 Good evening, I'm Harold Pacius, we're on the air again with another edition of Pacius on the News, and tonight we have a very, very interesting guy, Dan Brennan, who is the head of main housing. I always knew it as main housing authority, but it's the state agency that tries to help us solve our housing problems. Dan, welcome. Well, thank you very much. It's an honor to be here. I appreciate you reaching out. Well, you're a very nice guy. You come all the way down from Winslow, Maine, to be honest. I hope that you'll have a pleasant evening after this in Portland. I am sure, yes. So joy the great city of Portland. So Dan, as I said, runs the main housing authority, and all of us, you, me, we read in the newspaper every day about the housing crisis in Maine, and it takes many, many different forms from, you know, you go by the park and you see a lot of homeless people, and that's part of the housing crisis, because they have no place to live. That's a segment of the crisis. You read about people who say rents are too high, we can't find a place to rent. It's terrible. That's part of the housing crisis. You read about people who say, you know, we're trying to buy our first home, and prices are so high, with nothing available, we can't find anything. That's part of the housing crisis. And most of it, I'll ask my guest if he agrees with this, but of course, you know, after all these years, I have my own opinions. But most of it relates to something called supply and demand. That is exactly the issue. Over the years, over the last several decades, we simply haven't built enough housing units, let alone affordable housing units, but we simply have not built enough housing units for the population that needs housing. And that's not just in Maine. That's all around the country. So what we're experiencing in Maine, and you captured it very well by the different pockets of the crisis, it's as bad as it's ever been. It's as challenging as it's ever been. But we have a state housing authority, we have a plan, we've got hundreds and hundreds of people working on this, and we've also have support from our state and federal leaders that are helping us along the way. So I'm an optimist, I'm a hopeful guy, but we work very hard to tackle each one of those issues as best we can each and every day. So I think the news here, this is patience on the news, is going to be the plan. Before we get to the plan, I want to introduce you to Dan a little bit. So Dan, like 45% of the rest of the people in this state, you originally came from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. I did. I was born in the town of Brinkrey, Massachusetts, just outside of Boston, and lived there for the first nine years of my life. And then my family, my dad, mom, we moved down to Cape Cod, and I grew up on Cape Cod in the town of Sandwich, graduated high school from there. So I was very fortunate to grow up on the Cape. It's a great place, my brother is still there, and I love the Cape, but it gets a little claustrophobic. Particularly in the summertime, huh? Yeah. When you're 17, 18 years old, and you've been doing that, you want to get away. I was familiar enough with the Boston area, and I've been there, done that. So I wanted to go as far away as I possibly could. And I ended up in Orinomane and had the best four years of my life in Orinomane, getting a bachelor's degree at the University of Maine. And of course, with that came the good fortune of marrying a girl from Maine. You've made you permanent, right? Well, I don't know how those rules work, but no, I've been very lucky. I love the state of Maine. I've fallen in love with the state of Maine, and it's in my heart and it's in my soul. And so I love to go back and visit Boston. I love to go back and visit the Cape. But this is where my life's work is and will remain so. So you've been with the Maine State Housing for a long time now. I celebrated my 30th year this past April. Really? Yeah. And so you've held a variety of positions there. Now you're the boss. Yeah. I came out of the banking world. I actually worked right here in downtown Portland, working for a Maine national bank, working in their internal audit department, so you get a sense of how banks work. And it was very unstable employment back then, and I needed something a little more stable. So I ended up landing this job at Maine State Housing Authority in 1993, because they were looking to start an internal audit function. Maine State Housing Authority is a bank. It's an affordable housing bank that was created in 1969. And its primary purpose is to provide financing for people who are trying to buy their first home, and also to developers building apartments. So you've been there all those years, and who made you the director? Which governor made you the director? Paula Page. Back in 2018, our previous director had retired, and the governor had made an appointment and politics played out, and the legislature and the governor couldn't get along on that nominee. A good man would have been fine, but about an hour after that decision was made by the legislature, I got a call from the governor's office, and he asked me to come over and talk to him about the job, and I did, and I decided to do it, and once I did that, it felt right. It felt very comfortable. And so the current governor, you worked for Paula Page for a number of years, and the current governor for the last four and a half years, one's the Republican, one's the Democrat, but they tell me you're neither Democrat nor Republican. I am proudly neither a member of the Republican nor the Democratic Party, and that's by choice. I love this country, I love our state, and I do follow politics very closely, but I personally am not a member of either party, and I don't, and so I'm not being a political guy, I don't want my agency to be political either, because what I found is that Democrats and Republicans