 Good morning, everybody. Good morning, David. Welcome to Housing 101. My name is David Martins. I'm the director at the Vermont Affordable Housing Coalition. We, if those of you who don't know about VAHC, we are a statewide coalition of over 90 members, which is made up of nonprofit organizations, housing developers, individual members of every walk of life. And we always want to see it grow. So if you've not heard of us and you're not a member, I certainly encourage you to become one. If we were on Zoom, we would probably go around and spend an hour introducing ourselves, saying our name and our favorite animal or some other kind of icebreaker. But we are curious to know, just generally speaking, how many of you are here who are working for a housing organization or a housing practitioner of some flavor? How many are policymakers or how many are new policymakers? Oh, God bless you. You're in for it. So welcome, welcome one and all. And I'd like to just put what we're going to talk about in this breakout group into perspective and frame it for us a bit. And I wanted to do that by telling you a very brief story, if you'll bear with me. It's the story of a rich man and a poor man who was very talented. And the poor man was having a hard time, a hard time finding work, a hard time keeping up with the bills. And he didn't even live in Vermont. And he had these struggles. And the rich man approached the talented man and he said, you know, I know things have been kind of tough for you, so I want to help out. I'm going to hire you to build me a house. The guy said, I can build a house. Well, I want you to build me a house and spare no expense. And I'll pay you for all of your time. I'll reimburse you for all the materials. But I want the very best house that you can build for me. Well, the guy's so excited he goes out and he gets right to work. And the first week, he works like a 60-hour work week, turns on all the paperwork. And the guy just writes a check, doesn't even look at the paperwork. Weeks go by. He continues in this project. And as the weeks go by, he realizes, this guy's just writing me checks. Why am I working 60-hour work weeks? So 60-hour work weeks became 50-hour, became 40-hour, then became like 30-hour. And the best materials started to become the cheaper materials and the cheaper materials. And he's still turning in the same paperwork and getting these same decent checks. Well, finally, the house is done. And the day comes where he gets to give the rich man the tour of the house. And so they're walking around the house, and he's showing them all the different rooms. And his heart's just pounding in his chest because he looks at the ceiling fan and realizes that that's being held to the ceiling with some questionable screws. And he knows that this little detail may look nice and freshly painted, but he knows that it's not quite the quality that the rich man thinks he's getting. The tour is finally done. And the guy's relieved that he seems to have gotten away with this. And as he's heading down the driveway, the rich man comes to the door and he goes, oh, wait a minute. And the poor man turns around and looks. And the rich man holds out the keys. And he says, these are the keys to your house. I wanted to help you out. I knew you needed some work. I knew you needed a house for yourself. So I thought I could help you out and have you build this house. I share that story with you for a couple of reasons. First of all, because it's about housing, and that's why we're all here. But also because the talented man was unknowingly building his own house. And when we ask ourselves, how do we get into this housing crisis? Because we built it over 30 years of not keeping up with development and keeping up with new construction as we needed. And all the other elements of life in our society that has contributed to this, we unknowingly were building our own house. And now we're living in it. I also share that story because there is no rich man in real life. Well, there are. But there's no magic fix. There's no magic bullet. And the reality of it is that the housing organizations that you all work for, the policymakers in Montpelier, and everyday Vermonters are every single day out there working, trying to figure out ways that we can overcome barriers, that we can get more safe, decent, affordable housing built so that every Vermonter will have a home. And you'll learn about all of those realities today because we continue to build our home. But now we're building the home for the future. And if it took us decades to get into this mess, it's going to probably take some decades for us to entirely get out. And each and every one of us in this room can play a part in that. So I invite you to really absorb these folks that you're going to hear from are far brighter than I and have far more experience than I, especially Chad, who's going to speak next. Because of his advanced age, he has lots of experience. And we would just ask, if you have questions along the way, kind of throw them in your notebook. We hope that you'll join us after lunch for Housing 102, which is very intentionally the second half of this. So you will be missing something if you don't come back. And we have a sizable amount of question and answer time then. Some of the presenters might try to work in an opportunity to ask some questions. So just kind of bear with us. But we want to make sure we get to everything. So I'm going to stop talking. And I'm going to encourage you to just utilize those notebooks so we can make sure that we can get to everything. And on behalf of VAHC, and I'm sure all of us, I thank you for wanting to be part of the solution, the solution to our housing problem, because it's very easy to talk about. We all know there's a housing. Every time we write a rent check, we know that, or a mortgage, those of you who are really lucky, we know that there's a problem, but we're here to be part of the solution. So on that note, I'll pass it over to Chad Simmons from the Vermont Housing Finance Agency, or VHFA. Great, thank you, David. And thank you, everyone, for being here today. It's so great to see so many of you here. We're really excited to see how we can use the information that we'll be gleaning from today and what we've already heard from to see how we can be part of that solution that David speaks of. So before I show you a plethora of data and information to ground this discussion around where we can go, what policy levers and tools we can use, I wanted to provide a bit of context for what I'm about to share. And I'll just say in advance, I'm not gonna be able to get through all of these slides that are presented, but we will be providing all these slides and information, and we're actually being filmed for this to be shared afterwards. So a couple of things. One, as David was talking about, where we are right now is by design. We didn't just happenstance get here. And I think it's really important as you're looking at this data, as you're looking at these data to be thinking about that in particular where we see ourselves going and how we can take action based on this information. The second is I'm hoping you all can think about equity, who benefits from what we're seeing and who's disproportionately harmed. And I think that's really important to think about when you are looking at the information that we'll be discussing. Availability and cost. We'll be talking a lot about the availability of housing, where it's located, how much it costs to maintain, and to build new housing. And finally, the process and the tools. So