Charlottesville Redevelopment and Housing Authority Board Meeting   10/27/2025

How are you girls?

How are you doing?

Good.

But I made it through.

I feel like I could get them out.

So I'm not finished, but I'm getting there.

But I was like, oh, goodness.

Hi.

Shake your hand.

Yeah.

How's it going?

Have a nice day.

I was going to ask if there's anything I've missed in the last month.

Yeah, maybe.

I think November 17th is the plan.

But we'll hear.

Today, I was catching up on personal stuff.

I think that was sent back over.

Yeah.

I think it's the November 17th meeting.

We just have to go and be like, for profit, yes, for what?

Yeah, that works for me.

But yeah, I understand.

I'm pretty major advising right now so I've had like all of the students that you saw have had to have individual meetings with each one of them so that they can like I can sign off on their schedule for the spring

I think I've done 29, I've got five left.

They are keeping me busy, but they're very sweet.

What do you do when you're not here?

I started over this summer with Steve Bettinger.

So I'm Executive Director.

That's fantastic.

Yes, and then the whole, the disaster of our current moment, yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

It'll be like end of the year push to deal with everything that hasn't been dealt with.

So it's like running down.

I was like, oh, I can call these through.

Yes.

Yeah.

You're like, what is the running list of things in your head?

Yeah.

Yeah.

I have like my to do list app on my phone and I don't think I've survived without it.

So yeah.

Yeah, hi, how are you, Lise?

Good.

Hey.

We met in person.

Oh, Lise.

Nice to have you here.

Javier, good to see you.

Yeah, I haven't been able to make the last few.

She lives far away or just like work stuff.

I was just getting caught up at work.

Yeah.

So if you look at the background, it was like in the office.

You're talking to somebody and you're like, oh, I'm not making it down.

I know I just actually did a zoom for my car because it was until six and I was like well I guess I just have to like sit here.

No.

Did you go?

No I didn't.

I was also at Karsh but a few years ago.

So we can start.

So can we call into session the meeting of the Housing Authority?

Yes.

Commissioner Goldblith?

So I think we can fold into general announcement meeting dates and reminders.

First I'll read out our upcoming sessions.

We have a work session for the board on Thursday, November 13th at 6 p.m.

The next regular meeting is Monday, November the 24th.

We have a redevelopment committee meeting the first Thursday of the month from 3 to 4 with a Zoom option.

Safety Committee meeting, noon to one on October 29th at South First Street, phase one, so it will be on site, and October 5th at Crescent Hall, on site.

Resident Services Committee is every second Tuesday of the month at 1 p.m.

I might open it up to our

We'll have the final presentation for the annual plan in November.

and the vote is in December though.

And then at the next work session we'll also be doing the five-year plan for capital fund and so that will be the first go around.

You guys were pulling together multiple years to complete really big projects.

So it's going to be pretty close to what we've already submitted.

For a follow-up group, would it go along with the energy center?

Thank you, Mr.

Sales.

I just wanted to, we're going to be coming in before city council on the 17th, right?

For the nonprofit.

Not yet.

So it was, everything has been submitted to the city for comments.

Gotcha.

Okay.

So we're just waiting.

Okay.

Any other questions or

I would, somewhat indirectly related to the Housing Authority's work for those concerned about the LV collective project by West Haven and the public debate that's been going on around that.

At our next City Council meeting during the 4 p.m. work session on Monday, November 3rd, City Council will have an initial discussion about if there's any

zoning changes that the city council's interested in making in response to, you know, Bi-Rite student housing projects going in at 10th and Page and Fifeville.

Thank you, Councilor Payne.

Any other

If not, we could move into public comments followed by FAR comments.

It seems like we have one person present.

Hello.

OK. My name is Terry Tyree.

I'm a community member at South First Street and an intern at Virginia Organizing and PHAR.

And this is my first time here at City Council and I just wanted to speak on

The FSS in Ross program not being available to HCV and PBV members.

I have Section 8 voucher from Albemarle County and I live over South First Street and I cannot get into the FSS program.

I just don't feel like that's fair.

I don't know if it's like in the process of being available to everybody or if it was taken away from being available to everybody.

