 And all right. Good morning. Good morning. Good morning. Thank you all for joining us today, experiencing just a few technical difficulties. It's kind of fun. I'll let our presenters explain that as they want. Welcome to expanding housing that addresses homelessness through public-private partnerships. That's the workshop that you're in. And my name is Barry Cram. I'm with the Community Engagement Office here at the City of Fort Worth. And I'll be your host for this workshop. Before we get started, I've probably already heard the drill, but just in case this is your first time to be in a workshop, there are different ways that you can interact with the presenters and with the material as well as with each other. And I just want to, I want to show you, you know, at the top right hand of your screen, you see the inbox. Of course, if you see a dot like a green or red dot that pops up, someone's messaging you privately. And they very well may do that, especially if you leave a comment or something that's substantive and somebody wants more information. People can see who's in the workshop and they might just message you. So just be aware of that. And those are private conversations. The next tab that you see or the first icon under inbox is the chat, which is what you saw when you first came in. Great place to say hi. All of these comments are public. Okay, they're not private. So just be aware of that. And great way to chat and with each other while the presentation is going on. Or if you have a comment, all of these comments and different texts and the media, it's all being archived. They'll have a shelf life for a few months after the conference. So under the chat icon is the question icon. You see that? And I actually posted a question. Did you see what I did there? Do questions really go here? Right? If you have a specific question about the presentation or the content, please put it here. Don't put it in the chat. Put it in the question icon because at the end we'll have some Q&A and I'll be able to see them more clearly and consolidated all in one spot. So please do that and we'll do our best to respond at the very end. The one below that, you'll see a poll and I do believe there is a poll for you guys to answer. So click on that and answer it. The tab below that is the people. Of course, that's where you can see who's in attendance, who's presenting, who's kind of in this area and then who are the viewers, those of you who are participating. And then the last tab is where you can find any additional information. It's the files tab. We've actually uploaded the presentation. Flora has already given that. And so it's in PDF form but feel free to click on that if you want this and you can download it. It'll open up in a different browser so you can do that even now if you want. And so yeah, that's pretty much it. After the presentation is over, just know that we're going to have some Q&A so be ready for that. So with that, I'll just introduce Flora Brewer. She is with the Paulos Foundation here in the city of Fort Worth. And I was actually going to introduce her panelists but I'm going to let her do that. And hopefully she'll be able to take it away. Flora, are you there? Here. All right, go for it. Thanks so much, Barry. And thank you all so much for coming to our workshop. In case you saw the wild gyrations of my image, the power went out in my house at 941. So I'm quickly pivoting to telephone and Barry is going to help me advance slides and so forth. So the show must go on. So we are so happy today to have the opportunity to share our experiences over the last several years, figuring out how to bring together the resources of the city of Fort Worth, a major church, major foundations and private developers to build housing for people emerging from chronic homelessness. Let me start by giving you an overview of the workshop. First, I'm going to give each of our panelists an opportunity to introduce themselves and tell a little bit about how they got involved in our quail trail project. Then I'm going to make a brief presentation with Barry's help that shows the nuts and bolts of our project, including the approach we took and what each partner contributed. Then I'm going to ask our panelists some questions to help them talk about how the partners came together and what we've learned about the challenges of public private partnerships. Then finally, we really want to take your questions. Please feel free to use the chat and record your questions in the questions app and we'll leave lots of time at the end to deal with those. I know nobody happens to come to a workshop on homelessness unless they're particularly interested in homelessness. So we look forward to talking with you. So starting with introductions, again, I'm Flora Brewer and I've been a commercial property developer in Fort Worth for about 20 years among a lot of other things that I've done. But because of the location of my properties, I got very interested in homelessness and I attacked the issue through a lot of community engagement and through my businesses. Also founded a neighborhood association in the area where all our home shelters are located. In 2015, I bought an old apartment building to renovate for housing for people emerging from chronic homelessness. I was able to do the project independently through our family foundation but after that I wanted to do it again but I needed partners. I couldn't do another project by myself. So that journey led me to Tara Perez. So Tara, please tell us about your day job and how you got involved in this project. Thank you, Flora. So my day job is the manager of directions home. We are a two-person homelessness unit in the city manager's office at the city of Fort Worth. I've been here about five years. How I got involved was several years ago visiting Palm Tree and seeing what amazing work that Flora and her team had done there. And also just touching on her last question saying, how can we replicate this? And so that led to advocating for the city to allocate five million dollars in housing finance corporation funds for the creation of permanent supportive housing and getting commitments from local foundations to match that dollar-for-dollar. So really just trying to put together that pool of 10 million that we could use to develop at least 200 units of permanent supportive housing. Thank you, Tara. Tara, now I'd like to ask Randy Gideon, our designer, to also tell us his day job and how in the world he got involved in this project. Thank you, Flora. I'm a practicing architect still. I've been practicing architecture for almost 50 years and been developed at some level