All right, good afternoon, everybody.

We are gonna go ahead and get going with study session today.

Um, first up, we have Oscar Duran with the municipal housing agency, and he is gonna do a short presentation to the council about what is um new in his world and projects that are going on.

Oscar?

Oh, can you hit the button?

There you go.

I missed your one instruction on side.

Hello, everybody.

Oscar Duran with the municipal housing agency at Council Bless.

Um, just really excited um to kind of show you today kind of what we've been working on over the last few years.

Um one of the big things I we I arrived right in the middle of COVID.

Um, so we looked at the agency and kind of where it was in the community and kind of made a list of different things to do.

And so you'll see in the presentation here that first three years is what we call kind of like the foundational phase.

And it was we had a lot of ground to cover.

One of the first things we had to do was re-engage with our community and partners.

The agency had been kind of an asilo for a while in different ways, just because of the types of compliance and resources.

And then, but we reading building relationships with the partners became really important.

And part of that is actually getting on different boards, working with HSAC, and then really starting to rebuild trust also with our families.

One of the first things we started doing with our PHA annual planning process, like for example, in our public housing, we meet with the entire floor at one time and really giving families a really focused opportunity to share kind of what things they want to see happening in our public housing communities.

The next part we talked about, and we mentioned a little bit is we worked really across the city, the county, and HSAC.

And so these were really like a lot of the infrastructure of the community and all the nonprofit partners are all together, and it's a really tight-knit group.

The biggest thing too, then is actually building up then our knowledge base all across the country.

The agency joined a few different ones like NARO, FADA.

We're actually the chair for the FADA group for the state of Iowa.

Um we were invited to present at the appropriations committee two years ago.

So our agency here in Council Bless, I'm very proud.

We're trying to do some bigger things out of our weight class.

And then the biggest one is gonna be really focusing on understanding what the real needs in the community were.

You know, it's it'd be easy to come in even though you think you're you have a housing idea, and I I've lived in Council of Less a lot a long time as well.

But even then, to know the real frontline side, we we started to see patterns and everything we want.

And so, what that led us to is in 2023, we build what was called the expanding housing opportunities initiative.

And so it phased from 23 to 20, I should say 24.

Um, but reality here's here's the big pieces we did.

We created one new main role to kind of start doing some of this work too.

So expected landlord participation.

So for our HCV program, for example, or house section eight, y'all might have heard, it's about 790 vouchers, what we have total.

And when I got here, we had like about 118 landlords.

Well, with this new position, we were able to actually work and we secured over almost 40 new landlords.

To date, right now, we're currently right at about 181.

And this is a really big movement.

Um, HUD's actually also reached out seeing how we've grown our numbers.

Um, David Hazel, if any of y'all had the or not David, uh David Murdoch, if y'all any of y'all had the opportunity to interact with him, he's just fantastic.

So that's a 22% increase in our number of landlords.

So then we get to our increased family um placement success rate.

Um, I had been in housing a long time, and I had no idea how wait lists work.

And I'll be honest, they kind of broke my heart.

Um, when I arrived, I was just learning a little bit about it, and I was like, hey, when was the last time the wait list was open?

And they were like, oh, like two years ago.

I was like, oh my gosh.

So then just learning about how often it's open.

It was open for six hours.

That's all.

And because there's a regulation that HUD says that when you can't serve a certain number of families in two years, you have to close your waiting list.

Now we gotta open it, and at the height last year, we actually had oh, well, I'm not, I'm gonna jump ahead of here.

So with family success though, so to kind of tell you how it would be if somebody applies for housing assistance, they're not necessarily submitting a full application, they're just kind of getting their name ready for the wait for the the pool.

From there, you have less than a 5% chance is what it was before.

And then even once they're issued their voucher and briefed, it was really closer to about a 90% fail rate.

And that's because there wasn't a lot of resources in the community in terms of how to help family identify additional barriers that might be going on, and why is it some families are having a hard time getting placed?

Well, the the expanding housing opportunities coordinator really did a great job of that too.

We started having that role sit at every briefing.