what can we do to leverage the policy choices and the money that we have available? Finally, housing is about people. We house humans and our pets. The things that we love. Builds community, connection. And I think that's something that we oftentimes lose sight of when we look at the 20 slides that look at the data that I'm about to share is that ultimately it's about humans. And so to keep that in mind when we're looking at where we are right now as a state and where we wanna go. Who do we wanna be? So Vermont today, let's look at some data. And some of these slides may be familiar with you and some of these might be brand new. So just look at, we're hoping to give kind of a level set kind of where we're at right now. So the median age, as many of you may know, Vermont is the second oldest state, I'm sorry, the third oldest state in the country. And that has implications for the what type of housing we need, where we need to build housing. Is it connected to schools? Is it connected to health services? We're also one of the widest states in the country. And thinking about who has access to housing and again, where that housing is and how people are able to build wealth and build a community based on access to housing. Here's some of the income levels for the housing that and looking at who has access to housing. And a key thing here when looking at this slide in terms of the median income of family households is how much house or how much apartment can folks who earn $37,000 actually afford? And in this particular housing market that really doesn't go a long way. So thinking about the incomes that our households are generating and how much house we're able to buy. Vermont's rental vacancy rates. So the vacancy rates are essentially kind of the percentage of vacant housing units designated for rent compared to the total rental units. So essentially we want that number to be around, we typically say that around 5% is a healthy vacancy rate. And as of 2019, we were under 4%. And in some communities that vacancy rate is under 1%. So it makes it extremely difficult. And we'll talk a little bit more about this in the upcoming slides. Makes it extremely difficult for people to have choice. And we don't have choice whenever there's changes in cost to housing that makes it very difficult to find opportunities, healthy, safe, affordable housing. This one, I'm just gonna take a minute here to explain this one and it's really important to look at while our population hasn't grown extensively, it's gone up slightly. But what's really fascinating about these data is the household size has shrunk. So essentially what that means is that the household, the number of people in a household has gone down. And what that means is we need more housing units to be able to meet the needs of our families and households. So even though our population isn't skyrocketing, we actually need more housing units to meet the demand. And what that looks like is additional year round housing of almost 12,000 is needed. And number of, I'm sorry. And so from the 2020 census counts, this is the availability of homes. And what we can see here is that there's actually less availability. There's fewer vacation homes that are available that were being used for vacation homes. So that's telling us that some people are moving in using their vacation homes, their second or third homes to actually live in. So homelessness in Vermont. And it might be a little tough to see this slide, but essentially homelessness is counted every year. There's an annual point in time count. So essentially we try to get our best assessment of how many people are homeless on that particular day. And this is oftentimes under, is under representative. So these are conservatively lower numbers than we might know of. So in the last point in time count, there were just under 3,000 people who identified as homeless. And as you can tell by this slide and the data point in red, almost 500 people are under the age of 18. So we have too many, too many children, too many families who identify as homeless. So as many have known, are aware of, and as we've been seeing in the news quite often, is the housing prices to buy a home have continued to rise. And at this point, we're now over at, the median home sales price is over $280,000. So again, looking at the availability and the affordability, it's just too tight for many households. In Vermont, many people own their homes, almost three quarters of Vermont's population owns their home. But there are some disparities in who owns their home. So as we can see on the far left here, folks who identify as white alone, 72% own their home. But unfortunately, people who identify as black, only 24% own their home. So that's a massive disparity. And we'll talk a little bit about this. There's some other presentations throughout the day, but what are some policy tools? What are some efforts that we can use to make sure we can shorten that gap, to decrease that gap? Let's talk a little bit, just a minute about our housing stock. So Vermont's housing stock is one of the oldest in the country. The median year the house was built was 1974. And to think about the implications of what that means for old housing stock, it's expensive to fix. There might be implications for accessibility. So as we have an aging population, is it accessible to services? It doesn't need a fair amount of fixing up to be able to make it accessible and livable to age in place. And we're also looking at energy efficiency. So a lot of our conversations are happening around and what's our energy burden? How much money are people spending in their monthly paychecks to be able to pay for their heating and electrical? So our aging housing stock is really important that we have resources to be able to preserve our housing and make sure that it's safe, decent and affordable. This slide just shows a little bit about how much housing that we've gotten. So we have a little under 200,000 units that are owner occupied, 80,000 units that are rental and around 55,000 units that are for other uses. So vacant, seasonal, et cetera. And I've got a couple of slides in here but I didn't wanna have too, too much. But this is just a slide kind of indicating how much of our housing stock is not really being used for permanent housing. And we'll have a lot of conversations, I'm sure, around short-term rentals. And short-term rentals only take up statewide around 2.5% but vacant properties take up 17% of our housing stock. So a really important data point to look at in terms of how we can leverage some of the policy choices that we have before us. A final couple of slides here that I've got around housing construction and the cost to build housing. So we are, and as David alluded to, we have been under-constructing. So we haven't been building enough housing for almost 40 years and that's catching up with us. So this slide just shows that we were on a great trajectory until the mid-1980s and then we picked up a little bit and then fell way off. On average, we build about 2,000 units of housing per year and that has not kept up with the demand. The cost of housing is expensive and over the last few years it's gone up significantly and COVID only exacerbated that. As of 2022, the average cost per unit is around $370,000 to build housing and that makes it just more unaffordable for folks to be able to afford housing. Finally, the housing cost burden. So we look at 30%, federally 30% of our household income is that threshold for what we deem as capital A affordable and so that includes your mortgage, your