Charlottesville Redevelopment and Housing Authority Board Meeting   1/27/2025

It's no big deal.

Good afternoon.

Good evening everyone.

We officially are calling to order the Charlottesville Redevelopment Housing Authority Board of Commissioners meeting from Monday, January 27, 2025.

We will open up our meeting with a moment of silence for everyone who's lost their life, but specifically for one of our own who tragically has transitioned.

Commissioner Alice has moved on, so we want to offer a moment of silence for her.

Yeah, I think we should.

That's a great idea.

We also can, Miss Carey, can you make a note for us to send a communication to the city manager and we can potentially have the council working to ask her for her service, for Miss Alice's service.

You can do that tomorrow if that's okay.

I'm going to turn the meeting over to our Vice Chair, Commissioner Wicks.

She is very astute in running these meetings.

Okay, thanks a lot, Dr. Bellamy.

writing you a special thank you note.

Okay.

So our next board working session will be coming up on Thursday, February 13th.

And then our next regular meeting will be February 24th.

The redevelopment committee meeting is every first Thursday of the month.

The next one being on February 6th at 3 o'clock.

and then our CRHA admin redevelopment meeting is the third Thursday of the month so the next one will be on February 20th at 1 o'clock.

Safety committee is on the second Wednesday so the next one is February 12th at 4 o'clock and then resident services is every second Tuesday, next one being February 11th at 1 o'clock.

Good evening.

My name is Annette Wilcox.

I'm at 1400 Monticello Road.

in Charlottesville, Virginia, apartment 102.

So I think a lot of that is outside of the board's purview.

Good evening, I'm Emily Dreyfus and I'm a Senior Community Organizer with the Legal Aid Justice Center and I'd like to comment a bit about how the eviction procedures are going.

There are a lot fewer people on the docket, which I was glad to see this morning, but I think that means because most of the housing authority's cases have moved forward and completed the court process or potentially had the

resident be able to get financial assistance if they were getting evicted for back rent and being able to stay in their home.

There was one case that I heard about from one of our attorneys which was not dropped even though the person only owed $70 as the remainder.

I think she probably owed significantly more to begin with but was able to pay it all off except for that $70 and not dropping it at that point is

very aggressive litigation like that is not the norm and it means since they got a decision on CRHA's behalf that the resident can get evicted with only three days notice in the future if she was to fall behind again and

It's very concerning to Legal Aid Justice Center since, as we all know, CRHA housing is housing of last resort for a lot of people.

They don't have other options and this does not seem to be consistent with the housing authority becoming a trauma-informed agency or looking at evictions as

a last resort and trying to do what the residents need in order to be able to maintain their homes.

Well, I think maybe best is for us to make a note of it and have Mr.

Sales or whomever provide an update at our next meeting.

I don't think it may be best to... Well, if you say his name, he appears.

Oh, there he is.

I thought he was under the weather.

Well, I will just hit him with this question, see if that makes him feel better.

I don't get well on the floor tonight.

Yeah, we can take it offline and follow up, but thank you for bringing that up Emily.

I do think it's, I mean we've talked a lot about eviction.

So for those who aren't able to hear, Miss Kathleen Glenn-Matthews, Deputy Executive Director, stated that we'll be speaking on that during our next work session.

All right.

So I will move forward.

Did you want to do a PHAR comment?

Sorry, I was thinking Emily was... Me too.

You were just doing your one chat.

Okay, you just got here, so we'll give you time later.

Sorry to put you on the spot, Mr.

Sales, I did just have one topic you and I had discussed, and you may be doing it later in your update, just an update on the development of the

Yes, so yes I did get an update from the company doing a re-engine and they have confirmed that by the end of February they will have a complete set of documents to us for review and then staff will review those documents for any suggested changes and then bring it back for board submission.

Can we kind of declare a date for that?

Yes.

I've given them to the end of February to have something back to me.

Otherwise we're going the only other direction is to move forward with a different vendor.

We talked about that potentially.

but we kind of sort of changed some process internally to try to move them forward along.

So Maria's now working with them on scheduling.

So all internal meetings are being scheduled by Maria instead of them trying to schedule and tackle everyone's schedule together.

And we're supposed to be meeting every two weeks to confirm where they are and that they're still gonna hit that target date.

I think it may be beneficial, and I don't know if you can respond to this tonight, Mr.

Sales, but if you could communicate to them that you're looking to have the information back when we say the end of February, February is a short month, maybe February 20th or February 21st, which is a Thursday or Friday, and then it could be potentially reported out or at least provided to the board on Monday, February 24th, which is our standard meeting.

