Listed as module 2 TIM FUCHS: So this Housing Action Plan is how we hope you will organize your thoughts and future actions as we go through the content this week. So this is multipage, and it's actually designed so that you can copy and add to it. I can get you, you can use this printed copy while you're here but we can get you an electronic copy if you'd like it because you can make as many pages of this as you want. We have suggested some overall topics or content areas, like collaboration and partnerships on page 1. Advocacy on page 2. Obtain housing resources on page 3. Page 4 is blank, by design. So you can type in things that make the most sense in your community. So all of our small group work this week will be breaking, we might do a session on funding or partnerships and then a small group activity where you're actually going to work with the people at your table to fill in those items in your action plan based upon the specifics of your states and communities, write the solutions that are going to work for you all. And what we want to do with this, you can see, you identify an action item/activity. Who is going to need to be involved in that? If applicable, is there another organization or funder that you need to line up a meeting with or build a relationship with? Whether it's someone you work with all the time or whether building a relationship from scratch, who is responsible for that? You, co-worker, or is it your director? And then your next steps, your deadline and what you hope to accomplish, so take a common sense approach to this. You're not turning this in to us. It's going to work for you. We want this to literally be your format/approach so if the column doesn't apply, leave it blank. This is for you. So I just wanted to point out that action plan. A lot of our trainings, we have this same format but it might be shorter or we might hold it till the last day, but given the complexity of the topic, we wanted to weave this throughout the week so you will be working on this action plan. So I wanted to orient you to it if you had questions about it, please let us know. I said that I want to give Ann time for her next session which is on an overview on laws and policy. I am going to turn it over to Anne to do housing legislation. ANNE DENTON: I said this already and got overheard by some of my friends from Nevada. That I am always a little sheepish to try to talk about housing legislation for a group of people who are working in CILs, because you all know and are warriors around not letting people take advantage, not letting people violate the laws, so as I go through this, for those of you who are the few beginners that we have, I would say that you will, the beginners will probably benefit somewhat from this but what I'm going to do is I'm going to stop and keep asking people to talk about your experience and what's going on and what you have already tried. We're interested in talking about compliance, so I always like to start by saying community integration is not just a nice idea, so when you're talking to people about community integration, we are not asking for a favor, right. We're not asking for a favor. We're showing them how they can comply with the law, how they can avoid a lawsuit. We're doing them a favor by giving them this information. Community integration is not optional and real community integration as our federal speaker said, wow wasn't she good? She was great. It's not possible, the social determinants health literature will really shows how compellingly powerful a safe place to live is. She didn't mention it but there's some data that shows that housing is the most powerful nonmedical social determinant of health so it accounts for the largest amount of variance and to the way people's health outcomes go and the nonmedical social determinants of health are more powerful predictors than things like going to see the doctor and keeping doctor's appointments. So these social determinants of health is an important concept, so we're really talking about talking about housing, we're working on probably the most powerful predictor of health and wellness. So what is accessible, affordable, integrated? Accessible means people can enter and use the housing that they are paying for usually. There's not enough units to meet this description. She taught me something new which is one percent of the units are acceptable and 14 percent of the households report a person with a disability and those numbers don't match. Affordable, I have a Stella warrior over here on poverty and affordability. There's an extreme shortage of units that are affordable to people who are on SSI. You can work with developers to expand the number of accessible units which is what I was pushing you on, which is what this lady back here is doing. Tell me your name again: Sharon. This is what Sharon is doing. But there's also a challenge around making those units affordable. I can remember when I sat on a state committee and there were low income tax credit developers on that committee and they would say, "We're happy to build more accessible units.” The problem is we can't find people to live in them, and you know why? Somebody tell me why? Not affordable. For somebody on an SSI income to pay 30 percent of their income for rent, that means they can pay $250, right? Right? Did I do that math right? And most of our developers are building for renter households that are at a higher income than that and we'll talk some more about that but that's the problem, that's a problem. And then integrated