1 Making a House a Home - Part I. Presented by IL NET, Jay Klein and Paul Ford. >> OPERATOR: Welcome to the National Council on Independent Living conference call for the housing Part I. Today's first speaker will be Mr. Tim Fuchs and throughout the discussion all participants will be muted. You will have the opportunity to ask your questions by pressing 0, 1 on your telephone key pad and as a reminder your conference call is being recorded. Now without further delay I will turn the conference call over to Mr. Tim Fuchs. >> TIM: Thank you, Dawn. Good afternoon everyone. Welcome to today's webcast and teleconference which is called making housing a home, Part I. Identifying funding sources for accessible, affordable integrated housing, presented by Paul Ford and Jay Klein. This webcast and teleconference is hosted by IL NET, a program of ILRU and NCIL through grant funding from the Rehabilitation Services Administration. And I'm Tim Fuchs, operation director for NCIL and the IL NET training coordinator and I'll be assisting in moderating the presentation. I just want to cover a few housekeeping issues. For those of you on 2 the webcast today, you will be able to ask questions but in a minor different way and that's just to E-mail them directly to webcast@ilru.org. One more time, that's webcast@ilru.org. And those questions will be relayed over the air live. And for those of you participating today via our teleconference, our operator Dawn, who you just heard, will give you brief instructions on how to ask questions on the teleconference. Dawn, would you mind doing that now. Well, excuse me. To ask questions on the teleconference portion, you'll simply just need to hit 0, 1 on your telephone key pad when prompted and you'll be put in the queue to ask questions live of our trainers. We'll be doing Q. and A. sessions about four or five times during the presentation and you'll be able to ask questions about specific topics and then we'll have one final general Q. and A. session at the end of the call. If you have any technical difficulties with the webcast, please feel free to call ILRU, they'll walk you through your problem and make sure you get connected and their phone number at ILRU is (713)520-0232, and again if you have any problems with joining the webcast, the phone number is (713)520-0232. So thanks again for joining us and without any further ado, I want to introduce Jay Klein our first trainer today. Jay.... >> JAY: Hi, everyone, these calls are always so difficult because I'm not in the same room with y'all and so I'm very thankful for the question and answer periods. I'm really honored to be asked to do this call about housing, but I'm also a little bit -- I kind of feel like I'm really not as much of an expert on this as some of you on the phone. I've been part for years and just recently rejoined the NCIL housing 3 committee and I know there are some members of the housing committee who are on this call, so please feel free to chime in during the question and answer period if you have something to add or if you want to correct something that I'm saying or if you want to -- if there is some other detail that I might be missing. And I encourage everybody on the call, if you want more information about housing and some of the programs that I'm talking about is to get involved with the NCIL housing committee or ask for information from them. Now just to start the call, what we're going to start doing is just give you the whole concept of what this call is about, which is centered around a concept called blended funding. And basically what blended funding is, is to take a number of different funding sources and use those to supplement housing costs, whether those costs are for using -- that we're using those costs to lease a home or to buy a home. We can still use a number of different sources. And what happens many times is that we find a funding source for housing that we're familiar with or that we get to know well and it's widely available in our community and we tend to focus on that funding source. So when there is long waiting lists or that funding source dries up, we don't have a whole bunch of other options. Also, many times one funding source may not be adequate to handle the cost of the housing. For example, what we hear many times is we hear that SSI or supplemental security income in itself is not enough income to rent any sort of apartment or home within the community. And that's true in many ways, but unless we take other funding sources and we supplement it 4 with other housing sources, people are not going to be able to live within the community. Let me give you an example of that: Sum. Al security income level or the amount that people got was about $603 last year. And with state supplements which are available on about 21 states, the average payment was about $632. An average rent for a one bedroom apartment last year in the country was about $715, and so a person who is on SSI couldn't even afford to be in the average apartment or have an average payment. A studio apartment was about $633. Just to make this point even greater, in Alaska the highest -- the highest state supplement in the country, in Alaska your state supplements is around $632 and in addition to that supplemental security income payment would be around $965 and if the average rent is around 715, again, that really gives you the example. And what happens many times is we say, oh, rents aren't affordable. We can't rent a place. And what we're doing when we do that is we're ignoring the fact that there may be some other sources of funding. So we may not only have to blend housing vouchers, but we may have to blend or bring in other different kinds of sources of funding. So we're going to talk about those different funding sources throughout the call today, but what we wanted to do is just kind of give that you concept so you'd see why we're discussing that. What I'd like to do is just introduce Paul Ford who is going to be my colleague on this call and I know that most of you are going to be on both 5 calls. This call I'm kind of taking the lead for and Paul is going to help me -- help remind me what I forget and give you some specific examples of things. And on the Friday call, we're going to kind of reverse roles on that. So Paul, do you have anything to add to the concept of blended funding? >> PAUL: I think you covered it very well, Jay. As you said, it's so easy to get locked into one single source of funding that we're familiar with and to not use all of the available funding sources really can just limit the work that we're doing. I think the other thing is that some of the material that we're presenting today will relate to the development of housing, something centers for independent living typically don't get into, but it's important to work with your local developers and interested parties around developing housing and making them aware of these funding sources. I was at the Connecticut housing conference this week with over 800 people there, and over and over and over again I heard the same theme, that you can't do it with one funding source. You need to access as many funding sources or are available. >> JAY: Great. Thank you. I want to start with -- I'm going start by kind of going through some of the funding sources we're going to highlight today. The materials that you have, specifically the draft housing guide that we sent you by E-mail and also posted on the private website for this call, that particular -- we're going to follow that very closely in the sense of I'm going to go through some of the funding sources 6 that are the most used funding sources within that manual, and we'll add some stories and examples about that. But before we do that, what we would like is to see if you have any specific questions or answers -- questions and we'll try to provide some answers around the concept of blended funding. And so if you have any questions, go ahead and either E-mail them or get in the queue to ask questions, otherwise, we'll just keep going. >> OPERATOR: If you do have an audio question at this time, you may press the 0, 1 on your telephone key pad. Once again you may press the 0 key followed by the 1 key on your key pad. And you may also E-mail those questions. We have no audio questions at this time. Do we have any E-mail questions? >> TIM: We do not. Thank you, Dawn. >> OPERATOR: Thank you. We'll move on with the conference. >> JAY: Okay, we'll move on and talk to you about funding and programs for affordable, accessible and integrated housing. And just one word about why we talk about affordable, accessible and integrated and the materials -- much of the material that we've sent you really deals with those three concepts. Many times what we do is we focus on affordable housing and just focusing on affordable housing and you'll hear we have to create affordable housing and within the community, if we just focus on affordable housing, people will be -- maybe be able to get in, but if it's not accessible, they're not going to be able to get in and if it's not integrated, they are going to be in a segregated or congregant type situation. 