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A National Onsite Two-in-One Training Opportunity
CIL‑NET Training
Expanding Housing Options 
   for People with Disabilities  
Renaissance Chicago Downtown Hotel
One West Wacker Drive 
Chicago, Illinois
Friday, August 10, 2012
8:45 a.m. ‑ 2:45 p.m.

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This text is being provided in a rough draft format.  Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings.   
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>> AMBER SMOCK:  Okay, everybody.  Go ahead and get ready to kick off in just a minute.  Take your seats or whatever you need to do.  We'll start in just a minute.
Okay.  So this is Amber speaking.  And we're going to go ahead and kick off.  So I hope everybody got a good night's sleep.  Good night's sleep?  Yes or no?  Sort of yeah.  Okay.
(Audience responds.)
>> AMBER SMOCK:  I know it's the last day.  It's TGIF.  Friday the last day.  Congratulations for making it through three days.  If you look on your agenda, we end at 3:30.  So we're going to shoot for ending at 3:30 and not make you guys stay longer than that.  Hopefully a shorter time will be great.  
What I want to do is first of all thank you for hanging with us yesterday.  I know that there's a lot of information kind of coming through and everything.  And I know that sometimes I can be intimidating.  Maybe that was energizing for some folks.  We want to make sure you're encouraged and empowered today, and we'll challenge you a little bit more today as well.
With that let me just kind of ‑‑ 
>> ADAM BALLARD:  Yeah.  So I just wanted to ‑‑ we're not going to do a gut check this time.  I'm going to get a little more conversation this time about what people are feeling about yesterday.  So instead of just giving me a word or two, I want, you know, volunteers to talk about how they think things went yesterday.  
And just to review real quick, we started off ‑‑ how did we start off?  We talked about, you know, the history ‑‑ that's where we started.  History.  That's a good place to start.  We talked about the history of the housing movement.  We talked about some of the laws and funding sources that are out there.  Over lunch Ann talked to us about permanent supportive housing and how that works.  Then I had my panel after that on community organizing.  We had some good conversation started out there.  That conversation has been continuing after the panel even, so thank you for that.  And then we ended the day with presentation from Lisa Danna Brennan from HUD and also Ken Walden from Access Living, who talked more about ‑‑ Lisa talked about how we can build relationships with HUD and use them as an ally because they are probably the biggest potential ally we have.  They have the money, so we need to be friends with HUD.  Lisa talked about how we can build those relationships, and then Ken talked about how legal work can enter into this, how centers can use legal work for a variety of purposes, but especially the area of Fair Housing enforcement, how to use that as a tool to expand housing options.  That's kind of the bird's eye view of what happened yesterday.  
What are some reflections for impressions from yesterday?  Who would like to share? 
I'm going to start calling on people and that would be awkward.  I don't know your names.  So in order to avoid both you and me feeling awkward, could I have some volunteers? 
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER:  I'll volunteer.
>> ADAM BALLARD:  Thank you. 
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER:  That's tough.  Standing up there and asking for volunteers.  I know.  Since I work primarily with folks with psychiatric illnesses, this is all very eye opening to me.  And I really ‑‑ what I'm going to go home with is some ‑‑ well, some great ideas, I think, and some excitement about collaborating more with our local agency, independent ‑‑ Progressive Independence.  Sorry.  And just finding out ways that we can learn from the groups that are already ahead of us in advocacy.  So that's all. 
>> ADAM BALLARD:  Great.  Thank you.  Other thoughts? 
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER:  I'm a new member on the Texas consumer advocacy team.  And although I've been to one meeting, I didn't really know where to start.  And not only has it ‑‑ it's empowered, it's given me ‑‑ it's made me more excited, and it's also told me, you know, where to start with all of this and where I can actually go in and make some relationships.  And it was excellent for me. 
>> ADAM BALLARD:  Great.  Thank you.  I want to get at least one more if we can. 
People hit the bar as hard as I did last night?  What's going on?
All right.  One more. 
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER:  Okay.  This is something very, very new to me, and it's something that I am very passionate about, housing, and that's why I got to come here.
And I am amazed at how I can start helping people.  There are so many different agencies, I guess you would say, that I can go to, and you have given me so many great ideas that now I finally think I know what I'm going to be doing.  And I thank you.
(Applause.)
>> AMBER SMOCK:  Well, that's exactly what we wanted to make sure people were able to have this opportunity to come to this conference.  So I'm really happy to finally see a long conference dedicated to housing for people with disabilities, for folks to kind of really dig into what's out there, what are some of the problems.  You meet people from other states, network, mingle.  This is a really fantastic opportunity.  If I weren't standing up here, I would be sitting right down with you guys and being like I want to participate in this conversation because this issue so important.  We want to make sure you guys know all the post its that you turned in yesterday, NICL typed them up, and we reviewed them.  We are going to be attempting to answer questions that were brought up.  And I think that a couple of the presentations today are going to answer some of those questions for you.  
I know that our first presentation is a panel discussion between people who are actually working on a program to expand housing opportunities for people with disabilities, especially in the area of vouchers and public housing, and I think a number of the questions that were raised will be answered by that panel, and I really am looking forward for people to have that opportunity.  
At 11:00 what's going to happen is Adam and Beto and I are going to come back up, and there's the session called Star Trek to The Matrix, right?  So you guys know that?  You know Star Trek?  Yes, okay.  You know The Matrix, right?  Okay.  The difference between the two is pretty big, right?  So it's about ‑‑ we want to have a discussion, and it's not something where we want to lecture you per se, but we have a presentation on a few topics, but we want to have a discussion about elevating housing advocacy or answering questions that people may have.  And then after lunch we have a couple really exciting presenters.  One of them is already here, Amanda.  And what's going to happen is our Mayor's Office on People with Disabilities Commissioner Karen Tamley is going to be copresenting with Amanda From Chicago Housing Authority on ADA and 504 compliance, and that will be an opportunity to talk about ADA and 504 compliance at the city and regional level.  So I think we have a lot of good panels today.  I'm really excited for people to continue asking questions and so forth.  
And I also want folks to know that there was a huge line at the end of yesterday to ask Ken Walden questions.  Remember the attorney?  So Ken, we asked Ken if he could come back for the last session today for the wrap‑up, but unfortunately he is not available.  So if you have questions for Ken, please feel free to call him up or e‑mail him because he's really good at being conscientious about responding, so you still have that opportunity, you just have to do it on your own.  So he had some family commitments that he couldn't miss.  
So with that I would like to invite our first panel to come on up to the front, and let's take five minutes and let them set up, and then we'll kick off.  So stay nearby for the next five minutes, okay.  Thank you. 
>> JESSICA PORTER:  Good morning, everybody.  My name is Jessica Porter, and I'm the senior vice president from the ‑‑
>> AMBER SMOCK:  Hit the button. 
>> JESSICA PORTER:  Good morning.  I'm Jessica Porter from the Chicago Housing Authority.  And I am the senior vice president for the Housing Choice Voucher Program, and I'm joined by my really good friend, Rahnee Patrick ‑‑ hi, Rahnee ‑‑ and Tara Peele, and we're going to talk a little bit today about expanding housing opportunities mostly through public housing, Housing Choice Voucher, also known as Section 8 and working with your local organizations. 
So the Housing Choice Voucher Program used to be called Section 8, and is likely still called Section 8 by your local HUD administrators.  We haven't moved really past that old name.  And what we do is we provide housing assistance, rental subsidy for low income families.  How it works is that families pay approximately 30% of their adjusted income.  So just in short, what do we do?  We pay the rent.  We help pay the rent.  That is what the Section 8 program really is about.
Families are selected from a waiting list.  So back several years ago, the CHA had an open wait list, and we had over 253,000 families apply for housing, which is an outstanding number of families in need.  The computer system randomly selected 40,000 families and put them onto a waiting list.
So what are some of the challenges?  Well, we are, like all government agencies and not for profits as well, challenged by a reduced funding level every year.  The good news is HUD continues to pay the agency the rental subsidy.  They're just reducing our administrative fees which allows us to administer the program.  So we're asked basically to do more with less.  But those are a sign of the times and I'm sure you're feeling it within your own organizations as well.
The other challenge we had is this really interesting rental market.  For the first time here in Chicago, we have vacancies under 3%.  So that means there are fewer apartments to rent.  And the owners are getting higher rent income from those fewer rentals.  It's a very, very tight market.  So it's an interesting market, and here in Chicago, the Chicago Housing Authority has a unique situation.  Not all housing authorities have.  It may apply to your area.  It may not.  But here in Chicago we have flexibility from HUD to break some of the rules, to experiment to try new things.  That flexibility is called the moving to work demonstration program.  And because of that we're able to increase our rent amounts to meet market demand.  So if an owner would get a thousand dollars per month from a private renter, we're authorized to go and rent a thousand dollars as well.  And the family will still only pay 30% of their income.
Now, that's an unusual situation.  It may not apply in your jurisdictions.  But I want you to know that there are other things that are available too.
In addition to our Housing Choice Vouchers, the Chicago Housing Authority is probably the second or third largest in the nation.  We have approximately 37,000 vouchers.  That's astronomically, that's huge.  Congress sometimes appropriates additional vouchers that are intended for a special purpose.  And those are called targeted funding vouchers.  The top most known across the country are the veterans ‑‑ it's actually the Veterans Administration special housing vouchers.  We call them VASH.  The family unification program, FUP.  And the nonelderly disabled also nicknamed NED.  So VASH, FUP, and NED are targeted funding vouchers.  Usually when congress puts these forwarded is they'll ask for the housing agency to partner.  This is really important here to partner with other entities.  For example, with the VASH, here in Chicago, the CHA partners with the Jesse Brown Veterans Administration.  With the family unification program, we partner with the department of children and family services, DCFS, and with the nonelderly disabled, we partner with organizations such as Access Living.  It's a wonderful opportunity to really come together and partner.
