Housing Committee gets a Wake Up Call!!

Uh, yeah, we have major problems with affordable housing. I think this was a sobering meeting for the committee members. I don’t think they realized the depth of the problem with affordable housing in Madison. And honestly, I think they have more to learn. Many thanks to staff from Salvation Army and YWCA for coming to speak to them. This was a good first step. They have been presented with many, many options for programs in the past from various community members and myself, but have no money. We have lots of reports and minutes and lists. What we need is a group of people who will push to make it happen. And apparently, more education about how bad the problem is.

Sarah Gillmore from the Salvation Army and Heather Anderson from the YWCA presented to the committee.

Dave Porterfield said this issue came up because there are vacant units and people having hard time getting into the vacant units. What are the barriers?

Anderson works with YWCA Housing First program, they try to get people from shelter to housing, they have 4 programs they work with. 2 are transitional and 2 are permanent. They screen the tenants based on the barriers and they try to screen them in. Huge barriers are credit, criminal history and income. Income is one of largest barriers. Several have money owed to utilities and landlord, some have not rented before. If accepted, they try to work with the landlords and advocate for landlord and tenants. Landlord does the fair housing screening, but even with partial rent subsidies, with 100 families, still barely make the rent. Rents are too high. At lower income the WHEDA rent for a 2 bedroom is $762 (it was 700 and something, I might have typed that wrong) and W2 is only $653, they can’t make rent even with utilities. Other problems are that landlords want rental history and you can’t verify that people lived in a car, shelter is not a valid reference for landlords, even if they lived there 90 days.

Gillmore explains that Salvation Army is gatekeeper for homeless families, they can stay for 90 days upstairs, this is funded by city and county money. They also have motel vouchers. They work with Select on the east side, but is is hard to get hotels to take the vouchers because of the stigma and stereotypes. They also work with single women. They are also the only place that if a family is homeless they may have room, they have a warming house. The city and county fund this, they can have up to 16 people at the warming shelter. These are people that are waiting to get into the homeless shelter or not eligible. Currently there are 130 people waiting. At the Warming Housing in 2010 they helped 735 people, including children and babies. That was 226 families. In the shelter they helped 694 people and 225 families. They also helped 270 single women. They see the same barriers. It’s the basic things like resources. They help 225 families with 2 staff people. She wants them to think about what that means. She says the Madison School District did a report today and there are 902 students homeless today. She says that if she wanted to do adult education, she would need a masters degree. They only have 2 people to re-educate adults who do not have a role model. Young mothers who just moved out of family home because of violence, she tried to graduate high school. There is a generational cycle of poverty and homelessness. It’s hard for me to sleep at night, none of you have been here (later she says Bridget Manaici was there, but . . . ), everyone is busy, we live and breathe it every day, she is the face of Dane County when she has to say there is no place to sleep tonight.

Anderson says one of the big barriers is domestic violence, its the number one cause for women. With domestic violence you get negative landlord references, its hard to prove who made noise or punched hole in the wall. They have a transition program where they can serve 20 people in 3 years but the number of people who need help is much higher. The United Way program can help 45 families and they are trying to get that to 50, but a year is not long enough to increases an income. W2 income is going down. When Dempsey Manor switched from senior to affordable family that didn’t really help, they units are too expensive for their families. They are trying to help but landlords can’t afford to lower the rents that much. Income is the barrier, families can’t increase that because of other issues, childcare costs, transportation, lack of education.

Gillmore says that one mother at the Salvation Army spent 5 hours a day to to get three kids to school. She explains that if someone moves, federal legislation says they can stay in their school. That is to have stability, its a great program but only provides transportation for elementary kids, middle and high school have to ride the bus. Things are making it harder, nothing is making it easier.

Dietria Hassel who asked to have this item on the agenda asks Anderson about the barriers to housing being affordability – it not that they are felons. She says the problem has always been with affordability – she says when people are in and out of shelters, she knows because she is a community activist, some are having trouble finding housing, some are felons, some not, some on SSI, but affordability is a problem. They land in other peoples apartments and houses, they can’t sleep in the park, but they stay where crimes rates are higher. These are places where the crime rate had gone down, but its going up like on Vera Court where there are more drug busts. A lot of that crime had stopped, homeless people concentrated in these areas. She asks if they are not felons?

Gillmore says that she has been doing this for 8 years and has worked in Harlem and St Paul before moving back to Madison and its hard to see that in Madison we can’t say to every kid in the community they will have a place to stay. Its affordable housing, affordable housing, affordable housing. Families and singles can’t get in. We don’t have enough affordable housing in the community, other states have other initiatives, they don’t just give lip service to helping as a community. Kids have classmates and they like to have birthday parties, homeless kids don’t get that. It’s affordable housing. If we are a family friendly place, all WI families, even those with poverty, need to be welcome. Some can’t read, some can’t get glasses because they can’t afford it.

Detria asks if city needs to look at policy changes?

Gillmore says yes.

They all ask what policy changes.

Gillmore says that Housing First usually has a whole team of people working with a family. A team of professionals to help people stay in housing. The families identify what they need and go to them for this and that. They help get skills so they can be able to help others, it happens other places she worked, it doesn’t happen here.

Anderson says that they only have one case manager that does all that work here. They need a community surrounding them so they don’t go back to shelter.

