 Hi, my name is Molly Martin. I'm the director of New America Indianapolis. On behalf of New America, Urban America Forward and the National Urban League, I want to thank you all so much for being here today. The second in our series on equitable relief and recovery from COVID-19. At New America Local, the program that I'm a part of, we're committed to exploring issues of racial and economic equity, which is why we're so proud to partner on this important event with thanks to our partners and our sponsors for their support. Thank you so much to the Kresge Foundation and NEKC Foundation especially. Right now, I'd like to hand over to my colleague, Elena Beverly from the University of Chicago, the assistant vice president and assistant by president of Elena, I'm going to mess up your title. So I'm going to hand it off and ask you to kick us off today. Thank you so much. No problem at all. It's an assistant vice president of Urban Affairs, but I like to do all things that empower our community. So good afternoon, good afternoon, good afternoon. Welcome to the second in the Urban America Forward COVID-19 Equitable Relief and Recovery webinar series. Thank you for joining us for this critical discussion. My name is Elena Beverly. I am honored to have this important discussion on COVID-19 rent and mortgage relief. A special thing for our partners, New America Indianapolis and the National Urban League, as well as our generous sponsors and the foundation. Both of those foundations have been with Urban America Forward from the beginning. We're so grateful for their thought leadership and their sponsorship. The Urban America Forward program is a University of Chicago Office of Civic Engagement Initiative. We launched in 2015 with the goal of providing a platform that connects experts across a range of disciplines, all of whom are committed to furthering equity in America's cities. The program further is one of the University of Chicago's goals of convening the best and the brightest to help achieve urban impact and improve quality of life. We specifically designed this webinar series to bring together a network of practitioner experts who can share their efforts and their learnings in this critical and unprecedented COVID-19 moment. We know that the pandemic has had a devastating impact on our communities. It is exacerbating existing racial disparities and taking a disproportionate toll, both physical, economic, and now related to our housing and shelter, particularly on the African-American and Latino communities in America's cities. You, the practitioners on this webinar are implementing equitable relief efforts and working actively to fashion more equitable and inclusive recovery. We aim to share the work that you are doing so that you can help your peers envision and engineer tools to build a more inclusive economic recovery. The webinar series highlights practitioners from eight cities. We have Atlanta, Chicago, Baltimore, Detroit, Indianapolis, Minneapolis, New Orleans, and Washington, D.C. And again, our goal is to share experiences, the partnerships that have been developed uniquely in this moment, challenges, lessons learned, all work that prioritizes racial equity in the COVID-19 relief and response. We hope that you'll be able to hear from your peers, identify some common challenges and possible solutions to bring the bear on your community. And now it's my community or institutional partners with the National Urban League. Ms. Nancy Flake-Johnson. Nancy has a national reputation as a champion for community and economic development. She became president and CEO of the Urban League of Greater Atlanta in 2008. She's known across the country for her commitment and innovative approaches to education and advancing the black community through economic empowerment. She's created successful programs at the Urban League of Atlanta, meeting people where they are. She's intentional about developing programs that benefit job seekers across the entire spectrum, the underemployed, the unemployed, youth, young adults, professionals, those re-entering society after incarceration, first-time homebuyers and entrepreneurs, homelessness, and again, underemployed adults. So without further ado, I turn it over to Nancy Johnson. Thank you so very much for this opportunity to be with all of you this afternoon. Thank you to Urban America Forward for sponsoring this vitally important webinar to give us all the chance, the opportunity to share our experiences, learnings, and approaches so that we can gain better access to best practices so we can better serve our communities. I wanna give a shout-out to Terry Lee, our Chief Housing Officer for the City of Atlanta. We are great partners with our city in this fight. I am honored to be with you today to share this platform with each and every one of you. You are doing the critical and very difficult and challenging work that is necessary to support our most vulnerable people in our nation, black and brown, low to moderate income, essential workers, our children, seniors, and families to get us all through this pandemic to the other side, back towards stability and eventually prosperity. As we all know, this pandemic hit like a Mack truck out of nowhere. In Atlanta, like many cities across this nation, we faced a critical affordable housing shortage before COVID hit. So the pandemic has just put a critical situation into a more desperate one. It is now projected, and Terry may have more updated figures on this, but that between 15 and 20,000 city of Atlanta alone, families and households are vulnerable at this time to homelessness. We are working collaboratively here, leveraging federal, public, and private sector resources to try our best to meet the needs of families as we work toward stabilizing our community. There are a number of factors that are contributing to the impact of COVID and housing insecurities, food insecurities that are really hitting black and brown communities, particularly hard. There was a pre-COVID myth that all communities were part of our quote, economic recovery pre-COVID when in fact, unemployment rates among blacks and other vulnerable communities, we're still reaching double digits. Many in our communities, many in our black and brown communities have simply dropped out of the labor force due to inadequate skills to acquire the more technically oriented jobs that are now really flooding our labor force and our new economy. Many black and brown members of our community are essential workers. Many of our black and brown members of our community work in the service sector because so many are in the service sector, they are not able to work. As many of you know, the state of Georgia was one of the first states that prematurely reopened and did so initially with some of the most high touch businesses in our entire sector, hair salons, massage parlors, movie theaters. And as one might imagine, there was a surge as a result of those decisions. Further, which of course is delaying the recovery of our economy. Further, our Georgia Department of Labor, like many across our nation, was ill-equipped to handle the surge of cases due to inadequate infrastructure and not enough staffing. To this day, many who applied for benefits in March and April have yet to receive a dime of unemployment benefits. There's projected to be 1.4 million claims that have been deemed ineligible. Many of those represent families that maybe didn't have enough quarters to qualify for unemployment benefits. Many we found worked for employers that were not compliant with unemployment insurance filings and reportings. Whatever the case, we have thousands and thousands of families that are going into four, some five months now, with little to no income. So what are we doing about it? We are collaborating. And I'm very, very thankful that our mayor in the city of Atlanta, Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, just this past week, the city took $22 million of CARES federal resources and allocated those to support families for rental utility and security deposit assistance. The Urban League of Greater Atlanta is one of the organizations that was grateful to receive a portion of those benefits. 