So, again, this is usually a competitive application where you have to apply, and the application requires a partnership.
So how do people access it?  This is just what I was mentioning, that you're doing this.  The first thing we do is go through our waiting list, with the exception of VASH.  We go through our waiting list and we look for matches.  Where do we have common clients?  And those people would rise to the top for housing.  If we have exhausted our waiting list, then what we would do is we would work with Access Living for DCFS to open the waiting list for special referrals.  All right?  And that's another opportunity to say we've exhausted our waiting list for this special population.  We're going to open it for referrals from this recognized, state‑approved entity, and we're going to house that way.  All right.
There are some challenges with this program and not all housing authorities actually want to apply for these vouchers, letting housing ‑‑ educating housing authorities on this is a great opportunity to work with them.  These vouchers usually come with no additional administrative funding.  They will pay the rent and not the administrative costs.  And working with some of these populations actually does cost a little bit more money.  The VASH population, for example, usually are people with zero income.  So instead of them paying 30% of their income, the housing agency is paying 100% of the rent.  Other things like we do special outreach, those things wouldn't necessarily be covered.  So you want to work with your housing authority to make sure that they are applying for these targeted funding vouchers that sometimes are a little bit harder to administer, but are really worth it for the partnerships that come along with it.
We also have homeownership vouchers.  This slide is ‑‑ I'm sorry to say, not entirely correct.  But our program has an income requirement associated with homeownership vouchers.  It's waived in the case of people with disabilities and with seniors.  So those requirements are flexible for those populations.
What this is is actually instead of subsidizing a rental unit, we'll subsidize the mortgage for an ownership unit.  Here in Chicago, we have well over 300 such families, and we've expanded this program now to include participants from the public housing as well.
So, again, in the homeownership case, we go through and we work with families who may have poor credit, get them to the point where they have good credit.  They have to be able to obtain a mortgage.  We have classes in terms of credit repair, how to secure financing.  We work with private institutions and banks pro bono attorneys who will do closings to really come together to make this a reality.  And again, it works like a voucher in that the families do not pay more than 30% of their adjusted income towards their homeownership unit.
So the CHA will provide periods of enrollment, periods of learning sessions and outreach.  If anybody has any questions about it, my name and number are at the end of this presentation as well.
All right.  So the tenant based program is based on us providing a voucher to the individual, and the individual can choose any unit in the open market.  They can also use their vouch to port to other jurisdictions.  It's called portability.  And congress wanted us enable families to move anywhere in the United States that has a Housing Choice Voucher Program.  It's very flexible.  You have the voucher.  You have the choice.
We have other type of voucher that's called a property based voucher.  Here in Chicago we call it the property rental assistance.  In your jurisdiction it may be called a property based voucher or a PBV.  If this gets confusing, stop me, let me know.  I know it can get a little confusing.  In the property based system, what we do and I think Tara will talk about it a little bit as well.  We subsidize a unit in a property.  The property owner comes and says I have six units in my building, and I'd like to have a long‑term contract on two of those units, three, four, whatever, for a long period of time.  And I will take people from your waiting list and house them if you provide me a long‑term contract.  And those contracts can go anywhere from five years to 30 years, depending on the nature of the property.  Okay?
So that is ‑‑ actually, it's an excellent program to sustain the a long‑term housing resource.  What we do in Chicago is after a period of time, the individual who is living in that property may move to the tenant based program if we have a voucher available.  We don't want to lock them in forever if they choose not to want to stay there past two years, but they have to make a two‑year commitment.
Now, our property rental assistance program has an application process that never ends.  We'll take applications throughout the year.  It's not open or closed.  It's just forever open.  And it's forever being evaluated for properties, specifically here in Chicago that are located in what we call opportunity areas.  Those are areas that have less crime, less poverty, so we want to really house families in excellent neighborhoods.
We also will look at properties that have special services associated with them.  The CHA really needs to leverage our resources, which is housing, with resources that others can bring to the table.  Like supportive services, counseling services, and really kind of make those partnerships so that we both benefit, right?
So we'll look for those things in our evaluation process as well.  Our evaluation team is actually unique here in that we work with a variety of people both in the agency and externally.
So, again, people who are housed in the property based vouchers are from our waiting list.  If the property has special services, it's open to referral from other organizations, but the first thing we're going to do and the first responsibility is to review our own waiting list and to make sure that people have the opportunity to be housed in whatever housing is most appropriate.
The biggest challenge again here in Chicago, we do want to move families into opportunity areas.  We have past litigation from ‑‑ what I like to call the dark days that really restricts us from housing people in high concentration poverty areas.  So we're working hard to kind of get out of that history, and we actually have a court requirement to do so.
So in public housing, we own the unit.  Right?  And here in Chicago, you may know a lot about how we're redeveloping our properties.  I'm not sure if you visited Chicago in the past, you may have seen the old projects, as it were, going down State Street or in the Clybourn area.  We've done a lot to really rehabilitate, tear down, redevelop those properties.  Our properties are based on senior properties.  Those are for people 62 and older.  Scattered site properties, which may be where we own a building here or there.  And again the traditional public housing is kind of what you think about when you think about the old days of public housing, the big communities, concentrated property.
The new properties that we've torn down and redeveloped are called mixed income properties.  Our goal initially was to house people 30% market rate, 30% affordable, and 30% public housing.  So that's kind of the portfolio as it were today.
>> RAHNEE PATRICK:  Jessica, this is Rahnee, and I also wanted to also point out about how we worked in our partnership with the senior buildings, right?  In terms of the high vacancy senior buildings.  Do you want to talk about that?
>> JESSICA PORTER:  So here in Chicago, we had something called the senior designated housing plan and I'm sure there's something in your local areas as well.  What that did was, it said properties are designated only for seniors, and they used to be a blend of seniors and people with disabilities.  The mix here in Chicago didn't always work.  Now, if a property has a higher vacancy, right, so it's a senior property, we don't have seniors to fill those units, they are accessible, that we will make them available to people who have disabilities.  We've opened that up.  So it's ‑‑ again, that is the result of the partnerships that we have with Access Living.  Yes. 
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER:  Would you explain again the mixed income properties?
>> JESSICA PORTER:  Sure, sure.  So we've developed new communities on old CHA land.  So there used to be, let's say, a high rise of public housing and it's been torn down, and in its place, what we've tried to do is develop more of a community than a project.  So we work together with the community and with the developer for whatever is appropriate to that location.  And what we've tried to do is create townhomes, maybe it's low rises.  We aren't doing high rises really anymore.  But in the mix of units, across the variety of sizes, so it's not one building of affordable, one building of rental, and one building of affordable.  It's a mix, where people, like an average community where not everybody has the same income, right?  So it's a mix of income.  Some of the units will be marketed for general public rental at the market rate.  Some of it will be restricted for affordable housing, which is ‑‑ I've got 70% AMI, something like that?  60.  60 and above AMI and a third of the property will be restricted for low income or public housing.  And so it's just ‑‑ it's trying to be more representative of a real community, which has a variety of income levels and families. 
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER:  Are you saying that the properties, the senior properties that are 62 and above, if you can't fill them, you're able to ‑‑ the Chicago Housing Authority is able to allow people with disabilities to come in.
>> JESSICA PORTER:  That's correct.  But we'll look at the building one building at a time and only for a period of time that will make it, and then it will be reassessed periodically. 
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER:  Is that a state thing because in New York state they won't allow us to do that?
>> JESSICA PORTER:  No, it's a local.  So let me go back for a second.  We have governed not only ‑‑ we are governed not only by HUD and this wonderful flexibility that we have.  We publish our policies.  For the Section 8 program it's called the administrative plan, and for public housing it's called the admissions and continued occupancy plan, ACOP, and our policies really go through there.  Another approved by the board, and they're reviewed by HUD, so that's where we make these local distinctions, right?  There is a public comment period.  One of the things that we do with Access Living is as we are about to make changes, we notify Access Living that these changes are about to take place, invite them to review it.  Usually we try to do it before public comment so if we're going down the wrong path we don't have to do it publicly.  But we do want to have feedback in the policies that we're about to develop.  That's one of the things that you can do as advocates with your local housing authority, to say review the administrative plan and the ACOP, especially when it's an opportunity for a change to work in partnership is, it's very beneficial us to again so we don't have to be out publicly with something that's not in everybody's interest, and it works for you because then you get to see that the policies are making housing more accessible and available.
If I can take a step back, one of the other things I think that's been hugely valuable for us as an agency and for me individually, when the Housing Choice Voucher wait list was opened in 2008, that was actually before I was in this position.  In 2010, the wait list was opened for public housing, and what I got to see was a really strong partnership with Access Living that you can have with your local housing authority, where we want to make the waiting list available to everyone.  Access Living was not only a physical site where we registered people, but they were able to help us make our applications more accessible so that people could apply who had differences and needed assistance in the application process.  So that's a great entree to a collaborative and partnership arrangement with the local agencies.  
We do have limited resources.  We do count on our partners to help us do our job and achieve our mission, and in doing so, everybody wins.  There's not a winner and a loser.  It's really a collaboration, and we move forward together. 
