TIM FUCHS: As promised, we're going to spend most of the rest of the day talking about dollars, which I know we all love, right, where the rubber meets the road so we have talked a lot about laying the foundation. 

We have talked a lot about relationships, but how are you going to get this work funded?

What resources are out there?

A reminder coming up this afternoon we're actually going to hear two really innovative examples from two different centers and so Nancy and Brent are going to talk about their experience actually developing housing and then Gina Alvarez, who arrived last night, is going to join us to talk about some of the work that CECIL, the Central Coast Center for Independent Living has done in the Salinas Valley.

So anyway, I'm really excited, Nancy and Brentt have been with us all week but from the early days planning this training I knew we wanted to have some spotlight presentations on some centers that are doing really cool innovative stuff so I'm looking forward to that but first funding and turn it over to you, Ann.

ANN DENTON: Good morning.

So always when I start this section, I want to remind you of the movie, remember, I can't remember the name of the movie but, "Show me the money."

It's an old movie so this section I should really call, "Show me the money."

Where we are, just to sort of reorient myself, you guys are working on action plans.

Our goal is you are going to go home dangerous and you will have a plan and know what you want to do and who to contact and all of that stuff and so we've talked about partnerships and collaboration, you guys worked on that.

We have talked about advocacy strategies.

We're going to talk about advocacy strategies again tomorrow, we're going to dive further into the poverty argument.

Today is about obtaining resources, and part of what we've done throughout this is we've articulated, there's also been I think an unspoken division, at least there is for me, but there are two levels of things that you guys can do as a CIL, a lot of what we talked about yesterday was system-level stuff.

There are planning processes that you can impact, that will result in increased resources for the people that you serve.

That's systems stuff, and then there as also the stuff that you can do to help individual people, so that's about things like, and you asked for reasonable accommodation.

Let's talk more about reasonable accommodation.

That's a person by person kind of endeavor, so CILs are doing two separate levels of activity around housing.

A lot of the advocacy is going to be system level, most of it is going to be system-level.

Housing resources is both system-level and individual person level.

So today I'm going to show you what you or your staff should be doing in terms of being knowledgeable about affordable housing resources that you already have in your community.

So know system-level advocacy required although there is going to be a need for persistent action on the part of staff to get people into the housing resources that you have.

So we're going to look at the housing resources and I think for the EDs that are here and other managers who are here, your job is really to make sure that your staff have the basic information and you support them in doing the work they need to do, because it's not just about being able to link on an apartment complex and find the phone number of the manager.

It's also about, you know, schmoozing those managers, and you've got a property management company that owns twelve properties in your community and they're hostile, that takes patient, persistent, you know, friendly over and over and over again contact because you absolutely need them.

And even though you think they're being jerks, right, there's, if you want them on your side, or if you want them to even consider you, there's really a long patient process of approach that you need to do or your staff needs to do.

I'm not suggesting that you bark up an unresponsive tree forever, but I'm saying, in order to move the needle on this, in your local community for individual people, you have to push, you have to be pushy.

Okay so when we talk about the resources this morning, a lot of it is knowing what your resources are, knowing what they mean in terms of affordability and accessibility for the people you're serving and knowing how to push hard.

It's person-level advocacy.

Also, though, weaved all through this is going to be comments or understanding around, "How do we do better advocacy at the system level?"

So when you look at what the consolidated plan has funded in your community you can say I don't want any more of that any more or I want more of this.

It informs you about really what you want to ask more for.

Are you all still with me?

I want to do a quick check and see what does it mean to say subsidized housing, what is that?

[Shout outs will federal subsidy] Repeat maybe?

I'm asking you guys to tell me what does it mean to say subsidized housing, what does that mean?

Government assistance, yes, and in the context the way we are going to use it this morning it is government assistance that has been attached to a unit, so subsidized housing is housing that has some kind of assistance built into the way that it was developed so that might be project-based rental assistance, so the unit works just like a person had a rental assistance voucher, but it's attached to the unit so it stays, it makes that property permanently affordable.

The other kinds of assistance are upfront financial assistance in development which makes units slightly more affordable below market rate.

That's how tax credits work.

So subsidized means the assistance is built in.

Unsubsidized housing is market rate housing, probably, may have received some federal assistance, which is something that I personally would love to fix before I end my career, but I think if you take federal money you have a responsibility to serve the people that are most in need but that's not the fight we're going to do today.

So unsubsidized housing is market rate housing and we're going to look later and answer the question that was asked of fair market rents and what it usually means for us is no assistance attached to the housing so it is unaffordable for someone on SSI and in many communities it's unaffordable for somebody who is on a full time minimum wage job.

It's just not affordable so the way to access that is rental assistance, vouchers.

So the way we get our people to have access to those units is make sure they have a voucher in their hand and then take that to the landlords so that the unit becomes affordable.

For subsidized housing, and we'll talk a little bit about this, but you may have subsidized housing that is subsidized so that the tenants only pay 30 percent of their income, or you may have subsidies like in a tax credit program where the housing unit is below market rent but if someone on SSI is going to live there, they're still going to be paying more than 30 percent because the unit rents are set higher so it's below market rate, so it's a better deal than it could have been, but it's not perfect.

So subsidized housing is along a continuum of affordability.

Unsubsidized housing is unaffordable without financial assistance.

The way our voucher financial assistance is constructed makes it always the person pays 30 percent of their income.

So unsubsidized sounds like a poorer deal but the truth is if you can get a voucher you can take it anywhere where the landlord will accept the voucher.

Still with me?