in community development and redevelopment for most of that time. I'm also a member of a 100-year-old congregation of a Methodist church here in Fort Worth that resides in a neighborhood that has lots of challenges with one of them being certainly experiencing dealing with people experiencing homelessness. And about five or six years ago a young pastor in our church approached me and said, you know, there's a building in our neighborhood that would make great housing for some homeless people. And I said, well being on the leadership team of the church, I thought that'd be a good thing our church could do for the community. So I started down that trail very naive and uneducated and quickly realized how much I did not know about homelessness and the issues surrounding homelessness. And soon Tom Purvis, my real estate partner, graciously joined me in the quest. And over that time we learned a lot about funding and it being the least of our issues with politics, being the greatest of our issues. And we began looking for more partners that were smarter than we were that could help us maybe build some homeless housing, permanent supportive housing here in Fort Worth. Thank you, Randy. Over to you, Tom. All right, I'm Tom Purvis. I've been in the commercial estate business for about 40 years, primarily in the development side. And as Randy kind of explained, Randy and I have been working together for about 10 years on all sorts of projects. We do kind of unique special projects like historic redevelopments and that sort of thing. I've been a longtime supporter of a number of homeless initiatives here locally. When this opportunity came along and it really, for me, came along by way of an introduction to Tara and able to kind of plug into her vision. I'll say a couple of years ago, three years ago, I had never heard of permanent supportive housing. I've gotten a great education. I think it's a great model and look forward to telling you more about it. As Randy alluded, fortunately in our community, raising the funding for building the project is not the hardest part. The hardest part is finding sites and going through the logistics of getting something built. But we'll talk a little bit more about that here in a moment. Thanks, Laura. And last, Steve. A job is I'm real property director for the Tarrant Regional Water District in Fort Worth, which is a large regional water authority based in Fort Worth. In addition, I'm a member of First Presbyterian Church in Fort Worth, which is a big downtown church and also an elder there. I'm currently the board chair for the New Leaf Community Services nonprofit and also a board member of DRC Solutions, which is a nonprofit here in Fort Worth that provides case management and housing solutions for the homeless and also a member of our church's Mission Outreach Committee. So I've had a long period of experience with advocating and serving for the vulnerable in our community. Back in 30 years ago or so, I guess, just to give you an idea of our church's focus, we were instrumental in creating the Presbyterian night shelter in Fort Worth, which is, I think, currently the largest emergency shelter for homeless in our city. Also in partnership with the Trinity Habitat for Humanity, our congregation has built nearly 100 habitat homes in Fort Worth. We have a community center named Community Crossroads, in which our church volunteers and staff provide services such as a free dental clinic, groceries, clothing, formula and diapers, COVID vaccinations now, and other physical and spiritual needs for the community. In about 2018, our church was embarking on a renovation of our parking lot, which we ended up spending about two million dollars on. And at the time, our pastor, Carl Travis, knowing that our passion was for the homeless, said, you know, if we can spend two million dollars on a parking lot, maybe we need to spend two million dollars on helping our community homeless situation as well. And so our church gifted a million dollars toward developing permanent supportive housing and a million dollars to the night shelter in which they built a brand new men's shelter that they ended up naming after that pastor. I was asked to be on a task force to basically just consider how we might be able to use this one million dollar gift. And at that time, we were introduced to Tara Perez and Tom and Randy and Flora Brewer and we all seemed to converge on the fact that we were trying to do the same thing and so we formed what eventually became New Leaf Community Services of 501c3 non-profit organization. As you can see, I have amazing partners and that's a big part of our message to everyone today is these partners from all different sectors of our community is what really helped us get this done. Now let me give you a briefing with the slides attached and Barry's going to help me navigate these slides. As Steve and I'll kind of go back over some of the things you've heard already and I'll start to try to help you understand who are all these these people and who are all these names. Again, put your questions in the question app and we'll get to those at the end. As Steve described, one of the and Tara, the immediate catalyst for our project was a proposal from the city of Fort Worth to put money into housing projects for chronically homeless people that could be matched by contributions from the private sector and philanthropy. In response, we created New Leaf Community Services to create a platform from which to attract partners with the mission of creating innovative housing solutions for people experiencing chronic or long-term homelessness. Next slide. New Leaf brought together partners from many sectors. The piece is necessary to site, design, finance, build, and place into operation 48 new units of housing including social services and individual case management. We needed partners who could not only help us assemble the funding for the project but help us navigate policy and political issues like site selection, tax exemptions, and zoning. Next slide. The next critical catalyst for the project was the commitment of a million dollars from First Presbyterian Church that allowed us to attract other private donors and foundations. New Leaf served as the developer and owner of the project. Some of the major donors including First Presbyterian and the Paulus Foundation serve on our board of directors. Randy and Tom of L2L Development had been working on finding properties and creating designs and they became our project managers providing real estate and design services and expertise. We also partnered with a local non-profit provider of housing services for homeless