Yeah, that's what I was going to say.

It won't allow us time to review.

So the 13th.

I think that's reasonable.

Okay.

So just for clarity, we're looking at having them get it to Mr.

Sales on when we set it down on the 21st.

Our goal would be on the 24th for you to let us know that it's been received, not for you to necessarily present it.

And then we would have a presentation on it on Thursday at our work session.

It was very moving.

The memorial service for Alice, for Commissioner Alice Washington.

Everybody spoke very highly of her.

She will be missed.

Thank you all for attending.

Okay.

I move that we approve the November 24th board minutes.

All in favor?

Aye.

All right.

That's approved.

Welcome, Ms. Glenn-Matthews.

Thank you for having me.

Hello.

I wanted just to make some visual slides and they got shared a little late, but I just wanted to kind of talk about the evolution of the Resident Services Department.

It's a new department for the Housing Authority.

It was established in the spring of 2021.

And originally it was just two people.

It was Joy Johnson and myself.

We,

Hired a redevelopment coordinator through a grant through CACF for PMT, which was Brandon Collins in October of 2021.

And then we hired our first resident services assistant in March, 2022, which was part of a Sentara grant, which was the beginning of a really great partnership.

We got our first FSS coordinator in March, 2023.

and it was the beginning of us starting to build out some of our self-sufficiency programs.

We were able to hire a grants and development coordinator in October of 2023 and this was tremendous for us.

We also were fortunate enough that the redevelopment department was able to start getting some legs and build out and

We started becoming separate departments.

We were able to acquire a ROS grant, so the ROS coordinator came on in June 2024, and an AmeriCorps VISTA in September of 2024, Brigid, who has been amazing.

We've also been awarded a new AmeriCorps who will start in the fall, right when she's finishing up.

And then our Economic Opportunity Program through CDBG funding,

moved into resident services and started at the beginning of this year.

We've got one more outstanding grant that we're really hopeful about to get a clinical social worker who would work out of Crescent Halls.

What's a ROS coordinator?

Resident Opportunity and Self-Sufficiency.

The ROS coordinator is able to work holistically not only as individuals but families and often

Folks who might not be ready yet to get involved in something with a lot of specific goal settings such as FSS.

It's a great program to work on stability and getting the whole family to a good place.

Our ROS coordinator is Ayanna Hall.

I'm hoping to bring her to a future meeting to meet everyone.

She has a background in yoga and is also a doula and often is teaching other classes in the community.

Alright, I also just wanted to bring something that our UCA intern helped us put together today.

Just to kind of talk about, we have all these new programs and I just wanted to talk about how they all interact with each other.

You know, initially we had the CORE, which was the Resident Service Coordinators.

Originally it was just Joy Johnson.

Now we also have Joy is covering West Haven.

We have Chanelle Cowherd, who is at Crescent Halls.

We have Brittany Gordon, who has South First Street, Sixth Street, and our smaller sites.

We have a lot of interaction between all the staff.

We focus on monthly team meetings.

Our Family Self-Sufficiency Program, FSS, often gets referrals from the resident service coordinators as well as property managers, as well as our ROS program that is a newer program and is building pretty quickly based on these referrals.

Our employment opportunity program that just got started this month, it's really starting to get some footing as we do a lot of collaborating so that when our resident service, FSS or Ross staff have individuals who are focused on employment training, they're able to get plugged in with the EOP coordinator.

We're also looking at, we've integrated a family metric system, software system so that we can start tracking data and case management more specifically.

We're on the hunt right now for some trainings around

confidentiality and ethics that are culturally sensitive.

We've just been in the process of getting everyone in place for our Jobs Plus program and the majority of our new hires are all West Haven residents.

And we know that it can be hard to live and work in your own community so we're looking for some classes as have been requested by some of our new staff to really think about creative ways to keep that in the forefront.

I'm gonna be presenting at the work session a bit on the eviction diversion program and steps our department's taking with that in partnership with the housing program, our property management director, TerAna Banks.

We have been working on a referral form that we're gonna be talking about at that meeting and doing training with our staff on that on the 6th.

We are really, our biggest focus for this year is relationship building and that's why confidentiality training is also important.

We need to build trust in our communities.

Housing Authority doesn't have the greatest history and we're trying to focus on making a lot of changes with that as we're bringing services back.

We just had a really great meeting with our team and with Mr.

Sales

really made it clear that before we move forward with new initiatives, they need to be ones that we heard from our community that were desired.

And we want to have follow up.