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER:  I just have one more question about mixed income.  You said it was low income.  Do you extremely low income?
>> JESSICA PORTER:  Yes, we do.  Here in Chicago we do even below 30% AMI.  We have a requirement that 75% of our admissions is low to extremely low.  And we, unfortunately, have no problem meeting that here in Chicago. 
I wish that was more of a challenge. 
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER:  I was just going to add that in our senior designated buildings, there's still an age restriction, so it is people who are 55 and older with a disability.  So ‑‑ 
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER:  What's your name?   
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER:  Oh, I'm Amanda Motyka from the Chicago Housing Authority.  So it's not people of all ages with disabilities.  It's ‑‑ there's still an age, so it's 55 and older. 
>> JESSICA PORTER:  Yes. 
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER:  I'm curious.  Do you have any tenants with minimum rent payment? 
>> JESSICA PORTER:  Yes, we do.  Our minimum rent standard is $75.  That's above what the average is for HUD.  Usually it will be set to $50.  Ours is $75.  However, all agencies will have a hardship exemption.  So regardless of minimum rent, and regardless what jurisdiction you're in, they will have a process to appeal that minimum rent standard.  Absolutely. 
And there's a very long and complicated income calculation that includes disability allowances and medical expenses, et cetera.  So it's actually ‑‑ it's not your gross income that's looked at it.  It's an adjusted income. 
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER:  So while a person goes through this process, do you house them anyway, or in other words you wait until the process is complete?
>> JESSICA PORTER:  That's correct. 
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER:  And then how long roughly does that process take, and I know the proposal was to raise the minimum rate nationwide, and the feeling from advocates was that HUD couldn't handle the process.
>> JESSICA PORTER:  All right.  So I'll start with the last question and work backwards.  So, yes, HUD is looking nationally at increasing the minimum rent.  They've put it out for public comment.  I don't think that they couldn't handle it necessarily.  I think their systems are flexible.  So I'm not sure where that comes from.
But, again, regardless of what amount is set, there will be a hardship exemption.
Now, when you're coming off of the waiting list, right, regardless of the type of housing, and you're coming off the waiting list, what the housing authority will do is determine eligibility.  So in that process, the person is not housed.  We are looking at your criminal background.  We're looking at your income and we're verifying income.
The process depends on your agency.  In Chicago, I would say it's approximately 60 days from the time that your name is selected, you'll be briefed, then we start reviewing ‑‑ briefing is just when we talk about the program.  We determine your eligibility.  Then one of the biggest challenges is after you have a voucher, you have to look for a unit.  Once you have identified a unit, we have to inspect it to make sure it meets minimum housing standards.  That can actually be a challenge, and we work closely with Access Living on that.
Then after that, we negotiate rent with the owner.  Right?  And in that process, I have to say units that are accessible or adaptable can have a higher rent than HUD would otherwise permit, and that's uniform across public housing programs.  It's not just specific to Chicago.
After the rent is determined, then you can enter into a lease and move in.  So it's about 60 days. 
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER:  Okay.  Because I was at the national low income housing coalition conference last year, and the public housing providers at the conference said that the hardship exemption currently takes roughly four to six months to process, and that they felt ‑‑ so I'm asking you for verification‑‑ 
>> JESSICA PORTER:  No, no.   
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER:  ‑‑ and what you found it to be.
>> JESSICA PORTER:  I can't speak nationally, but I can speak for the CHA.  No, the hardship exemption should not take four to six months.  What sometimes delays a process is people who have applied for Social Security and of course waiting for that to come through, and what we'll do is we'll retroactively make an adjustment.  But the hardship exemption should not take that long.  There's something else that's going wrong there. 
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER:  Okay.
>> JESSICA PORTER:  Yeah, and again, if you're already housed, that's one thing.  You can apply for an exemption at any point during your housing experience.  But coming off the waiting list, no we wouldn't house you first.
Okay.  So, again in 2010, we had an open wait list.  And we worked very closely with Access Living.  For me personally it was a wonderful experience because I had not worked with them on the wait list project before.  It was very exciting to see the outreach.
And I do have to say that this is a really important point, that when an agency opens the waiting list, we partner with them, HUD really, really wants public housing agencies to make their waiting list as widely accessible and available as possible.  That means outreaching to areas that we don't typically have access to or think of, such as nursing homes and other institutions, supportive housing that may not be publicly funded.
So this is something new for us, nursing homes.  And this is where we can partner with groups such as yours selves that may have more familiarity, may have contacts, may have the doors already open.  So that's an incredible opportunity.
In public housing in a two‑week period over 240,000 applications.  It was actually more than 200 and like 50, but when you got rid of the duplicates, it boiled down to 240,000.  40,000 were randomly selected.  Right now I think combined public housing and Housing Choice Voucher here in Chicago is over 75,000 people remaining on the waiting list.  That's a huge, huge number.  The need is great.  So when I say we have limited resources and we need each other to really house families, it's critically important.
Again, challenges in public housing is also about the funding.  It really is.  More so than in the Section 8 program, funds are being reduced, and so we need to be creative in terms of our opportunities and our subsidies.
Amanda, since you're here, would you like to join in and talk about the VCA, the voluntary compliance?
>> RAHNEE PATRICK:  That's not a choice.
>> JESSICA PORTER:  I got the expert in the room, so it's kind of funny that I put this in my presentation, but the expert is right here, so ‑‑ but not to put you on the spot or anything.
>> AMANDA MOTYKA:  So I'll talk about this a little bit later if you guys stick around.  But we currently are under a voluntary compliance agreement with HUD.  So basically what happened was we weren't doing so well with our accessibility program.  And HUD comes in under Section 504, and they can perform a review of our housing stock and our policies and procedures.  They did that in 2004 and issued us a letter telling us that, you know, we were really deficient pretty much in every area that they looked at.
So what the agreement does is it kind of outlines benchmarks that CHA has to meet to bring their housing and nonhousing programs into compliance.  So we're basically at the end.  We have another year so we're going to finish up in 2013 and hopefully we won't have to ever go under other VCA again.  But right now we have about 1200 units that are certified as UFAS.  I know you guys probably went over that, so that's the rents under 504.  They're fully accessible for people with mobility impairments.  And we have about 400 units that are certified the same way for people with sensory impairments.
>> JESSICA PORTER:  So again this was an opportunity where ‑‑ I'll talk about the dark days, the bad old days, but it's really where the advocate and the housing agency work together in terms of developing the plan and making sure that we're following the plan.  And there's nothing better than having the resident expert volunteer to work with you and make that a reality, so that you're not fumbling through it or spending resources ‑‑
>> AMANDA MOTYKA:  And HUD doesn't just randomly pick places to go into, so you have Access Living kind of giving them a fork in the back kind of saying, hey, we're seeing a lot of people complaining that things are not accessible, you know, and they're not doing anything about it.  So that's when you have the power to kind of activate HUD to go in and do things like that.  So I think that's something you can take away too.
>> JESSICA PORTER:  One of the things I wanted to mention in broad scope here is having the light shined on your uglies is not necessarily a pleasant experience, but at the end of the day, I think when you work with your local housing authority, it really achieves the higher outcome, and while it's painful while it happens and it's a little embarrassing, at the end of the day, everybody walks away a little stronger, and that relationship has lasted, it's gone from one of pointing out the uglies to really working something to make them better.  So I just want to say it's possible to do this and to come out with very strong and lasting relationship, and one which I think, you know, we value. 
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER:  Did I understand ‑‑ I'm not sure.  Did I understand the previous statement that you could actually bill more ‑‑ 
>> TIM FUCHS:  There's a little switch. 
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER:  ‑‑ bill more for an accessible unit? 
>> JESSICA PORTER:  Oh, owners can get higher rents, that is correct.  If the unit is specifically adapted for disabilities, yes. 
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER:  So that's like Fair Housing is somewhat different than like ADA where you can't add additional charges for accommodations.
>> JESSICA PORTER:  Well, here it's an open market, and if a person needs this unit and the owner is going above a HUD standard, we can take that into consideration when accepting rents.  Absolutely.
>> TARA PEELE:  I don't think the person, the tenant pays more rent.  They still pay 30% of their income.  It's that the housing authority will pay more to the landlord.
>> RAHNEE PATRICK:  How this played out on the ground for us at Access Living ‑‑ this is Rahnee Patrick.  We have a person coming out of a nursing home.  The guy uses a ‑‑ I'm not sure what the type of mobility device is called but it's similar to what Ed Roberts had used where he's totally ‑‑ like he's totally prone as he moves around.  So how are we going to find a unit in the housing stock in Chicago that can allow this person to turn, make accessible turns and things like that in the unit?  And so how that plays out is we did a request for rent reasonableness through Amanda's role at the CHA as to, you know, review a request for reasonable accommodation, and then that rent, we now can look for units that have a higher rent for this person than typically would be paid under the Housing Choice Voucher Program right now.
>> JESSICA PORTER:  But again the participant only pays 30% of their adjusted income.  The CHA will pick up the balance of the increased rent. 
And, again, that's something that's not specific to the CHA.  That's something that I think applies in most housing authorities when you're looking at providing special features in housing. 
Okay.  So tips for partnering with Public Housing Authorities.
Again, there are a number of different housing authorities across the country.  Some large, some small.  Here we not only have the CHA, which is quite large.  We have Cook County.  We have the local Maywood authority or Cicero housing, so they come in a variety of shapes and sizes, not all with a great deal of flexibility that we have, but they have things in common.