housing units are typical of the kinds of units that are being created for households in the community. Olmstead, we all know Olmstead, everybody knows Olmstead, Olmstead really directly addressed, in my mind, the idea that housing units cannot be isolated or segregated, so that you can build but it's not about, a lot of communities have done this around homelessness. Not around building 100 units for people who are exiting homelessness and who have a psychiatric disability. That's not what Olmstead said to us. Olmstead says people need to have lives in the community, they need to experience the community. They need to experience the social interaction, the physical interaction, the access to the resources in the community. So accessible affordable, integrated, pretty simple but also very profound because when we talk about housing is so important and has been so important for decades, it's so frustrating to someone at my age to look back and say, "Some of these issues are still the same.” Can I get an amen from Wayne? And here's the message of hope. We can fix this. We could fix this, if we tried hard enough, and I loved hearing about the federal government is requiring the collaboration at the federal level, that they're really looking across those things that she talked about, across agencies. And they want to trickle that down to us. All right, we're ready for it. We're ready for it. About time, actually. So here are the laws that you guys could stand up and talk about as well as I can. But the things that really apply around housing are the Fair Housing Act is No. 1. So how many Fair Housing Act warriors do I have in the room? Let's see your hands. How many people are actively working on making reasonable accommodation easier to do? How many people are actively working with local jurisdictions or state jurisdictions to get some of the rules changed? Just a few, but enough. So a lot of this stuff you don't need to know, but these are the core elements of what all of these laws bring to us that people with disabilities have the right to be in the community. That came, it did start with Olmstead, from ADA, the Americans with Disabilities Act, to rent or buy housing on the same terms as anyone else. So there was a program that I was working with in a state that shall remain nameless, where they were working with landlords who wanted people with disabilities to make a double deposit. [LAUGHTER] And I mean you're all laughing but my first response to them was, "Will you get them to put that in writing?" [LAUGHTER] Because we can fix that. So on the same terms as others and also there's a lot of legal attention to retaining the housing on the same terms as others, so that applies to things like, that there are things that people are expected to do in housing and if someone is having difficulty like paying their rent on time, so say your disability check comes in on day 3 of the month and rent is due on day 1, that kind of thing, so retaining, there's also some tools for us in retaining housing, helping people retain housing. Reasonable accommodation, we talked about a second ago, and have the same right to the housing unit as any other tenant, so I have a big background in people with behavioral health disorders, so people with psychiatric disabilities and one of the things that can happen with people with psychiatric disabilities is that they, so people exiting homelessness, this is a better example, these people often feel guilty about having survivor guilt. They're in housing so one of the things that happens is that people bring other people in and let them stay. It's a very big issue, because it violates the lease. One of the things that is helpful around some of these laws is that you can use reasonable accommodation in all of these same tools to help people retain housing so if you've got someone that looks like they are doing a lease violation, part of eviction prevention comes back to these same laws. You can do a reasonable accommodation and we will talk a little bit more about that because I want to ask you about your experience, and I have a little bit more to share. I will speed through these cause you all know them. The ADA, Rehab Act, my favorite thing about the Rehab Act is hello, what year was that? 1973? We haven't made much progress, you know come on people, let's go. Fair Housing Act, again, I love the idea. I'm in from Austin, Texas, so hello Houston and Beaumont! And we have a very active ADAPT group in Austin and one of the things that they're famous for is going out and looking for violations and one of the violations is that there's an apartment for rent and the person comes to visit it and they're using a wheelchair and all of a sudden the apartment is not for rent any more. That is what this talks about, so they will send somebody out that is not use ago wheelchair and then it will be available again. Fair housing, this is basic information about the act itself. It protects people from discrimination and it's not just about disability. This is the keystone piece of legislation that applies to all protected classes. So not just about us. These are some of the things that people can't do, so set different terms, double deposit, provide different housing services, or require to you participate in different housing services. So in order to live in my house, you have to have a case manager, but I'm not supposed to walk too close to you guys because of the camera, sorry. Falsely denied that housing is available, I just used that as an example, and then yeah, so we talked about