people, DRC Solutions. Next slide. Now let me backtrack and say a little more about the problem we were trying to address. We currently have issues throughout the United States in providing housing that people can afford. We address these issues through the market primarily through the low-income low-income housing tax credit program. However, since the rise of homelessness in the 1980s we've developed local homelessness response systems that channel federal funding to prevent homelessness for those who are on the edge, emergency shelter for homeless people, short-term congregate transitional housing, short-term scattered site housing that's provided rapidly when people become homeless, and finally long-term supportive housing for people who've been chronically homeless. Next slide. Supportive housing is housing for people with disabilities who've been homeless for a long time or who have been repeatedly homeless with the greatest barriers to getting housing. Supportive housing includes low barriers to entry such as criminal background friendly landlords, long-term rental subsidies where the resident pays only 30% of their income, individual case management by trained social workers including coaching, problem solving, supportive services, and connecting residents to resources to help people with disabilities maintain their housing. Next slide. Here are some of the resource connections provided to residents both on and off site by our case managers. Additionally, in our model, units are fully furnished and residents are also provided with cleaning supplies, free laundry machines and detergent and hygiene items that are difficult to afford. Next slide. So how urgent is the need for this type of housing? To put it into context, more than 18,000 people were served in emergency shelters in our county between 2017 and 2019. We found that an increasing proportion of these people have significant challenges that make it almost impossible for them to earn enough income to afford housing. 41% of the people in our emergency shelters were age 45 and older. 73% had no income whatsoever. 27% had mental health conditions, 23% chronic physical health problems, and 18% physical disabilities. These are the folks who need long-term housing assistance and supportive services designed to help them remain stably housed. Next slide. Supportive housing is also a good deal for the community because it reduces the pressure on public services. It addresses problems associated with unsheltered homeless people, the folks camping in our alleys and our parks, and most importantly, it eliminates human suffering. Next slide. Our project was modeled after the project I did in 2015 at Palm Tree Apartments that Tara mentioned through our Family Foundation. We rehabilitated a 1955 24-unit courtyard style apartment building in one of our gentrifying commercial corridors. We were able to show that with rental subsidies provided through our local housing authority, we could fund property management, maintenance, and case management, keep people housed, and dramatically reduce calls for public service at the property. Having a proof of concept model helped us to convince donors that the project would work long-term. Next slide. So what contributed to attracting donors and public support? First, we found the right site. We were able to locate in an area of declining poverty so that we weren't increasing the concentration of poverty in areas in our community. The local city council member supported the location, which was on the edge of a commercial area. There was a bus stop across the street with employment opportunities, affordable retail, and health care within walking distance. Next slide. Further, Randy's design was brilliant. He created a model for a fourplex that looks like a 1500 square foot single family home and blends in beautifully with the nearby community. Randy and Tom have been able to keep our costs under a hundred thousand dollars per unit, including the cost of all the land, the community building, the offices, and a laundry. This is substantially lower than most market rate apartments. Next slide. The site overall looks like a 12-home gated single family community with lots of green space, making it compatible with nearby single family, the nearby single family community, and helped us tremendously in gaining community support and donor support. Next slide. Each unit is approximately 363 square feet, including a separate bedroom with a double bed and a combined sitting area and full kitchen with stove, range, and microwave. We provide a love seat, occasional tables, a small kitchen table and chairs, and a TV with a local antenna, lots of windows, and built-in storage space. Last slide. To sum it up, let's do the numbers. While folks have said funding was not our major problem, it still took us almost two years to pull together all the funding for the project. The project was awarded $1.2 million from the City of Fort Worth Housing Finance Corporation, $500,000 in home funding, which is federal HUD funding, awarded through the City, $1 million in faith-based contributions, $2 million from five local foundations, and more than $50,000, we're well over $50,000 now, in small gifts from individual donors. These are helping us provide all the necessities like a toilet bowl brush and a doormat and bedding and so forth for all for our residents. So overall, 64% of project development funds came from private sources. Rental subsidies are provided by federal funding through our local HUD continuum of care. Tenants contribute about 20% of the revenue that supports operating costs. We were awarded 100% city and county property tax exemptions, and because the project was fully funded, we have no debt service. Finally, the city and our local city council member supported us with political support through the grant, site selection, and zoning processes. The city had developed a reasonable accommodation ordinance for properties that serve people with disabilities that allowed us to use the property for supportive housing without rezoning. So that is the nuts and bolts of the project, and Barry, you can leave that last slide up if you like, and folks will tell us if they need us to reference other slides as needed. But now I'd like to turn to our panelists and ask them to talk informally about the project. So, Tara, please tell us a little bit, because you live through it, about the process that the city went through to decide that it wanted to develop a to suicide funding for permanent supportive housing. Okay, so one of the things we quickly realized is compared to other communities our size, there was very little