So one final thing, one final sort of sound bite is tax credits are subsidized below market rate, but they're not deeply affordable.

So tax credits are a little too high for people on SSI.

But tax credits are required by federal rule to accept vouchers.

So if you've got a voucher holder and sometimes communities have landlords who have decided they're just not going to take section 8, because section 8 frankly is burdensome to administer.

And you have a lot of requirements.

Karen was talking about that yesterday.

You have to do housing quality standards, you have to meet certain standards so some landlords are just not interested and so they can say no so sometimes in some communities a voucher holder can't find housing.

When you layer accessibility needs on top of that, you have difficulty in finding properties, so I'm just saying look at the tax credit list.

Yes, ma'am.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: So once a person gets a voucher and in our community they have 90 days to find a place to live so they've secured their housing.

Is there a shelf life for how long that voucher will last for them or does it just go on and on.

ANN DENTON: They have to reincome certify annual.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: What about section 8.

Once you get into section 8 is it the same thing you have to recertify on a periodic basis?

ANN DENTON: Section 8 is a form of voucher and you have to recertify, income certify every year.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Just looking for your opinion on staff helping people make sure that they're recertifying, and sometimes it can be enabling and sometimes it can be the difference between them sustaining their housing or not.

ANN DENTON: See I understand the dangers of enabling, but I'm all about housing and if you've twisted yourself into a pretzel getting the housing that you need, to make it available to people, I'm all about supporting tenancy, so if that's got some sort of an enabling effect and it's clinical issue further down the line, my attitude is "so be it."

Let's preserve the housing and then work on that later.

We want people to be, I want people to be very successful self advocates.

That's what we want.

But if we've gone to a lot of trouble to get all this housing and done all this advocacy and we've got the landlord relationship on the line and blah, blah, blah, help them recertify.

But that's up to you.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I couldn't really, I didn't hear you a moment ago when you said something about the portability of the vouchers?

ANN DENTON: So I didn't say anything about it but vouchers, section 8 housing choice vouchers are portable, so sometimes, I think there is always a rule you have to live in the jurisdiction for a year, right, but once you've lived in the awarding jurisdiction for a year, you can port them.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Out of state?

ANN DENTON: Yes.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I just want to make sure I heard you correctly.

ANN DENTON: I'm not implying that there won't be a bureaucrat process that's annoying but they will do that.

I know when my housing authority has a lot of our 900 vouchers or whatever we have, we're a small housing authority, I would bet maybe ten percent of them are ported in.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: So one of the things we have had our public housing authority do, it took a little bit of advocacy but was have them send us the notification / recertification as well.

ANN DENTON: Yeah, you can do that, I mean there are all kinds of rules about you have to have consent from the individual and then you have to beg, basically, to get them to do that because it's an extra step.

But yeah, that's great, good idea.

All right other things before we sort of dive into it?

For those of you who already know every single housing resource that you have, feel free to look up something else.

Yes, ma'am?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: So my question is how do we know if a building has been tax credited at that point?

ANN DENTON: I'm going to show you.

That's a great segue, okay let's do it.

So yeah I'm going to show you how to get all that kind of information.

I have said a bunch of this stuff already but the basic point is you have an inventory of units that's already been assisted in some way in your community.

That could be HUD, tax credits, USDA, it could be something developed locally, you know, there's an inventory of units that you have that are theoretically affordable.

So the way that you get that is you push, push, push, push.

Right, and that is at the housing specialist level, the independent living specialist level, that is the person who is trying to help the person find housing and you can either put all this information for your community together in a user-friendly format that people can use for themselves or you can actively assist people who are bewildered by all of this and for people I think making transitions out of institutions, I think there's sticker shock for one thing.

If people come out and they had housing five years ago and now they want to have housing again, the rents would be scary just to look at how much it costs.

So you can pull together your own information and also many communities have local apartment search engines.

Anybody know if you have that in your community?

So Houston has it.

So several, right.

So you can use those and sometimes those are structured in such a way that they'll show whether or not they're affordable.

So affordable to 30 percent or less of median family income.

And then there's always my favorite, affordablehousingonline.com, we like that.

One of the things affordable housing online dot com tracks is whether the housing authority waiting list is open or closed.

For both section 8 housing choice vouchers and the public housing units so if you don't know if it's open or closed, one of the places you can look is here.

This is management for doing routine training for new staff so they know how to did that or pair them up with somebody who knows it really well.

If you have lots of communities have not so much system-level meetings but they'll have service coordination meetings, so case managers, independent living specialists, counselors, whatever will meet and discuss how they manage referrals across agency boundaries and how different systems work and if you have an organization, a group like that, meeting with them regularly or letting your staff do that is worth the effort.

And then I would say at the management and leadership level, you can't take your eye off the ball.

Or the hockey puck, I think, would be a better analogy.

You really need to be and there are going to be some things that only the executive director can do.

That is probably will be more around advocacy but if there's some kind of a problem that you want, that somebody's got tax credit property is refusing to take vouchers, that would be an example of a problem.

The fix for that is, well the fix for that is to report them to the state and the feds.

Doing an organized outreach to property manager, owners and landlords is something that is well worth every minute that you do, and the Learning Collaborative that Tim has talked about and we have a couple of people here who are also in the Learning Collaborative, we have really looked at landlord outreach.

We took our whole first section and talked about landlord outreach, and the care and feeding of landlords and how you engage them, how you coax them on to your team and how you reward them for being on your team.

We've really, really need the landlords and it's important for us to understand where the landlords are coming from.

They're not, there's not, there's very rarely evil intent.