the multiple listing service down there, I talked about it to Sharon. Olmstead Supreme Court decision absolutely probably the cornerstone of what we're talking about. You cannot be living in the community and experiencing true community integration if you don't have a place to live. So the clinically unwarranted segregation of people with disabilities is a violation of the ADA. Okay so Karen is not here so I'm supposed to take over her part but I want to stop for just a second before I get into that because she's going to talk about or I'm going to talk about for her compliance and some of the other things. I want to hear about your experience with these laws in your community. So who has got a horror story they want to share? Wait for the mic. AUDIENCE MEMBER: I'm not here to talk about but I'm obviously doing that. In the great State of Missouri we're actually working on legislative change at the moment. Here's a couple things that Missouri does, that cities do. People with disabilities cannot live any closer than 1,320 feet to each other. That is a state, a city statute that we see across the nation and here. We're working on changing that for obvious reasons. The other one we were building a house, or helping put a house together for three elderly ladies in Springfield, Missouri and it was going very well and then everything stopped because a gentleman who lived on the block pulled up the city statute that three unrelated women cannot live together and hit them with it and that is, those two city codes are on the books of probably 70 cities in our state. ANNE DENTON: And they're on the books in cities in Texas, and cities in Ohio, and cities all over the country. AUDIENCE MEMBER: And we currently have legislation drawn up, next year hopefully, that makes this wrong, although it's like why do you need to did it. That's it. ANNE DENTON: There's another horror story a volunteer in the back but I'll just comment that there's a dynamic tension there because part of the reason for those status aside from rank prejudice and discrimination is also we don't want to encourage the idea that people with disabilities all need to be clustered together, but those things need to go. Those laws need to go. AUDIENCE MEMBER: Okay Illinois, I'm pretty sure it's nationwide but I know in Illinois we have something new called section 8-11 that is voucher system for persons with disabilities, correct. Supposed to be when it was first announced scattered and attached to the property. In our area, they are breaking ground on two new complexes, housing authority complexes and all of the vouchers are assigned to those two. Now there will be a handful in this one and a handful in that one and the rest of the people will just be low income. I feel like that is segregating and I think that is something that I need to know if I can fight that and how will I fight that and because I don't think that's the way it was intended to be. ANNE DENTON: Not the way it was intended to be at all. Not the way it was intended to be. Let's talk about that on a break. You can tell me more about it. Another horror story, anybody. Anything, I mean we have all these laws that protect our rights and we have the community integration mandate of Olmstead and yet it's not working, right. So who has got a story, related to the laws, what's not working. AUDIENCE MEMBER: So I worked with a gentleman, I was doing community reintegration at the time, and the property manager of the place he was trying to move into, which was in a very rural area and it was the only accessible subsidized housing units available actually said that he was too disabled to live there. ANNE DENTON: Who said that? AUDIENCE MEMBER: The property manager, and also that he could not have personal assistants in the apartment, and it took a year of getting equip for equality involved before this gentleman was actually allowed to move out of the nursing facility into that apartment building and he is still there today almost a decade later, and the apartment manager was let go and now she's been hired back, and we can't, we've not been able to determine who is managing that property right now, and how it is being funded. It is very cloaked in silence and unfortunately we're still not able to get anybody else in that unit since she's come back so that's my horror story. This man spent a year at a nursing home because he was discriminated against. ANNE DENTON: Let's take that story first. Let me just say I'm not a lawyer but there are at least three violations that I heard in that story. Who wants to tell me what one of those was? This gentleman right here. Will discrimination based on disability. What did they actually do, though? I'm not asking you again, but what did they actually do that was against the law? AUDIENCE MEMBER: I'm not sure if I have the right answer to your question, I'm sorry, but what started this was when he submitted his application, she goes and interviews that person in the nursing facility and, which is a whole different environment of course because it is medical and you have the CNAs and nurses, that in itself bothered me. But that is true throughout our two-county area. Everybody that submits an application for housing is interviewed in the nursing facility. ANNE DENTON: Do they interview regular tenants in their current home? AUDIENCE MEMBER: I doubt it. ANNE DENTON: Bing! What is the other thing, does a property manager, I have a lawyer friend who says just because you watch Grey's Anatomy doesn't make you expert. So does the property manager have any idea whether or not somebody is? So that's 1. 