rent and utilities. So folks, 15% of Vermont households spend more than half so that means extremely cost burden on their housing and that just makes it harder for people to save for a different apartment or move into home ownership. So I'm gonna end with, so that was a lot and kind of a downer so I'm gonna end with this. Going back to Dave's point around we are, we have the ability to change the direction of our housing situation and so my colleague, Seth, shared this slide around what can we do to kind of change the trajectory of all many of these slides and I love this because it both speaks to the data and how we turn the curve on our housing needs as well as it speaks to the human side of housing and how we can create inclusive, diverse and vibrant housing in communities and I'll leave you with many of us as Maura was pointing out this morning, we're able to stay safe from a public health crisis and many of us, like my family, stayed in our house for several months without leaving and so thinking about housing safety and decent affordable housing is a necessity, it's a right and what can we do to be able to make sure that's available for everyone so I'll leave you with, we'll be sharing all of these slides for folks and again, be sure to check out all the data on housingdata.org and many of the other sites that we've got, thank you. Hi, my name's Polly Major, I'm here today to talk to you about federal housing policy and the policy director for Vermont Housing and Conservation Board which is a state-created entity that invests in Vermont communities by making investments in housing, affordable housing and in conserving our open lands and agricultural resources but I also came, recently transitioned over from Senator Leahy's office where I covered housing policy for him here in Vermont and so that's really the perspective I'm bringing to this talk about federal housing resources and I love following Vermont Housing Finance Agency because their wealth of data, I wanna put another plug for Vermont Housingdata.org. Is it housingdata.org or just housingdata.org? As you go forward after the session and work and advocacy, it's such a wonderful resource to paint that picture of what is happening here in the state and in your communities. So as we think about the landscape of housing policy, federal policy and federal resources are really the big dollars in the room but also the least flexible. So they often set the parameters around the work that we can do and we look to state policy to work around the edges and do some innovative work and you're gonna hear about that from my colleague, Sean. So as I look at federal policy, we think about the programs that invest in housing here in Vermont that support creating housing, that support rental assistance and that support home ownership, really those three sections of the housing market. We also think about the housing policies such as fair housing that guide where housing is built and how housing is accessed. And at the end of this presentation, I really wanna take some time to talk about how do you engage in the federal policy discussion? We're really fortunate here in Vermont to have a small population and an extremely accessible delegation and working with them is something that you all have the ability to do. So before I go on to what are the agencies that invest in housing and the acronyms they use to put out money, I wanted to talk about what that looks like here in Vermont. So you see a picture here of downtown St. Johnsbury, new avenue apartments. This is a recent, an old building that was recently invested in with a whole suite of state and federal programs. And by braiding those resources together, using that long list of acronyms, the developers Rural Edge and partnership with Ever North were able to create 40 apartments and bring this building really back to life so that it could once again be this gem in downtown St. Johnsbury. But it's complicated. So as you might all be coming to this with a variety of understandings of federal resources. So I'm gonna start at the very, very basic and when we look at where does capital for building affordable housing come from at the federal level, most of it comes from the Department of Housing and Urban Development. And it comes to Vermont in these three block grant programs. So a block grant program is a federal program where there's a formula and Vermont gets every year an allocation to spend on projects here in the state. So I'm just gonna talk through some of these resources because these are some of the big grant dollars essentially that function here in the state to build housing. So there's the home program and many of these are known by their acronyms, I apologize. And what home is able to do is it funds development of affordable housing for rent or for home ownership so long as the housing is targeted for low and very low income Americans. This allocation to Vermont, there's two actually, one comes to the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board who then invests it in projects through the state, through our development community. And there's another allocation that comes to the city of Burlington that similarly invests it in community development initiatives. And coming to the statewide pot, I couldn't put my fingers on the Burlington allocation quickly is about 2.9 million that I believe that's the 2021 number. Next, there's the Community Development Block Grant Program. This is administered through the state of Vermont and again through the city of Burlington. The way HUD formulas work is that they have statewide grants and then they have grants that are made to cities. So that's why you see Burlington pulled out here. The CDBG programs administered through the state through my colleague, Sean Gilpin. And it's a little broader than the home program in that it can invest in a range of community development activities. And Vermont sees investment in affordable housing as key to building vibrant communities. So you do see those dollars play a role in the projects like the one you saw in New Avenue and St. Johnsbury. And then the third source that I want to call out is the Housing Trust Fund. This is one of the newer sources of affordable housing development capital that was really championed by Senator Bernie Sanders, both when he was in the House and the Senate. So we're really grateful for his work there. And this allocation of about 3 million per year also comes to Vermont Housing and Conservation Board again to invest in this. This source really targets very low income households. Then we have the big kind of federally supported private dollars and this is really done through the low income housing tax credit program, which I wanted to find the most complicated graphic out there. This actually isn't it. This was middle of the road. At the end of my presentation, I have a great video at that seven minutes long so I didn't want to show it, but it does walk through how this program works. But here what the impact of this program is here in Vermont, it's administered through Chad and the Vermont Housing Finance Agency. And it brings capital to the state and this covers about 60% of our non-profit development capital in the state. Last year, I think it was 2021, that it created 105 permanently affordable housing units in five communities across the state, really powerful program and the way it works. So the IRS allocates tax credits to a state agency who then gives those credits to projects across the state, sell those credits and that creates the capital that comes into these funding