But they have a property, it's a business, they need to make that property cash flow.

I don't begrudge them that.

They want to make a profit.

I don't begrudge them that.

That's what this is about but we can bring them qualified stable tenants who will pay the rent, so it's to their advantage, they just might not know that.

So here's how the resources are.

One of the reasons this is crazy complicated is that the money comes from HUD.

It comes in all different kinds of ways, like looking at one of those mazes, but as a kid I used to do mazes whether it had a start and end and find the only path through.

It looks like that.

Some money comes directly to programs in the community.

Some money goes directly to the city or the county.

We looked at some of that yesterday.

Some money goes to the state.

Some money goes to umbrella organizations like Continuum of Care organizations that run homelessness assistance.

That's a pretty rare thing but HUD has always wanted to not have to award funding to each individual provider in the homelessness assistance.

They want to fund it to the umbrella organization and let the umbrella organization apportion it out.

That has always been their goal.

Okay, so we're going to look, in this session we're going to look at three resources.

These are not the only three.

These are the three biggest funding sources but you're going to have state housing trust funds, some of you.

You're going to have local bond initiatives, some of you.

Some communities are experimenting with social impact bonds where investors put money upfront and they get paid when performance objectives are achieved.

So there are lots of different ways to achieve these goals.

These are just the three big funding sources we're going to talk about.

Okay so under HUD, let me back up, we have public housing authorities, consolidated plan resources which we talked about on an advocacy level yesterday.

Today we're going to look at kind of how the money flows.

Multi family housing developments funded by HUD and then 811 and VASH, some of the boutique programs that HUD funds.

So we're going to look at all those this morning and then look at USDA housing, some of you are already using USDA housing and look at how you find that and then look at tax credit properties.

So it's a database, incomplete and probably not up to date.

But there is a database that Tim is going to pull up later, but it will show all of the tax credit properties in your state.

So public housing authorities, operate public housing units.

I said this yesterday so I will be quick.

They do vouchers and or they do public housing.

In order to be a public housing authority, they have to do one of those two things, at least one.

Then they can also do these discretionary programs and we talked yesterday about advocacy with your public housing authorities to try to get them to do like the mainstream program when it comes out.

Okay, so here's how you find your public housing authority.

We're not going there, looking at Tim, and for the plan you're going to have to go to your public housing authority itself and get a copy of their plan.

What their plan will tell you, it will tell you what they have.

So it will tell you how many vouchers they have.

What kind of vouchers they have.

It will tell you how many public housing units they have, if they have any.

It will tell you about any discretionary programs that they run and it will tell you about any housing development that they're involved in their community, because they can do housing development.

So when you look at the plan, one of the things that you want to look for is those specialty programs.

The specialty programs tell you two things.

One, it will tell you that they're amenable to doing things outside the box for housing authority and they're interested in more money and so they might be friendly to an approach.

The other thing that it tells you that they're in reasonably good standing with HUD because housing authorities that are troubled, which is the HUD language for in trouble.

"Troubled" cannot apply for some of these discretionary funds so if the housing authority that you're looking up has them, that probably means they're in good standing which is good.

It's also not fatal if you have a troubled housing authority.

Actually if you have a troubled housing authority you might be able to help them and say, "Gosh, you know, I saw on your website that things are not good."

There was a public housing authority I worked with in rural Washington state -- "no I worked with that community."

The public housing authority was troubled and everybody was like, "Oh yeah, they're in so much trouble," but I am like, yeah we can help them.

This is going to be good because we want them to do these five things for us and those five things, we want them to do, will help make them look better to HUD.

It will help get them out of trouble, and that's how it worked out.

So consolidated plan.

This is where I should have started yesterday.

Okay the consolidated plan governs four types of dollars, and you get your own consolidated plan if you're over 50,000 in population.

You have to develop a plan.

Now the trick is, if you're between 50 and 75 thousand in population, the only money you get is community development block grant.

But you still have to write the plan.

So there's a plan on record for every community over 50,000.

The communities over 75,000 get home dollars so you're going to have a plan and also community development block grant and home funds.

Then the larger communities are also getting emergency solutions grant which is linked to a witch's brew formula of poverty and prevalence of homelessness.

That HUD awards that on a formula and then housing opportunity for people with aids which is based on prevalence of aids.

So at or above 75,000 in population your city gets it directly.

If you're also in an urban county of over 250,000 in population, your county gets it.

I live in Austin Texas, we get CDBG, all four of those funding sources in the city and we get all four of those funding sources in the county because the population of the city is a million, population of the county is over a million.

So we get all of those funding sources so when you're looking up your con plan in an urban county that's large you're going to have two plans to look up.

You're going to have two opportunities for advocacy so if you're pestering the city about wanting them to do this stuff with the con plan and they won't do it, go ask the county.

So CDBG, we said this yesterday, but I am going to say it again.

They do a lot of infrastructure development, public facilities development, streets and sewers.

20 percent of their dollars can be spent on housing.

That's your advocacy point.

If you want housing, if you want home mods, you guys are already using this money effectively to do home modifications.

Home funds, also a wide range of activities.

They do home owner, owner occupied housing assistance.

So grandma who owns her own house but can't afford to keep it up.

That is how you pay for that.

Also, home modifications are a frequent use of owner-occupied rehab, for people who own their own property.

Rental project assistance, as I said yesterday, rental project assistance, under the home program is frequently used as local match for tax credits.

And so if you can't move the needle on the state tax credit program, you can go and advocate with your local administrators and your local con plan writers to put 
what you want those tax credit developers do, put it into the requirements for them to get the matching funds to fall back.

