Director's Message
July 7, 2009

To: Employees and Partners of Oregon Housing and Community Services

From: Victor Merced

Re: Director’s Bulletin –

• Planning with Partners
• Habitat Photos
• Honoring America
  

It’s time to count our legislative blessings and look to the future.

Now that the session is over, Oregon Housing and Community Services is continuing its collaboration with partners to craft strategic measures to deliver on our gains in serving the best interests of Oregonians. Planning for the two years ahead will be thorough, transparent and quick.

We will soon be calling on key advocates to hone the details of the Housing Opportunity Bill. This work will transcend the general parameters defining the bill, as noted below.

Great work. The department has reaped the initial benefits from the considerable thought and energy that staff and partners put into the legislative session. Our successes, as reported here in the director’s bulletin and in Lisa Joyce’s legislative updates over the past six months, speak volumes.

Yes, it was a good session for OHCS, considering the crashing economy and unstable housing market that portend continuing high unemployment and foreclosures throughout the state. I thank you all yet again for your astounding support in advancing the OHCS legislative agenda.

Many Oregonians – OHCS staff, partners and citizens – have a stake in the work ahead. The department is designing a partner input process to plan distribution details of the Housing Opportunity Bill, a key legislative victory for the people of the state.

Housing Opportunity Bill. As I’ve often said, the document recording fee, better titled by our partners as the Housing Opportunity Bill, is no panacea. But it puts OHCS on the path to financial stability. And it holds great promise for hard-working and challenged Oregonians who deserve a place to live.

The bill’s increased fee on real estate transactions is expected to garner around $15 million in the new biennium, now underway, to support an array of important priorities – affordable multifamily housing, homeownership, homelessness and partner capacity building. Here’s more:

1. Multifamily. The lion’s share of the document recording fee, 70 percent as defined by the bill, is slated for multifamily housing.

The Housing Opportunity Bill funds development of new multifamily housing, including housing for special needs populations, purchase of manufactured home communities and developing them into homeowner-cooperatives, along with housing for working Oregonians.

In addition, the bill includes significant support to the department for preserving federally-subsidized multifamily rental housing.

2. Homeownership. The ongoing spike in home foreclosures puts great stress on homeownership. Accordingly, 14 percent of the document recording fee will go to support home purchase, largely through down-payment assistance, consumer education and homebuyer subsidies for Oregonians with lower incomes. The funds flow to agency partners throughout the state.

We know that homebuyer education pays enormous dividends. One-on-one counseling has been clearly demonstrated to provide consumers with better overall credit health, lower credit card balances and significantly lower foreclosure rates, compared to those who do not receive counseling.

3. Homelessness. Ten percent of the money will go to serve Oregon’s homeless persons through the Emergency Housing Account, largely through community action agencies in the counties.

There will continue to be much discussion about the value of permanent supportive housing as the most cost-effective way to help the chronically homeless. The aim is to stabilize their lives and to keep them out of hospital emergency rooms and jail cells that run up the bill on taxpayers.

4. Partner capacity building. The bill goes further still – to help finance the capacity of OHCS partners to continue enhancing their good work.

Using 6 percent of the document recording fee, this initiative supports the network of nonprofits and housing authorities that maintain public housing serving Oregonians that the private market cannot.

This helps seniors on fixed incomes, working families forced to make a go of it on low wages and unstable employment, and people with disabilities who cannot work.

Separately, OHCS is looking for solutions to the greater need in shoring up the organizations of its partners.

Looking beyond details of the historic Housing Opportunity Bill, let’s look at some other legislation that will help define the two years ahead.

Lottery-backed bonds. Passage of Senate Bill 5535 is a milestone in funding the preservation of affordable housing and preservation of manufactured home communities in keeping with department goals. This puts OHCS in a strong position to continue its strategy of rehabilitating federally subsidized rental housing.

We made strong gains, preserving 786 units in calendar 2008. And we expect to do more of the same by preserving about 1,600 units of affordable housing in the biennium, just begun, with $16.3 million in bonding approved by the bill.

Further, SB 5535 provides for $3.1 million in bonding for the purchase and preservation of manufactured communities. The current devalued market for land has diminished the interest by developers in snapping up existing dwelling parks for condos, but OHCS is prepared should demand shoot up again.

In other words, should conditions change, OHCS stands ready to move forward in facilitating the purchase of these communities in concert with partner advocates. If this does not transpire, the bonding authority reverts to preservation of subsidized rental housing.

Foreclosure legislation. OHCS will be working closely with sister agencies to facilitate the important work of helping Oregonians undergoing the calamity of foreclosure.

Senate Bill 628 puts forth a host of communication guidelines to help better protect homeowners facing loss of their homes. OHCS will collaborate with the Department of Justice and with the Department of Business and Consumer Services in crafting the best outcomes possible.

Foreclosure mitigation. The tangle of challenges confronting lenders, servicers and nonprofits dealing with home foreclosures showed signs of loosening a bit in recent days.

This past Monday, June 29, in Portland, the office of U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley came seeking solutions by facilitating these disparate interest groups, looking to uncork the bottlenecks that thwart frustrated homeowners facing foreclosure.

Dona Lanterman, OHCS single family programs manager, and Julie
Marshall, our homeownership coordinator, were there. They report the atmosphere was remarkably positive.

Participants put great effort into working through the challenges they face dealing with conflicting policies and priorities. This is compounded by surging pressure on foreclosure counselors. Counseling offices face dramatically more requests for help than they can possibly handle, say Dona and Julie.

The discussion worked so well that another is being planned in a few weeks. Sen. Merkley and his staff get high marks for working to untie the knots in this complex and exasperating dilemma for homeowners in crisis, their lenders and the counselors who toil to sort it out.

Habitat photos. As I earlier reported, the OHCS work party, May 27, on behalf of Habitat for Humanity was small. Now we have pictures from the South Salem site to prove that while the group was diminutive, it was most industrious.

Click images for larger views
	Members of the OHCS crew receive instruction from the Habitat pros. Tony Penrose, Vikki Pointer, (her husband, Eric Pointer, behind) and Jo Rawlins are rarin’ to go.
	Floyd Smith avoided smashing his typing fingers as he aligned foundation forms.
	Jo Rawlins (left) does heavy lifting with other Habitat volunteers.
	Eric and Vikki Pointer craft a firm foundation.

There have been murmurs that with a little more notice, department employees will turn out in greater numbers for the  next Habitat build. It’s one of those feel-good things.

Waving the Stars and Stripes. As we reflect on Independence Day weekend, just concluded, allow me to point out that we are enormously fortunate to benefit from the gifts of our great nation.

And in the 233 years that have passed since the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the words and ideas of our nation’s founders still resonate:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

I welcome your thoughts as Oregon Housing and Community Services moves into the challenging future.

The best way to predict the future is to create it.

       ~ Peter Drucker

Victor Merced, Director
Phone 503.986.2005
Email: victor.merced@hcs.state.or.us
www.ohcs.oregon.gov

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