24 nonprofits will now work feverishly between now and December 30th to disseminate these resources in collaboration with the United Way. We are in a crisis. We are literally fighting against time to keep families in their homes so they don't end up on the streets. So it is critically important for us to have this forum today. So that we can benefit from each other's experiences, leverage each other's knowledge and learnings so that we can do our very best to serve as many families as possible to keep our communities stable and safe. I appreciate this opportunity to bring welcoming remarks to each and every one of you. I look forward to participating in this conversation and contributing. Thank you so much for this opportunity. Thank you so much, Nancy Johnson Flake. Nancy Flake Johnson, my apologies with the Greater Atlanta Urban League. So I wanna run us through the program really briefly. We are going to have our distinguished speaker who's gonna provide context and table setting and also moderate the discussion with our featured panelists. Following the moderated panel, there will be some questions and reflections from a respondent and then we will have Q and A from the participants in the audience. So hopefully you're following along. Please send your questions into the chat. We will be sure to collect them thematically and then share them with our distinguished moderator. And with that, it is my pleasure to introduce our moderator and our distinguished guest who's gonna provide some framing remarks, Charles Routhizer, who's a senior associate at the Annie E. Casey Foundation and a longtime friend, as well as a national expert in the area of housing and community development. Charles is the senior associate in the Foundation Center for Civic Sites and Community Change. He manages the Foundation's national grant making on housing and community development as well as Casey's neighborhood transformation strategy in Baltimore. He's an advisor to the Foundation's unit responsible for making program and mission related investments in affordable housing and represents Casey and the US Impact Investing Alliance and the Community Investment Grantee Pool. He is a published author. He is a distinguished scholar. He is the founding chairman of the Anchor Institution Funders Group of the Funders Network for Smart Growth and Livable Communities and the Funders for Housing and Opportunity. And Charles, I'll turn it over to you. Thank you so very much, Elena. And thank you to everyone, our speakers, our respondents and our audience for joining us in today's conversation. The mission of the Annie E. Casey Foundation is to enable young people, especially young people of color to have brighter futures, which we try to achieve through a variety of means. Systems reform, policy advocacy, organizational capacity building, demonstration projects, research and evidence building, social investment and last but certainly not least, helping young people and their families to lead, to exercise their power and influence the systems and structures whose decisions have major consequences for their lives. Animating all of our work, however, is a paramount concern for advancing racial equity and inclusion with the goal of dismantling structural racism in the United States. One of the most important lessons that the Casey Foundation has learned over the last three decades, working in the housing and community development space, is that housing is much more than a roof over one's head. Having a place to call home is a basic human need. A place of safety, stability, support and belonging. Stable housing or having housing and security roots children, young people and families in communities, enabling them to access the opportunities that are necessary for their ability to thrive. However, when people experience housing and security due to unaffordability, systemic bias or other factors, they're at much greater risk for having poor economic, educational and health outcomes experiencing homelessness or both. And there are significant and long sustained racial disparities in housing security as well as in the experience of homelessness. People and especially young people of color are much more likely to struggle to pay their housing costs, to be displaced by eviction or closure and gentrification and experience homelessness. And I mentioned all of these points to underscore a simple and disturbing fact. That this spring when people around the world were asked to shelter in place, far too many Americans had far too precarious hold on their home or didn't have a place to call home at all. The ensuing economic dislocations caused by the loss of jobs and income has exacerbated the structural conditions that drive housing instability and has created tremendous uncertainty for millions of families. There is a tremendous amount that we do not yet know collecting and analyzing data in real time on a national scale has proven to be a major challenge. Many of the indicators we've used to measure status and progress on housing are backwards facing or in some cases data that's two years old. We lack a comprehensive real-time database nationally on evictions, although Princeton University's eviction lab is trying to change this. Up to half of the nation's renters live in properties owned by small landlords who manage four units or less and they don't use the same centralized data systems that multifamily housing providers do. Consequently, a lot of the data that you have seen and heard these days by the multifamily housing association that shows rent collections at between 80 to 90% doesn't include the properties where many of the poorest, most vulnerable Americans live. A number of organizations have risen to the challenge of collecting and analyzing providing better data on the current state of housing insecurity. They include the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, the National Low-Income Housing Coalition, Furman Center of New York University, Policy Link, the Turner Center of California at Berkeley, the Urban Institute and the Housing Initiative at the University of Pennsylvania. But over the last three months the US Census Department's Household Pulse Survey has provided weekly updates on how the pandemic has affected Americans in terms of job and income loss, access to medical care and education as well as food and housing insecurity. According to the latest data available and that is for the third week of July, 26.5% of American households reported either not being able to pay this month's rent or mortgage as well, or having slight or no confidence in being able to pay next month's housing costs. A percentage that has steadily increased over the last four weeks as the originally expanded unemployment benefits and eviction moratoriums have expired nationally and statewide. And this burden, this challenge is not evenly distributed either by region or by race and ethnicity. The household in the Southeast, the Southwest and the Northeast are much more likely. The percentage is closer to one third or more households in these regions of the country are reporting significant housing insecurity. And yes, black and brown Americans are much more likely to report being housing insecure in these ways. And if you drill down deeper into the Census Housing Pulse Survey you begin to see some deeply troubling disparities not just in terms of evictions but in terms of homeowners being able to access mortgage forbearance programs. The measures that were put in place earlier this year by federal, state and local governments through the CARES Act, the moratorium on eviction, mortgage forbearance, just to name a couple have been effective, but they're beginning to expire. And over the last several weeks as a number of media outlets have started to talk about the impending tsunami of evictions that has yet to hit fully. In fact, Bloomberg news a couple of days ago said, well, the tsunami has not yet hit. And there's a danger about being overly literal about metaphors, but here's the thing about tsunamis. The water often goes out to sea first for very complicated hydrodynamic reasons before flooding back inland slowly and not too high at first but building inexorably until you are in over your head and swept away. And we are at that moment right now when the water has gone out to sea and it is about to come back in. And this afternoon, we have the honor to hear from a number of people in a number of cities that are not waiting for the flood to plan, prepare, act and respond. So this is our panel. We have Marisa Novara, commissioner of the Chicago Housing Department. We have Terry Lee, who's the chief housing officer of the city of Atlanta. We have Tisha Edwards, who is the director of the mayor's office of children and family success in Baltimore. Warren Hansen is the president and CEO of the Greater Minnesota Housing Fund. And Breone DeDecker is the program director of the Jane Place Neighborhood Sustainability Initiative in New Orleans. And that is the order that we're gonna go in here. And I'm going to pose two rounds of questions for our speakers before moving to the respondent. The first question comes in two parts. How has the pandemic exacerbated housing affordability and homelessness in your city with a particular emphasis on the racial dimensions of these effects? And then second part of that question is how has your city responded? And with that, I will turn it over to Marisa. Thank you, Charles. It's great to be here. Thanks to everyone for putting this important conversation together. And in answer to your question, I think I would echo something that Ms. Johnson said, which is this virus really just reflected the inequities that we already had as a city here in Chicago. And to that I mean, even before the crisis, 63% of black renters in Chicago were cost burdened, 56% of Latino renters were cost burdened compared to 42% for white renters. And even before any COVID-19 cases, we were a city with profound racial and economic segregation and insufficient affordable housing. When I came in, I started a year ago in June, we were at roughly 120,000 unit gap of affordable units in this city. So when we, in answer to part of your second question, began in March to say, what can we do to get a very quick response? We kind of have had on the housing side a two tiered response. The first one was right away, we put out some of our own department of housing money. So local money to give housing