011: Affordable Housing, Covid-19 Evictions, and Social Leadership
In this episode of The Social Leader, Fr. Justin Mathews talks with Collen Hernandez, former CEO of the Homeowners Preservation Foundation and life-long advocate for Affordable Housing. They discuss the affordable housing crisis, the potential tidal-wave of evictions facing poor communities due to the economic hardship brought on by COVID 19, and the necessity of leaders to really listening to people who are actually affected by this issue and so many others.
EPISODE 11 — TRANSCRIPT
Father Justin Mathews: Well, hello everyone. Welcome to The Social Leader podcast, episode 11. The goal of our podcast is to help you learn to lead with greater social impact. I can't think of a time when that's more important than right now. Hi, I'm Father Justin Matthews, and real quickly before we begin today's episode, I need to acknowledge that we're recording this podcast in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the murder of George Floyd, and mass protests all over the country. Now more than ever, we need to work together for racial and economic reconciliation, but in meaningful and in tangible ways. This includes protest, which often is needed to bring the uncomfortable truth to the comfortable and to catalyze change when it never seems to come. But we also need education, we need relationships, and these two things are key strategies at the heart of the theory of change at Reconciliation Services and very much a point of these podcasts. We need to understand the lived experience of people whose experience is so far outside of our own that we can't imagine it. And we need to educate ourselves in order to activate ourselves, but meaningfully. As I've always said, we can create a good solution but to the wrong problem, which in the end is just the wrong solution. In order to bring about real solutions to the problems that we face as a nation, especially right now, we have to name the right problem. It needs to be named. So from our perspective at Reconciliation Services the problem is clearly the legacy and the present reality of racial discrimination and economic disinvestment in communities of color and in poor communities in general, all across the country. So if you're looking for ways to engage in this conversation, ways to help make a difference, even if just one heart at a time, you can find out more about Reconciliation Services programs, our volunteer opportunities, and how to support our work at rs3101.org. And lastly, if you like today's show, and if you want to go deeper in your ability to do something about all that we're seeing today, then you need to go to TheSocialLeader.org and sign up to find out more about a new e-course called Social Leader Essentials that we're launching very soon. Okay, now let's jump into our program.
Fr. Justin: All right, in today's show, we're going to focus our attention on the crisis of affordable housing. It's a topic that's critical to understand right now when rent payments are due again, we're recording this at the beginning of June. and there are over 40 million people in the US who are unemployed in the wake of COVID-19. So this week in our podcast, there's the important point that we need to make that no one should be out on the street, especially with the crisis going on, but that's exactly what's going to happen. That's what's happening. And the problem is potentially set to explode nationally. This crisis is also disproportionately affecting our black and our brown brothers and sisters in neighborhoods all across the United States, as well as in working poor tenants’ homes. And the protests that are linked to George Floyd's death that need to happen in order to put a spotlight on police brutality also need to be extrapolated to put a spotlight on the brutality of poverty that many of our neighbors are facing every single day. And this is a problem that obviously long predates the pandemic. And in order to better understand the situation, we're going to need to grasp some of the core and fundamental issues around affordable housing. So my guest on the show today is Colleen Hernandez and I want to welcome Colleen to The Social Leader podcast. Hi, Colleen.
Colleen Hernanez: Hi, Father. Thank you.
Fr. Justin: Thank you so much for making time to be with us today. Let me introduce you a little bit to our audience. Colleen, you were previously the leader of the Homeowners Preservation Foundation, which is a national nonprofit focused on sustainable home ownership and financial stability. And in that role, I'll note that you served at the request of both Presidents Bush and Obama during the housing crisis of the Great Recession. And then prior to that, you were the Executive Director of the Kansas City Neighborhood Alliance for 18 years, where you worked with neighborhood leaders for safe, strong and stable places where people wanted to live and where they were proud to live. And now finally, you run your own consulting firm and you're offering leadership development, which from your perspective, I think is so critical to offer. But also, you're still working for affordable housing development. Did I miss anything?
Colleen: No, you got all the high spots!
Fr. Justin: Well, again, I really appreciate you being here today and I want to dive in and begin our conversation by asking you really what fuels your passion for the issues that you've dedicated your entire life to? Where does that come from?
