In November, Shelterforce and Next City co-sponsored, “Fixing the Housing Crisis Beyond Supply,” a webinar that focused on the root causes of the housing crisis and solutions that go beyond merely adding supply.
The conversation covered various approaches that can help address this urgent problem, such as policy reforms and zoning changes, establishing community land trusts, affordable housing development, and tenant protections. Shelterforce’s Miriam Axel-Lute moderated a discussion that featured Next City’s housing correspondent Roshan Abraham, as well as:
- Julia Duranti-Martínez, senior program officer at Local Initiatives Support Corporation, known as LISC. Duranti-Martínez supports research and program design and implementation across LISC’s network of local offices and partners.
- Candice Turner, director of homeownership at Maggie Walker Community Land Trust. Turner is also a psychotherapist and social worker.
- Liz Ryan Murray, director of strategic campaigns at Public Advocates, a nonprofit law firm.
Editor’s note: This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
Miriam Axel-Lute: The need to support strategies that increase housing supply has gotten a lot of airtime in the past several years, and they’re necessary but not sufficient to address the housing crisis for a number of reasons.
First, there’s an income floor below which housing cannot be affordable without subsidy, period. Second, housing is not a widget, and so simple supply and demand curves don’t really work very well. As any real estate agent knows, it’s about location, location, location—and locations are all unique. They can’t be replaced for each other. Transaction costs are very high. Increases in supply do not always go to those who are going to use them, and the housing market is broken into many submarkets where changes in one don’t have the same effect on the other.
Finally, underlying talk of supply and demand is the fact that housing costs are very closely related to land costs. Land is in fixed supply, and as long as landowners continue to be able to capture increases in land value for themselves, it’s hard to keep housing prices from going up. In fact, a lot of the strategies you will hear today have something to do with changing the balance of land ownership or redirecting power and increments in land value away from private landlords or private landowners and toward the public good.
In general, you can’t talk about supply without talking about ownership. I hope you’re ready to go beyond supply with this wonderful panel, and I’m going to let them each introduce themselves.
Julia Duranti-Martínez: My name is Julia Duranti-Martínez, and I’m a senior department officer with LISC, with our National Community Research and Impact team, based in New York City. We are a national nonprofit community development lender. We’re a community development financial institution, grantmaker, capacity builder, convener, technical assistance provider, and many other things, with 38 local offices across the country, as well as a pretty extensive rural network.
Our team at LISC, Community Research and Impact, supports research and program design and implementation and systems change across our network of local offices and national programs. Preservation strategies is one area where our team has really focused over the last few years, supporting our local offices that are interested in strengthening their housing infrastructure.
To Miriam’s point, obviously, new production of housing is important, but we also need to invest in saving and improving what we have, and housing quality is a big part of that conversation alongside long-term affordability. Local offices are pursuing everything from [setting] up local housing trust funds to support groups with acquisition, supporting community development corporations and emerging developers, supporting home repair, addressing fractured title and heirs’ property issues, and efforts to expand tenant protections. All of this alongside supporting community ownership strategies like community land trusts, limited equity cooperatives, and resident-owned communities.
With that whole range of potential tools, there’s been a lot of interest across different local offices in community opportunity to purchase policies and tenant opportunity to purchase policies—COPA or TOPA, as they’re often called—as policy tools that can really complement different kinds of preservation investments, and also as a way to combat rising investor ownership, which is a key part of some of these dynamics.
Liz Ryan Murray: My name is Liz Ryan Murray. I am the director of strategic campaigns at Public Advocates, a legal and advocacy organization based in California, working on issues in housing, education, climate, and transportation.
I also am formerly the director of the Alliance for Housing Justice, and still staff and work with AHJ, which is a national coalition focused on the federal response on housing, looking at fair housing, tenants rights, and social housing. As Miriam said, there’s been so much emphasis on production without a lot of emphasis on production for whom.
