Lawrence housing production plan tabled after questions about data and enforcement

The Lawrence City Housing Committee on Wednesday voted to table a proposed Housing Production Plan after members said they needed more time to review the data and its implications for the city.

The plan, presented by planning staff, is intended to guide housing production over the next five years and to help the city qualify as a state-designated "housing choice" community, which gives municipalities access to a separate pool of housing choice grant funds, staff said.

Planning staff said, "When you are designated as a housing choice community, you get access to housing choice grants from the state," and described those grants as able to fund infrastructure such as water and sewer work and planning studies for neighborhood growth.

Committee members pressed staff on several data points in the draft plan. One member said the city's subsidized housing inventory (SHI) was "about 14%" and noted the state minimum is 10 percent; staff confirmed the 10 percent figure is a statutory threshold but said local needs typically exceed that level.

A councilor who opposed moving the plan forward said occupancy-permit counts and other data in the report appeared low and possibly flawed, calling the building department data "flawed" and asking staff to reconcile it before the council votes. That councilor also urged the plan to explicitly acknowledge unlawful apartments in the city and said, "I'm not anti-growth, but we need to figure out what we're doing with the unlawful apartments before we start growing more." The speaker told the chair they would not support the plan in its current form.

Staff acknowledged data lags in some sources and said they planned to extend charts to include school-year data through 2023 (and possibly 2024) and to provide exact SHI figures on request. A planning staff member told the committee the data often lags one to two years in state sources and offered to return to discuss the plan in more detail at a future full-council or committee meeting.

After discussion the committee voted to table the item. Committee members said they wanted to see corrected permit and school data, and some asked for a follow-up meeting with the project team before a final vote.

The committee's action will delay the Housing Production Plan vote; staff said the planning exercise remains important both as a way to evaluate housing needs and because designation as a housing choice community provides access to grant funding.

What happens next: staff offered to provide corrected data and to return for further discussion; the committee did not adopt the plan and took no final policy action.

Why it matters: the plan would shape the city's housing goals for the coming five years and affects eligibility for state housing choice grant funds, but several councilors said the underlying datasets must be verified before the city adopts a production strategy.