Colleen: Growing up I lived in the northeast part of Kansas City, Kansas that was deeply segregated. So I went to a school, St. Rosa Lima, which was 7th and Quindaro and black folks went to Our Lady of Lourdes which was at 15th and Quindaro and never the twain shall meet. I mean, it was just crazy. And there was an economic dividing line as well. So from the age of about six on up, I was acutely aware of the differences in the way people were treated. And I grew up during the civil rights era and was aware and leading some efforts on public accommodations in the ‘60s. And then in 1980, I was a single mom supporting two little girls and looking for an affordable place to live, working at City Hall, making slightly above food stamp eligibility, and I couldn't find an affordable place where I felt my kids were safe. And I was terrified, for a year I was terrified looking for a place that I felt okay about living with my kids. So it's been a whole life.
Fr. Justin: Your lived experience is vast. Coming from where you grew up, and then being a single mom, and to be honest with you, the story that you tell about being a single mom who's working but who's barely making enough to kind of keep on going with food stamps and keep your kids in school. What was that like? What was a night like with your kids when you weren't sure if you were going to be able to pay your rent that month?
Colleen: Well, I luckily found an affordable place to live. So I was divorced and lived in the house that we owned together. And to be fair, my ex husband would have provided financial support, but I was too proud to accept it. So I was lucky in that I had that safety net. But living very much on the margin, where we budgeted every nickel. And I’d tell my kids, if you're going to misbehave, don't misbehave on a night when I'm paying the bills because it's a really unpleasant and I'm not going to be nice to you. They’d come home and say, “Oh, Mary has a birthday party this weekend” and I’d think “Where am I going to get $3? I don't have $3 for a birthday present for Mary!” But luckily my kids who are now 45 and 43 tell me they didn't know that we were poor. That's really gratifying. It's like they didn't internalize my stress. And I was glad about that.
Fr. Justin: Well, it sounds like your kids were obviously incredibly well cared for by you, in spite of those difficult times and the circumstances. But you brought that lived experience, then I know just from reading and watching interviews that you've given, you brought all of that passion and that lived experience into your work in affordable housing. So here's the question that I think is on a lot of people's minds. As we look at the lessons that we learned during the Great Recession in the last decade. What did we learn that should be helping us navigate through this current crisis and how should we be applying those lessons today?
Colleen: A couple things occurred to me and this is not global. This is more focused. One of the things that is really important when somebody loses their job is that they get re-employed as soon as possible doing whatever it is they have to do to put food on the table. So a lot of people in the recession, and I think there were 12 million who lost jobs and then many didn't ever get back the original income level, they were waiting for the normal to return. They were waiting for a job that fit what they thought was their status and what we told them at the Homeownership Preservation Foundation was don't wait, don't burn through your savings, this is the new normal and you need you need to grab whatever you can right now and that's what I'm telling people now. Grab whatever you can and worry about your status and your resume and what people will think later but make whatever money you can and if it's in an Amazon distribution center, if it's driving a Amazon Prime truck, whatever, whoever hiring today, take that job and worry about your resume and your status later. So that was one thing we learned. Another thing that we learned in the banking environment, it's a pretty badly broken financial system. When you look for the role that servicers play with homeowners, they're just functionaries. They really don't deal with human beings and they don't have the systems nor is there any accountability in the servicing industry. So what we advise people is to take advantage of homeownership counseling, whether it's pre-purchase counseling or default counseling, but there are people who can help you with tha and there are free services. What I ran for the White House was a hotline, a crisis hotline, and we got 5,000 calls a day, we got all together 7 million calls. And only 2 million people agreed to be counseled. And the others said, “oh, that feels intrusive” or “I don't think it'll do any good” and it did a lot of good.
Fr. Justin: So by counseling, you mean somebody's kind of pre-planning or they're in a crisis and they're trying to figure out how to plan to get out of it?
