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<br />Housing Tools and Strategies Action Inventory 1 Overview <br />1. Overview <br /> <br />Housing affordability and availability is a long-standing and growing problem in Eugene. The <br />community and City Council have clearly stated, in a variety of public engagement processes and <br />policy documents that an adequate supply of housing is a high-priority goal. One of the seven <br />Envision Eugene Pillars is: <br />Provide housing affordable to all income levels. <br />In 2018, Council directed staff to implement a process that would tie together the many <br />overlapping initiatives and proposals that address housing affordability, availability, and diversity <br />for all income levels. Staff implemented the Housing Tools and Strategies (HTS) project to meet this <br />Council directive. The HTS project is intended to tie together the various initiatives and address the <br />issues in a comprehensive way, that provides City Council and the community with an objective, <br />fact-based work product that is informed by stakeholder perspectives and guides future policy <br />decisions to achieve those outcomes. <br />The HTS project included stakeholder engagement and technical analysis. The engagement process <br />focused on assembling a working group of 36 stakeholders representing diverse interests and <br />perspectives in the fall of 2018. In all, the working group discussed and identified over 80 specific <br />actions that the City might take to increase the availability, affordability, and diversity of housing in <br />Eugene. <br />In addition to the direct engagement with the HTS working group, staff conducted research <br />regarding best practices to address housing affordability. Staff looked both at best practices from <br />other cities and collaborated with Better Housing Together, a community-led initiative with over 40 <br />member-organizations working to increase the affordability, diversity, and supply of housing in <br />Lane County. <br />The stakeholder engagement and technical analysis was supported by analysis conducted by <br />Strategic Economics, an economics consulting firm, to assess market conditions and demographics <br />that affect housing issues. <br />This document is an inventory of the potential actions available to the City of Eugene that can be <br />used to address housing affordability, availability, and diversity. It is a working document that will <br />change over time. The actions listed in it emerged from the HTS working group, Better Housing <br />Together, which conducted interviews with builders in 2018 to identify specific time and cost <br />hurdles, and staff research. The tools and strategies are organized into three categories: <br />1. In-progress actions includes projects and initiatives currently underway that will address <br />housing affordability. <br />2. Recommended actions includes those that could be implemented in the future. Many of <br />these will be more effective if other preliminary steps are completed first. <br />3. Not recommended actions includes actions that emerged from the HTS working group <br />and had very little support or are technically infeasible. They are included in this document, <br />to show that they were discussed by the group but not supported. <br /> <br />March 13, 2019, Work Session - Item 2