Short Audio on the Cost of Living with Tyler Dos Santos-Tam

Tuesday, February 14 - Friday, May 5, 2023

Week 6 - Short Audio Assignment + Reflection

https://soundcloud.com/alani-calderon-555477823/jour-200-short-audio-tyler-dos

Extra audio recording of what Tyler Dos Santos-Tam completely said:

(I didn't include this whole piece due to the background noise)

https://soundcloud.com/alani-calderon-555477823/i-interview-tyler-dos-santos

Tyler Dos Santos-Tam: There are a number of things we're working on to deal with the number of cost of housing. There's a few aspects of the cost of housing. What goes into how much a house cost, construction cost, so we have to do something about that, the property taxes, go into how much rent a renter ends up paying, because the landlord has to cover the property taxes. The property taxes has gone up pretty significantly. We're working on what kind of relief programs we can do for local residents when it comes to property taxes. On the construction cost side, that's actually something I'm working on to reduce the construction costs so we can pass that on to potential buyers or renters. Our zoning policy as we kind of talked about a little bit earlier, a lot of restrictions will create additional costs for potential builders for affordable housing. There's also city funding, we dedicated $170,000,000 in the last year's budget to give the mayor the power to buy affordable housing properties to buy land, hopefully develop upon it. They’ve spent none of us so far. And so, we’re trying to find ways to give more money to low income properties, or give money to low-income housing developers just to make these things more feasible. The mayor has a proposal that is known for bill 7 which deals for construction of midsize apartments, low to midsize apartments. So three to four story type apartments. We're trying to find ways to make this program a little bit more successful and there’s only been a few projects that have been built successfully thus far. So that's actually something I'm really looking at: how do we expand with this program and make it a little bit more attractive. If you go to Makiki, if you go to Makali, a lot of the three to four story apartments that were built like 60 years ago. We really haven't had a lot of new low to mid level apartments lately, we've got a lot of these very tall towers, but that kind of product is one that's going to be naturally affordable to people. And so, we're hoping that we can get more of sort of low to mid size apartments built. We need to pass new laws there, so I'm working on that.

Alani Calderon: What are those apartments again?

Tyler Dos Santos-Tam: So, it's called, the program is called Bill 7. Which incentivizes low to midsize apartments being built. So, it is basically up to about three to four stories, it relaxes parking so it doesn't need as much parking stalls in the ground floor. Maybe put some units in the ground floor rather than dedicating fully to parking. There's a number of other sort of incentives in there to hopefully incentivize developers to build this kind of product rather than just super tall luxury towers. So, we're trying to use all of the different policy tools that we have available to us to hopefully make this happen, there's no silver bullet, there's no magic wand that we can wave, but little by little, we can hopefully make some changes around the edges that can really, really catalyze affordable housing development.