Colleen: What are their options, right. So they got the letter saying the home was going to be foreclosed. And many people just said, “well, my numbers up, there's nothing I can do.” But then many, 7 million, called us. And we'd walk them through their budget, their realities, their options, and it was intrusive. Here you are on a phone with a stranger telling them, “Well, here's exactly how I spend my money and here's where it's not working.” And very often they had to come clean on stuff that was embarrassing for them. One call I listened to, at the very end, two hours later, the woman said, “Well, I'm paying my car insurance for my 50 year old son and I know I shouldn't be doing that, but I'm ashamed and I'm embarrassed.” But then when we add that to the equation, it's like, okay, that's where now we get the full picture. But the whole housing counseling field, whether it's getting ready to own a home or being in default, it's that and credit counseling. A lot of people, most people, have credit issues. And that is the single factor that keeps them from envisioning themselves as homeowners. But because there's no lasticity on their income and so they're never going to make more money. But what they don't understand is that managing what you have can get you into a much more stable place where your credit score goes up, you can qualify for a home loan, you can make ends meet, you can sleep better at night.
Fr. Justin: Yeah, of course. One of the things that strikes me though about that, and that will help us get into the issue of evictions, is that there are a lot of people for whom they could manage as tightly as they could manage and it's still not going to be enough. So what would you say to somebody who called into the hotline who said “Look, I'm 67 years old, I'm on a fixed income and never worked for more than minimum wage my whole life. I've only got X amount of Social Security. I don't have anything more to manage and the housing prices keep going up. 30% of my income is this and I can't find anything.” What did you say to somebody like that?
Colleen: Well, actually, we didn't counsel those folks, we counsel people who were already owning and up against it. But the simple fact is this is a big problem and the federal government needs to play a big role in helping solve this problem. And in an era when the federal government acknowledged that and played that role, we had far less problems. If you look at just the brutal realities of rents going up and income staying stable or declining, we can't even think about somebody having a full time minimum wage job. That's an oxymoron. There's no point. People are cobbling together this part time job and that QuickTrip job and this Uber job and it's not enough to make ends meet. So when you look at the magnitude of the problem, and you alluded to it in the beginning, we've got 30% of the people in in Kansas City who are rent burdened, who are paying vastly more and many of them paying vastly more for really substandard properties that shouldn't even be allowed to be rented.
Fr. Justin: Yeah, we see about 5,000 people a year here in Kansas City just at Reconciliation Services. 99% of them live below the federal poverty line. And that means within a mile to a mile and a half of us there are thousands upon thousands of families that are struggling to survive and succeed. And the difficulty right now is that with literally 40 plus million people out of work, even people that had side hustles have lost the side hustle, that they're not making it right now. Even if they were making it then they're not making it now.
Colleen: People don’t have money to buy stuff.
Fr. Justin: And there's nothing to buy. And then, let's acknowledge this too, right when we were barely starting to squeak some of the doors open, we have this murder and now we have protests. It's compounding upon compounding. So let's dive in for a minute then on a pressing issue, the issue of evictions. Prior to COVID-19, about 100 tenants, if I read that right, in Jackson County were formally evicted in an average week.
Colleen: 42 per business day.
Fr. Justin: 42 families per business day. So those were families left desperate to rent anything because once they have an eviction on their record, it’s harder.
Colleen: Well, you hit the nail on the head because there is a group of landlords and you're a small landlord, I've been a landlord. There's a group of landlords that create a business model that is truly predatory, where they say “I'm gonna rent only to people who have been evicted because they have no choices and so I can rent them squalor and they're going to have to pay me because they've got an eviction on their record.” And that's why in the recently passed Tenant Bill of Rights landlords in KCMO are not entitled to use that as a criteria to categorically reject people. But that predator is still out there.
Fr. Justin: Well, and I think sadly, many tenants that you look at stopped paying rent before they were evicted, because there was a furnace that wasn't working or the basement was flooded, or the ceiling collapsed in their kids’ bedroom. So it's not just financial inability to pay. So here's the question, what can be done right now calling to protect tenants who simply can't pay because of the pandemic or who shouldn't be paying because of inadequate rental conditions?
Colleen: Those are two really different questions. And in number one, I think the answer is the moratorium. There needs to be a moratorium on evictions for the duration of the pandemic. And I am hopeful last night I'm a member of KC Tenants, which is a relatively new group that has mobilized the voice of low income renters to say we're here too.
Fr. Justin: You all were the ones that actually got the moratorium, or at least advocated for it with the judge here in Kansas City in the first place.