single site permanent supportive housing where all the residents of an apartment or in a building are practically homeless. There were only two projects in the entire city of Fort Worth, and we understood that there was a huge need for permanent supportive housing, and so we thought it would be best to see how we could spark the development of several projects to to produce these units. So our overall goal was 200 units. And so the city really liked the model of a public-private partnership, and being able to secure foundation commitments made it much easier to secure a commitment from our Housing Finance Corporation, which is the board is the same as our city council. And so to be able to present them with the foundations had stepped up and we need to also contribute and to just show them how much of an investment this was. Our model had been paying a lot of rental assistance, and we were able to show that some one-time funding into capital when paired with vouchers is a great model because the services pay for themselves. So we were very excited to support it, and in working with New Leaf, we really loved their design, like they said, it fits right into the neighborhood and very innovative, and they were very thoughtful in choosing the site, and so it just made a lot of sense for the city to want to support it. Thank you. Tom and Randy, piggyback on that and and talk about the site selection process, which is is such a huge issue. The location of projects like this is a challenge for all communities across the United States. Tell us about how that happened, what was challenging, how did partners help you, and so forth. We'll take the first crack at it. Sure. I think the first thing was the education that Tom and I went through about the competing desires of the community. The philanthropic community really wanted to invest their money, but one they wanted to invest in something successful, but large quantities built at once, which we quickly discovered was somewhat at odds with what the neighborhoods wanted. Anything that sounded like an apartment was not received very well by the neighbors, and we experienced that on a number of potential sites, and quickly came to the realization that our sites, their needs, while it may be difficult, more sites with smaller number of units that look more like the neighborhood, would be more acceptable and allow us to be able to find sites that might be successful in being able to develop some projects. I'm going to let Tom talk about the first site we found at the beginning of this process, but it really dovetailed with the design that we came up with that had to fit the neighborhood model and acceptance of our project and became an important part of this selection process. Tom, why don't you talk about the quell trail site? Sure, so the way we started, just if you want to know the mechanics, is we had a set of criteria that we needed to fit. Part of it was zoning sensitive, we had to have a properly zone-pride site, but we also need to have something that was on a bus line, for example, close to retail services like grocery store, walking distance, those sort of things, and we literally took a map of Fort Worth and gridded out in designated areas to start searching, literally almost property by property of what a candidate site would look like, because it is a difficult number of things that we're trying to combine here. Another thing that we had to work on is the cost of the site, obviously needs is important to us, because, and I think Tara Mayum mentioned it, one of the things that we were charged up with early on was to create a project that was self-sustaining long-term, with voucher support, with raising the capital funding to build it. What we've come up with here is a system that runs without additional capital funding in the future, it runs with the voucher support and the tenants income. In the case of the quell trail site, we were fortunate to find a three-acre site, and I know you've seen an example of how we laid it out, we actually identified the site before Randy really developed the idea of doing the fourplexes, the appeal to the fourplexes weekend, site adapt that to future sites that we're looking at, we have two candidate sites we're looking at right now, and so we're using that template of a building design, for example, to help us test and make sure the site works there. Floor, does that kind of give you a good feel for it? Absolutely, I think it's especially interesting to listen to have this problem, because Fort Worth has one of the highest percentages of single family-zoned property, so it's having something that didn't look like an apartment building was very, very important to getting community support. Steve, talk a little bit, you gave us a nice background on the church and how it got into this project. Talk a little bit more about the church's role in attracting donors. Yeah, well first off, you know, the fact that we were basically a group of interested members of the church who had a lot of compassion for the homeless and had done a lot of volunteer work in the past in other ways with helping solve the issues, but didn't really have any expertise in what Tara and Randy and Tom have just talked about. The members of our church that were involved in this were me, you know, government employee, we had a retired manager of a large CPA firm, we had a lawyer that was general counsel for a real estate firm and a retired commercial real estate broker that were on our task force, and we knew that we had a significant amount of money to help, but enter Tara and Randy and Tom and you and your expertise with Palm Tree and your success with that project, and then Tom and Randy and Tara's collaboration on what all they've just explained is how we found a site and what they've learned about navigating the processes that are involved were to us a godsend, and so that's when we created this partnership, and truly the reputation of all of the people on this panel and the entities they represent were what opened the doors to the foundations and giving, because we have a lot of foundations that are very generous and very interested in helping this population in our community, and so when they saw really the dream team that we had assembled, even though it took us two years, it seemed like it worked well. Thank you, thank you. Tara, can you talk a little bit more about the process of attracting partners? I'm thinking particularly of the role of after the Paulus Foundation, the Morris Foundation, in really stepping up to be a leader on the project. Some of that was this relationship building and trying to understand what our