2. What's another one? Yes sir. AUDIENCE MEMBER: They denied a reasonable accommodation request. They denied a reasonable accommodation request to have someone be able to help the person be able to live independently. ANNE DENTON: So the whole thing about not allowing an attendant is clearly a violation and the third one, how long did it take again? Year. Over a year. So there's some case law that says that just dragging it out is in and of itself a violation. Because you've got somebody whose rights have been denied to the housing unit and what they're hoping for is you will give up, go away, and live somewhere else, so okay. One of the things that this brings to mind for me is disparate impact. Anybody know what that is? Anybody disparate impact? HUD put out rules and this has been on the books forever, but if an action, a policy, a standard procedure, that is, that functions really as barrier for us and I like what Darrell said, we're not going to spend a lot of time on barriers because we all know them, that but you got something that is a barrier and that barrier, that rule has a disparate impact on a protected class, even if the intent was not to discriminate. You don't have to prove that the violator intended to discriminate. Again I'm not a lawyer so you are getting a civilian's version of this. That rule, that policy, that standard procedure is actionable under the law. So let's think of an example. Let's say my favorite one is one that I talk, that Darrell shares some history with, with me on it, but so somebody, how about the rule that you have to make three times the rent in your income in order to qualify? That's a rule. Seems very logical to an outsider, it's going to seem like, "Well that just makes sense," but is it a barrier for people? People on SSI, how much do they make? 750 this year, they got a big raise, what was it, $4? That is SSI is disability-related, so when the federal government, it's set below poverty, we're going to talk more about this in the advocacy section, but set below poverty and so people on SSI who are people with disabilities without a work history, without a sufficient work history to be on something else, those people are artificially kept below poverty, okay, so that law has a disparate impact or a discriminatory effect on people who are on SSI, which is who? A protected class. People with disabilities are a protected class. That's an example of how you can use disparate impact. So let me try to tell you what Karen was going to talk to you about. Karen is so much better than I'll ever be at this kind of stuff but she wanted to talk about what does all this stuff mean, and why are we talking about it? So I made some notes about what I wanted to say for her section. So really what we're talking about is let's talk about Olmstead for a second. One of the things that is cool about Olmstead is that, one of the many things that is good about Olmstead, there has been such a ripple effect as states seek to comply with Olmstead and not be out of compliance. That is an opportunity for us to strike. Opportunity for us to take advantage of that need to be in compliance with Olmstead. States have to have a state plan around Olmstead, so if you have not looked at your state plan, or if you don't know who is in charge of it, that could be one of the things that you could do under the advocacy category. States have the requirement to prove that they are not deliberately segregating people with disabilities and if they're offering the kinds of supports and services that will result in people being able to live life in the community. The state has to have a plan and then there are rollout kind of implications for nonprofits that are looking to develop housing. There are implications for local activity, to help influence the local housing market. The other people who have to comply with Olmstead, in addition to having a state plan in each and every state are entities that receive federal funding for housing. So they have to also show how they're complying with Fair Housing and with Olmstead. Public housing authorities in particular or any of the HUD programs have received guidance on Olmstead about what they need to do to be in compliance. So public housing authorities are under the gun to work with partners in the community to do more affordable accessible integrated housing. So public housing authorities have a problem, actually, in that they're required to do this and sometimes they don't have the customer base. They don't know where people with disabilities are because they haven't really been doing the kinds of outreach that they have to do. Yes, ma'am? Tim is coming with the mic phone. AUDIENCE MEMBER: On the previous slide, on the last bullet point there, you were talking about the public housing authorities are permitted to authorize a preference. What preferences are required under their accepting Section 8-11 funds or participating in that program? ANNE DENTON: The preference, they're allowed to set preferences, they're not required. Does Karen's slide say something different? AUDIENCE MEMBER: No, I'm just reading that they are authorized, they're permitted to authorize a preference consistent with the provisions of a Section 811 grant and I am just wondering what provisions. ANNE DENTON: 811 is a specific program that only some states have, so you're lucky to have it. And it is designed to create, it's a funding stream for integrated housing for people with disabilities. So what that means is that the PHA