Question.

I can't triangulate sound so I am looking.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: At one time, I have been out of this for a while, this housing stuff and a lot of it has changed, but do they still have to do the public hearings on CDBG?

So important for people to go to that and to advocate at those hearings, those public hearings.

I didn't know if they were still having those, how those funds  will be used.

ANN DENTON: Absolutely.

They have a community input requirement and the most common way they handle that is doing public hearings.

We had the Reno consolidated plan up yesterday and they had a whole section, which I didn't show you, but it was a very excellent way of obtaining input.

So they had public hearings, public hearings in accessible places.

They solicited the input of key informants.

They went to low income housing groups.

They talked to providers in the region.

So they proactively did that.

But if all you've got is a public hearing, show up in force.

Sorry so the third category of things you can do under home is down payment assistance, first time home buyers, so helping people access home ownership and the fourth thing that you can do under home is tenant based rental assistance.

So tenant-based rental assistance is what?

Voucher.

And so I said to start if you've got, if you don't have a lot of subsidized housing or if access to subsidized housing is blocked, you want people to have vouchers.

And if your housing authority has a waiting list that is into infinity or a waiting list that is closed, an advocacy point would be to go to the people who are running the home program and say, "We want an allocation of your home dollars for tenant-based rental assistance," it works just like a voucher.

It is a voucher.

The problem with it, it's only for two years.

So communities that are using  tenant-based rental assistance under the HOME program are using it as a bridge subsidy.

So what that means is you have to have, for the person, remember this is a person sitting in front of you.

If you're going to put them on a 24-month voucher, you want to be very sure that they can either transition to employment that will allow them to afford that unit without assistance, or that you can transition them to more permanent assistance.

So we don't want to do any dirty tricks to the people we're trying to serve but it's still a resource and they won't tell you this but the truth is in the federal regs, those vouchers can be extended to 30 months without any approval and they can get approval to extend them beyond that.

ESG, I won't belabor it, this is kind of money that's spent on shelters, commonly.

And it may be short term rental assistance.

They may spend it on a rapid rehousing program.

And then HOPWA.

So let's go to this website.

I think we put this up yesterday but I want to show it to you again.

I want you to know how much money your community receives.

If you don't already know that, this is, "Show me the money," right.

I want you to know where it is and then this link that Tim is going to is 2018 money, but all you have to do to find the 2019 is change, at the end of that long string of the web link, the link 18 to 19 and it will show you 19.

Who doesn't know how much money they are getting for their con plan and would like to know.

Tell me city and state.

Reno, Nevada again.

Sitting at the wrong table.

Okay Nevada.

You are getting in Reno, 2.1 million in CDBG, 1.4 million in home, 173,000 in emergency solutions grant, that’s annually.

Now the funding goes up and down and you know when you go and say, "We want to know about this con plan of which you speak and we know you got two million dollars in X funding last year," and they say, "Well that money is going down, going down, that's oversubscribed 
money," blah, blah nonsense!

It goes up and down, it goes up and down.

But don't let them deter you from seeking that.

Who else wants to know?

Okay I got a million hands, let's do three.

One, two, three, all right.

City and state.

Bloomington, Indiana.

So we will do Indiana.

All right, Indiana, Bloomington.

Okay so will you have 836,000 so.

837,000 CDBG, 584,000 in HUD.

You do not receive ESG or HOPWA.

Springfield, Illinois.

What is yours going to be so I can tell Tim?

So Illinois will do it.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: On the very bottom it says nonentitlement.

ANN DENTON: 
Yes that is balance of state.

We've been calling it balance of state, but it means if you're not covered by your own plan, you're in the state plan.

So say again the community, I've lost it already in my mind.

Springfield, Illinois has 1.2 million in CDBG and 615,000 in home.

And what was the other one?

Is that up there?

Did you see it up there?

Kankakee, Illinois?

I see it, you only have community development block grant.

So that means your population is between 50 and 75 thousand, right.

But you still have it, you know what I am saying, and you get it every year.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: We do see some of the CDBG funding.

I just wasn't sure about the other funding that is listed here.

ANN DENTON: Yeah, but totally based on population.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: What is the last column?

ANN DENTON: That is housing trust fund -- national housing trust fund.

I don't know that anybody is getting that yet.

There was a proposal for the national housing trust fund.

Anybody getting that?

Georgia is getting that, okay.

North Carolina gets it.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: It says North Carolina nonentitlement.

ANN DENTON: Yeah, nonentitlement.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Those funds in there for that?

ANN DENTON: For that.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: But nowhere else.

ANN DENTON: Yeah I haven't really followed the implementation of the national housing trust fund.

I'm happy to go educate myself about it.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: So in terms of how they determine how much money a community gets, if you're in an entitlement jurisdiction, you are entitled to a certain amount of money based upon the population.

If you are in the balance of state, and it's called nonentitlement, how do they decide how much money you get because there is a certain population outside of the urban areas that is rental.

ANN DENTON: Who gets what within that allocation is up to the state.

So you're in a smaller town, in Georgia, right.

And you're in the balance of state, or nonentitlement, the state housing financing agency is going to offer those dollars out in specific categories, based on what they say they have planned to do in their consolidated plan.

That's why what's in the con plan is important.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: But is the state entitled to a certain amount of money before they divvy it up?

ANN DENTON: Yeah the state is going to get a certain amount of money on a HUD formula which I do not know, I don't think anybody knows the details of it, it's like clouded in secrecy but it's based on population and poverty.

I don't know what else might be in there.

