Hi, good afternoon everyone. Thank you so much for coming to our lunch and learn today
Talking about housing in Alaska and how the continuum of care impacts the housing
in our state
My name is Genevieve Mina. I represent house district 19 in the legislature
That includes the Anchorage neighborhoods of airport Heights Mountain View and Russian Jack
I represent an area where I'm also representing many neighbors who are impacted by our huge housing needs in our community.
I want to thank our presenters today for coming down here and presenting on the work that they're doing within our Continuum of Care.
I recently did a youth homelessness fellowship over this past interim.
And I learned a lot about how Continuums of care work.
in our state, and so that's how I've been able to work more with both Brian and Jessica.
Jessica Parks is the interim director for the Anchorage Coalition to End Homelessness.
Brian Wilson is director of the Alaska State Housing and
Thank you, Alaska Coalition on Housing And Homeless, we have two continuums of care in
our State and I'm excited to have them talk about the work that they're doing.
Thank you very much representative
Yeah, we're working on our name. It's really long and so we were thinking of rebranding here
So it'll be a little easier
So thank you for having us today
We are going to talk today about what our two organizations do in terms of addressing housing and homelessness issues across the state
for the data wonks in the crowd,
we're gonna go over a lot of different data
because that's a big core pillar of our work.
And then we also gonna highlight one of
our awesome initiatives that we are working on right now
called the Youth Homeless System Improvement,
which is basically centering our youth voice
to help improve our systems.
We actually have a lotta of the youth
that were in town this week for a convening,
and so it's great to have them here.
You might see them in a presentation.
We are what are called continuum of care organizations.
Basically, the easiest way to think of what a continuum care organization is is that HUD divides up the country into 400 different geographic regions.
In Alaska, there's two of those regions, one is Anchorage, and the other is everywhere else, which we call the balance of state.
for everyone that understands Alaska that doesn't make much sense but it's what the the hand that
we're given so we play with it and basically what we are responsible for doing is planning
and implementing the homeless prevention and response system and so
We always get confused when you're talking about systems work. We aren't talking
about like just a shelter like oh I operate a
shelter or permanent supportive housing. It's all the backbone work
and it doesn't make the front page of the paper all
the time but it's really important because all of our housing providers
depend on these systems to operate efficiently
and effectively for us to reach our mission of reducing and ending
homelessness in Alaska. So we're going to talk about four different pillars of
data and evaluation, grants, and advocacy education
community engagement, which we're doing right here.
So I will start with the first one,
which is really the foundation
of our homeless response system,
which the policy work.
From the Department of Housing and Urban Development and COC interim rule, we are mandated by the federal government and responsible from a governance standpoint to establish policies that outline how services are delivered in the state, how referrals are made, and all of the homelessness grants that HUD grants down.
are required to follow those things. So we'll talk about data, we talk
about what those grants are, but basically we call it coordinated entry.
Where are services accessed? What questions are we asking
every person that walks through the door? If we only have two beds
in a community and there's five people that need a bed
How are we choosing which two?
It's a very challenging and very emotion driven problem to have,
but that's what we do.
And it's all through community input from our providers,
from people with lived experience,
and from community members as well.
All right, the second pillar is data and evaluation.
So Brian gave a bit of a sneak peek in there.
If you are not a data nerd.
you will be by the time we get done talking about this. So I
think the biggest
piece of this pillar pillar is making sure that we are using that data to help measure what we're
doing. We make data informed decisions when it comes to designing and implementing our homeless
prevention and response system. we communicate that day back out to the public via publicly
available dashboards we synthesize a lot of materials for these types of advocacy conversations
presentation, and you'll see how some of the data we were collecting about youth
experiencing homelessness helped drive some
of
the changes that we're putting into place on that.
The last thing around our data is that HUD mandates us to perform a point in time count
at least once per year.
That just happened last week.
So you may have heard in your community talk about the point and time account or the pit.
That's a time when we count every person experiencing homelessness in our communities and we gather
Something that is important to remember is that we have to follow a very strict HUD definition
of homelessness when we gather some of this data, so that excludes people in communities
where they might be doubled up because there aren't resources available for them.
