Oh, there we are in person. But Joe and yeah. Yes. Just to confirm, Edgar City hadn't received it yet. All right, are you ready? All right. I'd like to welcome everybody to the Asset Management study session. In a minute, I'm going to turn it over to Preston Thomas and Frenita. Roll call. Oh, roll call first. On the roll call. Student director Simmons? Yeah. Director Vasquez? Director Lara? Present. K. Director Williams? Present, sir. K. Director Hutchinson? Director Berry? Director Thompson? Vice President Bachelor?
Here. And President Pearlhart? Here. Quorum President. And can we have a translation check, please, Mr. Seichao? Yes, President Brochard. Moving to interpretation announcement. For tonight's meeting, we have two languages for live interpretation. They are Arabic and Spanish. For in person, we have laptops here if anyone needs, interpretation. There is also a closed caption feature available on Zoom that you can use by clicking the closed caption icon on your Zoom taskbar. Great. Thank you, Ms. Abdi. Check attendees to see if any hands are raised for Arabic interpretation. Seeing no hands raised,
we will now start with Arabic interpretation. Next, we'll go to Spanish. Again, please only raise your hand if you need Spanish interpretation. Mr. Copenhagen, if you can come off mute and make the interpretation announcement for Spanish, please. Sure. Thank you, Mr. Seichal. Great. Thank you, Mr. Copenhagen. Checking attendees to see if any hands are raised for, Spanish interpretation. Seeing no hands raised, we will now start with Spanish interpretation. And that concludes the interpretation announcement, and we will monitor it throughout the meeting. Mr. Yggstra? Madam President, the interpretation announcements have been made.
Thank you. Just wanted to note to make sure that people know that there's registration on the side for public speaking. There'll be public speaking after the presentation. And then for online speakers, you should have registered beforehand. Hopefully you did. And we'll take, Zoom, speakers as well. And I'm gonna turn it over now to there he is, he's recording it, Preston Thomas. Good evening, board. Preston Thomas, the chief systems and services officer for the district. I'm really excited to be here tonight to kind of walk through kind of a journey that we've been on for quite some time around the use of our vacant
assets. Some of these properties have sat vacant for up to twenty years and we're really here tonight to kind of start to explore the what are some of the potential uses for those properties and how the Board might implement, a comprehensive strategy that goes across those properties. So one, there are various factors that the Board should be considering in terms of developing this plan, the valuation and the underlying feasibility. And one of the things that I want to really emphasize is the feasibility of doing some of these plans that before we move forward we want to make sure that we understand the key factors and variables that are critical,
to our asset management's property. We do have a list of phase one properties that we'll be talking through and you'll get some initial concepts of what is possible on those properties, right, to integrate into a broader district wide plan. And then from the board will have an opportunity after this session to begin providing direction on how we're going to put that strategy together, to further develop ideas and concepts around phase one and then also look into phase two properties that the board will. One of the things I'm really excited about tonight is we're gonna talk very briefly
about long term planning because it's been quite a journey. We've had multiple study sessions. The board has had two by twos excuse me. The board has had done site visits over at the sites and we've kind of discussed this at length to build kind of the depth of knowledge that the board has. One of the things that I'm really excited about is we had some of our labor partners join us on some of those visits to some of the workforce housing. So you'll hear from them, they're here tonight, as well. And then we're really gonna go deep dive into what's possible conceptually on these properties.
And the three properties I'll just list up that we're talking about are, one, the former Ralph Bunche Academy property, 1025 Second Avenue, and the Lakeview property. And then we'll give, you know, kind of an overview of next steps that the board can take around this. A couple of key, we're gonna talk about our strategic plan. There we go. Just really one of the things that I want you to consider as we're developing this plan, this plan should be serving our strategic plan. How does the use of those properties align to the overall strategic plan that the
district has and is guiding the work that we're doing? I wanna bring this slide back up because this came directly from a previous study session which really talked about the things that you all value around our development of our asset management strategy. And this is really gonna be critical as we move forward with the development of these properties and I want you to really listen for kind of some of those areas here where it's gonna be really critical to stick to those values. One is that we are meeting our enrollment and programmatic needs across the district,
that we utilize and leverage our properties to meet those needs. Two, that we're inclusive and transparent planning. I think we are, this is our third study session. We have invited our labor partners to come and visit so that they're part of the dialogue and that'll be an ongoing process and, you know, wanna make sure that we're continuing to do that. You're gonna get a lot of data tonight around what drives the ability to kind of develop these properties and really an overlying principle around identifying the public good. I just wanna highlight that bottom piece right there about collaboration with public agencies.
You're gonna hear tonight about how public agencies are really critical around putting together packages to finance and implement many of the concepts that you're gonna see tonight. In terms of just to review, this is a slide that you've seen before. This does come out of a board resolution 20 three-twenty four-one hundred and fifty five which really highlights some of the uses for our vacant properties. And we are talking about our vacant properties tonight, and I wanna make sure that that's, you know, clear. I know that there have been some questions about Lakeview, but the lease for Lakeview ends in 2027.
And so, like, there isn't you would not be moving forward on any of these properties until that lease was ended. So like these were three large high value properties that the board decided to include in phase one. And so, the three areas really are affordable housing and housing to support homeless populations in Oakland, youth, childcare, and family services as another pillar of that, and the third was housing for teachers and district employees and we'll talk through those concepts at depth this evening. I I wanna pause on this slide because I heard this loud and clear and
I just wanna like frame this conceptually for the board as you're considering what how is this gonna benefit the community? That broader umbrella is generally we've heard and there's unanimity amongst the board directors that we want our properties to definitely benefit the Oakland community and there are different ways that we can do that. There are some types of indirect benefit to the strategic plan and I wanna name what indirect means is that we can't control it directly but it does influence the families that are in our district and it can provide supports.
Affordable housing is one of those, right? No cost CBO leases to organizations in Oakland that are supporting our families. We could transfer the property to city or do property swaps with other agencies to actually do something different around the way that we're leveraging our properties and then seven-eleven committees and just open space in Oakland. Those don't directly benefit our students and your strategic plan but they do actually provide benefit to the families that we serve. There are direct benefits to the strategic plan.
We've talked about some of these and if a property meets some of these criteria, we've talked about non public schools, we've talked about early childhood centers, that's not part of the conversation tonight but as properties meet the criteria for that, we can launch those initiatives that directly benefit our criteria for that, we can launch those initiatives that directly benefit our families. The three that we're gonna talk about tonight is the workforce housing, potentially the sale of properties, market rate or mixed housing for revenue generation and just revenue generating leases. And so those are some of the things that can provide direct benefit either to the general
fund or to the employees and staff that work here in the district. Finally, and I'm gonna wrap it up with one more slide right here if it goes forward and it is on. Alright, there we go. Oh, two more slides. One I do wanna say that Director Berry had brought forward an amendment to the spending plan and we are in deep engagement around our vacant properties and moving forward around planning and provide the board guidance around the demolition of some of our properties. And so I do wanna say that this is not really the topic for tonight,
but it does it does influence our vacant properties, right, in particular, our vacant properties that are located in areas that have either high crime or high levels of, like, unsheltered populations that we will be talking about but it is not the focus for tonight but I do wanna let you know that that is ongoing work that we are doing right now. Here's the final slide and this is kind of your cheat sheet for tonight that I just wanted to leave you with. This kinda gives you a roadmap of some of the options that the board has at its disposal in developing its asset management strategy.
There are two types of sales that we're gonna talk about tonight very briefly because we have heard generally speaking that the board is not interested in selling properties, as is sale and an entitled sale and I just wanna highlight that it gives you the time frame on how long it takes to move forward with those items, right? So if you look at just that as is sale, you do need to do a seven-eleven committee. At the end of the seven-eleven committee, you can negotiate the sale. That takes about a year and a half, right? So as you're thinking through these things, these are long term strategies that the district should be developing that aren't quick hitters
in asset management universe. So and then if you could look at like as you go down, I really wanna just highlight workforce housing, because there's also a green box right there. One, building housing for faculty and staff. The process would be a feasibility study to figure out which properties you're interested in, then you could do an RFQ RFP and then notice that the development takes between five and seven years. These are long term development cycles and notice that we've put right in there a window that is green that has potential for bond measures.
So as Oakland has had a really amazing track record and the voters of Oakland have really supported OUSD over the last three consecutive bonds, this current bond measure y would be reaching the eight year life cycle in 'twenty seven, 'twenty eight and so there are some strategies that that future bond could end up leveraging to support any of the strategy that strategy in particular. And then also I just want to highlight that like not all of this is about developing There's a concept around exchange that can be brought into a feasibility study.
So that gives you kind of a roadmap. I am gonna hand it over now to our team that has been looking at property usage to really go deep dive into some of the concepts and we're gonna talk through, just market conditions, generally speaking. We're gonna talk about, like, affordable housing and then we're gonna talk about workforce housing in this next section. So I'll pause there. Were there any questions before we move into this? Yeah. So similarly to workforce housing, would we be able to use bond dollars for affordable housing for unhoused, communities or even TAY housing?
That is a great question. I think we should hold that until the presentation. But I would just you know, we can note that, and and it'll definitely come up as a as an area Thank you, Preston. And that's great, context for setting the the information tonight. Hi, everyone. We've been working on this for a while, so it's great to be in the same room and able to share, some preliminary findings with you all. We're looking forward to sharing our findings and getting, getting your feedback. I'm gonna grab that water. So we were engaged to look at some of your underutilized and surplus properties in
order to help you understand some options for what to do with them and and find a path forward. The framework that we've we've looked at for this is to break it into two phases where we would focus our efforts on three properties to begin with and then share those findings and learn what we can from your preferences and then later do a phase two where we can apply those learnings to a broader set of properties and potentially do a deeper dive of analysis. This is a map showing the properties. They range from vacant to district use to leased.