But I know that originally when I had my voucher in Harrisonburg, I was a part of the FSS program without hopes that transferring to Charlottesville or Albemarle

Though Albemarle don't have the FSS program, that I will be able to be enrolled into the program once being in CRHA property.

I'd like a response.

So the FSS program is ran by the housing authorities and so it's not just who's your tenant, but it's who's administering your assistance.

So if you're in a voucher program, it's who's administering that voucher.

All right, thank you, Mr.

Sales.

Just the last follow-up to that.

Okay, so that's pretty informative.

If there's no other public comment, we hold a section for PHAR comments.

Hi everyone.

Good afternoon.

My name is Sophia Marrero.

I'm a community organizer with the Public Housing Association of Residence and I'm here to give the PhAR update today.

So most important thing that we've had in the past month is that we started the internship program.

We have a great, great class of interns who are asking the right questions, who are pushing, who are really trying to learn about everything.

Today we had a really great

It was so exciting to see them energized and excited about that and excited about learning and becoming more educated about their rights.

So that's something that will continue for six months.

And we're very hopeful that we have a very strong class and that it'll be a great result.

Some other events that we had this month, we had a financial literacy event with the Piedmont Housing Alliance at South First Street.

This was just an overview on budgeting and money management.

We got some residents to attend who were really interested in connecting with the Piedmont Housing Alliance afterwards.

and learning about their resources not just with financial coaching but with rent assistance.

So we're always happy to collaborate with other organizations and let residents know about the different opportunities that there are for them.

We also had very popular bingo night at West Haven and we had a great turnout and it was a lot of fun.

We are having one at South First Street this Wednesday at 5 p.m.

So we're very excited for that.

Over at Creston Halls, we've been hosting some Thursday Night Football events.

That is led by Stacey Rush.

I've heard that residents are really excited about that and having a great time and they're really into football.

So that's great for them.

This past Saturday, we also had Fall Fest at Sixth Street.

So this was for all residents of any public housing site.

And we had a lot of kids come up.

We had pumpkin painting, we had pizza, we had candy.

We had goodie bags, just a lot of, and then we also had some people from Virginia organizing, we had the interns come and help, and some other, the Rivanna,

I can't remember their name, but there were other organizations there as well, tabling and providing information for community members, so that was great.

Finally, we had Know Your Rights trainings across the different community sites.

We had one around leasing and policing, and we will be having one around immigrant rights.

So we're planning on that and then as Michael Payne mentioned the LV Collective work is still running and next City Council meeting at 4 p.m. November 3rd the work session encourage everyone to come out and support that's a really big meeting that we're hoping will allow us to get some work done with the zoning ordinance

Thank you.

Well if there's no further public comments we can move into updates from commissioners and discussion.

Say no so we can keep moving steadily through the agenda.

We have agenda item number one which is approval of board minutes for September 22, 2025.

It's attachment A.

Would the commission like to consider a motion regarding the minutes?

Motion.

Would somebody second a motion to approve the minutes for September 22nd, 2025?

Second.

Could we call a voice vote for approval of board minutes for September 22nd, 2025?

Aye.

Aye.

All opposed?

minutes were approved for zero.

We can move on to agenda item two, which is the annual panel hand.

Good evening, everyone.

I'm Kathleen Glenn-Matthews.

I'm the deputy executive director for the Housing Authority.

I'm here tonight to talk about the CRHA annual plan which we published on the 24th of this month.

This is a draft.

We're going to just go over the process, some of the next steps, and I've got time for feedback as well at the end.

For anyone who isn't familiar with the annual plan, I just wanted to give an overview of what it is and how it works and how it impacts our agency.

spend a lot of time, particularly during the summer, looking at what our goals are as an agency.

The Housing Authority did a complete revamp of the goals a couple of years ago.

Our executive director really spent some time looking at our five year plan and annual plan and looked at how we could tie some of these together.

And because of that, we set some pretty lofty goals.

So we haven't had a lot of changes this year.

Part of the plan is also looking to see if there's been any significant policy changes.

And if there are there, if we actually have a draft, we attach it.

And some of those policy changes you might see are the admin plan, which is the administrative documents for the voucher program, section three, the FSS action plan, which we did make some minor edits to this year.

So it is an attached document.

and the admissions and occupancy plan, which are the policies for public housing.

There's a lot of hub forms that have to be executed with the finalization of the plan.