They have the administrative plan.  That's a requirement.  The ACOP, that's a requirement.  Wait list periods.  And all of these things are great opportunities to go and work with the agency and provide your expertise and your knowledge in a way that enhances opportunities for everyone.
So I just have to say, it starts with a phone call.  Call up your local office.  We're all governed by regions of HUD, and HUD can be a great resource in terms of identifying who to call, where the housing authorities are located.  Here in Chicago, Region 5 covers Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota ‑‑ I'm going to blow it.  There's another one.  I'm sorry. 
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER:  Ohio. 
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER:  Indiana. 
>> JESSICA PORTER:  Indiana, thank you.  I mean, HUD is a great resource.  We work very closely with our local ‑‑ with our local office, and I'm sure they can point you in a great direction to introduce yourselves, look at the administrative plan and look at opportunities for collaboration. 
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER:  Can you find the Public Housing Authority's administrative plan on line?
>> JESSICA PORTER:  Yes, most agencies will have it posted.  It's in the a requirement to be online.  It's a requirement that it's made available.  But most agencies will post it online, because the reproduction costs are prohibitive.  Ours is over 480 pages.  It's not written in legalese, though.  Most agencies are.  Ours is written in English so most people can understand it.  It's just there for your review.  It talks about what is the process for opening a wait list.  What are their local preferences, what are their ‑‑ you know, just what are their policies, they really step through what HUD says you may do, and it says what we are doing.  So HUD is very broad in terms of some of the portions.  They have the "must" section and they have the "may" and this really describes what that "may" looks like for that local agency.
Okay.  I'm sorry.  Deconcentrating poverty is an extra bonus for us, and that again I think I mentioned before here in Chicago that means looking at neighborhoods that have lower crime, lower poverty.  One of the things that Access Living is amazing at is not only finding appropriate housing for people with disabilities, but finding it in areas that we typically may not have access to achieve, and that is something that again is a benefit of that partnership and that can be promoted with that agency.
So thank you. 
>> TARA PEELE:  Hi, I'm Tara Peele, and I work for IFF which used to be ‑‑ it used to stand for Illinois Facilities Fund, but now we cover five states so we're just IFF.  What we are is a community development financial institution, which basically means we're a bank that lends to nonprofits.  It also helps nonprofits develop their own space, child care centers, schools, charter schools.  We helped Access Living develop their offices that some of you might have toured, and more recently we started getting into developing housing, affordable and supportive housing.  What I do there is I'm the director of Home First Illinois, and that's a partnership.  Home First Illinois was created between IFF and Access Living to develop integrated housing for people with disabilities.
So I'll talk a little bit about Home First Illinois later.  I'm going to go through a lot of resources today.  My background is in housing, affordable housing development and affordable housing policy.  So I know a lot about the financing programs, but they're all really complicated.  So what I've been doing while Jessica was talking was writing myself so I could follow up with links with more information, I know online there are contact information for housing, there are housing authority profiles to tell you whether they have Section 8 or public housing and how much of each.  And then there's links to your local housing finance agencies and things like that that you really want to bookmark because you want to develop relationships with folks.  I can follow that up also with links to more information about the resources I'm going to talk about today because there's no way I can get into detail about every single one of them.
So I'm going to talk a little bit about rental assistance not managed by Public Housing Authorities.
So Section 811, you probably heard of especially recently.  Section 811 used to be a program ‑‑ it's a HUD program.  It used to be a program that basically created group homes.  It provides capital and rental assistance financing, and it was pretty much producing group homes supposedly calling it supportive housing for people with disabilities.  But recently a couple years ago, a ‑‑ many changes were made to the Section 811 program.  And what I urge you to do is when you go home, make sure that your state applied for Section 811, and I will tell you why.  
Basically the way the program is changed now is the rental assistance is uncoupled from the capital funding, and the rules are that it can only be applied to up to 25% of the units in a given project or housing development, and that means the housing will be more integrated than it was in the past.  And because it's specifically for people with disabilities, you're not in competition to get that resource with general low income populations.  It is specifically for people with disabilities.
So states actually had to turn in their applications to HUD this week to try to receive an allocation of Section 811 rental assistance, and they would have said in their application how they planned to get referrals for that assistance and basically how they planned to make the work, and a lot of them got their local housing authorities to commit vouchers to do leveraging for the program, so that will be additional vouchers that are set aside for people with disabilities.
Really huge great change to this program, the award announcements are supposed to be made in November.
And it will be managed by your local, your state's housing finance agency.  If you don't have a relationship with your state housing finance agency, you should definitely make that a priority.  They manage a lot of resources.  Obviously you need to know your Public Housing Authorities, but your state housing finance agency manages a lot of affordable housing programs, and sometimes state rental assistance programs and things like HOME that I'm going to be talking about in a minute.  They will be managing the states Section 811, if they get an allocation you'll want to know how that works.
One program is better known, a group of programs is better known for homeless households, but a lot of them are targeted to homeless people with disabilities.  It's a whole bucket of programs that comes out of HUD, formerly I think called McKinney‑Vento, now it's sort of all rolled in together and called (indiscernible).  Basically what it had was a supportive housing program.  It's what you think of as supportive housing which is a building with a lot of homeless people.  Many of them would have disabilities living there with services on site.  Typically a supportive housing environment, but what it has is rental assistance so, it's good to know about the resources even if they're not the most ideal integrated type of housing option it's still better than a homeless shelter or nursing home, right?  It's good know what it is.  They fund a state Shelter Plus Care those are housing vouchers for people with disabilities.  They're single room occupy jeans projects that are funded through what's formerly known as McKinney‑Vento.  So these are all funded to Continuum of Care and every state has a number of these, and I put on my list of things to send out, how do you find out where the local Continuum of Care?  Those of these works in the Continuum of Care will be homeless services providers, homeless service providers and disability advocacy agencies don't always cross paths.  But they should, because some of you may be advocating to move people into the community from nursing homes, whereas a lot of homeless service providers really folk on preventing people from going into the nursing homes because a lot of homeless people end up going into the nursing homes.  So a lot of these homeless resources that get awarded through these Continuum of Care could often benefit and do often benefit people with disabilities as well.  So it's good to be aware.  So participating in that continuum is care is a good idea.
One side note is although HUD's homeless definition was recently expanded to include people living in institutions as homeless, there's a cutoff limit.  It basically means if you've been there 90 days then they don't can you remember homeless.  So it's still progress because they didn't use to define homeless ‑‑ people in institutions as homeless at all.  Now they are including people that have been there less than 90 days as homeless and therefore eligible to access some of these programs.
>> RAHNEE PATRICK:  So on the ground for folks ‑‑ this is Rahnee again from Access Living.  On the ground, you may also in addition to joining your Continuum of Care, you may want to look into local ombudsman groups that those folks that are doing investigations of abuse and neglect in nursing facilities, because by my participation in this advisory group that has local ombudsman here in Chicago, they know that there are nursing homes specifically identified and will accept people off the street, just like no questions asked, and they'll bring them in as long as they got a Medicaid card, they have a bed guaranteed for them.  And so we were able to identify which nursing facility here in Chicago is the go‑to for, you know, the police department, et cetera, for people that have disabilities, and they have a Medicaid card, and they are on the street.  And so, you know, that's how our city handled like a crisis situation for people that are on the street.  But not that it's good or bad, no judgment at all, but that is how it appeared.  We were able to find out where those facilities are, so that's another resource that can get you connected to what Tara is talking about.
>> TARA PEELE:  Okay.  One thing that a lot of people don't think about when they think about looking for housing is the United States Department of Agriculture's Rural Development housing.  Obviously they're not located in cities or they wouldn't be rural.  Most states have Rural Development programs.  Basically these are ‑‑ they can be for seniors or they can be for nonseniors.  Basically they say families.  But the good thing about Rural Development programs is even in your senior properties if you're a person with a disability you don't have to meet an age requirement.  You just need to be 18 or older.  And the other huge thing byte and the reason I'm promoting it is because almost all the units have rental assistance.  Some of them are older, you know.  Because they're sort of out in the rural areas, they may not have as much access to services or may not be as accessible.  But you need to know about all the subsidized housing resources you can, so I'm mentioning it today.  Rural Development has a great Web site where you can search for where these housing units are.  I have some instructions on the slides that I'm assuming you guys have copies of.
Now to get into capital development, we've talked up to now mostly about rental assistance, which is one of the best things, because it's one of the easiest.  You have rental assistance, and you can take it somewhere, and they accept it and there you go.  You also need to pay attention to how to build housing, because, you know, building affordable housing and the capital funds what, they call the capital or construction funds for that is also very important and often a little easier to come by than the rental assistance.  Often the two will need to be paired together in order to reach people with disabilities on the SSI income.
HOME is a major capital program.  HUD allocates it.  It's one of the big programs that HUD administers.  It funds affordable housing construction.  It can be used to fund two years of tenant based rental assistance.  You would need to talk directly with a local HOME administering agency for that.  And since I brought that up, that housing finance agency that I mentioned before are most likely going to be the ones that administer the state HOME allocation from HUD, and it's allocated based on population and them doing Consolidated Plans every year.  There are also local jurisdictions that get direct allocations if they have populations, I think it's 30 or 50,000 people or more, they can get a direct allocation of HOME and administer it in their own way, so they can do local awards to developers to develop housing, and you can approach them directly about whether they have a tenant based rental assistance program or whether they use their HOME for rental assistance, or whether they would be willing to do that.  So I have a link here.  You know, HOME is not ideal in that it doesn't often reach people at extremely low incomes, but what it's often used for is to combine with other housing sources as a grant, to help them lower the rents to 30% AMI, income for less, so it's part of a lasagna financing thing where they have some HOME and tax credits and other stuff to make sure that some of the units in the project can reach people who are actually extremely low income.