7 In the same sense if we just focus on affordable and accessible, we may be able to afford it. We may be able to get in, but it could still be a segregated or congregant setting. So a nursing home might be -- or a nursing facility might be affordable and it may be accessible, but it's certainly not a place that most of us want to live. So what we do is we talk about all three of those concepts and the nice part about this particular call is the funding sources that we're going to talk about all can be used for affordable, accessible and integrated housing. Okay, I'll get started with talking to you about housing choice vouchers which are the most used source of funding for affordable, accessible and integrated housing and you -- many people on the call probably have heard about Section 8 vouchers or Section 8 certificates. Most of you probably have heard about that. Typically the way that we've heard about that is as a rental supplement. What we're going to do is we're going to talk about housing choice vouchers both as a rental supplement and as a supplement to purchase a home. There are so many different kinds of housing choice voucher programs. Again, formerly called the Section 8 vouchers. What's happened is over the years HUD targeted a number of -- HUD being the housing -- the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, targeted a number of the funding that they were putting out towards different purposes related to housing choice vouchers. So they have housing vouchers for people who are going back to work and have welfare. They have housing vouchers for converting assisted living. They have housing vouchers for a number of different things. The problem with 8 some of those vouchers is many of those were short-term and they -- or they put out a thousand vouchers or 500 vouchers over the years and some of those have gone back into general funds and they are not really widely available. Well, on a call of this length we're not going to have a lot of time to talk about each one of those. So what we're going to do is focus on four of the most used voucher programs in the country. And those four voucher programs are tenant-based vouchers, mainstream vouchers, home ownership vouchers and project-based vouchers. So I'm going to go through each one of those and just kind of give you an idea, but before I do that, let me just give you a little bit more information on the voucher program itself. What happens is, is public housing agencies, which are in all of our communities, get funds to participate in the housing choice voucher program. Not all PHA's or public housing agencies have to participate or do participate in the housing choice voucher program. So, for example, you can have a state housing agency or a state housing finance agency that has decided to be a public housing agency for vouchers and receive vouchers., but not all housing finance agencies in the country have a housing choice voucher program. The housing choice voucher program is for people who are at 50 percent below area median income. And so if you hear the term AMI, it stands for area median income. And I'll give you a little bit more information about that. Basically what happens with the area median income is HUD every year publishes a list of what the area median income is for every community in 9 the country. And the way that they do that is they take the income of that particular community or that particular city, county, whatever it might be, and they divide it into two equal parts. So when you hear that somebody is below the median income, it's the income for that area divided in half and then it's lower than that. So it's lower than the median, whatever the median is for that particular community. So for the housing choice voucher program being 50 percent below area median income, somebody has to be at that level of being low income. The other term that I just want to mention because you'll hear this a lot in relation to housing choice voucher programs is fair market rents. What you hear is you hear the term -- and sometimes it's referred to as FMR or fair market rent. The fair market rent is the rent for that area. Again, HUD will publish a list of the fair market rents. They'll say for a one bedroom apartment in this particular area, the fair market or the fair way to charge somebody would be this amount for this particular apartment in that area. Now, the reason that that's significant for the housing choice voucher program is that public housing agencies can set that fair market rent at 90 to 100 percent. So if the fair market rent were $1,000, let's say, they could set that rent as low as $900, but they could also set it at 1,000. Now, for people with disabilities need something sort of accommodation, they can go up to 120 percent of the fair market rent. So they can do that without having to get special permission to do that and they can go up to 120 percent. They can even go higher with special permission from HUD. They can go higher than the fair market rent, meaning 10 that for somebody -- sometimes particular places or rental housing or apartments might actually cost more than the fair market rent and this way that particular standard can be brought up. Okay, just one more thing that I want to mention in relation to housing choice vouchers and then I'll get into the different kinds of housing choice vouchers is local preferences. And we'll give you some examples of those in a little bit; but basically your local public housing agency gets to determine what -- how they give out those vouchers. And the way that they do that, whatever kinds of vouchers they have, is that they do that through something called local preferences or preferences on the local level. So the way that they do that by setting and determining how those vouchers can be used and how the vouchers that are on the waiting list can be allocated or given out. So let me give you an example of that. A local preference might be that vouchers will be given or the people will be given priority on the list if they are moving from a nursing home. And they can actually set a local preference which says that somebody who may be moving from a nursing home gets priority on the waiting list which puts whoever has that preference, whoever meets the eligibility to that preference to the top of the waiting list. This is really important because if the local community sets a preference or has a number of preferences, sometimes the waiting list can be 20,000 people or 10,000 people, and this actually puts -- based on whatever criteria or based on whatever preference -- can put you to the top of that waiting list. 11 So one of the advocacy kinds of things that we all need to do is to find out, one, what the preferences are for the local community, if they have any. Some don't. And then to see if there is any possibility of adding preferences. Now we will give some examples