stacks to create wonderful buildings like the one you'll see actually on the next slide. So moving off the capital for production, I also want to talk about housing as a three-legged stool, that's the analogy we use a lot. And those legs of the stool are supply so that housing production, subsidy, the rental assistance that I'll talk about next and the support services that support the households that are living in our communities. So think about the subsidy, how people can afford to rent the home that they have. On the federal level, housing rental assistance is administered primarily through HUD but also through the US Department of Agriculture. I'll call out that HUD is the agency most of us think of when we think of housing investments in rural areas and like most of the state of Vermont outside of Chittenden County, the US Department of Agriculture through its rural development mission area has strong housing programs that invest in multifamily housing, rental assistance and home ownership. So when we're thinking about federal rental assistance, there's really two primary paths that you can go down, either project-based, so tying the rental assistance to units within housing developments, but also tenant-based, those vouchers that follow people who are renting in the private market and providing that assistance that covers between 30% of their income and the fair market rent in the area. And rental assistance here in Vermont is administered through the Vermont State Housing Authority and the local public housing authorities across the state. So when you think of that three-legged stool, the services, the supply, the subsidy, it all works together, braids together to create these projects often in downtown, these buildings that create homes for people. So this is an example of the power of federal estate programs. We have the Bellows Falls Garage that's being redeveloped by the Wyndham Windsor Housing Trust, including my sister who's standing in the back there. And you see Gateway to the Community, this old parking garage building that Wyndham Windsor Housing Trust is drawing down these federal and state dollars to transform into 27 apartments for households in an area where housing is scarce and where having safe, decent and affordable housing can really transform a family's life. So moving off rental housing, I also wanted to touch on home ownership and the federal supports for home ownership. The federal government supports home ownership through a variety of ways. But two really main levers that the federal government pulls on is to ensure privately held mortgages. And that's a role that the government's been playing for a long time, I want to say, since the 30s, moving out of the Depression. And also the mortgage interest deduction on taxes, so providing that support to households. And as I mentioned earlier, in rural communities like Vermont, an important player is USDA Rural Development that offers direct mortgages to income-qualifying homeowners and Vermonters, and also guarantees mortgages for income-qualifying home seekers. And the Department of Veterans Affairs similarly comes in with that guarantee to help people access housing when the bank might not take the loan, might not take the risk on that individual because of income eligibility. And just to call out rural development again, 3.4 million rural home buyers have been assisted since 1949. So a significant impact in our rural economy. But as we think of housing, think of home ownership, it is one of the areas where federal policy has had a serious effect in terms of equity and in terms of a history of discrimination, especially discrimination in lending. So in the 1960s, to address this, the Fair Housing Act was passed. The Fair Housing Act protects people from discrimination when they are renting or buying a home, getting a mortgage, seeking housing assistance, or engaging in other housing-related activities. It does this by protecting different groups of people and prohibits discrimination based on race, color, national origin, religion, sex, familiar status, and disability. And Vermont actually goes a step further, and I know Sean is going to touch on this, in protecting more categories of people from discrimination. And I touched on the types of housing that are covered. But it's really nearly all housing, including private housing, so including mortgages and private rental housing. And we have wonderful organizations, both through CVOEO, Champlain Valley Office of Opportunity, and Vermont Legal Aid, are two great resources we have in the state to help people who believe that they might be facing housing discrimination to determine whether there is any action they can take to address that discrimination. And an example could be an unequal treatment in renting, lending, or advertising. So advertising to target a population and by targeting a population try to really hide that resource from another population. Some really the kind of funding coming to the state for housing was changed through the COVID pandemic with the relief funding that came in both through the CARES Act earlier in the pandemic and then the American Recovery Plan Act, ARPA, passed in 2021. And both of these recognize the impact that the pandemic was having on the housing market, on people's ability to access housing. And so invested dollars in addressing that. And a lot of these programs were actually put out directly through the Department of the Treasury. So we traditionally think of HUD and rural development as our main players, but we're thinking COVID funding, we're working with the Treasury Department. And two of the main sources that they put out was direct assistance to states through the coronavirus relief fund, which was passed in CARES and the state and local fiscal recovery funds passed in ARPA. Those delivered these large allocations to the state and allowed the legislatures of the state and administrations of the state to invest those dollars where needed. And Vermont was really at the forefront of saying where these dollars are needed are in housing. And they put out significant funding to address housing through rental assistance and through addressing supply. However, we're about to see a contraction in those federal resources. This is one time funding that needs to be quickly deployed. And so we saw this bump in production. We saw a large number of renters who were assisted through the emergency rental assistance program. And unfortunately, there is not the ability at the federal level to continue the same influx of funding into the state to support these initiatives. So that's really going to affect the housing landscape moving forward. And Vermont will need to build on the success we've had in building housing and supporting families and figure out, how do we continue to do that with a changing federal landscape? So that's kind of the big picture overview of some of the housing resources at the federal level. There are more, depending on which part of housing you're looking at. But I wanted to go big picture and really spend some time talking about how to engage. And you see here a picture of our delegation plus one. So we have Senator Leahy at the top who is retiring at the end of this year, after 48 years serving Vermont in the Senate. He serves as chair of the Appropriations Committee. And in that capacity, has been able to direct resources towards the state. And has always had a soft spot for housing because of the role it plays in supporting our communities and our most vulnerable. Then of course, we have Senator Sanders, who's been a