A lot of the work that I get to do at the Alliance for Housing Justice and at Public Advocates is working with our community partners and our organizing partners and our legal and advocacy partners towards what we keep being told by the folks that are most negatively impacted by our housing crisis: We have to move beyond the system we have. It doesn’t work. It wasn’t designed to work for everyone. We need to move to a system that is decommodified, permanently affordable for everyone. Make sure that everyone, especially people who can’t afford market rent, have decent, safe, stable, affordable housing.
A lot of times we talk about social housing. I’m going to talk a little bit today about how we get there and acknowledge it’s not a single step. It wasn’t a single step before two weeks ago when the political landscape shifted, and it’s not going to be a single step now. There are many pathways we have to walk down.
Roshan Abraham: My name’s Roshan Abraham. I live in Queens, New York. I’m a freelance journalist. The issue of supply is one I think about a lot. When we talk about supply, we’re often talking about the way that supply or limited supply offers more market power to landowners by limiting the amount of choices that consumers have. We don’t talk enough about the fact that there are many other points of leverage that tenants have and that they can use or produce by banding together.
We don’t talk enough about all the leverage that communities or the state and the government has in terms of having the power of the purse, which it often doesn’t use. That includes federal housing tax credits, which are disbursed by states and where states can set conditions, and includes state trust funds and other forms of states acting as lenders and having the power to set conditions on loans and financing.
The question of who we’re producing housing for is a really important one.
Candice Turner: I am Candice Turner. I’m the director of homeownership with Maggie Walker Community Land Trust in Richmond, Virginia. In a community land trust, homeowners purchase what is referred to as the improvements, and they lease the land.
That process is an act of reciprocity to keep homes affordable in perpetuity throughout the life of the ground lease, which is 99 years. What I want to add to the conversation here is the importance of making housing successful, not just for that person that we’re housing in that moment, but that we’re providing stability throughout the lifetime of that particular family or families to come.
The first way that we do that is to approach housing from a holistic perspective. I have worked with, of course, homeowners in my current position, but I’ve also worked with veterans, [and] with community members that were facing displacement from public housing. What I’ve noticed is that when we think of a housing first model—that once somebody is stably housed, we see their mental health improve, we see their wellness improve, so their physical health improve—we also acknowledge that there are comorbidities when it comes to housing instability.
When we think of ways to make a great impact, not just today, but tomorrow, we have to use that holistic approach in thinking about what affordability is. At the end of the day, everybody is trying to afford wherever they live. Even when we think about the term “housing affordability,” we have to recognize and acknowledge all the things that have to be in place for someone to not just get housed, but to remain housed.
What can we do to address not only the existing housing crisis, but a likely increase in homelessness outside of or not relying on a hostile federal government and possibly even multiple hostile state governments?
Ryan Murray: The very first thing is don’t give up before we’ve lost. I think there’s an instinct sometimes—I certainly felt it, right? To just lie down on the floor—We can’t do that. Last time we went through something like this, there were a lot of battles we won. I want to make sure that everybody keeps fighting. There are battles to be won. That is not to sugarcoat that it’s going to be a really challenging environment, in many states and at the federal government.
I want to make sure that everybody keeps fighting. There are battles to be won.’
Liz Ryan Murray
I would say that the big thing is local, local, local. As local as talking to your neighbors, talking to the folks who live around you, who shop with you. Find local organizing groups that can bring people together, bring together as tenants, as homeowners, to do work in your own neighborhood. Mutual aid and service, especially as homelessness numbers may go up and certainly the attitudes towards our homeless neighbors continue to toxify. Anything you can do to help those folks individually and at your own local level would be my response.
Abraham: The question is a really, really difficult one because the political landscape that we’re currently in regarding homelessness was a bipartisan one, which makes it really challenging for people who care about the rights of people who’ve been forced out of the housing market. The Supreme Court case that was ruled over the summer, that only came to the attention of the Supreme Court after both Republican and Democratic politicians, including Gavin Newsom, petitioned the Supreme Court to take it up.