of that in just a little bit after we go through these programs and then if there are some questions we'll certainly take them. The first kind of voucher program that I want to address is the one that's the most used and it's called tenant-based vouchers. Tenant-based vouchers are exactly what that is -- what it is saying it is. Is they are vouchers designed for the tenant, meaning that those vouchers can be used in a very flexible way to rent any apartment or any house within the community as long as you have a voucher that's a tenant-based voucher that meets that bedroom criteria and, again, that meets the fair market rent criteria. You can take a tenant-based voucher and rent any apartment for any landlord that agrees to be part of the program. And the way that they agree to be part of the program is that they agree to an inspection of their apartment based on very basic health and safety standards, and that they then agree to receive their payment from HUD through the public housing agency. These vouchers are portable. Meaning that they can be taken and used anywhere in the country. So if you have a tenant-based voucher with some specific criteria which is really spelled out in many of the materials that we provided, but the tenant-based voucher can be used, and if once you have a tenant-based voucher you can decide that you're living in one community 12 and you want to go to another community or find a place to rent in a different community within your state or even out of state, anywhere in the country. So that makes it very flexible. The other thing about tenant-based vouchers that I'll point out is that -- back to the concept of blending funding, they can be used with other sources of funding very easily. And we'll give some examples of that as we go through the different funding sources on which ones really work well with tenant-based vouchers; but they can be used with just about any other funding source as an additional supplement. The next program that I'll talk about is called the mainstream voucher program. And if you hear about mainstream vouchers, the major thing about mainstream vouchers is mainstream vouchers were designed and were created for people with disabilities. So those vouchers can only be used for people with disabilities. In order for a person with a disability to use those vouchers, they have to be on the housing choice voucher list for the public housing agency. And the other thing about mainstream vouchers which is really unique with most of these housing programs is that a nonprofit -- any nonprofit can work with their local public housing agency and receive an allocation of mainstream vouchers. There hasn't been a lot of new mainstream vouchers in the last couple of years, but if there was an allocation of mainstream vouchers, a nonprofit could get that allocation and in fact -- so that independent living centers could be the recipient of -- a direct recipient of housing choice vouchers or mainstream vouchers in this particular example. And 13 they could be the recipient and in fact when mainstream vouchers were allocated, there is a few centers for independent living -- one in Bolder, Colorado that received an allocation of mainstream vouchers. So that's really the main distinction and it's something for all of us to pay attention to and to find out if your public housing agency has any mainstream vouchers or were allocated any mainstream vouchers and there is materials out that we certainly can guide you towards if you're interested on who was allocated mainstream vouchers over the last few years. One of the big issues with mainstream vouchers also is that some of the housing agencies that were awarded mainstream vouchers ten years ago may have -- may have or may be using those vouchers for folks who don't have disabilities. And the only way that we're going to tell that is to find out -- there have been many groups that have been asking HUD to kind of help with that. At this point, HUD hasn't been all that helpful in really finding all of those vouchers. The best way to do it really is on the local level, is to determine if they were allocated those vouchers, what year they were allocated those vouchers and then find out where those vouchers are, who they are being allocated to. And if they are being allocated to anyone who doesn't have a disability, then to help the housing agency to redirect those. The next voucher program that I'll talk about -- and I realize I'm going through these fairly quickly. So, you know, we'll get to questions and answers and we'll try to provide you with some answers to some of these. Is the home ownership voucher program. And I know in some of the objectives that you all had for the call, you mentioned home ownership. 14 About seven or eight years ago, vouchers -- Congress made it so that the tenant-based vouchers could also be used not only for rental, but also be used for home ownership and HUD came out with a whole set of guidelines and rules. Since then, those rules have been updated, but the current rules right now are that those vouchers that are home ownership vouchers can be used to pay a mortgage and they are allocated just like tenant-based vouchers; and in fact any public housing agency in the country that receives tenant-based vouchers can then apply to also use those vouchers -- any of their allocation towards home ownership. And so they can decide that. That's great that any one of the public housing agencies can decide to use them. The problem with it is that they are not mandated to use those vouchers in any way towards home ownership. So many of the housing agencies don't want to participate or have decided that it's too complicated or they don't want to do that or they don't have enough vouchers to give out for that particular purpose. And so they just don't participate in that program. The nice part about this particular program is that as the rent payment or the rent supplement with the tenant-based voucher goes directly to a landlord, these payments would pay the mortgage payment directly to a bank or mortgage company. So it would pay a portion. Now, the portion is basically the same as the tenant-based voucher and I didn't go over that totally, but in a tenant-based voucher, about 30 percent of somebody's income with some set asides and so forth, but about 30 percent of somebody's income is -- they have to put whatever 30 percent of their income is. So in the case of SSI it would be 30 percent of their SSI. 15 But then what happens is the federal government gives the public housing agency the other 70 percent to pay towards the landlord. So the landlord would get 70 percent and the scenario of home ownership vouchers, the person would pay 30 percent of their income towards a mortgage payment and the housing agency would pay the additional 70 percent. So the other things about the home ownership vouchers are that the income qualifications for home ownership vouchers are the SSI level of income. So somebody who is on SSI can actually qualify for the home ownership program. What they do is they take the SSI payment, whatever it is at any particular time and multiply that by 12 for the yearly payment. So your income can actually be as low as the SSI payment to use one of those vouchers towards home ownership. And, therefore, you would pay 30 percent of that income and the other 70 percent would be paid for by the public housing agency. The other thing about the vouchers that are a little different than tenant-based vouchers is that a tenant-based voucher usually is available for three years or five years and then it gets renewed and it may be available for ten years and it gets renewed. The home ownership vouchers for a person who has a disability or a person who is elderly is available for the term of the lease or up to 30 years. So once you have that voucher and it's paying towards your mortgage, it's available for 30 years. It's also one of the reasons why some of the public housing agencies haven't wanted to commit to allocating those