October 2016
Events & Campaigns

Nov. 15
In partnership with HAND and the Healthy Building Network, NHT will host the Washington, D.C. workshop on affordable & healthy building materials.

NHT Sustainable Development Manager Jared Lang will be speaking




Josh Earn,
Director of Lending
Mary West,
Loan Fund Administrator
Did you know?
PrezCat: The Database for State Affordable Housing 
Preservation Policies

PrezCat allows affordable housing preservation developers, housing finance authorities, housing advocates, and state and local decision makers to easily search and query policies, data and programs that are most relevant to their short- and long-term needs.   Try it today!
Voter Registration is Fundamental to Organizing
Residents at our Tequesta Knoll community in Florida visit the non-partisan voter registration event


The National Housing Trust-Enterprise (NHT-E), in partnership with the League of Women Voters, launched a national non-partisan voter registration campaign to engage residents across its portfolio.  The campaign involved mailings, automated phone calls, and onsite voter registration to encourage residents to vote in the upcoming 2016 election.   Nearly 2,500 residents age 17 and above received at a minimum, six "contacts" in the form of mail, automated phone calls, and home visits to encourage registration.   

Devin Tucker, NHT-E's Director of Community Development Programs, said that the non-partisan campaign is bigger than registration.  

"This is about helping residents develop 'high opportunity neighborhoods.'  Voting in its most basic form is about civic engagement and organizing," Tucker exclaims.  "We'd very much like to continue the momentum around this effort in a way that would encourage residents to be involved and tuned-in to local issues - to specifically address investments related to schools, police service, or transportation."  
 
The nonpartisan campaign supported NHT-E residents across several states including Maryland, South Carolina and Florida.  Partners such as the League of Women Voters will work with NHT-E communities on Election Day to help residents with transportation to the polls.   Tucker said that the initiative will be evaluated after the election to measure outcomes related to registration and voting.  

Tucker says that NHT-E property managers have a unique communication channel to individuals when it comes to encouraging civil engagement. "We believe that there are opportunities here to help place our residents in the driver's seat when it comes to local decision making.  We are grateful to all of our partners supporting our civic engagement work."
Staff Column
No Rooftop? No Sun? No Problem: The Promise of Community Solar
  Jared Lang , Sustainable Development Manager

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In the first quarter of 2016, solar made up approximately 2/3 of the new electric generating capacity installed in the US.  Despite the US Solar Power Industry growing at snail's pace throughout the past several decades, solar power installation is now booming and the industry is maturing. Why now? Strong federal and state incentives, combined with technological advances, have brought down the cost of solar and made it competitive with traditional fossil fuel energy.
 
As the solar power industry matures and installation costs come down, there has been a lot of talk about how we can include low-income communities in the solar power boom. Outside of their housing costs, low-income families  and seniors spend the largest share of their income on utilities and would benefit most from an ongoing source of free power. However, the upfront capital needed to install solar systems has remained a major hurdle.  

Arial view of the rooftop solar on Channel Square Apartments in Washington, D.C.
With this in mind, the National Housing Trust developed several financing structures for the installation of solar power on low-income residential properties. To date, NHT has completed 1 Megawatt of solar power on 22 buildings and formed partnerships with several other housing owners to do the same. At one of our communities, Channel Square, NHT worked with funding from the MacArthur and Wells Fargo Foundations to install the largest rooftop solar on a privately owned property in Washington D.C. We anticipate annual savings to exceed $60,000! 
 
In addition to adding solar panels to individual buildings, NHT is exploring the potential of "community solar" to reach low-income residents.  We're working with several partners in the Washington D.C. area, including Enterprise Community Partners and Nixon-Peabody, to develop one of the first community solar projects in Washington, D.C. Community Solar projects are especially impactful for renters because the mechanism allows utility customers who do not own rooftops suitable for solar to buy power from a solar system installed in a different location, perhaps even in a different neighborhood. The utility customers' share of the electricity generated by the solar is credited to their electricity bill, as if the solar system were located on their own home. Community solar will enable us to develop large-scale solar projects anywhere and provide power to our residents at low or no-cost.
 