want to solve affordable housing problems, and I want to work with them. So I let the politics play out, and when they play out and all is said and done, obviously I interact with politicians of both parties willingly, try and help them make the best decisions that they feel they need to make, and once those decisions are made, and funding decisions are made, our job is to spend that and help the main people. And do you get, so do you get, I know you deal with the legislature all the time, in the governor's office, and that's part of the job, but let's get back, it's a bank, so I don't think people think of your agency as a bank, why do you say it's a bank? So we're a bank because we're partly a bank, a two and a half billion dollar bank, so that would make us about the fourth or fifth largest bank in the state of Maine, and we're also an administrator of many federal programs where the government pays us a fee and we help people out and we can talk about that a bit. The bank side is, most banks run by depositors coming and depositing money into the bank, so the bank has money to lend out and help people do their thing. Our type of bank, we borrow money by selling tax exempt bonds on Wall Street, and the legislature gave us that authority. So we're able to raise money by borrowing it from bondholders, and we can typically raise that money at a lower interest rate than community or commercial banks. We can then lend that money out at a lower interest rate to people who are making lower incomes for first time home buyers, or we can use that money and other subsidies we get from the federal government to help developers lower their cost of debt for the apartments that they are building, and therefore they can charge a lower rent. The rent levels are set by the federal government. The income levels are set by the federal government. So we work in our own unique world, which is a construct that plays out in all 50 states. We're a housing finance agency. So if I were a young person, I read about these young couples that want to get a house and so forth, interest rates are pretty high, prices of the houses are high. So I need to get a loan. How would I end up connecting with main housing? Sure. Well, first of all, we have a great website, mainhousing.org. There's a whole host of information on that website. But what they would do is they would contact one of about 40 different banks or mortgage companies that we work with. We do not lend directly to first time home buyers. We purchase mortgages that other organizations make. So people would go to their bank or their mortgage company, and that bank or mortgage company would offer them our loan product at our rate, which right now is 5.5%, which is much lower than the market rate, which is up around six and a half or seven. And they would make the loan to the home buyer, close the loan, and then they would turn and actually sell it to us, and we would buy it from them. Would you service the loan? We have a... Servicing contractor? We have a servicing contractor, which happens to be the Rhode Island Housing Agency, because that's a line of business that they're good at, and they uniquely got into that servicing business. Servicing loans is very complicated, but right now Rhode Island Housing Services all those loans for the people in need. So, in my example, if I went to the bank and I said, look, there's a $350,000 home I want to buy. I just got the contract, I made a down payment. I need to finance this. Like a bank, I mean, that bank would say, okay, well, you've got to put down a certain amount of equity. You've got to have some equity. Well, it depends on the type of mortgage product. We work with a lot of mortgage insurance companies and agencies, one of them being the Federal Housing Administration, the Veterans Administration, and some of those products don't require any down payment. And if you're going to come to Maine Housing, we'll also offer you a $5,000 grant for down payment assistance and closing cost assistance. Okay. Let's say I'm a veteran and I'm told that I don't need a down payment on a particular program that I applied under and the $350,000, I get from the bank, but then they sell the loan to you. Exactly. Okay. So the $350,000 might be a little high and we're usually right around $200, $250,000. Again we're statewide. I was going to say, that statewide is important because you don't find too many, the $350,000 around here, but you go to Rooster County, every house is under $350,000. And that's part of what we're trying to do as we talked about our plan. One of our plans is we need to build, we need to have the state of Maine, whether it be through Maine Housing or the private market, build more affordable, build homes cheaper, which is really hard to do in this environment right now. So some of the monies we get from the state and federal government, in this case the state government through Governor Mills and the legislature, we'll give a housing developer a grant of up to $60,000 or $70,000 per home that they build so that they can then lower the price of that home making it more affordable to that first time home buyer that we just talked about. Do you pay attention to spreading it out geographically around the state? Very much so. The lenders that we use are statewide. What we find is a majority of our loans are outside the Cumberland County area. I think just for what you just said, that the pricing is just so, so high that a lot of our loans are along the western coast part of Maine or up in the central and northern part of Maine. On our website at mainhousing.org we've got a production dashboard where people can go on and actually see where loans are made and it's really helpful to people who analyze housing trends in Maine and analyze what we do. We care very much about making sure that there's geographic distribution of our product throughout the entire state. I find this