local foundations were investing in, in the areas of homelessness, and if they were satisfied with that or looking for something more, and I think what we found is they were looking for something more. Understandably, you know, emergency shelter is an important part of our system, and that's funded a lot with a lot of private funds. However, when we're looking at reducing homelessness long term, that's around housing, and so being able to talk with them about the opportunity of not just mitigate some of the aspects of homelessness that's be able to end it, I think was attractive. We understood that their interest was not, for example, on the operating side of contributing to the project for 20 years, but rather the one-time investment of capital to help get it off the grant. Thank you, thank you. And Morris, for example, had a very particular mission to helping people in homelessness and with health care and other issues, so that was a great connection there. Steve, talk a little bit more about the how we decided to form the nonprofit. Some of us sit around and joke that we can't remember why we decided to form a nonprofit, but there really were some important reasons, some of which related to donors like the Morris Foundation. Talk to us about that a bit. Sure. Yeah, I think from from my perspective, from the church's perspective, it was we had this large gift and we knew what we wanted to be used for, but hadn't really completely determined the best vehicle for that. And we have created nonprofits in the past for specific projects that it was best for the church not to actually own, and so it was felt that for a lot of reasons that this entity needed to be separate and apart from the church, even though the church was supporting it, and so that was one of the reasons that we supported starting a 501c3, and so of course also becoming tax exempt helped to acquire gifts as well, because a lot of the foundations wouldn't really talk to us until we had that status. And that 501c3 was also extremely helpful when we started to address property tax exemptions. I know for my family foundation, it was not quite as easy because of the structure of a family foundation to be able in the state of Texas to get those 100% property tax exemptions, which are really, really important to make the project operationally feasible over the long term without constant infusions of cash. Talk a little bit more, Tom and Randy, about some of the challenges, particular to forming public private partnerships. Well, I'll let Randy talk on that, but let me just mention real quick one other aspect of the property tax, or excuse me, having a nonprofit set up is being sales tax exempt on materials on the construction side of the project. It's another big number along with Flora. You mentioned the property tax exemption going forward, which is critical to the equation, especially here in Texas. Well, I think also it'd be really important to clarify, I think, some of the people, some of the participants in this, in viewing this session, had a question about wraparound services, and I think one of the important aspects of this model, being able to raise the money, we didn't have any debt going forward. Therefore, any revenue we could get through the vouchers or through people's portions of their supplemental income could go directly into operating the facility. And in that operation, you know, it's being able to be successful was really dependent on having no property taxes. That's a reoccurring expense every year. And then, of course, you know, having a limited or uncertain revenue stream having no debt made it possible for us to create an operational model that allowed us to pay for case management, management of the property, a reserve fund for taking care of the property over time. And we tried to incorporate all of the services that the residents would need into the operational model that would be paid for by whatever revenue there is. So there's not a lot. There's no excess revenue, as it were, except that any excess revenue goes back into the budget to help fund the reserve fund for future maintenance and for any additional cost associated with services for the residents. You know, putting together the partnership, you find, I think, with some divine intervention, you find allies that all bring something different and that knows somebody different and can help direct you someplace. As I said, it was a rather rigorous process for Tom and I to learn. We thought, how hard can it be to build some housing for some people? Well, we found out very quickly how hard it could be. It was much harder than we thought and for many, many reasons that we never thought about. So having partners that could help diffuse that tarot was just awesome in helping us navigate the city. For was unbelievable in helping us identify what the operational issues were going to be and the cost and in designing the facility, what the residents may need and particular issues that may arise from a security standpoint or a health standpoint or some other reason. So finding these partners and, you know, having them on the team, it really made the difference in us being able to approach as a group to approach some of the foundations and the other funding sources. I would be less than candid if I didn't say that many of our major foundations were skeptical. They've seen a lot of initiatives for homelessness and some of them have not been successful, people with good intentions and it just never really was sustainable. And I think what they wanted to see is for us to prove that we could build something and it could be sustainable. Part of that is selfish because they don't want, as Voron mentioned earlier and I think Tara also mentioned, they don't want to continue to have to be pitted upon for operations of facilities that they helped to spawn. If they did, they'd have an unmanageable burden as many initiatives as they helped to fund and create. So they really wanted us to prove it and had a number of them tell us when we left sessions with them and presentations say hey we're watching, we want to see this proven if it is, we're on board but you guys are going to have to show us that this can work. And they like the model, they believe in the model, but they've got to see the model operating which is what we're doing and now we're ready to go back and and try to get some more projects funded. But it took all the partners in that effort to be able to have the credibility to get that first chance at this project model. Hey Flora, can I just add one thing to that? That's a very good comment. And I think one of the things that helped us convince the