Flint Revitalization Public Hearing 5 4 22

so i'm sarah page from the fall river redevelopment authority and i want to welcome you and we have a whole welcoming party here um but i just want to thank you all for coming i'm so glad you're here and we look forward to all of your input so i would so i will now pass it to senator rogers thank you sarah hello everyone thank you this is really exciting two years ago

in an economic development bundle in the legislature myself and richard schmidt secured a million dollars for the redevelopment of the flint neighborhood but before you actually access that money you need a plane right this is capital money this is money to do sidewalks or lights or sewer or water whatever it needs for capital but you need to have a plan so the city has been working very very hard with the

leadership of the redevelopment authority um in developing a plan so that we know what we're going to ask the governor for uh when he authorizes the bond when he actually goes out and borrows the money and gives it to the city of fall river to make that investment there's another economic development bond bill that they actually just had the public hearing on today that will be going through the

legislation before the end of this session so hopefully we'll have enough information um before then so that we can secure another authorization so that we can really make the type of investments uh in the flint that's necessary and we know that there's a lot of investments that are necessary there so thank you it's great working with uh the mayor the redevelopment authority of course schmidt and all of you

to make this dream happen so thank you you know i think the senator deserves an extra round of applause because because it was he who put that money in the uh bond bill of course i helped on out on the house side it's all about working together the senator myself and the mayor but that's what it takes actually i'm just so excited to be here tonight as i know you are because we've been

working for this for years haven't we yes this is what we have wanted to bring the community together to have funding available from the state to know that there is potential for future support from the state so this is a monumental time for the clinton and all of you should be so proud that you're taking part in it be here be here for every meeting and help guide us i mentioned that we

have a great team we're awful lucky to have mayor paul coogan he has been supporting the flint since he was elected this has been his dream to bring us together and now i wish you'd give we have a couple of city councils here council michelle dion um counselor andrew repulsa i also want to thank mike dion from the community development agency this summer i guarantee you that but i

do want to talk a little bit about the meeting tonight this is another important step in trying to get the flint rehabilitated everybody in this room that's driven down pleasant street that's driven on some of the side streets know what we need to do and what the problems are so tonight what i'm respectfully asking for is ideas that that's what this meeting's about if you came here to talk about graffiti

raise your hand if you don't know there's graffiti in flint raise your hand because we'll fill you in if potholes how about vacant buildings who doesn't know there's native buildings along pleasant street let's talk about those again our goal at this meeting is to accentuate the positives coming from the report the positives from the people in this room that are gonna move this project forward

if you came here to tell us what's wrong that's the reason we're all here we know what's wrong we've got to find a way to tackle it and we've got to find a way to fix it and and uh with senator rodricks and representative schmidt and additional funding from the state we can move this project along we're being driven by our associates and as associates who are hired to look at this

whole project and how we can make the flint more livable more vibrant someplace we can call home that's the goal of the meeting tonight if you want to complain and talk about things that are wrong do it somewhere else please i'm not telling you not to say it i'm just saying give us a break tonight and let's talk about positives and the way we can change the direction of the flint

and i can't tell you how great it is to see everybody here tonight and i look around and i see people that are engaged in the community that want this place to be a better place to live just like the people up here in the front and the people we hired to give us some advice so if that's what you're here for i can't thank you enough for coming it's

important enough for you to give up the night to come out but if you're here to tell us what's wrong and this is what they did before and how things didn't work that's not what this is about you have other places and other opportunities to do that so please go do it please go do it but right now tonight for an hour let's focus on how we can improve the flint and thank you very

very much for coming thank you everybody

well now i want to introduce emily innis who runs innis associates she um helped with our downtown urban renewal plan a number of years ago and the waterfront plan so when she um was the proposal we got proposals and we picked her proposal and we're so happy they're working with us she's going to introduce her team and really give a wonderful presentation so i want to introduce emily ennis

so first of all enormous thrill to be back in fall river even bigger thrill to be in this neighborhood i my team have enjoyed learning about your neighborhood so much but as consultants there's only so much that we can learn um so what we really want to do is exactly as the mayor said he pretty much stole my entire speech and we'd like to hear from you today so i'm going to go through uh some

introductions of people who have been involved in this process to date um i urge you that if you haven't already signed in and you'd like to be kept updated on future meetings future events please do so i'll talk a little bit about the existing conditions from what we've heard we're going to do a gut check with you on some of those we're going to get you around the room looking

at some ways to maybe spark some of that creativity that the mayor mentioned and then we're absolutely going to have a chance for you to come back and tell us just what's on your mind so we want to make sure that you have a chance to share that ideas excitement what you want for your community so first of all let me introduce iris lynn from harvard and timeline studio iris is a landscape architect and has