particularly interesting because I was brought up in a household where this business was conducted. My father, who was a Greek immigrant, came to this country when he was nine years old with his parents. That ended up by pure luck in a nice job with the Prudential Insurance Company. I don't know whether the folks here are interested in this story, but I am so, bear with me for a minute. He was a Newark, he was a young man, he had a job in Newark where their headquarters is, and they became a mortgage loan appraiser. Then they sent him out to the field and one of the places he was was New Haven, Connecticut, where I was born. In 1939, they got contacted by the insurance commissioners of Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont. They said to the Prudential, you sell a lot of life insurance policies in these three states and you don't make any residential loans in these states. We're telling you right now, we want you to make loans. My parents moved to Maine and his job was to go around to all these small banks in the three state area and buy residential loans. Then later they added commercial loans. That's what he did. When I was a kid I would go with him. He'd go to these houses and he'd have his tape measure and his camera and do his appraisals and so forth. I know a little bit about this, but in those days all I remember is a kid, FHA, FHA insured. That's the Federal Housing Administration. They did federally what you do too here. We're buying the loans. The folks that are ensuring the loans are largest insurers, U.S. rural development. They ensure 50 to 60 percent of our loans and you're right, we're serving as a very similar to the Prudential where we're actually buying those loans. Backcoming out of President Johnson's great society in the late 1960s found the start of these housing finance agencies around the country. Many state legislatures started putting them together and putting them in legislation and creating them for the express purpose of being a place where lower income individuals within any state can get access to capital so that they can buy their first home. The capital that you have, you raise through bond issues. The loans are insured, which means that me, as a bond holder, I have a little bit more comfort that this is an insured loan. Exactly. And that helps the credit. And so I say, okay, I'm going to buy main housing bonds because I think it's a low risk. These are insured, these loans. They're not going to go belly up because the loans are insured. And the financial stability that we have built over the last 50 years, bonds are issued out of a thing called a bond resolution. And that bond resolution, every time you sell bonds, and we sell them four or five times a year on the single family side for anywhere from 40 to 50 million at a time. And each and every one of those bond sales that we do has to be rated by Moody's and Standard & Poor's in Wall Street. They're rating agencies. In those rating agencies, take a look at main housing and they say, okay, you've been in business of 50 years. You've got this loan portfolio. We're going to give you a rating, but we're going to base that rating on how strong are you. And they put various financial stress tests to say, if everybody stopped paying their mortgage all at once, would you still be able to survive as an organization in scenarios like that? Our bond rating is a double A plus double A, which is in financial terms very, very strong. You've heard of triple A bond. We're just below a triple A bond. And that gives us the financial strength because, as you said that, we're essentially negotiating with bond buyers to say, we want to get the lowest possible rate on our bonds so that we can pass on those savings to our customers. And that's how that all works. So you raise that money from bondholders. And one of your programs is to help people buy a house. How much money has main housing got invested in housing in this state? Well, I can tell you that we have $1.6 billion worth of bonds outstanding. We have about 11,000 single family loans right now in our portfolio. Since our inception, and we did our very first bond sale in 1972, $8.86 billion. So in terms of the money that we have borrowed and invested back into Maine, $2.5 billion in assets, most of that is in those mortgages. So we are a substantial financial organization that is specifically designed to help the lowest income people in the state, not only buy their homes, but also provide money to developers to build more apartments because we also need more rental apartments in the state. So with the single family homes, you're helping the buyer buy it. With the rental apartments, you're subsidizing it in a way which I want you to explain, to help people be able to rent an apartment. And you're dealing mostly with the people who need to be in the affordable category. In the unlimited market, they need affordable help. Exactly. Short history on federal investment and affordable housing going back into the 40, 50, 60, 70s. The federal government directly would invest in the construction and creation of affordable housing. And they did that through USDA Rural Development Program, had a program where a developer could build an apartment building and they get a 50-year, 1% mortgage. And then a rental assistance contract to help those folks pay their rent would be put right on top of that building. Same building. Same building. So the people living in that apartment would only pay 30% of their income towards their rent. That still exists here in Maine today. There are several hundred Rural Development projects with those contracts still in place. Public housing. Public housing authorities, about 25 different public housing authorities around the state. And they created and they actually own public housing. Works very similarly where the people living in those homes only have to pay 30% of their income towards their