As Preston has mentioned, the three we're focused in phase one are 1025 Second, Ralph Bunch, and Lakeview. All of these are on the larger side out of the the pool of properties considered and so they're all, large enough to support, a housing development project. And then you can see the rest of the properties, can be studied, further in phase two. I just wanna take a minute to describe some of the fundamentals of how you can think about, you know, evaluating your options for these properties. So the first here on the left is an as is value. This is,
you know, not getting it ready to develop at all, getting any approvals in place. It's just today's market conditions, which this is gonna be a recurring theme. The the market conditions in Oakland are currently down and so the as is valuations are are currently low. The one strategy is to reentitle the sites. So that's to look at the highest and best use of the property, go through the design and approval process with the city. This derisks the project so that when it's later sold, it's, you know,
would have the the the idea is it would have a higher value. So it's one way to sort of maximize your your real estate assets. Important consideration is that real estate markets are cyclical. We're, you know, all over the state we're having, a down market cycle because of construction costs, interest rates, lack of demand, etcetera, but Oakland is particularly down at the moment. And then on the right, moment. And then on the right, you know, this is what Preston was talking about with the indirect value. So, you being a school district, there are considerations you might want to think about other than just the economic value
of the site. Is it helping you meet your educational mission? Is it providing a community good to the citizens of Oakland, etcetera? So just digging a little bit deeper into these options and as is sale, if you choose to go that route, you still have to do a seven eleven surplus process and that takes a few months and then you need to hire a broker. So the whole process probably at least a year to until there's actually funds available. When those funds are available, they're one time funds to the district. So you don't get to do anything else with that property,
of course, and you'd be selling in a down market. Again, the entitling sale would add a couple of years to the process and it requires an investment from the district. So the notion being you invest in a couple of year process to entitle the site, This increases the value and then a couple of years later, you have a higher value. Again, same thing, you have onetime funds. Those need to would need to be reinvested into facilities and capital improvement projects. That's a state law. Moving into different housing development options, you've got affordable and,
housing for the unhoused. Candy's gonna talk some more about how all this works, but, this is this would work by donating or potentially leasing the site to an affordable housing developer who then puts together the rest of the capital needed to develop the site and then lease the units to just anyone in the community that's lower income. So, it provides a nice benefit to the citizens of Oakland, which is positive. The challenge here is that it's expensive to build and there's a very large subsidy
that's needed from public sources. This is usually through tax credits and the city or county. The challenge in Oakland is that Measure U funds have been allocated to other projects and so it could take a very long time, potentially more than five years up to ten years for this to be realized. Workforce housing is, and is an exciting option that a lot of school districts around the state and around the Bay Area are currently pursuing. You would build apartments on land that you own and lease them at lower than
market rents to your employees, both classified and certificated. It's a great way to attract and entertain great educators. And other districts in the Bay Area, sort of in the immediate area here, are pursuing this, so it's one way to stay competitive in attracting and retaining great educators. Still have to go through the funding process and approvals and construction, so it's probably five to seven years out from being able to be delivered. Next steps would be feasibility study and really honing in on a funding strategy, which we'll I have some more slides tonight. We'll we'll get into some details about different funding strategies.
And then finally on the end here is market rate housing. There's it's possible to generate long term revenue for the district's general fund by developing market rate housing on a ground lease or joint venture structure. This money goes into the general fund and so it's unrestricted. It can be used for potentially salary increases or educational, uses, whatever you choose to use it on. It's a way to participate in real estate market appreciation. So, you know, others around the Bay Area are doing this and it's a way for you, Oakland Unified,
to do that. The downside is that it's subject to those same market cycles that I've been discussing. We're currently in a down market cycle. It's likely years away from this becoming financially feasible, so that's, that's certainly a challenge today. Okay. So I think we'd put in some some break points here to stop and see if we have questions or discussion. Yeah. You mentioned it a little bit, but can you talk a little bit about the factors that make, marking conditions fluctuate? So we're down at the moment. What what what would need to happen to bring it back up and then?
Sure. I mean, statewide, it's, it's really been driven by that huge inflation run up that we had a couple of years ago coming out of COVID that add a lot of cost to construction costs. And, you know, certainly now we're looking at some uncertainty around macroeconomic conditions and tariffs and fire rebuilding, so there's some uncertainty in the future around construction costs. That's a big factor. Interest rates is another big one. It's perhaps, you know, like a workforce housing project might be a little bit less sensitive to interest rates because you're not borrowing as much but in a market rate project,
the equity and debt both base the returns that they're looking, based on sort of macroeconomic interest rates. So if interest rates were to drop back down to where they were a few years ago, that would help projects get off the ground. And then really the last factor is demand, so rental rates, home prices, etcetera. And so that really varies on a market to market basis. And there's there was a lot of supply built in Oakland, new apartments built in Oakland over the last, you know, five to ten years.
And so those need to be leased up and, sort of have have there be pent up demand to be able to justify new market rate housing. You had talked about, low income housing. For unhoused families, what would that look like for no income housing? I mean, we have, you know, so I think there's kind of a difference between people. So if you could explain a little bit about that. I'm going to, I think our next major section of the presentation is focused on affordable housing and how it works and the funding mechanisms. So, if if it's alright with you, we'll wait until then.
I had one clarifying question, which was you mentioned in the market rate section around a joint venture. Could you just clarify what you mean by that? And then I do have one other question after. Yeah. I may have misspoke slightly because I think technically school districts can't form a true joint venture but, you can structure a ground lease so that you can participate in the upside over time, so that's it sort of functions more like a joint venture. But to just kind of simply answer the question, it's,
you can ground lease your property and just have a set annual rent payment with very prescribed, you know, 2% increases over a long period of time, or you can structure it so that you can, take a little bit more risk with the market going up and down, but also potentially benefit from the upside when the market increases. So it's it's a it's kind of a risk tolerance question. Yeah. So I think All in my head. Thank you. Thank you very much for the intro. My question is about, state or city incentives that might be out there to build affordable housing.
I think there was once a statewide converse or statewide conversation to build 20,000 affordable housing around the I don't know if that's the same incentive for the city or maybe the county. Have we talked about how those possible incentives can support, any affordable housing measures that, the district may consider. I'm gonna I just wanna point out, we're working with Divine and Gong, who are the affordable housing experts. So Candee's here. She's our she's a member of a team who's more of an expert in affordable
housing finance than I am, so I'm gonna let her talk to the specific incentives. But in general, there's been a lot of legislation passed in the past few years to try to streamline the approval process for affordable housing finance, for affordable housing development. But I think you're asking specifically about economic incentives. Building incentives. Yeah. And and Mhmm. Rather within the county, Alameda County and the city that would support any particular measure. I don't know if it's workforce housing and affordable housing or,
you know, what the what are those incentives that would be a positive attribute to looking at building units? Mhmm. Well, I have, a little bit later in the presentation, I have some description of some of the things that the state is doing to try to incentivize specifically school districts pursuing workforce housing. So I'll talk about those when we get to there. And then, if it's alright with you, I'm gonna defer the affordable housing finance questions to Candy. I just asked what a CBO, please say. A CBO? I mean, I was on Preston's list.
Community based organization. Okay. Thanks. Okay. All right. I'm going to yes. Excuse me. Thank you. And unfortunately today was a tough day for me but I was watching on Zoom leading in. And, respectfully it's not even a direct question for you. I need to just put this on the record as soon as possible. This whole thing is offensive tonight. Now, we were supposed to work on our master's facilities plan which would help inform decisions going forward. We were also supposed to have a list of recommendations under the three R's for re envisioning the footprint.
None of that stuff has happened. Now, I've sat in this room and heard this presentation before. And the fact that we're being told to choose a plan to build housing and develop on our properties is offensive. That hasn't been decided by the board. And so now in the last couple of weeks our superintendent has been forced out. Two days ago our head of facilities quit after eighteen years in the district and now we're getting a presentation about using our properties for sale or development. Now if you look at any anything the Board has passed in the last ten
years, This priority is at the bottom of the list. The thing we prioritize first are facilities to help pursue our academic goals for our to provide services to our community. And the fact that we're now starting with a conversation about surplus properties when nothing has been declared surplus through a seven-eleven committee that's being mentioned here today. So I just want to be very clear that this won't go down. I've done this dance a number of times and to see what's been happening now
in the District and that this is what we're choosing to have a study session on, not the fact that we have no superintendent, Not the fact that we're leaving receivership. Not the fact that we have a budget that we still need to pass in June. But on how to move our properties for development or sale. It's offensive. We've been here before. This isn't what the community wants and there's no way this is ever going to happen. Thank you. Okay. Anything else before we go to the next section? Okay. I'll introduce Candi Repp with Divine and Gong who's gonna work on,
talk to you about affordable housing. Good evening, y'all. I'm Candy Repp. I work at Devine and Gong. I work with, Chanu Lee, many of whom I believe know her but Chanu is out of town so she wasn't able to join us this evening. So you guys have had a lot of great questions about, the affordable housing piece. So I'm just gonna quickly go through the slides, not spend a lot of time and really just try to address your questions. So I am not, do I hit the point in over that direction?
Oh, I went too far. Okay. So, I think as we've alluded to already, you know, the term affordable housing is really a catch all, right? It's for housing folks that are making less than the area median income. Typically, because it is supported by a variety of public sources the top range is usually 60 to 80% of the area median but it also can capture folks all the way down to no income. So,
you know, currently unhoused populations assuming that their part of the structure of the financing would allow for rent subsidies to support those folks that don't have any income. As I've said, it's financed publicly, but also it's financed in a mixed way. So, usually local sources, that can be city, county, school districts, it can be different, used to be redevelopment agencies back in the day, not anymore, state funding, federal funding,
and then private dollars that come to projects either because the project can actually support like a regular commercial bank loan or, through the syndication of an allocation of low income housing tax credits. So, as the slide describes, there's two components to the tax credit prod tax credit program. I'm not gonna go into a lot of detail, it's a lot of information that I'm happy to share if anybody has any specific questions. The program, you know, was originated in 1985 as part of the tax act.
It is a tax driven program, it is not a federal grant program. That's the important thing to know about low income housing tax credit. So projects therefore have to meet certain economic tests and feasibility tests and the developers and property managers have to have certain levels of capacity and experience. There are thresholds in order to be able to access these funds. In addition to that, there are a variety of other programs that are listed there, some of which are under threat right now,
especially at the federal level. The proposed budget has zeroed out. The home program, the two zero two elderly program, the eight eleven program which is for disabled households and has severely restricted the CDBG program. So we'll see what happens through the federal budget process and where we end up, with our new budget. That obviously puts additional pressures on cities and counties because their entitlement, the city of Oakland, the county of Alameda are entitlement
jurisdictions, they get money from the federal government through the HOME program and through the CDBG program and they turn around those dollars and make them available to local developers. So that is a very quick, very quick. So, when we look at how we can very quickly assess whether a particular property site is ideal for affordable housing, We want to see whether or not it is accessible to transit,
whether or not it's accessible to other important community amenities grocery stores, pharmacies, medical facilities, schools, parks, libraries. Within the allocation system for these public funds, their projects that are well located are advantaged. So they have an extreme advantage. So when we looked at the district sites, that was one of the criteria that we really looked at carefully is where is this site, what's around it, would it achieve the kind of amenity
levels that would be necessary. There's also a state mapping program that talks about whether or not sites are located in high or low resource areas. The state has defined those areas as a combination of factors. It includes education level, crime statistics, the average income of a particular census tract, whether there's been local investment so new things being built,
new transit, new infrastructure, etcetera. Those neighborhoods and census tracts where incomes are low, where crime is high, where educational achievement levels are lower than the state required, those typically fall into a low resource area. Those project sites then are disadvantaged in the competition for public funds. And conversely, sites that, you know, have higher incomes, lower crime rates,
higher levels of achievement, those are considered high resource areas and they are advantaged. Yes. I had a question about that in the colors of this map. There's no legends so can you give us a hint as to what the colors might mean? Yes, so, the blue are high and highest resource and the green tones or kind of beigey tones are low and lower resource areas. So just to give you an idea like the count the city of San Jose
has been fighting with the state of California over these opportunity maps because they have like maybe three census tracts that are considered high resource and they, of course, would argue, I think appropriately, that that isn't really an accurate reflection of their neighborhoods and their investment in their community. So there is a lot of controversy around these maps but it is the tool that the state uses as part of their allocation process
so we wanted to bring it to your attention because it is an important site consideration. Yeah. And then bunch is in a, like, yellow Yeah. Low resource. Okay. Thank you. So, and the next thing we did is we just wanted to just illustrate for you kind of the cake, as we call it. You have to build a cake. You have to build layers onto a cake in order to support an affordable housing project. There's never a single source or two sources.
