes that unit more expensive, but on the other hand, it can address some of the service concerns.

So when you did your study, like, where did you get this information?

uh... number of source like did you go out into the communities and talk to uh... mayors and council and you know fire departments and whatever businesses i'm just curious uh... so we started we have a very extensive database that we maintain that that incorporates a lot of data not just census data but all that transaction data Bureau of Labor Statistics data, other economic indicators. So we can put together a data story that we start to look at, that starts to tell us something. But then we come back to the community with this few rounds of focus groups with dozens of people in the room each time. to talk to local people to see is this is what we're seeing in the data true what's behind that and why is that happening what are the consequences in your communities just to ground truth so it was a combination of of us doing our objective data research and then bouncing that off members of the community across the four counties to to hone the story i have to watch my words yes well being

Being a resident of York County all my life, my family even goes back to the founding of the county back when York, which I can tell you a lot I remember about the old York and everything, but we're already strapped infrastructure-wise. And a lot of people that are original to York County, Now their kids can't afford because of the influx. And this ain't just a problem, I don't think, for York County. This is a problem for South Carolina. And a lot of it, and I'll just go ahead and say it, don't care whose feelings I heard or anything else, these national track builders. And it's put a lot of burden on our local builders that born and raised here and build houses, whether they can find lots or anything else. But I think we had a tipping point here. I mean, you can't get down 161. Now you can't get down Highway 5. You can't get down 49. conjungled everything early on in strategic areas. So I think there's a lot to look at here. I personally don't think being bigger is better. I think all high density should always be retained within the municipalities. That's my personal I think that we've got a lot to look at. Technically, for example, you've got apartments there in Rock Hill, and this was a couple of years ago. They're not even 500 square foot, and they're $1,300. I'm fortunate to have land, and I'm fortunate I had seven kids. And I understand a lot of people ain't, but we worked a lot of years to have all that. And I told somebody the other day, I could about kill myself when I graduated high school, because I could have bought land right here in York County for $400 and $500 an acre. It... overwhelmed, but at that time I didn't think I could afford it. They heard me make a speech in here. It's amazing how back when we didn't make much money, for some reason we was able to have land, a house, and could eat. Now all those things are overwhelming people. And making more money ain't helped it. Being better educated ain't helped it. It's a serious dilemma. And it goes way further than just what we're looking at here. But that's my two cents for it.

Thank you. We had to draw the scope somewhere. But you're exactly right. Things are harder than they've been in the past for a lot of people, especially people just starting out. The anecdote that you used or maybe alluded to, we hear all over the place. The kids that grew up here can't come back. They want to, but there's nothing they can afford There isn't something that they want. There's a variety of reasons, and that can be a wake-up call for some people, because when they moved there, it wasn't like that, and they remember that vividly. We're seeing that more and more across the country. It certainly is the case in York County, in this region. I think your comment about the track builders, I think you were saying they can out-compete the local builders that build at a smaller scale. They can just... build more for less, and suck up all the land. And I think that's, we need a variety of builders to work with us, but we've seen that the regulatory conversation, you have to keep everybody up to building to the standard that reflects the community's value.

If what wouldn't have happened with the trap builders, the growth that we see would have held and retained itself. The phenomena that happened was unexpected. And believe me, I know because I remember when the first subdivision of any size, Autumn Cove, when it come in, I was working on equipment up there. Never thought nothing about it. And then after the mid-'90s, especially into the 2000s, It's just, may I remind people, in the mid-'90s, a dollar still had 88 cents in value, and now we're even doing good if it's got three cents. We did it.

Jeff, can I ask one last question, please? So do you have any examples of planning and zoning departments around the United States that have created, I don't know, I wrote down a fast pass, a fast pass to get to construction and completion, like building a Chick-fil-A is an example. Chick-fil-A's are built in, I don't know, a couple of months, depending on what needs to be done today, where it was a year, years ago. AI's helped out a lot with this, I'm sure. But do you have examples of counties that have created an efficient path to build out like what you have on the screen here, something like that. And that architecturally, going back to what Councilman Adkins was saying, architecturally for the rural area, it complements the rural character of York County as an example.