been working with me on thinking about some of the physical aspects of the neighborhood we also have two separate economic teams uh with us they're not here today because we weren't talking about the economy so much but we're working with fxm associates who also work on the downtown and the waterfront plans with me and we're working with rkg associates and we're looking with both of them at different aspects of the

economy both what's happening now and what could happen in the future so we'd love to hear your thoughts on that we've been really creative and also you see a list of names here i'm not going to introduce every name but i want to say that in addition to just the consultant team we have an amazing working group of city staff members uh you've heard obviously sarah and mike called out just if you're a

city stat kate when i see you back there raise your hand and wave see i'm not letting her get away with this members of the citizen advisory uh if you could raise your hands i know there's a few of you here we'll call you out if you want to be shy yes thank you very much um they have been terrific and starting to give us a flavor of some of the problems there

because we know there are problems but also some of the ways that we can think about those in a constructive manner so i want to recognize them and we also have the fall record redevelopment authority who with the community development agency are the sponsors for this so i see a few fall river uh redevelopment authority members around if you could raise your hands too thank you john so oh yes

thank you because you're sitting back there we have interpretive services so if i talk um too much or too quickly which is uh quite likely or you might need a translation of planning jargon as well as translation from other things they are here able to translate spanish portuguese and haitian creole please make use of them if you need them they'll also be available to walk through the boards if you have any

questions on the instructions delighted to have their services here it's a luxury we don't always get and it's fantastic to know that we can communicate with as many people as we possibly can so we had the welcome already so i'm going to talk a little bit about the two programs that are working with uh with us here one of course is the fall river redevelopment authority is a sponsor and

then the community development agency mike dion is sponsoring it through the neighborhood hub program and the neighborhood program hub program is a state program um that gives funds to communities to help deal with their neighborhoods and come up with positive solutions and there is a cohort of five cities for the 2020 round delayed a little bit because of coba fall river is one of them so they are

getting special funding that helps support this study and if you need to know more in specific happy to answer that or have mike speak to it they're also you can see in that huge paragraph and this will be available online as well a lot of state agencies that are partnering on the neighborhood club so that's part of it and this first meeting that we're having today is really talking about a road map or a

blueprint of what can happen under that neighborhood cup program there's also an urban renewal plan and i know when we think about urban renewal a lot of us think about the 50s and 60s and things getting knocked down that is not how we do urban renewal now and it's certainly not what we're talking about not that whole scale clearance that happened during those periods urban renewal plans now are

plans that lead to action and so what we do is we take the recommendations of the neighborhood pump plan process that roadmap i mentioned and we pull out those things that are relevant for urban renewal and then we create an urban renewal plan to deal with that and we'll be talking about some of those today but that's primarily in terms of those abandoned buildings for example that the mayor mentioned urban renewal

is one way of dealing with individual abandoned buildings now again not the wholesale clearance of the 50s and 60s and then what the urban renewal plan does is allow the fall river redevelopment authority to take action that helps support this roadmap so the cda other city partners will be implementing taking action on the roadmap the fra would be taking action on the urban renewal plans just to give you a

sense of the context so in terms of the purpose of this it's almost two studies happening simultaneously with the the revitalization roadmap the the first part we're looking at the redevelopment of substandard vacant housing units on pleasant street and within the neighborhood and revitalizing the overall area to be attractive and vibrant part of what we want to hear from you today is what does attractive

and vibrant mean to you we'll talk about some of those questions the urban renewal plan as i said expands on that addresses vacancies addresses those underutilized properties and that includes commercial properties so we've got a two-fold addressing houses and housing and commercial the the timeline um just roughly we are right here at the public charette uh you didn't know you were coming to a

charette today uh the road map is going to be a draft form and that drop will be finished roughly into this month middle of next month depending on the back and forth the urban renewal plan takes a little longer because the roadmap has to come first so we're expecting that to be done in september there will be more opportunities you can see for example public coming in here and then all of

these meetings are public as well we also have an online survey that's open now and i'll talk to you a little bit about that as we get to the end so there are plenty of points at which as we move forward plenty of points where you love your feedback so i'm going to break this down into a couple of different things one is um sort of different topics so we're going to start with buildings and economic

activity you can see a picture out there of a building that has been called out to us as problematic um and we've worked as i mentioned with the citizens advisory group to find out what they heard what we'll find out from them what their values what their concerns and what their hopes were so that's what you see on the left-hand side um and in terms of buildings and economic activity this idea that people