It is often, you know, anywhere from four to seven sources of financing to support a project and right now the kind of typical cost for a unit in Oakland is, about $942,000 again, to reiterate the timeline, so affordable housing projects do take a lot of time. As was mentioned by Chris, one of the questions that one of the board members had was, you know, what have states and localities and others done to incentivize affordable housing.
And the main thing that the state has done and localities have really tried to allow for quicker entitlements and permitting processes and to allow certain types of projects to proceed as a by right project instead of having to go through a variety of planning and zoning hearings in order to get their entitlements. There's also been some work around CEQA, there's been some work around if properties are owned by,
churches, that they have some advantage through the permitting process. That has all been really helpful. We call those kind of revenue neutral, things. So things that that can be done where they don't have to put money towards it. So, in terms of putting money towards things, the city Of Oakland had their Measure U funds, that was, you know, a great pot of money for, to support affordable housing in the city of Oakland. They issued a NOFA, it was oversubscribed, probably five to one.
They funded some projects, they have a long waiting list, they've exhausted that set of funds. County Of Alameda, you know, they had their prop one. All of those funds have been expended and they have not had a new bond issue for affordable housing. The state of California also, chose not to in '24 put a housing bond on the ballot. They thought about it and they considered it and then instead went for a bond to support transportation and education.
They felt that was a higher priority. The state had benefited substantially from funds from the American Recovery Act and those funds, a lot of those funds were used for affordable housing and have been deployed. So at this point, the majority of funds at the state level right now to support affordable housing are really to support, the unhoused, which is fabulous and within the unhoused that would include, Tay as well as chronically homeless and homeless individuals with behavioral health issues.
So, that's where the bulk of the money is currently being directed at the state level. The timeline, you know, we we're showing it could be as long as seven years and the reason for that is because you have to go almost like from source to source. You can't, simultaneously usually secure money both from the locality and the state at the same time. And again, it has everything to do with how the programs are set up to really advantage
what they call projects that are ready. So projects that are ready are projects that already have some form of local commitment so that they're only looking for a gap from the state. So we have to really layer this cake. And because we have to layer it and because the timing of how these notices of fund availability come out, they don't always work perfectly. And so we can find ourselves in this process of accumulating the necessary capital over
several years and several cycles, because, you know, there are other projects that are more competitive than our project and so we have to keep trying, you know, multiple applications to the same source. I am gonna stop there and take questions. So on this resource map, it clearly benefits wealthier neighborhoods that have those things already. How does that affect the funding from this? So if you need to be in a highly resourced area,
I would assume there's also a lot of opposition in those areas to particularly these kinds of housing that you just mentioned. That's correct and usually the land costs are higher, because, you know, the market drives it and says, you're in this better neighborhood, you know, we think this land is Those things are all true. The policy goal behind it is to support low income families living in neighborhoods where folks have higher resources and there's been
a lot of, you know studies that have been done that Demonstrate that, it is advantageous for folks of limited means to live in higher resource neighborhoods that they, gain advantages, you know, better parks, better schools, better grocery options, etcetera. And so the policy goal at the state is, you know, we think affordable housing should be directed to those neighborhoods. I will say that it isn't an all or nothing. There it's it's a nuanced advantage.
So, when they're doing the sort on an application cycle that comes in, those projects that are in the high resource area, once they've hit 50% of an allocation in a region, then they basically level the playing field and then it no longer matters. And that's really the result of a lot of advocacy from community based organizations who have effectively argued that investing in neighborhoods that are gentrifying or have been marginalized is as valuable as it is as
investing in high resource areas that with the new development of affordable housing, typically we elevate those neighborhoods. So, that's the compromise that was reached. A quick question somewhat tangential to what, president Brohard was saying, but I want to approach it from a different angle. I'm wondering, I know you talked about CBOs and how they can actually advocate for it, it. But I'm wondering what can your group do to advocate for a resource property that
I mean, a property that's, in the low lower resourced area? Or does your company even? Well, we're, I mean, we are financial consultants, so we work with CBOs. That's who our client base is, that are public agencies for the most part. So, you know, if someone came to us, you know, with say the Ralph Bunche site and said, we really want to do affordable housing on this site for all these reasons, you know, we would perform a very in-depth feasibility study and we would show them,
you know, this is how you would score in these various competitions, these would be the hurdles we would have to overcome. You know, would we say to them, no, you shouldn't do it? Not necessarily, but we would want them to understand that there's an additional hurdle to, utilizing a site in a low resource area. I sort of asked that question because when I look at, the 1025, property and then when I look at the property just adjacent to it,
I see that low income housing Mhmm. Or affordable housing is built there. So I'm wondering Yeah. How were they able to navigate getting low income housing built there, and then maybe we not be able to hear? Yeah. They, I mean, you know, timing is also important in life. And they, they were able to access a state program, called the Affordable Sustainability Program, which is advantageous projects that are benefiting from transit or transportation infrastructure improvements.
And so and and by demonstrating that their development in conjunction with whatever transit and transportation infrastructure thing is happening lowers greenhouse gases, by certain percentages, those projects are very competitive. And the project that you're referring to got one of those grants. They are very, very hard to come by. They are very, very valuable. But the problem is that's not what happened with that property and that's not the history that we have here in Oakland. So our Administration Building was intentionally flooded in 2013 because they were all a part
of the Lake Merritt area plan around that development. That parcel that's now being built on was created by a city measure, AA, and that city property. And so to conflate these two and to say, Oh, they did it because they moved on something. That property sat vacant for eight years because urban core was trying to develop market rate housing on all of our sites. And so this is the problem that we're in right now. We're a school district. We're not developers or land management company.
And we bring in outside consultants and they're sitting here trying to tell us the history of our properties that they weren't here to even know about. And why are we talking about developing housing when we have real facility needs to provide academic services to our community? Why when the state, the county, and the city haven't done it, people think they're gonna come and take our property to do it? This is so offensive. And the part that everyone leaves out is nobody's coming and doing anything for free.
So how much of our property do we need to give them for them to develop a hundred units? As a board, we haven't voted that we're prioritizing housing. So why is this being brought before us? The superintendent's not here, general counsel's not even here, and we're gonna have a free flowing conversation about how to dispose of our properties? I've actually heard this presentation more than once. I thought the days of developers being brought before the school board in the community by school board leadership were over.
And here we are, deja vu all over again, like Yogi Berra said. So there's real laws in place that protect our properties, thankfully, from just these very actions. And it's offensive that people who serve a four year term think they're gonna make permanent decisions around our properties. But thankfully there's laws in place and I will never fall for the banana in the tailpipe and I won't let my community either. So as this goes forward I need everyone listening to make sure they realize this is a development plan on our district property that's being pitched to us.
And this is not how we are managing our facilities or our facility bonds. So why did the board president choose to bring this forward now? And why is there nobody in leadership even here in the room to have this discussion? Thank you. Candi, just for a point of clarification, are you a developing company? Like No. Do you develop property? No. We thank you. No. We are not a part of OUSD. They're an outside contracted firm and as people who will be dedicated and make all of these things, you can say Mr. Hutchinson all you want,
but it's very clear she's not a district employee. She was hired from the outside and she's telling us things about our properties that are not true because our community experienced exactly what happened with these properties. Thank you. I'm gonna remind board members that when other members are speaking, when our presenters are speaking as well, that we'll have plenty of opportunity for all of us to speak. So you also mentioned that California specifically has funding at the moment for, unhoused, community members, to house them, Tay, youth,
as well as, folks that have, mental health, challenges. Can you talk a little bit about the possibility of accessing so what are some of the things that we would have to do in order to access some of those funds? I know for, like, Tay Youth, for example, there would be need to be wraparound services that are provided on-site. Are those similar are there similar constraints like that for the other two categories of Yeah. It's the the current funding that the state has available to support, the unhoused populations
are, currently out in a notice of fund availability, with applications that are due, at the end of, May. And it requires a combination of a non profit organization working with a local government entity, city or county, and requires some very, very tough development milestones including being able to, you know, have really a project that's pretty much ready to go and all the other necessary
dollars outside of the state dollars in hand and be able to accomplish any building or renovation within twelve months of an award so that, units can be leased up as quickly as possible. The goal being of course to, move the unhoused into housing as quickly as possible. And yes, there is a very hefty service requirement. So, there are service ratios depending on the type of population that you want to serve,
so certain number of case managers per unit, and working with experienced service providers, who have experience working with that population and success working with that population. So, yeah, that's, it would require assembling a team. Anything else? Great. Thank you. Thank you very much, Candy. That's a lot of great information about affordable housing. There we go. So, I'm gonna do a section where I just focus on workforce housing here for for a little while. This shown on the screen here is the Jefferson Union High School District project in
Daly City that I know a lot of you toured. This is a project that that we worked on so I have a lot of detailed information I can share on it. This is a map of the school districts around the Bay Area who are in various stages of pursuing workforce housing for their employees. CSBA says that I think over 80 school districts statewide are pursuing this and in different stages of it. So there's just there's a lot of momentum these last couple of years and a lot of interest in this type of project. Some of the projects here, again, Jefferson Union High School District has been completed and operational for about three years now.