Colleen: Exactly. You're right. It expired on Monday and so now eviction court is going to be held on Thursday. The mayor has weighed in and Judge David Byrn is the guy's name. We had a protest at his home last night at 2510 Grand in the Santa Fe apartments and there were 70 of us that showed up and we said, please extend the moratorium on eviction for six months or the duration of the crisis. And he issued a statement last Thursday that said if the local municipality requests that, I will enforce it. Our mayor is requesting that, so our mayor's attorney is meeting with the judge tomorrow and we're hoping that they settle it and that that moratorium is extended for the duration.
Fr. Justin: So let's meet one of the objections that's out there. Because a lot of people say, look, if the tenants don't pay, these aren't all huge companies. Like you talked about, there's a lot of onesie-twosie landlords out there that actually aren't predatory, they want to make a difference.
Colleen: This is their income, right?
Fr. Justin: Right. And so if the tenants don't pay, are there going to be landlords who lose those rental homes? And is that going to further exacerbate the affordable housing shortage?
Colleen: It needs to be a two part effort. There also needs to be forbearance and relief for landlords who have mortgages on these properties so that they don't lose those properties. So if the tenant can't pay then indeed the landlord can't pay the mortgage and the person holding the mortgage needs to give forbearance for that. There needs to be pressure put on the servicers, the investors, the examiners to say grant forbearance during the crisis. And forbearance, there are different kinds, but one is a balloon payment at a date certain. So alright, we're going to give you forbearance for three months, but in month four, you're going to owe all that money back. Well, nobody has that kind of money. Instead, it needs to be, you've got a 30 year note, we're going to add that three months onto years 31, 32. We need to add it on at the end, so you'll be held and nobody will get evicted.
Fr. Justin: Okay, so roll it up one more time, then. The first part you're saying is the moratorium. And then you're saying the second part is the mortgage forbearance?
Colleen: So on the current reality, it needs to be a moratorium for tenants, as well as forbearance for landlords. Now when I owned 283 units of low income rental housing in the ‘80s and ‘90s, half of the rent payment went to maintain the property and the other half went to pay the debt. So there are still going to be some issues if I'm a landlord: how am I going to fix the toilet when it breaks or the roof when it leaks or whatever and I'd have no rip coming in. There's still gonna be some issues, but at least people will be able to kind of get by with a roof over their head.
Fr. Justin: I know you've thought about this at a national global level. And so this may or may not be something that's in your wheelhouse, but let's roll it up one more time. So let's say that the landlords aren't paying the mortgage holders, the mortgage holders then oftentimes are bundled together with big investment funds. I mean, where does it stop? Because I would agree with you.
Colleen: So the servicers are the people you and I get a mortgage from. We get it from the bank down the street. The bank sells that paper, the debt, to an investor and they hire, they outsource the function of collecting the mortgage and paying the debt. So the servicer is the one that decides to grant forbearance and what I'm hearing from my banker friends is that that's happening more and more and more during the crisis, that just by request, you get a 90 day forbearance. But the important thing is that the forbearance needs to not be a balloon payment, it needs to be added onto the back end of the note.
Colleen: What's interesting is that with the way that's structured right now, it goes back to your issue about not having a relationship. We don't have a local banker who I can go talk to about my situation. So it is a very complex problem. So again, I want to stay at fundamentals because you're educating me, but you're also educating those who are listening. And by the way, there are people listening right now who are live. If you want to chime in if you want to add a comment on Facebook, if you want to leave your experience, if you're facing eviction right now or you're a landlord, feel free to chime in. We want to know what you have to say. If we can't bring it on live, we'll definitely engage in the conversation after the podcast. But let's dive in a little bit to another one of the fundamentals, Colleen. So for the city to implement any effective housing assistance or policies, it's got to identify definitions of affordability. And so there are obviously widely different things when you think about affordability, people have very different incomes. And many people who do work don't make enough money to afford the suitable housing, like you've said. So as I understand that there are over 30,000 households who have an income in Kansas City of less than $15,000 annually, and certainly, that's the majority of our clients here at Reconciliation Services. So this shows that there's a substantial demand for housing at the very low income levels, whereas you mentioned the margins for those landlords are also incredibly slim. So first of all, what's affordable, and how do we define that?