want to be able to go store to store without you know do their daily errands without having to actually leave the community um improving the area where people spend most of their day so you will also get a chance the boards behind you when we break up you're going to get a chance to add your own values to all of these different categories we definitely heard concerns about vacant buildings and abandoned and empty

buildings and so that's part of what we're looking at but just an overall lack of development and emptiness of the area that was something that got called out and then hopes retail on first level upper story residential reuse of the abandoned buildings not just the removal of them just revitalizing the facades making it a more pleasant area and more business activity so that on each of these slides you're

going to see that breakdown of what we heard from the cag on the right hand slide you're going to see the hard data that our team was pulling now i didn't extract all of it there's a very very long existing conditions report that looks at a lot of these characteristics but just a couple of these things that are important for the study so the fact that over 70 percent of the housing stock in this

area is older than 1939. that says something to us about condition about needs for upgrades needs for energy efficiency a whole list of things that as we look at this we say are there funding programs that can help address this are there other actions that the city can take to health addresses or other organizations can help address this so as you look through these now that we're looking at them

we're thinking what are the solutions and we're hoping to hear a lot of solutions or a lot of ideas for solutions from you today we talked a little about the vacant buildings and tired storefronts from my perspective on primarily land use and regulatory planner i'm looking at the zoning right so i see these uses that in zoning language we call non-conforming which means they were generally there

before the zoning came in and that makes it really difficult if you are a property owner a business owner say you own your own shop you want to make some improvements to it you're a non-conforming use or non-conforming parcel all of a sudden there's a lot of hoops you have to jump through so one of the things i look for is where are those hoops is something preventing this investment from happening

in terms of community identity uh so you know we started with the buildings with the physical area we did a lot not just on the buildings but on the sites as well we did a whole inventory and that is online i'll talk about those online maps later but we also wanted to talk about community identity because a physical place can be an expression of that community identity so we look for

are there stores and the languages that on the storefronts reflect the people who live here are there murals are there public arts is there a visual expression about identity coming out through there and what i loved about some of the things that the cag said the idea that this is a proud family community that you know there's a long history of people who have lived here grown up here

their families have grown up here a sense of community a sense of diversity that these are all values that this area has real possibilities and you know that's an encouraging thing we like to bring that out of the planning and then hopes for a clean neighborhood a vibrant neighborhood restoring pride in the neighborhood so again as we look at things that communities can do we're also then looking at the the the

data as we think about community identity these vacant storefronts these vacant buildings this idea that the area feels neglected and how do we change that um and that the you've got so many historic holdings in this area and what does that say about how this area has developed over time and how the community has developed with it in terms again of what we heard a healthy community we think of economic

health of wealth building we also think of physical health people's ability to get around the places they live where can they walk where can they play so you know the walking trail obviously huge community resource it's also at the bottom of the steep hill for those who might have difficulty with mobility so we look at you know are there connections there um concerns about crime drug

homelessness again the negative aspects of it but then what are the conditions so there's a nice big sat word up there impervious surface that means that the water can't soak into it so stafford square when it floods that's a combination of all the asphalt around it's also a combination of sewer systems so we look at what happens with that how can that be addressed um there's not a lot of amenities for

pedestrian comfort don't mention the topography there's no if you're older or if you're uh have physical limitations there's no place to sit down and rest as you're moving from one place to the other and then looking at the public health data and the city's public health department was fantastic in steering me to a couple of useful websites uh there are high rates of asthma high rates of

obesity high rates of depression all of this moves into this and it coupled with there is a low income population this all reflects the community health the community in terms of economic economy and of their physical health what we like to do is one of the things that by changing the physical environment we can do to address that and again we've loved some creative ideas from you we've been

doing our own research on opportunities i do have something funny to say about that last slide please do yeah that's my client's car in the water i i took that from a local news report from a couple of years ago that is yeah yeah that was that was kind of horrifying when i saw those those pictures um so the advisory group this is another thing that we would really like to hear

from you sarah rounded up when she and i were talking back and forth about the presentation the advisory group had concerns about abandoned buildings i put that because that was their top concern but their second concern was that you know it's great that you're doing that nice nice of you to visit the flint nice of you to have these consultants come in and say you know this is what you should

be doing and here's a pretty plan but how are we going to follow through right we've heard things about planning before and so what we'd like to do um i had one question that sarah had another sarah would like to know as as in the first year what would give you comfort that this plan is is moving forward that you're actually seeing some implementation and what i'd love to know and you could

be thinking about this you don't need to answer right now because we will come back and i'll come back to the slide i'd like to know how you measure success in say 10 years so what would you like to see moving forward so that if we just snapped forward into the future right now and we looked around we'd say wow this this planning process worked so a year from now what would you like to