who is in partnership on the 811 program with a consortium, usually, is permitted then to designate a preference related to that program. Now the thing about preferences is that preferences cannot be disability-specific. Somebody said something about we have better data or understand this better with IDD population or all the housing is for people with developmental disabilities. Really not cool. You talk to the fair housing people at HUD and having disability-specific housing is in a gray area but it's a grey area that is increasingly becoming frowned upon, so when you're talking about a preference there, you're talking about a preference for people with disabilities because that is who this housing stream is for but you can't be specific. can't be specific. You can't say specific. AUDIENCE MEMBER: So my name is Kelsey, and my organization LINK, Incorporated is a CIL in St. Clair County area. We actually reached out to a local housing authority and we kind of explained Olmstead to them and how we could collaborate with them and they actually have an agreement with us to allow twelve of our individuals that we are getting back in the community to get a voucher and be on top of the list so instead of waiting on a housing list, if you're just doing it for a community, is four to five years. This dwindles it down to within months so makes it more reasonable. ANNE DENTON: Yes and setting preferences or we're going to talk more about this on day 3, but setting preferences or allowing people to jump the line, which is what happened, partly what happened here, is one of the ways to work around things like a 3 or 4 or two decades long waiting list. I'm getting the stink eye from Time. I think you all know this, Olmstead is about people who are not in the community and need to be in the community and we need to make a pass for that to happen. One of the things that I think communities are not doing, as well as they could be, and this is an opportunity for collaboration, an opportunity for advocacy, and an opportunity to obtain resources, is they're not doing their strategic planning so you will discover, as we go through this, Darrell is going to talk about this in more detail after lunch. There are planning processes that are required for the housing side of the street. That includes market studies, includes all kinds of things that we can use, really, kind of against them. They publish a market study that shows that there's a disparity between the number of households that report people with disabilities or the number of people on SSI, and the number of housing units that are deeply affordable for that group, so there are planning processes that are in place, that you can tap into, also that your state Olmstead plan, but what's not happening is that those planning processes are not really inclusive, so they follow a rote thing that HUD requires so unless you do proactive sustained advocacy around that, they'll just write what they've always written because they're under the gun to submit it by a certain time and gotta meet certain criteria and nobody cares about it, that's the attitude and yet it's an opportunity for us to influence the strategic plan that will have, could have a comprehensive effect across community, how housing is developed, it could affect how housing is accessed by people with disabilities, it could affect how housing is sustained by people with disabilities, it could affect all kinds of things that are barriers now. Those barriers can be identified in these plans and once you call it out like that and put it in writing, you've created a problem for the people who are running these programs. They have to find a way to be able to address that in the next update to HUD. Affirmative marketing, one of the things I have said already, is that I have heard tax credit developers have said to me, "We don't mind building accessible units," they admit that it really does not cost any more to do that. But they don't want to because they can't get people to live in them and we already know, without a subsidy or without a development process that makes some of those units deeply affordable, part of that is affordability but the other part is they're not marketing. When was the last time somebody came to your CIL and said, "We've got housing that's accessible and affordable. Do you have any people?" Anybody ever said that? But not common, right, and so they're not marketing to us. They don't understand and so marketing, so making availability of these affordable, accessible units, getting something like that into the MLS, the multiple listing service, is an important component of making real housing, making it feasible for us to access that housing. Okay. All right. One of the things I wanted to close with is or I just want to talk to you guys about for a minute is what this action plan is about and what all this me and Darrell standing up here talking is about with regard to your action plan so the way that the whole thing is structured is we're trying to stimulate your thinking around collaboration, who do you need to be in partnership with, to make this thing work? How can you influence the development stream, so people are making a ton of money developing affordable housing. If you don't already know that, I'm here to tell you. I have a good friend who helped me write the IL-Net book, Choose Get Keep Regular Integrated Housing , Sarah Ondrey helped me write that book, she's gone to the dark side, a tax credit developer, except she's a tax credit developer who has not forgotten where she