rent. HUD did the Section 8 project-based program up until 1983. So you have, between those three programs, you have thousands of units in Maine that exist today that are subsidized by the federal government for people at 30% of income or below. That production largely stopped in the mid-1980s. And the government pivoted, the federal government pivoted and created a different way to go about creating affordable housing. And they did that through a program called the Low Income Housing Tax Credit. They turned to the tax code and they offered tax credits as the vehicle to attract developers to build affordable housing. But they increased the income limits up to 50% and 60% of area median income. So we're not necessarily hitting the 30%. So what we saw there was the people that were being served were a little bit higher income and the volume went down dramatically. So you go through the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, 2010s to today. The number of affordable apartments that have been created is a fraction of what it used to be and that's why we have the demand supply problem. This Low Income Housing Tax Credit program, the way it works is Maine Housing will allocate the credit to the developer. The developer can't really use the credit, but they sell it to an investor. So this tax credit actually goes to a private company. So if I want to be an investor in a development company and in a project, they say, okay, you invest $50,000 in this project and you'll get tax credits and there's a market for the tax credits. There is a market for the tax credits. They're basically sold through syndicators. So here in Maine, a company called Ever North, formerly known as the Northern New England Housing Investment Fund, they've rebranded and now they're called Ever North, right here in Portland, Maine. They go around to various companies and organizations that are looking for tax credits to offset their tax liabilities and they pool together investment funds. Developers come to me, my organization, for these tax credits and the developers then are connected with the syndicator who has the investment and cash. Well, let's take a $10 million building. With one of these types of credits, the developer could get about $7 million worth of cash to meet the $10 million required. They only need- From guys that say, I'll invest $50 million because I want the tax credits. Yes. And that tax credit lasts for 10 years. So that $7 million comes in, the developer then using some, we might look at, remember, the rents are going to be restricted down by the federal government, the revenue that they can drive is lower. So they can't afford as big a loan. Maybe they can only afford a million and a half loan on a $10 million building. But all those people are going to be served. So now they have a million and a half that they need to find. That's where the state government and federal government have invested in us and we have those subsidies. So that's how it works. It's very, very complicated. And I hope I- It is complicated, but I think the audience should understand. You've kept it understandable. So the tax incentive program now is bearing most of the burden and providing you most of your tools to get things built. The U.S. Treasury Department is our affordable housing supplier in the country. There are two types of credit, one which will yield that $7 million for a $10 million building, and that's capped. We only have so much of that to spend. But there's a lower cost credit that when we call a 9 percent, when we call a 4 percent. The 4 percent program is unlimited. So the federal government is basically saying to the states, we're going to forego tax revenue on these tax credits for you to go ahead and build affordable housing. But in Maine, because rents in general in Maine are lower than they are the rest of the country, you need another subsidy source. You need another pot of money that you can loan at 0 percent with no repayment to help that developer cover all the costs that he or she may be incurring in the development of the project. We provide that money, that is the fuel that allows Maine Housing to increase the size of our pipeline, which we've done in the last five years. We used to be able to do about 200 units a year, 200 new units with all the tools that we have. Right now we have over 3,500 units in our pipeline. In 2023, we have 1,000 units that are either going to be completed this year and online, many right here in Portland, or start construction in 2023, or complete in 2023, another 1,000. There's another 1,500 units behind that that are in our pipeline that are going to start construction. Telling me that right now in this program, you are going to produce for this state 3,500 apartment units? Over the next, say, starting right now, some which might be done tomorrow, and some which will be 2025, 2026. Okay. But in the next three or four years? But we've got to keep going, right? We've got to keep going. We can't stop there. So that's why I talked about the legislative session that's going on right now, and I've been using the term potentially historic, because the legislature is actually looking and the governor put into her budget $80 million of this subsidy money for us at Maine Housing to help developers do another 3,500 affordable apartments. All throughout the state of Maine, $80 million in the budget. We've never seen that level of investment, not only from a governor, but the legislature set up a joint select committee on housing, and that committee has endorsed this approach as well. They've done wonderful work. That committee's both parties, huh? Both parties. And they've done wonderful work, really hard work, and their joint select committee, so they're going to continue to exist after this first session of the legislature is over, and we're going to continue to work with them. But there's a level of investment going on