have seen happen what gives you comfort that we're moving forward and 10 years from now so you can be thinking about that there's some places to write it down on the boards but i also want you to talk to it so those are those are questions that require a thoughtful response so i'm going to talk about some of the draft strategies that we've been kicking around you're going to see the word

draft on all the next few slides because these very much are graph strategies they're coming out of the research that we've done so far but without your input so some of what you tell us may change a little bit about this and we've narrowed it down to four main categories so code enforcement which also includes build regular building inspections uh addressing pleasant street um uh the

revitalization of pleasant street addressing the existing housing stock and building acquisition and stabilization that goes to the abandoned buildings there's a phasing system to them as as well that some of these things can move forward more quickly than others under those and i'm going to take each one of these in turn so in terms of code enforcement it's increasing the inspections on commercial

multi-family properties and then it's digitizing the data and making sure that data is accessible so that if an inspection is done everything can be followed through from uh one of the things that we're looking at that we've seen in other communities is this idea is that when an inspection is done and something it has failed that instead of saying oh you your inspection has failed um sorry whatever

you have to buy it's this has failed we have a program to address this let's get you into that program but that's difficult to do if everything is paper-based right because city employees have far more important things to do with their time than the transcribing a lot of paper into multiple different databases so that's where the digital digitization helps um it's important because we don't know

how to address the conditions until we know what they are and inspections can help with this and i should say these aren't single family inspections they're multi-family inspections and they're also commercial tenant inspection so it's not that you're going if you're if you're living in a house you own your house you're not going to get a knock on the door to inspect it it's more it's state law that multi-family

units are inspected on a regular basis and so in addition to being able to give programs and advice there's also the tracking of success you know how do we know that houses of three family houses or six family houses along this street have been addressed well we've got it digitized we can call it up and say these this many um units have been looked at in this year and have been

brought up to standard so removal of lead paint uh addressing uh plumbing or electrical violations all of the above and that leads back to that community health piece that i mentioned of getting the places where people live where they spend their time on a regular basis into good condition that will support their health now on pleasant street the three sort of sub items are tracking and filling

vacancies and storefronts along pleasant street so getting that ground level planners talk a lot about getting the ground level active so that's the first thing is finding out what's going on there um focusing the city's storefront improvement program so the city has a storefront improvement program that provides funds to help small businesses and property owners address the facade

clean it up paint it maybe do a little signage there's also a state program that the state has four vacant storefronts and fall river is a participant to that so we'll be looking at how can we direct some of those efforts to pleasant street in a coordinated manner to make sure that it's not just a storefront here and a store from here or maybe down there but that it's uh consistently happening and then

from my perspective changing the city's zoning ordinance what's interesting and looking at it is that there are some uses that other places are looking at that would be very valuable for say entrepreneurs small businesses that aren't currently mentioned in the zoning order so changing it to allow that one popular one is something like uh and you've already got some of it in your uh

or the beginnings of it in this area uh allowing for manufacture and retail um i like to say a bakery because you have some bakeries but that would also be to a business that is manufacturing for wholesale but also has a small retail shop with it so there's a lot of that happening thinking about incubation space thinking about things that support entrepreneurs now this is a longer term piece but we'd

love to hear your ideas on whether or not that sort of activity is happening now when there's a space for it i think in terms of the city zoning ordinance we also see a lot of businesses as i mentioned that are scattered throughout the neighborhood they're not just on pleasant street current zoning doesn't really allow those so that's where that starts to get to be problematic if they want to invest in their space

and there's some other components of that and then addressing substandard housing and we have three um areas of that apartments above commercial which brings people on to pleasant street we know there's some already maybe maybe we think about more rehabilitating by property owners and investors so people who own the property already or buy the property and helping them bring it up to code about the standards

and then rehabilitating properties to sell to new home or to sell to home buyers this is that part of that building wealth because not everybody wants to move from rental to home ownership but for those who do uh finding programs that make it easier for them and then supporting housing is twofold one as i mentioned housing is out of date it is on average much older than other housing

and it also helps support residents health as i mentioned before that gives them stability um you're removing environmental hazards you're helping their operating budget by making it more energy efficient so it's really addressing um a lot of those problems and then the final one is building acquisition and stabilization uh now there's something called tax title uh which is if uh a billing owner falls

behind on his or her taxes and it builds up this is happening to some commercial properties the city can take that because of tax title and then move it to somebody who can invest in that that is a tool we're interested in thinking about it transferring city-owned properties to the fra the fall river redevelopment authority so city councils aren't really set up to be property developers but redevelopment