Yes, back in there.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: How we do that in California is based upon application of the homeless census they do every two years so they have the count for the homeless so all those people should be counted because that's how much money will come to your city and state.

ANN DENTON: That's a different plan.

That's a different plan.

This is the consolidated plan.

So the homeless count has nothing to do with this one.

But the homeless count helps inform the formula for the Continuum of Care homeless assistance funding.

You're exactly right so the better you are at counting, the more accurate is the data upon which HUD is determining your allocation.

Okay all right so the link for this is in the slides.

We can go back to the slides.

That's the con plan.

So remember on this slide I said we are going to discuss are housing authorities, we've talked about them.

We've talked about the consolidated plan.

I have shown you how to find out how much money you're getting and what it can pay for.

That's where we are.

Next we're going to go to here's an example for Missouri.

Yeah, now we're going to go to HUD multi family housing inventory.

Okay what this is, this is a list of subsidized housing.

Remember what I said about subsidized housing?

It means that the units are affordable and they may be affordable on the formula where the person pays 30 percent of their income or they may be affordable because they're below market rate, either way.

Most of the units on this list are going to be affordable in the way we want them to be.

Which is the person pays 30 percent of their income.

So there is, I'm going to show you a page from it and then Tim is going to pull it up, but they have a total inventory of housing that has been developed for people who are elderly and disabled, that's their language not mine.

So and those units are, most of the time, deeply affordable, so these are the good ones.

Okay so this is Ohio, just a page from Ohio, and I want to show you how to read this.

So you've got Adams County apartments.

West union, Ohio, anybody, do we have Ohio?

Ohio in the room?

Is it, that is right, is this a big city, West Union, Ohio?

No, so Adams County Apartments, West Union, Ohio, elderly and disabled, okay they have 13 total units.

It's little.

They have 13 assisted units.

That means deeply affordable.

Looking at another one, let me see if I can find a big one, Abundant Life of Perrysburg, Ohio, another small town, right.

So they have 108 total units, 108 units are assisted, so deeply affordable.

And 108 designated for elderly.

Total units with accessible features is the third from the right, it says 12 here.

I mean that is not good but it's information, right, it's information.

So if you want to go to the website, I'll show you a little bit about how many you've got.

Will click on the website in the slides, this is what comes up, this is the page that comes up.

So somebody who hasn't already called out their state.

Who should we look at?

California is going to be huge.

Okay California.

So let's take a quick look to review here.

Let's say second avenue apartments in Los Angeles, 20 units, 20 assisted units, and no special designation.

And it says total units with accessible features it says zero, I think that is against the law.

I should have prefaced all of this by saying we're looking at a data source, take it with a grain of salt.

These things are not routinely updated or they're updated in a haphazard kind of fashion but still armed with information, right.

We know, now we know what we've got.

All right so if you look at this, so can you scroll up just a tiny bit so we can see how many apartments are on this page, eight apartments on this page and there are 167 pages in this inventory.

So 167 times 8 is the number of apartment complexes in California that have been assisted and there can be from 12 units to 500 units per apartment complex.

So if this is not something that your staff is already attuned to, this is a tremendous resource.

Now is it a guarantee?

You're going to call up these apartments and somebody will say, yes, come on over I have vacancies.

That would be nice.

But what I would do, if I was an independent living specialist and I was just starting this, I'd get this list and the way to find your city, this is the Ann Denton cheat way.

Do control F and type the name of the city and then I would write them down and I would go look at them, go drive by them.

And this thing gives you the contact information, street address.

It is labor-intensive research, on the ground research.

Would I let my mother live here, that kind of question?

Yes, ma'am?

I love having the mic go cause I get a chance to drink coffee.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Are the units income restricted?

ANN DENTON: What do you mean by that?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Are the elderly or disabled person that would be applying for it.

ANN DENTON: Has to be low income.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: at what level, what do they consider low income?

Is it poverty.

ANN DENTON: Those units are most likely developed for 80 percent.

But remember it doesn't really matter what they think the rent is because the subsidy that they are getting.

These properties are funded in all different ways but lets say you've got a property that has a project based rental assistance in it, is how it was funded.

I'm the landlord, I'm going to charge up to the very top of the fair market of the rent which is a thousand dollars.

And a person comes and they're a qualified applicant.

In other words they're income-qualified, they're under whatever my limit is so they're income-qualified.

They're going to pay 30 percent of their income no matter what it is.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Right but the income limit could be different depending upon how they financed the construction of these units.

ANN DENTON: That's true but our people are so low income that we're never, well okay I will.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: In the case of the elderly.

ANN DENTON: I bet you a fancy dinner that there is not one property that someone on SSI makes too much money to get into.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: But the category says these units are for elderly and disabled so you might have an elderly person that you're helping look for a unit they are not on SSI, or.

ANN DENTON: Okay in that case – 

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Or even a disabled person who is working but they're still having trouble finding accessible unit.

ANN DENTON: So the answer, thank you for your patience as I figured out your question, yes, they are income restricted, you have to be low income, yes, sir.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I love this idea, maybe is there anything more than the standard of your mom living in this place, is there any way to look for accessibility features?

ANN DENTON: Well like I said there's a column here that says accessibility features but the truth is if I am the independent living specialist working in your center, I'm going to have to do the grunt work, go out, look at some of these see most likely, might be able to look at the addresses and eliminate some just based on the neighborhood.

That I already know that that is substandard housing, let's say.

So but I'm still going to have to do the work to find out, and in the process, you make friends, you find out who is running the property now.

It's probably not the person who is listed there, all right.