Please contact Sustainable Development Manager Jared Lang ( jlang@nhtinc.org) to explore any possible partner opportunities and so we can together assess the potential to develop solar for residents.
Two Convenings Held on the Health-Energy Efficiency Nexus in Multifamily Housing 
 
In September, the National Housing Trust worked with its Energy Efficiency for All partners,  The Green and Healthy Homes Initiative, and shared research on how unhealthy indoor air quality in low-income homes can exacerbate asthma and other chronic diseases, leading to missed work, missed school, emergency department visits, and repeat hospitalizations. 

Convening participants learned about the health benefits of energy-health retrofits to multifamily housing. These retrofits might include boiler replacement, bathroom and kitchen venting, stabilizing chipping paint, and resident education. NHT partnered with  NRDC  and the Green and Healthy Homes Initiative, as well as local organizations to host these convenings in Minneapolis, MN and Jefferson City, MO. Attendees included housing owners and advocates, energy organizations, utilities, community action agencies, state energy offices, state health departments, nonprofit hospitals, health insurance providers, county health departments and public health organizations. This was the first time health stakeholders joined an energy efficiency discussion in these states.
 
For more information on the nexus of energy efficiency and health or any future convenings of this topic, please contact NHT Energy Efficiency Advisor Annika Brinkabrink@nhtinc.org).
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Clean Power for All Policy Innovation Center Launches  

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency 's Clean Power Plan (CPP) provides the first ever national protections against carbon pollution from existing power plants. The CPP presents a historic opportunity for investments in energy efficiency and renewable energy in affordable housing and low-income communities.

The CPP requires each state to reduce carbon emissions by an amount prescribed by the EPA. States can choose from a variety of strategies to meet their emissions reduction requirement, including energy efficiency and renewable energy. But there is a lot work all of us must to do to bring the benefits of the Clean Power Plan-environmental, economic, and health benefits-to the most vulnerable residents and communities.

With this goal in mind, the National Housing Trust has worked with a diverse coalition of environmental, affordable housing, and economic justice organizations to launch the C lean Power Plan for All Policy Innovation Center to provide an effective starting point for developing equitable state implementation plans.

The Clean Power for All Policy Innovation Center  released a toolkit series to provide background on critical issues, share ideas and policy options for states to address the effects of climate change, while creating good quality jobs, reducing costs for low-income families, and improving health through smart program design.

To view the first edition of the toolkits, visit thecleanpowerplan.com




President's Message
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Lack of Section 8 is not Just About Poverty: It's About Race

Michael Bodaken, President
 
At the National Housing Trust, we have used project-based Section 8 assistance to help preserve affordable rental housing for over 25 years.  Project-based Section 8 has been a successful public-private partnership which helps provide affordable housing to very low income households.  Today, however, I want to talk about tenant-based Section 8 assistance Tenant-based Section 8 vouchers, commonly known as Housing Choice Vouchers, are provided directly to very low income residents to find an affordable home in the private market. 
 
Being eligible for Section 8 does not guarantee that a poor household receives Section 8 assistance.  Securing Section 8 assistance is more akin to winning a lottery.  75 percent of U.S. households who are eligible do not receive Section 8 assistance.  More likely, the household is placed on a very long Godot-like "wait list."  And the household waits.  And waits.  And  waits. The average wait time on such a list is years. Not months. Years.
 
The lack of universal application of Section 8 is obviously a housing injustice.  According to the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey (ACS), 20.7 million U.S. renter households are cost burdened, spending more than 30 percent of their income on housing.  This number represents slightly more than half of all renter households.  But there is another pernicious outcome of the lack of Section 8 resources for every eligible householdLack of Section 8 fuels inequality and works a racial injustice.
 
The obvious answer: universal vouchers. The Bipartisan Policy Commission (BPC) has recommended making federal rental assistance available to all eligible extremely low income households (with incomes at or below 30 percent of Area Median Income) who apply.  More research is needed, but early studies show that providing permanent housing actually reduces public costs associated with meeting the needs of the homeless.  Surely the benefits of meeting the housing needs of our lowest income citizens plus the added savings associated with no longer needing to provide emergency health care and other services is worth the investment of the wealthiest country on the planet.  Providing stable housing for these under-served millions - many of them minority families - will open the door for them to then access education, steady jobs, health care, and opportunities for a brighter future. Seems like a pretty good idea, right?*
 
*A longer version of this commentary was used by Living Cities for their compendium of essays,  Closing the Racial Gaps, Together We Can