One model that we see a lot of across the country is for a jurisdiction to create a pattern book. It's a pre-approved design is one way of putting it. So as long as you build to these specifications You can accelerate through the process. Sometimes they design them in some detail. And it's almost like you're, it's not unlike a home builder would operate. Here's the catalog. And you can vet those designs based on what the community wants to see. So it's reflective of their sense of identity. And I mean, that's the thing that slows things down, is getting that in order in the first place. So if you can just shortcut some of those complicated conversations with builders and developers, then as long as they're going to your spec they can move to the process and because they know what the spec is in detail they can they can get to their process quickly as well and they can the financing is more straightforward and and the risk lower that there are a lot of of of communities uh... south bend indiana's example of the topic i can't think of a ton of them but we see that we see that work a lot people think about that right now so i'm sure that there are many more we could provide for you but it's it's a great option the key part of that is vetting the design standards of the community so that everyone is on the same page about what they want to see. And the more transparent you can be with developers and builders about what you want, then they're going to self-select. And only developers that want to give you what you want are going to come forward.

I'm smiling because I'm looking over your shoulder, and our planning director is so giddy, I think he wants to come up and respond to the question. But it's good to see staff excited about this topic. Thank you.

Okay, I have just one last question. Do you happen to know the break-even point on the value of a residential unit and the cost of services? So I know back in, I don't know,

early two thousand somewhere around two hundred thousand or so you have to know what that number is i don't think there's we might be a rough estimate we've done that i can do that type of analysis uh... we've done it in some communities it depends on the type of unit for one thing is different types of units have different types of households that need different services Is it going to have kids in the school system or not, for example? How far is it from the fire department? So there is such thing as a break-even point. And that is another thing that you could look at locally to try to decide, is this fiscally in balance? Are we burdening ourselves long term? How are we going to take care of all this infrastructure we just invested in? Those sorts of things. But that's a pretty common way to look at it as well, to just make a prudent fiscal decision about what types of housing you want to see moving forward.

think I think our county staff can work up some numbers that's what it cost to serve what's the break even we've done it years ago we had a number um one thing I want to I want to point out a few things the first thing that jumped out to me and I kind of lit up a little bit when you said it that we have so many jobs here our jobs are outpacing our housing you know other communities probably have a different issue they don't have the jobs And so we've kind of jumped ahead and created this by, and I guess I can toot York County's horn and some of the other municipalities in the area, we've done such a great job of bringing jobs here. We have so many jobs that we do see people coming in to work them, but we still haven't, slowed down 77 north at 6 a.m in the morning because my wife tells me about that traffic going north in the morning and south coming in the evening so we do still have a lot of people leaving york county but we do have a plentiful of jobs here that we are able to offer employment to residents here you know some people that's still going up 77 they've been working those jobs for years and New people coming to the job market are still jumping on 77, but it was good to hear that we are supplying our very own community with enough jobs that maybe we're starting to slow down 77 a little bit. One thing that I know that after getting this report, I think our staff would definitely need to take a look at it. Some of the barriers that you mentioned, like you said, permitting time, impact fees, and some of the regulations. I know we've talked on this council several times that we do not have a square footage minimum to build in the county. But one thing that's an obstacle is when you start looking at the cost of land and what it would cost to put a well and septic on it. you have to build a certain square footage to get back to a profit situation for a builder because no one's going to go out and build an 800 square foot when you have to have well and septic or you have to be on an acre lot and you're not doing a subdivision where you can have smaller lots. So that's one of the things that when Councilman Huckabee mentioned about some shared water systems. Is that even allowed in South Carolina now? Are we able to build houses in shared water system? I think that gets into an issue with a banking situation. If you're selling that house, I don't know how many banks will finance a property that has a shared water system. I mean, I just mentioned to Councilman Litton that this council, in over the years, we've had issue with allowing shared driveways. You know, something as simple as that, it's hard to even get through. But just looking at some of the things we can do, but then you have to look to see how does the financial market respond to some of the problems Intuitive things that we can do to try to get those costs lower. I would love to see I mean with this this County's talked about Small or town houses for years But that's something that would have to take place at a municipality that they can get water and sewer there That it would make it a little more feasible I've said for years we would love to see someone bring a project that will offer like a tiny house community as a pilot program to build smaller. That's definitely one option. You look across the country and people are building these container houses and they're coming up with all kind of cultural things that they're doing to make it more affordable. We just haven't gotten there yet. I don't know if our regulations will allow certain things like that. But there's a lot of different products out there. We even had a project come through that wanted to do a mobile home community. Everybody wants affordable housing. Nobody wants a mobile home community near their existing home. That's another obstacle because we had a project coming and we heard from several people that the stigma of trailer park, but they're building houses and manufacturing homes now better than stick builds. They're able to crank them out so much faster, so much more affordable. I think that's definitely some of the options, but Definitely want to thank you, Jeff and Randy and the COG Board members and all the counties that participated in the study to help fund it. This is some good information. I think there's a lot here on the plate that this council can look at, our staff can look at. Definitely from some regulations that we can start to look at, permitting, even some of the fees that are associated with building. Those building permits, that goes into the cost of the house. Some of the things that we can do as a staff, I think we definitely need to put our eyes on it to see what we can do. But there's definitely some good information in there. I thank everybody who participated, everybody who came out tonight. Any words from staff before we wrap up?