assistance grants of $1,000 each. And we used 2 million of our money for that. So that was right away already in March, knowing that we, well, hoping that there would be federal money coming, but not knowing how long that would take. We wanted to do something quickly. We also worked with our multifamily bureau within our department to come up with grants for our existing affordable housing providers to make sure that that housing remains stable and well cared for, even if they were falling short of their rents in any way. We also passed some legislation that provided higher levels of protection for people facing eviction. Right now we are still under a statewide eviction moratorium in Illinois. But when that is lifted, we will have in place another 60 days in which landlords are held to a higher standard and tenants are held to working harder together to try to avoid eviction through things like mediation, payment plans, things of that nature. And then we were just able to do another round of funding with coronavirus relief funds of about 30 million, 35 million, excuse me, between a department of housing and the department of family and support services to provide higher levels this time of rental support as well as mortgage assistance and pro bono eviction attorneys for when that becomes needed, when the ban is lifted. When we put out the application back in March for those grants, we had, as I mentioned, we had about 2000 slots to fill and we had 83,000 applicants in about five days. What we found when we analyzed the data was that those applications did come from all over the city, from every single ward, from every community area, the need was widespread, but it was most heavily concentrated in the city's communities of color. This time around, we've actually seen, we feel we have enough resources to assist about 10,000 households and we received about 12,000 applications. So the application level was much different this time for reasons we're not, we're not as sure of just yet. I'll stop there and make sure there's time for others. Thank you so much, Terry. How would you respond to the question that I've been opposed? Good afternoon, Charles. Thank you so much. And I also want to thank Urban American Four, Urban American Four for having this panel discussion at this most critical and crucial time for our country as well as our cities. I would be remiss if I didn't acknowledge Nancy. Atlanta has a champion in Nancy Flake Johnson and I'm just grateful to be a part of her team as we talk not just about housing but economic mobility because at the end of the day, when we talk about housing affordability in Atlanta, like Chicago and many of the cities on this panel, we had a crisis prior to but it really comes down to what people make versus what housing costs. And so until we start addressing, having a real conversation around economic mobility, we will always be having an issue with housing affordability. And so, when you think about the pandemic, it just brought that more to light, right? Because when you look at the families that have been most impacted, there have been families, of course, black and brown families, but also families of low economic means. We found here in Atlanta, we did analysis early on that of our about 165,000 households, 29,000 of those households actually are in occupations that would be most impacted by COVID from an economic standpoint. Of the 29,000 households, 16,000 of those households were renter households and were already making below $50,000 a year. And so when we talk about it from an industry aspect, you're looking at your service industry, you're looking at a hotel industry, you're looking at retail jobs that quite honestly may not be coming back. And so when you think through what a response should be, I think all of us have probably had sleepless nights, but the one thing I will say about Atlanta and then talking to my colleagues across the country, we had a plan in place. And the plan we had in place was released last June and it was the mayor's one Atlanta housing affordability action plan, which we focused very heavily on, how do we increase production? How do we invest more money into affordable housing? How do we become smarter about policies impacting affordable housing? And probably most important, how do we ensure that Atlanta becomes a place for everyone and families are not being displaced? And what I have found during the pandemic is that that plan, that framework hasn't changed, we just have to accelerate the work and really accelerate the work under ensuring equitable opportunities for all Atlantis, specifically focusing on our black and brown communities. Atlanta, like many cities, has not been exempt from protest. And those protests really go back to social justice and racial equity. And I think if you really wanna focus on addressing systemic racism in our country, let's start with housing policy. And let's start with housing policy from the standpoint that housing policy looks at the fairness and the inclusion opportunities for everyone. In the state of Georgia, we have not, like my colleague in Chicago, been able to do a statewide moratorium on evictions. We've had a state of emergency declared by our judicial system, but not a state of emergency on evictions. And so we've mostly relied on federal protections, as well as a limited local protection where the mayor put forth an eviction moratorium for any project that received any level subsidy from the city and or its public sector agencies. And so that eviction moratorium is still in place. It is in place until August 31st. And we're looking to extend it once again. This would be the third extension that we've had on that moratorium, but that only captures a small population of units, right? We're still dealing with units that have not received any public sector or local funding that very well may have folks that are being, there will be hurt with evictions. One of the things that we've looked at in addition to the moratorium, and Nancy spoke about it a little bit, was we've invested $22 million from our coronavirus relief funds. At the start of the pandemic, the city invested $7 million from its local funds, focusing on emergency assistance, homelessness, as well as small business development. Because we've seen the largest impact on our renters, we've prioritized our coronavirus relief funding to impact households at 60% and or below. To be able to move quickly with those dollars, we've decided to work with a third party entity through United Way of Greater Atlanta, who in turn will be working with 24 nonprofit organizations. We're looking to be able to serve approximately 6,700 families with either rental assistance, utility assistance, and our security deposit assistance. But quite frankly, it's only a down payment and much more will have to be done, not just at the local level, but at the state and federal level as we continue through this process. Thank you. Great, thank you. And now we turn to Tisha Edwards from Casey's hometown of Baltimore. Hi Tisha. Hi, thank you so much for having me to be a part of this really important conversation. I am Tisha Edwards, the executive director of the mayor's office of Children and Family Success in Baltimore, Maryland. And I am in a somewhat unique position from my other panelists because what has happened in our city is that we've been working really hard to bundle all of the resources that are available to families and creating a kind of seamless entry point in order for them to be able to access those resources because the name of the game is financial stability and housing insecurity usually is just one part of a very complex set of pressure points that a family is receiving. And so we are the lead service provider. We are the lead entity, the mayor's office of Children and Family Success because of infrastructure that already exists. Prior to COVID, we were providing energy assistance to 23,000 families on an annual basis. So we already had a relationship with these families. We already knew pre-COVID kind of the sense of need that was going to be in the community. And these were working families, working families in the jobs that you've talked about, the service industry, the hospitality industry at our local grocery stores. And they were having two families in a household and couldn't meet all of their essential needs. And so through our energy assistance program, we were already supporting those families. So now we've built out our infrastructure to make sure that families can go back into our community action centers and receive certification and approval for energy assistance or SNAP benefits for housing stability and eviction prevention. And so Baltimore's model has really been focused on how do we take existing infrastructure so that we can support, build up the program very quickly. When we opened our application process in the first 14 days, we received over 1,000 applicants needing eviction prevention assistance. We are anticipating that in the first six months of our program that we will probably need to be able to support about 10,000 families. And so to do that, we are having to bundle and braid lots of different funding sources. We are using local, federal and state dollars. We've asked all of our agents who received various funding from state and local resources where