vouchers towards home ownership because it's for people with disabilities or people who are elderly they can be putting out those dollars towards that one person for 30 years. In 16 reality, many times they do that anyway through renewals and so forth, but that's also one of the reasons why they've been reluctant to jump on the program. The other thing about the housing choice voucher program -- and then I'll move on -- is that you have to be on the home choice voucher waiting list in order to get one of those vouchers and typically, most of the agencies have looked at somebody using that tenant-based voucher for a year. So renting for a year before it can be converted over to a home ownership voucher. The last voucher program that I'll talk about is project-based vouchers and the project-based vouchers are basically again what it says, they are connected to some sort of project. And most of the project-based vouchers are allocated towards some sort of development -- housing development in some way or another. The public housing agency can take 20 percent of their voucher allocation and set aside that for project-based vouchers. These vouchers are not portable, so once you have -- if you have a project-based voucher, you have to use it for that particular designation, whatever that project is. But after a year of living in some sort of -- or using a project-based voucher, you can apply to convert that voucher, the voucher that you have to tenant-based vouchers. And essentially what happens is that moves you up on the waiting list, again, like preferences do and then when it becomes available you can convert it to a tent ant-based voucher and then somebody else would get your project-based voucher. So those are just some things to know about project-based vouchers. 17 The other thing just to give you one example and then I'm going to see if Paul has some examples for you all is that the project-based vouchers can be used by a public housing agency somewhat flexibly if they want and I'll give you an example of a way that we think is very flexible. If a housing agency wanted to use those vouchers, for example, to make one unit or one apartment accessible, they could actually negotiate with the landlord and say to that landlord we're going to use this project-based voucher because you have an accessible apartment and this apartment is in a good location and we're going to guarantee to you that that project-based voucher is attached to your particular unit. And, therefore, it would make it available to somebody who had those accessibility needs any time the apartment became vacant. And there would be a voucher that was attached to it. As far as I know, I don't know that it's been used in that way widely. I heard of an example of somebody doing that in -- or a public housing agency doing that in Pennsylvania, but it's certainly within their rules to be able to do that. Paul, do you have some other examples or some things to add to this whole discussion of housing choice vouchers? >> PAUL: Well, as usual, I hing you've covered it very well, Jay. A couple of examples here in Connecticut of using preferences that Jay spoke about, in working with our partners in the state, we were actually at Jay's suggestion able to get a modification in the state housing plan to do a preference or set aside of vouchers for people coming out of nursing facilities. And we discovered that the state already had a preference that they had established some time before for family 18 reunification under the department of children and families. So they actually used that model to do the set aside and it's worked very well here in Connecticut. It provides vouchers for up to 50 people coming out of nursing facilities with direct access. So they kind of avoid that waiting list. I think the other thing around using the vouchers creatively, whether it's trying to get a landlord to modify a unit and then get a project-based voucher assigned to it or accepting a tenant-based voucher is using that 120 percent, that if they do the modifications, the landlord can actually receive a higher rent for that unit. >> JAY: Great. And you know, again, I think Paul's example of using this particular funding source creatively is really important for us all to remember. I went through a lot of the rules and a lot of how the programs are set up, although there may be some opportunities to use those programs either creatively or to use them to piggy back creating other programs. We're going to talk about one other funding source and then we'll open it up for questions and answers. And we'll try to provide the answers -- I keep saying questions and answers, but we'll try to provide you with answers. The next program is called low income housing tax credits and the low income housing tax credits is the most -- the largest funding source of affordable housing, let me put it that way, in the country. There is more money that goes into low income housing tax credits than any other affordable housing program in the country. There are more than 110,000 units funded yearly through this program, 19 and when I say 110,000 units, they are 110,000 units of affordable housing. It's an affordable housing program, not necessarily an accessible housing program. It's not necessarily an integrated housing program, although in most situations the integrated part goes along with low income housing tax credits and I'll kind of explain that a little bit more. So the issue is, is how do we make sure that it's accessible and that also the issue of affordability is that the way that the I. R. S. who actually funds that program, it comes out of the Internal Revenue Service or the I. R. S., they fund that program -- the tax credit program, but what their rules are or the way that they target that money is to 50 or 60 percent below median income, below area median income again. And so if we go back to what that is, that means that 50 or 60 percent below what that median income or that income is for that particular community. Well, if we look at somebody who receives SSI or supplemental security income as their only income, that's only 18.2 percent of area median income. And I'm giving you kind of an average of area median income for the country, but it is -- down, so it may be a little higher or a little lower, but it's right around that particular range. So the low income housing tax credits may be called affordable housing, although it's certainly not affordable to people who have supplemental security income just without bringing it a little bit lower. So here is where the blending of funding comes in with this program. So with a housing choice voucher we might be able to make that affordable, but in some places even with a housing choice voucher we may not be able to make low income housing tax credit or low income housing tax credit unit 20 affordable. And so what we need to do is to look at a variety of different funding sources and I'm going to give you some examples of that. So I said it was funded by the Internal Revenue Service and let me give you a little bit of an idea of how this program kind of works. The Internal Revenue Service funds the program. They fund -- they give tax credits to the organization in every one of the states called the housing finance agency. That does go to every housing finance agency gets an allocation of tax credits every year. And that -- you know, without getting into all the complicated ways that that's done, it's based on population, it's based on a number of different factors that they determine and they give out an allocation. So for example Louisiana and Mississippi got a large low income housing tax credit allocation after the hurricanes a couple of years ago. And I think Texas may have gotten an enhanced level. So, you know, there is a number of different factors that determine that. So once the housing finance agency gets that funding, then what they have to do is they have to put together -- or they do it before they get is the funding, they put together something