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.

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

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

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 buil

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. B

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.

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?

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

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 li

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.

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

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 connotatio

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?

All right. If there's nothing else, do I have a motion to adjourn? Say it. All in favor say aye. Aye. We're all adjourned.