foundations was the success of your project at Palm Tree. Because that was the template, you had pioneered that and you had made it work there and when we told them that we were going to try to duplicate that model, that really helped them understand that it could work and helped them to be willing to be our partners. Thanks, just understanding Randy's discussion of sustainability, there's research out there on non-profit affordable housing projects across the country and they are notoriously under-capitalized and as years go by they don't have enough room in their operating budgets to really put enough money back into the project. And one of the things I just want to say kudos to our project management team of Randy and Tom. Tom is an absolutely brilliant development project manager and he they gave us a budget for the project what two years ago and we are still at that budget and that's after Snowmageddon in Texas has raised material costs, material delays, labor shortages, COVID-19 and all of those problems and we are still at the same budget at just under a hundred thousand dollars a unit. Absolutely amazing. Tom did you want to say just a little bit about the the the challenge of contracting working through the developing the government grants from the the city? Sure I think what what you find and and I think Tom will be able to join in here once I I say what I'm about to say this is not to criticize processes because you have to have processes for you know all of these good good intention people trying to get into the business of some type of public realm and when HUD has requirements they seem almost overwhelming the the goals are or again we found many of these competing goals in that we're trying to find contractors that are residential contractors that can build our project in the most cost-effective manner that we can and at the same time they're not very familiar with HUD requirements, HUD contracting requirements, getting documentation from their subcontractors the best price even though the residential contractor that we have in charge of the project he's doing a great job but his subcontractors may never have seen an invoice before or had an invoice many of his things were you know something written on a piece of paper and they had a handshake deal and they knew they were going to get paid well that doesn't work very well with contracting with a you know with a government subsidy at some point either through forgivable loan or through the processes of getting the grant and Tom has spent an incredible amount of time translating English to English so that we would have the correct documentation for the city folks that have to administer these funds and we've had to navigate some major hurdles with how to manage the funds how to create the city has struggled frankly with the fact that we have no debt because so much of this these funds are tied to some type of debt associated with the project and when so many things are based on your debt and you have no debt that that can create quite a conundrum for the people that have boxes to fill out and and items to check off their list and you have to have those guidelines and lists and checklists in order to be able to get a project done successfully but sometimes the way we're doing the project doesn't necessarily fit into all those boxes so it's been a challenge that that Tom has spent a lot of time working with it and and us working with our contractor and I'll add real quick how we got there was for purpose of being cost effective and that sort of thing we wanted to design a residential a simple residential house that could be built by residential contractors and we appreciate that huge savings which we've done but along with that is just what Randy described of when you have those contractors that don't have that skill set that are for me with HUD we've got to fill the gap we figured out how to do that the city of Fort Worth has their regulations they need to work with but I'll say this their staff has been great to work with and we've got through the process at this point let me ask you to close out this section of the questions and then we'll go to questions from the audience but what are your last thoughts after living through this I still remember I was on vacation and this was what three years ago and or two years ago three years ago probably and and I was trying to bring a project along and and we were desperately thrashing around trying to figure out how the city could participate and we finally just gave up and said we're not ready yet we need to figure this out some more so so give us some some of your overall thoughts on the public private partnership I think the strong relationships are very important because this is a very difficult and frustrating process and things happen that you don't anticipate that can really throw a wrench in things and I think that's why it's really important to have that strong working relationship and trust with partners is so that we can come together and kind of pick up the pieces and move forward it took a long time when I would I talked with dozens and dozens and dozens of people about that the city has this money and we didn't want to do permanent support of housing and I don't think most people believed that the city was going to do that and so I'm very appreciative for Randy and Tom believing that this was a possibility and not just a dream that we could really make that happen I'm very appreciative to Steve and First Presbyterian Church they stepped forward and did a huge thing when I mentioned this in presentations people asked to make sure they heard right that a church donated a million dollars to help house 48 chronically homeless people and so many thanks to Flora her model of palm tree has given us credibility and a wonderful solid model that foundations respected that the city has come to see is just a very good model and it makes our makes our investment because obviously when we're talking about public money there's a lot of scrutiny and to be able to point to something very successful and then also to show who our partners are and the respect they have in the community that is key thank you so much Tara we got a bunch of questions on and yeah um I can I can read those off a little bit um and give I guess the panel a chance and there's a couple here um actually um Tiffany kind of posted the in in light of what just happened and there's a link to the statewide ban on homeless encampments you know approved by Texas Senate so it might be coming down the pike she's asking about um just the scalability of the project and I've I'm hearing it every level from starts from Tom