On Feb. 28, Meyer Memorial Trust will release a new Request for Proposals (RFP) through the Affordable Housing Initiative. We’re looking to support community-driven public policy advocacy and community organizing aimed at policy and system changes that will expand the availability of affordable housing to low-income Oregonians.
For the past three years, through AHI, Meyer has supported advocacy work through focused efforts. With this new funding opportunity, Meyer anticipates awarding up to $600,000 through two funding tracks:
The Advocacy Mobilizers track will award smaller grants for organizing efforts in the early stages of mobilizing support.
The Campaign Leader track will award grants to support more focused and/or fully developed campaigns that have an articulated strategy for changing a specific system or policy.
Each track is described in more detail in the RFP. Proposals for both tracks are due by 5:00 p.m., Wednesday, April 5, 2017.
This RFP supports the Affordable Housing Initiative goal of promoting advocacy, policy and systems change to increase the availability of affordable housing.
We invite you to two upcoming information sessions about the RFP.
The first session is Thursday, March 2, from 10:30 a.m. to noon, and the second is Monday, March 6, from 3 to 4:30 p.m. Please see the RFP for more details.
Please direct any questions to Michael Parkhurst via email at michael [at] mmt.org (michael[at]mmt[dot]org) or by phone at 503-228-5512.
Matthew Desmond's book Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City has made him a celebrity of sorts among affordable housing wonks and anti-poverty activists. Writing in an engaging, approachable way about the struggles of low-income folks in Milwaukee, Wisc., Desmond shows how easy it is for vulnerable renters to get trapped in a downward spiral of housing instability, desperation and misfortune.
Even advocates immersed in housing and poverty issues will come away from Desmond's book with deeper insight and inspiration, and Meyer is pleased to support his visit to Oregon as part of Everybody Reads by:
Helping the Library Foundation to purchase additional copies of the book and with outreach to local groups, including high school classrooms;
Purchasing tickets to Desmond's Literary Arts lecture for recent Meyer grantees active in housing advocacy; and
Supporting an additional event for local policy makers to meet with Desmond, led by Community Alliance of Tenants, Welcome Home Coalition, Oregon Center for Public Policy and Oregon Coalition Against Domestic and Sexual Violence.
If you haven't read Evicted, check it out! Jenny Lee of Neighborhood Partnerships shared an excellent review of the book last year. Tickets to the March 9 event in Portland are still available.
The cost of new affordable housing in Oregon has been a topic of intense scrutiny. The need for affordable housing continues to outpace the current system’s ability to deliver additional units. There is immense pressure to stretch the scarce public funds dedicated to affordable housing as far as possible.
Meyer’s Cost Efficiency strategy was developed in direct response to public, private and nonprofit community partners’ call for Meyer to spark and test innovations to address the high cost of affordable housing development and to influence policy and systems changes supporting different approaches.
As part of the the Affordable Housing Initiative, Meyer convened a group of experts to define problems and potential solutions. The final report of the Cost Efficiencies Work Group, The Cost of Affordable Housing Development in Oregon, was completed in October 2015 and has received wide attention from public funders, elected officials and the affordable housing industry.
As a continuation of that work, Meyer began funding five innovative pilot projects last year (with predevelopment grants under a Request for Proposals that elicited 17 proposals overall), focused on trying new approaches to reduce the cost of affordable housing development. The sponsors of those five projects were recently invited to request capital grants to support further development of their projects, depending on how well the projects were furthering the goals and criteria outlined in the 2016 RFP.
While each of the five predevelopment pilots ran into challenges (both expected and not), four of the five proposals appear to be moving ahead, and we are pleased to support these projects with significant capital grants approved in January.
Northwest Housing Alternatives ($400,000) — Building a replicable, efficient small project that is not reliant on 9 percent Low Income Housing Tax Credits for funding
This project, underway in Oregon City, will draw on and develop lessons from several other NHA projects around the state at different stages of development (in Hermiston, Hillsboro and Florence). In addition to rigorously focusing on cost-efficiency in design, NHA (working closely with its contractor Walsh Construction) will compare the feasibility of using factory-built modular housing with the most cost-efficient approach to site-built housing.
REACH CDC ($400,000) — Adapting “Lean” manufacturing to affordable housing on a large project in Southeast Portland.
Lean planning and coordination, typically associated with manufacturing processes, depends on an intensely collaborative and iterative approach to design and execution. The Lean approach taps into the collective expertise of the project team, identifies waste and inefficiencies, and focuses on continuous learning to improve workflow. By working closely from the outset of the design process with the general contractor (Walsh Construction), subcontractors, architect and other project partners, REACH hopes to achieve significant cost savings over a more typical affordable housing development.