Colleen: I think we don't define it the way the federal government does because that doesn't help us get to those people that you're just talking about. So if you use the federal definition that they use at IRS and at HUD (Department of Housing and Urban Development) for low income in our metropolitan and in our MSA (Metropolitan Statistical Area) the adjusted median income is about $74,000. And so the feds say 60% of that, so 60% of $74,000, it's like $45,000. That's not the people you're talking about and the people that I'm relating to at KC Tenants. Those folks can afford the units downtown and Crossroads and River Market that are going for 1,200 and 1,300 or more a month and it is affordable to them. And so the Federal Government allows the developer to get the incentives for that, to get tax credits for that. And in fact, it doesn't even begin to address the actual affordable problem. So if you look at some research that was done by Dr. Kirk McClure at KU a couple years ago, he said that there's a need for 25,000 units that cost less than $500 a month in Kansas City, Missouri proper. And that's roughly what you're talking about, with the people making $15,000. They can afford $300 or $400 a month, they can't afford $800 or $900. So we've got a real deficit of units that are at the right cost. Meanwhile, we're over-built in units that cost $800 to $1,200 a month. So his contention is we don't need more bricks and mortar, we need more affordable financing. We need the rents to be lower and in order to do that you need more money that you don't have to pay back. So in the old days when I was building houses in the ‘80s and ‘90s, two thirds of the costs we didn't have to pay back. So the units that I had I charged $235 a month and I only had to pay back $80 or so a month. So that that was that was manageable when the federal government played a very active role. So yeah, I define affordability based on 30% of your income going for housing related expenses and I think the most recent data I read was that there are 91,000 renters in Kansas City, Missouri and 50% of them are rent burdened, so they're paying more than the 30%. So they're not making ends meet basically. Yeah, so defining affordability is kind of a game when you look at the the city conversation in the last two years, and I have a particularly strong bias about this, where they're trying to convince for profit developers to set aside X number of units that they call affordable, and in return, they'll get the abatement and the other incentives. And the fact is that it's a badly broken system. Because these guys, they want to do market rate, they don't want to do low income. They aren't structured to do it, they don't care about it. And what we really need to do as a community, what I've seen nationally where it works best in Boston, Chicago, and Minneapolis, is when government and philanthropic dollars go to build the capacity of nonprofits. When I ran a nonprofit, nobody had to put a gun to my head and incentivize me to serve a low income population. That's my mission. So we could shift gears and instead of trying to incentivize the for profit guys that don't want to do it anyway, forget that, shift gears and build up the capacity of either socially driven for profit groups, like the Preservation of Affordable Housing or McCormack Baron Salazar, or the nonprofit groups.
Fr. Justin: I wish we had all day because there are a lot of things we could get into there and certainly we could clearly make the economic argument that regional sustainability, regional economic prosperity is easily directly tied to basic social determinants of health, which one of the key ones is obviously stable, safe housing. But there have been a lot of so-called bold ideas that have been put forth in Kansas City. They've got a new five year housing plan that was released in the last year. So how do you think that we can best provide and sustain housing for all of our residents affordably over the long term? But especially I want to ask you about traditionally black and brown neighborhoods that were intentionally disinvested and are even further behind in the kind of the structural systems that allow them to succeed. What do we do if it's not a mixed income market developer housing? What will work?
Colleen: There are three things. The first is groups like KC Tenants who are the voice of the people who are affected. Unlike people like you, who serve low income, and me, who used to serve low income and we're well meaning people and we probably go home to a relatively comfortable middle class life. In mobilizing, like what Tara Raghuveer has done, mobilizing the voice of the people who are affected. They're not going anywhere. They're not forgetting how they live every day. So when we had 70 people turn out last night at Judge Bryn’s home, those are people who face eviction today. And so making sure that that voice stays active and that we respond to it in the way that Mayor Lucas has done admirably. So his first night as Mayor, he spent the night at 23rd and Topping in a squalid apartment. People said to him, “look, we know you grew up low income, we know you were homeless, we know you were in and out of motel rooms with your mom, etc., but fast forward to today and look at how we live.” This home had roaches falling from the ceiling and stray gunfire all night long and raw sewage in the tub and truly squalid, which really helped him build his motivation to help work with KC Tenants to pass the Tenants Bill of Rights to enforce the Healthy Homes Ordinance, etc. So that voice, the KC Tenants and and groups that are mobilizing the voice of those in need are just hugely important. There's a way to go online and donate to that group. They're a very lean organization and extraordinarily effective. So that's the first thing. The second thing is the capacity to do it. So I think as a community, we need to say who's doing what and whose efforts, however big or small, what do they need? Where are the gaps? So there's a very interesting experiment going on over on the east side with very affordable homeownership. There's a group of private rehabbers, you may know some of them, Larry Myer is kind of the leading guy, where they get a house out of the land bank for next to nothing, they fix it up for $50,000 or $60,000 and they can sell it then to somebody for $600 a month for 3% down. So we can do that in Kansas City. They can't do that anyplace else. We can do it because our housing stock that remains is still affordable.