We see, in every major city, that there are attitudes about homelessness and strategies toward homelessness among those cities’ mayors that they don’t take [into account], first and foremost, the health and safety of people who are unhoused for no [fault] of their own. There are attempts at cleaning up and addressing perceived blight.
In terms of solutions, the first thing I would say is to resist the tendency to be reactive about this. I think most big-city mayors addressing this are really acting from . . . the politics of grievance instead of looking at solutions. For tenants and renters, there’s a big challenge [in that] tenant movements are not always seen as being in solidarity with movements of unhoused people. There’s a lot of cross-class organizing that can happen.
We’re seeing that groups like the LA Tenant Union are doing a good job of putting this front and center as an idea in terms of organizing, treating unhoused people as tenants. That’s a big deal because, at the end of the day, politicians do not see unhoused people as their constituents. Even when they’re outwardly trying to present solutions, there’s a level of pity there. We’ve seen great organizing among unhoused people historically throughout the decades. There’s been a lot of organizing.
There’s the National Homeless Union, which is seeing a resurgence recently. We saw what I thought was a really great model in Sacramento last year, where there was a group of unhoused people who created an encampment on what was a city-owned lot that was supposed to be a space for homeless people, but there were bureaucratic issues getting in the way. They essentially started an occupation and the city reached a lease with them that guaranteed that everyone could stay on the land until they had permanent housing. Everyone agreed to that.
No one really wanted to live permanently outdoors. They all wanted permanent housing. Unfortunately, even though I think that was a great model, it could not withstand the politics, both at the national and local level. The lease was dissolved over the summer and they were swept from the encampment, but I still think it’s a great example. It’s something we can look to in terms of cross-tenant and unhoused person solidarity [to build] strength to respect unhoused people and find ways to give folks what they want and need, which is not a really complicated thing. It’s the way to solve homelessness with housing.
Turner: We have to get creative, No. 1. No. 2, also acknowledge that everyone that’s here, I’m assuming, is already doing the work. As Liz said, don’t stop and don’t give up. There is a time, and I think a lot of people have already taken that time—a moment of grief—to acknowledge the struggle may look a little different now.
However, that doesn’t negate the fact that there’s still work for us to do. I mentioned getting creative because here in Richmond, there’s an organization that’s been around for a while called Caritas, which goes from church to church or places of faith, and specifically during this time of year, people that are houseless are able to stay. Churches turn into somewhat of a shelter and a place of resources.
We have people [signing] up that move from place to place until stable housing is able to be offered. I’m mentioning that because there’s work that has to be done to put people in position of receiving housing. We’re talking about that housing affordability or the houselessness issue. There are also things that need to be put in place to prepare someone even for that.
When we talk about those comorbidities—severe mental illness can be a comorbidity when it comes to houselessness—how are we providing care in that regard as well, preparing someone for housing in any capacity? Also keeping in mind that people have housing trauma. I am one of them. What are we putting in place to meet those needs as well? Again, all trauma isn’t visible. Housing trauma is one of those things.
Thinking about which other organizations and providers can we bring into the fold to assist people and meet them exactly where they are. Also offering other pilot programs. We ran a lease-to-own program which allowed a certain portion of money that people paid for rent to go into escrow if they decided to purchase. Is that a way that we can offer additional housing?
Again, getting creative, using the resources that we have right now. There is a push nationally from a faith-based initiative because . . . some churches have not returned after COVID. What spaces in your community are not being utilized at all that could be used? That’s something to think about as well.
Candice, can you give a definition of housing trauma?
Turner: Yes. Some people have housing trauma when it comes to separation of families in public housing. There’s a plethora of ways that we can define housing trauma, [for instance], think of a break in how someone sees themselves as stable. Anything could trigger that, but it can leave someone stuck thinking “I can never purchase a home” or “I’ll always be in a shelter” or “a particular type of housing is something that I should not be able to have access to.”
Duranti-Martínez: The only thing that I might add is there’s obviously going to be a need for rapid response organizing and for emergency kinds of organizing. Something that long predates our current moment and predates COVID, although it’s certainly been exacerbated by the pandemic, is just the need to invest in the basic capacity of community-based organizations.
