ANN DENTON: Okay so now it's a red post-it, right?

So we want to talk about in this session and Karen and I are going to sort of co-work on this, is advocacy, so opportunities for advocacy.

And all advocacy starts with making the case that you have a need that whoever you're approaching can help you meet.

So you start by making the case.

And so the basic argument, which is on the slide, is that we have X number of people who need affordable accessible housing.

Our housing market has too few units, and I'm going to show you how to find that in data if you don't already have it, and this is how we want you to fix this.

That's a basic, what we're doing here.

So what do you already know?

So a lot of times communities have already done a housing market study.

Anybody in this room participated in or know that your community has done sort of a private housing market study, anybody?

One two three four or five people, maybe ten, I didn't look this way.

Okay that's great.

If you participated in that, it's even better but okay, even if you didn't, it's a source of data so you look at that.

So this is one source of data and if you participated in it, you know that you have an idea about the quality of that data, you kind of know where it came from and how much you trust it.

If you didn't participate in it, you still review it.

if your community is 50,000 or higher in population, you have a local consolidated plan.

So if your community is between 50 and 75 thousand people the only money you're getting is community development block grant but you still have to have a plan, so they have a plan.

If your community is 75,000 or over in population, you have a larger plan.

You have home funds coming to your community through the consolidated plan.

The consolidated plan is important in this part, around advocacy, because it has a market study in it.

It has needs data in it and it has a housing market study data in it and we're going to pull one up and show it to you.

Now this last bullet is an cynicism, but you can't always trust the information in there.

I would regard that information as a starting place.

If for example the consolidated plan says that you have 9,000 people with disabilities in your county and you know you have 25,000 people with disabilities in your county, that's a great conversation starter with the people who wrote the plan.

Right?

So the HUD consolidated plan has a housing market analysis.

It has an analysis of the housing problems that are in your community.

Accessibility should be included in it and if it's not, again, a great conversation starter.

And it has population estimates for various groups.

So Tim, if we could go to the consolidated plan, and while Tim is getting ready to do that, so somebody said over here about the special needs language, wasn't that you?

How many people find that offensive?

Special needs population?

Me too.

This is HUD, it's HUD, so if you want somebody to blame it's HUD but I would not fight with them about it, it's like I'd rather have the money.

I don't care what they call it right?

So we're going to take a look, this is a consolidated plan.

So since I've been here I've looked at Memphis, Detroit and Reno.

This is Reno.

These consolidated plans, and Reno is good, it's a good plan, an example of a good plan.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I wish I could say I wrote it!

ANN DENTON: Yeah, yeah, and I'm leaving uncommented upon the quality of the other two.

That was supposed to be a joke.

So the way that these things are structured, thank you, they have a needs assessment portion which is the first part of the plan.

So on the Reno plan that starts on page 12.

So needs assessment overview, this tells you kind of how they did it, what data they included, and then it will come to some conclusions about what the needs are, right.

It's worth sitting down and actually reading it.

So on page 18 on this one, they have somewhere on that page, they start having a summary of what they see as common housing problems.

So what you might find, they do a needs assessment, that really looks at populations and poverty, it looks at a little bit about input from public comment, but then they come to a set of conclusions and so this one talks about cost burden.

So cost burden is a HUD term, and in this case they're defining it, HUD would define, if you're paying more than half of your income towards your housing, that's, in HUD language, that's a severe cost burden, so they've identified that in Reno, they have a severe, the most common housing problem is a severe cost burden.

In this plan, they have somewhere a statistic that says they have 14,500 households that make less than $20,000 a year.

And their analysis of the rental market is they have about 7,200 rental units that would be affordable for that group.

So there's a gap between the number of households, 14,500 that are making less than 20,000 a year and the 7,200 units that they have that theoretically are affordable.

Are you all with me?

7,200.

I'm doing that from memory, just from looking at it close enough.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: About half.

ANN DENTON: About half.

So we've already identified a gap.