right now in affordable housing from our state leaders that we've never seen before, and we're very grateful for it. But we know that we can take this money and apply it and make good things happen to help this supply and demand problem over time equal out. Once you equal that out, then rental rates may come down, affordability may get easier. As supply grows, and demand diminishes a little because of more supply, hopefully that will have an ameliorating effect on prices. That's the plan, that's the strategy, yes. So we've covered housing, you know, loans, people, particularly first time buyers. We've talked about affordable apartments. Many of the people, when they think of the housing crisis, they think of driving through deering oaks and seeing tents and so forth. That's another prong of the housing crisis, isn't it? It absolutely is. And it breaks my heart just coming here tonight and coming into Portland. And my heart breaks for every individual that's out there. We have been working with homeless advocates, practitioners in homeless shelters, state and local officials for many, many years to come up with a strategy of how to help the situation. When the pandemic broke out and we were all on Zoom and had to do our legislative hearings on Zoom, previous to becoming director, I had been in a position where I was very close to overseeing the work of the homeless shelters in Maine. I've been to every single one of them. And they were overwhelmed, they were overwhelmed before the pandemic. And they were structured in such a way, not only here in Portland, but let's get as many people into a small space as we can out of the elements. And then in the morning, they're going to go out onto the street and then they come back at five o'clock. It just wasn't a very strategic way to go about. So the pandemic hit. We had to separate people. You couldn't be next to another person. So we very quickly stood up, helped stand up with the help of the university system and nonprofits, Preble Street here in Portland, the city of Portland, shelters. We did one at the University of Southern Maine at Sullivan Gym. And what we found is when you separate people just by a little bit and give them a little bit of privacy, it's a little more humane. It's a little bit better way to go about housing. We've talked about housing first, and we've talked about the approach of housing first, of getting services to people who have had the ability to have a good night's sleep, cup of coffee, and a shower. They're in a much better place to be able to address the problems and issues that led to their homelessness. Fantastic. What is housing first? You mentioned housing first. So housing first is a national best practice on how to deal with chronic homelessness. And what that means is that there is no barrier to getting a housing unit for someone who is chronically homeless. Get them their housing first. And the way we... You've got to have the housing. Right. And so the way we do that is we're a bank. It's an apartment building. We do that all the time. So we can finance a housing first project. We've done three of them here in Portland. We can also provide, because of some other federal resources we have in the term of the housing vouchers, we can provide the cost to operate the property for the owner by giving a voucher to the person living there, and their rent will be paid. Let me get an example for the folks here. So you've done it three times here, and we're talking about people that are really in hopeless situations on the street, giving them a place to live and services, which one without the other doesn't work very well. It doesn't. The problem that we've had is that we've never had a dedicated funding service, I'm sorry, a dedicated funding source for services. And right now in our legislature, LD2 is the name of the bill, is a housing first bill sponsored by Speaker of the House Talbot Ross. Right now as we speak. Right now as we speak. Yeah. The governor has also endorsed this and put it into our budget, again let the politics play out of how that all comes, but there's a very high likelihood that a dedicated revenue stream has been identified that already exists, that was going to the state's general fund is going to come to service providers through the Department of Health and Human Services to provide services. So we need about 10 more of these. We need 10 to 12 more of these. Hold on before you go to the revenue stream, because some of these people, you know, some of them are always worried about their taxes, they say, oh, more spending, hold on. The dedicated revenue stream is a tax that already exists, it's the real estate transfer tax that produces a lot of money in our budget, goes into the general fund. So it's there, it's been coming in for years. Real estate transfer, all these people, they come up from New York and buy a big house and buy a harbor, they pay a real estate transfer tax, and that money is going to be used for Housing First. It is. It's the dedicated revenue stream for services, the missing piece of the puzzle. Once that's in place, we will be able to work with housing developers here in Portland, in in Bangor, Lewiston, wherever developer wants to put a Housing First project, and they will have the comfort. And the investors, remember, these are tax credit deals too. The investors are going to have comfort that the building will operate and be functional and be successful, because we've got three examples of them here in Portland. We know it works. Well, one of them, I think, is Logan Place. That was the first one. Yes. That was the first one. It was down near St. John Street, below the main medical center. And I think it was for women only, wasn't it? Well, we've done Logan Place. We've done Florence House, which is off St. John Street, similar neighborhood, not too far away from one another. Is that for women only? Florence House is for women