SquareOne Villages ($200,000) — Developing a new tiny-house village in Cottage Grove, with an emphasis on assisting other grass-roots efforts at low-cost housing.
SquareOne is building upon its recent successes in Lane County (with Opportunity Village Eugene and Emerald Village Eugene) in providing basic, extremely low-cost housing drawing on grass-roots support. As it begins work on its latest project in Cottage Grove, SquareOne will distill what it has learned to date into a Toolbox and training kit meant to help other small Oregon communities with fewer local housing resources replicate the approach.
Transition Projects Inc. ($500,000) — Piloting efficient and flexible modular housing designs.
At the core of TPI’s proposal is an innovative modular approach to design and construction that can be combined and configured in a variety of ways, including some single-room occupancy units with shared bath and kitchen facilities. Like the NHA project, TPI will work closely with its partner on this project (Housing Development Center) to compare and evaluate whether factory-built modules can be cost competitive with site-built versions of the units. This “kit of parts” approach will be piloted on an unusually shaped property in North Portland that would be difficult to develop with a conventional apartment building. HDC hopes to then partner with Northwest Oregon Housing Authority (NOHA) to replicate this approach to pilot low-cost workforce housing on the north coast.
The fifth predevelopment project (creation of a new rental housing community using manufactured homes in East Portland, led by Innovative Housing Inc.) is not proceeding as originally proposed but has surfaced important lessons for when and where manufactured housing might be a good choice for affordable developers.
This slate of grants represents different strategies and housing types with real potential to push the envelope in the affordable housing space in Oregon. Even though three of the four projects are located in the Portland region, the four approaches cover a mix of common housing challenges. Their hard-earned experience will benefit developers creating affordable housing across the state.
As part of our emphasis on shared learning and informing the field, we will collect and disseminate detailed lessons learned from all five projects (including the one not going forward), and we are actively engaging partners around the state (including developers, funders and regulators) about the best venue and format for continuing the cost efficiency/innovation discussion. We have a commitment from the project teams to document the lessons they learn and to actively share these lessons broadly with the affordable housing industry. We expect a high level of interest from a variety of public, private and nonprofit partners.
Lessons Learned So Far
Although these projects are still in early stages of development, the core conclusions of the 2015 report seem largely validated.
There are meaningful opportunities to shave down both soft costs and hard costs. The best way to identify and exploit these opportunities is to challenge development teams (in a thoughtful and nuanced way) to deliver at a lower cost.
All partners in affordable housing — funders, lenders, investors and local jurisdictions to name a few — have a part to play in lowering costs.
Some approaches — including new rental communities with manufactured homes and building with factory-built modular units — have turned out to be more complex or costly than originally expected, at least for the pilot projects.
Radically lower costs probably come with unacceptable tradeoffs in terms of quality, durability, neighborhood acceptance and other important factors that developers must wrestle with.
This is an inherently complex set of issues, and there is still a lot of work to be done (see sidebar). We hope these projects will inspire and inform affordable housing developers who are genuinely interested in lower cost development, as well as funders who are exploring ways to support and encourage lower costs without compromising other crucial aspects of housing development.
Other Meyer Efforts Around Cost Efficiency
The 2015 report listed a number of recommended next steps to advance work around lowering development costs. Along with our partners in the field, we’ve made some headway on many of these.
We continue to meet with a wide array of stakeholders — including public funders, decision-makers and influential private sector groups —regarding the lessons of the Cost Efficiency report.
Following up on the identified need for more flexible funding, Meyer has convened some fruitful early conversations around identifying potential sources of new private funding for affordable housing.
Good work is under way (led by Earth Advantage and supported by HDC) to adapt a framework for lifecycle cost analysis that can help evaluate the long-term cost savings of specific energy-efficiency related strategies in housing development.
We continue to engage public funders and decision-makers, as well as the industry at large around how to achieve lower costs without compromising on other goals and on messaging and communications around these issues.
Meyer’s Affordable Housing Initiative has always prioritized the distinct and urgent needs around affordable housing in rural Oregon. The stories of Oregonians living in manufactured housing are particularly moving, both because of their vulnerability to dislocation and because so many people live in older, substandard homes with few resources to address housing issues that impact their health, utility bills and basic housing stability.
Although we’re still interested in strategies for the cost-efficient replacement of older manufactured homes, Meyer has been persuaded by partners around the state to support repair programs helping low-income residents of manufactured homes with urgent repair needs, weatherization and accessibility improvements. By addressing urgent repair needs that homeowners can’t afford themselves, small grants and loans for crucial repairs can help homeowners avoid costly and difficult relocation, help people live in better comfort and health within a community, and even prevent homelessness.
