City staff said Revere's Housing Production Plan and a proposed Housing Development Incentive Program (HDIP) are expected to return to a Council-as-a-Whole committee for further consideration, and that any adoption would lead to disposition work and requests for proposals (RFPs) for city-owned parcels.

Tom Starosky, the city's representative to the Affordable Housing Trust Fund Board, said the planning board unanimously voted to recommend adoption in November and that misinformation had circulated in the community about immediate zoning changes. "What this plan is gonna do is provide the city with the toolbox of different strategies that we might want to employ to, build the right kind of housing in the right locations across the income spectrums," Starosky said.

Nut graf: The plan and HDIP are policy tools the city intends to use to encourage housing production; formal zoning or site disposition actions will follow separate council votes, and the trust will be involved in future RFPs for city-owned properties.

Starosky said the HDIP is a flexible financing tool that can include local tax agreements and state tax credits intended to support housing production, and that the city will not begin RFPs for discharging or disposing of identified parcels until the council has acted on the plan and HDIP. He said the timing may depend on the new council leadership, which will be set by the council's officer elections.

The board discussed guidance for future RFPs. Starosky recommended the trust keep affordability as a clear selection criterion and consider site-by-site outcomes: some parcels might be best for direct affordable production while others could be sold to generate proceeds the trust could reinvest. "Ensure that affordability is front and center, of the criteria you use to select somebody," Starosky said.

Ending: Starosky and the board said they will return to RFP planning after council action on the housing production plan and HDIP; no council vote occurred at the Jan. 8 meeting and no RFPs were issued.