If someone in our community tells us they want to learn about plumbing, we want to make sure we follow up with that individual and let them know steps we're taking, classes we've found, and how that process works.

We're working with our AmeriCorps VISTA as well as some UVA interns on visual charts so that people who learn differently won't just have paper trails, they can also look at a visual chart on the why of the classes they're taking.

Soft skills will be on the chart.

Financial Literacy, the classes doing financial aid and all the different steps at PVCC and we're gonna work really closely on getting this translated and make sure that nothing's lost in that translation.

We are a really new department with the agency and we're growing very fast but we're also trying to be very intentional as we move forward.

This month was the first month we started applying more streamlined reporting systems.

We had forms that we used for everyone and we're really building out the family metric system so eventually the majority of data from our department will be pulled from that.

I have a quick question.

One, thank you for this report, Kathleen.

Great job as always.

So how many, I'm just asking because I'm trying to understand it.

In all the housing.

It's around, when I did the last report, I think it was right around 1,000, is that right?

For housing that we manage.

One staff.

One staff.

He has one staff, 30 participants.

Mm-hmm.

Would it be fair to say that, I mean, I know in a dream world, obviously we don't have the funding, but in a dream world, all of our residents would have FSS support or

I know some of them may already have case managers do other services and whatnot.

I'm just wondering, I know for FSS they have to apply and go through the process, but is there a way for the need in which we know so many of our residents have and not all of them apply to the programs or choose to participate for a wide variety of different reasons?

And how many of those do we have?

As we grow, we're definitely going to need to hire more.

This is very new.

It wasn't a role they had before.

And so we're doing a lot of training on that with family metrics as well using software.

We are also, you know, we're looking at a part of meeting people where they're at is not everyone wants to do an FSS program.

A lot of people, you know, have a lot of challenges happening right now that they're not ready yet.

And so we need to figure out

what's going on and how to help them.

The Ross program is a tremendous program for that.

Unfortunately though it's only available to public housing residents.

That's a program that I really think if you know we were able to open up to the voucher program would be great.

We have a lot of voucher participants who would like to be in that program.

They're hearing word of mouth about it.

And we are really hopeful, you know, especially as we work on opening a nonprofit that we can have more homegrown programs that are more of what our residents are telling us they'd really like than just federal programs.

Lots of things are possible, so you know we're trying to really think ahead.

You know, we have, you know, seen the ability to move the needle a little bit now getting these programs in place as we're setting up every single one of our programs with the exception of the resident service coordinators use individual service plans and the level of those vary on the program like the FSS program has the most stringent

goal setting and it's also tied with successful completion after five years and a savings account that's with that.

The new JOBS Plus program, which I have to do a presentation on as soon as we get two more West Haven residents hired.

I want to bring them here to meet you all.

That program has something called JOBS Plus earned income disregard.

With some new policies, earned income disregard has gone away as of right now, but JOBS Plus earned income disregard will be in place.

Any resident of West Haven will be able to sign up for that.

And that would mean that if you sign up and your rent is $200 a month, your earning goes up.

It's offset.

Why only West Haven?

Only West Haven.

That's where that grant is in place through HUD.

It's a very specific footprint.

And that program is also set in place to really focus on preparing the community for redevelopment and opportunities for wealth building that could come from that.

with training.

Thank you.

We appreciate the thorough breakdown.

It really was informative.

I'm sorry, colleagues, I don't know if you had anything to add.

All right, thank you.

Housing director is actually out today.

I wasn't trying to put you on the spot.

No, you're all good.

We have 34 total vacant units.

Yes, that's a large number, but not all those units are actually vacant and can be reoccupied.

There's six units at South, I mean, at Sixth Street that are under Demo Dyspo.

This is only showing eight occupied, but it's actually 18.

It's one vacant unit over there.

At West Haven, there's 15 vacant units.

13 of them are not ready.

One is offline due to substantial rehab, and we have three applications approved for a one, two, and a three bedroom unit.

At Riverside, there's one vacant which was completed, but we're using that vacant for a warming shelter as we do the HVAC turnover at Riverside.

and Masson Avenue, we have two vacant units, both of them are not ready.

At Mickey, we have three vacant, two are substantial and they're going through it for renovation and one is just not ready.

One of those units will be also used as a warming station when we get ready to do the HVAC turnover at that site as well.

At Crescent Halls, we have two vacants, one is rent ready and one is already ready with an approved application.

At South First year we had three vacant units.

We have two notices to vacate.

Public housing wait list is closed.

We do have 3,699 families on the public housing wait list.

That's between the one bedroom to five bedroom units.

There was one new unlawful detainer filed or already pending.