Last fall, Meyer released a Request for Proposals to build the capacity of rural manufactured home repair programs, and we encouraged nonprofits and housing authorities to submit proposals for up to $50,000 per year for up to two years (no more than $100,000 total). With a strong field of proposals, Meyer funded nine projects totaling $630,000 over two years:
ACCESS (Jackson County) $50,000 Benton Habitat for Humanity (Benton County) $100,000 Community Action Team (Clatsop, Columbia and Tillamook counties) $50,000 Community in Action (Harney and Malheur counties) $100,000 Habitat for Humanity of Lincoln County (Lincoln County) $30,000 NeighborImpact (Crook, Deschutes and Jefferson counties) $50,000 Neighborworks Umpqua (Douglas County) $100,000 Umpqua Community Action Network (Josephine County) $100,000 Yamhill County Affordable Housing Corporation (Yamhill County) $50,000
The nine grants cover a wide swath of rural Oregon, from the coast and southern Oregon to the central and eastern part of the state. In each case, the proposals described in detail the need for this work in the community, how the agency would carry out repairs, and how the agency would prioritize which households were assisted (most commonly, seniors, people with disabilities and households with veterans were defined priorities). Each program actively seeks out ways to leverage other resources, including donors and volunteers, weatherization funds and other local resources. In most cases, Meyer funding will help programs reach homeowners who can’t be assisted with other, less flexible funding.
We know that these grants will only address a fraction of the statewide need. We intend to document the impact of this work and hope to demonstrate the value of these programs to other funders, public and private. We believe that small repairs can make a huge difference in rural Oregon.
Support for Housing Stability
Last fall, the Network for Oregon Affordable Housing (NOAH) was awarded a two-year Meyer grant to support a statewide steering group including public, private and nonprofit partners wrestling with supporting long-term affordability and housing stability in manufactured home parks. We are pleased to see them take on this important convening and coordinating role and will be interested in their progress identifying opportunities, resources and supportive policies to maintain manufactured homes as an affordable housing option for Oregonians.
For more information, contact Rob Prasch at NOAH: 503-223-3211
All Meyer staff and trustees were invited to participate in Meyer’s 2016 Columbia Gorge Region Learning Tour. The invitation described the tour as an opportunity for us to collectively question and understand what a “flourishing and equitable Oregon” means for the Columbia River Gorge region.
These tours have taken place on a roughly biennial schedule, with a visit in 2012 to Umatilla County and in 2014 to Coos and Curry counties. Each provided an opportunity to get a flavor of a community's unique history and culture and to understand better how both have shaped and defined the region. As a Momentum Fellow, my personal interest in participating this past year was also to understand Meyer’s role in supporting gorge communities in their efforts to ensure a place where all citizens can thrive.
Life is about perspective. I see the world through a lens that is different from how a majority of folks would describe it. My eyeglasses are watermarked: One lens is institutional racism; the other lens is oppression.
Going on this tour reinforced my beliefs and broadened my perspective. I was so touched by what I heard and saw that I felt a need to share how I came to appreciate even more the work done by Meyer. Every stop offered me a glimpse into why Meyer’s mission around equity is crucial to the vision of a “flourishing and equitable Oregon.”
Although I focus primarily on what I learned about farmworker and Native American tribal housing issues, the other stories I heard were equally impactful.
Looking Anew
Looking through the viewfinder of my Nikon, I captured the majestic beauty of the Columbia River Gorge. I also saw something disturbing and complex in each image. Beyond the windsurfing, wineries and tourist attractions lives the gorge’s checkered past. If you dare look closely, you can see it.
I saw it, and heard it too, from those whose history tells a story not often heard. I listened to stories of Native American tribes, Japanese settlers, and the Mexican bracero program.
I listened to Randy Kiyokawa, owner of Kiyokawa Orchards and of Japanese descent, and to Paul Lumley, tribal member of the Yakama Nation and past executive director for the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fishing Commission (CRITFC). Their stories, and what I saw, made me look anew on the institutional racism and oppression that many of the people who call the gorge home have faced, how it has impacted their life in the past and today, and where we're headed.
Day One: Kiyokawa Orchards and the Challenges of Farming in the Gorge
On the first day, Randy Kiyokawa greeted us, and as we moved through his store I could see that Kiyokawa Orchards had done well over the years and contributed to the local economy. Randy shared his family’s story about how his father and mother were sent to Japanese internment camps during World War II, depicting a clear portrayal of the institutional racism experienced by Japanese Americans. Next, he invited us to pick apples off the trees. But my mind wasn’t on apples. I was thinking about the plight of farmworkers walking past our group, and I wondered if anything about housing would come up. I didn’t have to wait long.