We have a form that has to go in front of the city manager for signature.

It's reviewed by neighborhood services and city housing staff.

We have submitted that to them to begin the review process.

The main purpose of that is to see that it's consistent with the area consolidated plan.

We have forms around certification.

We also attach our five-year plan for capital funds that Mr.

Sales was just referring to.

And we also have sections just about civil rights.

For certifications, our executive director and board chair are often the two individuals who sign these documents.

We usually sign these documents after the board has approved the annual plan and then it's part of our submission ahead.

It seems like a lot of people today, as we were putting it in the offices on Friday, say that it's almost 200 pages, but it's a really important document, and anyone who

attends annual plan meetings as an opportunity to have their voice heard and it is recorded.

You're gonna see a lot of sections that will be added to the annual plan documenting every meeting we had.

Any question that's asked by attendees at the meeting and response is reported in the document.

The major steps, if it's an annual plan we usually start

around July if it's a five-year plan on March.

This year was just an annual plan.

I started talking to our resident advisory board which is our PHAR board.

I was speaking to the executive director of PHAR in July just to start getting a calendar set up to have meetings with the resident advisory board.

We started meeting in September.

I attended a PHAR board meeting and did a presentation on the plan and all of these documents became

officially recorded because it was with the Resident Advisory Board.

I'm going to be sharing some calendars shortly for public meetings we're going to be having for this process.

And I'd just like to reiterate, this is really an opportunity for residents to have their voice heard and influence the Housing Authority.

So I really encourage attendance, even though it might not sound like the most interesting thing when we're talking about goals and policies.

It's very important because it is what administrates what the agency does.

So the Housing Authority's fiscal year starts April 1st through March 31st.

We are right now working with an annual plan that started April 1st.

And the work we're doing now will be submitted to HUD for approval.

And that often takes quite a few months.

And also since we're seeing a government shutdown, we're expecting it may take a little longer this year.

All of these documents are on our website.

I sent the link to everyone when we posted the plan last week.

You can also go to that same link with key documents.

It's the very first section with annual plans.

You can see last year, the year before.

You can see our five-year plan.

You can see drafts and amendments.

It's all in one place on the website.

I make the point of making hard copies available to anyone who wants those.

We have them at all of our offices.

Residents can come and sit down and look at them.

They can check them out.

I try to reach out to as many members of the resident advisory board to see if they want hard copies or not.

A lot of folks are now telling me they're looking at it on their tablets.

Tonight, we're coming to you to do just an orientation of what the plan is, but we look forward to hearing feedback.

I was grateful to hear from Tara Rook that she reviewed the plan over the weekend.

So the five-year plan is through the fifth fiscal year.

We won't be working on that again for a couple years, but it's gonna come on quickly.

But one thing we always like to make sure people know is if something major happens, we can revise the five-year and the annual plan.

It's a process that involves putting out a draft for another 45-day period with the comments and public meetings, but these things can be done.

This is the official posting document that I sent out to everyone last week.

These are all the public meetings that are happening.

I'm going to be adding one more meeting as soon as we set a date to have a kind of education session with the new PhAR interns.

And I don't think we've quite settled on the date yet.

So once I get that, I'll add that because that'll be part of the official document as well.

All these meetings are hybrid.

If I am aware there's a need for translation, we can make sure it's at the meeting.

We also have put information everywhere that if individuals want to see a translated version, we can get that to them.

Our Language Access Department has already started the process of translating this document.

It's a big undertaking because it is a very long document, but I'm really grateful.

Last year was our first year and we had the entire plan translated in Arabic, but this year we have lost your goals.

and I know they've got a lot of work to do.

This resolution will be going before the board at the December 11th special meeting which is the same date you would have had a work session.

Traditionally, the Housing Authority has not had a December regular meeting because it falls right around the holidays.

If something was to happen and we needed to reschedule, we can do that.

We do start to push up against a deadline as we get closer with when the submission is due to HUD.

So we need to have it submitted to HUD around the second week.

One thing we're experiencing this year is we were having some challenges with the HUD portal and HUD staff were not there.

So Mr.

Sales has been making sure to reach out to HUD staff and have me reach out as well just so we've laid a paper trail that might be a completely electronic submission this year.

But hopefully the government shutdown won't last too much longer, but we will see.