strong advocate for Vermonters. And Senator Elect, Peter Welch. And Representative Elect Becca Ballant. And I also thought here, yes, we're very excited about the changes in our delegation and know that they're gonna continue to be open to working directly with Vermonters. And I was sitting next to my former colleague Tafin Dean who covers housing for Representative Welch during the intro session and was thinking, oh, I should have put a picture of the staff up here because that's really who you're gonna work with as you're working in trying to influence federal policy. So some ways that you can engage is one, it's connect with a coalition. You kind of shout out to David on the Vermont Affordable Housing Coalition. That is a strong voice that the delegation looks to to say what are the needs of Vermonters in housing and where do we need to put investments or make policy changes. So as you're thinking about how to engage, working with those coalitions, both Vermont based coalitions and national coalitions, is a powerful way to communicate with your federal delegation. And also reaching out directly, calling the offices. Each of the members has their websites and if you write in and call in the kind of process for that is that your message, it's gonna get to a staffer who's going to want to connect back with you and have a conversation and say there's this coalition you can work with or to talk through the issue that you're working with. So I just want to leave you with a message that these folks are accessible and are interested to hear from Vermonters and from Vermont communities. And I can say this now because I'm not taking these calls anymore and I'm just asking you to call all my former colleagues. So you've heard the saying, never go to a meeting without an ask. So as you're thinking about a federal policy ask, what are the types of things that you might ask for? One of the simplest things is to ask members of your delegation to co-sign a piece of legislation. You'll hear from national advocacy groups saying there's this piece of legislation we're working with and we want as many members of Congress to support it as possible. So you can reach out to your delegation and say, hey, this would really impact my community and would further the goals that we have here in Vermont. I'm just gonna call on one from the last, this current congressional session, the Affordable Housing Credit Improvement Act sounds a little wonky of 2021. But what that act does is it increases the number of tax credits to really increase the capacity of Vermont Housing Finance Agency to work in maybe more than five communities across the state, maybe seven next year if the act was able to be passed. So it's really helpful from a congressional staffer point of view to have people flag that legislation because they see a lot of these pieces coming around every day. They don't have the capacity to read through all of them. So really rely on Vermont advocates to say which are important to Vermont and your voice really matters there. The next thing you can do is you can ask to sign onto a letter. So if you're looking more at a piece of regulation and you would like HUD to change how it's evaluating fair market rents so those vouchers are worth more and you know from national coalitions that there's a letter that members of Congress are sending to HUD saying, hey, can you please change your formula? You can ask the delegation to sign onto that letter. So that's another very simple, easy ask that can prompt action from the delegation. Then there's kind of the more long-term asks that you can make. You can make a policy ask. So in Congress, there's really two pieces of work that the members are doing. They're authorizing. They're creating new programs and they're creating new policies and they're appropriating. They're putting money into the programs. So if you're making an authorizing ask, you might ask for changes in a piece of legislation that is coming up for, it was being worked on coming up for a debate and for a vote. So this coming year is a farm bill year. This is a massive piece of legislation that affects a lot of agricultural policy but also rural policy and there might be an opportunity to impact some of those USDA programs if not directly through the farm bill, a companion piece of legislation that's going to move along with it because we're looking, Congress is focusing on rural policy and agricultural policy. And you could also make a money ask. You can say, Congress, you need to continue to fund the home program, the CDBG program, the Housing Trust Fund, these important block grant programs that support affordable housing across Vermont. And within those money asks, there's now two different tools you can use. Congress has the tool of Congressionally Directed Spending, this was formerly known as earmarks, but that's a bad word, so we don't use that anymore. And this is something that Senator Leahy, as chair of the Appropriations Committee brought back to Vermont to allow communities to ask for Congress to directly fund their programs. So if you have a community project that you are looking to further with federal funding, it's worth being in touch with your delegation and asking them, what's your process for submitting requests for Congressionally Directed Spending? What are you looking for? And what are the parameter, the kind of rules around getting a CDS request, a Congressionally Directed Spending Request? It is a complicated process and I'm not gonna bore you with an explanation of it now, but I just want to flag that something that in the last two years has come back into the federal appropriations process and is being used across Vermont. I think in the current bills that are the current funding bill that still needs to be voted on this year, I wanna say Senator Leahy's asks alone are about 18 million and change for housing related initiatives across the state. Senator Sanders I know has several requests in there as well as does Welch. So this is a powerful tool. And then a programmatic request changing existing federal program through appropriations to better meet the needs here in Vermont. So I'll just end with a picture here. This is a Champlain Housing Trust proposal to invest in the Harbor Place and Champlain Housing Trust came to Senator Leahy over many years saying we wanna invest in affordable home ownership. We wanna invest in shared equity and how do we do that? We need capital to build these homes so that we can offer affordable homes to two people in Chittenden County. And over a year, Senator Leahy was able to build a federal program within NeighborWorks which invests in housing across the country to support shared equity and eventually to have capital grants to build. So they were one of the first grantees in the country to get those capital grants and hopefully we'll be able to invest in building condos as part of this larger project. So these policy asks, these appropriations asks have a real impact here in the state. And I'll just leave you with resources that Chad I believe will send around later if you wanna read more. The Congressional Research Service is open to the public and has lots of dense pages of reading on the history of federal housing policy. And I'll leave you with my contact information as well. So thank you. And I think we'll move on to Sean if we have questions at the very end we'll do that. My name's Sean Gilpin. I'm the Director of the Housing Division at the Department of Housing and Community Development. And I'll try to move through what we've got. I was asked to do again some