Today, conversations on housing issues are ubiquitous and unavoidable. The challenge for farmers like Randy is figuring out how to provide affordable housing for their workers (predominantly Mexican migrants) that won’t break the farmer’s bank, nor leave workers paying exorbitant rent that breaks their banks. As Randy can attest, lack of affordable housing is one of the region's biggest barriers to retaining employees. This is exacerbated by rapid growth and land use laws that protect farm and forest lands, while creating myriad challenges for those who want to develop housing in the region. Many Hood River orchards build housing on their farms and offer it free to their workers, but building it is prohibitively costly. Still, a farmer who can’t afford to build housing might not be in business for long. The alternative for farmworkers is to find housing in Hood River or a surrounding city, which comes with its own set of challenges.
Housing in Hood River is EXPENSIVE! The median home price in Hood River is around $400,000, compared with the statewide median of $319,000. For those who aren’t interested in homeownership, finding a home or apartment to rent is also problematic. Lack of affordable housing in the gorge has escalated to a wicked problem that requires a collective approach toward a solution. Randy is looking forward to community leaders collaborating with each other and with funders like Meyer to address and seek solutions.
Day Two: Skamania County and Tribal Housing
The next day, we crossed the Columbia River into Skamania County. As a child I spent significant time on Native American reservations in Montana, Wyoming and Canada. Thus, I was eager to visit the tribal fishing villages mentioned on the tour agenda. Looking through the big bus windows, I saw Underwood. Instead of a tribal village with permanent homes and community structures, it looked liked a haphazard, dilapidated trailer park. Debris littered the site, including weathered indoor furniture and a menagerie of fishing nets, boats, rusty tire rims and boat trailers. The image contradicted everything I had experienced as a child.
Paul, a Yakama Nation tribal member who was our tour guide, explained that CRITFC’s mission was “to ensure a unified voice in the overall management of the fishery resources and, as managers, to protect reserved treaty rights through the exercise of the inherent sovereign powers of the tribes.” The fishing villages fell under their purview.
As we pulled off the road at the base of the Bonneville Dam, I stared into the distance, thinking about what I had just heard and saw. I thought about how oppression and privilege played out in this scenario. Paul informed us that the entire town of North Bonneville (with a white resident population of nearly 500 people) was completely relocated through congressional intervention so that Bonneville Dam could be expanded in the late 1970’s. On the other hand, I could see that the Native American residents, a fraction of the white residents, were left to their own devices to recreate and cobble together a community. I looked eastward at the spectacular view of the dam, pausing to absorb its awesomeness. The irony wasn’t lost. Minutes away from the engineering masterpiece that has generated incredible wealth for the region is an encampment, land given to tribes as a replacement for the homes and villages wiped out in order to build the dam. This land embodies a history of oppression and is a reminder of an irredeemable loss for many tribal members of the Yakama Nation, Warm Springs, Nez Perce and Umatilla tribes.
Paul addressed this matter from a place of honesty and personal insight and with a keen perspective of the past and present, particularly around treaty rights and housing. He said families living on the sites didn’t live in homes and are not allowed to build permanent housing on the sites. In addition, sites had no access to city services such as garbage or electricity, creating myriad problems for these families. The last stop was what he described as CRITFC's biggest challenge: Lone Pine. What initially disturbed me about Lone Pine was the street signs at the intersection of Bret Clodfelter Way and Indian Road. It was the use of a pejorative term in naming a street leading to the Native American encampment that was unsettling. It gave me perspective on how institutional racism can be subtle, and in this case cloaked as a street sign. Then I saw Lone Pine.
Lone Pine, is one of the sites that have been approved for families to live on and have no electricity or running water, except to the public restroom. Paul shared that the restroom facility had four shower and four toilet stalls without doors. Because there is no other source of running water on the site, residents also wash their dishes and laundry in the unsanitary restroom, which raises CRITFC’s concern around public health issues. “This is a health hazard for the residents” states Paul as we stop directly in front of the restroom. There’s also no permanent housing. The entire experience left me bewildered and sad and thinking about how oppression played into this scenario. I left wondering about tribal members living in each of the 31 fishing villages and their housing crisis. Today, only 15 permanent homes have been built as part of the Army Corps of Engineers’ effort to make good on their promise to replace the homes and infrastructure. A recent concerted effort of tribes, CRITFC, Congress and the Army Corps is looking to address the still ever present tribal housing needs.