That includes community land trusts and cooperatives and other forms of solidarity economy. Understanding all of this as rebuilding our community-controlled and local-controlled infrastructure and institutions who have always played a really important role in literally sustaining communities and meeting community needs and are going to become especially important in the face of hostile governments and cuts to resources at the federal level that may filter down, and hostile state government policies as well.
I think, again, that’s everything from the mutual aid, locally rooted kinds of work that Liz was speaking about, to investing in nonprofit organizations and their capacity to continue delivering their services and doing their work, to the housing organizations that want to add some sort of housing preservation or housing development work to what they’re doing, recognizing how much time it takes to build out that experience and how resource-intensive it is.
I would say too, just as a queer person, one thing that I’ve found really helpful is re-grounding in our movement histories and just what we can learn from the incredible work that queer and trans elders have done for generations in resisting hostile institutions and creating structures and practices around community care and mutual aid and building organizations to reflect that.
All of that also needs to be shored up, especially given that LGBTQ+ folks are among the many communities that are potentially going to be most targeted. In general, reconnecting with those histories and practices brings a lot of sustenance to a time that can otherwise feel . . . like it’s really hard to imagine a path forward and what action might look like.
Amen to that. I just want to note that Shelterforce has a piece about folks in Florida who’ve been working on how to keep doing tenant organizing in the face of state preemption on the kinds of protections they’ve been working on before. There’s some recent history of folks trying to figure this out. We’re going to keep doing it going forward.
Let’s move on to some more depth on the strategies that we’ve been talking about. Can we each talk about one concrete, promising strategy that would help with addressing our housing crisis?
Abraham: One thing that I mentioned really briefly at the top: states have the ability to set conditions on federal money that comes their way, including for the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit, which is the main way that affordable housing is funded in the United States.
We had reported on that a few weeks ago. That’s where state-level advocacy can lead to deeper affordability and longer affordability periods instead of the minimum 30 years. The other thing that I would like to lift up is—when we’re talking about supply and about where that supply is targeted, like what affordability levels—that one really good model that gets at this is in New Jersey, [the Mt. Laurel doctrine], which stem from a 50-year-old civil rights lawsuit of a Black woman who had filed this class action lawsuit on behalf of her community because their homes were being destroyed.
The new zoning that was being put in place in their community just did not allow for multifamily housing at all. This led to a lawsuit, and 50 years of back-and-forth lawsuits, and now New Jersey has this legal framework where basically every region has to produce their fair share of affordable housing and the income levels are based on the jobs numbers for those regions and the housing is subsidized by the federal Low-Income Housing Tax Credits I mentioned earlier, but also by development taxes.
New development gets a small tax and that goes to a state housing trust fund. Obviously, whenever there’s development taxes, developers claim that it’s going to reduce the amount of housing production. There’s no evidence that that has happened in this case. It’s developed a lot of housing. The amount of housing it’s developed has increased a lot in the past seven years just because the legal framework has kept getting stronger with additional lawsuits and back-and-forth lawsuits.
I think it’s something to look at and it can be reproduced. It would be hard to reproduce it through the judicial branch, but I think that legislatively, on a state level or community level, it can be reproduced. What’s good about it is that even though communities can still have input on the housing that’s getting built, they can’t really just turn down housing out of hand. They have to meet this requirement, these affordability requirements.
I think it’s a really good model that contrasts a bit with [the idea that] market rate is the only type of housing that matters and somehow it’s the cheapest way of producing housing, which I don’t really think it necessarily is when you’re thinking about the lowest income renters.
Great. I just want to throw out very quickly, Massachusetts has something a little similar that they did legislatively, 40B, and recently, some studies have found that that actually meaningfully reduced segregation, which is something that has felt very sticky and hard to achieve. It has many benefits approaching fair share housing that way. I’m going to turn to Candice now to talk just a little bit more about CLTs.