and Randy the I guess at every level there's obstacles to scalability so um if you know in a smaller city like San Marcos you don't have a million dollars um you know they might have you know some space but um you know how do you how do you scale this to a um with a smaller city um and what would that look like Tara can I ask you to talk about that if you if you only had a half a million dollars and you had a small homeless population um after all that you've learned what would what would you do with that money so um the covid has not been kind to motels and hotels and some of those are in trouble now so I would try to find a small motel with an owner that is um eager to sell and see how you could um maybe get the community to chip in on some renovations but I would also not settle for the half million there's a lot of state and federal money coming in with the ARPA the American Rescue Plan Act and so I would do both of those things try to find something cheap but also try to go after a lot more money um what wraparound services are included as part of this project so uh we uh this is 48 units so we have two full-time case managers with offices on the property they'll be there uh during the business day five days a week and then that that the residents will have their cell phones for emergencies on the weekends um we're also on this project exploring hiring uh a part-time activity and volunteer coordinator to help do more in the way of of bringing activities onto the site and helping people get to things to do off the site helping people get to their providing transportation to healthcare appointments maybe job appointments maybe grocery shopping and so forth think almost uh so that's uh those are some of the kinds of supportive services we provide we partner with a lot of healthcare providers to help our folks with mental health and physical health problems at palm tree we've in in the five years we've been open a half a dozen people have passed away from chronic illnesses so we're giving them a place to live with dignity and support as they deal with their illnesses and and and their lives we also have a huge partnership with the food bank they bring uh fresh food and protein on site which is far better than our residents could get at the local pantries and we found that this was absolutely critical because people just literally didn't have enough food because they are still even though they're housed they're excruciatingly poor Jessica asks who's responsible for like upkeep and of the property or repairing damages the we are in addition to hiring a management agency we also hire a property management company and this is a company that has experience working into the affordable housing housing world has a lot of sensitivity to the disability of our residents and their job is to we try to have the residents have as normal a tenant relationship as possible with the property management company because that's that's just good for them to to normalize their lives and we the property management is responsible for day-to-day maintenance and then we accumulate revenue over time and we have a long range uh repair and replacement program for the the big ticket items like roofs and and so forth um have there oh let's kind of a similar one let's go dot actually ask how how did you approach and engage nearby neighbors um did you encounter the not in my backyard kind of pushback and if so um you know how did you earn the neighbors respect and trust in that regard uh Tara I can add some comments would you like to talk about that a little bit why don't you go ahead okay okay um we have frankly um kept a fairly low profile and a lot of our success has been the tremendous support from the council members in our area um I can talk about palm tree a little bit when we first opened palm tree we did have a significant backlash from the local neighbors and frankly they were very frustrated that there was nothing they could do to stop the project uh because it was it was an apartment we were just going to put the apartment under different management um but we met with the neighborhood associations we had some very long conversations a number of conversations about what their concerns were one of their concerns was that there was a significant amount of camping in there in the neighborhood and they were saying well if you're going to do this anyway can you do something about these people who are sleeping in our alleys and parks and so um we made it a specific target of the palm tree apartments to first house the people who were camping in the neighborhoods and we were able to make a significant dent and I think um Tara's been learning that uh our our unsheltered homeless people um have a lot of ties to the communities where they're camping so this seems to be a winning strategy anything else on that Tara? I agree with Laura's assessment I think um it's important to be very thoughtful about how you engage the community I admit I had nightmares about something being on next door um the neighbor app and stirring up a lot of nimbyism um there was a lot I had a lot of anxiety about that that that did not happen um there are some specific protections for people with disabilities and I think it was important that we utilize those um for example one of our administrative processes is if the land is not zoned for multifamily but all the residents have disabilities it can be done through an administrative process rather than a public zoning hearing and so I really feel that that um worked um it protected the rights of people with disabilities and so we were going so we were able to go ahead with the project um I remember speaking there's a local Greek Orthodox Church um they wanted to learn about homelessness and so I was able to talk about that not very far from your church there's going to be some housing and answer a lot of questions and I think when there's time and space to really answer people's questions that the nimbyism dies down but when you don't have that space when it's something reactionary that gets out there like on a next door app or Facebook or something that's about fear mongering um that's when it's it's very much a danger to the project I am uh saying in communication with a number of the neighbors there are very few residential neighbors right around the whale trail project um they do have concerns about the typical concerns about property values and so forth um even though the research shows that property values do not go down with the advent the inclusion of affordable housing and housing for special populations um but it's it's these one-on-one conversations too I think that's just making