Right now all of the meetings are in place and we're going to be starting them.

As I said, we're going to be waiting to hear back from the city to see if they have any questions.

The city usually submits a list of comments to us and then we put together a response to those.

We also

Shortly before the hearing, you should get a letter that's part of the official document and our table of contents, which is a response to the annual plan from the Resident Advisory Board.

And we usually reply in a letter that is from Mr.

Sales in the form of a chart where we respond to each question or comment that is in the letter itself.

So any questions for me?

All right, well, please reach out if anything comes up.

Thank you, Kathleen.

Well, if we don't have any other questions, we can hop about the annual plan.

And I'm gonna be handling that this evening.

So we have not had a lot of change, but I do want to continue pointing

in the areas where we have had the greatest concern and issues from HUD and that's along the lines of tenant accounts receivable.

And so the staff has been working to address those through the eviction diversion program as well as unfortunately some court proceedings as well for individuals that we have not been successful with working with through the process of eviction diversion.

and so I'll highlight some of those numbers.

This month we sent out 72 non-payment notices.

Those are folks who did not pay their rent by the fifth of the month.

We had 24 UD's filed and those are gonna be for folks who owe more than two months worth of rent.

Typically those folks are averaging more than four months worth of rent

We currently have eight pending court dates.

And of the 24 pending, that is roughly $62,000.

a worth of our total tenant accounts receivable that is a little over $230,000.

Which is about 10% of all the rent that we charge for the entire year.

Public housing is about a million dollar, a little less than a million dollars.

City housing in Dogwood is a little bit over a million dollars in rent that's charged amongst all those units.

The HUD average should be 3% or less.

And so we're off of hitting that target.

But we're working with families to adjust that through repayment agreements and instances where folks are not willing to work with us.

We unfortunately have to proceed with evictions.

That is never our first choice or first route we would like to go.

But a lot of the cases that we are moving forward with folks haven't paid in months.

And so we have to correct that behavior.

Knowing the shutdown is happening and assuming it's going to get pretty bad for folks next month if it doesn't end, is there anything that we can do to prevent making that worse by not evicting people?

If folks have a hardship, there is language for folks to put in for hardship, a temporary hardship.

We offer that both in the public housing program and the housing choice voucher program, and we do them.

So that will be the first course of action.

In the past we have stopped evictions which is kind of sort of how we got to where we are now.

When you just don't proceed with them, folks do not fear them.

Most of our rent gets paid after notices are distributed.

either a warning or proceeding with an actual eviction.

That's typically when we see folks come in to work with us on payments.

And so I would be very concerned with halting them completely, but we do offer some remedies to help folks adjust in times when there are hardships.

We did send out, so each year housing authorities are required to do a purge of their wait lists just to make sure the folks that are on the wait lists are actually looking for housing.

They're still in need of housing and so each year we send out notices to all folks.

on the waitlist requesting them to update their information just to make sure they're still interested in housing and so we started that process this year and we should think we're starting to see letters come back in so currently the number of folks

When the public housing waitlist is a little bit over 2,400 families, that number should change.

Our waitlist is closed, but depending on the number of folks that respond to that letter will determine how that looks, how many folks are actually on that waitlist next month.

It's a physical letter, correct.

So all of the processes held by HUD typically call for a written letter because that was the preferred response.

We are looking to adjust that, like we've added some additional technology like Ring Cafe,

and we're looking to utilize that a little bit more and so that will allow us to accept electronic documents.

Folks will be able to log into an app on their phone and take a picture of a document and send it over as a scanned document instead of having to physically come to the office, drop the letter or document off.

But we're working through that.

HCV is getting a step closer next month.

We'll have folks getting EFT payments.

Landlords having access to all their tenant information online.

So we're moving in an direction, but it's a slow crawl, not a marathon.

No, not a sprint, sorry.

Marathon's slow too.

And I believe that is all I have.

Any questions from the commissioners?

Thank you, Mr.

Sales.

And I'm going to take that.

Both of these departments have great managers and supervisors that are running them.

I'm just here to present the information.

And so there hasn't been much change in HVC department.

There will not be much change here in this department.

We're currently

on the cusp of a shortfall in HCV.

And so we have not issued any new vouchers.

The only vouchers that are getting issued are folks who are moving or in special programs that have special allocations for those vouchers.