possible for them to bring money together into this pool to help us to be able to meet this growing need. Our situation in Baltimore is no different than what is being described in Chicago and Atlanta. I think one of the things that we're finding as a particular area of concern is the immigrant population. And many of the federal dollars exclude those individuals. So they are concerned about having to bring identification. They don't have the employment history and the employment information. So we've had to work creatively to identify philanthropic private dollars to make sure that our immigrant population is not left out of receiving the support that they need in this time of crisis. So that's a particular concern for us is making sure that the growing immigrant population also has access to the dollars. And many of the federal rules, some of the CARES dollars makes it particularly challenging for them to benefit from this program. Mm-hmm. Great. Perfectly on time. Warren, from Minneapolis, you're up. Thanks, Charles, and good afternoon, everybody. I am also a bit of an outlier. I'm a community development, or we, are a community development finance institution. And we work with multiple cities. So I will talk about Minneapolis and St. Paul, Twin Cities, which has been way too much in the news lately for all the wrong reasons. But I also just want to mention that we work statewide. So for example, we work closely with the city of Rochester, a home of Mayo Clinic, Duluth, Minnesota, municipalities that are doing good work. And just in summary, some of the things that we have been doing, been a partner with, and also that the state and local governments have been doing. First of all, our governor declared a state of emergency and then imposed a red moratorium. So we have that going for us. Before I get into what has evolved, I will just say, in general, our governor, Governor Wall's great governor, has had to dial back some of the criteria for the moratorium to open up the economy a little bit more and a little bit more month by month, every time he extends it by 30 days. And so that has created a lot more housing and stability, a lot more concern, and sent kind of a shockwave every time that happens throughout the whole state. On the good side, the governor did use his emergency powers without going to the legislature. There was too many bad politics involved with our very divided houses and allocated $100 million for statewide rental assistance and mortgage assistance. And that's now being delivered through all of the normal providers of Section 8 rent assistance and all the other assistance. So that's a very good thing. One thing that we have done as Greater Minnesota Housing Fund is we've scanned and learning from all of you right now, like my colleagues on the panel, but we've done a national scan of best practices. And I'm happy to share it's still in draft form. And I will post it in the comments after I'm done here. But we looked at national literature, the National Apartment Association Housing Partnership Network, Mercy Housing, a lot of organizations that have published articles or white papers or even provided protocol documents of what to do around things like preventing eviction, assisting tenants to access the services and the rental assistance they need, managing COVID illnesses among employees and among tenants, intensified asset management. So you're dealing with your lenders and investors more frequently, you're getting forbearance. The maintenance protocols, restricted uses of common space and employee morale and engagement and so forth. I want to mention a couple of things that are kind of unique. We think that they're going to pan out and actually contribute, of course, with the pandemic and also right in the middle of this, George Floyd was murdered in the Minneapolis that continues in Kenosha yesterday. But so we had an enormous amount of people dislocated even from their campments as homeless people. And so in response to that, there's been many responses to stabilize those people, get them into hotels and so forth. But there's a community-based initiative right now to use, initially it was going to be a vacant Kmart. Now if you think about Minnesota or Chicago, it's a cold, cold winter and being intense or being anywhere outside is not good. And this would be a indoor village of 94 tiny houses inside of a warehouse. We're funding the feasibility study right now. The hope is that that would be occupiable by late November. And we'll see how that goes. It's very ambitious, very creative, adds to social distancing, it's better than just a wide open space in a warehouse with lines painted on the floor. One of the other things that we're doing is that we've been tracking is many, this is interesting, I think it doesn't deal directly with housing instability, but the Minneapolis Public Housing Authority, which has 6,000 units and 26,000 residents right now is proactively working on increasing telemedicine and increasing communication among all the service providers for those tenants, much like what Tisha was just talking about in terms of all that coordination, but they're working within that environment of the public housing residents. And it's already resulted in a lot of better communication and more efficiency under COVID, healthcare delivery and using telemedicine, using more coordination among the care providers, the FQHCs, the hospitals and the visiting nurses. And so they think that this will have, it's just beginning, but they think it'll have a long-term change impact on how they manage the health and welfare of their tenants, but also maintain more housing stability. And I think I will stop there and just answer questions later. Okay, thank you, Warren, very much. Now we turn to Breone Dedecker from Jane Place Neighborhood Sustainability Initiative in New Orleans. Hi, folks, good afternoon. I'm so excited to be sharing this space with all of you and learning so much about what's happened in other cities. Jane Place is very much an outlier compared to the other folks on this panel in that we are not a city entity or a state entity. We're actually a small neighborhood-based community land trust that develops permanently affordable housing in New Orleans. We were founded in 2008 following Hurricane Katrina as a response to what we saw as an inequitable recovery strategy that was being developed that was going to put renters at risk of being permanently displaced from mid-city New Orleans where we're based, which is something that happened. The Hurricane Katrina recovery, there's a lot of success stories, but it also negatively impacted a lot of poor and working class communities, particularly communities of color, and led to the permanent displacement of 100,000 Black residents from New Orleans. Jane Place as an organization builds permanently affordable housing for renters. We opened the first apartment complex in 2016, and we're currently bringing eight more apartments online right now. And we also do a lot of community-based organizing and attempts to do issue-based advocacy and improve renters' rights and housing rights for the city of New Orleans. What I'm gonna really talk about right now is our efforts to do community organizing as a response to COVID. We do a lot of participatory research projects here in New Orleans. We've trained monitors to go into eviction courts where we are keeping track of everyone who's being evicted in New Orleans and why they're being evicted. We launched that project before the pandemics. We had six months of data accumulated before the pandemic where we were definitively able to say, yes, the majority of people who are being impacted by evictions and displacement in New Orleans are Black residents. 80% of all of the tenants who are being evicted were Black. 57% were Black women. So there is a massive disproportionate effect on Black women and Black communities. And again, it is concentrated in communities where, quote-unquote, it's more affordable to live. And that is again a reflection of the poverty economy that we have in New Orleans. New Orleans is a city extremely over-reliant on tourism. It's a city that is stuck with the federal minimum wage because we've been preempted at the state level. So folks are working for $7.25 an hour. The average renter household makes $24,000 a year in New Orleans. And they cannot make ends meet. The rent has doubled since Hurricane Katrina and the incomes have remained flat. So folks have been struggling for a long time and they are struggling for a long time before COVID hit. We, the state did a lot of the same similar strategies immediately after the pandemic hit where there was an eviction moratorium put in place. But that actually ended on June 15th and evictions have been ongoing in New Orleans since the end of June. We still have folks going into court and monitoring. And now we know that today the Federal Cares Act has fully expired and we have been alerted that at least one landlord in New Orleans is planning on filing 250 evictions tomorrow. And that is one landlord. So it's a really stressful situation. But again, we do a lot of community-based advocacy. So one of the first things that we did with our lead organizer was map every single apartment complex in New Orleans that was covered by the Cares Act. And we have sent