It's not about people with disabilities, right?

This is about poverty.

This is about households and poverty and it's about their identification of this group as a high need group.

Now we know that in that 14,500 households that make less than 20,000 a year, that should include every single household on SSI, right?

Because what is the SSI annual income?

$9,800 or something like that.

Now in a minute, I'm going to show you the Social Security site where you can check how many SSI recipients you have in your county.

That is quick way to check the veracity of this information, right, so we're going  to go there in a minute, but so this is common housing problems, all of these consolidated plans are structured in similar ways, following a formula from HUD.

This is your first beginning look at what your government thinks the need is.

Okay, the next piece that I find interesting is it gives you information about resources so on page 30, it shows you public housing resources.

Tomorrow we're going to look at will how to find all your USDA housing, all your HUD multi family housing, all your housing authority housing, all your blah, blah, blah, but this shows you right here, let me tell you what this shows you.

You have 750 public housing units.

Okay the list for public housing, the same people who raised their hands and said that the list for housing choice vouchers is two years long, right?

I'm going to ask you to raise your hand again, I'm just saying that more than half this group raised your hand.

Those same housing authorities may have public housing where the list is 
not even full because public housing is less popular than the voucher program.

I will also say public housing has had a bad reputation right that it's in poor repair and that it's crime-ridden and it may be that way, but I would encourage you to look.

Go and look.

Figure it out for yourself because housing authorities have spent -- HUD spent a lot of money over the last few years helping housing authorities improve public housing performance and for small housing authorities, right now, a lot of housing authorities are doing what they call an RAD conversion -- rental assistance development conversion.

And I was skeptical at first but what that does is it converts public housing units into basically project-based housing so that income requirements stay the same.

People can, they have to relocate during the renovations but they can go back to their units and they end up, public housing residents end up with a renovated unit at the same cost that they had before so if your housing authority is doing something like that, that's a good thing, in my opinion.

So this housing authority, these people have 750 public housing units.

They have 2,300 tenant-based rental assistance units.

That is 2,100, whatever, 2,200 minus 220 is their 2,100 is their housing choice voucher list, their section 8 list, that is the number of vouchers they have.

Then 40 they have dedicated to project based so that means probably that they've dedicated 40 units, they've helped somebody build 40 affordable units, so they've got peeled off some of their tenant-based rental assistance and then they have 220 veterans affairs supported housing.

This is a wealth of information from one table. 

They got a lot of public housing.

They got a ton, a lot of vouchers, I'm sure they have a waiting list but still a nice number for a community of that size and they are friendly to doing applications for discretionary funding or they would not have gotten those VASH vouchers.

So, that's all good, right.

You got that all from the consolidated plan.

So let's look at what this particular consolidated plan says about people with disabilities.

Now you're going to love, if you don't like special needs, this is on page 38, you're going to really hate this.

This is called, this section is called, "Nonhomeless special needs assessment."

So this is HUD's definition of what some special needs population is.

So people with disabilities are lumped in with these other populations.

This gives you information, if you'll scroll up, Tim, we want to get where it says persons with disabilities.

Okay.

So 46,000 people in the region with disabilities, so I'll turn to you guys and say does that sound like the right number?

For Reno, Washoe county?

And then 9,200 or 21 percent are below poverty so that should correlate, should be a number that's similar to the number we'll find on the SSA website for SSI recipients.

These are the sections you look at, so you pull up your consolidated plan.

This is the quick, how to take a quick look.

Then you want to go to the housing market study so they've done all your work for you.

They are going to tell you about rental housing, about home ownership, they are going to talk about different levels of income.

So move into page 42, you're ahead of me, this is where the housing market analysis for Reno starts.

They're giving you some background information, if you'll scroll up, keep going.

So first of all, 2013 data.

I did not say it already, but this plan expires this year 2019.

So immediately you look at what your plan span is and if it's 2019, they're already working on the next one right.