only. It's very unique, where it's a shelter on the first floor, and it's permanent apartments on the second floor. It's a wonderful model. And then Houston Commons was the third one that was most recently done. Do you mean housing helped the developer build the building by providing the tax credits? Tax credits and the housing, actually, I stand corrected, Portland Housing Authority stepped up with the housing vouchers. So Portland Housing Authority was very important in that building. But yes, that's how that works. And now the service providers are going to have a dedicated revenue stream that they know is going to be there that will be able to do maybe 10 more of these projects over the next five to seven years. And the services, including detox, all kinds of things, right? It's a 24-7, 365, round-the-clock care for the individuals in that building. Remember, these folks are experiencing a tremendous amount of trauma in their lives. Yeah, and many of them are mentally ill, and many of them are abused drugs and are addicted and so forth. So the services are designed to stop this circle of trouble. It's to erase the demons, and we've seen it happen. You've seen it happen. We have seen cases where individuals were on the street and just not in just miserable. When they come into a housing first property, first of all, they're not going to the emergency room every other day. They're not going to interacting with law enforcement. There's a very high success rate of individuals going into these. And then before you know it, in some cases, going to school, getting a job, reconnecting, reuniting with family, just a number of success stories out of housing first. And that's why this is so important and such a huge historic thing that's happening right now. Well, what you're saying is that success is measurable. I mean, you can measure the effectiveness of this housing first program by just looking at statistics regarding police calls, ambulance calls. Yes, exactly. And you know, statistics also plays a big part in the other part of the solution that we're deploying, which is, I talked about talking to the Legislative Committee on Zoom, and I just said, you know, we've got to come up with a better way here with our homeless shelters around the state. We just have to come up with a better way. And over the last couple of years, we have been working on a homeless system redesign where we're taking the state of Maine, not we, Maine Housing, but the statewide homeless council, the state's continuum of care. These are two large organizational bodies that have been set up for many years in Maine to tackle the issue of homelessness. The practitioners and the advocates got together and we have identified broken up the state of Maine into nine hubs. And those nine hubs are geographically all represent the entire state. But the hubs are very specifically designed around the idea of let's take care of the folks that are homeless that are in our own communities, and let's try and mitigate the number of people that are going from all over the state into Portland, all over the state to Bangor, up in the county, all going to Presquile. And let's try and help each one of these communities work together to come up with a solution so that the solution on homelessness is shared more equally, more equitably around the state. And then come into the same urban centers so that that would mean, for instance, I just used an example, Rumpford. So would that mean that you would, you would, part of the plan would be thinking about actually constructing such a facility in Rumpford? What that would do is the folks in Rumpford, the folks in Oxford County, the folks in Farmington, that geographic area, main housing has funded a full-time position in an organization each one of these hubs to be a hub coordinator. The hub coordinator's job is to look around that hub and say, what are my resources here? What do I currently have? Farmington has resources, Rumpford has resources, and what's missing? Let's get the educators at the table. There's so many homeless youth in our schools. Let's identify them. Let's talk with our first responders. Let that community come together because they have their geographic area. Yeah, but what do they need? They need a housing first. They may need a housing first. They may decide, you know what, we don't have the resources to support a housing first, but maybe what we need is more navigators. So a navigator is a person who is connecting with an individual to help solve that particular person's housing problem wherever they, maybe their couch surface. That's not part of your agency. Oh, yes. It is? We're at the forefront of helping support and provide funding to each one of these hubs. Okay, so let's go to the example of, let's say maybe there's enough critical mass so that between Farmington and Rumpford, a housing first facility where they get all the services and off the street and everything makes some sense. First thing you need is a private developer. That's correct. You need private enterprise to say, okay, we can do this. We can get a return and we can get investors and we're going to do this. You need a private developer and or the host of developers we currently work with which might be non-profit organizations, housing authorities, community action agencies. So the housing developer could be a for-profit or non-profit? That's correct. Okay. And for the most part we find that the non-profits are the ones that we work with. There are some really, really good for-profits as well. But we work very closely with the state's community action agencies to help deliver all of the services that we, all the other types of federal funding that we have. We work very closely with the main association of public housing directors, all the public housing agencies. And then there are other small non-profits that exist in each area of the state. The homeless shelters