Partners in Housing meets on the last Friday of the month at 1:30 pm.
Locations vary and all meetings are hybrid.
Strategy:
Our Strategy is made up of three elements:
Identifying Housing Opportunities:
Partners in Housing believes that the fastest route to increasing safe and healthy housing is to identify empty housing units, address the reason they are offline, and return them to the market as safe and healthy housing. Using Vermont Housing Finance Agency (VHFA) data, there are approximately 15,000 vacant housing units in the State of Vermont and there are several reasons that they are vacant.
Vermont’s housing stock is some of the oldest in the nation and many housing units simply need to be renovated and brought up to code in order to qualify as safe and healthy housing.
Property Owners that have had a bad experience with tenants or with the courts may allow their rental housing units to go fallow, avoiding the landlord-tenant relationship and simply letting their property appreciate slowly with low risk.
Local zoning sometimes prevents creative modification of large residential properties and adaptive reuse of commercial properties, resulting in empty residential and commercial space that could be repurposed but there will need to be zoning accommodations.
At the end of the day, the starting point is to create a registry of vacant properties, identify the obstacles, and to partner in turning them into safe and healthy housing .
Connecting the Partners:
Partners in Housing believes that the best solutions come from connecting Housers, Wrappers, Supporters, and the Government. There are abundant agencies, authorities, organizations, and departments that have a piece of the Vermont industrialized housing complex, resulting in an ecosystem that is full of inefficiencies, redundancies, and contradictions. The housing is safe and healthy but the landlord isn’t connected to the service providers that have clients in need of housing.
The siloes have to come down, the agencies and authorities need to work together, and the status quo needs to be disrupted!
Partners in Housing is working to bring the parties together to work for the common good, to house those in need of housing!
Funding that results in Housing:
From the Federal Government to the State Government to local initiatives, there are abundant sources of funding that can be utilized to support renovations, adaptive reuse, new construction, and property management. The largest obstacle to putting the funds to work are the complexity of the current processes, the narrow pipelines, and the need for a navigator in order to sync the correct funds with the appropriate project. The funds are there, the need is there, all that’s missing is a funding navigator that can guide the participants to the ribbon cutting.