Fr. Justin: There's a lot of it. There's hundreds upon hundreds of homes that could be rehabbed, if we get to that. You mentioned something earlier you mentioned the Healthy Homes Initiative. So tell us about this kind of relatively new Healthy Homes Rental Inspection Program in KC.
Colleen: For the time being, it's been suspended because it's not safe for the inspectors to be inside people's homes. So they will resume that at whatever point it's deemed to be effective. So the Mayor put me on the Rental Housing Advisory Board, so I helped to oversee that program and there are strong positives with it. I was the treasurer of the campaign that passed that measure in August of 2018. So I made a lot of promises to a lot of people about what we could expect. One of the things that we've seen is that of the complaints turned in in the first full year of operation, 90% of those were true violations, and some of them were truly squalid. And so having it on the books that you can't have raw sewage, you have to have hot and cold running water, you have to have locks on the door, real basic stuff. So when it works and the tenant or a neighbor or a family member of an evicted tenant complains 90% of the time, it's legitimate, there's really a health reason for that complaint. My criticism of it is I think it needs to be much more aggressive, much more active, and it needs to address the worst of the worst first. So if they had to triage, who are we going after, they know where the really bad properties are, and a lot of them, unfortunately, are section eight multifamily programs that are place-based section eight. So the federal inspections are meaningless. So it's good for as much as it does, but in the first year of operation, they did fewer than 1,000 complaints and we have 91,000 rental units. So they need to pump up the volume of it. They need to do a lot more. What they are doing ,they're doing well.
Fr. Justin: Let me back this up. First of all, I've been in the homes of our clients, and you walk in and if there is a front door, which by the way, I've been into a client's home that had nothing more than a piece of plywood that that the young woman had to screw on and screw off. And then you would go into the home, and there was no window in the living room. The floors were just riddled with holes, like right down to the basement. There were cockroaches and rats and bed bugs in the home. You would go into the bathroom and as you indicated the bathtub is just full of squalid water and you asked, is there any electricity? No. Is there any running water? No, I go to my neighbors and I get it. And I've asked her, this one particular person, why are you living here? And she said, “Look, my dad is in a wheelchair. This is the only place he feels comfortable. He has mental health issues and if I take him anywhere out of here we have massive issues. In addition to that, I don't even know the landlord.” She said, “this is a landlord who lives out of state and I've sent him messages. I don't get anything back, but if I ever miss a payment, I definitely hear about it. I don't even know his real name. There's a manager.” And you look at the situation and how powerless that she felt and it was not only powerless economically, but she was trying to deal with a family member. She was the only caretaker for somebody who had very serious mental health issues, which I'm sure were only contributed to by the amount of chaos that was in the external environment. Nobody should be living in that.
Colleen: And there's a lot of it. That is not uncommon to hear about those conditions. I know you read the Matthew Desmond book, Evicted, that takes place in Milwaukee. That same exact situation happens here every day. I've been in the homes of a handful, at least of the KC Tenants folks, and they're spending $800-$900 a month to rent something that's almost uninhabitable.
Fr. Justin: Yeah, I started here as executive director at RS, I think it was 2013. Back then our case managers actually could find affordable housing both east and west of Troost. And the interesting thing is sometimes it was easier to find it west of troost in the immediate area. But there's been a lot of development, I mean, millions upon hundreds of millions of dollars of development in Midtown. Now, some of which was funded by incentives and city programs and others. So what do we do? What do we do when we see the redevelopment of a place like Beacon Hill or some of the other neighborhoods east and south on troost? Obviously, we don't want to live in blight. We don't want to live in those conditions. What do we do right now when there isn't a federal program that's going to help make up that gap for the developer? Even now, state low income housing tax credits were removed by the governor of Missouri. What are we supposed to do right now while we're working on this pending policy change and long term legislative change that's needed? What are families doing?