So remember that some this is data is driven by very-stricked HUD definitions.
That's the money.
So the main grant program that our two organizations
manage is called the Continuum Care Grant.
Imagine that.
And basically, it funds about 30 or so homelessness programs
across the state.
that are primarily serving providing rental assistance or permanent supportive housing,
rapid rehousings of time limited rental assistants. There's some transitional housing in there.
It funds a lot of DV housing programs around the state.
It's really one of the few funding sources that's relatively sustainable that provides
ongoing operating costs that have provided by case management services and other functions
With grants too, there are a number of federal grants that are actually required to enter into
our HMIS database that you cannot actually make a referral into those programs without having a
coordinated entry intake on it. So beyond just the grants we manage,
there's a whole host of other federal funding streams that bring in millions of dollars into
All right, and the last pillar advocacy education and community engagement is Brian said that's
what we're doing right now.
our road show out to you. We talk with the community about what's working in their community, what
's not working, in there community. Where they're identifying gaps in the their communities and
then we help them advocate for those changes. Uh, we spend a lot of time talking about things that
we need and how can we connect the dots on those resources to make sure that they come to our
who we are, what we do, and what kind of resources we have for them.
On these slides, this is what it looks like. It looks
like this room right now.
It looked like joint convenings where we bring people
together from around the state to network to talk to other providers and say,
have you had this problem? I've had
this problems and really helped tell the story
So, housing gap, Alaska needs over 27,000 housing units over the next 10 years just to
meet the existing need for housing.
And not all of these are new units.
You can see that it's about 50-50 existing units that need replacement or renovation
due to the housing condition, you know, not meeting those housing code standards.
New units that are needed to meet that need due to population growth and severe overcrowding
I talked about that a little bit before we have a lot of communities where there just isn't enough housing and so families are
Double triple quadrupled up in housing because there's no other resource for them
Important to note that that housing is needed across the state
And it's needed across the entire income spectrum.
You see in this breakdown that the amount of housing needed
for lower income households is about equal to the housing
that we need for the higher income household.
When we look at housing policy and housing
need across this spectrum, we'd need housing everywhere.
One thing that is important to note is the differences between the rate of people who are renting that housing and the people
who're owning that house. So most lower income households are rent their housing on the opposite side.
Higher income household are usually owning the housing.
And this is a breakdown of the units that are needed, both new and rehab, by that income category.
So while you can see that the housing that exists is divided pretty equally across those spectrums,
the need is much greater for people who are at or below that 80% area median income amount,
which is what the federal government defines as a poverty line.
Oh, sorry. And then looking at that housing cost burden by the income groups, those people who are extremely low income, and that is zero to 30% of that area median income. So extremely, low
Over half of them are paying more than 50% of their income towards housing costs.
That would include the cost of rent or mortgage along with the utilities that go along maintaining that housing.
The term is severely cost burdened for that.
But the low income people in our state are way more likely to be severely
cost burden than the higher income.
Okay, so there's a lot of different narratives around homelessness in this state.
It's very emotional topic.
It is something that we need this amount of time or even more to explain that you often
uh in a newspaper and that's a huge challenge we have to communicate you know why people experience
homelessness you what are the needs of housing across all the different communities in this state
and i was just presenting this at the Alaska Forum like two days ago and and I'll say to you
what I said to them if you can walk out of this room with one thing with
housing and homelessness world. It's this chart and it's that bottom chart.
For folks who are extremely low income, for every 100 households that are in
that income group, there are only 36 available and affordable units in this
state for that. So again,
So when you go back to that graph of like oh my gosh two-thirds of low-income people are spending more than half of their income on housing
We're all we were always asked. It's like the first question. What's the cause of homelessness?
There hasn't been a quarter in the nine and a half years that I've worked in this program where economics or
or too little of income isn't the primary driver of homelessness, and I'm not going to sit here
and say there aren't other things that come into play or factors, but a lot of the things
that people jump to at the beginning to say that's why homelessness exists is often a byproduct of
somebody trying to survive. So if you could walk out of here and just understand that
So what happens when you don't have enough housing?