And then you get their phone number and you bring them some information and a cup of coffee, and it's labor-intensive.

Yes, ma'am?

You're going to get your steps in today!

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Can I go back to the consolidated plan resources please?

So cities that are not listed for the state plan would fall under the nonentitlement and then how is that money divided up and how do you get it?

ANN DENTON: That money is divided at the discretion of the state.

However, let me say again, you have access, you can find your state consolidated plan.

So when we talked about that yesterday, the same kinds of questions apply.

What does it say about?

It was nonhomeless special needs.

What does it say about that in the plan?

What are they going to do?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: So look in my state's plan, it isn't allocated by geographical area.

It's allocated by goal or objective.

ANN DENTON: It could be.

They have a lot of flexibility, so some states, I know that in my state, Houston, Beaumont.

TDHCA allocates a lot of their discretionary money based on state region based on population, poverty and then they'll set aside some money for people with disabilities, that's how it is structured in Texas for nonentitlement jurisdiction.

You have to know what is in your plan.

If your plan is completely unfriendly to you, no tenant based rental assistance, no provisions around serving extremely low income, no extra provisions around accessibility.

It's all homeowner development,  that is a mistake that jurisdictions make all the time.

Homeowners are popular in a bipartisan sort of way.

Homeownership is an American value, and so sometimes people sink all their money into home ownership.

Doesn't mean we can't use that but it is not going to be to scale so I would say, would I advocate for a distribution of money, into tenant-based rental assistance or a distribution of money into rental project development with deeply affordable units?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: And to access that money, it is all through a grant process, whether it is CDBG, or HOME, or HOWWA.

ANN DENTON: Your state determines how that is going to be and it's not going to be in the con plan but should be on their website somewhere.

Most typically they say in the plan we're going to do rental project development money and it's going to be matched for tax credits.

And then they publish a NOFA, Notice of Funding Availability at a certain time, or a request for proposals and you have to be alert to that and respond to it.

Other states might do like Texas, which is allocate, preallocates on a preformula to the regions and then the state still controls what is spent and when.

Okay so California, anybody else want to look at their list, anybody interested or we can move on.

So back to the slides.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Before we got off this income level thing, one of the issues that we would have, too, would be for instance an individual who is in the age limit, a grandparent, for instance, that's raising a child with a disability, so autism, so forth.

We have a lot of problems and they would not rent to them with that child.

And has anything been changed at all about that as far as being under the age of adulthood, anyone living in these apartments with someone who is of the correct age and the income level?

ANN DENTON: As far as I know if you are in a property that has been designated as elderly, there is a prohibition against children.

So that's the HUD multi family inventory for elderly and disabled.

Again their language.

They also have a list of assistive properties available to any low income family.

That is less useful, I think, because you're looking at properties that are below market rate but may not be affordable to someone without a voucher so there's the example again.

The 811 program.

So the 811 program, remember yesterday we talked about the 811 program is a small, what my friend Anne O'Hara calls a boutique program within HUD, relatively small.

It is not related to or have anything to do with the section 8 program, it just sounds the same.

Section 8 is housing choice vouchers and it's huge.

The section 811 program is little.

So what you have in the 811 program is you have two types of things going on.

In the elderly and disabled multi family housing inventory that we just looked at, included on that list is properties developed under the old section 811.

The old section 811 built small apartment complexes, lots of times with good accessibility features, affordable, they had project-based rental assistance built into them so they were deeply affordable, and all of those properties, and there are hundreds if not thousands across the country are on the list we just looked at.

So you don't have to look anywhere else for it, it's on there somewhere.

The new, "811 program" is termed some of those dollars into a funding stream that would make some units in the regular affordable housing pipeline, the development pipeline, the 811 money is used to make some units, in larger complexes, deeply affordable.

So it's a way to develop integrated housing that is deeply affordable so people on SSI can live there.

So Tim is going to pull up the website I gave you, because this doesn't go where I thought it went.

I don't know if they've changed it, but I can tell you, while I'm standing here, somewhere I have the list of states.

Yes, not every state has this.

This is the states that have it.

We're looking for the 811.

I think it's the one I had a star by.

OK, yes, this is it.

So the states that have it are California, Delaware, Georgia, Illinois, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Maryland, Minnesota, Montana, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Texas and Washington.

So if you scroll down, Tim, you will come to a table that shows how much they got.

$97 million.

So what does that mean?

Well what it means is the state should have used their allocation to fund down, to spend down units in the development pipeline, to make them more deeply affordable.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I just got a quick question.

I know for a fact that Ohio does have an 811 program.

Is it a different 811 program than this.

Because it houses people with disabilities.

So is there a different type of funding then for it.

Because is that list that you mentioned just the places that received a typical type of federal funding to get their state's an 811.

ANN DENTON: This is, I can't imagine there is two 811s.

An 811 is for people with disabilities.

So I'm not sure what you're looking at but you could be looking at an inventory of the old properties that were developed in enclaves, congregated settings, all the units are for people with disabilities.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: This is a tax credit program, I think is a little bit different than developing full units because this has a limit of 25 percent.

ANN DENTON: That's the new one.

This is a perfect example so they've got a tax credit program in Ohio that is, and Ohio wasn't on my list was it?

Okay the information on this is so restricted.

I knew there was a second round of funding but I couldn't find it anywhere on the website and the supportive housing resource center that my link used to go to is no longer there.

Anyway how this works, and then I'll come back, how this works is they had a tax credit property somewhere in the development, either at the application stage or after award, probably at the application stage, where they proposed to use some of this money to make up to 25 percent of the units deeply affordable.