That's had a tremendous impact on their ability to attract and retain employees. Their annual turnover rate has been cut from 20% to 25% annually down to, you know, closer to zero. San Francisco Unified just opened their first project and San Leandro, just to the south of us here in Oakland, is is looking to do this as well and and Berkeley. So I have a little bit more information about, case studies of those school districts that we'll share. And, you know, the majority of these districts have declining enrollment. That's that seems to go hand in hand with school districts looking to do workforce
housing. There's a lot happening at the state level to encourage and, you know, make it easier for school districts to pursue this type of work. What started was 2016, the Teacher Housing Act that made it explicitly legal for school districts to build housing and lease it to their employees. 2295 from a couple of years ago was was a consequential piece of legislation that allowed districts to streamline the approval process on the general plan and zoning amendment front. So, there's also some legislation from,
10/21 that would amend and extend this so that it would pertain to even more school districts and more housing projects. There's another piece of legislation making its way through that would create a revolving fund for for predevelopment expenses for school districts who are interested in pursuing this. It's, say, a hundred, a hundred and $50,000 for, feasibility studies and things like that. It's I think it's a couple of years away from it being approved and going into effect, so, not available in the in the near term and then, you know, more legislation to provide technical assistance.
So, there's a lot happening at the state level. This is some employee survey results from the past few years that was done by your staff. And looking at the state of the thing that jumps out to me are right in the middle there, top two factors that influence staff decision to in the middle there, top two factors that influence staff decision to leave Oakland USD. And 17% say transportation or commute time and 29% say cost of living. So by building housing inside of your school district bounds and making it low cost and affordable to your employees, that can you know, workforce housing could have,
a big impact on both of those. So there's there's evidence within the survey results here. And, we can look to other school districts who have completed workforce housing projects to show that it does actually have an impact on attracting and retaining great educators. Okay. I'm gonna spend a couple of slides here talking about the funding options for workforce housing. So I like to think of them in these three buckets. On the left, school district facilities funding mechanisms. These are unique to school districts. You have the ability to go ask your voters to pass a general obligation bond.
This is how you, you know, fund your, facilities improvements. A certificate of participation is essentially a loan that school districts can take out. And so many districts combine funds from a GO bond with a COP, which is certificate of participation for short. And between the two of those, you can self fund your own workforce housing project. In the middle Mister Thomas, I thought our facilities bonds are maxed out and we don't have the ability to go for another facilities bond for this. Is that correct?
Because again we need to be real careful with the information that's being presented here. And I'm trying to maintain myself but we should not have outside consultants telling us what we can and can't do without somebody being here to verify this information. And so, our facilities bonds are maxed out and have been. And when we have the ability to go for a new one at the max, we will. So we need to be real clear with the information. The middle bucket here is utilizing market upside. So you could sell surplus or owner utilized land and reinvest the proceeds from that
sale into workforce housing projects that could be either entitled or or as is. There's there's the possibility of a hybrid scenario where market rate housing is built sort of the mixed mixed project and then the rent from the market rents subsidizes the rent in the workforce housing. That's a little bit trickier here in Oakland because we think we're a few years away from a market recovery for market rate housing so probably not immediately available for that. And then finally on the right, this is the bucket of funding that that Candy was describing,
you know, putting together the cake with all the different funding sources, city and county, local money, tax credits from the state and federal government. And so there have been some instances that I'll talk about next of school districts pursuing workforce housing with it, that type of funding. This is a case study of a few different examples. We have the district funded model on the left. Jefferson Union High School District is that. San Leandro just to the south of us here is looking to do this with $60,000,000 of bonds that they passed in 2024.
And then on the right, we have tax credit and city subsidy style projects. San Francisco just opened its doors to, that type of a project. Berkeley is looking to break ground very soon and then LA Unified has done it as well. The I'll kinda draw your attention to the bottom row, the key subsidy. So for Jefferson Union, they use $33,000,000 in GO bonds. That's the main way that you plug the gap and make the finances work. For the rest of them, San Francisco put in $48,000,000 into their school district project and that's that's how that project was able to move
forward. Similar with Berkeley, Dollars Twenty Two Million there so that can work if there is a city or county funding available. Just kind of comparing and contrasting the two again, of course, in a district funded model, you you own the asset yourself because you've self funded it. So the benefit of this is that down the road when the loan is paid off, you could potentially generate net cash flow from that asset that would go into your general fund and could be used for salary increases. That's a benefit of funding it yourself and owning the asset yourself.
You all. With Jefferson Union though, wasn't there a number of acres turned over to the development corporation for them to build market rate housing and commercial facilities as a part of that deal and shouldn't that be accounted for here? Because if I remember right, over 20 acres were turned over and there was only a few acres left for actual workforce housing. So where is that accounted for here? Because that's a big cost for us or for Jefferson Union. I can address that. The the what you're referring to is the rest of that,
Ceremony Del Rey site was entitled for market rate and affordable housing. That's completely separate from the faculty and staff housing project, the workforce housing. The workforce housing was funded with GO Bond and COP money. So that workforce housing building is completely revenue neutral to the district, and it doesn't depend on market rate housing. I'm gonna turn back to the slide. The another benefit of district funded workforce housing is that one thing that happens with the tax credit and city subsidy projects is it when you take outside funding sources,
it comes with a lot of restrictions and needing to be competitive. So, you know, we've sort of seen on average the unit sizes and mix need to be smaller. The parking ratios are usually quite low at half a space per unit or or lower to save money and, there can be a reduction in amenities provided. Whereas, in a district funded model, you're not you don't have any other restrictions. Competing for other funding sources. So you don't you can, you can build sort of exactly what you think is demanded from your own employees.
Can I just ask a quick what is a GO bond? I know you've said this before. Seems we're general obligation. Okay. Thanks. Yep. Okay. Slide 27, please. Do you mind telling us again? I know you please forgive me. I write the yellow bus. What does key subsidy actually mean? Just key in terms of, like, the primary, the main subsidy Okay. That was that made that enabled the the project finances to work out. And I I thought I understood it, but I wasn't sure. I wanted to make sure. So why and I noticed you didn't talk about LA,
and that's in the last column. And it's only 3,500,000.0 as opposed to San Francisco being 48,000,000. Can you kind of elucidate that? Sure. Yep. The difference here is that LA Unified was built ten years ago, and so construction costs were a lot lower then. And that's that's one reason for it. The other is that this is starting to get a little bit complicated here, but for the San Francisco and the Berkeley projects and some others that are using the city subsidy tax credit model,
they actually have two separate types of projects. One is a a classic low income housing tax credit building and then also one that is a a middle income building. And so that the middle income building requires a larger subsidy from that key subsidy line to make the financing work out because it's not eligible for traditional affordable tax credits. The LA project did not also do the the middle income project. So it's just low income.
So in order to qualify to live there, you have to have low income. And most districts that we've worked with around the state, their certificated employees make a little bit too much money to to quite a bit too much money to qualify for that low income. So it's my understanding that, LA Unified doesn't have any certificated employees living in this building. They make too much money, and so that's they sort of were able to do it with less funding from LA, the city of LA, but it perhaps if your goal is to make sure that you're housing some of
your certificated employees that perhaps did not meet that goal. So I don't k. Just just a couple of pieces I wanna clarify. Preston Thomas again, chief systems officer, for the District. We are here in a study session, and one of my jobs is to make sure that the board has the depth of information around the options, around the the vacant properties that exist. So there is no action tonight, but from this, the Board should have, enough information to think about what types of feasibility studies the Board is interested in exploring moving forward with the vacant assets that are on our properties.
I do also wanna note that like right now, Director Hutchinson is absolutely right. We have a bond, measure Y, that is fully prescribed and has work moving forward. These, as we started out in the conversation, that these are long term strategies that the board needs to be thinking around its assets and can take significant amount of time and there will be a future bond and then this would be some of the things that the board should consider. I just write the Jefferson Union High School District property is two separate projects. There was one project that was developed exclusively for workforce housing.
That is the picture that you see here that was solely funded by the district. And then there is another development that that district made a decision with the rest of the property to continue to develop out that property. So I just wanted to be clear around yeah. The the we can get into that more detail. I I do wanna say that that was a stand alone piece and that and these are the conversations that the board needs to have and make a decision around moving forward on this. And so one of the pieces going back to the values that the Board has was to really start to include some of our partners in this conversation,
particularly around the workforce housing. And so, really tonight we're here to hear a little bit from each of, our labor partners. Not all of them were able to attend, but you do have some here tonight and I'll walk through that. So just before we go, because just what you said was the intention of this is to present options. Mhmm. And I reject that idea wholeheartedly when we're just being presented with one option of housing. And we're talking about properties that are part of our school district that have provided academic services for generations some of these properties. And so we're not being presented with all of the options.
We're not even being presented with the first options according to our own policies. We're being presented an option of housing. And so we need to be very clear when we use these words and it's and we have to be very clear that this is not the first option that any of our bylaws, policies, documents, or community will ever list because our first priority is always to use these properties to provide academic services. Especially a property like Ralph Bunche that was housing students until the pandemic.
The district didn't make the repairs necessary and now all of a sudden it's being discussed for other things. So this is a slippery slope. I know what we as a district have approved over the last ten years when it comes to this, but we need to be really clear. We're not presenting options, we're presenting one option that comes to housing. Yeah. I I just want to clarify and then we can move move forward to kind of like the is that there are many options for the district's properties. I do wanna say that. And this slide was the intent was to capture that. The focus for tonight was on some of the housing options that the board had
requested to get more information on. So I do wanna just point out some of the options that we've talked about, non public schools, early childhood centers, there are other options there. The focus for this study session tonight was specifically the methodologies that other districts are using around housing. So I do wanna make sure that there are many options that the board has in front of them. The focus for tonight was really on housing. I do wanna first of all I just wanna appreciate and let me get all the way to the slide so we can see. Oh, takes a little while to get there. I do I do really wanna turn to our labor partners and and give them
an opportunity to come up and talk about it because there are lots of historical when you start talking about workforce housing, you think of company housing and things like that and like this is not that. Right? And we invited some of our partners, and I really wanna appreciate you all because I know that it's a long day, and then you go to Jefferson Union High School District to kinda go and visit. And so, like, we really wanted to give, our employees an opportunity to share in and understand, like, what the properties actually look like that have been developed. And so, what I'd like to do is just kind of give each of our labor partners
I just wanna name who was there. The first one, we had BCT that joined us, on that property and we saw and also UAOS was there as well. And I don't know if we may have some members that are online that might wanna chime in. We had ASME join us on our second, visit, with president Wood is here tonight, and then also BCT, and also SEIU was there as well on the visit. And so, really, tonight, we just wanted to invite you up to just kind of three to four minutes just around your impressions, questions you had around the specific property that you saw at Jefferson Union High School
District. So I don't know who wants to go first, but, you know yeah. If you can there we go. How's it going? Good afternoon. I'm Francisco Reynoso. I'm a plumber for Billings and Grounds, and I was, fortunate enough to go down there and take a look at the apartment complexes. And, from what I got, it helps people save money, you know, so that they could afford their own house eventually. And I feel like that would help out, you know, the our blue collar workers that we have, the teachers and the building grounds people. Hi. My name is. I'm a BCTC chief steward. What I like about this idea and this making it,
it would definitely retain our workers. As I myself, I commute two hours every day to come here to service the OUSD schools. As of 90% of my members, they're not locally living. That will give them actually opportunity to live and work in Auckland, which is gonna give us opportunity to afford the living in Auckland. Based on our salaries, we could do that. Another thing, this thing that I saw basically, in Jefferson High, the whole property looks like a to me, it's like a hotel. It has beautiful amenities. It has a lot of participates.
