Untitled Document

[00:00:00] turn our attention to affordability, [00:00:02] housing. Both of you have put an [00:00:04] emphasis on this. What are you hearing [00:00:06] from your citizens, your residents about [00:00:09] the cost of living in your state? [00:00:11] >> Yeah, I'm hearing the rent is too damn [00:00:12] high. That there's uh there's [00:00:17] at some base level in in Delaware and my [00:00:21] family I was born in Michigan. I moved [00:00:23] to Delaware as a baby. My family went to [00:00:24] Delaware because my parents thought it [00:00:26] was an affordable place to raise a [00:00:28] family. It has a reputation in the [00:00:29] Mid-Atlantic as an affordable place to [00:00:31] go. We're actually the only state uh [00:00:34] between DC and New England states that's [00:00:36] growing in population where millionaires [00:00:38] are moving to Delaware. It's a place [00:00:40] people like to be. Yet housing [00:00:43] affordability is is disappearing like [00:00:46] never before. The real problem is a [00:00:48] shortage of housing and it's driven [00:00:50] ultimately by overregulation by local [00:00:53] governments and some by state [00:00:54] governments. So that when someone [00:00:56] decides to invest, to renovate a house, [00:00:58] to build a house, the regulatory [00:01:00] requirements, the zoning hoops you have [00:01:02] to jump through to get there. In [00:01:03] Delaware, it's about a third of the [00:01:05] construction cost of the house are soft [00:01:07] costs. You're not even putting a shovel [00:01:08] in the ground and it's costing you a [00:01:10] third to to just get to a shovel in the [00:01:13] ground. That's not right. We have an [00:01:14] initiative where we're working very hard [00:01:16] to speed up all those timelines, make [00:01:18] sure things are are done right and [00:01:20] quickly. And I think it's an issue in [00:01:21] which many governors and many local [00:01:22] officials are aligned [00:01:23] >> and bipartisan. Wouldn't you say, [00:01:25] Governor Armstrong, to hear a Democrat [00:01:26] talk about deregulation? [00:01:28] >> I got invited to come talk to a Yes in [00:01:30] My Backyard uh conference in Connecticut [00:01:33] that I mean, everything he just said is [00:01:37] so substantially similar to the [00:01:38] stressors we're seeing in North Dakota. [00:01:40] We have a property tax issue. We've [00:01:42] worked on that at the state level, but [00:01:43] being able to get permits, I mean, just [00:01:46] removing blighted houses in small [00:01:48] communities, building a house that costs [00:01:50] $400,000 to build, but the comparables [00:01:52] in a small town only only get it compar [00:01:55] only get it appraised at 250 grand. So, [00:01:58] we have some creative ways in which [00:01:59] we're starting to fix those things. But [00:02:01] I think the bigger issue, regardless of [00:02:03] whether you're in a very urban area in [00:02:05] the East Coast, a very rural area in the [00:02:07] central part of the country is how do we [00:02:10] speed this up? How do we make the code? [00:02:12] And it is often times, sometimes it's as [00:02:14] simple as local fire code.