One pending court date, non-trial schedule, zero pending writs.

For the non-public housing units and snow vacancies at Coleman, one vacancy at Montrose, nine in Dogwood, two of them are offline.

Harris Road does one vacancy which has an application on it.

A majority of them, I can get an update on them.

but a majority of them were in, I believe, the Ridge Street properties and their one-barrel units.

They typically have a decent amount of turnover and a decent amount of them were rented to UVA-affiliated folks, so either students or faculty.

But I can get a bigger update on where those units are located and the condition of them.

The tenant accounts receivable for the month

It's $109,000 and the total is $265,102.

That number should continue to come down.

We've been working with the tenants, also Pathways to pay some of the rent.

And then we also have a program that we'll be rolling out.

with the eviction diversion, you'll hear about it next month, that will provide some financial assistance to the folks as they continue drawing, paying those balances down.

The report also goes into the traffic amount of visitors coming into the office.

As you can see, Crescent Halls is typically the busiest at 214 Interaction, South First Street at 120, West Haven at 139, and Sixth Street with 65.

The report also goes into the collection efforts of the collections manager.

The case management update, which we have ten eligibility letters were sent out to unit offer letters are waiting.

and then upcoming staff training, which you'll see frequently.

Quick question, Mr.

because those residents are very active.

We see the traffic active as they're engaging with us.

Okay, I didn't know if there were like specific types of requests or anything or just...

Some are just stopping in to say hello.

Fair enough.

Anytime there's an issue, like if security didn't check their ID when they came in.

So they stop frequently for almost everything.

But we also have a lot of events that happen at Crescent Halls.

So have like a bingo crochet event.

And so they're doing a lot of planning and engaging there.

I think I hit on all the highlights.

If you don't have any questions after you are analyzed, I can answer.

One additional highlight.

I'm sorry.

Not the property manager.

service coordinator?

Brittany Gordon.

Brittany.

Mr.

Sales, Ms. Carey, Ms. Gordon, Ms. Green, they put together, I forgot to mention this, but they put together a toy giveaway and kind of a community outing for Christmas.

It went really well.

Mr.

Sales bought a gang of toys and almost got me beat up for them.

You gonna say Mr.

Sales?

Yeah, cause that's what's gonna get blamed.

They had free food and

a lot of giveaways and whatnot.

It made me think about it when you touched on the traffic.

It was very, very well attended.

And those are the type of events that come out of the resident service coordinators.

So that's all under Kathleen.

And so they are supposed to have at least one event every month at each of the sites to engage with the residents.

But then the property managers also have an event.

And so that was the holiday event for South First Street.

But that is something that we're gonna make sure continues.

Completely.

Sorry about that, Miss Kathleen, who set up the tables, the chicken, the mac and cheese, gave out the food.

Thank you for your efforts as well.

I apologize.

But that was a great event.

I'm looking forward to more of those.

I think even as those kind of events are planned, if all of us could maybe get a schedule of sorts.

I know that we all would love to, if we can, participate in some capacity.

Ms. Wilcox, you okay?

Thank you, Ms. Wilcox.

Does that conclude your report, Mr.

Thank you, Mr.

Sales.

Good evening everybody.

Good evening.

So we have 476 participants in the regular voucher program.

In the mainstream voucher program we have 33.

We have 47 in Crescent Halls and South First Street.

We have 23 and we have one available placement.

We have 22 participants in the crossings, enhanced vouchers is eight.

we have 10 emergency housing vouchers and eight tenant protection vouchers and eight relocation vouchers and we also have four participants in the VASH program and we also got an application to fill out for the last part.

We have 19 in the fostering youth independence program and we are trying to

Admore participant to reach 25, which is our CAT.

And we have 10 portable vouchers and we have 60

eight participants in the CSRAP program.

As you can tell in the inspection, we don't have as many numbers like we usually have.

We have a became for the inspector position and we're working to hire one.

There were 50 research done in the month of December, January.

and we have eight which are past due which we're working with those participants to get that paperwork in.

So I just have a question.

These numbers, the wait list available, do we have 1,706 people on the wait list for housing choice vouchers?

Yes.

And we have 1,239 for the crossings?

That's correct.

The need is great.

I think you raise one thank you.

I think that brings the point to how significant the need is, specifically in the city.

However, it's not solely our responsibility to house all of these individuals, and we're doing a valiant job.

We're putting forth a valiant effort to address the housing needs.

but we also see that there's a great need for a wide variety of different sectors to assist.

Okay, TC finance update.

Doing good.

So yeah, I don't have a report.