And so we are consistent in an AT program at 450 participants for a total half of about $496,000.

There's 1,700 families on the wait list and nine unleased units.

Those folks are moving with the vouchers so they were already leased up.

The mainstream program has 37 folks and so that's a voucher capacity of three but that's under shortfall as well so we are not leasing that up.

and so that's actually a net loss of three families that were previously receiving assistance and so that happened because the rents for the 37 families went up so much that we can no longer afford to lease up the other three vouchers and so housing authorities have two ways of hitting their funding or goals from HUD, either spending the money or leasing up the total number of vouchers that your housing authority can have

Most housing authorities are not reaching their voucher capacity just because there's not enough money to get to the voucher capacity.

And so most folks are only spending the actual dollars.

There are some housing authorities that aren't doing either, but that is not us.

The project-based vouchers at Crescent Halls is steady at 49.

So there are two vouchers that need to be leased there.

And so we have the ability to lease up there.

There is a contract on that property.

to cover those vouchers.

Same with South First Street, there's one voucher there.

In the crossings there's also one family there.

And the crossings has their own wait list and that is 1,239 families.

And their wait list is open, which is why it continues to grow.

That is, all the other programs are fairly steady.

We do have an issue with our port vouchers.

Those are when families are living with CRHA but port moved to another location.

So let's say they decide they want to live in San Francisco, their voucher will allow them to move to San Francisco.

Typically housing authorities can do two things.

They can either absorb the voucher or build the other housing authority.

The housing authority probably at the time

did not have the funding to actually absorb the voucher and so they billed us.

We have probably about 20 housing authorities that owe us around $100,000 and so we are working to collect that as debt collectors with another housing authority.

Before the government shut down, we actually had a HUD working with us to do that.

We have had some success because there's some local housing authorities like neighbors that were a part of that list that we're working with directly.

But there are some housing authorities that are not close that owe us significant, significant dollars.

Like the California Housing Authority, I think it's like two or $3,000 a month that we're paying in rent because it's California, rents are high.

And so the housing authority hasn't paid in over a year.

So we're looking to collect.

CISRAP.

The CISRAP program is also fairly steady.

We did see an increase in the number of families there.

We leased up two, we leased up one additional family that had the voucher for about a year, which we are looking to try to reduce that search period because over the time that it has increased from three months

Six months to now and over a year it carries a liability because this whole time no one's accounting for that voucher and when it's going to lease up and then all of a sudden it leased up when the program was already full and so we could not just say hey you no longer have a voucher we leased it and

Wait for someone to fall off and then just not feel that position.

But we should not get to that position.

And so we're going to be working with the city to hone in on the search period a little bit more and then some other regulations with the scrap.

But that should be going towards council.

I think for its first reading towards in December and then overall program amendment in I think May of next year.

and I think that's all we have here.

Almost all in the same situation, except I did just read about one housing authority, I think Spark or Stark, that had hundreds of vouchers that haven't been leased up.

Well, commissioners, do you have questions?

We have John here available.

OK. Would we like to move on to the finance update?

Good afternoon.

I do not have much of a voice, so bear with me.

It is budget season for our tax credit properties.

Those are due to VCDC the 10th of November.

So we have the project going on.

As Mr.

Sales mentioned, in the HCV department, we have been slowly but steadily getting the EFT payments out.

So we have a round of landlords that will be in their first EFT payments out this month, and then we'll be expanding that.

pretty rapidly if everything works out okay.

So we're still trying to keep that very controlled for now though.

Beyond that, we have our audit coming up.

That is due on New Year's Eve to HUD.

So working with our auditor right now on scheduling all those times out for the fiscal year 25 audit.

Beyond that, there's not a whole lot else going on.

Any questions?

All right, thank you, thanks again.

Back to you, Mr.

So I wanted to briefly talk about the government shutdown and the impact on the housing authority.

At the moment, we do not know the impact.

Besides not being able to communicate with anyone at HUD,

when we have problems.

The funding has not stopped.

In fact, we've received emails just as recent as Friday and Thursday of last week about H-T-B funds for December.

And so they are a little early, earlier than normal when we would see that email.

And so I currently don't anticipate any issue there because we received those emails and it had the adjustment.