That is perfect example.

Yes ma'am.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: When I was at the Coalition for Citizens with Disabilities in Mississippi, we built two different units because nonprofits could apply for that.

Then when we started to try to build another one at one point, you have to get, in Mississippi you do, anyway, I don't know about other places, you had to get the Department of Rehab Services to sign off on it to say it was needed and so forth.

At that time they didn't want us to do it again so they wouldn't sign it because they said it was so restrictive and that it was putting everyone with disabilities.

But our problem was we just wanted housing then you can work on that later.

But I just wanted to say, like in Pennsylvania, some of the CILs have done this program and are doing the new program now and so forth so there are centers for independent living that have actually gotten these grants to do these.

ANN DENTON: Yes and I would say the centers for independent living, what your role in this is you're doing, bringing the qualified tenants, right.

You are bringing the qualified tenants, that is the CIL role in the new version.

The old version always had a requirement that services had to be signed off on by a state agency.

I used to do that when I worked for the state MHMR, many decades ago.

I was the person that did it and I always signed off on it.

I think like in an earlier conversation.

I am in favor of integrated housing, but I understand and am much, and am sympathetic and supportive and will help you to build a congregated setting because that may be exactly what your community needs, and that way you can control the accessibility features and do what Darrell said which is make it 100 percent.

Okay.

So back to your slides.

I think you're doing USDA next.

No this is VASH.

I'm going to leave this up here, we're not going to go to it, Tim.

Veterans Affairs Supported Housing, this will take you to a list of housing authorities that operate those dollars.

Let's look at the USDA map.

So USDA has, this is more than 440,000 multi family units so that's not 440,000 units.

That 440,000 times however many apartments they have in each of those complexes.

So it's a huge investment in housing in rural areas.

It also provides rental assistance and some of the rental assistance is available and can be used in that housing.

So let's go to the link.

Because I want to show you again from looking at the perspective of an independent living specialist or a case manager, whatever, housing specialist, I want to know where these places are, and what they're like, and who wants to take a look?

You have to know what county you want to look at.

It's done by county.

Who wants to go?

Which state wants to go?

Indiana.

All right we're going to do Indiana.

So sometimes click on a county and there will be nothing there.

That means they didn't develop anything there.

Sometimes you can click on a county in the middle of nowhere and find five properties.

It seems to be random.

So tell me a county in Indiana.

Orange, and where is that so Tim can find it.

Orange, there it is.

All right eight properties.

So you'll see that, so it shows you the name of the town that it is in on the right hand side, so let's click on one at random.

New Westgate.

So what you have here is you have, it will tell you, it says, I'm doing the wrong thing, pointer, 39 units.

30 units with subsidy.

That means all of these are below market rate, all 39 of them, but 30 of them are deeply affordable.

That is how you read that.

And then the complex type is family.

Now family does not mean a family with kids.

Family in the housing world can be a family of one.

So family, basically means unrestricted because it doesn't say elderly.

Or it doesn't say disabled.

It means anybody who meets the income limits can live there.

Go back.

Do another one just at random, see if we can find an elderly one.

This is another one, this is total units 24, I see none subsidized so these 24 units are going to be below market rate but somebody has to call up and find out what the rent is.

Anybody else want to play or should we move on?

I have a hand.

North Carolina.

We haven't done anything for North Carolina yet so let's go

back out and look at North Carolina, Wake county.

Like a wake from a motorboat, okay.

Where is that?

So let's just look, you have a bunch of properties, did you know those, do you know those?

Go back, so these are the towns that are in there, so click on one and let's see what we've got.

So this is 52 units, 52 with subsidized, all deeply affordable and unrestricted cause it is family and it tells you who operates it, how to find them, so the questions you asked when you call up you say, "Do you have any vacancies?"

Tell them who you are, do you have any vacancies.

What's the waiting list like?

Is there an application fee?"

All those specific questions.

Okay one more or a question, perhaps a question.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: How do they define rural, the USDA?

ANN DENTON: I don't know the exact population, you'll have to ask, we can look it up on the website.

I don't know how they define rural, that was the question, how do they define rural.

I can tell you that you find USDA properties in the oddest places.

I have found two properties in Dallas!

Who can tell me why?

Because they're old and Dallas used to be this big and now it's this big, right, so it's worth a look.

So we just did all of this.

Let's look at tax credits.

I probably have like ten minutes left, so tax credits, remember tax credits are this huge funding stream.

The state runs it, governed by the qualified allocation plan and a scoring mechanism for these applications and those are your advocacy opportunities.

You look at those and see do they have in them anything that would spur the development of deeply affordable units, spur development of additional accessible units above the federal minimums.

Highly competitive so if you can get your desires into the qualified allocation plan, the builders will follow the money.

They'll do what you want them to did if it's in the plan and they will get points for it.

They'll do it.

Okay so I gave Tim, you have a website that I emailed to you.

This is a HUD website, again take this with a grain of salt.

But it purports to show all of the low income housing tax credit properties that have been activated, have been developed.

And so -- microphone?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Does that list include properties that were developed with state match for the tax credit?

Just federal?

ANN DENTON: It's not going to differentiate.

Just anybody who has used the low income housing tax credit, properties that have been assisted with the tax credit.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Wonderful, thank you.

ANN DENTON: It's this one, and so let's pick a state we haven't picked yet.

Massachusetts.

So scroll down to Massachusetts on the left-hand side.

And then just take a quick look and make sure there are no restrictions checked.

Usually it comes up with no restrictions checked.

We want to see all the properties.

Okay, so then go down to retrieve project data.