Turner: As I mentioned, CLTs really are an act of reciprocity, whereas the program is bringing someone into homeownership. Then in turn, that person, if they do decide to sell, is bringing someone else in [who] has the same qualifications. In a CLT, we use the HUD 80 percent of AMI, but for our program, most of our buyers are truthfully in the 60 percent AMI scenario.
It’s very important to keep in mind that legacy is something we have to think about when we’re thinking about stability. The idea is not just that we house someone. We want to make sure that we’re offering opportunities that don’t allow people to recycle back through the system. In our desire to house someone or to provide an opportunity, it’s increasingly important that we keep the mission in mind and not [be] in crisis mode.
A CLT is one solution to that, in the sense that the home can be passed down as a legacy asset. Thinking about our namesake Maggie Lena Walker, who was born in Richmond and was the first Black woman to preside over a bank, I really believe that there were tables that needed to be created [when] there was not a seat at the table. When we think about . . . a solution to this, community land trusts offer that legacy opportunity.
I also want to mention, [regarding] something that Julia said earlier in terms of finding the people that are already doing the work in the community that often go without assistance: How do we link to people that are already in the community? That’s one of the things that we do at MWCLT. If there’s a community that has an opportunity for us to build, it is going into the community and finding those organizations that are doing the work and asking what those needs are. Asking what does housing affordability look like in this community? What does the ideal home look like? What are the needs?
Again, that’s even outside of housing. We can’t talk about housing without talking about food insecurity. We can’t talk about housing without talking about other supports that are needed. That is something that I want to bring to the table as well when we’re talking about strategy. Let’s not exclude the big picture of it all. Stability is inclusive of health. Of course, that wealth piece, but also the mental wellness part. Bringing in those other providers that can assist with that is important as well.
Duranti-Martínez: To what Liz was saying earlier, none of this is just one tool. Even if we’re just looking at preservation, there’s no one quick fix. One policy that has been gaining a lot of momentum over the last few years is COPA or TOPA, community opportunity to purchase, tenant opportunity to purchase. There’s different ways of structuring these policies, but basically the idea is to give either tenants or a community-based partner a fair shot at buying rental buildings when they go up for sale, which is often an extremely destabilizing moment for tenants and for any organizing work that may be happening because [of the] ownership change.
They have to start over from scratch when it comes to improving building conditions or limiting rent takes, things like that. The best-known example is, of course, Washington, D.C.’s TOPA policy. It’s been in place for over 40 years, has had a lot of success preserving affordability, but also leading to significant housing upgrades and repairs in about 12 percent of the district’s multifamily housing stock, which is pretty tremendous given that most places don’t—outside of code enforcement—have real mandates around owners improving their property.
It can lead to real improvement for tenants, both in terms of quality and in terms of affordability and just having a say, [or] if tenants are not interested in forming a co-op and buying their building themselves, having a say in who the future owner is going to be. That can very easily be a community land trust, for example, or similar kind of community-based nonprofit.
There’s a way that these strategies can be used to support CLTs in growing and scaling their work and supporting cooperatives as well. The last thing to note about these is that a policy by itself without investments in tenant organizing, technical and legal assistance to groups, and fast and flexible acquisition financing, it’s not that helpful.
Being able to pair these kinds of TOPA or COPA policies with investments in local preservation programs and infrastructure has been something that folks in communities who have COPA or TOPA emphasized over and over. There’s a flip side of that too, which is that if you’re working in a state that maybe would preempt something like a local right of first refusal or COPA or TOPA policy, there are still ways to get similar outcomes by investing in those kinds of preservation programs and tenant organizing.
I think, too, the fact that there has been [such] an incredible amount of tenant organizing nationally in different communities—including in cities and smaller cities and towns that have not historically had a super strong tenant movement—is a real sign of encouragement. Just the number of groups who were able to organize and actually acquire their first properties during the pandemic, this time of incredible, incredible strain on communities, you look at examples like in Comunidades Latinas Unidas En Servicio in the Twin Cities or Buena Vista Co-op in D.C., some of the New York City-based CLTs and co-op efforts, California.