came from so she's one of the good ones, but influencing your development stream is something you cannot do by yourself. Influencing the rules about how people get into housing, what the standard lease requirements are, what the requirements are to rent, influencing those things is not something you can do alone and you're not the only ones that are being blocked by those crazy rules. So you've got natural allies out there, so the first piece that we're challenging you to think about is collaboration in partnerships. Think outside your typical friends. Look for who else is getting, who else is being treated unfairly? That is a good save, do you see that [giggling] so those are your natural allies so think about who you need on your team. Sharon was talking to me about and said that she's working with a group of investors, people who are buying up properties, right. Well that's not the kind, when I'm sitting on the state Olmstead committee a million years ago, that is not the group of people we invited to Olmstead committee but we should have. So thinking outside that, so collaboration, talk about who can help with this. Advocacy. I've already talked a bunch about advocacy in the context of these laws. Advocacy, where are your opportunities for advocacy? Where can you push? These laws will help you push. There's also a lot of other ways you can push, but where can you, where can you worm your way in? Where is there a chink in their armor, how can we make it different? So there's a content in this training on collaborations. There's content in this training on advocacy opportunities and how to take advantage of those, and then the third thing is how do you get more resources, right, and how do you get more resources is another opportunity for sustained action, so how can you push harder to get more resources to make housing more affordable, accessible, integrated for the people that we're serving? So this whole thing is structured around these three core ideas. Your action plans are like Tim said, we took the liberty of putting those three goals in there, although it's your action plan, if you have something completely different, work on that. But we're providing you content that's structured to help you think again about those three content areas. Resources. Advocacy. And partnerships. Yes, let's wait for the mic. AUDIENCE MEMBER: What is your thought or recommendation if you were to choose as an ally a Disability Rights of California, their legal team, there's probably legal teams everywhere, to use them in litigation for some of these things that are happening with the laws already in place? One of the important things that I see when I'm thinking of them is this oversight. One that I was involved with a housing element with for some account accounting and it was interesting in some of their description having to do with funding for persons with disabilities, they use the word, "Special needs" and it really drew me into that, I said, "Well what are you guys doing?" And the other thing is mental health, because what's out there in the news is this idea that we need to throw money at mental health, in everything, so people feel kind of warm and fuzzy that we're doing something as a community, and so that would be one of the folks that I would like to team up with is someone with some legal litigation that literally can do class action. I know a lady in California that is an attorney and they actually did a lawsuit with Los Angeles County Housing Authorities and it was incredible what they did, because it was looking at their structure, the housing authority structure and how the selection was done, where was that lottery system? How did it translate to people being on list? And disparity, you talk about this idea of being unfair to a particular class. So that's, I'd like to get your thoughts. ANNE DENTON: I think having Disability Rights at the table, first of all they can teach you more about reasonable accommodation and eviction prevention than we have time for, but I'm not a lawyer, but having your staff armed with that information, they'll know discrimination when they see it and be able to fight it. AUDIENCE MEMBER: Is there any contact with ILCs? AUDIENCE MEMBER: No, acronym? ANNE DENTON: Independent living center. Sorry. CIL, I don't believe so, but I'm not the CIL expert. Darrell is saying no. Disability Rights? Who else? In that example, you want Disability Rights, you also want maybe your local people who are concerned with things like code enforcement, or there was a case, and I'll look it up at lunch time but there was a case in California that Michael Allen's organization helped an independent living center make the case that the housing funding policies in Los Angeles made it impossible for the centers for independent living to fulfill their mission of providing community integration opportunities for the people they were serving. And they won. And so I'm wondering why all of the, that's against Los Angeles city, Los Angeles county, I'm wondering why all of the CILs in California are not, you know, going, "Yesssssss!" AUDIENCE MEMBER: It's a collaboration with attorneys and that's why I asked twice if there was any conflict because we have to work with legislators and we really have to train or educate them and sometimes we shy away kinda, organizations do, from having attorneys come in, but I think with housing, it's gotten to a critical point that you almost need that oversight. ANNE DENTON: Right, there's a nuance here that I'm not seeing but I'm like, "Why not?" Turn on Darrells