Affordable Housing: Best Practices

Housing Continuum and S.M.A.R.T HousingTM

The Neighborhood Housing and Community Development (NHCD) of the City of Austin is charged with providing housing, community and small business development services to benefit eligible residents for access to livable neighborhoods and increased opportunities for self-sufficiency. To meet this challenge, NHCD uses the Housing Continuum and S.M.A.R.T. Housing.TM

The Housing Continuum is the framework for community collaboration and partnership among formally competing interests by linking housing programs through various community resources. It also assists residents in moving into the private housing market. The Continuum allocates how the City evaluates programs designed to assist residents in moving towards self-sufficiency. It incorporates S.M.A.R.T. (Safe, Mixed-Income, Accessible, Reasonably priced, and Transit oriented) HousingTM as its foundation.

S.M.A.R.T. HousingTM is designed to stimulate creation of reasonably priced homes that meet the standards of Austin Energy's Green Building program. It stair-steps across eight categories: of housing Homeless services, emergency shelters, transitional housing, public housing and assisted housing to rental housing, first-time homebuyer, and owner-occupied housing.

The City of Austin investment strategy is to offer developers incentives by way of a single point of contact to advocate through the development process. S.M.A.R.T. HousingTM provides builders who reserve a minimum of 10% of their housing units for families earning 80% or below the median family income fee waivers of up to $2,000 per lot and faster development reviews.

Grove Boulevard

Grove Place demonstrates four types of housing along the Continuum and S.M.A.R.T. HousingTM used by the City of Austin existing in one place.

Lyons Gardens

Lyons Gardens, sponsored by Family Eldercare, is a great place to grow old. “Aging in the Community” is the ideal for which most seniors strive. Lyons Gardens provides a fully accessible, affordable, independent living community that integrates rental homes and services for older adults, age 62 years and older with income less than 50% MFI. In 2005 Lyons Gardens was awarded:

Villas on Sixth Street

The Villas on Sixth Street is a mixed-use, multi-family development in East Austin. It includes 160 apartment units, 136 of which will be reserved for families earning incomes at or below 50% of the Austin MFI. (rentals)

Pedernales Lofts

This is a mixed-use development one mile east of I35. (moderately priced for purchasing)

Webb Middle School - educational success and affordable housing

Using Housing and Neighborhood Strategies to Improve Schools — the St. John Community

In 2006, St. John Community faced the closure of their neighborhood middle school, Webb, in anticipation of a fourth year of missing the TAKS standards. Thankfully, the St. John community had seen strong community organizing efforts take place in the preceding four years, beginning with the building of Pickle Elementary. Working from this foundation, the community was able to mobilize quickly and put together a successful effort to keep Webb open.

What were the keys to success?

  1. “Together We Can Do More.” The St. John community learned the power of bringing together all of the public and private “assets” in the community as it addresses challenges. They worked to change perception through community marches, block parties and other gatherings that bring us together. Prior to Webb, many people volunteered at Pickle Elementary, and had been successful in cleaning up the neighborhood and reducing crime.
  2. Get into productive conversations with the right people. They learned to focus on persuading the people who really had power over Webb's destiny, the AISD Board of Trustees.
  3. Be the solution. Rather than expecting AISD to come up with the solution to Webb's challenges, they came up with intelligent and creative proposals. These became the basis of the “Webb Community Improvement Plan” (below) that is being implemented at the school today.
  4. Stop the bleeding. As they had conversations with the teachers and staff at Webb, organizers tried to figure out what things were hurting Webb the most. Two things stood out: the large number of transient families and the significant number of students coming to Webb well below grade level in reading. The Webb plan came up with strong solutions for both problems.
  5. Focus on the whole child. The school district is good at the academics, but the low-income schools are being killed by what goes on outside of school. If low-income schools are to succeed, the barriers to education faced by children must be dealt with strongly. These include homelessness and housing instability.
  6. Change perception. As long as schools are being branded as “low performing,” they will come up (or down) to that label. The community began to change the perception of students and teachers about themselves.

Key Elements of the Webb Community Improvement Plan

  1. Stabilize transient families. Last year, 1/3 of Webb students turned over during the school year, many of them coming and going because of housing instability. As an answer to this problem, Webb has established a new Family Resource Center with a city-supplied social worker and 9 trained bilingual community volunteer family advocates called promotoras. Every new family (between 100 and 150 each year) is assessed by the social worker for areas of basic need, including housing, health and employment. Families are offered a promotora to work with them to build stability. The goal is to make sure that a minimum of Webb children transfer out of Webb during the school year.
  2. Extend English Language Learner services to every child who needs them. Webb has the district's only middle school academy for English Language Learners, but its services only extended to those who had been in the U.S. two years or less. The plan brought extra funds to the school to hire more bilingual, ESL-trained teachers to make sure that all students who were struggling in English would be placed in the right classes with the right curriculum.
  3. Increase educational opportunities for parents. One way to increase parental involvement is to get the parents on campus as learners themselves. AISD agreed to put a full slate of ESL and GED classes back at Webb this year, with more career training classes planned.
  4. Improve vertical teaming between the community schools. Reagan, Webb and Pickle have a vertical team relationship technically, but the reality had been that the schools were negative towards one another. The Webb plan calls for a new cooperative spirit to be in place, with the schools cooperating on calendar planning, curriculum and student placement. Of special importance is improving the transitions between 5th and6th grade and 8th and 9th grade, both places where students get lost.
  5. Support the community schools through an alliance of support services. The area around Webb is rich in services. St. John has had some history of various service agencies and groups working together, leading to the formation of the St. John Tri-School Alliance (now Community/School Alliance) last year. This alliance, consisting of the four local schools, city agencies, non-profits, neighborhood associations and churches, meets monthly to work on projects that support the schools. Already, the alliance has worked on several new grants and is leading the way in coordinating school calendars.