Day Three: Talking About the Future
On the last day, a panel of local housing providers shared their insights on the housing issues gorge communities face. Each panel member expressed the difficulty of providing affordable housing. Joel Madsen, executive director of both Columbia Cascade Housing Corporation and Mid-Columbia Housing Authority, and Paul Blackburn, mayor of Hood River, discussed the challenge community leaders have in sustaining a commitment to the long vision. For over a decade, Hood River city councilors and county commissioners have been stalwarts in working to make affordable housing a reality. Starting with a strategy and fighting battles beyond what they envisioned and longer than they wished, they have stayed on task.
A United Effort
What I learned shook me to my core, and I’m thankful it did! I want to acknowledge that many of the people, organizations and communities we visited are thriving and doing unbelievable work. I saw tremendous strength and resilience in people I met and was inspired by the many working together to present a united effort in tackling problems each faced. I think I speak for Meyer when I say we continue to see value in the work each of you are doing.
Meyer’s commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion is reflected across all its portfolios. In this batch of Housing Opportunities grants, we are pleased to support an effort cultivating a new generation of talent by placing culturally diverse paid interns in rural Oregon housing and community development organizations over the next three years.
The California Coalition for Rural Housing launched the Rural West Internship Program in 1998 and, over the years, has placed over 140 interns. Over half of those continue to serve rural housing and development agencies — as staff, Directors and board members.
“The program provides a critical pathway for students to pursue professional positions in the affordable housing field while simultaneously developing qualified candidates for the field, “ says Gisela Salgado, director of leadership and programs for California Coalition for Rural Housing. “As a graduate of the program, I feel proud and honored to work with current interns and fellow alumni in the field — people I respect and admire — who care deeply about creating a more equitable society and making a difference in people's lives.”
After running the program in California for over a dozen years, CCRH expanded in 2010 to Washington, Oregon and, most recently, Arizona. Six interns have successfully completed the intern program in Oregon. Meyer support will enable six more interns to be placed in Oregon, one per year at two different agencies, CASA of Oregon and Willamette Neighborhood Housing Services.
The program is an important step for recruiting, training and retaining students who may not otherwise know about the housing field.
“Our diverse interns reflect the diverse cultural and linguistic demographics in Oregon and the West,” says Salgado.
With leadership of many rural housing organizations approaching retirement, the time is ripe for building a more diverse pipeline of new professionals. “We see future opportunity for expansion in Oregon and welcome discussion with interested rural housing and development partners.”
We are thrilled to share the Housing Opportunities portfolio’s grant awards for the 2016 funding round. All 39 awards support our vision for every Oregonian to have a decent, safe, and affordable place to call home. And all align well with our equity mission, either by working to reduce the disparities faced by marginalized people, supporting vulnerable populations or strengthening the many dedicated organizations working to bring stable housing to every Oregon community.
Beyond those common elements, we see the batch of awards as extremely diverse. It contains both solid and proven approaches and new, innovative efforts to increase stability and success for residents and address affordable housing needs. Some awards centered on bold approaches and others much more subtle.
Before looking at the grantees, we’ll explore a few notable themes evident in this batch of awards:
Equity is most prevalent in the populations served
The projects in the Housing Opportunities batch are all aimed to reach people living on lower-incomes. Our requirement was generally 60 percent area median income, but many projects reached populations at much lower-incomes, from zero to 40 percent area median income. The capital projects reached a variety of vulnerable populations and those most affected by the housing crisis: seniors, people with severe physical, developmental or behavioral disabilities, foster youth, pregnant and parenting youth, formerly incarcerated people, veterans and people of color. Other projects are designed to serve formerly homeless families and individuals, survivors of sexual assault and Latino seniors.
This funding batch also reaches several culturally specific organizations and some other culturally responsive organizations serving predominantly communities of color.
Equity also showed up in how projects are carried out.
All capital projects reflected a commitment to use minority-owned, women-owned and emerging small business contractors. (See more in our blog, Focus on Contracting). And where projects needed help to secure minority contracting, technical assistance support was awarded. Similar technical assistance was awarded for some projects that included equity components or for which we saw that equity training would be an important step for the organization.
Some goal areas reflected better geographic diversity of applicants than others
Most of our larger capital projects are concentrated in the seven largest municipalities in the state, and only one reaches outside of the I-5 corridor. Smaller and more rural communities were better reflected in our Goal 2 and Goal 3 areas. We were less successful in reaching some more remote parts of the state, including eastern Oregon, Tribal reservations and many parts of the coast. In the coming months, we will investigate methods to better reach more rural and tribal communities.