in our state, many of whom have done housing development before. Tedford Shelter and Brunswick has done some housing development. Knopscott Community Health Center up in Bangor has done some development. So we're there to help support whatever organization or group in that region wants to tackle their homeless situation. And the way, one of the key things is in each one of these regions is to get what's called a by-name list. Let's not just- Get the what? It's called a by-name list. Let's find out exactly who by-name each one of these individuals are. And let's do a deeper dive into collecting information about who they are, where they came from, and what their needs are. And have that consolidated because we need a better data management system collectively throughout the state. So one of the things about the, one of the goals of this homeless system redesign is better quality data. So we know what we're dealing with. And the goal is to get to what's called functional zero. You want to get the functional zero, which is homelessness. It's never going to go away. People will always have a homeless. But you want that homeless situation to be as short as it possibly can be. And you want to have more people exit the system in a given period of time than come into the system. And if you've done that, you've achieved functional zero. And- Isn't mental health treatment a big piece of that? I mean, huge, huge. Huge. Yes. You know, when I think about it, because I'm old, when I was growing up, I think I might have been telling you this story, but it was either you or somebody else. I played, when I was in high school, American Legion Baseball in Maine. And every year, I played for the South Portland team. And we were good. And we would go to the state tournament, one of the teams in the state tournament, every year. And the state tournament was held at the Veterans Hospital in Togus. And the reason it was held there is there were a lot of long-term residents of the veterans home. Since the 1950s, only 10 years or less after World War II. So there was a large number of veterans who would, you know, PTSD, whatever you call it, and that were there at the Veterans Zone. There were long-term patients there receiving mental health treatment. And we stayed there. We ate our meals there. We didn't stay. We stayed somewhere else. We ate all our meals there. We were around there. We knew some of the guys that would come to the ball games. And these people in a clean place, they got three meals a day. They got doctors examined. They got doctors making sure, nurses making sure they took their pills. I thought that was humane. But people said, no, that's not humane to institutionalize people. Now they're on the street. Yeah. I think I'm not a mental health expert, but my observation is maybe the pendulum swung too far in the other direction. Now I think there are cases that there was inhumane treatment, no question, in Maine and elsewhere around folks battling with mental illness, substance abuse disorder. And then the shift went right on to the communities, but the services didn't flow with them. The services didn't flow with them. Now when you talk about housing first, this bill that's being considered by the legislature, housing first, that is swinging it back toward services that were provided in institutionally. Yes. I think that's a bit of the strategy there. Now we also talk very closely with Maine's hospitals, particularly those that have mental health facilities, the Maine Behavioral Health Association, about what their housing needs are because they've got patients that are in their facilities that are really ready to go. They're really ready to move on and out of there. But there's no place for them to go. And therefore, is there a partnership that Maine Housing can have with a housing developer and someone who's been in a hospital? And we've been able to achieve some of those types of properties as well. The work that developer Kevin Bunker did right here in Portland on Freedom Place, a magical place for women with substance abuse disorder, more dignity, more privacy, more ability to move on with one's life. So Maine Housing wants to be active not only in helping people buy their homes and people getting apartments, but also helping the homeless community and the homeless providers serve homeless people who are experiencing homeless better. We haven't even talked about helping people heat their homes and keep themselves warm in the winter, which we also do. So we're an organization that takes a lot of pride in coming to work every day helping the people of Maine that need so much help. How do you, what do you have to do with helping people, you're in the, you're in the capital, but you're a bank, what do you have to do with helping people heat their houses? Yeah, so the bank stuff is over here. The other part of our agency is we're a federal administrator for the federal government on a number of programs, including home weatherization, the LIHEAP program, weatherization assistance program from the Department of Energy. We help remediate lead paint from people's homes. We help people repair their homes. Maine has one of the highest home ownership rates with one of the lowest incomes, meaning there's an, and the oldest housing stock. So there's a lot of homeowners that are poor that are living in substandard homes. They need their homes repaired. Yeah, so I need, so I'm living in substandard stock, let's say, and some down in Maine and I don't have much money and my place is falling apart, I call you people up and you help me? You would call your local community action agency. Okay, I call my community action and then, and they get in touch with you? They're under contract to us. And what do you do for me when, you know, I want to, I want to, I don't want the whole place to crumble. What are you going to do for me? Well, they're going to send out an