organizers out into those apartment complexes to flyer, let them know what their rights are under the Cares Act. We have a hotline that we've developed that folks are able to call to reach us for legal advice. We have pro bono attorneys. We also have trained folks on where to direct various people. If they have a disability, we're directing them to the disability rights organization. If they're experiencing domestic violence, we've trained folks to show them what resources exist there. So we're really trying to build up the community to respond to the community's problem. So it's like that's really the strategy that we're trying to take. Because we also know, and this is something that New Orleans learned very much the hard way following Katrina is that during these disasters, there are these opportunities to change things. And so if you really focus on community empowerment activities, you can build power to actually shift things at the city level and at the state level. And I know a lot of folks are also in states where they have faced preemption from getting better municipal policies in place. So it's really important to build up people and empower them to be able to take on city and state legislatures in this way. It is a very fluid and flexible situation. We've been trying to make the case that eviction court needs to be closed again in New Orleans. So that's really what we've been focusing on. And the argument that we're trying to make right now is with Congress still out, we know that more aid hopefully is coming, right? Eventually, and so the argument that we're trying to make to state legislatures into the city right now is, please keep courts closed until we know what this aid is gonna look like because it is easier to keep people housed and sort of first all that larger disaster of homelessness, then let this happen and then have to muster even greater resources on the next end because it is gonna be much more expensive to manage the homelessness crisis than it is gonna be to manage this moment. So that's really what we're working on. And I think I'm gonna leave it there and move on to questions. Thank you so much. And now what we have, we'll have time for a very quick bonus round, second round of questions that folks will have less than a minute to answer. And it's sharing either one lesson that you've learned already or one challenge that keeps you up at night. And I know there's many to choose from. So why don't we start in the order that we originally presented and begin with Marisa. Sure. So a challenge that we're still working through is in the wake of the crisis immediately, we set out to find emergency housing for people, both kind of housing for people to quarantine or isolate as well as expanding our congregate shelters. And now months later, what we're trying to do is figure out how do you transition to a longer term plan when you're not just in emergency mode, but when you're in the mode of, hey, this could be another year, this could be another, we don't know how long and paying for an entire hotel for folks that are being heavily served, which we're very grateful for, should we be transitioning to some kind of permanent supportive housing for folks? And should we start that process now? And if so, with what money? And those are some of the things that we're working through right now and the National Equity Fund has a potential source for that. And we're just in the midst of trying to figure out how do you move out of the emergency solving the problem that mode that we were in in March and shift into this is gonna be a while and we need to figure some other things out here. Mm-hmm, great. Teri? So I'll pick up where Marissa left off and what keeps me up at night is that this is going to be a while. You know, the reality of it is we don't know the full magnitude, but we know that the tsunami is coming and the fact that, you know, we may not be able to help everybody is something that I find pretty stressful. I will also bend a little bit and answer the first question you asked, which is what are some of the creative and innovative things that we're doing? This is a time for the philanthropic and private corporations to step up and step in. And in Atlanta, I feel that we have a good start to that. At the start of the pandemic, we had the Greater Community Foundation release a $25 million fund to really help the entire metropolitan area. We now have, and Nancy alluded to this in the chat, we have an effort that's being driven by the philanthropic community to do a very robust fundraising effort to really be able to counter some of the things that we can't use our federal dollars for as such as addressing the immigrant population and quite honestly going beyond housing to really creating dollars for family sufficiency. Great, Tisha. Yeah, in many ways, I would echo what Terry says. What gives me pause and heart palpitations is that the scale is unimaginable to me and the amount of resources I can't even begin to think through what it's going to take because it is not 30 days, 60 days, it's not gonna be a year for the families that we're talking about. The recovery is going to be the longest for them. This is going to have a two, three, four year impact on some of the most vulnerable communities. And so how do you sustain that level of need for that period of time? I'm also really trying to think about how do we get many, our landlords to be partners in this process? I understand that they have responsibilities, these are their businesses, their livelihoods are also at stake when they're not collecting rent. And so in Baltimore, many of our landlords are individual landlords, right? So these have mortgages on these properties and it is a part of their financial stability. And so how do we not demonize the landlords and bring them into the solution so that it's a win-win? And oftentimes when you have something this significant, there are winners and losers. And so for me, I'm trying to figure out how can Baltimore create a strategy that is sustainable but has a win-win bottom line approach? And so we don't have all of the solutions. I think we need to continue to bring landlords to the table to partner with them and figure out how to make this work for everyone. So that's the magnitude and making sure that everyone's needs get met, which is a very complex thing to do. But I think we should enter it with a win-win, not it's tenants versus landlords, right? So just trying to think that through so that it does not become another issue that is divisive and landlords are struggling financially also. So how do we help them to get through this? And I don't think it's just moratoriums. It's bigger than that. And again, I don't have the answer but that's what I'm hoping for and working towards. Great, thank you, Warren. Well, I don't think I have the answer but I can think of the answer and that the win-win I think is really a lot more investment in rental assistance, a lot more investment in unemployment insurance and a lot more investment in income support, supports of different kinds. That is the win-win in terms of it's good for the tenants, it stabilizes people, it's good for the property owners. And what keeps me up at night aside from the election can we get there politically is that we're probably facing, no matter how progressive or how proactive our government leaders are given the magnitude of this, we're probably facing something like the 2008 foreclosure crisis. And this time it's gonna be foreclosures of the small mom and pop landlords because they just can't sustain it without these, without their tenants paying the rent essentially and the tenants then need the income support. So the amount of speculation that will occur shortly in the multifamily sector of the small NOAA properties, the mom and pops and even the more moderate portfolios, these people are gonna just skid right out of the ball game and the same with homeowners but I think homeowners are seemingly more stable. I'm not sure why, for the most part. And the other thing that I'm kind of pulling for locally, I forgot to mention this, but I have been working with Hennepin Coney here because our county is gonna, looking at using CARES money to buy hotels. And that guy goes directly to addressing the homelessness issue, that's why those units are very adaptable. Seemingly they're having problems, they, more of them are on the market. The problem there that keeps me up at night is they're still trying to sell them for $250,000 a door based on income. And for permanent support of housing and NOAA kind of adaptive reuse, that's just not feasible. Unless you have endless amounts of money. Mm-hmm, great, Breon. Yeah, so I just wanna comment very briefly on something innovative that Jane Place has been doing, which we've tapped into our repair reserve fund at our housing development in order to forgive rent for our tenants. Using those funds because we understand that evictions are costly for landlords but also evictions are very costly for these families that we've built really intense and strong relationships with. And that is something that we've done before given certain circumstances. We also launched a shared equity strategy with our rental households so that they can earn equity points which go to rent forgiveness for doing things like participating in board