pretty big picture broad brush about sort of state housing policy and you'll hear some echoes from what Paulie had to provide just because we do coordinate so much with our federal delegation and have to engage with those federal programs. But I also wanted to talk about sort of some of the unique landscape. Well, I'll try to leave a little time for some questions for folks who can't come back but definitely want to echo the encouragement that Dave had about folks coming back for 102 if you're interested. I know that we've got some presenters that will really put a face to some of the more abstract things that we deal with on a policy level and have some time for discussion. So with that, I needed to have my own complicated flow chart. So this is something I put together actually for a UVM class a while ago, the state housing agencies in Vermont. And it is intentionally a little bit obfuscating but honestly is not that much off the mark. And I know it's a little difficult to see but from left to right up top in the blue boxes is the Agency of Human Services. We have the Vermont State Housing Authority, Vermont Housing Finance Agency in the middle, Vermont Housing and Conservation Board and the Department of Housing and Community Development. And all of these organizations interact but they all have their separate little niches as well and different programmatic uses throughout the state. The two on either side are actual government entities. So my boss is an appointed official from appointed by the governor's office. Leadership at Agency of Human Services, similar. Although most of us are frontline bureaucrats. The three in the middle are all actually instrumentalities of the state. So they kind of have this interesting, they're not entirely private nonprofits like many of our housing developers but they're not really entirely state entities. They're created by legislative statute but then have boards of directors that aren't all appointed by an elected official so there's a little bit intentionally of a buffer which for better or worse provides a little bit of insulation from sort of the electoral cycles which frankly I think is probably pretty helpful given that we have a two year cycle where everybody's up for reelection and in the world of housing development and having stable housing programs that type of rapid turnover is not always the most sustainable way to go about things. And I won't go into all the rest of the lower parts but suffice to say that each organization deals with a little bit of a different angle. And so in short, and this is definitely not an exhaustive list by any means of what programs are utilized but the Agency of Human Services, one of their major forms of funding is the Emergency Solution Grant which was formerly known as the Emergency Shelter Grant I believe but we changed that as to be a little bit more forward thinking. And then they have a myriad, I didn't want to list all of them, myriad different support and services organization. So this is one of those, AHS is largely in charge of one of the legs of the three-legged stool that Polly brought up. The Vermont State Housing Authority, VSHA, provides rental subsidies, including the housing choice voucher which is sort of commonly referred to as section eight. Although just like earmarks, we're trying to get away from that terminology because of some of the stigma there. VSHA also, I will do a shout out, I don't think I see anybody from there and oh, yeah, here we are, right in front of me, Daniel. Did incredible amounts of work utilizing the Emergency Rental Assistance Funds. If you check out their website, they still have a ticker along the top of how many tens of millions of dollars went out to support thousands of Vermonters during the worst of the pandemic to make sure they stayed housed. VSHA also manages some housing themselves. VHFA, we already talked about the Low Income Housing Tax Credit, LITECH, that's one of the biggest tools that they have although they utilize other tax credits as well. VHCB, Vermont Housing Conservation Board, Holly Shoppe is a very unique organization. It was started in 1987 with the distinct mission of working on both affordable housing development and land conservation, which we'll talk a little bit more about smart growth and some of the land use and policy that the state of Vermont engages in that kind of makes our state a little unique. Most places would probably see those as sort of conflicting efforts. Obviously, if you're conserving land, you can't build housing on it, but in the wisdom of past legislators and other advocates, we actually managed to create an organization that utilizes and largely through the property transfer tax. So whenever a property is sold in Vermont, a portion of that or there's a tax on that sale, and a portion of that is statutorily supposed to go to VHCB. The dirty little secret is that it often gets some titrated off for other uses, but the interesting part about that mechanism is as property values rise, that means more money gets put into the Vermont Housing Conservation Board. So it's kind of an intentional circuit breaker to provide more funding when it becomes more expensive to acquire land and build housing. They also administer the home investment partnership that and the Housing Trust Fund that Polly mentioned. And then my shop, DHCD, our biggest grants is the Community Development Block Grants, which actually passes through municipalities. As Polly mentioned, we, I'm gonna say that a lot, aren't I? As Polly mentioned, we're authorized to use it for a number of different uses, everything from accessibility modifications and public buildings to economic development to housing. And Vermont's actually a little unique in that we put almost all of our CDBG funds into affordable housing development. It's not entirely 100% but the plurality of it. In most states that goes towards economic development and business development, which is just an interesting sort of policy and philosophical situation. And then we also administer municipal planning grants, which again will be important for a topic later, that help both the regional planning commissions and actually ultimately help municipalities with addressing some of the zoning issues and bylaws that that was the purpose of the keynote speaker this morning. And you'll notice that there's a few of these that have been asterisked and underlined and they're all included in what's called the Consolidated Plan, which is a plan that we have to, oh no. Yeah, those look, some of those bullets aren't showing up. But the, that's probably white text. The Consolidated Plan is something that we provide to HUD, Housing and Urban Development. It's a five-year strategy plan and then we have an annual update. I will admit it is dry read. It is not exactly meant for the sort of inspirational messaging that we're trying to have today. But it is important and it is one way that communities can actually get engaged and have a say in how we prioritize those community development block grant dollars as well as the other dollars we have. The pre-planning requirements include an analysis of impediments to fair housing as well as a housing needs assessment, which actually Chad linked to the housing needs assessment. I will update this and get you a link to the AI. And then the little indented bullet is actually another plug for housingdata.org community profiles, which is again, where Chad got a lot of his data visualizations there. Polly mentioned it as well. It's an incredible resource. It's run by the Vermont Housing Finance