called the qualified allocation plan. And basically their qualified allocation plan specifies how they are going to allocate their voucher -- their tax credits. And they have a little bit of flexibility in that qualified allocation plan. There has to be public input to that so that we can all have input into that plan. But they can set something that's called bonus points which basically those bonus points, as a developer may look to get those tax credits, if they set some bonus points that say, well, if you focus 10 percent of your units or 20 percent of your units on full accessibility or if you focus 21 10 percent of your units on just targeted towards people with disabilities, then if a developer were to apply for that and get those bonus points, that could certainly help out the allocation of tax credits. Now, what does a developer do with those tax credits once they get it? What the developer does is they apply for tax credits. They get those tax credits. Then they take those tax credits and they sell them on the open market basically. They sell them to investors to who invest in those to get a tax break. So they go from the Internal Revenue Service to the housing finance agency and then te go out and a developer applies for those and then they go to investors and the investor buys those tax credits from the developer and that provides the capital for them to create the housing. Now, why would they want to do that? Well, those tax credits are a ten year tax credit. So for an investor that may have a large tax bill, they have ten years of tax credits. So they may be willing to pay a lot of money for that. And then what the developer has to agree to is to keep the housing that they develop affordable for at least 15 years. So it's a win-win all around for everyone. So just to give you some examples of how low income housing tax credits have been used is that if you look at the state of Pennsylvania, they have a housing tax credit now that they can -- between their bonus points they can actually bring their -- they can bring the affordability of each one of the low income housing tax credits that go out -- not every one of them, but a certain amount within each one of the complexes down to 18 percent below the median income. Meaning that they are affordable to people at the supplemental security income level. 22 The state of North Carolina also has bonus points which bring those down. Louisiana has just initiated a program that's bringing those down. So the way that -- how do they do it? How do they bring it down to that low and how do the developers then -- how are they able to develop the housing? Part of the way that they do that is they do it through state supplements many times. They have something called a bridge program. They can use all sorts of different funding sources to blend funding at the state level to supplement low income housing tax credit and again what it is is it's not the whole unit. So it's not 100 percent of the whole complex. It may be 10 percent. So they can make it affordable by charging the higher rents in many of the other units that they are developing. So that's some examples of it. And because we want to get to a number off they are funding sources -- and we also want to get to your questions, what we'll do right now is go to some questions. Paul, do you have anything to add at this point? >> PAUL: Just a quick comment: The tax credits -- one of the advantages of them is they can also be blended with other sources. This project here in Connecticut that was recently opened where low income housing credits were just one of the many sources that were used to develop the integrated affordable accessible units. The other thing is as you said, they may tie those -- the lower rents to certain units, to a number of units, but in the development of that housing, it creates new housing within the community and we've been able to assist folks using a rental assistance voucher or a Section 8 voucher to access some of the nonsubsidized units. So it creates additional housing in the community. 23 >> JAY: Great. Thank you for making that point. So, Dawn, I think we're going to go to questions now. So if you could just tell people how they can get into the queue. >> OPERATOR: Most certainly. If anyone has a question now, please press the 0, 1 on your telephone key pad. Once again if you do have a question, please press the 0, 1 on your telephone key pad at this time. Or you may E-mail in your questions. The first question from the audience comes from Courtney Harris. >> CALLER: Yes, this is Patricia Hardy from progress Center for Independent Living in forest park. >> JAY: Hi, Patricia. >> CALLER: Hi, you mentioned that centers for independent living can get these vouchers, the mainstream vouchers. >> JAY: Right. >> CALLER: How did you say that could be done? >> JAY: Right now you would have to have an allocation of mainstream vouchers. So if those were allocated through HUD, and you had a relationship with your public housing agency because the vouchers actually come through your public housing agency and then to the nonprofit or the independent living center. So when there would be a new allocation, your housing agency would apply for that allocation and apply for mainstream vouchers, but it would apply basically with a joint application with you saying that the vouchers are going to go directly to the independent living center. >> CALLER: And may I ask another question? 24 >> JAY: Sure. >> CALLER: How realistic is it that that is something that's feasible that can actually happen? >> JAY: The reason I guess that we mentioned it is that it is happening. >> CALLER: I'm sorry? >> JAY: The reason that we mentioned it is because it is happening. >> CALLER: Okay. >> JAY: So whether it's feasible now in the future to continue to happen, we have to have an allocation first. But once there is an allocation, it's very feasible to happen and there are independent living centers that do receive mainstream vouchers. >> CALLER: And is there in fact a preferred time that a person would request from their local or city housing development, you know, that they should act toward this allocation? >> JAY: We're going to continue to talk about this throughout the call and on Friday also. Developing a relationship with your public housing agency is really important -- very, very important in any of this, and whether there is a specific time, HUD releases money on a yearly basis through a national allocation process. So they put funds out and they put out this notice. That notice is public to everyone and then the housing agencies get to apply for those funds. >> CALLER: So when you say that it's public to everyone, where would we find that notice? 25 >> JAY: Right on the HUD website and we have that provided in all of the materials. >> CALLER: Okay. >> JAY: So you could certainly find the yearly allocation and you'd be able to see that, but I think developing the relationship beforehand is the important part to say the next time there is an allocation of this would you be willing to work with us around that. >> CALLER: When do they usually do that allocation? >> JAY: Usually after the first of the year, but I don't know exactly if somebody else on the call wants to know and wants to just E-mail us the exact time line on that, go ahead and do that. Or I could certainly find out for you when it's been released. >> CALLER: Thank you. >> CALLER: I had a question. This is Courtney, regarding when you were stating people moving out of nursing homes, they are a priority to be moved to the top. I really couldn't hear you. You're very low. They have priority to be moved to the top of the list. Are you stating that they should already be established on the waiting list or they can be put on that list considering they are moving out of a nursing home? >> JAY: Okay, sorry that I was low. I apologize for that. I think where I gave that example had to do with local preferences. So whether the person is on the list or whether they are not on the