meetings, attending committee meetings, doing basic upkeep around the apartments because we understand that housing stability benefits us as landlords and it benefits the neighborhood and obviously benefits our families. So that's something that we've been working on as well as doing case management with them to connect them to resources that are coming through the city and coming through the state. Things that keep me up at night so much. New Orleans in Louisiana is a state where evictions occur very, very, very fast. You can get a five day notice for being a day late and a dollar short on rent and there's no publicly accessible database of filings. So we've been trying to work with the click of court to get notices of who's getting eviction findings so we can actually go send door knockers to give them, we've developed a comic book on what to do when you're facing eviction in New Orleans that explains what the process is, the laws, what basic defenses can be and other sort of resources because we know at least in New Orleans that just showing up improves your chances in court. It improves like the ability for the judge to negotiate a settlement with the landlord giving you more time because again in New Orleans you can get a five day notice and then you show up to court and you get a 24 hour notice to vacate. So it is very fast and it really impacts people's ability to secure housing in the future. And so right now we're trying to access these notifications. So we're able to contact people on the front end and try to connect them to as much resources as possible. That's great. Thank you all so much. And now we turn to Dr. Bianca Merritt who's the founding director at the Center for Policy for Research on Inclusion and Social Policy. Hi, Bianca. Hi, thank you all. I'm just here to provide a synthesis of the excellent feedback and thoughts that our panelists have shared and then pose a quick question as well just some thoughts that I've had as you've all spoken about different experiences and challenges from your respective cities. I'm representing Indianapolis. I know there are a lot of Indian folks on the call. So a lot of what you all have said has really resonated with seeing that we're experiencing as well as presenting some opportunities for growth. I think overall everyone's really pointed to the fact that we're operating in a very broken system that really predates COVID-19 and the pandemic and the economic fallout from it. And everyone spoke really clearly about, there are some short-term fixes and there are some long-term fixes that we can't even really get to yet because we're trying to deal with these approaches that we know work like rental assistance like court representation, but they're essentially band-aids to a larger structural problem. And of course the fact that race intersects with all of the issues of the reasons why our housing structures are so broken. Heard a lot of great things around root causes and sources of inequity in housing and other factors such as the fact that wages aren't keeping up with the cost of rent and housing that there's an employment issue that again cross-cuts with the ability to afford housing. And the fact that again racial inequities kind of cross all of those issues. I appreciate that everyone's coming from a perspective of the role of government working from a city perspective and the fact that we know that government plays such a huge role. Similar as we have in Indianapolis using CARES Act funds to provide rental assistance, but also dealing with these fluctuating eviction moratoriums. I think we talked a little bit about and I think more in particular, the fact that we have some places including here where, you know, we're gonna do this piecemeal approach for like week by week, month by month, we're gonna extend it until it's finally gone and then what do we do with that? We also spoke really great about, you know, the need to engage tenants, being engaged in the community at large, especially Brown's conversation around how to empower communities, especially Black and Brown ones around their capacity to build rights, to know what exists with them and the opportunities that they can take advantage of to maximize their experiences too. But I think the main question that I have after hearing everyone is this role of cross sector partnerships. And, you know, for especially guys working as part of cities, it seems like you've been able to kind of move in a racially equitable way toward action, toward reflection. And so I think a lot of you guys have touched on this a little bit, but I would like to hear from our panelists around what is, how do we coordinate those efforts a little better and specifically around maybe what is the most crucial, racially equitable action that your city should be taking that it hasn't. I pose that question because I think a lot of folks listening in, a lot of folks on this panel know that, you know, people are really trying to talk about racial equity and systemic racism and policies. But the fact is, you know, landlords are a part of policymaking, right? They are not directly in government, but we rely on them through housing agencies and other folks to do some of this work. Here in Indianapolis, we have our rental assistance program and we still have about 40% of landlords who are not participating in it. And so, you know, what can we do from a racially equitable perspective is really quickly to engage folks from a private sector or the nonprofit sector who might not be at the table? What are some things that your city maybe hasn't done yet that you think could do better in terms of engaging other partners in a way that leads to more racially equitable housing outcomes? Mm-hmm. Anyone want to take that, Berifna? Well, one thing that this isn't directly related to COVID, but one thing that we're in the midst of doing is a racial equity impact assessment on a qualified allocation plan. So the city of Chicago is one with just a few entities that are not states that receives its own li-tech allocation. And this is, we chose to, to use our qualified allocation plan as the first tool that we are doing a racial equity impact assessment on, essentially to say, what are the results of the way that we are distributing tax credits as a tool and a resource that we have? How do we learn from that and how do we adjust based on what we have seen are the results of our use of this tool? So what I'm interested in, this is the first time we've done this, it's the first time. I understand it's been done on a qualified allocation plan in particular. Certainly cities, other cities have longer experience working with these tools within their departments than the Department of Housing does. But what I'm excited about is that as we learn, as we get this first one under our belt and we kind of build our own internal capacity is that we are then applying this lens to more and more of what we do and more and more of how we make decisions so that we're not making decisions and making policy in anything resembling a race neutral fashion. And for Atlanta, one of the things we're looking at is source of income discrimination. Our state preempts us from requiring or passing our own source of income legislation but what it doesn't preempt us from doing is really marketing and communicating with apartment developers. And so we formed, as a result of COVID, we formed a relationship with Atlanta apartment association really teaming them with our housing authority as well as our homelessness entity focusing on how can we match folks with vouchers to units that are available on the market. We wanna take that a step further to a don't discriminate conversation where we're really encouraging property owners to basically accept voucher holders. We have, we probably have a waiting list of about maybe close to 20,000 individuals on our voucher waiting list but we also have excess capacity. So while we may not be able to house all 20,000, we still have folks who have vouchers right down the city of Atlanta that can't find somewhere to stay. And so really trying to educate and partner with our apartment owners and developers I think is really a key, is a key component to the conversation. Anyone else wanna? I just have a real quick. Terry stole my answer, Terry stole my answer. That's what I wanna see in New Orleans, one of the things. Yeah, just a real quick comment. Minneapolis has passed the city council and Minneapolis has passed an ordinance that requires section eight to be accepted by landlords. And that's, you know, this result of, this was before the pandemic, of course, it was something that they did last year and it was fought very heavily by the landlords. And there was a little compromising, a little, you know, some meeting of the minds but the repercussion, even though, you know, all the advocates, all of us believe that this is critical because people's inability to find an apartment when they have a voucher. But now we have landlords saying that they're pulling out of Minneapolis. You know, they're gonna not develop any new multifamily housing. They're selling it off and things like that. I'm not sure if that's bluster. It's just all within the last six months. So we're watching it really closely. Cool. Priyanka, do you have any sort of reactions to the reactions or a follow-up? Yeah, I