And then, of course, I mentioned the rental assistance, and we actually have ‑‑ is Beto in here?  Everybody knows Beto, right?  The fellow in the back?  He's a big time proponent of HOME tenant based rental assistance, has done a lot of looking into it.  If you want more information about that, he's a good resource.
I mentioned the Consolidated Plan.  Folks should know about those.  A lot of times your state financing agency will have one to two per year of public hearings on their ConPlan or their Consolidated Plan action plan, basically what that means is the Consolidated Plan is what they have to submit to HUD saying, here's how we're going to use all these resources we're getting from you, and they're almost all affordable housing resources, and the public has an opportunity to comment on that and influence what that plan is.  And then, of course, they usually have another public hearing when it's time to report what their action plan for the year is or what their results for the year was.  So the state will have one ConPlan, and then those localities that get direct allocation of things like HOME will have Consolidated Plans and hearings associated with that, so paying attention to when those hearings are and participating in that is important.  And I can tell you that despite the size of Chicago, and I used to work for the state housing finance agency here, sometimes at their Consolidated Plan hearings only two or three people would show up, and we're talking millions and millions and millions of dollars in housing resources.
Sorry, I was too busy like the words ‑‑
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER:  Are HOME funds used to develop mixed income housing?
>> TARA PEELE:  Yes, the HOME itself, not to get too complicated, but you have to set aside a certain number of HOME units within a project.  So if you get, you know, a few million in HOME, you need to have a corresponding number of affordable housing units within that development, so the development may have units for people that are even market rate with market rate incomes or people who are 80% of income, if you get a HOME allocation for that project you also need to have a certain number of units that reach lower incomes, and perhaps that's 50% of area median income or less.  Unless there's also rental assistance applied onto the units.
Okay Community Development Block Grant program is another one that gets allocated to states and localities.  It will also be covered in the state Consolidated Plan that I mentioned on how it will be used Community Development Block Grants are often used for economic infrastructure and business development, but a lot of states and localities also use it for housing development.
Our state doesn't use it so much for housing development.  It's kind of odd.  More at the localities here use it for housing development more often.
The majority of the CDBG funds must benefit low and moderate income households, so regardless of how you're using it.  If you're developing housing with it, a lot of that housing needs to benefit low and moderate income households.  If you're doing infrastructure development, you have to make the case that's going to benefit it.  It gets a little weird, but we're talking housing today so I'm not going down the infrastructure road.  HUD's Web site is here, which has been vastly improved in the recent year, I think, so you can actually find things on there.  But it will lead you to a map.  You know, you can find out who the local CDBG managing agencies are.
One note on that, because I'm not sure if I put this in here.  I didn't.  When there's a disaster in your area, which there have been a lot lately, a lot of times CDBG will be used as a vehicle to fund redevelopment.  And when that ‑‑ when a CDBG disaster recovery program funds essentially, so it's a special allocation CDBG, and it has relaxed rules so states are encouraged to use more of that for housing, there has been a lot of that for housing, particularly in the gulf states, but here because of flooding and things like that, so it's worth keeping and eye out for that, because they will do a ‑‑ or the state will do a special amendment to their Consolidated Plan saying how thee plan to use that money and it's worth pushing them.  Don't just do vanilla affordable housing with it.  You could think about doing some integrated housing for people with disabilities while you have more flexibility.
Similar neighborhood stabilization program, which is a recent in the last few years creation, and it sort of runs a lot like CDBG or under a lot of the CDBG rules, but it was based created in response to foreclosure crisis.  So a lot of the states and then direct regions and localities, depending on the stipulations of the funding round, have gotten major allocations of neighborhood stabilization program funds.
You know, it may be drying up now, but my understanding is that there actually may be another funding round.  In some funding rounds, states are encouraged to create housing for people with disabilities.  They are allowed to create rental housing for the program.  One thing that my agency did was get an allocation from the state to do very small group homes, which is my favorite topic, but unfortunately some need is still there.  But they also did some supportive housing development for just affordable housing where you would have a lease in your own unit.  So it can be used that way.  And because it's focused on acquiring foreclosed properties, there's foreclosed properties of all types.  There's condos, there's single family homes, and those sort of ripe for being acquired and made accessible.  That's what Home First Illinois does, so if that opportunity arises, it's good to sort of know what's available in your area, who's been doing the work, if anybody has actually been pushing the boundaries of the neighborhood stabilization program, monies used to create how is for people with disabilities.
Oh, you know what?  I forgot to note this.  This is one of the examples of poking with a pitchfork.  You said fork, and I said pitchfork.  Ask your regional HUD office how your NSP in your area has been using it to meet accessibility requirements.  Because it is a federal funding course.  It triggers the Section 504 Rehabilitation Act.  They should be using this.  Because it's sort of flowing really fast and loose, it's possible that they haven't really been meeting those requirements, and best case scenario, they have been and this will be a way for you to learn where those actual units are that they've created that are accessible.  So pull out your pitchforks.
This one.  Low income housing tax program.  This is a complicated program.  Every state gets an allocation.  Very few cities get direct allocation.  It's basically per capita.  Developers compete to be awarded tax credits, which they sell to raise money to build affordable housing.  It's an IRS program.  It's the biggest affordable housing development program in the country.  The reason I'm bringing it up, even though it's complicated is because a lot of states through what they call their qualified allocation plan have criteria in there to encourage extra accessible units in the development, extra units target to do people with extremely low incomes and a lot of cases, and even more cases as time goes on, they encourage the developers to set aside or target units for people with disabilities.  Some states, like Illinois, go even one step further and say, you're going to target a certain number of like 10%, 20% of units for people with disabilities under 30% of area median income that are coming out of institutions.  They have the ability to do that.
Pitchforks.  But actually a lot of housing finance agencies that manage these tax credits and allocate these tax credits are really open‑minded about working with you about this.  You have to know where they are.  You have to look at that qualified allocation plan.  They have hearings U. need to know who their board members are.  And chances are somebody is going to be sympathetic there.  Like I said, a lot of states already have plans in place within to strongly encourage developers.  And it's a very competitive application process, to set aside units within their projects.  And these are nice buildings that are being created because of the fact that developers sell the tax credits to investors to raise the money, the investors stay interested in the quality of the housing over a number of years.  So it's actually a very good resource.
>> AMBER SMOCK:  Okay.  This is Amber.  Can you go back to the Low Income Housing Tax Credit?
Okay.  So we had an attendee yesterday who was looking at low income housing and the affordability of low income tax credit things.  And that was one of the issues.  There's a sheet on the flip chart board that's just before the current one that was listing different issues in HOME states.  Could you speak to the problem of, you know, of the affordability of these properties?
>> TARA PEELE:  Yes, indeed.  If you just have a vanilla tax credit development, just the bare minimum of what you have to do, then you have to have ‑‑ if you create a hundred unit project you either have to have 40% of the units set for people at 50% of area median income and they don't care about the less or 20% of the units set aside for 60% of the income and they don't ‑‑ actually I think I flipped it backwards, what matters is 50 or 60% doesn't reach people on SSI, but nobody does the vanilla development, because it's so competitive to get these, within these qualified plans, the states have given incentive to do lower and lower.  They incentivize a mix of incomes.  You actually need to have some of the higher income units in there to get higher rents so that you can afford to have some of the 30% AMI or less, even 30% is not low enough to reach SSI a lot of the time.  What you also need to know is developers often get good points in their application to layer project based rental assistance on this.  Remember I said lasagna financing.  This is like tomato sauce.  This is what is going to make it reach the people on SSI income.  And many, many, many most tax credit developments have some tax credits layered on them.  They do.  Being aware of where those developments are and getting on the waiting list for those units is a great idea.  Because oftentimes at least some units in that development are going to reach people on SSI for having rental assistance.
Of course, they all have to accept Section 8 vouchers as well.  So if a person, you know, hits oil and has a voucher, they can actually bring it to that development. 
>> JESSICA PORTER:  Just one quick comment.  Here in Chicago, and I believe there's a proposal now in Cook County, the source of income is actually a protected class of individuals seeking housing.  So if you have a voucher and you go to a property, they cannot tell you that they don't take Section 8.  That's no longer an option here in Chicago.  And I believe soon to be, hopefully, in ‑‑ yay ‑‑ in Cook County as well.
All right, and that's another reason why these low income tax credit fund properties that you want to work with the agencies.  We will go to our waiting lists in terms of housing individuals into those assisted units in the property. 
>> TARA PEELE:  So here's the ricotta cheese in the lasagna.  A lot of states have their own state tax credit program.  And this works a little simpler.  The way it works here is if the developer come and the city has said, here, we're going to donate you this land so you can build some housing on it, then they can take the value of that land and apply for tax credits and get credit for half the value of that land.  That's the way it works here but each state has its own rules and then sell those tax credits to raise money.  It doesn't cost anybody anything except the taxpayer, but they raise money that way to help finance the housing, so this is yet another ‑‑ now this one don't have a lot of rules associated with it.  It's a little bit easier, so because each state is a little bit different and most states do have their own state tax credit program it's worth checking it out. 
>> RAHNEE PATRICK:  Are you ready to go to the next one?
>> TARA PEELE:  Go ahead.