list, they need to be on the list in order to have -- to get a local preference. >> CALLER: So they would have to already be on the list? >> JAY: So again you have to work with your housing agency to 26 make sure that they create these local preferences or to find out what their local preferences are. >> CALLER: So in order to get them on the list, doesn't there have to be an opening? I mean, what if the list is closed and you're trying to get that person on a list? How can they ever be part of a preference? >> JAY: Well, I mean if there is nobody that's on the list that's part of the preference that you certainly need to work with your housing agency about opening up the list so that at least people who want to get the preference, but the lists do open up at some point and as soon as the lists open up, you can get on it. The other thing is -- and this is something I didn't mention, but I think it's really important in relation to the housing choice voucher program, is we need to look at a variety of different public housing agencies. So if your agency -- your public housing agency in your particular community where you live is not open, you can certainly get on a list in the community next door to you. You can get on the state list. Can you get on as many lists as, you know, as you want. You may have to fill out a whole application and go through the whole application process for that community, but you can get on any list. >> CALLER: So are you saying that if there is nothing open in cook county, we can go over to another county and see if we can establish a preference? >> JAY: You're going to have a harder time establishing a preference in another community if you're not a member of that community, 27 but you certainly could work with the folks who are in that community to establish the preference. But what I'm saying is -- your question had to do with whether or not if your list was closed how do you get on the list. >> CALLER: Right. >> JAY: And I'm saying is if your list is closed, you can certainly get your name on other lists or get somebody's name on another list. >> PAUL: Just one thing to add, I think it's also important to add the relationship you make with the housing authorities. It can have long reaching benefits, everything from being aware of when offerings of vouchers are going to be coming down, a couple of things that we've worked out here in Connecticut, recently our statewide Section 8 waiting list did open up and typically the way they do it is a lottery to get on the waiting list, but we got advanced notice of that happening and our centers for independent living were designated as the sites where people with disabilities could go for assistance in applying for that. The other thing that we've been able to get here in Connecticut is the state now sends out a notice when any of the housing authorities are opening their lists. So, again, it's developing that relationship and holding out the importance of it so that you're in the communication loop. >> JAY: Thank you for the questions. Do we want to take one more question? >> OPERATOR: Thank you. If you have an audio question you may press the 0, 1 on your telephone. Do you have any web questions at this time? 28 >> TIM: Yeah, Jay, if I could pop one last question in here for this session. I have a question from somebody in Michigan who states that they find it very hard to navigate individuals on SSI into housing. And the barriers of very low income coupled with poor credit history seem to make it nearly impossible to place people into anything but subsidized housing which is vastly unavailable and they ask for any suggestions you might have. >> JAY: We're going to -- I think that's a great question and again that's why I focused on the whole idea of using and blending funding. What we need to do is just look at a variety of different funding sources rather than just looking at subsidized housing and it sounds like what you're wanting to do is not just focus on that. And if you can get a voucher, if you can look in addition to subsidized housing, so as Paul mentioned, using a housing choice voucher within a low income housing tax credit program since we talked about those can make it affordable and maybe adding some state supplement or using some other funding that the state might have available. So kind of combining the funding sources to make it affordable. Somebody who is on SSI level of income is going to be the most challenging because as I mentioned as far as how high the rents are, we may have to find two, three, sometimes four different sources of funding to assist somebody to get housing or affordable, accessible and integrated housing. The other thing that we're going talk about on this call and if we don't get to it today we'll certainly address it or at least mention it on Friday, and it's in much of the materials we sent out, but to think about 29 home ownership. Not that we think that's the only way to go by any means, but if you can get a voucher and use a home ownership voucher in your community and they allow that and with home ownership you may end up having access to a number of funding sources that you wouldn't have for rental. So it's interesting in the sense that within a lot of communities there is all sorts of funding sources available for home ownership that may not be available for somebody to rent. So shall we move on here? What we're going to do is maybe -- because of how much time we have and then we're just going to go through a few other funding sources very quickly, and we're only going to go for another ten minutes or 12 minutes or so and then we'll open it up for the last 15 minutes being questions. So if you have some questions, kind of think what those are and we'll spend the last 15 minutes if you want answering those questions. A few of the other programs that are available and that are more used or more available that are mentioned in the housing guide that I've reference add couple of times are the Section 8 11 program and just to you a quick history about the section 811 program, that originally started as kind of an off-shoot of a program that was specifically designed for elderly and some of the public housing or some of the housing that was created was also for elderly and for people who had disabilities. Basically the section 811 program provides capital for development, development capital so that a developer can develop housing in some way or another. When the program originally started, one of the things that it was touted as and that we all were very excited about is that the program 30 allowed for scattered site housing and the way that scattered site housing was defined, it meant that people could live anywhere in the community instead of having to be in a congregant type situation. The problem with the program was for the first ten years or so that the program has been around -- it's only been around for a little over ten years -- is there hasn't been very much scattered site housing developed. Developers said, gosh, we can't make it affordable for any less than eight people living in the same place. So the way it really played out was that particular funding source ended up becoming somewhat of a congregant and segregated type funding source. That's not by regulation. It doesn't have to be, but that's the way it's played out. And the other thing I'll just mention about that program is that a portion of the funding for 811 does go to tenant-based housing. So it is on a yearly basis whatever the 811 funding is, some of that goes towards tenant-based housing. Let me give you an example of the way that that particular program can be used and why we're mentioning it on the call. And the example comes from the united cerebral palsy program. They worked with a local housing developer to be able to use capital to create -- to buy 16 units within a large complex. And what they did is they used -- they put in this application for 811 funding so that they could purchase those units and make them affordable, accessible