authorities are so taking strategic studio to parcels and moving them to the redevelopment authority that's where the urban renewal plan comes in is at this stage none of the rest of that is really urban renewal but this stage is and so this is the acquiring the blighted properties requiring the city owned properties turning them over by sale or whatever to whatever process there's multiple to a

developer who will develop them this is key under the patrol and guidance of the fall river rebellion authority and that control of guidance is in the urban renewal plan and comes out of conversations that we've had and then finally assembling larger parcels for development so if you think about a mixed-use building or you think about additional housing some of the parcels in this area even on pleasant

street are quite small so putting a couple of them together these are all again tools this is all a draft for for discussion and listening to your comments so you're going to see this map over on this table here um and there's there's actually four boards there's one that's the the full map this is our area with the red line around it um and what you're going to do is it's part of the whole exercise i'm

going to walk you through it now um actually let me just jump forward one bit um so i'll walk you through the boards and we'll come to this question and take inside and take initial questions so there's maps over there would ask you to do some things at the mass there's boards across there and behind you we're going to ask you to do things the maps we're going to ask you to identify your favorite places

in the area there's uh iris is going to be having read and read stickers and also the places that cause you concern that you'll be able to record if you have any comments you're more than welcome to go green red move on to the next if you want to stay and talk a little bit iris is happy to take down any comments on these three boards the red the blue and the green we're talking

about redevelopment the the community health and the community identity and it's what you saw up there on the boards but we love your reactions to it writing it down and so this gives you a chance to give us your individual opinions and we'll come back and you'll be able to give your group opinions as well and we can have a discussion and then finally in the back next caitlyn we have our four strategies

thank you caitlyn that was very well presented we have our four strategies we'd like you to prioritize them and then we'd like you to start thinking about that question earlier about what success in the year and what is success in 10 years so with that i'm going to stop on this the instructions are here they are also on your agenda if you picked it up as are if you turn it over and flip it to

the back should be all of the different strategies so um if you if you get up to that boardwalk wait a second what was that what we're talking about it's on the back of your sheet so before we break up any initial questions about process or what we've been doing again we'll we will break into the groups to go around call you back in about 20 minutes or so um and we'll

start talking you know as we move about what we've seen are there any initial questions yes yeah i just have a general question um many years ago there was a project that completely uh directed by the street works it's a multi-billion dollar project it was a downtown revitalization um

it was actually known as the second downtown but my question is these projects tend to be extraordinarily expensive i think quincy was in the multi-billion dollar range something between two and two and a half billion dollars my my question is how does a project like what's the plan a long-term financing project as you know uh broad as this because it's going to take a great deal of money the million

dollars is wonderful i think it's a perfect congratulations to the city and the state delegation for securing a million dollars but frankly that's a very very very small amount of money great seed money but it's not the kind of money that's going to materially change the flint to where it should be and it could be so my question is in our question now is where's the financing going from the

long-term finances to sustain this project for as long as it's going to need to be sustained do the kind of work that is an excellent question i am very glad to ask that i'm glad you asked them at this stage because it's very easy to walk out of meaning going wait why didn't i ask this woman how much it cost um and how we're going to do it so as

part of an earth so there's two stages as part of the road map of the piece that we're primarily talking about tonight we've already started identifying some of the funding sources in some cases they're funding sources the city already has access to so it's talking about policy change to redirect some of them or to direct some of them in ways that are more coordinated so um through

no fault of the city staff they've been very responsive when things come up but it's more about being proactive and giving governance so that's the neighborhood club plan there are also in addition to the city fund resource state and federal funds that we're looking at in terms of the urban renewal plan that the urban renewal plan goes through two levels of approval one is the city level

has to go all the way through city council one city council approves that it goes to dhcd and urban renewal plans must be created in a format that dhcp has laid out and part of that format is a financial plan and it says you need to tell us what you're planning on doing order of magnitude what it costs you're not going to put us down to the center

or even to the dollar but we need to let them know how much it is and how you're going to find it and so as part of that we look to a number of resources we will obviously always check to see what the city has available but a lot of them are things like the massworks grant which is now part of the community run staff program there are parks grants there are federal

funds out there not specifically for urban renewal if you read the legislation it suggests that there's some big federal fund for legislation that is no longer true um but there are smaller grants many of which address the things that we've been talking about so the financial plan and we haven't written it yet so i don't know what the components will be but that financial plan will be

in there and drastics after that quincy had to do the same thing um if you look at their urban real plan i should also say that urban renewal now in the 21st century is really about creating the conditions for the private market to work so that's where the regulatory changes come in the change in the zoning the one or two catalytic projects that the fall river redevelopment authority