We saw several common themes emerge across the thirty-nine awards:
Awards cover a wide range of the housing stock continuum. From those exiting homelessness into supportive housing, rental housing, manufactured housing and single family homeownership options.
The awards reflected energy and creativity around finding and retaining housing in a tight market. Several models of housing are reflected in this batch, such as house sharing, tiny houses, accessory dwelling units and intergenerational housing.
Projects often straddle systems of care. Housing is often paired with other significant systems of care, including child welfare, foster care, domestic violence, mental and physical health, or civil and criminal justice.
Leverage opportunities are prevalent. Many projects directly leverage large public investments, which often come from restricted funding sources (e.g., tax increment financing that must be spent on capital in a certain neighborhood region) and philanthropy can play a role in helping to fund the staffing and support services needed to deploy such funds.
Several projects center on evaluation and data. These are often structured as pilot programs, prototypes or demonstration projects that are designed to give tracking and evaluation data to support future funding from public sources or other private sources.
Grants went to both new and experienced organizations. Nearly a quarter of the awards — 23 percent — were made to organizations that had never before received Meyer funding. This batch also includes our first award to a for-profit housing developer. Pacific Crest Affordable Housing LLC, based in Bend, is contributing much needed affordable housing development capacity in central Oregon.
The influence of the Affordable Housing Initiative (AHI) is clear in this batch. AHI’s strategies include funding advocacy, access to private market units, broader systems alignment and larger-scale preservation work through targeted investments. Those efforts continue parallel to this funding opportunity. Several projects here either deepen, further or complement the work of initial investment made in AHI. We expect to see the continued interplay of AHI and the statewide housing work.
Summary of awards
The 39 awards were spread across the three overarching goals of the Housing Opportunities portfolio:
Goal 1: Preserve and increase the number of affordable housing rental units
We anticipated that this goal would receive the largest demand for grant dollars and it did. Of the nine awards made, three are for preservation of existing affordable housing units, many with federal rental subsidies attached (Human Solutions, Caritas Community Housing Corporation, Catholic Community Services Foundation). Collectively, these projects will result in a total of 123 units of preserved affordable housing stock.
Goal 2: Support the stability and success of affordable housing residents
This pool of awards reflects a wide variety of approaches to accomplish the goal of increasing resident stability and success:
Four awards are aimed at removing a barrier to housing and/or employment or building up assets that can lead to housing and/or advancement: Oregon Law Center, Housing Works, ASSIST and Casa de Belen;
Goal 3: Strengthen the housing sector by building the capacity and long-term health of housing organizations
Two awards under this goal have equity prominent in the project design. California Coalition of Rural Housing’s will build diversity in rural housing organizations with an internship program and Community Partners for Affordable Housing seeks consulting to build a resident advisory committee for its properties. Other awards contain equity components, such as diversity, equity and inclusion training for staff and board.
For an overview of all 151 awards Meyer made this month, please see this blog by our Program Director, Candy Solovjovs.
Final words of gratitude
In the end, we are very pleased with how this group of awards aligns with Meyer’s equity mission and vision of systems change. Each grant stands well on its own, with special characteristics and different approaches to advance our goal areas. And together, they complement and accentuate each other, providing many opportunities for us to see leverage, innovation and learning play out. We appreciate the feedback you’ve given so far and look forward to hearing from all applicants in Meyer’s upcoming survey. We can wait to see how the work of our partners will contribute to an equitable and flourishing Oregon.
In the most recent round of grants, the application for Housing Opportunities portfolio funding posed a new question to applicants seeking capital support: What is your goal on this project for Minority-Owned, Women-Owned or Emerging Small Business participation? We have asked the question before but not consistently or as part of an application.
The responses were surprising.
Meyer has not set any particular bar for equity in contracting. That’s partly because we understand that contracting opportunities may not look the same in Grants Pass as they do in Gearhart or Gresham. But we do ask all capital applicants to consider their contracting policies and set a project target.
The nine capital projects funded in this latest batch all reflect a commitment to use minority-owned, women-owned or emerging small businesses for between 10 percent and 50 percent of their contract dollars. And where a project needed help in navigating minority-owned, women-owned or emerging small business contracting, Meyer added technical assistance support from expert consultants, Metropolitan Contractor Improvement Partnership (MCIP).
We were especially pleased to see MCIP receive an investment from the Building Community portfolio to expand its work. This will involve analyzing barriers to hiring minority contractors; providing training to industry partners; identifying policy improvements to ensure fairness in procurement; increasing the size and visibility of minority-owned, women-owned or emerging small businesses; and providing more one-on-one mentoring and capacity building services to these firms.