Unfortunately, a lot of people fall into the homeless response system.
we pulled data from our HMIS database for the last year and every year it hovers around 14
to 15,000 unique Alaskans that access some sort of homeless service in our state. As you can see
this is these are actually these squares are proportional to the amount of like resources we
have overwhelmingly 6, 000 that that are accessing shelter that's a number one intervention and that
Down in the lower right-hand corner there, 683 in permanent supportive housing.
Those are the longest lengths of homelessness with co-occurring disabilities, the most vulnerable population.
That's what we have the least of to address that population, but you know what?
If you look at our system performance metrics
of who's staying in, housing, who is improving
their situations, whose drinking less,
whose adjusting more drugs,
who gets interacting with the judicial system least,
that's the most successful category.
So it's almost as if our systems is upside down.
that shelters people get stuck in the shelters because they're waiting for a
housing referral and that's the biggest challenge that Jessica and I have in our
jobs is trying to manage that and identify the person who's probably going
to die next to get that next bed that opens.
Not to brag a little bit, but we got a great staff here and like in both
continuance of care and the way that the federal government sends down these
continued care dollars is initially they give you a formula that's based on a
bunch of metrics that don't make sense for our state like population how many
homes were built in the 1950s like all this stuff like how
many how people are experiencing literal homelessness but overcrowding
doesn't count and so they gave you this tranche of money and then the only way
is to have high-performing programs and I'm just like it's so awesome to see
providers and former providers that are in this room because our state has two
contains of care that perform so highly that we receive bonus funding every
single year there's a competitive process we have not missed out on one
bonus-funding opportunity in the last five years if you compare the balance of
against all the other 50 balance estate communities
were the third highest performer in the country.
If you compare Anchorage to similar sized communities,
they're the eighth highest
performer of the Country.
And that's incredible.
And because we are up against
all odds to address this problem.
So, while some people do enter our homeless prevention response system, we always have
to have a huge asterisk on our data, because we just don't simply have programming all
over the place.
This is showing beds per capita, year-round beds, per campus, and not temporary shelters
by Census Bureau.
And if you could see this, this is a little outdated.
The YK region is going to be like a shade of yellow right now.
that's year round. A lot of places have like a temporary shelter, but what happens April 1st?
Back out. And so when you don't have resources to get people
into to get permanently housed, we start to see record levels of overcrowding. And Alaska has
the highest overcrowded rates, particularly in our rural communities in the entire country,
and it isn't even close. I put this in here that like there are some places where there
are more homes that meet the federal definition of severe overcrowd, versus just regular overcrowd.
And if you haven't had an opportunity to travel to a village and be invited into
someone's home to see what that looks like, that could mean a 900 square foot
home. I've walked into a nine hundred square
foot home in Savannah that had 24 people living in it.
Yeah, severe overcrowding means more than 1.5 individuals per room, not
bedroom, but like for the living room for your kitchen.
for your family room, your bathroom, so on and so forth.
Overcrowding at levels where people have to move out appliances and kitchens
to make enough room to sleep and have sleep in shifts so the kids
the next day can make it to school and be well rested and successful.
When we send our data, our homelessness data to the feds
in these communities, we're sending zeros because there's no homeless
response system in these communities,
and overcrowding doesn't count.
So a big part of our advocacy,
I know we aren't supposed to talk too much about advocacy
but our big message is that the system
isn't set up to address Alaska's need
and we need to progress that.
And so when you hear narratives about
why is there overcrowded in this community?
Why is their unsheltered population in
this committee, please keep this as an overlay
of that there isn't an adequate response
system to meet the need.
So here's a couple examples of the households and what it can look like.
Moving the appliances out of
the kitchen, that's the house on the left.
On the right, 14 people live in that house, the entire left-hand side of that
house isn't even habitable because it's not sealed up.