Walla!

List of assisted properties and again I do control F for find, enter city name in there and see what we've got.

So scroll down, Tim, and let's see how many there are.

This is not really user friendly.

Okay that is officially a lot of properties!

Because when you look at it and I haven't looked at this for a long time but it should tell you, it tells you the number of units, 151, this top one.

And the number of low income units.

Now remember tax credits are not in and of themselves affordable to somebody on an SSI income.

Remember that.

There is no requirement that tax credits build units for extremely low income, 30 percent or less.

When they say affordable units, that means the number of units that are affordable to households at 50 or 60 percent of median family incomes so well above an SSI check.

But it might not be above SSDI check.

It might not be above somebody that is working full time minimum 
wage job, maybe.

And tax credits are required to accept vouchers.

Yes, ma'am right here, one and then over here and then Tim.

TIM FUCHS:  This is really basic so you'll have to excuse me if you do this all the time but for people looking at these tables and find them daunting, anything like this, website, PDF, whatever, you can put all that data into excel, alphabetize the city or town or even zip code whatever you want to do and start to ditch the stuff that is not relevant to you and start to save those tables, collect just save the information you need.

ANN DENTON: See that is something because I'm a really old person, I don't know that.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Is there like a time frame where the landlords don't have to accept section 8 if they have this tax credit.

ANN DENTON: Tax credits have a time limit under which they have to be affordable and so some tax credits roll off the inventory.

But if this database was up-to-date, then the properties here should still be within their time frame where they have to accept vouchers and do the affordable units.

Now the other place that you can get this information is, and it will be state-specific, just like this is, but it might be more up-to-date, sometimes your housing finance agency will have a list of assistive properties in it.

That is not 100 percent.

So that's why, if you can't, you know, find it on your, if you find it here and are dissatisfied or you can start at your housing finance agency website and look for low income housing LITHC, low income -- no LIHTC, low income housing tax credit, assisted properties, something like that.

And I think that we're done pretty much, if we will go back to the slides.

Yes, I'm done, so why do we do all this?

One reason is I hope to spark again your interest in advocacy, so influencing what is in the consolidated plan.

Your local, city, county or state consolidated plan.

Your interest in affecting what's in the qualified allocation plan for the tax credit program.

Your interest in looking at what your public housing authority is doing in advocating for a better fair share of what they've got.

Questions?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Very simply, is it going to be worth the time to look at the tax credit properties and just call and ask if they take a section 8 voucher?

ANN DENTON: Well I mean you can call and ask.

They're supposed to.

It's a federal rule.

So if they tell you no, say could 
you email me that in writing?

Real sweetly, right?

Yes, ma'am, down here?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: One of the best things that I found -- about rural development is that they have a low interest loan program as well as grant program for people over 60.

They will allow ramps to be built with the grant money from rural development and then also the foreclosure through rural development, they have a lot of houses that is have been foreclosed upon on their websites and those can be purchased, I think it's a one percent loan as well for people with disabilities.

ANN DENTON: Absolutely I did not go into, USDA does all sorts of cool things and people have used it for home mods and then you can weigh deeply affordable homeownership opportunities.

They also influence development, they'll fund development and increasingly, they're getting more collaborative, getting an expanded number of units on the ground.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Ann, I have a consolidated plan comment/pep talk along with what Darrell has been preaching, especially yesterday.

When we showed up, actually we already knew who was the keeper 
of our consolidated plan.

When we showed up for the first meeting where the open invitation is posted publicly, she was shocked and thrilled that we were there.

We were the only people there, of course, and she was open to our input, and I just want to encourage you to get your input because she's basically, as far as the grants go, a one-person shop, so she does what she knows and what she knows she can get done, so when you go and you tell her what you can do to help and how you can participate, that's how doors get opened and things get done. 

So just encourage you to step out there and find the people in charge of your consolidated plan.

ANN DENTON: Absolutely and get what you want in there, and then after they fund it, use it.

Anything else?

I think I am out of time.

One more.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Well also when they post the consolidated plan and announce the public hearing, they also indicate a comment period from such and such a date to such and such a date, and so if it is not convenient for your organization to go in person, you can just as effectively write up your comments.

We do ours as a coalition for balance of state.

We divide it up and do a combined analysis and recommendations and send it to them and then we have a copy that we can then compare to see what, when they finalize the plan, did it change?

ANN DENTON: Right and also they have, to one of the things I love about comments like that, written comments, if you go and do testimony, I would also submit written comments for that exact reason, they have to tell HUD what the comments were and how they responded.

It's really kind of cool.

All right I think I'm done, we're going to hear from Karen, or do we take a break.

So let's take a brick.

You all have the look on your faces of, "We need a break."

TIM  There's only two temperature settings at the hotel and that's 85 and 40!

So we're just to go willing back and forth between the two right now.

I'm doing my best.

We just brought it back up one degree, we're stopping there so I'm doing the best I can.

And Robb, you had a comment before we broke.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I want to share a quick resource in Colorado a lot called Coloradohousingsearch.com and most states have it, and there's a lot of overlap with the kind of spreadsheets and stuff we're looking at but there's a lot of filters that you can use and it will tell you exactly, you know, you can put if you have a section 8 voucher or a VASH voucher, or if it's low income housing tax credit, it breaks down the percentage category that it is in.

ANN DENTON: I would definitely need, if you don't know if you have one of those, look it up, because they pull together, again, nothing is perfect, right, and so you may find that all of these sources are incomplete, and maybe not up-to-date but you just pull all the information together and use it from scramble to get the information and the money.