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CommonBond provides a home for low-income earners |
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By Maria Wiering
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Thursday, 12 March 2009 |
Paul Fate is president and CEO of CommonBond Communities, the largest nonprofit provider of affordable homes with on-site resident service in the upper Midwest. The Catholic Spirit interviewed Fate to learn more about CommonBond and how the current economy is affecting it.
Fate
Q - What are the stories that you hear from people who come to live in your housing?
A - The average income [of people] in our housing is around
$14,000 [per year]. That’s pretty low-income. About 65 percent of our
housing is for families, and most of them are working with low incomes.
And then we have seniors, many of whom are living on limited means,
typically just Social Security or other kinds of government dollars
that are pretty limited.
About 5 percent [of CommonBond residents] are special-needs
populations. We built something recently for people living with
multiple sclerosis. We’ve done some housing for people with mental and
physical disabilities. . . .
What we find is that people have bounced around. They’ve had a lot of
mobility in poor housing conditions that were not safe. The things
people like most about the transition to our housing is a sense of
safety and security, affordability,
. . . [ and] the services component, where their kids are involved in
studybuddies, tutoring or the employment side for the parent.
We really try to create a sense of community within these housing
developments, and people feel more connected. School performance goes
way down if there’s a lot of mobility in families’ lives, and that’s
something people are very appreciative of — being able to have their
kids in the same school for many years, rather than bouncing around.
What is CommonBond?
Archbishop John Roach, Father Ed Flahavan and others founded CommonBond in 1971 because they believed the Catholic Church should be a social justice leader in affordable housing.
Today, the organization is the largest nonprofit provider of affordable homes with on-site resident services in the upper Midwest. It has 95 housing communities with 5,000 units of housing.
Now a separate 501(c)3 organization, CommonBond still has strong ties to the archdiocese, said its president and CEO Paul Fate.
About 75 percent of its housing is Section 8 housing, which means residents pay no more than 30 percent of their income for housing. Other rents are determined by income and number of residents, Fate said.
CommonBond’s housing is funded by grants, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development funds and tax-credit incentives.
The organization fund raises for its “advantages services,” which provide services for education, child care, employment and other opportunities to help its residents gain economic success and move into market-rate rental housing or home ownership.
— Maria Wiering
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Q - How do people in need find CommonBond?
A - We don’t have to do a lot — I mean, our property management
people do market, and we do get the word out through various formal and
informal systems, but . . . with Trails Edge [Townhomes] in Maplewood,
we had almost 600 applicants for [about] 50 units. The demand is just
off the charts.
[CommonBond built its Trails Edge Townhomes community on land bought
from the Benedictine sisters at St. Paul’s Monastery in Maplewood. It
opened in February with 48 units of affordable townhomes.]
Q - With demand like that, how does a person qualify for CommonBond housing?
A - There’s an application process, and people are screened. Our
property management staff does a very good job. It depends on the
income requirements, and we obviously have to pay attention to whether
there are criminal records. It’s pretty straightforward in terms of the
things that we look at.
Q - How has CommonBond been affected by the current economy? I’m guessing you have greater need and fewer resources.
A - You’ve got it. What’s toughest right now is assembling the
financing for these particular developments. The area that we worry
about the most is finding the investors in the low-income housing tax
credit.
[CommonBond relies on six to eight different sources of revenue to fund
its housing projects, including money from the low-income housing tax
credit. These credits allow dollar-for-dollar tax reduction of a
private donor’s federal income tax.]
The investor market has just really, really cooled off, so finding investors is one of our toughest assignments.
When you find them, the pricing [of what businesses are willing to pay
for the low-income housing tax credits] has really dropped, and it
creates gaps, so we have to look at ways to fill those.
The other side is on the debt side. The banks are certainly more hunkered down than they used to be. . . .
We have a lot of developments that are close to being ready to build,
but we’re being delayed by this slow-down in the investor market, first
and foremost, but also by this slow-down in the credit markets as well.
Q - How are you addressing that challenge? Will the recently passed federal stimulus package affect CommonBond?
A - We’re getting out and meeting with individual companies
that have the potential [to be] or have been profitable, or would be
more inclined to invest, so we’re making some of those calls.
We’re getting out and meeting with banks we’ve had relationships with, and we push them as much as we can.
There is some opportunity with the stimulus package — there is some
money available to help fill the gap. Then there’s also an opportunity
to tap directly into the U.S. Treasury as a substitute to the
investors; the Treasury would actually invest in these projects as an
alternative. Those two new things have come out of the stimulus
package, but nobody knows the rules, nobody knows when it will flow and
when it will come exactly.
Q - How has the housing market’s downturn, with all the foreclosures we’ve seen, affected the need for your services?
A - The need and the demand has just gone off the charts, and we
see it anecdotally in the number of applications coming in. We had
twice as many applicants for Trails Edge in Maplewood as we did in
Plymouth [in 2007]. They’re about a year and a half apart, same size
development, same type of financing, same target market. You’d expect
them to have similar types of application numbers, but in fact, we had
twice as many people apply in Maplewood, and that reflects an increase
in demand.
We have a waiting list right now of 5,800 people across our portfolio —
that tells you something. We opened up our waiting list at South
Minneapolis’ Seward Towers [in late fall 2008], which is 320 units,
just for a couple of days, and got over 900 applicants.
Quite frankly, the demand was heavy before [the recession], and it’s much heavier now. . . .
Fifty-five percent of the people living at Trails Edge went through
foreclosure proceedings. Normally, a couple of years ago, that might
have been more like 10 percent.
Q - How does that make you feel, knowing that you are able to serve some people but not all people?
A - It spurs us to do whatever we can to create more housing
opportunities. We have a campaign underway that is all about opening
4,000 doors of opportunity. So by 2012, we are trying to get up to
8,000 units of housing in our portfolio. We have gone from 4,000 to
5,000, and we want to get up to 8,000. (About 1,000 of this campaign’s
units have already been built.)
The other part of this is that we have to pay a great deal of attention
to taking care of what we already have, and we do that as well as
anybody in the business. In other words, we’re in this for the long
haul, and we have to be really good owners and operators of these
housing communities for the long haul.
Q - What is your goal for the people who live in CommonBond communities?
A - The focus of our services with families is to have people
keep in mind the ability to move up and out of this housing into either
market-rate rental housing or an ownership opportunity. We see
[CommonBond Communities] as a stepping stone to further their economic
and social success.
With seniors, it’s more about how people can live independently with
the highest quality of life possible. With families, it’s about people
being able to use it as a stable platform and to continue to work on
things like getting a better job, education and building their assets
so they can move on and up.
Q - What is the long-range vision for CommonBond, through the 2012 campaign and beyond?
A - There are a few things as we look toward the future.
Certainly, the ability to achieve this goal of getting up to 8,000
units is part of that. We’re working now in Wisconsin and Iowa in
addition to Minnesota, so we have a broader geographic reach.
We want to be a leader in green and sustainable development practices
in the way we approach our housing, and there are three reasons to do
that.
One is very practical — to lower the operating costs of our housing
communities, and that’s a very important objective. Number two, in the
process we think we can build a conservation ethic within our staff and
residents that will again be beneficial from a cost standpoint, but it
also will create a very positive culture with our staff and residents
and a sense of pride about where they live.
Number three is overall wanting to lower our carbon footprint in the process.
We also give opportunities for our business partners to volunteer in
the communities . . . and it ends up being a win-win for both the
companies and CommonBond.
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