>> RAHNEE PATRICK:  And too this is kind of where I'm coming up with another acronym for you all to remember, which is partnership pitchfork, PP, and the way that worked in state housing tax credit program.  Based on the lawsuits that happened here in our state as well as in Cook County that allowed for people with disabilities to come out of nursing facilities and get community based services rather than facility services, we developed, the state became very interested in working with us on finding housing.  Suddenly they realized there's a lot of problems with finding housing for certain people.  Wow, interesting.
Anyway, so as a result, they created these regions, the state level created regions on this housing tax credit program.  But now they're much more targeted and collaborate directly with Access Living and other agencies that are helping people move out of nursing facilities, et cetera, and being specific about getting people with disabilities into these units that are developed.  What we found in that program, because we had a partnership and we were documenting who we referred over to these buildings, their name, what happened to the person, and then the state point person followed up with other agency on what happened with those referrals, some of these buildings and the developers have to enter into compliance agreements.  Recently they had a compliance agreement that they entered into with one of the developers because they were not ‑‑ we had one woman, no arms, go in to try to apply, and they said if you don't have somebody to help out filling out your application, you're not going to apply.  Ah!  Right?  So we had that kind of documentation in place and anecdotes, and as a result a compliance agreement was entered in.  So again PP, pitchfork was used, but in the partnership with the state point person, then they entered into a compliance agreement. 
>> TARA PEELE:  So here's an example of turning lemons into lemonade.  We've had lots of foreclosures lately.  Real estate owned properties, banks have long lists of properties that were foreclosed.  So throughout Chicago and in the Chicago metro region, we have a major problem with that, even more major than most other areas, with having vacant single families homes, but a lot of vacant condos as well.  Some of these condos were on the market for a few hundred thousand dollars not too long ago, and now they're more like $80,000.  If that's not an opportunity to grab a condo and make it available for a person with a disability for as long as you own it, I don't know what is.  I mean, you know, why wait?  So I'm bringing this up specifically because it's something that Home First Illinois is working on with Access Living, and I'm going to tell you a little bit more about that in a minute to show you how that works.  But it's a good time for me to stop and say, I'm giving you all this information, but not because you should go out and become developers.  I'm giving you all this information soul know it's out there so when you approach developers and develop partnerships with them, you can show that you have done your research, you know what this is, and you want to work with them.  You shouldn't have to become developers.  There are already great developers out there.  You certainly can become developers, but you have a lot on your plate other than that, and it's a lot of time good to do a lot of the advocacy so the developer doesn't piss off the funder, so you get to piss off the funder, and then the developer can do the housing, create the housing for people with disabilities.  So all these resources are for you to know in case you want to approach a partner just like Access Living approached IFF to partner.
So banks ‑‑ a lot of the banks have thrown their REO, their real estated owned list on to a national list.  So I threw in a link to that. 
A lot of ‑‑ there's a National Housing Trust Fund that's been created.  It's not funded yet.  It's supposed to be funded out of like Ginnie Mae and Freddie Mac and these organizations aren't doing so hot right now, but it is there and hopefully it will be funded, because they have ‑‑ and this is a national housing coalition that really led this charge and led the creation of this, and focused on that at lest 75% of the funds that will be in there will have to be used to create housing for people with extremely low incomes.  Yes. 
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER:  Sorry.  Back one page for a second.  It took me a minute to process this.  
When you're advising or considering working with a developer to secure property, you don't mean that a Center for Independent Living will go in with a developer.  You mean assure them that you have the person to rent and they buy the property, right?
>> TARA PEELE:  Exactly.  And that's exactly how Home First Illinois works.  I do want to tell you about it.  But I made a slide for it.
No, nobody is coming out of the pocket for you guys on this.  I know it's hard enough right now.
Did I talk about that?  I wanted to mention that yes there's this unfunded national housing trust fund, but there are funded state housing trust funds and often local house trust funds as well.  These are used most often to build for the construction financing, but even it's another layer that does reach down to people with extremely low income.  In some cases I think Chicago is one, it's ‑‑ some of it is actually used for rental assistance as well.  It's actually reached people below 15% of area median income.
This gets really complicated, but states often issue bonds, and the reason I think I brought this up most likely is because Illinois did a capital program where they set aside $130 million for housing development and really put a lot of language in about how that needs to benefit people with disabilities and veterans, and that's how Home First Illinois was basically funded for our first project, that $15 million we started with came out of the state housing bond issued to do capital financing for housing.  So it sounds like a bad idea right now because what state is going to want to say here's some more money when you're asking a fiscal crisis, but it was basically presented as a jobs creation program, because it is a jobs creation program when you're funding capital development in your states, you're providing and supporting jobs in your state.
So, you know, most of the money is actually for infrastructure, but they did set aside $130 million just for housing, so it actually is possible because it was just passed here in the past couple years that even in bad fiscal environment a state would be open to issuing a housing bond.
So I finally get to talk about Home First Illinois.
Access Living and IFF have a pretty lengthy relationship because of IFF predating me, helped Access Living develop their new space.  So IFF had ‑‑ oversaw the construction management.  So there was some trust already there, and Access Living knew as well as any of you guys know the difficulty in finding housing for people with disabilities, but they also knew they didn't want to become developers because their hands are full doing a lot of other extremely important things.  IFF has the capacity on staff, because we have a real estate consulting arm, to actually do housing development.  We had never done housing ownership.  So what we did we created Home First Illinois at IFF to own the housing that we developed.  
Access Living got out their pitchforks, and got the state to set aside that $130 million in capital funds, and further got the state to set aside 30 million of that 130 million to make sure that it went for housing for people with disabilities and got the 15 million‑dollar allocation for Home First Illinois' first project.  That's huge.  That's what you can do at a Center for Independent Living that you can't really do as a developer unless you're the son of the governor or something.  I don't know important people.  But the important people I know are at Access Living, honestly.  So they made that happen.  They made that money happen.  They made Home First Illinois happen.  IFF runs it, and we meet regularly with Access Living, and here's with a we do, with our first allocation.  We go and look for really cheap properties, condos, in high rises, right now, and we're focused on Chicago in our first phase.  The reign we're looking at high rises is because they're elevator buildings with accessible entrances.  
So we use the money to buy the unit and oftentimes it's a foreclosed unit or short sale not always.  Sometimes it's a unit that's been on the market for a while and gotten affordable.  We use the money to buy the unit and use the money to make it accessible to wheelchair users, and what we have also worked with Access Living on really hard is working with Chicago Housing Authority to get rental assistance, project based or property rental assistance as it's called they're apply to the unit that will stay with the unit, so it will always be stay with the unit, so people with SSI can afford to live in these units.  They're very scattered site.  In a 900 unit building we've got 3 units under contract and that's all we're going to do there.  Maybe a mile up the road in a 500 unit building we might have two we by.  In Hyde Park on the south side we have a few under contract.  We look at studios one bedrooms and two bedrooms.  For right now we don't see the need for a larger and we're trying this out so we want to go for the more affordable units.  We go in there and replace the flooring.  We lower cabinets.  You know, make sure there is rolling space under the countertops.  We raise the outlets.  We make it accessible.  You know, upgrade the bathrooms.  So we really don't care if the unit interior is in great shape.  We're going to get it cheaper.  We're going to replace it and make it a super nice unit.  
Access Living is going to transition people out of nursing homes and help them get settled into the unit and get connected to whatever that individual might need to live independently for as long as they want to stay there.  It's permanent housing.  They have a lease.  Like I said, they'll have rental assistance.  Fingers crossed, we're going to the housing authority's board next week for that.  And, you know, it's all been part of a partnership.  You know, the money ‑‑ this is an easy atypical way to finance a project, like I said, this is not lasagna financing.  It was super easy, it was ‑‑ well not for me, it was easy for me not so much for Access Living, but it's a pot of money, and that's all we needed, right?  That's rare.  But that's the importance of working with a developer, because the developer knows how to like figure out those layers of financing.  They put together the layers of financing.  You commit to be their partner, help them advocate.  Make sure that the housing authority is doing what they're supposed to do.  Make sure that the housing finance agency is aware of the support in the community for this type of project, at every level stay involved because we've had ‑‑ we've had lots of meetings.  We've had fights, you know.  We've had a lot of things to work out with the housing authority and with the housing finance agency as time has gone on, but Access Living has been right there with us every step of the way to make sure that they know, it's not just IFF who is trying to do this.  It's a larger community of people with disabilities and advocates that want to do this and they're committed it to.
>> RAHNEE PATRICK:  Right, in terms of the fighting too, we had ‑‑ we didn't always agree about what those units were going to look like.  We still constantly negotiate about what's an acceptable ‑‑ you know, acceptable in terms of accessibility for units.  I distinctly remember saying we should have pets, we should allow people to have pets in their units and the lead person at IFF was like no, absolutely not.  You know, he was very strong.
>> TARA PEELE:  We had never owned housing before.
>> RAHNEE PATRICK:  My husband and I have two dogs.  We're like, we're pet people.  So there is ‑‑ but those are things that are going to come down to, again, the PP stuff, right?  Partnership pitchfork, constantly, you know, going ‑‑
>> TARA PEELE:  And I should say the staff at Chicago Housing Authority, well, first of all, people who work at Chicago Housing Authority don't take the job because it's glamour.  They do want to help people get into affordable housing, but they also have boards and the boards are focused on making sure that they're complying with all the other requirements that they have.  Jessica mentioned that there's this whole other lawsuit that the CHA is dealing with, that they have to comply with.  So a lot of their fights have bumped up against their other obligations, which are very valid obligations and us sort of asking why don't you just think about something else for a minute and don't do that obligation, and they've been flexible about that.  So that's been a huge benefit, but it's taken a lot of talking.