Meyer is also considering sponsoring training or learning groups focused on how to start or enhance minority-owned, women-owned or emerging small business contracting in nonprofits, with a focus on housing developers. What do you think? Would you be interested in attending such a training? If so, please enter your information in this google form.
For additional information on minority-owned, women-owned or emerging small business contracting for your organization, check out these resources:
Metro’s Annual Minority-Owned, Women-Owned and Emerging Small Business Report (includes a list of best practices)
Housing issues in rural Oregon have always been central to Meyer’s Affordable Housing Initiative. Both in the initial AHI launched in 2007 and in the second phase (underway since 2013), Meyer has responded to emphatic and persuasive testimony from stakeholders around the state that rural Oregon has distinct and urgent needs around affordable housing.
In particular, our trustees were moved by the housing needs of Oregonians living in manufactured housing,* both because of their vulnerability to dislocation and because of the huge numbers of Oregonians living in older, substandard homes with few resources to address housing issues impacting their health, utility bills and basic housing stability.
Since 2007, Meyer has supported a network of amazing partners focused on these issues, around two broad categories: preventing displacement by helping residents form cooperatives to buy their own parks and identifying ways to leverage a variety of resources to improve the condition of manufactured homes around the state.
Resident-owned cooperatives
Across Oregon, rising land values are putting some manufactured home parks in the cross hairs of redevelopment. Residents of investor-owned parks are vulnerable to rents rising beyond their means, even as some owners may not be keeping up with basic infrastructure repairs and other ownership responsibilities.
Oregon has become a nationally recognized leader in the resident-owned cooperative movement, largely thanks to the pioneering work of CASA of Oregon, based in Sherwood. Owners of manufactured homes in a typical privately owned park are vulnerable to losing their homes and even potentially slipping into homelessness if the owner decides to close the park or increase space rents beyond what residents can afford.
It might appear that the homeowners could simply move their homes, but in many cases that’s not a real possibility. It may cost as much as $10,000 to move and install a home in a new location — and only if one is available (and often parks won’t accept an older home even if the owner can afford to move it). It’s not surprising that homeowners often will walk away from a home if they can’t afford to move or can’t find a park that will accept it.
More than a decade ago, CASA set about developing an alternative that provides long-term stability and affordability, helping the residents of a park form a cooperative to pool resources and get help to buy their park, make necessary improvements and control costs going forward. It’s complex, difficult work and doesn’t work for every park, but when it does come together, it provides more than housing stability — it preserves often irreplaceable communities where people have lived for many years.
With support from Meyer, Network for Oregon Affordable Housing, the state of Oregon and other partners, CASA has assisted the formation of nine manufactured home co-ops around the state, covering nearly 600 mostly low-income households.
CASA has also been instrumental in important policy initiatives at the state level to help protect the interests of park residents, including legislation requiring notification one year before a park closure, relocation assistance to residents of parks being closed and even right-of-first-refusal allowing residents an opportunity to buy their park before any sale.
Another approach to helping maintain housing stability and affordability in manufactured home parks is nonprofit ownership. On this front, St. Vincent De Paul of Lane County and NeighborWorks Umpqua in Douglas County have stepped in to purchase and manage parks in their communities to help improve the physical infrastructure, stabilize rents and address other issues in parks, often after years of neglect by prior owners.
Addressing substandard manufactured housing
Although there is a definite stigma attached to manufactured homes, advances in manufacturing and federal codes regulating their production have led to dramatic improvements in the quality, durability and energy efficiency of manufactured homes.
Unfortunately, many Oregonians are living in homes built before those changes and have no choice but to tolerate leaking roofs, drafty windows and, in some cases, structural, plumbing or electrical issues that are truly unsafe. When homeowners struggle to manage the upkeep of their aging homes, they may turn to nonprofits such as NeighborWorks Umpqua, St. Vincent De Paul of Lane County and sometimes local Habitat for Humanity chapters to help with basic repairs or even replacement of older homes.
Cost-effective replacement of homes has long been a key priority for advocates working with owners of older homes. Meyer supported an effort led by NeighborWorks Umpqua on the southern Oregon coast to pilot home replacements leveraging energy savings. And under the AHI, Meyer also seeded a research project including NeighborWorks Umpqua, St. Vincent De Paul of Lane County, CASA and Network for Oregon Affordable Housing to better understand challenges and opportunities around replacement.
