Can small homes cost less to subsidize?

Good afternoon. Jim Frank. Since I've kind of retired actively from Greenstone, I've been spending a lot of time on housing advocacy issues and spending a lot of time with assisting nonprofit housing providers and small infill developers. I've learned in this process the difficulties, the challenges that affordable housing providers have and small infill developers have. I've made extensive comments on the draft EIS, so I'm assuming you've all read them. I don't want to repeat them all now, except to say that I think that the focus of all these alternatives is a kind of a centers and corridors-focused, high-intensity development focus, and that's a result of a narrative that's developed, I think, partially from Department of Commerce, partially in a misunderstanding of the narrative from the Department of Commerce, and a narrative that's just been adopted kind of in general by the planning community, that the only way we can meet the housing needs of low-income families and middle-income families is to build apartments. That is a fundamentally flawed strategy, and it's a fundamentally flawed narrative. And I think it results a lot from that's all that we've ever done. Housing families that make less than 60% of median income takes a subsidy, and all the subsidy dollars essentially come from the Low Income Housing Tax Credit. It comes from federal money, and that program is an apartment building program. It doesn't consider the building of affordable housing with other strategies. We've done a lot of work with Habitat on building what I call small homes on small lots, doing small homes, doing townhouses, doing various kinds of infill development, and we can produce small homes at far less subsidy requirement than you need for building apartments. The Commerce-funded subsidized apartments are costing ballpark $500,000 each, and that requires 100% subsidy of the $500,000 because the nonprofit that owns it cannot afford to have a mortgage. Yet we're building 1,000 square foot, three-bedroom houses for Habitat in a project in Airway Heights for $200,000, and the subsidy required for that is far less. So there needs to be a land use plan and a strategy that enables more middle housing and not everything focused on building apartments, which is what your plan does. So unfortunately, there was no alternative that looked at broad-scale, mixed-use development at a neighborhood scale. And mixed-use, a low-intensity, neighborhood-scale mixed use that would allow middle housing and small level retail develop in a broader range of our neighborhoods and not just along arterial corridors and extend to a larger area, and the issue there is the density- And that is time, Jim. Thank you. You can achieve moderate level densities of 15 units an acre by using middle housing, and so I think really that's very unfortunate that that option wasn't looked at. Thank you.