All of those are things that can be built on and scaled and channeled for all of this work. If we’re trying to think about potential opportunities and windows as we look towards the future, those are some of the things to focus on.
Ryan Murray: Roshan talked a little bit about what I want to highlight, which is the opportunity to shape the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit [LIHTC] in individual states. As Roshan mentioned, it is the largest by far source of funding for construction and rehab of affordable housing. It’s $13-some billion a year that comes from the federal government, and most states also have their own allocations. It was established in 1986, I believe.
It was passed to replace public housing. The racialized disinvestment from public housing went hand in hand with LIHTC, which is a tax credit program. It is a corporate tax giveaway with a trade-off of some affordable housing. It would be great if, someday, we could get to a point where we’re doing more direct funding for CLTs and programs and other forms of decommodified permanent affordable housing.
For now, LIHTC is what we have. It’s huge. I believe it’s well over 90 percent of every affordable construction project that’s out there has some LIHTC in it one way or another. The federal government—again, it tells you a little bit about the priority of this—this is an IRS program. This comes from the Treasury. This is not a HUD program. It does not contain a whole lot of rules other than the tax rules. For tenant protections at the federal level, it’s quite skimpy.
There’s a very limited affordability window federally, 30 years. After that, the building can convert to market rate, which generally means mass displacement. Rents are set programwide at area median income, not at the family’s income. Often that leads to a pretty large rent burden in LIHTC buildings. There are very ill-defined just cause eviction protections at the federal level. There are no real rent caps. There’s an extremely complicated formula on how HUD actually sets rents.
If we talked about all the details of LIHTC, we would be here until next year. It’s an extraordinarily complex program. No community control or tenant control. The good news is . . . every state and a couple of cities around the country get their allocation of credits from the federal government and can set their own rules for the needs that they have in their own communities. Every community is different. Every geography is different. Every housing crisis looks different.
States and these cities have the opportunity, through something called the QAP, the Qualified Allocation Plan, to set their own rules. It’s a real opportunity for organizing because there are great examples of where states have really moved the LIHTC program to much more stability, much more tenant focused. California has a 55-year affordability ceiling, which is better than 30. Vermont has 99 years. (The ground lease is like Candice was talking about for CLTs.)
There are a bunch of states that set rent caps at 5 percent or lower, just cause eviction protections that are much better, much more protective of tenants in that process. It’s a bureaucratic process. Most of these rules are set at the community development departments. In California, it’s the Tax Credit Allocation Committee. There are rules about being open and taking comment, and some states do this every year.
There’s a real opportunity to lay down more bricks on this pathway towards true, sustainable, affordable, habitable housing for folks, and using the money we have. This is the big money.
We have some questions about how we encourage small towns and rural counties to think of themselves as places where they want to create housing and to engage in creating housing, perhaps beyond just using tax credits.
Also, are there Opportunity to Purchase Act versions that rural communities could see themselves in, in a way that they don’t in D.C.? One thing I will throw out there is that there is Opportunity to Purchase Act stuff around mobile home communities in Colorado, which is one place to start. Obviously, that’s not all the housing in rural areas, but it is one piece of the puzzle.
Duranti-Martínez: My understanding is New Hampshire and Minnesota have similar right of first refusal policies for manufactured home parks. Also looking at the work that Resident Owned Communities has done, ROC USA, is also super helpful. Then the handful of Maryland jurisdictions that also have right of first refusal and TOPA policies, some have been in place since around the same time as D.C.’s and others are more recent. They all work a little bit differently, but those might also be just helpful other examples to learn from.
Ryan Murray: Not every problem is a nail for my particular hammer, but I will say there are some states who have included, in particular, extra points on applications for LIHTC for incorporating a TOPA and COPA, which is a way to do that statewide. A big issue is getting the money to purchase.