inspector to your home, they're going to assess the situation and they're going to put you in touch with contractors now. There are wait lists, there isn't nearly enough, but the community action agencies will go out to a person's home, assess the situation, determine a solution. If the heating system needs to be replaced, there are funds for that. We're trying to put as many heat pumps in electric heat pumps in people's homes as we can to help the energy situation. I'm a member of the Maine's Climate Council, and we're very much involved in green energy and keeping, you know, doing the right thing in building and constructing homes. So we're very, very active in that grant administration side, helping people pay their rent through Section 8 vouchers, which are vouchers that people go around the state to private landlords with. Okay, so you're going to pass the term whenever. What I'm sensing here is that we all see the homeless population, they're on the street, they're right in front of us, and we all, so we're all conscious of it. And as you say, they'll never be solved, they'll always, forever, there will be homeless people, there always have been and there always will be, but the idea is to rein it in and to provide services and to make it diminish the homeless population. I'm hopeful that we can solve chronic homelessness. I'm hopeful that with these tools that were being given by the legislature, that we can solve the chronic homeless where we see so many people on the streets, and tents, and chronically out there. If you can do it, why can't they do it in San Francisco? Well... California Home Housing Finance Agency. Yeah, I talked to my counterparts, we're all trying to do the same thing. The idea of housing first. Housing first is active in California in San Francisco. It's just the, at that point, you talk about the overall society of the haves and have-nots, that's bigger than Maine Housing, but the number of people in need is overwhelming. Well, here we go back to the hopeful part, so we're in a state that's a little bit more manageable than California. So I sensed from you some real optimism. I didn't anticipate this, that there'd be some significant changes in housing in Maine. You know, we help hundreds, if not thousands of people every single day. Our agency does, and the partners around the state that work with us, our community action agencies and public housing authorities and nonprofits that we work with, we are solving people's housing problems every single day, and we're succeeding. The visual part is there. What the people watching this program look at, they don't see the measurable change. There's still much more to go. You know, oftentimes someone will come into a homeless shelter and they'll get counted and they'll be tracked, and the statistic will be taken, and then they'll succeed and they disappear. Right? We're not tracking them anymore, because they've succeeded. They're out in society. So they're not a statistic anymore? They're not a statistic anymore. And so there are, I don't want to diminish the level of the problem. It's significant. But the solutions that are in place right now, when we can help one person get into their first home, we've succeeded, when we can help one person get out of a homeless shelter into their apartment, we've done, we've succeeded for that particular family. Sources are the successes that we have to keep looking at as well, but we can't take our eye off the larger strategy we've been talking about tonight, and really focusing in on continuing to use what is the best practice. And by the best practice, you're talking about how we treat them or what services it? The best practice that is out there for their particular situation. So we really focus in on what are the best practices we can use. Housing first is a best practice in the issue of chronic homelessness. Using our tax-exempt bonding abilities and being very creative about how we manage our bond portfolio is a best practice to make sure that we can get as many people into their homes as we can. Moving out to Maine's landlords, as we've been doing, to incent them to rent to a person with a Section 8 voucher where they might have reservations about that. Well, let's help with some down payment assistance. Let's give a bonus to a new landlord that wants to help someone who hasn't helped before. Let's assure that landlord that if it goes bad and your unit gets damaged, we'll be there for you. That's a best practice in helping landlords. So we look around our lines of business. We try and identify best practices and go down those paths. What you're doing is you're energizing and motivating in many cases the free market system. People who are participating, capitalists. You know, Theodore White was a great author long gone now, but he covered all of the great events of the World for Life magazine from the mid-1930s until 1970. And he covered it all. And he wrote a book in which he talked about what he learned by observing all these things. And he said the greatest thing he ever saw was the Marshall Plan. Very few people ran it, but it was all about capital and using capital. And it taught him that there are only two ways that we move people, change things. And he says it's either he observed at the end of a bayonet or by kind of greasing them palms a little bit. Those are the two ways. The second part is a capitalist system. And he says it works. We're going to wrap it up. This has been terrific. I've really enjoyed this and I've learned a lot. And I think you do a great job for your agency by explaining it as you have to the public. I really do. You're doing a terrific job. As I said earlier, it's an honor to have you reach out to me and have me on here, give me the opportunity to talk about what we do. Thank you very much. And the honor is from the people that are watching, not me. I'm in a locator. Anyway, thanks for coming. Thank you.