So someone's working to look at

how much they've given us previously compared to how much they need to give us to fulfill the current request.

And so we believe we're finally, we're moving forward with all of our current projects.

So in capital fund, we have a $4 million project starting with the complete renovations at Mickey Madison Riverside and the scattered homes.

And we also recently received the emergency

Emergency Safety Solutions Grant.

And that is for, I think I briefly said it was for fences.

I need to correct that.

That is for cameras at those three sites.

Residents, redevelopment along, the redevelopment team, Miss Taylor and Mr. Collins, did some door knocking and community engagement with all the sites to determine what's the best way to use those funds.

and so out of those conversations residents overwhelmingly requested security cameras and fencing and so the grant called for security cameras and fencing with fencing not being the primary the primary item in that request but the cameras being the primary item and the fence is going around like basketball courts in the site

in general.

There's a lot of conversation that will still happen around that because we also put money in a capital fund in future years for fences around the backyards and playgrounds and so there'll probably be some pooling of funds to actually get the full request fulfilled because the emergency solutions grant I think only had like twenty or thirty thousand dollars a year for fences and that number is going to be closer to a hundred or something.

and so we have a little ways to go there.

We were prepared to move forward with a contract for cameras.

I was gonna put on the agenda, but the government shutdown has caused that not to happen.

There are some things we need to do with HUD.

We had to sign a new ACC agreement for those funds and we had to amend the

Annual plan to include those dollars because they're capital fund dollars so it needs to be amended to include those additional funds.

Neither one of those things can happen without HUD staff being in the office.

And so there are emails sitting in folks' emails when they do come to work to get those things done.

But we can't move forward on that project until that happens because we do not have the $250,000 extra sitting around.

Let's see, what else?

I want to make sure that we highlight what's happening along redevelopment.

I don't know if anyone is driven by the site South First Street and Sixth Street, but their buildings are coming along.

We have two townhouse buildings that are completely up and now they're working on the interiors.

and we have a apartment building that's going up at the corner of Elliott where they're working on framing.

And so it's a lot of work happening over there.

It's really a transformational project.

It is the first tear down project that we're completing and so

There's a lot of emotions along with that project and so residents were able to go inside of that site a couple weeks ago the redevelopment team took some residents along to do a site tour but we're keeping really good documentation and we're going to be able to produce something really nice at the end to show the changes from like the very beginning the groundbreaking all the way through completion of residents moving in both for 6th Street and South 1st Street

I think at the last meeting I mentioned language access and the changes around how we are providing that service.

That service is currently going through the redevelopment department because they are the biggest user of that service.

They're engaging with the

most families in meetings and documents that need to be translated due to the redevelopments happening at West Haven, Mickey Madison, Riverside, 6th Street, South 1st Street.

And so we'll be looking to do something different there.

We're currently also using the language line, the language access line.

And so we'll be working through the next couple months to figure out what's the best placement for that and the best

Best fit for our needs because we did create a language access plan that was a HUD requirement that will no longer be the case and in play and so we'll have to figure out what is our our plan going forward to match our need not only what is required but what actually gets us to where we need to be and we're engaging with all of our folks they can engage with us.

One other thing I'll point out is home ownership.

We currently, Kathleen told me earlier today we had a family that's going to be moving in that direction from public housing.

And so they're not a part of our program, but we do have some public housing home ownership down payment assistance funds available that we'll be looking to get spent out by the end of the year, not the end of our year, but the end, not the end of the calendar year, but the end of our fiscal year.

Commissioners have questions for our Executive Director, Mr.

I thought you had said at a previous meeting that HUD not only ended the language access program requirement, but also maybe wasn't gonna allow for language access programs.

Well, so we would need to find other ways to pay for it.

To fund it.

We can't fund it through HUD means.

Got it.

There's still a question that we have not been able to get answered.

around program income.

So HUD looks at two different things as their income.

They look at the money they give you directly and the money you generate from what you have due to them.

So technically we have public housing that's owned by HUD and so the income that we generate from that is called program income.

And so that income

is a derivative of federal funds and so typically when they say hey you can't use our money you also can't use program income which was generated due to their income and they do the same thing with like their loans so they may create like a down payment assistance loan through home when that loan gets prepaid it's program income it still has the same regulations as the original income that they gave you that produced the program income

And so we're still waiting on direction on that piece.