And that is where you find, we talk a lot about like...
power costs and stuff in the state. When you have poor conditioned homes in rural Alaska,
it costs more and more more to heat those homes. And so it's like the cycle just continues. It's
like, it it, not just addressing one thing of condition of homes or the amount of
homes, that's just all these different connected things. Sorry to be a Debbie downer, but we like
and just get them out there so we can start with the solution making.
And so a lot of the things that we're recommending are directly from these
communities that are experiencing this that
are saying here's the low hanging fruit of what we
can do to get the process started. And Jessica's going to talk about the good
news with that mic. The good news. So this is a snapshot of
the last year and it talks about everybody
who entered and interacted with our homeless prevention and response system.
What I want to call attention to is on the left-hand side those columns that say minors and youth.
Those numbers added up 30 percent. Out of every 10 people who enter homelessness
in our communities in the state, three of them are under the age of 24. So we saw this. We saw
that this was an issue and we wanted to work together to figure out what can we do.
We worked together, we applied for a youth homeless systems improvement grant and
we were granted that for our whole state. We were the only state that had the entire state covered
by this project and what the youth homelessness system improvement Grant does is it brings the
who are or have experienced homelessness directly to the forefront of developing those policies,
of looking at that system and saying, what is broken about this system that we need to address.
So what we were able to do is bring those young people here to Juneau this week. This is a picture
from two days ago. And they sat down. They worked together. These are youth from all around the
What are those gaps? What goals do we have?
What do want to do to help start addressing the pieces of our system that need to be improved?
So I want call attention if you know of a young person, age 16 to 24, who is interested in doing
Reach out. Let us know. We want to hear from the people who have this lived experience and expertise because they are the experts.
They are experts in their system. They're the expert in the programs that are being provided in our continuum of care.
If you, like our region is 660,000 square miles.
we have seven staff to cover that whole area. It's not enough, as you know, but we try our best
to meet the need, where it's at, and the sometimes the only way to learn, oftentimes the
only ways to learned about what's happening on the ground floor is to be invited to come. And
our staff, we're kind of scattered all around the state, so there's probably someone that's only
like a quick flight away, But we would love to met with anybody, give a town hall,
floor so we can make sure that that the things that we're advocating for and the programs that
we manage are accessible and relevant to your community as well. So you can always email me
or Jessica and we'll get back to you on it. That's where we are going to pause now. We can go on
for a lot longer but I didn't know if we wanted to do some questions on this or the representative
No, okay. Does anybody have a question? We got my way in the back. Do you want me to bring this back here?
Okay
Hello, I was curious as someone who has lived in Juneau for a while and I work with a lot of the homeless youth here
How you were presenting numbers about the housing and things in some of your earlier slides
How have like short-term rentals and thing affected this cuz I know in Juneau
There's like 400 plus short term rentals that people aren't living in but like
Just sit there vacant for months at a time
That's a great question. I live here in Juno as well over on Douglas and and just watching the
the cost of housing go up in communities that you can't drive to or whatnot,
skyrocket. And I wouldn't say that it's like the complete cause of our housing.
crisis that we have, but I feel like in this stage right now, we
have a long ways to go at the local level to even like monitor
and know where these units are, you know, how often are they
are the vacant or not vacant? What's the what's
the economy behind them and propose those local solutions?
It's kind of off of our radar, to be honest, because we just
don't have access to that kind, of housing data. But there
hasn't been a community that I go in where they aren't talking
of others than others. There's also sample legislation from other states
that have looked at maybe making that a revenue source or whatnot. I know there's
been a couple of conversations but nothing really fully introduced that I
know of at least in this state for it but it's definitely something that needs
to be tracked.
Yeah, I was just going to share in Anchorage, we recently passed a resolution to start gathering some of that information.
I think Brian's exact 100% correct. We don't have all of the pieces of
what the short-term rental impacts on our housing economy are to be able to have that data
and make good data-driven decisions about what we should do. So I think we're starting
at the ground and saying let's gather some information on what
the housing stock looks like, what is being put out there for short term rentals,
Alright, well it's been a privilege. I see some of the electives, I'll probably be bugging you later today, and
And thanks everybody. Hope you enjoyed the tacos