might do leveraging some of those grants that says to a private investor you know what it is worth being here we are putting our time and energy in this area we've got this great community you too should be here so i always think of these as almost sort of marketing plans as saying you know there's something happening so some of this will be private funding it's not all over the public yes sir last question yeah

so in a project like this it is impossible to do everything all at once absolutely there's enough money to be able to do it all it's too large project uh is there a plan to create i think the buzzword is a tight urban center where these things kind of grow organically that's really likely to be done quickly uh and be sufficiently funded so that this begins to grow out you can't do all of it

just you can't do all of that but you can't do all the first three on one someone's going to drop two billion dollars in the city's treasury so is our plan to do that to identify an area so this can actually begin to grow out and create that hydrogen center which then energizes you know future growth that is exactly why we're having you do the mapping exercise is this idea that

by telling us a seat hand there in the hand there this mapping exercise what you're telling us tonight goes into exactly that it's prioritization by area but also prioritization over time so excellent question can i just jump in and say that we already have prioritized pleasant street yes and before we even started that was a key focus so that's where we're focusing first and you know that's an important card right

the pledge street's a very long streak yeah let me come back to the map here kind of tending to be focusing between eastern and quickishian yep so rough roughly part of this

you were talking about long-range plans those plans are not going to be restricted just to brick and mortar i assume right because you're talking about community community people we have some issues here with what's going to happen with the rights that's going to happen and also you know i know they don't want to go back i would thank the state delegation for bringing bringing the money down here

the reality is that you don't get a chance often to get a state rep of state senator mayor and some city councils in the same room this community i've lived in this community basically my entire life except for my military time my first apartment was a block down from that window the last department i lived in before i went to the military is the yellow house there is two three decades when you walk

out i've lived in this community my entire life i walked pleasant street when every single store was full i i wore pleasant street when uh you couldn't find an apartment uh and the reality is we we have to learn from history and we're doomed to repeat it and i'm not blaming this is not the way i you know this is great i'm going to invest in the flint i've lived here my whole life i love them

i've lived in this city my entire life the fact is that you we have to get something coordinated that's going to deal with uh improving our workforce because the dynamic that we had when the flint was active is simple everybody worked and we had discretionary income and small businesses are the engines that drive communities of this size small and medium cities are driven by people with discretionary cash and you

look at fall river now since the mills closed there were never any apprenticeship programs business business public kinds of things to get people to work like they did in rhode island with electric boat and we look at the dynamic i've got statistics which i'll go with i'll deal with it but the fact is the u.s census bureau says full river right now and this is the latest if you don't want to

believe my statistics you get on the u.s census bureau floor river has 5 000 well it's going to be off obviously but uh 5 214 businesses newton has 13 744 and small why because the household income and newton's 154 000 household income and forward is 43. we have a demographic with low income and other poor and and fixed income people that has to be addressed it is we're going to we're

going to build a recession or inflation which will soon be coming uh and i have a letter from the national building board i have some studies about the urban tax impacts of this kind of stuff and we have to deal with this because we don't want to just fix up the flint and then have it die again yeah so i just want to make sure we make that point okay we're going to look at this

long term and we're going to look at that multi-faceted approach to this and we've done it all in the room now so just wanted to say that and i'm glad you did sir because that was exactly why we have both fxm and rkg on this team is to look exactly at that i would love to see your statistics i believe that has been a topic of conversation among the consultant team of how do we because as

we look at this right there are cities all over the world that are saying you know what we really need a walkable community where people can come right out of their houses and walk to downtown and walk to recreation and we all have to listen to the flint has everything that people are looking for except jobs um i'm going to recognize you but i'm going to open in the back first so yes please yeah my question

kind of piggybacks his confidence as you've been speaking i've been thinking about you're addressing housing stock as you're making the investments as properties and changing hands as revitalization occurs how do you bring the present into the future yes how do we go about not leaving people behind and and um you know we already have a problem with people that can't afford with the market rate housing with the

changes in the ball river with the railway coming how do we not adversely affect the people who live in the flint now who should be able to still be here 10 years from now and that is the second topic that has been running around among myself iris and the two economic students is keeping people here who are here so that they can receive the benefits of that uh of the change in more things coming here more

people coming here the area getting revitalized we don't want to kick out the people who have been here all their lives so what programs come in for that how do we structure thinking about that some of them might be regulatory changes some of them might be problematic changes some of them might be to that point figuring out how to find jobs that residents here couldn't work out would like to work at