microphone. DARRELL CHRISTENSON: I think part of this is, too, many times we hear somebody pointing the finger at somebody else as far as who is responsible, as far as enforcement piece. Is it the architects' responsibility, the builder's responsibility, is it the designer's responsibility, is it the funder? Everybody is pointing fingers at each other and everybody is responsible. So as someone who may have purchased a property, they're saying look, I trust my architect. I hire my architect to get me in compliance with all the rules and regulations and the architect is saying, "Well it's these others," but I think to the point as a CIL, center for independent living, we need to work with everybody, because in order to make a project or, project successful, it takes everybody. So you can't just put it into silos saying that one or the other holds the main piece of responsibility, and so my part of the equation, too, is will education. Education is so important because, you know, everybody can point to different examples where some are just flaming ignorant. They're just ignorant about the issues and they don't want people with disabilities because they don't want to have to deal with, "Those people. " But when you look at the education piece and say, "Here's what you can do," and here's the cost benefit, to doing so, that education. Okay, that education piece says, "Well that makes sense," and so to leave any piece of the equation, architects, builders, designer, funder, out of the equation as a center, we're really missing putting all the pieces to the puzzle together for success. AUDIENCE MEMBER: Hi I'm Lisa Bonney What is the role of the P & A in the state, protection and advocacy? ANNE DENTON: That is Disability Rights in California. I mean I don't know what their legislation says, but they sure seem like a natural ally, and I think the stuff that you talked about, which is bringing them in, they can help you look at a particular situation and say, "Is this actionable or not? Is this a pervasive problem? Could we do a class action suit?" I also think they might be resources around understanding the nuances of the law. DARRELL CHRISTENSON: I think it really depends on how high you or the individual wants to take it, because there's different types of advocacy, and so you can go different ways but if you want to take it from a legal standpoint and file a suit, then that, you know again, if that consumer who has been discriminated against wants to go that route, then as a center staff, then we should be supporting them and if we need to pull in other resources in the community to be another ally or another legal mind to the equation, to help that consumer, that's doing due diligence and getting community resources together to make that happen for the consumer. ANNE DENTON: The only thing I would add to that is at the local, state P & A or disability rights groups are state level. There are local resource, like local legal aid and then many HUD has funded fair housing organizations in most communities, there's usually some sort of fair housing commission at the state level. You should have an Olmstead committee, but I agree with Darrell, there are many steps that you could choose to take prior to taking legal action. I like the strategy of being concerned. I would really be concerned because it could look like a violation of the ADA or could look like a violation of fair housing. You know I'm not really concerned. I'm mad at him but using that as the approach, you may have a problem, is there some way I can help you with that? As a gentler, preliminary approach, and then you can always do what I call saber-rattling. Other questions or thoughts? When Darrell is talking this afternoon about planning, the way, different ways that is we can address this at the planning level, you know, we know that there are not enough accessible units, right. We know that there are not enough affordable units, right. And so the ways that you can address that is you can make what you have more easily accessed by people at the lowest income levels or people who need accessible units, you can smooth the transition between available accessible units and the people who need them, and the way, one of the main ways to do that is by getting somebody a voucher so they can afford these tax credit units. So there's a whole cluster of strategies that are advocacy, partnership and resource acquisition that are about affecting the housing -- access to the housing you have now. You've got a ton of housing, there's been billions of dollars poured into communities over decades that developed housing that quotes unquote affordable which is quote unquote not affordable, but it's there, and so attacking that is like one whole piece of what you could do. DARRELL CHRISTENSON: And another thing with the strategic planning with your different cities, you know I have been at a number of meetings where everybody is there giving the input to the city and they didn't want this, this, and this, and our piece is we want more accessibility. "Oh, gee, I'm the only person in the room that brought that topic up?" Really? So what we can suggest, in one city actually succeeded in getting was more incentives to add more accessibility because any time people put in for an application for funding for a new project, they have to go through the building, codes, and the other processes, right. Well if you can actually add in bonus points for accessibility, it's not mandated but there's more incentives, it might be your plans are going to be reviewed