If some of you have a plan that expires in 2020, they're going to start working on it in the next six months.

So those are opportunities for advocacy, so you look at what the plan span is, but 2013 in the housing world, that's old data at this point, and yet it's still useful, so this tells you what kinds of housing you have.

And go up.

And this plan is consolidated as the Washoe County, city of Sparks and city of Reno, altogether.

Which is one of the things that makes it good.

It gives you a snapshot of really what constitutes the real community in that region.

Keep going, so this shows you by entity that's included, all good information, none of it is particularly, okay keep going.

I don't want you to be overwhelmed by the data in here, I just want you to know what to look for.

So does the availability of housing units meet the needs of this population?

This is a standardized question of the population.

The answer no.

Because they have all of these severely cost-burdened households.

So what you're looking for which eventually what you're going to look for, right now we're looking at housing market so you'll know your housing market.

But eventually you want to look for, they said this is their biggest problem.

When the time comes in the strategic plan, I mean in the consolidated plan to look at their strategic plan which shows how they're going to spend the money, does their planned expenditure of the money match what they just said?

And the most common problem with consolidated plans is they'll do all this work and do all of this wonderful analysis and I've already picked on Detroit so I'll just say it.

So Detroit said their biggest problem was cost burdened households and they went through five priorities for funding before they got to No. 6 which was rental assistance.

Everything else was public infrastructure, economic development and all this other stuff, so that is an exploitable gap between what they said and what they're going to spend money on.

So you are kind of also going to look for that.

Okay, so let's look at page 47.

So this shows, okay so this is again 2013 data, the median gross rent was $815.

Hello?

Right?

Somebody on SSI makes how much?

Not, clearly not going to work, by their own data and this is old data.

So you look at all of this is potentially useful information but scroll up just for a second, and okay, so this shows you renter households at various income levels.

For Reno.

Actually I don't know what that is, so go on, I don't know what that means, those numbers don't make sense, I have to sit down and look at it but keep going.

What you're really looking for is information that will support the argument that you have a population of 9,000 households that are below the poverty line and that you lack a sufficient supply of housing that is affordable to those populations.

And remember affordability is I can pay 30 percent of my income towards housing.

So for someone on SSI that's about $250 a month.

So you're using their data to help make that case.

All right so let's go back to the slides.

This is a quick look at a consolidated plan.

Okay.

So I just said this, you want to contrast the number of units affordable to households at or below 30 percent of median and the number people on of SSI.

So let's go to SSA so if you're not sure or never checked this number from the SSA website, when you get there what you find is a list of states and you have to know the county.

it is listed by county.

So who wants to throw up their community to see, just to see their county, 
who knows their county?

Jackson County, Missouri.

So go down to Missouri, I would click on the PDF, it might be easier.

And then scroll down to Jackson County.

You will Jackson County, okay, so I have a pointer, so Jackson County, come down a little bit so I can read the columns at the top, 17,222 people, on assistance.

Now some of that number is going to be people who are over 65, and 998.

Blind and disabled, again language is theirs, not mine, 16,224.

That's really the number you're looking for, right.

So if that number is drastically different from what's in your consolidated plan, so let's check Nevada, Washoe county.

Cause we are picking on them.

Nevada, that is right.

So Washoe county, not bad a total of  7,100 recipient, 5,529 blind and disabled.

So not bad, actually.

They're saying there are nine thousand households in poverty, that makes logical sense because this entire group is in poverty and then there are other people in poverty as well.

So this is just checking the data.

Just checking the data so back to the slides.

Let's go to the second bullet.

The first bullet, in the consolidated plan, we would have to really dig to see if there's accessibility information and I don't think there is, so let's go to the second bullet.

So if you want to make the case that this is the case you're making and you move down only X number of units and in Washoe county we only have seven thousand units that are affordable for somebody living on an SSI income and yet we have more than 20,000 households that make below 20,000 a year.

14,000 households making less than 20,000 a year.

You're identifing a gap for them.