Everything that probably, family or a single person or teacher, certified class, doesn't matter if needed, that he can get close by. Like I said, getting coming to work and going back home, basically, daily, it's four hours for me. That's twenty hours a week of staying away from my family, from my kids. I didn't choose that. You know, basically, it's just that the opportunity happened that I come to the work for Auckland, and I loved it. And I stayed and been fifteen years here. I like every idea on it. The work it is,
I support. You will get a more you you will get a union works, union companies to work on these projects, which would give the decade of the war for the union workers that represent from IBW, plumbing things, from carpentry, everybody. So to me, this is something that I definitely will support it and will give me later on maybe the opportunity for me to move myself out as well to live in Auckland. Thank you. And we'll give you an opportunity to ask a round of questions to them. President Wood, would you mind? And I want to just share that at Jefferson Union,
it's about 60% certificated and 40% classified, and we've been able to have our classified employees come and visit the sites. And so I want to give President Wood and I don't know if if if, Joe is online as well, but if not, president Wood, please. Good evening. Again, my name is Dana Wood. I am the president of AFNI. I did take the, I call it, the field trip over to Jefferson. And one of the reasons why I did do it because I was born and raised here in East Oakland. I get to go by the Edward Shands site,
which is a wreck. And if we're going to fight about what we're going to do with the property, first, we need to make sure we are maintaining our properties, because that's a blight for for us to be arguing about affordable housing or work for housing is, appalling. I'm a use that. It's appalling because when again, when you start thinking about, my labor brothers who are traveling and even in, AFMI, we have folks who are had to move to Sacramento because they couldn't afford to
live in Oakland. And if we are going to, provide the best education for our students and our families, because that's what we keep hollering, then we need to make sure that the people who are serving our children, our communities, our family can afford to live here. We we are we are going to other places. I'm grateful. I've been blessed. I was able to buy a home in Oakland, but not because I'm working for the district. If we expect to have the best educators, They we need to be able to be in a position where we're not driving
four or five hours a day because we love what we do. We need support. And I think that it is imperative on the board. And I get what you said, mister Hutchinson, but we need to start looking. Because if not, we're going to lose great people to districts who are doing it and doing it well. If it was if I were in need, Jefferson would look good to me right now. It would look real good to me right now. 48% below market rates,
That looks good. And we're fighting about the sustainability of the people who care for our children and our community. It's a shame. And, mister Woods, I'm I'm really glad you brought up Edward Shands. I think that's an important part of this story. And so one of the things that I'm sure a lot of the community doesn't realize is in 2021, the school board voted a development deal with Eagle Construction for Edward Shands and the Tilden CDC that the school board words Smith in at the last minute to include
50% affordable workforce housing. And because this district doesn't know how to do these things and the board takes actions without thinking it through, in the almost four years since that deal was approved, nothing has been done. So the blight you see now at Edward Shands is a direct result of the school board agreeing to a lease with Eagle Construction to build affordable housing. And it was a boondoggle and a hustle then and we have to get those properties back. And that's a lot of the reason why I'm so concerned about this talk now
because the district has failed at doing this and Edward Chance is a direct result of that. The board tried to do that and the blight there is on Eagle Construction because the board signed a forty plus year lease with them. And so as we're talking about this, those facts really need to matter too because I agree with you philosophically but we have a real issue with these kinds of plans being put forward before a school board and we're talking about our district properties. And so I just wanna throw that side of caution in there and it's really
important that we as a community get our heads around what's happened with Edward Shands because that has to inform what we do going forward. Okay. And I get that but it's hard for for me to hear from you because you are bringing really bad energy. Even in the last board meeting, you were upset when people interrupted you. You interrupted him. And I found that if you really want us to hear you, I like good information. But I don't wanna hear it from someone who sounds like they're mad.
Well, hold on. Hold on. Hold on. Hold on. So you can get rid of the getting rid of the No. No. I'm not getting rid of the let please let the speaker continue, mister Hutchinson. What I want but what I'm saying is even since you've been in here, there's been interruption. I get what you're saying. I wanna learn more. But I've been asked to give my opinion based upon what I saw at Jefferson, and that's what I'm doing. I think it's important. Hold on, miss Hutchinson. Hold on. Hold on. And so if if you want us to hear you,
I wanna hear you. I don't want someone yelling or screaming and hollering because you don't agree. There are a lot of things we don't agree with, but I wanna hear. Now do I will I am I willing to sound and talk with you? Sure. But we need to we need to start thinking about the students. But but So don't lecture me. I mean, so if we wanna go back with work, I'm available anytime. Okay. Joe Trapp has my personal contact information. Excuse me, Director Hutchinson, I've just been informed by Mr. Raikstra that the back and forth,
shouldn't be happening here. So I appreciate your comments. Thank you so much. I also want to add and then we'll invite our friends from SEIU up. One of the pieces that I do think is really important, I wasn't in this role when Edward Jan's, that lease was and general counsel is also online who wasn't in her current role. It's really important that we understand from Candy like what are some of the barriers that get away get in front of districts as they're moving forward with these projects. That's the importance of the study session, right, so that the board is fully informed around the complexities around this. We do have vacant properties that are blighted and we need to do something to
address that. It also is just a really critical element. So I do wanna name that, like, this is part of the process is to make sure that the board is fully informed, that we're request to do this in public so the full community can see what it takes to do, whether it's affordable housing, whether it's a lease, all of those things are really complex and, you know, other districts are moving forward on it. We wanna bring forward the best practices to you all so that we can do feasibility studies. We can try to understand why the EGLE project has not progressed at the rate
that we want to. Can you just restate what that is? Yeah. And then yeah. I I just wanted to, like, that that is why we are here tonight, right? We are here tonight that there was a lease to develop two properties, within the district that had a combination of affordable and workforce housing and that has been an ongoing issue and it has hit some snags along the way. We can absolutely do, as one of the actions that the board has, is to do an inquiry around what has happened with those properties and where the developer might be struggling around it. It. So I just wanna name the whole body of like all the things that I
pointed out earlier around the options. My job is to give you the options that the board has, to inform you about how to move forward on them, and then we will implement the policies that you bring forward. So that's what tonight is for, right? And I do wanna also point out that after we hear from our our labor partners, I do wanna make sure there are some concepts around how this might look if you think about the future five to seven years down the road, what the landscape of these properties could look like and I think it's a really critical thing for the community and for the board to see what those options might
look like, what they might cost, how they might support. And and we're we have an ask around surveying more of our our our, staff to find out where they're at. But I also one other piece before I invite both, Holly and Catherine up here, so I apologize I'm a little long winded right now, is this takes time and it takes a coalition of people that are willing to do it. And I think that that takes time to build and I I wanna move away from acting quickly, but I want the board to be well informed and strategic around the decisions that you're making around these. So without further ado Before they come up,
I just want to go back to your slide three and keep in mind, and it's something I think President Wood also said, is that I'm looking at these two goals of ensuring strong readers by third grade and growing a diverse and stable workforce. And I think looking at listening to stories of people commuting two and three hours a day, moving to communities that are more for excuse me, I think to one of the things that really ensures that readers are reading by third grade is that we have stable site staff, is that we that whatever role you are playing in the district,
whether you're in buildings and grounds, whether you're, you know, an attendance what whoever you are, you are adding to that ability to ensure that we have strong readers. So I think that looking at ways that we can make it affordable for people to live in their communities, to vote in their communities, I think that, I appreciate your comments. I think going back but going back to your Slide three, grounding ourselves in that part of the discussion. Thank you. Hi, everyone. Good evening. So, yes, we deserve to be able to afford to live in the areas in which we
work, but we're missing a root issue here. The core issue of the district should be education, not real estate development. These proposals stretch our institutional capacity, distract from instructional priorities, and place us in the com in the middle of complex housing politics. SEIU will be clear. As labor, we do not want the semblance of a company town, especially in an institution rife with annual reductions and layoffs of which SEIU members are regularly the most impacted by this and the lowest paid. It must be emphasized that this project will not even provide immediate relief to our
members who are quite literally living out of their cars right now. We want wages that afford a stability, security, and a dignified way of life just as those within senior leadership are able to have, and which we all deserve. This is not to take from them. We all deserve to have this stability. We cannot continue to funnel resources to areas that already have ample resources and then complain when our under resourced and exploited areas are unfairly blamed for the products of their intentionally underdeveloped and under resourced environment. The fact that, and to quote slide 19, in general,
the most competitive and financially feasible projects have the following characteristics and list high and highest resource is textbook systemic racism and perpetuates a cycle of harm to our already most vulnerable communities. And we definitely do question why is there only four options that are mentioned, and now we're only seeing one at this time because we really need to start looking at students being placed first, obviously. And the focus should be on the most un unserved areas such as in an innovative way to repurpose unused properties by transforming transforming them into use led enterprise hubs,
which could house student run coffee shops, rotating pop up shops, art studios, and even culinary training kitchens providing real world platforms where students can design, launch, and operate real businesses. There's clearly an imbalance in availability of career pathways programs across schools in the district. These spaces could also create career pathway programs and skilled trades with the hands on support from labor partners like BCTC. By embedding these opportunities into entrepreneurship business, economics, and line courses, OUSD students would gain essential startup experiences and workforce training while contributing to the community
and building skills that lead to employment in higher education. And we too have concerns regarding the market rate model that is being used here where it's saying on page 20 that if Ralph Bunche site is used, it would be serving 30 to 60% of the area medium income. When we have people who are the lowest paid in SEIU. We believe that workers should not be spending more than 20% of their income on the rent and utilities. If these projects are built and only accessible to staff making 80 k or more,
they become luxury perks for these few while the vast majority of essential workers, the backbone of our schools, remain priced out. This is not equity. This is exclusion. And just to give an example, for a classified employee earning $20 per hour and working full time over a ten month period, that would equate to a maximum affordable rent of 531.25 per month if spread across twelve months. So the focus really should be on, give me one second. The focus should really be on setting affordability benchmarks based on real safe staff wages
that m I m I or market rate proxies. And, really, if we're bringing it all back, it should really be focused on increasing wages. So that way, our members and our brothers or siblings, our labor siblings are able to live in Oakland. Thank you. I will I one of the things that I just wanna point out is that there's definitely lots of, you know, input that we wanted, and I believe the board wanted, you know, a diverse voices at the table, and I really appreciate you for for lifting that up. And I will turn it over to you all if you have some questions before
we get into some of the concepts that are explored here in the deck. So I don't know if there's any questions that you have for labor partners before we move on. Yeah. Oops. I actually do have one for, SEIU. Yeah. I've seen places where enterprise zones are working and have, are working period. Do you have any ideas, as you spoke, of student led ones that we could also take a look at or or do some reading about or talk to people who are doing this? And if not, we can do some research too. I just I didn't know if you had something else. So right now, no. We don't have examples of this, like, at at the ready.