think that I appreciate, again, just the willingness and interest and of course recognition that landlords need to be brought in. But I think, you know, Warm brings up a great point about kind of the unintended consequences of some of these policies, whether it's state or local and how, again, crucial, I think one of the questions someone brought up in the chat is about, you know, braided sources of funding and ways to create more integration of effort to maybe help reduce the chance that something like that might happen where you're essentially taking away housing rather than keeping it and then making it more affordable and therefore equitable for folks of all different backgrounds. So I think just hearing that reinforces, again, the need for greater collaboration, greater cross-sector partnerships as, you know, is the premise of this discussion. So it's great to hear kind of the hiccups as well as the opportunities that exist to create more equitable systems. That's great. And then I'm just gonna make one sort of final comment about how philanthropy has been responding. And then we're gonna open it up because I see we have gotten quite a few questions. So I don't think there's been a single foundation in the United States that hasn't, you know, made a rapid coronavirus response outside of the normal context of their grant making. So a lot of foundations I think have responded individually, not only through special allocations but also thinking and trying to be, and I know certainly Casey has, be very flexible with grants that had already gone out the door and grants that were just about to go out the door and really tailoring them to the changing circumstances. And I know and we're gonna continue to do that going forward, especially in our hometowns of Baltimore and Atlanta. But we're also working together nationally. And this is not something that foundations always do well. One great example is Funders for Housing and Opportunity, which is a funders collaborative that I had the honor of being one of the founding members. It was created by Susan Thomas, who's now the executive director of the Melville Charitable Trust and is actually currently chaired by David Bukazawa of the Kresge Foundation. And this I think shows one of the examples of an already existing funders collaborative because we were able to move very quickly. In fact, sometimes quicker than our own individual foundations to respond both nationally, as well as on the ground in particular localities, especially Minneapolis and New Orleans, to respond to some of the highest priority needs. I think the big challenge for philanthropy though, is to think beyond and really take into account that this is a long-term evolving crisis situation. This has been new normal and it will challenge some of our assumptions, perhaps challenge some of our strategic directions and emphases and we need to be flexible enough to respond, but we also need to respond in an aligned fashion, a coordinated fashion. And I'm seeing some very promising first steps here, but certainly, as all of you have mentioned, we all have a long way to go. The other thing too, is that this isn't just a matter for cities. This is something that's affecting suburban and rural communities and these are places that sometimes don't even don't have the public or the nonprofit capacity to be able to respond. So there are a bunch of questions here that have come in and I'd like to sort of pose them. Most of them I think are up for grabs for everyone and I'll start off with one. One person says, we've heard from quite a few speakers that this crisis is going to be with us for a while. What advice do you have for practitioners to prepare themselves for a long-term response? So this is what I was just commenting on in the chat box, Charles. I think that we need to continue to have a community of learning and dialogue and sharing. I think this is an excellent example where there are similarities, but there is also pockets of innovation that we need to be privy to. And it's hard to do that when you're in the throes of warfare, right? You're just locking and just trying to make it through Monday, right? But I think that it's, we're going to need partners, supporters like Casey, like Urban America 4 that kind of pulls us back, allows us to breathe and consult with one another. I also think that we have to think about how we can have information sharing more globally, whether those are podcast, whether those are listservs. There has to be, I mean, this is a robust and dynamic national crisis. And when you have that kind of magnitude, using Terry's words, what's your go-to resource? And you need local resources, you need regional resources, and you need national resources. So how do we create access points so that we can get that real-time information so that we can pivot, learn and pivot throughout the long term? And I think that's what we need to be thinking about to build a community of support and a community of information as this crisis evolves. And I think to build, that's Tisha's absolutely correct, but I would also encourage us as practitioners to be vulnerable. You know, this is a very emotional and taxing time. And if you take this work seriously, you can't help but to really wear it all over you. And so I think it's really important that we also recognize that it's okay to be vulnerable, but it's also okay to use the system and really support that we have, not only for intellectual resources, but also for that emotional support to continue to all keep us going doing this work. You know, when we joke a lot with some other cities that I've been fortunate enough to work with, that we're not alone, right? And we were saying that we're not alone prior to the pandemic. Thank God we're not alone now, because it's really taking those conversations as to what we're all doing from not just a policy extent, but also how are we engaging with the communities of need, right? You know, knowing that you only have so much in resources, how are you engaging? How are you communicating that? And how are you really just taking care of your own physical and mental well-being? And I would add to that that, you know, oftentimes the best defense is a good offense. And so sometimes when we're faced with such a crisis of this magnitude, which is, you know, something New Orleans really experienced post Katrina, you really need to have a positive vision about what you want your city to look like in the next five to 10 years and then think about strategically how to make those investments. So, you know, the reason why Jane Place was founded as a community land trust is because we knew that we wanted to create community control development, development that kept people rooted in place where they were like resistant to displacement. And so I think it's also about trying to direct resources towards organizations and towards projects that are actively working on equitable development strategies as a way to just expand these sort of like islands that we've created. And, you know, there are hundreds of community land trusts across the country. There are hundreds of cooperatives, all sorts of organizations that really are trying to build housing that is more equitable, build a more equitable and resilient economy. You know, there's lots of worker owned co-ops that have really been incubating and trying to think about how to build an alternative economy that is not centered on exploitation, which is something we also need to see in our housing. Like there are plenty of good landlords out there, but in New Orleans, we have plenty of bad exploitative landlords and like they should not be rewarded for continuing to drain resources from members of our community. And so we really need to think about a positive vision for the communities that we want to create. And I know it can be very challenging when it feels so dark to like do that work, but it is like restorative to really concentrate on a positive future. Charles, can I build on Breonna's point about creating that vision? So many cities have plans in place prior to the pandemic. And I think it's so critically important not to veer away from those plans, because if you think through it, those plans were built with a level of cooperation and intelligence in order to set forth what the framework would be to address the longterm systemic issue, not having enough affordable housing. The key is now, how do we accelerate that growth and how do we prioritize in many people in many cases to help the folks most at need? And so one thing that's been helpful for us is that we already had a blueprint. And because we had that blueprint, we were able to pick it up, talk with our funders and our stakeholders about what needs to be done, but also really focusing in on accelerating the work. And that's what's really important right now. How do we accelerate the work and also build it to where we have the volume and really capacity to be able to help more folks? Mm-hmm. Deaking of capacity and resources and alignment and connection, and not to put anyone on the spot, but what have been some of the pros and cons, the positive and some of the challenging aspects of working with the governors or the state administration of your particular states? Some of you may have had a happier experience than others. I will say in