Agency, largely by Leslie Black Plumo and Mia Watson who are absolute treasures for the state and what they can do with data collection and analysis. And it was funded actually by, or the latest iteration of it was funded by a community development block grant to really enhance that to make it a much more useful tool. So with state housing, we for better or worse put an awful lot of things into our affordable housing developments, a lot of policy. Sometimes people sort of derisively refer to affordable housing as a Christmas tree of policy because it seems like, again, for better or worse, every time that we're building an affordable housing unit and I'm using affordable as in a subsidized housing unit, not necessarily one that's just naturally affordable, we wanna see a lot of things attached to it, including obviously affordability. Vermont's unique in that we, anything that touches low income housing tax credit or Vermont Housing Conservation Board funding needs to be perpetually affordable. That is unique in the country. I don't know, well, unique might be wrong. It's very rare. I don't know of many other places that do that. Most times you have a subsidized housing that gets built is maintained as subsidized housing, affordable housing for a certain number of years, usually anywhere from 15 to 30, depending on the federal tools that are used. And then it's sold on the open market. We don't do that here. When we invest these public dollars into this housing type, we wanna maintain it in perpetuity so that you avoid the displacement, you can get away from possible gentrification in areas and all of those things. That means to co-opt Dave's story from earlier, that means our housing developers who use these funds know they're building their own home. So they're not pulling punches and using lesser materials. Oftentimes, if anybody has the opportunity, and I would encourage you to take it to do a walkthrough tour of any of our neighbor works, home ownership centers, developments, the VHCB developments, all of the regional housing developers. You'll see that it's not glamorous, but it is well thought, well designed, and it's built to last, which is really important. Accessibility, another huge issue, being able to make sure that particularly again, as Chad mentioned, as our populations age, or just to have the availability of homes for people who might have mobility issues, auditory, visual problems, that having housing that's accessible is really important. And that ties right into health. I mean, never before, I've been around long enough I remember a time where we used to be told that we were a little on the fringes by saying that housing is healthcare. I think that after this pandemic, nobody will deny that having a safe place to live is absolutely imperative for maintaining a good, a good, healthful existence. We also value historic preservation, maintaining the historic buildings, particularly in our downtowns, and making sure that they're vibrant so that our communities are healthy and have a vibrancy to them. Energy efficiency is a growing, a huge growing concern. And often when done well, can address some of the affordability issues. So we require a pretty high, it's called the Arby's, the residential building energy standards, are much higher in Vermont than they are in many other places. And also location efficiency. So building in our downtowns, near our transit centers, near amenities and things that people, so that they don't have to get in a car and drive absolutely everywhere. All of these things, I don't think anybody would refute that these are all important aspects. They also add to cost. And it's for this reason, I think that you often see people who are skeptical about public housing and public investment housing will talk about how it costs more, or perhaps they might suggest that a private developer could do it for less. And that may be true in some cases, but you're not gonna get this whole menu of items in your housing development without some policy choices and without some costs associated with that. And I was asked to talk a little bit about smart growth. And that goes to the locational efficiency. And so we actually have articulated in the statutes one of the major goals of it's popularly known as Act 250. And it's really, if anybody gets involved for a long time in, or not very long at all actually, in housing development and management, you'll hear about Act 250. But part of the reason why it was created was as you can see to plan development so as to maintain the historic settlement pattern compact village and urban centers separated by rural countryside. So that's kind of a very bland and not terribly inspiring way to talk about the beauty of Vermont. Like that's what we all talk about how Vermont looks different than other places. And it's largely due to these land use statutes that try to address historical patterns of development, putting energy into places where we have typically lived and not sprawling out and into the forests and into the working landscape. And this is kind of a little graphic at the bottom there of the graphical representation of what that kind of looks like. Again, that is, it's a policy choice that we've made that might also add to cost. It's more expensive to buy and build in a downtown area than it would be to get a big track of former pasture land and put up a bunch of ticky tacky suburb homes or McMansions. There's also the historic development pattern and before I go on, it's one of the things that we've been dealing with a lot lately is trying to sort of reform the Act 250 regulations and the permitting requirements particularly in those areas that we've already identified as where we want to see development. And to speak a little bit to again, the keynote speaker this morning talked about zoning and we actually have a situation in Vermont right now where a lot of our zoning was redone in the 70s when people were very afraid about explosive growth. And my colleagues at the community planning and revitalization division in our department who do a lot of what I'm gonna talk about in a moment and address a lot of the needs of our downtowns, they often bring up the fact that if you picked pretty much any like let's take a downtown Bristol, St. John'sbury, some of these other even small towns that actually have a village center, if God forbid the center got wiped out just a act of God, you would not be able to rebuild some of our most vibrant and most desirable downtown areas, the same as what they are now with the bylaws and the zoning codes that we have. And that's really, it's a huge deterrent to making sure that our communities are able to be adaptive and vibrant and to house the people that want to live there. And so we, the smart planning sort of has a bit of a trickle down. There's big state planning goals and then regional plans. And these actually outline the regional planning commissions on that map. And then those inform municipal plans. And we pride ourselves in a, is that my time? We pride ourselves in addressing these needs and we actually have what are called the designated areas. And so village centers, downtowns and new town centers are kind of the, they almost speak for themselves. Downtowns, I think most people would know it when they see it, a village center. Similarly, we have a lot of historic villages. New town centers are a relatively new designation where if a municipality has decided that they have a place where they wanna see a downtown where they don't, so for instance, take maybe a coal chester or even South Burlington