The challenges are formidable. A clear path to replacing older, seriously substandard homes has been obstructed by some foreseeable issues (the high total cost of replacement and a lack of dedicated subsidies for this purpose) and some less obvious ones (owners’ attachment to their homes and strong resistance to taking on debt). But there is hope on the horizon. The Rural Development branch of the U.S. Department of Agriculture is exploring ways to open its existing housing programs to manufactured home buyers and owners, and Energy Trust of Oregon is leading an effort to leverage the energy savings from replacing older homes, which can have shockingly high utility costs, with new, energy-efficient homes. HUD’s Oregon office has been actively engaged in manufactured home efforts around the state, and Oregon Housing and Community Services remains a committed and vitally important partner. We are happy to continue to engage with these partners and believe that solutions will be found soon that will retire many of the worst homes around the state.
In the meantime, we have continued to explore cost-effective repairs of older manufactured homes, drawing on the grants described above and on a recent Meyer-commissioned study of the work of Habitat for Humanity of Benton County on repairing manufactured homes under its Home Repair Initiative. Repairing manufactured homes raises its own thicket of issues, but we’ve become convinced it’s an important tool in the affordable housing toolbox.
Although putting several thousand dollars into an older structure that probably has negative value as a financial asset may not look like a good investment, it makes sense to see this through the lens of homelessness prevention. Talking with partners around the state convinced us that repair can be a cost-effective way to help people remain in housing they can afford and prevent a slide into a much worse situation. To that end, we recently launched a new Request for Proposals for grants to support repair programs (available here — the application deadline is 5 p.m. December 5).
Equity in the manufactured home context
Not all park residents are especially low-income, but there is a strong equity dimension to this work, especially in rural parts of the state where parks may represent a large share of the existing housing affordable to very low-income people. Even if Oregon manufactured home park residents in general may be less diverse in terms of race and ethnicity than the state as a whole (NeighborWorks Umpqua and Portland State University are currently surveying park residents around the state, which will give us a clearer sense of these demographics), there are opportunities to target Meyer’s support to communities that need it most, in line with Meyer’s commitment to equity as a core value. We will continue to foreground equity in our work with partners on these issues.
Next up
Two other projects recently supported by Meyer deserve mention here: Innovative Housing Inc. (IHI), a Portland-based nonprofit, received a pre-development grant under our “Innovation in Affordable Housing Design, Finance and Construction” RFP early this year as part of our efforts to support pilots around lowering the cost of affordable housing development. IHI’s proposed innovation is really a variation on the familiar manufactured home park: in their case, brand-new homes in a community developed and managed by Innovative Housing Inc. as affordable rental housing. We look forward to seeing what lessons can be drawn from the effort to build a new park intentionally as permanently affordable housing.
And just this fall, Network for Oregon Affordable Housing was awarded a two-year Meyer grant to support a statewide steering group including all the public, private and nonprofit partners wrestling with supporting long-term affordability and housing stability in manufactured home parks. We are pleased to see them take on this important convening and coordinating role and will be interested in their progress identifying opportunities, resources and supportive policies to maintain manufactured homes as an affordable housing option for Oregonians.
Resources
What do we mean by "manufactured housing?”
Factory-built homes, commonly referred to as "mobile homes" in the past. (Corporation for Enterprise Development has a great fact sheet here).
Manufactured homes represent an important part of non-subsidized or "naturally occurring" affordable housing in Oregon, with over 65,000 homes spread across the state, both in the state’s 1,300 manufactured home parks and on privately owned land.
Meyer is excited to have three of the first class of Philanthropy NW's Momentum Fellows.
Sharon Wade Ellis works as a fellow on the Housing Opportunities portfolio. She blogged about by her passions for philanthropy and housing, which ultimately brought her to Meyer.
Here's how she began her essay:
When I was a kid, I spent summers with my grandparents in their old and drafty home on Chicago's South Side. I recall going to the candy store next door, falling asleep on the enclosed back porch with the hot Midwestern summer sapping all my energy, listening to the roar of the trains rattling by. I remember navigating the rickety wooden stairs down the dirt alley to a shared garden patch where we'd pick greens and onions, and crossing the gravel parking lot to visit my great-grandmother nearby.
My grandmother would often share her own memories of that home and say, “Those were good times," and I remember thinking, "It's just an old, dilapidated house.” With each passing year, however, I grew to understand my grandmother’s feeling. There was always laughter, especially around the kitchen table. Even when hard times hit, there was a sense of security permeating every nook and cranny of that old home — and laughter wasn’t far behind.
Read all of Sharon's essay, and check out essays and blogs by other Momentum Fellows, here.