are appropriate are entrepreneurial whatever that combination is we're kind of hoping to hear from you about what some of your thoughts have been is not actually the judgment here in the drop ship yes sir you know the the flint has an opportunity to become the new downtown it has everything a city resident you know would want food dining shopping haircuts whatever but as one of those solutions this area does not need

is more market rate housing market rate housing is just not needed it's not sustainable long term for the average resident who have lived here their whole lives i know we're talking about the physical aspect you know one of those things you can do is repave the road to pave the sidewalks clean up the street where food goes up take it down discipline is not the enemy of enthusiasm you have

to keep up with the appearance of your city but what's important is you have to keep the human aspect in line with these plans because it will be will not be fair to the average for the everyday flint resident to be kicked out because what they're going to think about is am i going to be gone ten years from now because if you do not have the residents if they all move

you don't have a neighborhood right we're living in unprecedented times right now as a city marketing housing is not sustainable what is sustainable long-term is installing affordable house options they this is their city too and it should be right for outside developers to come in make a quick buck and then leave it's not fair the human aspect needs to be 24 7 in the minds of this planning because they are important

and and last thing i want to say is is that the upkeep of this of this plan needs to be enforced it shouldn't just be a short-term fix for the area it needs to remain a long-term solution not only for people who live here today but for future residents of the city there's been talks about installing a new economic tourism director well this is a perfect example to show outside of visitors who come to

the city to get look look what we've done look what we look what we can talk about this is one of the areas that marketplace housing is just not one of those solutions so i just hope that the human aspect the city resident is always in in these plans 247 because this is their neighborhood and it wouldn't be right for them to just get priced down in the world excellent thank you very much good followers yeah

because you guys an outfit okay uh i see the man smiling i love the feedback you asked for you ain't asked for answers i'm gonna let you off the ball okay that idea i i looked at numerous uh urban tax studies okay and i can give you links to some of them this is this is a very small synopsis of what i just kind of condensed it urban tax impact studies have shown that

there is a dramatic negative impact on low and fixed income and renters when there is a rapid increase in housing and rents due to develops developers and gentrification projects foreclosures and evictions skyrocket in the vulnerable populations this dynamic this isn't this is the important part this dynamic can only be offset with targeted government programs at local state and federal levels so

there's your route go look for some money to keep to keep these people because uh basically you'll displace the entire flint with the way the housing market has gone into flint with no incremental increases in the taxes it's going to jump it's not like newton when the taxes go up all the time and everybody can afford it when you when houses and like i said statistically uh according to the u.s census a house of 20

uh in florida was sold but 256 000 not a seller for four or five thousand four or five hundred thousand six hundred thousand and when people get their tax bills are on fixed incomes and low incomes they are going to be displaced so i just wanted to put that out there so i'm gonna stop you there not because i'm not interested you and i can have a conversation so i'm making sure

everybody else gets a chance to go around the boards so why don't you all take about 20 minutes we've got pens if you need them up your pins to write with um uh if you need them up here we've got the stickies iris will be over at the maps katelyn will be at the back i'll be floating around for a conversation and we'll come back in about 20 minutes a few questions at the beginning about

what would be success for you both in the short term in the long term i'm sure many of you also continue to have other questions and be happy to uh to answer those as well but first of all any volunteers for the short term if we were standing here a year from today what would tell you that the people that you saw on that list at the beginning have been serious about implementing change what what

would you like to see yes sir what i said about the handicapped accessibility so the ability for people to get into buildings and to store fonts into their resume we live our complex in the back there's no ramp but yet there's handicapped packing in the back and i shared with this gentleman that some storefront improvement programs you mentioned we you remember that we mentioned that as a tool earlier some

storefront recruitment programs actually give funds for helping storefronts address accessibility so everybody feels welcome they'll be there so so small thing there what else other ideas for a year from today so a year it can be too big they're promising the entire you know changes but what else what else would would make you feel that this or as you walk down pleasant street as you walk through the

neighborhood say oh yes we that happened that wasn't there before we remember talking about them at least one new building one new building at least one it might be a tolerance here right i don't think so actually

what's going on some move some movement but as we talked about the real issue about the impact on a low income and fixed income community with tax increases we would you know like to see what's going on not only on nobody but you guys can accurately as the liaison to the state reps we had and the senators and and obviously spoke to the mayor already but even on our federal delegation i plan on

but to see as i said from that report the urban urban report basically said that this would be unsustainable in the initial stages without some help for low income and fixed income so for you it's seeing those problematic challenges yeah and obviously these things don't happen overnight but we really need something to do quick because the way inflation is going i i represent all the municipal retirees