and integrated for people with disabilities. Because that worked so well and that they were so successful in doing that, they ended up doing another -- they did another project so that that 31 first two years they did this first project and then they did another project and then as an example of what they did, a number of other organizations and two other United Cerebral Palsy organizations within their community went and applied for the 811 funding within their communities and were able to do something similar. All of those examples are discussed within the housing guide that I have been referring to. So that's just to give you an example. Paul, do you have anything to add to section 811? >> PAUL: Again, I think you've covered it really well. It often is used for developing project-based or sort of group assisted type living. One creative use has been in the development of some housing for persons with psychiatric and substance abuse issues, is sort of a transitional housing and we've used that to get some folks out of nursing homes into that as a vehicle to get them into the community. >> JAY: The next funding source that we're going to talk about is housing trusts. Now, this is a really under used type of funding. So when we hear that there are communities where it's not affordable for people to live and they have housing trusts that may be used, maybe we just don't know about those. So let me give you some examples of what housing trusts are. The first thing is there are over 400 housing trusts around the country in 350 cities and counties throughout the country. So if we don't know about housing trusts, we need to and we need to find out whether or not there are housing trusts within our community or within our counties. There are about $750 million that go towards housing yearly through 32 housing trust funds. The thing about a housing trust fund which is so critical is that it's driven locally. So if you happen to have a housing trust fund in your area and right now with what they give those funds out for are not the kinds of things that you're that interested in being part of, you can work with the housing trust fund to change some of that. And a lot easier because the people who run are within your local community. And they are not withholding hundred because it's local funds and it comes through the state they are not as beholden to the federal government guidelines. The other couple more things I'll mention about housing trust funds is that there are -- there is a national effort right now to create a national housing trust and that national housing trust would be funded through the federal government and I won't get into all the complicated ways that it might be funded on this call right now, but their goal is to create 1.5 million affordable homes over the next ten years and they are starting with looking at people who are 75 percent below the area median income. And so basically -- actually what they are looking at is that 75 percent of the money of this 1.5 million units that would be created would be less than 30 percent below the median income. So I said that wrong. Basically, they are looking at this being a very affordable -- creating a whole federal trust that would create affordable housing. The folks who have been working on this are the national low income housing coalition. Again, I'll say that, the national low income housing coalition, and they have been working on this housing trust campaign for the last few years. Just about two weeks ago they had a bill that went 33 through the House of Representatives passing the national affordable housing trust. They are in the process of introducing a bill within the Senate and believe that they have enough support that this national housing trust could be a reality this year. So something to really keep track of, and for those of you who are interested in learning more about it, you can go to their website at www.nlihc.org. And right on the front page you'll see also some information about the campaign, the housing trust, the national housing trust campaign. There are a number of examples, but I'm going to move on to just one more source of funding so that you just kind of get an idea of the diversity of it and this particular funding source is called individual development accounts. And basically what individual development accounts are is a matched savings account. So basically these particular accounts are set up and then they are matched by the state or local community groups. Now, the individual development account started by being funded by a bill in Congress called the assets for independence act. And those funds went to people who were receiving any sort of funds from the federal government for people who are very low income. And so what the assets for independence act did was allowed states to use their TANF funding, their temporary assistance funding for people who are very low income to fund these individual development accounts. There are over 250 individual development accounts nationwide and basically they -- a person saves money, and they save money for one of three purposes. They save money for home ownership. They save money for creating their own business -- 34 microenterprise development as they call it, or they save money for postsecondary education. So going beyond high school years and getting some education. They can save money for anyone of those three purposes under the federal program and the program helps the person to save money. And then that program then is matched from the state and the federal government one dollar. So the person has -- puts in a dollar and then they get two dollars when they are ready to use those funds. So that's a two to one match on the federal program. And what's happened is that somebody -- communities were excited about this individual development account that they created their own individual development accounts using a variety of different sources of funding, again, like the housing trusts. They used private funding. They used community -- some churches put money in, some local community action funds put money in, they got grants, foundations put money into some of these so that then they could bring the match up but also may be extend the purposes. So some IDA's can help with transportation or you can save towards transportation costs, for example, buying a vehicle. In some you might be able to get some sort of assistive technology device. So, again, you'd be safing for these on these private programs. In the materials again that I've mentioned, there are websites that talk about this particular funding source, individual development accounts, and one in particular allows -- is a site where you can go in and you can put in your community. You can put in your city. You can put in your state and it will come up to see where -- if there are individual 35 development account programs that are close to you. And what we would suggest is that you contact those particular programs within your community or that are close to your community and just find out what the eligibility criteria is and whether or not either people you're interested in or whether you yourself could be part of that program. And again, the materials that we've put together for this call do talk about this other funding source. The time has gone by very, very quickly, but we want to make sure that the rest of the call we take questions from you. So what we're going to do is we're going to go right to questions now if that's okay, unless Paul you have anything to add at all. >> PAUL: Just very quickly, I just amplify what you said about the housing trust funds and the also individual development accounts because they are local, the possibility of your being able to influence them, become involved with them, channel that in very creative ways is achievable as opposed to trying to move the federal government. >> JAY: Okay, we'll go to questions now. >> OPERATOR: Thank you. If anyone has a question please press the 0, 1 on your telephone key