>> JESSICA PORTER:  And can I add, the key word here is pilot.  Try small projects.  Boards are better with small projects.  Pilot.  Let it be successful and then the fear, the newness kind of disseminates over time.  We all started with ‑‑ I think we started with a very small 50 voucher pilot program.
>> RAHNEE PATRICK:  Yeah.
>> TARA PEELE:  Yeah, I mean, that's all you want to handle at first anyway.  Make that work and prove yourself and it makes the housing authority look good it makes everybody look good and it creates housing for people with disabilities and everybody wants to do more.  That's our first project.  We started in the City of Chicago.  We're going to spread next to suburban Cook County and then metro Chicago or statewide.  That's our first project.  We're also actively seeking financing for additional projects that serve people with all types of disabilities.  So there will be more maybe to talk about in the future maybe at another conference.
I jumped into this.  I think I already told you about this.  One of our challenges you should know, and it probably is going to be similar everywhere, is just finding units within buildings that actually have the baseline accessibility to get to the unit.  There's a lot of walk‑up housing here, which eliminated almost entire neighborhoods where we could search for housing, but we wanted to look within Chicago Housing Authority's opportunity areas, because those were the nicer neighborhoods less concentration of poverty.  That's again why we were sort of driven to the high rises more here.  But in the future, we're also going to work on acquiring some of the real estate owned, the foreclosed houses and making them accessible, or even acquiring vacant lots from the city and building slab on grade housing so there's at least two units on the ground floor that are accessible for wheelchair units, maybe a couple units up top for other disabilities.  So there's a lot of options there.
Yeah, so, I mean, we've had to negotiate with each building, each homeowners association, even if there's accessible entrance and the elevators are wide enough, there are sometimes things we want them to replace the door handles with levered door handles or make sure the route into the laundry room is accessible.  Mine or things like that.  Some of them have reacted well.  I think I got a letter from one yesterday saying they weren't interested in doing it but we were welcome to pay for it.  Some of them do it because they're nice, they'll pick up the tab for these common area accessibility modifications.  That's just an example of issues that you have to iron out.  But can be ironed out if you partner.
>> RAHNEE PATRICK:  So while I'm moving over to the thing, maybe you guys can like squeeze your eyes and open them or do some face exercise.  Make a raspberry. 
I'm serious.  I've not heard one raspberry.
(Audience responds.)
>> RAHNEE PATRICK:  Hey! 
Okay.  I'm Rahnee Patrick.  I'm the director of independent living at Access Living.  I'm the codirector with Amber Smock.  And a codirector with Lisa.  And we are come together as the triangle of power at programs within Access Living.  Don't tell Marca.  Anyway, so what our goal is, as you all know, is that we want to integrate folks with disabilities, and so this is from our mission statement, we're fostering an inclusive society that enables people with disabilities in Chicago to live fully engaged and self‑directed lives.  And in this photograph here is Linell Colbert.  He is ‑‑ the microphone is being held by our legal director Lisa, and Linell and other residents of nursing facilities sued the State of Illinois to make sure that folks that live in Cook County and are in nursing facilities actually get home and community based services to live in the community as under the Olmstead decision under the Americans with Disabilities Act under the human rights of our people.
And so this is a really important photograph here.  It's very moving for me.  Because if you can see, this is a gentleman who has lived in a nursing facility, because there are not services in the community.  And why?  Because he has a disability.  And so here he is with other people suing the State of Illinois to get community based services.  And so it's very powerful.  He's living in the community, I just want to let you know.
(Applause.)
>> RAHNEE PATRICK:  Okay.  So how does it work when we're working with the Chicago Housing Authority?  You know, the whole PP aspect, as you can hear already, is a really critical part of our relationship.  But I wanted to point out, though, Jessica in terms of ‑‑ I don't think this is your ‑‑ I mean, it probably is your personality.  But there is a part of how ‑‑ did you hear how Jessica framed what occurred when the pitchfork was on the backs of CHA?  The framing was like this is an opportunity for us to grow, to be in compliance.  Right?  This is a powerful person within an agency that has that perspective.  I don't know, but I imagine, I have a big imagination, that not all of your powerful people in your housing authorities are going to see this initially as opportunities for, you know, wonderful things.  So there is definitely personality stuff that goes down when we're working as a pitchfork partnership.
And what we do to get this to happen ‑‑ I want you to think about Jessica's ‑‑ how she talked about the process of getting Housing Choice Vouchers and what this is.  This is what we go through as a Center for Independent Living.  We have what we call life cycles when we are transitioning people out of nursing facilities.  So what we did as a strategy at our Center for Independent Living was that I directed our manager of community ‑‑ of long‑term care services, Emmanuel, who is really a phenomenal person at Access Living.  And you know what?  We're going to just start piling people up.  I want you to start getting people approved through the State of Illinois to move out of nursing facilities.  So we just did in‑takes, we kept loading them up, even though we had exhausted all of our Housing Choice Vouchers, and luckily what we were able to do is we were able to then partner with Chicago Housing Authority to lease out Housing Choice Vouchers that became suddenly available.
In that life cycle ‑‑ so what we do, we have a bunch of different life cycles and the two life cycles that are identified here is the prescreen and the moving life silk cycles.  This is a piece or section of how we transition people out of nursing facilities.  So in the prescreen process we look at and evaluate nursing facility residents, and then we use the funds through Illinois' general revenue called community reintegration program as well as we use the federal funding for Money Follows the Person to get people identified and pay for our staff to do the outreach and to do those assessments.
In the moving life cycle, we get the CHA had this agreement to give us a percentage of voucher attrition.  So vouchers, folks pass away.  Folks do not follow eligibility requirements to have a voucher, like sell drugs from their unit or things like that, really significant illegal activity.
And so when those vouchers are turned back to the Chicago Housing Authority, we get a certain percentage of those vouchers.  Yeah.  You had your hand up. 
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER:  So you get those ‑‑ you get a certain percentage of those vouchers ahead of people who are on a waiting list? 
>> JESSICA PORTER:  Yes. 
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER:  Okay.  So you somehow worked out that agreement.  Because I love Rahnee, you know, we came into vouchers.  I'm like, well, good Lord, I want to come into vouchers.  It's very difficult in metropolitan areas.  I'm from near D.C.  So it's equally hard as Chicago.
>> JESSICA PORTER:  So I don't know of the things that Rahnee did early on, actually I think within the first few months of me taking my position, was to introduce herself to me, introduce the program to me and say we'd really like to start a pilot, a small, little demonstration program.
We had something in the past that was a one‑time only type of deal.  This allowed us to write something into our administrative plan as a demonstration program.  And then very ‑‑ I shouldn't say this out loud because it's being videotaped, but we quietly added to our administrative plan a provision that allowed for us to take 3% of our annual attrition and use it to house people leaving institutions through a referral process to a state‑approved entity.  So we were very careful not to box in where the vouchers were going specifically, but to say an approved state entity.  And so that's really how it began, with a small pilot, and then a small expansion, and thus far hasn't drawn too much attention, and hopefully not too much thereafter, so that we can grow it gradually.
Again, boards don't like ‑‑ boards are required ‑‑ we're required to serve our housing waiting list.  There's hundreds of thousands of people who want to be on that list.  So jumping into something that you want to do cautiously, and we had an environment in our state that really allowed us to do that. 
>> TARA PEELE:  I can't believe I forgot to bring this up yet.  HUD recently released a memo in June or July.  It doesn't require housing authorities to set aside housing for Olmstead populations, but it really is the strongest language to date encouraging them to do it and how to do it in terms of wait list preferences and opening their wait list for specific groups and giving a lot of leeway if you're in a state where there's a lot of litigation.  Something I actually found out about only because a Chicago Housing Authority employee put it in a memo to their board, they were actually using it as a tool to convince their board that they should approve our project. 
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER:  Do you know the number to that memo?
>> TARA PEELE:  I'll make sure I follow up with a list of things.  I'll include it, it's important.
>> RAHNEE PATRICK:  We had the gentleman in the suit and then the gentleman behind him. 
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER:  When did this program start, and how many people do you all ‑‑ how many people have you transitioned since the implementation of the program, and how many people do you still have on the waiting list?
>> RAHNEE PATRICK:  Okay.  Where is my pencil?  Waiting ‑‑ who's on the waiting list.  Number on waiting list.  Number transitioned. 
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER:  Since you all went into the program with the CHA.
>> RAHNEE PATRICK:  When did we start that?  That was under ‑‑ '09.  What's that?
>> AMBER SMOCK:  Oh, the ‑‑ are you talking MFP or ‑‑ which?
>> RAHNEE PATRICK:  The relationship between the CHA and Access Living.  Beto.  Beto.  What year did we begin working with the Chicago Housing Authority to get vouchers? 
>> 2000.  In the year 2000. 
>> RAHNEE PATRICK:  Put it in the form of a question. 
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER:  Do you want to know how?  Through advocacy and organizing.
>> RAHNEE PATRICK:  Hold on.  And then number that we have transitioned is we have transitioned 243 people over ‑‑ from the time that we started doing community reintegration.  We started community reintegration in the mid '90s, so in the mid '90s we didn't have vouchers, we were using existing public PRA or units that were in buildings that were ‑‑ the whole building was subsidized not specific vouchers. 