in florida their average immediate income is 22 000 dollars you take out the 5 000 they're losing with with inflation and you take out their medicare payments get down to about 13 000 to live on and now they're going to get a tax bill based on the increases that we see with these these buyers and i'm not going to them they're going to do what they're going to do they're going

to try to make money but the fact is this is why the government has to intervene and there's like a thousand studies out there that says the only alternative to to act as a bridge is have something like that happen it's gonna be totally wrong and have you office yeah it's all been valuable uh you sir you mentioned building building of the year or at least start starting a building in size right that might change that

thoughts the other thing that would be incredible is that somehow we could come to terms with a a clear-cut list as to you know like you said with the zoning like okay this is going to go here and this is what we would like to see there maybe that would bring in potential businesses that have that idea because let's face the facts right now every a lot of businesses in florida they're going and they need new

locations so the biggest thing as me as a business owner is finding a location where i can expand so we need to try to look at the businesses we have and try to say hey i think what would be a gigantic success is that if we could find a spot let's say that somebody that's busting at the seams and see them build and create more jobs i would i think that would be incredible that's a great

idea i'm glad you brought up the commercial as well because this is housing and commercial yes ma'am in the umass dartmouth shirt thank you for the opportunity to speak um what about parking uh like i think of people like my mom she's having a knee replacement i know we have parking on the cash street side and i think there's a couple of small lots in different places i know we talked about having

benches along the way more handicap accessible ramps and stuff like that but can we highlight parking so if we have all these businesses come in and all of these improvements where are we going to park if you know the streets get full and all that are we going to have signage like 15-minute parking 30-minute parking um i always i'm always thinking about that because i have a toddler and it just gets crazy

with like four different bags and a stroller so i i'd like to like talk about bargaining here that's great and it's great to hear that you know um that's actually something that we know as small lots multi-family houses on small lots not a whole lot of places to park so yes i'm glad you brought that up um i can see iris is furiously writing things down so um thank you for that yes yes i think about

a year out that i would love to see a an image and a slogan that encapsulates what the vision is for pleasant street corridor so that when no matter where you are who you are that when you see that you know that that means x y and z that is uh your calling card for entrepreneurs it is a welcome mat for people who are looking for a place to

call home but that it is you know just like the big apple is new york what is fall river what is the pleasant street corridor and in a year's time have that defined so that people look at that and they know question for the crowd that's great any thoughts those are the street car reactions spring positive forward thinking images spring to mind for the flash for the final street maybe something to

think about for the next time we get in touch with you yes sir i also want to say i think it's a five day uh it's about time we paved pleasant street by the street is a disaster you got to swerve like the go just to avoid platforms you know if you want to if you want to have an attractive community you have to repay the rules and pay the sidewalks make sure that the cleans are

swept you know uh consecutively because you want to have the the good feeling of attractiveness you got to beautify the the area and the opportunity is here but you just have to execute

6 30 to 8 30 but i want to make sure

all right so what i'm going to do is i'm going to run through very quickly what i have for you next and then we'll jump back and keep going to kick us out as long as it's you know all right just for more information so we have something called a story map online that's the first thing to be um uh to the left there and that story map

is a way of diving into a lot of the information that we collected we also have a survey that's part of it i've been told today that it is not user friendly for my apologies if you tried it and it didn't make sense we will be doing another survey at another point and we'll use a different form after that so if you get a chance at least check out the story map there's a lot of

the underlying conditions that we've been using and you can zoom in and out we also have a video that's the one on the on the left of them sorry on the right that just talks a little bit about the processing very high level if you bump into people who want to know what's going on you mentioned we were at this meeting um please send them to that video and then keep an eye out for more

things we will have more to another survey and more touch points as we move through um we will leave that particular survey open just for another week it's been open for a while um as i said draft through a map that was written a little early sometime this month or next month in draft form for additional comments it's not likely to be done and dusted um and then completing the draft series

and we will plan around august ish so that we can move it into the municipal process in september and i think there'll be at least one more public meeting as part of that process plus the whole process of approval which is four or five different types of public health with that that is it i'm happy to take some more questions

we had a great crowd here tonight i can see there's a lot of good positive comments on all the boards i can't thank you enough for giving up a wednesday evening to join us it's really important i appreciate it and we will keep these going uh we have work to do on pleasant street i think that's a uniform consensus from everybody in here and we're not going to go away

to like don't allow us to try but we're going to do our best to fix it i want to thank representative schmidt and uh and senator rogers for giving us a little bit of seed money as uh as someone pointed out it's that's seed money to get it going let's get something going again thanks everybody go home and watch ozark they're in the second season thank you mayor