pad. Once again you may press the 0, 1 or E-mail in your questions. The first audio question we have comes from Christopher Walsh. >> CALLER: Hello. My question is about the home ownership vouchers. Now, if I remember right, you said that somebody on SSI is pretty much -- they pretty much able to get one, but does that same principle hold true for somebody who is only on SSD? 36 >> JAY: Again, if in fact -- and I don't know if you're familiar with tenant-based voucher programs, but if you're eligible and your community has the home ownership vouchers, if you're eligible for the tenant-based voucher, then you would be eligible for the home ownership voucher. Now, if you're on SSD or SSDI, you're still well below the median income for your area. And if that's your only source of income or if that's the only source of income, yes, that would certainly -- you would certainly be eligible for it. >> CALLER: Okay. >> JAY: And because SSDI is for people who have disabilities, the same criteria would exist. So you could have a 30 year mortgage and so forth. And the income qualifications that I mentioned and so forth would all be the same. >> OPERATOR: Thank you. If anyone else has a question, please press 0, 1 on your telephone or you may submit your questions through the Internet. There are no further audio questions. Are there any E-mail questions? >> TIM: There are not, no. >> JAY: Okay, do we want to wait for questions or do we want to maybe talk about a few other things? >> TIM: Jay, I'll remind everybody to ask E-mail questions it webcast@ilru.org. And if we don't receive any in a second here then we'll go ahead and wrap up and meet again on Friday. >> PAUL: While we're waiting for calls -- this is Paul. I'll 37 just add again taking a look at the idea of blending funding and how you think it may be achievable. That last question on home ownership, if the individual could become involved in an individual development account, it's a vehicle for saving so that you have some assets to put towards that. So it's really important to just not focus on one program, but to really take a look at all these and see if any of them make sense for any of the folks that you're working with or to use to stimulate the development of housing in your communities. >> JAY: And, you know, because we have a little bit of time being about eight minutes or so, we were trying to just make sure we had enough questions. If you do, just come in and we'll take them in between breaths here, but two other funding sources I would mention in relation to both the home ownership and can be used for rental are the home partnership act or HOME funds. And basically HOME funds are on formula grants to every state. So every state gets HOME dollars. And it also goes to cities of a certain size and some local governments actually kind of have conglomerates where they join hands with other local governments and put together a package and because of the population of a few communities instead of just one, they get an allocation of HOME funds. These HOME funds are really very flexible and they can be used for construction. They can be used for acquisition. They can be used for renovation on rental housing. They can also be used like housing choice vouchers as tenant-based rental assistance. And again we talk about that in some of our materials. They can be used to supplement home ownership, to repair an apartment. They can be used for accessibility and the reason that I wanted to make sure that we 38 at least mention HOME dollars is that again as Paul was saying, these funds can be used on the local level, and we can have a lot of influence on the local level on how those funds are used and because it's public funds, the housing agency that gets an allocation of HOME funds has to conduct public hearings and has to have a plan for how they are going to allocate those funds. It's called the consolidated plan and they have to say this is how we're going to use these funds and you get to have input into that and many places the communities weren't even aware that there were folks who were -- who wanted to use these funds for specific purposes. The one area that we talk about in the guide is tenant-based rental assistance because we're focusing on this whole idea of supplements to rent, the HOME money can be used for tenant-based rental assistance. The criteria is a little bit different. It's very similar to housing choice vouchers, although it's supposed to be time limited. So if a housing agency is using some of their HOME funds for rental, they ronnel supposed to use it for about two years. Although they can use it for longer. And they can extend that to three years or four years. So the whole idea is that if you're going to use your tenant-based rental assistance towards -- or I'm sorry -- your HOME dollars towards tenant-based rental assistance that the person needs to then get on the housing choice voucher waiting list. And, you know, there are a number of different states that have actually used the tenant-based rental assistance option. But out of the whole allocation of HOME dollars, there is only 2 percent being used for tenant-based rental assistance and our assessment of that is because they 39 haven't been asked and that we haven't advocated strongly enough for our communities and our states to use those funds towards rental assistance. We know they get it. They get it every year. We know how much they are getting, and even some of those funds get turned back every year. So what we have to do is we have to check with our community, find out what the allocation is. Find out what the plan is for allocating those and find out if they are willing to use tenant-based rental assistance towards that. And if you look in the guide again, we have some examples of that being used. One of the examples we have is from the state of Arkansas. Paul, do you want to add anything to that? >> PAUL: Only we've talked a lot about -- it's not really in the manual, but we talked a lot about federal sources and also sort of local private. But I'd encourage folks to look to their states -- I know Connecticut is one of a very few states -- I believe there is only four that actually have state funded housing programs. So for example in Connecticut we have a rental assistance program that is state funded and it is modeled on Section 8, but it may be a long term advocacy goal to encourage other states to do similar types of things. >> JAY: Is there any -- >> PAUL: Explore every option. >> JAY: Is there any other questions before? >> TIM: There are not. I think we can go ahead and wrap up. Any final statements before Friday's call? Okay, thanks. I want to let everyone on the phone know that we encourage you all to share the information that's been presented today along with the materials 40 with colleagues that are at your centers or your SILC. And also to let you know that the archives of the webcast will be available to ilru.org and please don't forget to fill out the evaluation form which is available on both ilru.org and on the materials page at NCIL.org. Feedback is very important to us and we use that to plan and improve further training. I also want to thank everyone in the organizations that help make the presentation today possible, and the IL NET and this webcast are sponsored by the Rehabilitation Services Administration and the opinions and views expressed today are those of the presenters and no endorsement of the sponsoring agency should be inferred. And finally, this webcast would not be possible without the efforts of the ILRU webcast team, Rob Dickehuth, and our captioner Marie Bryant. I want to pass my thanks along to them and my thanks goes to Paul and to Jay for their presentations today and it looks like everyone that has signed up for Part I has also signed up for part 2, so I look forward to speaking to y'all Friday. In the meantime if you need to contact us, the best way to do that is simply to write to me at Tim@NCIL.org. Thanks very much and we'll talk to you Friday. Bye-bye.