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER:  Well, in the year 2000 HUD put out also on their NOFA or Notice of Funding Available to Public Housing Authorities that we could designate certain vouchers for nonelderly disabled and to get people out.  It was a very small amount.  And based on that, the Chicago Housing Authority, through one of its contractors that is no longer with the Chicago Housing Authority, gave us some of those vouchers.  But at the beginning, we were as organized as we are now because we didn't know how to actually do it, to get people out, and we were confronted with a lot of state bureaucracy, and nursing home bureaucracies.  So we were having problems even using the vouchers.
So I believe ‑‑ and they gave us first around 21, 22 vouchers.  We were only able to use 10 or 12, or in the following year about 5 or 6.  We didn't know how to process the voucher.  We created lotteries.  We didn't know who has got the most needs and things like that.  It was not until our restructuring at Access Living about three years ago that we started getting better organized on the utilization process.  And now we still have ‑‑ we've been successful in great part because, like I said yesterday, the magnificent staff that we have, and also our great partnership with the Chicago Housing Authority, and I'm saying that because you're here, and because it's true, it's true.  And the vouchers you give us of course.
>> RAHNEE PATRICK:  And when you said on the waiting list, do you mean on the Chicago Housing Authority's list or Access Living's waiting list to get people out? 
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER:  Access Living.
>> RAHNEE PATRICK:  Access Living right now we have currently processed people who are green lighted on the state level at 43.  We have 43 people waiting to get out of nursing facilities.  One reason they're waiting is we don't have the funding through the State of Illinois.  We just got a new budget amount, pot of money.  Number two, we just got some more vouchers through the attrition process.  So very small number of vouchers. 
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER:  All right.  So 2000 is when you partnered, you transitioned 240, and you have 43 on your waiting list.
>> RAHNEE PATRICK:  Correct.  Well, you know, I want to say the 243 number started in the mid '90s.  So the number of transitioned started in the mid '90s.  Partnership with CHA started in 2000.  In total we moved 243 people. 
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER:  And one final question.  And I'm not being facetious when I say this.  Do you all keep up with your recidivism rate?  And I say it that way because to me, I've been in one of those facilities, and so it's a long time ago, but, you know, it's like prison.  And so, you know, I think you have done a great job simply because in our city, I know it's very difficult to even transition two or three, you've done well, because of course the major barriers to transitioning someone out is housing and personal assistance.  Those two things.  
>> RAHNEE PATRICK:  Right, yeah. 
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: So I think you guys have done a great job.  But I just wonder how many people because of whatever reasons ‑‑
>> RAHNEE PATRICK:  Right.  I do want to say, we do track the recidivism right now and the restructure that Beto cited was an important component of us tracking that, and the restructure is where we became the triangle of power in terms of the program directors.  Before hand, it was one program director and actually I was the program director for two years prior to the prestructure actually conceived the idea and then executed it with my vice president.  And so this was to get much more focused in on how we do service delivery.  How we do advocacy.  He's are tines of the pitchfork, how we do stuff in the court.  So with that under my directorship in the services part, we have been able to track recidivism.  What we have seen as recidivism is right now we have two people that went back, that went back to the nursing facility, out of ‑‑ I can't remember ‑‑ it's in two years.  I think we've moved 100 people.
>> 86.
>> RAHNEE PATRICK:  86 people.  So two out of 86.  We've had six people ‑‑ six to eight people, I believe, pass away.  So death is an issue too.  But as you all know, they die free, baby.  They die free.  That's what we say.  Some other people had some hands up.  The guy in the red shirt, were you being a support?  Okay.  Woman in the green. 
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER:  I'm good.
>> RAHNEE PATRICK:  Amber? 
>> AMBER SMOCK:  In talking with some of the people here, you know, people are coming from different sizes of Centers for Independent Living, right?  So we know that Access Living has ‑‑ I'm note sure of the total number right now, but it's somewhere between 60 and 70, right?
>> RAHNEE PATRICK:  It's like 68.
>> AMBER SMOCK:  Okay.
>> RAHNEE PATRICK:  68 staff.
>> AMBER SMOCK:  One thing that would be good to know in terms of size and how many people are involved.  I'm hearing that some groups are small as like 6 people.  You know.  So in moving somebody out, transition them into the community, how many staff people have to be involved?  Because I know there's like the case manager, counselor person, and then there's the housing locator, so in all how many people actually have a hand in moving one person with a disability out of a nursing home? 
>> RAHNEE PATRICK:  Well, I don't know about the one person, but we do know that to accomplish the 86 transitions in the two‑year period, that we needed six people total staff.  That does not ‑‑ that's all front liners plus a manager.  So that six number includes a manager number.  And so that's six.  That's what we're looking at as a trend.  If we want to make this exponential in terms of this lawsuit under Linell's name, they're supposed to under the settlement agreement get 1100 people out of nursing facilities in three years, we're going to have to really exponentially grow as an agency because we need six people to get through the Money Follows the Person stuff.  You know, in our state the risk mitigation plan is such a big deal because according to the state nursing facilities are so safe, oh, they're not dangerous at all.  But you put somebody in their own home, oh, no, they might get hurt or something.  And so, you know, like the world is not bubble wrapped, and nursing facilities are not bubble wrapped either.  So that is though a perspective of a funder that we give money to actually transition people out.  So we're trying to play their game while pitchforking them in the a‑s‑s.
Now I have five minutes.  Not fair.  Okay.  Okay.  So with that, you can see through the moving life cycle, we do have a process of working with the CHA and Access Living to get them to be approved through the application process as well as fulfilling the guidelines that are outlined by HUD to get the Housing Choice Vouchers.
What we do ‑‑ one of the things I would pass on as a best practice is what we do is we call eight dry run.  A dry run is the week before the briefing that Jessica cited earlier, people have to bring in all the documents that are required for the application process.  And so we look, we get it all together.  We make copies.  We have it all stacked up.  Okay, next week you need to have your income verification for Social Security.  Let's go down to the Social Security office en masse, line up, let's get this stuff together.  So we have a dry run day, and what we have found as one of the delegate agencies, state approved agency as Jessica cited, we actually have the best success rate of applicants for Housing Choice Vouchers.  A 90% success rate for people that come through our program to apply for vouchers.  So they know if access.  They're not screwing around with us.  We did sit on vouchers in our agency after the restructure we didn't sit on them anymore and we're like a monster with them.  We make sure that that person is going to apply, they're going to apply and they're going to be eligible and that's what we call a dry run day.
>> JESSICA PORTER:  And I just want to add that working with Access Living, you know the applicants are going to go through, and that after a period of time allows for a certain degree of flexibility where we know if something is missing, keep moving.  Access Living is going to get it to you before the lease is signed.  Keep moving.  And that really only comes with a developed relationship over time and starting, as I keep mentioning, pilot.  It really helps build the trust and help everybody moved forward.
>> RAHNEE PATRICK:  So the challenges we found were inaccessible housing stock, poor credit score of our people, they have eviction histories, they've been discriminated against, they will be discriminated against as we're doing the housing searches.  The application at CHA are paper based so what we do at Access Living is through Emmanuel's computer science brain and love of Google was create a process where you populate forms that they ask over and over, date of birth, you know, who lives with you, so it's all ‑‑ so what we did is we electronically did the forms so that you do it once and it populates in all the forms, very quickly.  CHA did not have that available, and we created if a for them.
And lengthy inspection time frame.  The inspections were very, very difficult.  I think that CHA actually has addressed that issue recently.  And we were not really getting much feedback or good turn around from the inspections department there.  What does work?  As you can see from the love here is that we are true partners.  There is a fund that we get through the Chicago Housing Authority for home modification.  You all need to do that.  You need to do that.  You need to do that.  That's from Beto's brain days.  And flexibility to work with Access Living staff and clients.  They do have a mobility program that helps people that are voucher holders find units that are going to work for them, which supplements what our unit ‑‑ what we do at Access Living.  And then we do fund a staff person who inspects the units prior to the CHA's inspectors going out.  So again it's like the dry run philosophy.  We make sure this is going to work before CHA even touches it.
And so let's see.  Next thing.  Chicago has a very long and closed waiting list for people to access Housing Choice Vouchers and we have found that people who currently reside in nursing facilities are not on the waiting list.  So kind of working on getting your housing authority to, you know, they did the partnership with Access Living, to access those nursing facility folks.  We do that as well as we can, but we got to really get the housing authority to work with ombudsman programs, get people that are residents right now on the waiting list.  And then go to your ‑‑ go to the top.  Go to HUD.  Go to federal HUD.  Invite your PHA head to go with you and say look we're working together what are you going to do for us?  And then educate the housing authority on specific segregation of people with disabilities into nursing facilities, and that includes the PHA's board, as you can hear that's a whole entity and so there are a lot of people that are in power and play, and they need to be educated about our issue in crisis of being segregated into facilities for unnecessary reasons, you know, for just totally unnecessary for us to be segregated.
And then advocate for modification fund and for preferences for nursing facility residents to be made in the housing authority's administrative plan, and train your own staff at the independent living center on the Fair Housing Act amendment and protections and customer service.  Because, you know, you talk about people in crisis and so you don't want to talk to people like a jerk.  You don't want to start screaming at people.  Yes, a person in a nursing home has a lot of time on their hands, and they know how to dial their cell phone.  Indeed.  And they will call and call and call.  That does not mean you need to get aggressive with that person.  So make sure your staff understands customer service.
And then always, with your Public Housing Authority, with, you know, the jerk on the phone, with the jackass landlord that wants to discriminate against you, you do want to communicate assertively but not violently so don't call him a jackass.
(Laughter.)
>> RAHNEE PATRICK:  And that is all.
(Applause.)