right now is trying to work on sort of creating that center that never existed. And then there's sort of add-on designations called the neighborhood development areas and growth centers. And getting these designations requires that the town goes through a lot of this planning process and talks about how they're going to address infrastructure needs, how they're going to encourage housing development, how are they going to do it? And once they pass all of that muster, they get certain incentives, so tax credits, regulatory incentives, permitting things, as well as some funding opportunities and other resources. And again, the links here are showing up in white text, but I would encourage folks when I resend this PowerPoint to if you'd like to learn more about sort of our ongoing efforts here to subscribe to our Strong Communities Monthly newsletter. It's a brief little newsletter that goes out that underscores a lot of the activities that go on in the department. And so I know we're getting close, so I'm just quickly gonna touch on, as promised, some of the Housing Discrimination and Fair Housing Act. And thanks, Polly, for unwittingly letting me borrow this slide, just a prime. So again, on top of the federal prohibited bases is the term that legal aid likes me to use now, but it's a little clunky. Vermont has gone even farther than the Federal Fair Housing Act and actually has identified these other six, sexual orientation, gender identity, age with some limited exceptions. You are technically allowed to, there's some issues with minor signing leases that are age issues. And also, theoretically, I know some folks are probably familiar with senior housing. There's certain criteria by which you can have an age-restricted housing. It's technically, 80% of the units need to be with people at 55 or above and have facilities that pertain to some sort of age-related issue, or 100% need to be 65 or older. Oftentimes, it's almost impossible to convert an existing building from being mixed age to an age-restricted building without discriminating. So most of the senior housing that we have was built with the intention of being a senior housing facility. Marital status, so you can't discriminate on the basis of a couple not being married or being married, for that matter. Receipt of public assistance is actually a really big one. Oftentimes, I think in the past, it's been called source of income, which isn't exactly correct. But basically, you can't say in the state of Vermont, I don't accept section eight. I won't take your housing subsidy voucher. So if somebody's receiving public assistance and it's adequate assistance to be able to rent the unit, then you can't say I won't go through that program. I see a couple squinting eyebrows here because that is really prevalent. I actually have a rental unit myself in my duplex, and the number of times when I put out an application and somebody says, oh, do you accept section eight? And I've got a little half pager that just you have to accept. Public or private landlord has to accept section eight. If anybody tells you this, here's the people that you should call because it's required. And that's actually, that's pretty huge. A lot of places don't have that. My sister actually works for a coalition and homelessness across the river there in the state we shall not name. And they have this problem all the time that somebody has a voucher. They've identified a unit that passes inspection. They're ready to go. And the landlord says, no, I don't do section eight. So that's huge. And the most recent one that was passed, gosh, now it must have been like 2018. Anyway, you can't discriminate on the basis of somebody having been a victim of domestic violence, stalking or sexual assault. Why on earth would anybody do that? A reasonable person might say, well, a landlord can't say, hey, I know that Jane's husband is a lunatic and she escaped him and I don't want him coming around. I'm not gonna rent to Jane. Like you're not allowed to do that in the state of Vermont. And there's actually in that same piece of statute, there's particular requirements about changing locks, installing security devices and things like that for somebody who can reasonably show that they are in danger. One thing I do wanna say, well, actually two things I do wanna say on this before I close out. First of all, if anybody's interested in learning more about fair housing generally, as well as how it interacts with bylaws and exclusionary housing and whatnot, I would encourage you to check out our websites, which we actually have a training, I wanna say it's December 12th. Naomi, do you remember? I don't know, Jamie's not here, is she? Anyway, I think it's December 12th. We do a virtual training that's intended for municipal officials, but actually I think is really helpful for anybody who wants to learn more. It's free, it's from two to four. I'll include when I fix up these slides, I'll link to that as well. And also something that I bring up at that training, which I think is really important, and this is a little bit of a tangent, but I think important for housing discrimination is that if you think about it, if you look at these categories, every one of us is in all of these categories. So fair housing and housing discrimination law doesn't protect any particular group, it protects everybody. You can't say I only rent to, I don't rent to white Christians just as much as you can't say I don't rent to a black Jewish person. The sword cuts both ways, and I think it's really important when we message fair housing and anti-discrimination laws that we make sure that we're putting it in that context because it is something that protects everyone, it doesn't protect a special group of people. So, and which is hugely important because housing has such a massive effect on every aspect of our lives. So with that, I will, I don't know, do we have a, no not really, we have a couple minutes. Yeah, come back for one or two. I just add a thought for you to take with you to lunch, which is that when you're sitting at your Thanksgiving table next week or the week at, what is it, next week, and people start talking about different issues in culture and Uncle Joe says, well housing, why don't they just, you can be like, well because I went to an hour long talk about why we can't just because it's complicated. But I'd invite you to think during lunch about what all of what we heard, how that impacts even further, like even in the smaller ways, right? For example, I was in a romantic relationship, he moved in, it didn't work out, I can tell you about it at lunch, but I thought to myself, there's nowhere for either of us to go. There's nowhere to, like there's nowhere to run. What about the couples where there's violence? Like then what? And this is wonderful, we have all these protections, but if you think that just because we have rainbow flags all over Burlington, the LGBT community is, I mean, you know, pop into the Pride Center and they'll tell you stories of the trans person who didn't get their lease renewed and because it was a no cause eviction. Like we hear these stories all the time and so I would invite you to just sort of take that with you to lunch, to think about like, well maybe I'm not a housing developer and I can't directly pull these lovers, but there's ways that we can all be involved because as Sean so perfectly put, we're all in these slides. So please come back and join us for 102 after lunch, which is gonna be a bit different, it'll be much more interactive and there'll be no quiz, we promise. Sorry.