But I think this is also why, personally, like, I wish that this was brought to us sooner. Right? And so, like, we got the email and invite two days beforehand. And I just wish, like, I want a clear understanding of what community engagement actually means, because I also don't think that we have all the answers. Right? I think we should invite our families and our students in this in a more robust way because they probably do have I mean, they absolutely do have their own ideas and examples. So currently now, no, we don't, but we can also look into it further.
Yeah. Yeah. Are there any more before I go back? Thank you for sharing. Did you get a chance to make it to the Jefferson? We did. Okay. Yes. Okay. Just a second. Friday before spring break, and so we went. Okay. We went over there. And they mentioned that it was, 60% certificated and 40% classified. No. I think it was the other way around. Am I incorrect? Yeah. It's the other way around. 60% classified and 40% certificated. Okay. It reflects their own, hiring pool. Sure. Mhmm. Okay. And, I'm 60? I'm just kidding. It is 60.
Yeah. Something like that. Pile. Although there's multiple challenges that lay ahead lay ahead of all of us in regards to making sure, everyone's paid, a comfortable wage. Is is is there something that, you think may could be, improved in that particular offering that Jefferson Union provided for their employees. Do I have any ideas of improvement from Jefferson High? Or Right. With eighty, twenty, 40. I mean, what what would a, some type of ballots look like?
I'm gonna be a broken record and see higher wages. Okay. Because, I've, I forgot her. I think her name was Fabiola who, yeah, gave us the tour and, you know, she was happy. And I wish I had this question when I was there. She was happy to be there because she got to be in the area that she grew up with, grew up in, and had, you know, her her family was close by. But it's also, like, if we all have the option, like, would you choose to have your rent tied to where you're working? You know? Like, would you if you were making more, I'm sure you would not choose to live by your coworkers,
which shout out to my coworkers, but, like Sorry, go ahead, Kat. I wanna check. I definitely agree. Definitely higher wages, making sure people are able to really afford living in Oakland. That's really what it is. And being able to have that deli well, I can't speak right now, but the distinction between that work and home life balance. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. No. You guys are good. Thank you. Can I just have one one quick comment? Sure. I just wanna make sure. It it the the board had decided initially in the initial plans for Jefferson to be sixtyforty. So 60% certificated,
40% classified, and they have recently that shift has been kind of shifting a little bit more towards the classified balance, but not significantly. Like, that that has been ongoing. And I just want to actually make sure that I'm really clear around some previous slides in the presentation. One, the general fund is what usually funds your pay the pay and compensation for our employees. Most of the funding strategies that you're talking about for each of these properties and these options that the board has, particularly around housing, are usually coming from from areas outside of the general fund,
so there is a separation between those two. None of the districts that, at least, I'm aware of are using general fund dollars to support kind of the development of these projects. It's either bonds or these different complex matrices of funding sources to support the the housing developments within the district. So I just wanna make sure that, like, that that there is a separation between those two things. So I'll turn it back over to you if you have questions. Yeah. I was just gonna, make it up my own comments about, the visit that I had. As someone who is a trade unionist and was very concerned about the company town,
I was very apprehensive about going, and, what it would look like. I took the tour and I was astounded by the hotel like feel of it, the amenities that are there, the amount of staff that are, supported, and the rate in which they saw a decrease in staff retention. That to me was was huge. It also, one of the other things that I I really appreciated was that they have a separate kind of board that takes a look at, you know, other issues that come with a tendency. Right? So that it doesn't have to be our school board or it doesn't have to
be, an entity within the school district, which can make conflict of interests all kinds of, craziness when it comes to people's housing. I do hear folks in the concern around, like, providing folks with with a living wage. I am one of those people that's like, I would love to provide folks with the wage in which they could live wherever they wanted to so that they could be the whole person that they are. We are not living in an economy at the moment that allows us to do that. And so there are also so many other school districts that we are competing with at the
moment for staff, for students, that to me, it makes it imperative that we must figure out housing and support not only our staff, but our students at the same time. I was fortunate enough to just take twelve eighth graders from Urban Promise Academy up to Sacramento, and the stories that they shared of their parents having to work two to three jobs just to to to make it. Of them having to take care of their siblings. Of a 14 year old having to figure out a part time job over the summer to help with rent.
Like, those kinds of things to me just like a 14 year old should be able to do whatever they want. They should be able to have fun in the city. They should be able to be with their friends and to have a good summer, not have to have those responsibilities. And so, that to me and the timeline that we just shared, I mean, none of these projects, even if we voted on anything today, which we are I'm going to. That those projects wouldn't occur. They wouldn't even actually even open for another five to ten years. I don't want someone living in their car today. I sure as hell don't want someone living in their car for the next ten
years, and without having anything for them after that ten years. And so I think it's really important that we're having these conversations, having them publicly so that we can make sure that folks know what we're thinking about and what we're doing. And of course, continuing to have community engagement such as the, community engagements we're going to have around the master facilities plan that could incorporate some of this. But I think not having these conversations, trying to shut down these conversations, trying to obstruct these conversations from happening, just we'll continue to have buildings like the building across the street sit there for
another ten years, and have potential issues, down the line. So I really I appreciate the presentation and the conversation, and I appreciate our partners that we've brought on so that we can figure all of this stuff out. Because as much as I'd like to bake, I don't know how to bake this. I don't know how to make this cake. So as much as we can get support around the financing and what all of this looks like, I think it's gonna be helpful. I do wanna move us forward and I know that there might be some other comments but No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. We're not a relax especially after those last comments there.
Because it's real interesting how people who weren't even living in Oakland when some of these projects first came to be have a lot to say right now. And this is a hustle and it's not even a good one y'all. I've seen a number of groups come before us to try to steal our properties. I have no idea why our labor partners were invited to a project across the bay. A project that we haven't decided to do as a board with a development firm that we haven't decided to work with in that sort of way.
I don't even understand this and I've seen it before. This is how people do it when they wanna come try to steal our properties. And it's real interesting that this board wants to talk about things publicly with what's going on behind closed session for the last two months. But let's be just clear about a couple of facts here. Jefferson is not like Oakland. We have 6,000 employees, 34,000 students. It's offensive that people are talking about giving away our property, our birthright to maybe provide a hundred units or so. And you can hear people love to sigh when I speak because that's the level
of respect that they actually have for us and for our properties. That many of us, have injected blood, sweat, and tears into these properties. Some of us for generations. I'm also the only one in here who actually sat through all of the seven-eleven committees that we've had as a district. I can tell you about these things inside and out. And it's telling that tonight not only is the superintendent not here, but the general counsel's not here. There are legal restrictions from us getting anywhere near these projects anytime soon. And like we heard from one of the comments, the fact that we're not discussing potential rehabs for Ralph Bunch or the academic services
we can provide at Lakeview or returning the Paul Robeson building back to our district headquarters. Kind of just shows you what's going on here. And it's offensive. I'm about to leave in a minute because I know there's no way that any of our properties are being used for housing. If you listen real closely, all of this involves funding, which involves either giving away our property or including market rate housing in it. That's the only way it pencils out. And since when as a school district are we going to take on that responsibility?
There's one property where something can happen at that OUSD has a connection to. And that's the old Chabot Science Center site that most recently housed community day. Because that's actually city property that we as a district lease from the city. So all of these grand ideas, that's perfect for that property. And then you get the city and the county involved and you leverage those things. But the idea that you're gonna take one of our properties, that we're gonna take from the general fund to build housing at an extreme cost for maybe a hundred or 200 employees will never make sense for us.
And it's offensive that people come here and they talk about that as an imperative when they don't care about our kids and what's happening inside our classrooms. So I'm about to leave now because I know this won't happen. I've literally had this meeting five times before in this room and not once was anyone allowed to come into our district and steal our properties. And with all due respect to everyone here, they're not district employees that were coming in presenting to us. They're consultants that were hired to come and sell their wares. And I'm offended that the district asked our labor partners to participate in this and
I'm offended that the Board President scheduled this as the topic for tonight given what we have going on in this district. So the next just the next phase in terms of what we'll present tonight and really the next step for the board is to start determining whether there's feasibility studies in areas that you would like to explore more deeply. There are some phase two properties with the old Chabot, is actually one of those phase two properties that we're considering based on feedback we've heard from the board. One of the things that I would like for you to just these are conceptual
designs as to what is potentially possible and some of the funding structures that are available. The next step for the board would be like, hey, these are the things that we're interested in. We would like to explore some feasibility studies to go deeper to see if there's an RFP that we could put out for for some of these concepts. So I'm gonna turn it back over to Chris to kind of talk through those. Let me see if I can get it. Do you know what slide it's at? 35? Slide 35? We're also just reminded of two hours, so I just wanna make sure how much longer do you I would say this will take about twenty minutes,
and then the next steps are for you all in terms of like, we could we'll just walk through the next steps that you all have. Okay. Go ahead. Thanks. Okay. We can I'll try to kind of move through these relatively quickly because I know we're at 08:00. These are the phase one properties, Ralph Bunch, Lakeview, and 1025 Second Avenue. They were all selected because they're large enough to support a housing project. The biggest difference is one thing we've been talking about throughout the evening that Candy highlighted, which is the, the opportunity maps for affordable housing financing.
Two out of three of these are not deemed high resource and therefore much less likely to be competitive for affordable housing funds. And that's Ralph Bunch and 1025 Second Avenue. And then, you know, Lakeview has is a high resource and it and it could support all different types of housing, but I'm gonna go through each of them with in some more detail and and explain what I mean by that. So for Ralph Bunche, the location in West Oakland, it's right across from a public library and public park, which is a great amenity. And then it's kind of right in between the industrial zone of West Oakland and
the residential area, which is in yellow, and the industrial area in purple. So it's, sort of, you know, could could be considered, going either direction. The biggest driver here is that it has low access to community amenities and transportation options. And so that's one of the reasons why it's a low resource for scoring for affordable housing funding. It's also one of the reasons why it would be tricky to build market rate housing. It's not impossible but as the market recovers over the next few years, it's it's less likely than some of the other sites to recover earlier for for
market rate housing. And so for that reason, we think the the best use here if you want to build housing on this site, the best type of housing here would be workforce housing for your employees. And it could be a a great housing site, as I'll show you here. We just drew a very conceptual fit plan to see how it could potentially lay out on the site. This is about 200 units in total. It's two apartment buildings kind of on the left. They're U shaped, yellow around a courtyard, and then another one on the right that are four to five stories.