quicker, the process will be quicker, it may mean putting your application above others, if you have those incentive points of additional accessibility pieces. AUDIENCE MEMBER: I apologize, I interrupted, but one of the things you might want to consider in Missouri, low income housing task program is huge, billions of dollars, and it took us several years but they now have in their requirements that all new construction must be universally designed so it takes off that mess of HUD, 5 percent, 25 percent special needs. It's just folks build it for everybody. DARRELL CHRISTENSON: And that's a great point because I mention this again later, but the paradigm out there that everybody has seen is we have to go up to five percent accessible, the 5 percent, 2, and 2, how with we going to do 5 percent and go all the way up to that level and the paradigm shift in the education is let's start off thinking that we are 100 percent accessible. That is our standard. Now if we happen to have a design of two-story building and the second level is not available by elevator, now you've cut it down to 50 percent. Okay, but the paradigm shift has to happen and I'm going to talk later about marketing and working with folks to impress upon them why it makes more sense for them, whoever the thems are, but that is a real paradigm shift and everybody in this room is responsible for educating people in your community. AUDIENCE MEMBER: Donna Winchester, from Eureka. I've heard the argument made that as an incentive for builders that building for aging is really appropriate because then you will get people moving in who are more likely to stay longer, if it's inclusive, but in the inclusive argument, something I haven't heard said is for those of us who do not have mobility issues as our disability, I'm denied the companionship of my friends who do use mobility devices, who can't get into my home, and that wasn't even something that I saw or noticed until I became part of the independent living movement and I started making friends and associates with people who had mobility issues and I can't have them over to my home, and so I just want to throw that out there as another argument that I haven't heard made. DARRELL CHRISTENSON: No, exactly and we'll talk more about the demographics and building to go accommodate your community, but you know it's really interesting how we're doing everything we can to build for our veterans. It's the American way to do it, build for the vets and help them out with housing. We do that with seniors, because they're 85 and want to stay in their community and by golly we'll build for them but to build for 25-year-old with a spinal cord injury from a gun shot wound is too tough. It's not politically sexy enough so it's interesting how you build or want to build or not to the different populations. AUDIENCE MEMBER: We were able to get the builders in Fresno County to have this idea of universal design and there were like six features that would help everyone, thresholds. DARRELL CHRISTENSON: A good segue into my afternoon. AUDIENCE MEMBER: That was important to us as advocates. The other thing we started using were words like visibility which answer this is young lady's issue about people visiting them. We also talked also about aging in place which is another word that talked about these folks who are buying these homes but that also takes into account maybe accidents that might occur, that now you're living with a roll-in shower, maybe that's for 40 years from now but let's say you got in an accident all of a sudden, you need it when you're 25, 30, just depends when you bought the house. So that's the way, how we kind of collaborated with the city and got more bang for the buck, so to speak, in the sense of what we were able to negotiate with that isn't exactly everything we wanted, but it is at least something to start with, and that was building affordable, no building affordable housing using federal dollars, so that was how those things went into place for those housing projects. DARRELL CHRISTENSON: I was going to respond with something but it's just building to meet your community needs but there was a point to make but I lost it. ANNE DENTON: When Darrell talks about that this afternoon, there are things in the consolidated plan, in the public housing authority plan, or things in community planning about how to spend bond dollars, in the qualified allocation program in the state budget that govern tax credit programs that you can get changed. This is not impossible. So one last thing, we talked about how to get a better access to the affordable housing authority in your community, making it more affordable/accessible and making them comply with the laws that are already on the books, making it easy for them to do the right thing. You have an inventory in your community, let's shake the tree and use it. The other stuff is really what some of you have been talking about which is impacting the development stream and Darrell has done that very well, one of the many things they have done very well but looking at how developers get their money, what are the requirements for those developers, how do you create deeply affordable units within the pipeline already? So you've got two big areas that are slightly different strategies, better use of the affordable housing you have, better access to it, streamlined access to it, a way to get it, make them conform, and then influence what's coming out now so if you have a bond program in your community, influence those rules, right. Other questions?