Thank you. I'd just like to finish by saying thank you to county council. This was... a regional effort a true regional effort i thank you for your financial support of this project each county in our region participated financially a handful of municipalities participated financially we had private sector contributors uh... to the project as well we also had special purpose districts that contribute to the project all too uh... improve what we have throughout our region, not only in York County, but in Chester, Lancaster, and Union as well. But what you did is very much appreciated. We also wanted to say thank you to your planning staff. Very helpful, very supportive, participating in the process along the way. So along with you all, I'd like to say thank you, York County staff. Thank you, Community Scale and Jeff. And we appreciate you listening tonight. We appreciate you taking this information. And as Jeff said, these are recommendations and options. They're not mandates. It's up to you, the empowered leaders of the county, and its citizens to do with it what you want. But we're excited to be your partner in this effort. And thank you for being here tonight. Thank you.

Thank you.

I guess I'll close by saying I think this study has gotten us off to a good start, given us something to look at of substance that we can now talk about, massage, work with planning, work with staff to see what are some of the options that are available in here that we can bring to the forefront to assist in this effort. One thing I know we're definitely committed to, we definitely won't stop recruiting jobs to come here. fight on the other end to be able to get more housing, workforce housing. And I like the term workforce housing because affordable housing just had such a negative connotation to it. People stuck people in different groups and said affordable housing, that's only for poor people. We know that's not the case. We have a lot of people that's working, and the market has just outgrown the financials of a lot of people. So we got our work cut out on that end. But definitely, I like this new field. And I think the community will embrace it, because it affects so many different income levels. We do have people living well above their means. That's always going to be an issue. And I'll say this from a personal standpoint. When I was in my late 20s, early 30s, I wanted a big house. Now I'm in my 50s, I'm looking at downsides. I want a town home with no grass to cut, no downsides. I want the easy living. I cut enough grass in my days coming up. I wash enough cars for Mom and Daddy. I'm ready to downsize and let that 25, 30-year-old get the bigger house. I'm looking for the easy way out so I can sit on the porch and watch the cars go by myself. Thank you guys for all that you... for all that you do in presenting this with us. Appreciate everybody coming out tonight. And if.

Council Member Roddy, quick question. Randy. Yes, sir. There are a number of entities in York County that have a special interest in this topic. Habitat for Humanity is in the room tonight, for one. Is it beyond your scope to attempt to pull all of these strategic resources together to have a common voice so we're all on the same page with what we're trying to accomplish?

That's a great question. Part of our mandate is to help people collaborate and communicate. We've already started some of those conversations as well, and we look forward to continuing them. We do work on a regional basis, though, so we have to consider all the needs of all the counties and those who want to participate and those who don't want to participate. So, yes, we're open to that type of conversation and that collaboration because we ultimately think it's more efficient for the taxpayer.

No doubt about it. Thank you.

All right. If there's nothing else, do I have a motion to adjourn?

Motion to adjourn.

Say it. All in favor say aye. Aye. We're all adjourned.