So it would be prudent to consider that in the future we might have to get creative.

Yes.

I don't want to speak for the rest but you know it's part of our strategic planning was accessibility on language so maybe it's something to highlight.

Yes.

So that will be the nonprofit should be the vehicle to get a lot of things done that you can't do with federal money.

Like resident services is one of the biggest obstacles when it comes to federal money.

Like as the speaker said earlier, there's so many programs where depending on what subsidy you're receiving, you can't

get assistance even though you're living on the same property.

So South First Street is one of our anomaly properties where you have three different subsidies.

You have public housing, voucher, and then no subsidy at all.

And so depending on what unit you were living in really determines what you qualify for, which is why we created the Resident Service Department.

We have individuals like Brigid Moss who works in resident services who can work with anyone at any of those sites because they're not just federally funded.

They're funded through other sources like the city is a contributor.

They give $137,000 a year for resident service support.

changing slightly but for thanks for the site updates I think you mentioned that you're kind of cataloging the shift just so you can kind of show for lack of a better term of before and after and I know we talked about well I'll use this word like showing our work so it's like that there might be an opportunity as you kind of work through the phases to say hey this is

It could be like, you know, this is development work that's continuing despite outside factors in HUD and the federal government.

But I do think it's, you know, between social media or what might merit to provide clarity on the work being done over at both of our sites.

What is it?

Yeah, we definitely agree with you.

I got to spend more time on that piece.

But yeah, we definitely agree with you.

That was one of the reasons why we made the investment in getting a drone.

We had a company provide us with a quote to go every two weeks or every month, they would go take photos.

And the price was like $15,000.

And the drone was like $1,000.

So yeah, get a drone.

We're putting it in the sky.

And so it was probably one of the best investments we've made so far is being able to document everything that's happening without actually having to be there is amazing.

We're able to now plot all of our homes.

Because now we have houses all throughout the city.

But now we have a GIS map that shows exactly where every house is located.

they also have like photos to actually document and market all of our units now because at one point we were only public housing so your marketing was really the people on the wait list so you didn't really have to do marketing but now we have tax credit units we have the Dogwood site we have the NOAA units which need marketing and so we are trying to improve on that end as well because it's new but we're competing against every other landlord that's in shawls from now and so

We're going to get there.

And I don't know if PHAR has an interest in some of that material.

Yeah, was that it?

Was it three years ago?

I think it was 22, maybe.

Yeah, 22 or 23.

Yeah, that's between you guys.

The other thing I just wanted to ask on a personal level is you kind of highlighted that you're trying to make progress on a few things and really it's back in the house where you weren't getting responses from HUD.

Is there anything, none of us know how long this will go, but is there anything that will be tangible, very visible, or residents will feel really effective in an immediacy?

I know that

programs outside that are tangential to us like SNAP.

So we started our food sharing is caring partnership earlier this month and rode it out to more than just Crescent Halls.

I think we did the perfect timing because we're already starting to hear from folks and just us providing those at one point we were just providing trips to food banks but just seeing the number of folks that is just increasing often folks are coming to get assistance or requesting transportation to a food bank and like Crescent Halls

Every week is consistent of the number of folks that are needing the assistance.

So that is not going to change.

Like Kathleen mentioned, the number of agencies that are willing to provide that assistance or have the capacity to provide that assistance will drastically decrease.

Agencies like The Haven, which is a big partner when it comes to keeping families housed, they're already running on very slim funds to help families in general.

But now you're increasing the number of families that need the assistance and the dollar amounts of the need is increasing as well.

And so it's really a compounding problem where you're going to help even less because it costs to help their families even more.

And so those are things we're going to continue to see.

I will say we have some things in place.

to help families that are back rent, such as repayment agreements where they were actually giving folks a realistic number that they can actually pay.

So it's not a take that number divided by six, give them six months to pay it.

No, we have folks that are paying like 50 bucks or $25 additional or $100 additional when maybe what they owe is like $6,000.

Thank you.

Do commissioners have any other questions?

If we don't have any other further comments we can open up to our

Public comments again.

Is there anybody in the audience or online who's interested in providing a public comment?

Well, it seems to me that there's nobody present.

Do we have a second?

Second.

All in favor?

Aye.