people making sure people know that they have somebody to call who is responsible for addressing their concerns got a question here yeah let me uh there let me let randy uh chime in on that a little bit randy can you unmute oh there okay I think uh one of the things that uh needs to be pointed out is the property at quail trail was zoned commercially so taking it to residential was actually going to a less intensive use and I think that was that was a benefit to us uh I will tell you that there have been other the key is also having the city as Tara said having the city councilman support uh because we use the city council staff people for each city councilman to test uh you know their feelings about individual sites before we ever even attempt to get anything under contract um we had another site in an area that the councilwoman said that she was supportive of it it was actually owned by the housing authority and uh there was some objections I think uh unreasonably raised by a neighbor and uh she she re reneged on her support so it does happen but in that case we use the council person and we hope to have uh an opportunity to work with her again and we moved on to the next site um I think that that you know that's going to be inevitable but we've really concentrated on sites that might be either already zoned multifamily or are commercial in nature or even industrial in nature that might be in a suitable location that we could take back and if we used the mechanisms that Tara was talking about to serve people with disabilities and some top administrative process we would do that where we would actually be taking the use to a less intensive use or be in an area where it'd be more appropriate I wanted to drop back and address one thing real quickly that was talked about previously and that was about the size of the project for a small city it's really important to note that part of our design too is that a case manager can generally manage about 24 residents or 24 units we have 48 on our side therefore we have two full-time case managers but you could do a smaller project with you know 10 or 12 you know units that you know are up to say 20 would probably be the most effective for having one case manager for those and it really depends on how you get your funding for your case manager if you have case managers that work out of the central office and go and serve people at sites which we we're not using that model but if you did you could you could build smaller projects on on a smaller scale and use a model similar to ours where you would build an increments of four you know you could do two four-unit buildings and do eight units or or 12 but if you have on-site case management it's most cost effective to do at least 24 maybe 20 but you could use a similar model you just have to scale it back what we're finding is finding appropriate sites seem to always be in the three or four two or three or four acre size finding one bigger than that is a problem finding one less than that's a problem to get critical mass and that you know you can get about 48 units of quadriplexes on a three acre site and it totally depends on shape topography all those things but that's just what we're finding and that's what we're using as our broad criteria to begin to look to help us sift through sites very quickly based on increments of you know of 24 24 units or six buildings at a time how many of those of those types of units could we get on a site but i wanted to draw back and address that because the operations in case management also helps drive the the size of the project even for a small project so something to think about we've got time for maybe just one more question i believe i'll put these um well a couple a couple of them here the what's the predicted lifespan of these units dan asked and um jessica was asking also about the maintenance issues um have there been any like major ones those might kind of go together um can you just speak to that just briefly uh the these are uh this this new project uh should have a very very long lifespan it is the intent of the owners the nonprofit that owns the project that they will in perpetuity be allocated to supporting housing for people who are homeless further the the grants that we got generally have uh 20 25 years tom is that right uh required that in order for the the loans they're forgivable loans to be forgiven we have to continue to serve chronically homeless people with disabilities for at least 20 years on maintenance problems i i come and go in in this i am so excited to have a project that is new construction because at palm tree i have a 1955 building that i'm still trying to to maintain but um and and for the most part when residents leave as they sometimes you know either pass away or move on the the idea is that residents will be able to stay in the units as long as they need to uh some of them may be able to emerge to use some other kind of a housing subsidy like a housing choice voucher but uh occasionally we do have residents who have problems and have uh contributed to damage in the units and uh that you do have to be ready uh to be able to repair you know replace an air conditioning system for example um so uh but that is not uh i would say in the six years that we've been at palm tree uh we've only had a few units that have had substantial uh tenant damage okay i i think actually we've gotten all through the questions i didn't um some of you are asking questions and uh panelists were responding so within that so i'm not going to repeat all those but i am going to archive them make sure we're good um thank you thank you so much um wow what a wealth of information i think and very i hope everybody everybody um please feel free to reach out to us individually through our contact information we would absolutely be delighted it's our mission in life to see that this happens more and everywhere so contact us with questions please yeah what a wealth of resources here and um hopefully um those of you have um similar pursuits can find a way to to scale and make it happen so um just real quick um this um workshop has been recorded in in about a minute or so while i'll stop the stream and i believe it'll be available on this platform until august so at least um three months so have a shelf life if you need to come back and watch or maybe someone on your staff um you can bring them in and log in and let them watch with you and um so that's there for you guys our next session workshop session begins in about 10 minutes um at 11 15 is that correct yes so um anyway just back to the lobby uh at the top left and we'll see you next time thank you guys