The parking is in a parking structure kind of in the middle in gray. There's a Paseo, kind of walkable pedestrian Paseo connecting to adjacent, streets with a row of two story townhomes looking out onto that Paseo. So this is a workforce housing project that, you know, could could support up to a little over 200 of your employees. We've taken a a really high level look at a preliminary budget to develop, housing on the site and we've done this for all three sites. We've included a 1.5
parking ratio which is the highest of the three sites here just because of its lack of, a lot of a lot of, transportation options nearby, so a little bit higher parking ratio. The construction costs are really high. The last couple of years after COVID of inflation has increased construction costs all around the state. We have lots of city fees and soft costs and, baked into the budget here. There's also a healthy project contingency because we're in the conceptual phase of the analysis, and we've also escalated the costs out a couple of years until the actual start
of construction, which we're figuring could be in 2028. So when you put all that together, it's about 220 to 240,000,000 to to develop the site. And we have some, some financing options coming up a little later. Just moving on to the Lakeview site. This site is really transit rich. There is a Transbay terminal express bus across the street. There's a carpool pickup, a freeway, on and off ramp is right there, so a lot of different transit options. It's very walkable to Grand Avenue retail Across the street is a public library and
several parks, so it's really a amenity rich housing location. It's been deemed a high resource site from the state, so it would be really competitive for affordable housing funding here. We think, in a few years when market rate development recovers, this would be an excellent place for market rate housing. So we think any of those housing options could could work here. Again, just a conceptual fit plan to see how it could lay out. This is about a 40 units in total. We've broken it up into three areas. The middle section is existing three story building that we imagine could be repurposed with
kind of a resident amenities on the Ground Floor and then units on the upper floors. There's a smaller apartment building, four stories along Grand Avenue with ground floor retail so that the the retail street along Grand continues, and then a little bit larger apartment building up in the the larger area of the site in yellow around a a central courtyard. That's a a five story building. So 40 residential units across, across these three. It's quite possible that we could go higher higher buildings and higher density on the
site. It's just a trade off between additional construction costs on a per square foot or or per unit basis. But it's for for this great site, it's it's certainly worth considering. Similar analysis on the project budget, about a hundred and 60 to a hundred and 70 5 million including cost escalation out to start of construction. And finally moving to the Second Avenue site, it's walkable to Lake Merritt BART Station, which is great. It's also very close to Lane College and Lake Merritt, so a a pretty great location here as well. There's the existing building on-site,
which is expensive to demolish. That's one thing, a challenge around the site. And then there's one particular planning issue that I'll talk about next. There's, in the Lake Merritt, specific plan, that was approved by the city about ten years ago, there's a hundred foot setback requirement from the channel. And, you know, we've spoken with the city. We think that there there could be an opportunity to to decrease that setback perhaps to 60 feet. What we've drawn here shows about a 60 foot setback from the channel, so that's one kind of challenge or consideration in developing the site.
We've assumed a 1.25 parking ratio here because it is walkable to BART, but there's not tremendous amount of other transportation options, nearby. This scheme, with six four stories of residential over two stories of podium yields about a 30 residential units. And the development budget here, a 40 to a hundred and 56,000,000 and, you know, again, escalating out to start a construction. So they're just lining up the budgets for those different housing projects and, you know, considerations of whether prevailing wage or PLA.
PLA led some additional costs for additional labor considerations. You know, we haven't really tried to take into consideration the potential impact of tariffs or building rebuilding in LA after after the fires. Those are some unknowns at the moment in the development industry. But we we did some high level analysis of if you wanted to build workforce housing and you wanted to finance it with the COP and GO general obligation bond, how much could you allocate between those? So what's the what's the amount of general obligation bond that would be needed for
each of these projects? So we took a look at market rents, and we we took about a a flat 30% discount to market rents. That would be what employees would pay. If you wanted to discount it even further, that's absolutely, you know, within your prerogative. It just would mean that more money would need to come from the general obligation bond relative to the COP. And the funding gap down at the bottom for each of these is over a hundred million per project. So 110 to 20,000,000, up to about a hundred and 80,000,000 of funding gap that would need to come from a subsidy source.
And in this case, we're suggesting it could be a general obligation bond. But, you know, I think we're we know that that's a lot of money. And so we we just for the purposes of discussion and to really get your questions and get your feedback tonight, we we said, what if there is a a smaller housing project that would require less in absolute dollars from a general obligation bond. We're calling it a pilot project so that you could, get started on workforce housing to benefit your employees but, not have quite as big a bill for the general obligation bond.
So here's two examples of that. In the Lakeview, the the benefit of each of Ralph Bunche and Lakeview is by breaking it up into the different buildings, it can be phased. So looking at a a 43 unit building, this is just the four story apartments along Grand. They're shown in orange. They can be surface parked temporarily while the project is phased. So you save some money on the expensive, you know, concrete podium for for parking. And the funding gap here is about $30.30 to 5 or $35,000,000 That's perhaps a little bit more bite sized chunk.
And then just another option here is part of the Ralph Bunche site, the 75 units. That's color you know, shown in color on the right. Again, this could be surface parts. The funding gap is around $60,000,000. So with that, you know, it might be interesting to kind of spark a conversation among you all tonight. And that is the last slide. So I'll perhaps hand it back over to Preston. Do you have any questions about those before we move into kind of I have a couple of questions. I'll just give all my questions here. The first one is looking back at Bunch and it's doing the pilot project.
I am kind of thinking about these entrepreneurial zones, if that's a possibility. I mean, I'm thinking like there's a Prescott market near there. There's know, it's kind of an area where the the, you know, ballers play around in that. So I mean, I think that's an area that, could be maybe a mixed use kind of thing with that. 10/25, I know we're talking about housing, but I would also like to make sure that we are also talking about the CTE TAHUB, and looking at feasibility for that as well. And then my final thing here is on your figures,
and I I just have to say, I'm not interested in doing anything that isn't at prevailing wage. I think that should just for me personally, I think that should be, stricken. I am interested in prevailing wages and a PLA that, addresses our labor issues and supports our labor partners. I could just respond on the prevailing wage. Any project that the school district will be part of developing would be required to be prevailing wage at least. I think we showed without prevailing wages, perhaps market rate housing could be developed by someone else without it,
But, you know, we can we can remove that from future analysis. Yeah. I would just I would remove it just because I think it does raise the issue then of, oh, well, we could do that. But being clear that we're not Yeah. I also wanna say something about market rate. I I I'm also not in favor of of market rate. I mean, I think that's for us, that's just that's another thing that I think, you know, Director Hutchinson was talking about some things with that too that I feel like that's, I feel like if we're going to do housing, it should benefit our employees and our students and families. Do you mind if I Sure. Actually,
can you bring it back to the slide? This actually gets to the options, and I wanna walk through with the Board what kind of some of the next steps are as we develop kind of a plan for for, one more slide forward. So this is for you to kind of self reflect on. Right? And and can we go to the presentation mode? Because it's one, and and we know we've heard from the board that as is sale or even entitled sale is not something that the board was generally interested in, but we do wanna did wanna provide you that option. So one, option one,
as is sale or an entitled sale that does provide funding for the district to invest in its facilities, but we have heard from you all that that is an option that you do have, as a board to do that with the properties. That does go through the, the seven eleven process to surplus those properties to do go in that direction. Two, you have an option around fees, affordable housing. And we're specifically talking about the housing here, and I'll get to another slide that talks about other options that include TAHUB proposals, enterprise zones, things of that nature. Affordable unhoused housing, should the district consider utilizing some of its properties for some of those,
options there? Option three is workforce housing. Should the district consider developing workforce housing for its employees and you've heard various different takes on that? And option four is, and I wanna be really explicit about the language here, should market rate housing be used to support affordable or workforce housing if it increases the fiscal viability of that project, right? And that's for you to determine as you move forward with like a feasibility study, Hey. If it does get us to doing a TAHUB or a, you know, affordable housing,
we would be interested in considering that. That's for the board to bring forward any either policy or, you know, feasibility study around it, and that would be included, like, how you finance that. A couple of things. We're planning on sending out a part like a, and we'll work with the labor partners that are here and, like, I I did wanna point out that OEA and the Teamsters weren't able to attend the Jefferson Union visit on those dates, and we'll work with them to see if we can schedule a time for them to see other examples of workforce housing. But just generally collecting data goes back to our values about what are our employees
saying in terms of conceptually about workforce housing that we'll be sending that out to get feedback from them after we kind of review that with each of our labor partners. And then really the next phase one and phase two properties is there are these properties. If there are ideas and concepts that the board would like us to explore around feasibility studies, we're happy to put that together, and that would require kind of a deeper analysis. And I just wanna point out there aren't developers involved at any phase of this, right? When you're built and even if the district would decide to do workforce housing,
that would be the district leading that, you know, when San Leandro is planning on doing that, that is the district that is getting in contract around those properties and they maintain those properties as district district properties. So you know essentially conduct the feasibility studies, board review the approval of the next steps, and then essentially if there's something that the board is aligned behind as part of the plan, you would issue an RFQP for developers to move forward in those areas. So like there are several steps in there and really it's for you to get
the best information forward around the feasibility studies. Also in the phase two evaluations is like are there other properties that you would like us to explore in more depth like we did with these properties. And so that would be and there's a list of vacant properties on the right that could be included in any future like phase two analysis. So finally like these are the options for phase one properties that we've discussed. One, option one, as is or an entitled sale. Two,
affordable or unhoused housing. Three, workforce housing. And four, development for educational purposes through community partnerships. You can blend all of those in terms of what you would like in a feasibility and it just gives you each of those options for each of the properties. And I do wanna name, like, one of the reasons why Lakeview, Ralph Bunche, some of these different properties are there. They have significant, issues from a facilities. We we are also going through the the facilities master planning where we're doing assessments across all of our sites. These are some of our oldest and have some of the most need in terms
of conditions of the facilities themselves, and those are definitely would would cost a lot of money to rehabilitate them up to a level, that would be acceptable for students or other uses. Yeah. So next steps, you know, work with staff, formal recommendations around any feasibility studies, and I've heard some concepts and ideas that have been explored here. Distribute the OUSD all staff survey to get an accurate picture of what, like, even interest is among staff around workforce housing. And then phase two sites, determine which of these phase two sites we would like to move forward, and that's a further conversation that we'll have with the board.