That’s a real opportunity. Then, also working with states that’s a real opportunity. Then, also working with state, local, county, and federal on directing of funds, because there tends to be lip service to rural, sometimes more than actual services. Being able to shove, move some of that attention, some of that money, can be really helpful. Not that it’s easy, but it’s worth fighting for.
In this political time, what do you see as the potential for being a little more unified in our approach and messaging in a way that reaches a wider range of folks, including people who may not yet be housing insecure?
Ryan Murray: One of the things that we should all be echoing and telling the story and yelling the story of is a lot of this election was about people not feeling like they were being heard on affordability, on the costs of their daily life, and the biggest cost in just about everybody’s daily life is housing.
Their rent is too high. Mortgage is too high. Taxes are too high. They’re seeing it in their neighborhoods and they’re feeling it themselves and their kids and that’s the lesson we have to keep hammering.
There’s a real danger, and I’m seeing it, of people taking lessons from the election. It’s like, “Oh, we need to shift right. Oh, we need to stop talking about the most vulnerable people.” That is just frankly the wrong lesson, wrong from what we learned of who stayed home and who made decisions the way they did. It was about what they could afford. We have got to address the housing crisis.
It’s OK, to some extent, to let many flowers bloom on solutions. CLTs are a solution, and TOPA/COPA is a solution, and moving money is a solution, and homeless services is a solution, and decriminalizing houselessness is a solution. I don’t think that’s always necessarily bad as long as we’re coming back to this message of the dignity of all of our neighbors.
Turner: Liz hit the nail on the head. The common thread in all of this is that there is a need and we have to meet that need. What happens a lot of times is homeownership is cheaper than renting. We also have to acknowledge that some people may not be at a place of getting a mortgage and then there are also a group of people that aren’t at a place where they can even rent at certain housing communities because of the requirements that they might have.
We all do need to come together because the common denominator here is housing instability. The other piece of that is that CLTs are a solution. It’s not the solution for everybody. We want to get all of the players at the table, wherever it is that you live. If there’s a housing authority, if there is a CLT, whoever the players are, it’s really important, at this crucial time of transition, that we get everybody together to have the conversation, not just about who’s going to get the grant funding per se, but how do we address this problem together?
It is the only way we’re going to solve it. We can’t continue to walk around the elephant in the room as if it doesn’t exist. It’s here and it’s taking up space. The only way to address that is one conversation at a time with action. When we think about the rural areas, part of that is, at least here in Richmond, we have some of the mobile communities that have been taken on by some of our smaller development organizations in the area.
How do we give some of those other developers a chance or a seat at the table as well? They may not be able to develop 10 properties, but maybe they can do 1 or 2. How are we bringing other people and other resources into the room that weren’t considered? Another way of looking at this—it’s like Dorothy from “The Wizard of Oz.” She had the ability to go home, but she had to meet people along the way to get there.
It can’t just be on one organization or one path to get somewhere. It’s going to take all of us in order to get where we need to get to.
We have questions about a number of other solutions that we haven’t managed to touch on today, including supporting smaller property owners who want to keep rents affordable but need some financial support, inclusionary zoning, and rent restrictions. If there are any that you want to very quickly address, or talk about this general idea of how we coordinate all these multiple solutions.
Abraham: Rent restrictions are something that can be put as a condition of state funding or even federal funding that goes through the state. There’s ballot measures. There’s one that I think passed in the Twin Cities recently. That obviously there’s always like a lot of political pushback with rent restrictions.
As someone brought up, smaller property owners don’t always have the—there are certainly cases where there are units where the rent rolls are not matching maintenance need. It is incumbent on states to provide more support and do audits to figure out where that is happening, where the rent rolls are not matching maintenance needs, and to provide subsidies through one of the channels that we’ve talked about here.
Ryan Murray: We need rent control because all of the costs are real, but they shouldn’t be borne by the poorest and lowest income folks who are trying to keep a roof over their heads. That said, I agree on the issue of operating costs. As Miriam said, we need government help with this. If we’re going to house everybody, the private market isn’t going to do it.
Thank you.
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