And Karen is going to come up and talk to you more about some of this, I already said.

KAREN MICHALSKI-KARNEY: I just turned to Darrell and I said, "I'm going to go up and talk about what Anne just talked about."

ANN DENTON: Lets take questions.

Let's you and I both take questions since we both know how to do this.

KAREN MICHALSKI-KARNEY: That was funny!

ANN DENTON: Questions?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: So do you specifically recommend using the SSI income figure as opposed to the poverty figures in the community surveys?

The American community survey from the census bureau or --

ANN DENTON: Use both.

Why wouldn't you use both?

KAREN MICHALSKI-KARNEY: I think this really, if you go to the Social Security website, you know for a fact that these are how many people are getting SSI in your community.

With the ACS, American Community Survey, that's an estimate.

ANN DENTON:  It should be higher, a higher number than the SSI recipients.

KAREN MICHLSKI-KARNEY: But this is the number, if you're considering doing a CDBG application for home modifications, these are the numbers that I refer to every year when I do my CDBG application because I always want them to have updated information and I say last year we had this many and now this year we have this many people and so I constantly refer back to this to do the CDBG application so you know it's a definite number.

ANN DENTON: Other questions?

Anyone?

KAREN MICHALSKI-KARNEY: Okay so again this is about making the case, hopefully.

No, I did.

Trying not to, but I am.

All right so we just talked about the number of SSI beneficiaries in your state and again, that gives you the base number of extremely low income households, right, because everybody who is getting SSI always falls within the extremely low income category according to HUD.

And you can assume that all of the households receiving SSI need assistance in order to afford housing and that number is a very high -- I'm buzzing -- conservative number of the need.

Does that make sense to everybody?

So next thing you're going to do is determine the number of housing choice vouchers that your state provides, and you're also going to determine the number of project-based rental assistance designated to lower rents and affordable housing developments, so those are your tax credit properties, home, etc.

And then you're going to go to the, to look at the Continuous Care award, and see how much money your state receives under the Continuum of Care, and what you're doing is you're actually building a gross estimate of the number of households that are within your state that need financial help and perhaps need assistance to live in housing.

Clear as mud?

Everybody confused?

Does that make sense?

Okay, good, good, good!

And so we know that unless special provisions are made, people at the lowest levels of income are simply left out and that's also the plan for the study that Anne just talked about, priced out, that also backs up that document, that statement.

And so what you want to do is you want to find out whether people with disabilities are getting their fair share, their fair share of the vouchers, their fair shares of the Continuum of Care money, their fair share of the properties that are subsidized.

What you're trying to do is to show that people with disabilities, basically, do not have equal opportunity, when it comes to benefiting from the resources that are coming to your state.

-- for affordable housing.

And you're looking at, "Does the planned housing development include plans for the needs of households receiving SSI?"

And again you can be certain that the data will show that people with disabilities are not getting their fair share of the resources that are coming to your state so again this is building the case, right.

You want to have numbers.

You want to have statistics.

You want to be able to show that these programs are not working for people with disabilities.

And one strategy is to use the poverty argument.

You don't even have to mention people with disabilities.

You can just strictly look at poverty.

People at extremely low income must be proactively served or you're going to have a lot more people out on the streets and people who are homeless.

You want to ask for a target or a set aside based on income.

Anne talked about this a little earlier.

Most HUD programs are set to serve households at 80 percent of the median income and we know that households receiving SSI are one of the lowest income groups eligible for housing assistance.

So using HUD's own definitions and rules, it's possible to make the poverty argument.

So does that make sense?

We're talking about poverty here.

We're not talking about people with disabilities.

We're talking about people who are living in poverty.

And again the housing problems of people with disabilities are more about poverty than they are about the disability.

You know a lot of times if we can find the affordable housing, we have ways to make the affordable housing accessible, but if people with disabilities can't find affordable housing, it doesn't matter if we have millions of dollars to make things accessible.

Now you are going to want to communicate the need.