Bridget Maniaci says we have a world class university, great public health, hospitals, etc. what parts of the community are not stepping up? Who is missing from the team?

Gillmore says that people should be interested and see people at the shelter and realize family homelessness is in the community. People don’t know the volume of people struggling pay check to pay check. She says even if both parents are work, it is still hard to afford rent. She says that people can only afford to live in low-income areas, that is where the flexible landlords are. Depending upon how much income you have, that is where you live. The first thing to do is to get people interested to come and see and talk to the families, come down and talk to a family.

Hassel says they shared valuable data with the committee in the past. Nothing was done with data from years ago, we did get to look at it and see what policy changes we could do. We have had some progress on 3 times the rent, but also there are other things that could be done, if we take the time to look at it.

Maniaci says they have “fun” budgets coming up, on base level what do you need of us in funding, what should we be on the lookout for? What can’t part with?

Gillmore says there is not enough places for kids to sleep, they turn kids away, she would hate to have emergency shelter cut. It would be great to better work with banking institutions who have foreclosed homes so could have some partnership with social service agencies to use these places, maybe no one likes that. She loses sleep every night cuz this is my reality, she loses sleep cuz people can’t find a place to sleep. She appreciates that Maniaci came to the shelter in 2009, but it made her uncomfortable and she wanted to leave.

Porterfiled asks Curt Brink, a committee member, because he represents the landlords, does he think it would be worthwhile for landlord/tenant committee or affordable housing subcommittee to put on agenda to discuss how private sector could get involved? Homelessness is complex and multifaceted, lots of problems, health issues wrapped up together in this, no one part of this thing will solve the problem, one small piece is the property owners who might be able to do something, like STEM.

Brink (note that he ignores – perhaps rightfully since this is a city committee – what the private sector can do) says that they have the Affordable Housing Trust Fund, there is $3M in there, that was leveraged at Truax. They worked hard with ordinance, was so tight couldn’t get the money out, it was set to get to $10m to get the money out, that went through a process to get the money out there. If they do it through the affordability subcommittee, we could work out how we could get that level down, how can we enhance and use section 8 and section 42 together. (NOTE: Section 8 is feeling the pressure that their vouchers being used for projects and people can’t get them to move throughout the community. I think they are looking at stopping or scaling back the use of section 8 for seciton 42 projects.) The committees viewpoint before was we worked hard to open up the fund, tried to get IZ money into the fund so they had more resources, but they lost half a million dollars.

Maniaci says there is not the political will on the council to fund the program.

Brink says ignorance creates bliss. He thanks Hassel for asking for this to be on the agenda, he says maybe we can enhance some properties, perhaps get a loan to fix up the properties and bring down the rent. If we can’t take care of youth we’re in trouble, maybe we can break that cycle. At Truax, the units were dilapidated, they got major funding from the feds, got $6M and they are redoing the housing. They can work on that, like what you are doing, educating and bringing people in. They need to educate people more, this is a systemic issue in the city, this is not people from out of town. We have to leverage our money, and when money comes through, it should go into the trust fund. There have been heavy fights over this in the past and people have lost political capital over it.

Maniaci asks if it should go to the affordability subcommittee.

Brink says yes, they can go through the ordinance and reset it if they have to. They could have a place people could donate money, maybe leverage the money.

Maniaci says Judy Compton has a long term complaint about CDBG having lots of pots of money all over the place, its hard to get an assessment of where the money is, where do we stand in terms of where our resources are. She would like to honor Compton’s long standing goal to get to the bottom of the state of the city’s commitment. She wants them to work on it.

Brink says they have sharp people who work in CDBG.

Maniaci wants them to “untangle the ball”. She wishes Marj Passman was here, she says they have to talk about what is happening between schools and the city and services. She had a discussion with the principal of O’Keefe where they talked about programs for the children coming out of Salvation Army. They get them stabilized in the 60 or 90 days they have in shelter and then they are off. Think of all the money wasted jumping around from school to school. We need to communicate about housing options and neighborhoods and ability for elementary kids. There are all kinds of psychology reports that show how important middle and high school is in terms of life choices.

Kieth Broadmax works for section 42 investors, he understands why it is so expensive, they have been able to get developers to work with city and county and get subsidies from them, so they can have a more mixed income community.

Porterfield says this is a good subject for the affordable housing subcommittee. They can spend more time focusing on policy recommendations.

Maniaci asks when they meet?

Staff tells here is is the third Thursday, same as Tenant/Landlord committee.

Porterfield says that the presenters will get an invitation to talk with that committee.

Brink says that we have 902 students who are homeless. The school district will not admit the poverty rate we have, we are losing money because of it. We have to get it out it is really a problem. Soglin said this is a critical issue, we have to solve it. There are plusses and minuses all around – we have primary evidence and can work from that, we have enough tools and committee people.

Hassel knows people who have a job but have been told that they have to stay at the YWCA for two years if they live there, why is that, or is it true?

Anderson explains that is not true, they have many different programs and people have 3, 6 and 12 month leases. She says that with Section 8 they have attached to the units, if they stay there for a year, they earn the right to have section 8. They do not have to stay for two years. Their rent is from $337 to $700 for apartments.

Porterfield tries again to get a motion to get this to the affordable housing subcommittee and finally get it and they adjourn.