Minnesota, we probably have an exceptionally good experience I'll just leave it at that. They're trying to do the right thing. We have a great governor, we have a Democratic House and a Republican Senate. So we kind of run into brick walls because of that partisan environment, but our situation is probably very good in Minnesota. I'd say Charles, with our CRF rental assistance, we created a portal for which people can apply and they're directed to the program that best fits them, one of which could be our rental assistance program, another could be emergency assistance from the Department of Family and Support Services and then the other is the state's own money that was allocated and we can, through our portal, sort of send them over to the state when that makes more sense for the applicant. So we have been able, we contemplated other ways of potentially working together, but this was the way we ended up determining we were best able to do, but it's a level of at least, we hope, ease for the applicant that they're not running around trying to figure out which entity is the best fit for their need. Cool. I do have another question for you. I mean, it's only building on what Tisha had said in terms of the importance of having this kind of shared action learning between and among places, but it is so challenging to do and it's certainly something that philanthropy, that is one of philanthropy's sweet spots and actually quite a number of organizations, particularly Urban and others, I think have thought and National Low Encome Housing Coalition have fostered these real-time learning communities, but are there particular pieces and kinds of action research that you would think would be helpful to collect data that would enable your places in organizations to respond to the challenge? In Minnesota, I'll just mention something really quick. I think this is happening all over the country, but we have something called the Heading Home Funders Collaborative. It's around homelessness. It's around funders getting together around homelessness. There's another one for childcare. There's another one for transit, but I would say we feel in this funders collaborative around homelessness somewhat isolated and less connected to what other funders are doing nationally. So while it's got a good relationship with the Minnesota Council on Foundations, it doesn't necessarily draw on all the learnings from around the country. So I would encourage national foundations and FHO and others to foster this knowledge sharing through things like this among foundations nationally. And I know that's going on, but we have felt like we're inventing it somewhat on our own in real time and looking hard for that research of those best practices. Yeah, and I know the housing initiative at University of Pennsylvania is actively working, Baltimore and Atlanta and four other cities. And I know they're thinking about trying to expand that reach. Urban has been doing I think a really phenomenal job for Kapothick and Solomon Green. And it's just beginning, but there's certainly plenty more can do. And I was wondering if anyone might wanna highlight any private sector partners. And by with this, I think the questioner probably meant non philanthropic partners who really stepped up in the face of the current situation. Well, that's okay, please Lauren. Well, it's so insignificant. I mean, I won't even mention the name, but a couple of landlords have, in Minnesota have, now this includes nonprofits too. So, but even a couple of for-profit landlords have set up a little bit of rent assistance within their own account more or less. And they have proactively, and this is a learning that we inventory here. They have proactively provide the rent forgiveness just to keep the tenant stable for three months. You know, like just trying to take some of that worry out of it for the tenant. And it's not the equivalent of rent assistance partial, but I think that there are some private landlords that's probably an industry practice. You know, it's not well known or maybe well-honed, but to provide a rent forgiveness and rent payment plans. And it just comes in various shapes and forms. I mean, Charles, could I push that back to you? I mean, you have this kind of more national perspective. And I just wonder, is that a missed opportunity in this work around bringing other people to the conversation? Because many of these employers are the folks who have these low wage individuals that the government is having to subsidize. So when you think about the hospitality industry, and there's some big players in the hospitality industry and they take great pride in being places where people entry level jobs and opportunities to grow, what could and should we be doing to create a call to action for those manufacturers? But you have some large companies that the government is having to subsidize their employees in this moment. So is that a lost opportunity and opportunity and also an opportunity for call to action? It's definitely, I think, a call to action. And I think it points to a divide between the private sector and the public sector and philanthropy outside of the context of the usual growth coalitions or growth regimes, however, what you wanna talk about it. But I think one set of actors that had already been moving in this direction about really working together, working together with themselves and community are anchor institutions, our universities and hospitals, which in many of the cities that we have represented here are major employers. I mean, it's the biggest single sector in the Baltimore economy, but in many other places, universities and hospitals, being those that are entities that in many cases are private sector, but really do have a public, nonprofit, social betterment mission. And a number of cities have moved in that direction to foster those kinds of connections. It's a difficult set of connections to have when you don't necessarily have those relationships, but certainly it is, I think, a perfectly valid and very important call to action. And with that, we are at, yeah, anyone else wanna just come on? I was just gonna say, for a non-traditional partner that we've worked with, with some success at the beginning of the pandemic is hospitality unions in New Orleans. We built a coalition with a bunch of labor activists, unions, other community-based organizations to put pressure on the New Orleans Convention Center, which was sitting on $100 million surplus that they were gonna use for various development projects around town and other things. And through a public campaign and pressure, we actually got them to chip off a million dollars to put towards rental assistance. So again, community organizing is always a great strategy to try to unlock resources for folks. I mean, we were asking for a lot more than a million, but it was a big victory that we secured that funding and it really was a union and community organization and based efforts. So don't forget about labor unions as a resource in the park there. I'm so glad you mentioned that also for lifting up. There are quasi-public sector entities, development corporations and the like that play a critical role. And actually in Baltimore and Atlanta have been playing a very important role in the small business recovery, but haven't necessarily focused as much of their attention yet on housing, but it is something on which to build. And we are almost at time. So I'm going to turn it back over to Elena, but I just wanted to thank everyone, all of our panelists and Brianka are responding for taking the time out of your very, very, very busy days to share your thoughts and experiences with us. Elena. Thank you, Charles. And I echo that I thank you to each of the panelists and to our respondent. That was such an incredibly rich conversation. It was so substantive. We were chatting with each other behind the scenes saying that you guys are providing some very substantive information for peers in other cities, speaking candidly about the challenges, but also the ways that you have stepped up to meet this moment. I invite you to continue along with us, continue this community of practice and continue with this conversation. We're going to continue to have Urban America forward, equitable relief and recovery sessions every three weeks. So mark your calendars. We have the next one on September 14th. And then again, on October 5th, that will be the last in the series. I absolutely need to thank Charles Rathizer for leading us through that discussion and providing that substantive thread throughout the conversation. Again, thank you to New America, Indianapolis and to the National Urban League. But to each of you, all as well as our sponsors, Kresge Foundation and Annie Kasey Foundation, to each of our panelists, again, thank you so much for the hard work and for the way that you are serving the communities that we care about. Please stay in touch. This program will be memorialized on the New America local YouTube site as well as the Urban America Forward website. We will follow up with the high points and themes from today's conversation and we will continue to stay in contact with you. So we're only a phone call or an email away, but thank you so much for all of your work to make our cities more equitable and to make our recovery more inclusive.