You've identified what the need is.

You've gone to the website and the consolidated plan and looked at what the consolidated plan says and so now you want to make the, "Ask" and a good ask is specific, and you can do this in a number of ways.

You can say you want an allocation of 25 percent of the home funds for extremely low income households.

That's one way that you can make your ask.

You can say dedicate the home funds to subsidized tax credit properties to lower the cost for a percentage of units making them affordable for households at extremely low income levels.

So those are two ways to make a specific ask.

So again, you've identified the need, now you're making the ask.

You want to make it very specific so you'll know whether you have been successful, right.

And we, the three of us talked a little bit about this, I don't know that we've discussed it that much here, but you want to make your organization an informed partner.

One of the ways that is we did that in Virginia, we actually got the SILC to approve funding that CILs could use in order to have staff trained to understand more about housing.

Some of the things that we're going through this week, the Virginia Association of Centers for Independent Living, we have a staff person, the SILC paid that staff person to do training for our staff so that staff would be more familiar with housing terms, have a better understanding of how federal housing and state housing and all of that stuff works.

So that may be something that you want to look at.

I don't know what your relationship is with your SILC.

I don't know how many SILC people are in the room today, but that's just one opportunity for the CILs to partner with the SILC on an issue that's very important.

CILs are supposed to be doing nursing home transition and we just discussed this.

There's no way to transition somebody when there's nothing to transition them to, right.

You're going to go talk to people in nursing homes, do you want to get out in the community?

Well hell yes.

Okay, it will be five years before we can find you a place to live, right.

No you're not going to do that to anybody.

So you want to become an expert on housing and then you're more likely to be taken seriously when you're advocating for resources for a share of planned developments.

You're also a better partner for likeminded groups such as homeless coalitions or groups concerned with addressing poverty and if there is no group like that in your community, start one.

Somebody asked me a question about long term goals for the Roanoke Regional Housing Network that we started.

Now we started that group, probably at least 20 years ago, and the reason it was started was again because we had such an issue with rental property that was basically unlivable and that was the issue we wanted to tackle, and then from there what we did, we started having symposiums and at these community-wide symposiums we would have workshops on different issues and we would always make sure that there was a workshop included on the needs of affordable, accessible housing for people with disabilities.

We're talking about home modifications, we're talking about nursing home transition so we don't operate that group any longer.

That group is self sustaining.

There's 22 board members, but there are 96 members of that housing network.

That's how large it has become and it's a serious group, when they advocate together for something, they usually get what they're looking for.

One more thing.

Remember people with disabilities have the right to live in the community.

We shouldn't be forced to stay in institutions simply because there are no affordable accessible housing units.

People with disabilities have the right to rent or buy housing on the same terms as others without any special conditions or agreements.

Somebody shouldn't have to put down a larger deposit on a house, simply because they're a person with a disability.

People with disabilities have the right to request a reasonable accommodation for disabilities when needed.

And lastly, people with disabilities have the same rights to housing units as any other tenant assuming the use of a standard lease.

So those are all things we need to remember as we're advocating on behalf of people with disabilities.

[Person sneezing]
God bless you!

And the other things that you need to remember are:

Housing officials are compelled by law to uphold these rights.

And every housing jurisdiction must complete an analysis of impediments to fair housing as a part of its planning process.

If you haven't taken a look at that, that's really an eye-opener.

I know when I went into the city office that did the fair housing impediments analysis, they had basically put up a map of the city and put pins where most of the folks with, folks who were living in poverty lived.

It was a shocker.

I mean you could see that the city of Roanoke is extremely discriminatory when it comes to housing for people living in poverty so you might want to track that down and Ann exactly where would we find that?

ANN DENTON: Analysis of impediments.

I would Google it.

Google is your friend, so I would say Reno, or Washoe County analysis of impediments to fair housing, if you cannot find that, then go to the city office, city community development, division of community development or neighborhood housing, they're going to have it.