And then finally, there's an option for property experts to analyze the roadblocks and barriers, in successful completion of projects at Edward Shands and the Tilden CDC. So that is it for tonight, but I questions that the board might have. Yeah. I appreciate those next steps, because it's clearly laid out. I think, for number two, I think it it it is extremely helpful to know, like, what our current OUSC staff needs are around housing. After talking to the talent division as well as, some of our educators, I think it's also really important for our talent division to be sending this out
as part of their, like, way in which they're recruiting folks because Mhmm. I think the biggest concern is, and what I've seen, or what what I've heard from talent is, you know, especially educators or other folks get through the first couple hurdles, and then they can't find housing. And regardless of whether they have an actual offer at a site, that person can't move here, can't be here, can't actually work here. Here. So I think it's good for us to know both, like, again, what our current staff are dealing with, but also, like,
what is the hurdle for our educators, our classified folks, our, you know, buildings like, every single classification. Because I could all even see principals and administrators and also not being able to afford to live here if they are on a single income. So, I think that that would be just an additional ask, from the talent division of, like, maybe the pool of applicants or, folks that, they have identified for, you know, positions for next year, so that we can, be looking at it in in forward thinking. I would say if we're going back to slide, number 52,
Personally, I would wanna see, options two through four, for each one of these, locations, because I'm also not necessarily interested in as is, sales. I'm also I just wanna say again, extremely uninterested even if it gives us just a couple more million dollars for, market rate housing because one of the biggest challenges we've faced is the gentrification in our community. And as a school district, we cannot add to that gentrification. We have to be able to use our properties to support the folks that we currently have here and the folks that are,
that are from Oakland. So, I would like to see, you know, feasibility studies around those three options for, those three, parcels. And then, I'm just gonna make a plug for Edward Shands to be on the phase two, because it is in my neighborhood, and I have heard from many, many of my neighbors, as to some of the challenges that are happening on that property. And I am very concerned about trying to enter into any sort of other agreements while we have current agreements. So it's figuring out what we need to do to, to get to get out of the agreements that we're currently in for that property.
And I believe Tilden. Is that the same is that another property? That's right. With the same developer, because from my understanding, they have just, like, not paid even the lease, for many, many months now, even almost a year. So, yeah, I'd like to see, that property, specifically on phase two. Because and the other reason I would say that is from my understanding, there is also the Black Cultural Zone is doing some development in that neighborhood, and then there is Eastmont Mall. There is the revitalization of, hopefully, that can that area, that community. So I'm hoping that those all can, like, kind of plug into each other versus,
yeah, versus having Blythe. Any other questions or yeah. Doctor. Warren? You have two. Okay. I would, also echo that I, are not interested. I would you know, will not support us entering into any kind of as is or entitled sale. And, yeah, I think a blend of two to four, I think the and I think the reason why in particular is, having four as an option, and I think this came up, you know, like, for example, having, an early childhood site on the Ground Floor and then having housing above it or,
you know, having some kind of educational purpose, or service happening. You know, I think one thing that we you know, another thing for families in this district is, childcare for our employees that's affordable. So not just you know, I think that's another issue that a lot of our, workers deal with is not being able to find it. It's not high quality. They can't afford it. That, I think, is another thing that, leads to people working multiple jobs, leaving the workforce early. So I think any way that we can support those those goals.
The other and maybe that's part of the survey that our labor partners will be doing of their members around what are some other benefits that, the district could provide to make it easier for you to work in Oakland, to stay in Oakland. So that's one. The other thing that I'm curious about is, the idea of swapping properties. So, for example, like, the Tilden or not Tilden, but, like, Old Chabot, site, for example. It's a city site. In other municipalities, I believe people have people,
LEAs have swapped a public parcel for a, for, like, say, a high rise downtown that, you are able to again, it's not you're you're leveraging your property. And, again, I think this would be, you know, think to director Hutchinson's point and and I think also director you know, all of our concern is around kind of giving away our property. That's a public good that the, to, you know, kind of a private entity. But I do think there is something to be said for if you were able
to make a swap happen, you're able to deliver workforce housing much faster than if you're building it yourself, you know. So I think, again, I'm not an expert. I would defer to our experts on how that would work. I think the other thing is anything else creative. So that's, you know, that you know, another thing that has been that other LEAs have done is for our very smallest sites. Like, I think Golden Gate is a good example of a site that's so, so small, that, you know, could we entitle that for, you know, maybe it's maybe it's a transitional age youth,
maybe it's unhoused, maybe it's like I get, like, housing for displaced residents that they actually would own or, you know, that again, that's very small amounts of, you know, like, numbers of housing. But, yeah, I think some some something like that could, and again, those might also be seven eleven, you know, so I think for some of those that are we can't really deliver an educational, service, to think about. But thank you. Thank you for your feedback. What time is it? Yeah. Final words. I'm a keep this to thirty seconds. That's my joke. Thank thank you for the presentation.
I think, I I appreciate the information. I think that's really what we, as a board, need to hear, to do our due diligence, to ask questions. You gave us a lot to think about, and our visioning process. And I really do believe if we don't start it now, it'd it'd be ten years later before we start talking about the same thing. So, as difficult as these conversations are, they need to be had. We also need to be educated. We we're sitting, as a board over an education institution. And so it's it's best for us to be educated to make informed decisions than
not. Not everyone agrees as we see. You have a number of different individuals who have different ideas, which is great also because it continues what division we want is always a community well, I'll speak for myself. What I'm hoping for is a very engaging community process that's transparent, and that is honest in the conversations. I I definitely I'm glad to hear, some of the challenges that are present for our, staff. Their voice is very important. And I will continue to lift up salary as one.
That's right. And they have every right to to continue to advocate for that. I support that. I don't wanna be bargaining right now. I got hit a couple times by that. You know? I'm not trying to bargain about that, but it is, necessary. I but I'm open to all possibilities. I'm I I am a % affordable. I think that especially the history of West Oakland, strong civil rights, community have been really active active and really promoting, a historical understanding that,
it's a community oriented place. You have to take care of the people. So I believe in that for sure. I'm also you know, I'm open to mixed use. I think we definitely have to be flexible in how we use our resources. So as we continue to look at, whether the best options for the properties was really presented very well. It gives me a vision. I think we didn't have a clear vision until this presentation came. So now we have something to work with, and that opens up the door to ask more questions of how it can how
we can tweak or what are those options there. My concern again is our economy. It's it's very much uncertain, and that's what worries me the most is because, again, if we, if we don't have these conversations now or and make a decision now, we could be set back another ten years. And so I think that we have to have courageous and bold conversations to, look at new ways to support our educators, our staff, and as we show the map of all the cities surrounding us that are doing
very much the same, having similar conversations, we can't miss this boat. We cannot miss this boat. All we as a, a district employing employees, we will lose employees if we don't get, active into this kind of conversation. They're gonna other cities will build out their housing, and our particular employees will leave our district and go there. So I think that's something to be really not to be afraid of, but to be smart and be conscious and aware of where the balance lies and
how we move forward. So, I'm open to seeing what is possible and open to look at those timelines. I think, again, we will make decisions. I'm not sure how many of us will be sitting in the seats in 02/2829, but we do have to have a thoughtful process. Our our staff will be here. Our staff will be working, and they you know, you've invested, so you'll retire. But we wanna make sure that those conversations are honest, transparent and looking future forward as well.
So I just want to thank you. My thirty seconds is up. You nailed it, thirty seconds. That was perfect. Thirty seconds. I'm out. I am out. Director Thompson, did you have anything you want to say? No. This is fine. We've done everything. Okay. I do again just want to make sure that the CTE, Tayhub is part of I assume that's the So So let me first of all, I just really wanna appreciate everything and I appreciate you all for not only taking the tour but also coming tonight to participate in the conversation. I think, three things I just wanted to kinda end with. One is you know,
the job of the board is to develop policy and also to have long term strategic plans, right? You do have a facilities master plan that is ongoing right now that is doing an assessment of your facilities. We're right now talking about your vacant properties and what the plan is around your assets, Right? There's also a comprehensive maintenance plan that we'll be developing right now. Right? Like so and then you do have your whole entire school and instructional programming and staffing plans as well. Right? We're holding those three and I just always want you to, like, be thinking about how each of those are supporting each other.
And so, like, tonight was an effort to bring forward some of the things and it is complex and it is long range. I appreciate you. Like, you may not even be on the board at the time that some of these things come to fruition, but I did wanna really appreciate the conversation, the the the discourse because you do wanna have a deeper discourse and and and then we'll be following up with you all around some of the next steps. So really just appreciate the the engagement and thank you all for coming tonight to really engage in this conversation. Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate the presentation. I appreciate the labor partners,
the urgent views. I think this gives us a lot to think about and I look forward to the community engagements that are coming up from this. Sorry, we have public comment. Not so fast. Alright. Yes. We have Kim Davis. How much time would you like to allot for public comment? Two minutes. Kim Davis. Thank you for the opportunity to speak. It was an interesting conversation, you know, a little depressing. But, you know and there's a lot it's very complex. Obviously, I I hear what folks are saying about having to compete with our other districts
to provide housing. But when you break it down where, you know, in the the presentation, we're talking about less than 5% of our classified staff and less than 6% of our, certificated staff that would be provided housing under these, things. So I'm not, you know I mean, that just creates another level of competition. I don't know how we, you know, you determine who's going to get housing, who's not gonna get housing. But it's certainly not going to solve our employee retention problem.
And and I share Director Hutchinson and others' concerns about the ability of OUSD to do it well. It's we are not a housing organization. We're not developers. We're not even, you know, necessarily in the realm of housing as a public policy. This this would be something that is way beyond the scope of what this school district should have to do. And we do a lot of that. But, so I, you know, I it concern it greatly concerns me that we're focusing on the idea of workforce housing.
The, idea of of, affordable housing is different. I agree with you that we should not be building market rate housing. We already have gentrified our city through all of our school closures. But I also wanna say that it is, really disappointing to use a term often used by director Hutchinson that, you know, you hire someone, a firm, Divine and Gong, and Brookwood Partners to help you with this process. That decision was unanimous to hire this firm back in November.
And then when they come with a unsurprising development oriented plan, they're accused of coming to sell their wares. You've agreed to do this. These are the experts in their field. It's really disrespectful and not to mention just unnecessarily inflammatory. Thank you. Are there any other speakers? All names for public comment have been called. Okay. Thank you. Okay. Now you can stay at the bridge, Erin.