That is because we just finished our audit.

on 1231 for CRHA, clean audit, no findings, everything is glorious.

I am going to speak with our auditor, Jake Dooley, and see if he can do a presentation for us next month.

I know he has a busy schedule with tax season and other audits that he's working on.

I'm going to reach out to him to do a brief synopsis of our audit.

Tax credit properties, those audits are coming due.

We actually have to wrap those up next week.

So that's what we're working on now.

Those should be finished by mid-April, so I can let you know how those go.

As for now, that's all I got.

Would it be possible for us to get a copy of the audit?

Yeah.

Potentially in the next packet, or it could

being emailed to us electronically via PDF, whatever's easiest.

Mr.

Yes, I do, and I'll be brief.

All right, so I wanted to start by congratulating the team on the hard work for the Clean Audit, not only this year, but closing out all the findings, the HCV findings from last year.

They were on Programmatic, so I believe it was HUS Suspections, Reserves, and

income calculation, I believe were the free findings.

Those findings were closed out this year and there were no new findings.

Congratulations.

A bonus.

A bonus.

We've already had that much, so the bonus, you better watch Wes.

All right, so good job DB, good job Finance.

We're currently finalizing the closing for South First Street phase two.

We estimate that it will close within the next 30 to 45 days for us to start construction for phase two of South First Street.

Sixth Street phase one, it's currently in the works as well.

It's in the final step of HUD approvals.

so we're gonna be looking to move forward with that project towards the second quarter of this year.

We did receive a really large grant this at the end of the year, end of December.

Thank you.

So we've applied for, this is like a third year in a row applying.

We were not sets for the first two, but we were a third.

And so they are going to help us fund the bathroom upgrades, kitchen upgrades, flooring replacement, interior door replacement, painting, and light replacement.

We currently have two projects that are underway in those three sites.

That's the entry door, which we're seeing about a $200,000 savings by doing it in-house.

and HVAC expansion which is about 95% complete at Riverside and it's currently in progress at Mickey Drive.

We're working on a Madison Avenue HVAC and electrical project internally to reduce costs.

We're estimating a savings of around $300,000 by doing the work in house and stepping out the electrical compared to what we paid the current firm to do Mickey and Riverside.

The CFP development and engagement process is well underway and we should see large projects move forward in the upcoming year that were previously slated for 2027 and 2028 due to additional money from HUD for that site.

We're estimating it's going to be about $3 million to complete all of those projects, that's the kitchen, bathroom, flooring, painting, interior doors, and interior lighting, and temporary relocation.

I gave the update on the SOP, so I'll skip that.

310 East Main, demolition is underway to prepare for rebuild to start in March or April.

I will work with New Hill to redesign their space that will be the food hall, that will be on the mall entry level and in the basement level.

and we are working with CNE which is the Center for Nonprofit Excellence to finalize their design in their space which will be on the mall level towards the back facing Water Street.

Upcoming meetings, we have the work session on the 13th which will cover the eviction process and the eviction diversion program and so that will be presented by Miss Terana Banks who is the director of property management

and Miss Kathleen Glenn-Matthews, the deputy executive director.

We're also working with the auditor to schedule a date for him to present the audit and we'll make that available to you guys as well and hard copy.

I was gonna say I think that you've

We're all already into March based on the things that we just talked about this evening.

I can't think of anything at this time, but I shouldn't speak for my other.

No, I think that we just have to all intentionally, we all are going to have to be intentional in terms of meeting for our work sessions.

We got a great deal of work to get done.

Yeah, so our last one was towards the middle end of last year, which I thought was really good.

I've had some calls from a couple of counselors, not in a bad way.

Yes, indeed.

Mr.

Sales, one quick question.

Well, we meet with the HUD monthly.

TC's face maybe says no.

It depends who you're talking about.

So we meet with our field office monthly.

TC must meet with them a lot.

But we meet with, like Kathleen meets with jobs plus folks.

She's probably done it twice a month.

what may or may not be transpiring, I think it's best if all of us are well aware so that we can be prepared to pivot if need be and maybe we just continue to excel.

Well, we're gonna continue to excel regardless.

Yeah, we're gonna excel regardless, but I think...

Yeah, a few things to have on council's radar.

It would be helpful to get a fuller safety update at some point since I saw that five of the court dates are being set that were not about non-payment of rent.

So I assume that a lot of those are safety related.

Awesome.

Okay.

Please don't ask me.

No problem.

Okay.

You have comments, Stokely?

Stokely.

Okay.

I'll second.

Aye.

All opposed?

Thank you, everyone.

All right.