Colleen: There isn't a good answer. I mean, the only short term band-aids are the moratorium against evictions, and waiting for the Healthy Homes to reopen. There's no good answer. It's a huge, ugly, awful problem. It's just like the George Floyd situation. We have huge, ugly, awful problems, and we don't have any quick fixes or any answers but building the will to address it. And you said it exactly right. We need to be solving the right problem. This isn't a bricks and mortar problem. This is a social disinvestment. This is a racial disparity. This is economic racism. They're deep problems and if we just do a quick gloss over and say, alright, we're going to do 350 units and have affordable family housing. Well, okay, that's worth doing, but it doesn't solve it at any kind of systemic level. It doesn't address the magnitude of the problem. I personally think politics is a big part of the answer. When I look at what I'm going to do with my life now through November, I'm going to be very politically active in Missouri and at the federal level, because I want people in office who actually care about this stuff and are effective enough to get something done
Fr. Justin: And thank goodness, there's people like you, Colleen, that dedicated your life with this single and passionate focus as a social leader to bring about affordable housing and to intervene in these particular areas. I know you're involved in leadership training, both in formal programs as well as on an individual basis. So let's dive into this as we wrap up, there are a lot of people listening, who are trying to figure out what they can do, not only about the issue of affordable housing, but about a number of social issues that they are passionate about. So often people want to do something, they want to become what we would talk about as social leaders, and they're not nonprofit folks, they're not independently wealthy, they're not politicians. So I always end the podcast with this question, what would you say to leaders who are listening who want to step up their social impact and become social leaders? What do they need to do? Where do they begin?
Colleen: This is actually a question that in the Kansas City Tomorrow Leadership Program sponsored by the Civic Council, Mary Birch, my co-facilitator, and I address this as at the culmination of the program and there's really four things. The first is it’s internal, you need to feel connected to and passionate about whatever issue you want to address, and there's no skipping over that. There's no shortcut to that. That's why the Kansas City Tomorrow Program is so good because it exposes people to education, crime and violence, housing, and jobs, etc. But you need it on a personal level. That's why my story, I'll never forget that terrifying year of 1980. It's like it stayed with me and whether your own life is traumatic or whatever, doing the deep dive to know that you personally are passionate about this and it's going to be part of your life's work, that's number one. The second thing, though, is more cerebral. And that's what you also said, is research. So what about this issue? What is underneath the presenting problems? And what interventions might work? So that you don't just stumble into “Oh, I have a friend who knows somebody and they work in this arena and maybe it'll work and maybe it won't.” For example, I worked a lot in financial literacy and I used to give speeches about financial literacy and I would always Google those words before I spoke, and there were 8 million results on Google. It means everybody and their brother’s trying to do something about this, but where's the literature that says what works? So what's the actual defining problem and what intervention might work? That's number two. So the passion is first, the research on the intervention is second. The third is to find kindred spirits because you can't do anything all by yourself. If you affiliate with an organization, if you start an organization, if you start an initiative, if you start a political campaign, you need to have kindred spirits just to feed your own soul. And the fourth is to not shy away from politics that people say, “oh, I don't want to dirty my hands with that, they're all corrupt, they're all self serving, they're all whatever.” Well, they have the power. And they're only that way if we let them, if we ignore politics, so the willingness to start at the grassroots level, sponsor candidates, write checks, knock on doors, work the polling place, whatever, to get involved in politics and make this government more accountable, more transparent and more honest.
Fr. Justin: Wow, thank you for unpacking. That’s a very clear four step plan that anybody listening can really dive deeply into. And I appreciate you mentioning Civic Council and the program that you work in there and the good work that you all are doing. I want to make sure that as we wrap up that people who care about the things that you care about and want to get involved know where to go to learn more. So you mentioned KC Tenants, why don't you give the website and any other website that you'd like to give so people can donate, they can connect, they can get involved?
Colleen: Wow. Well, KC Tenants at the bottom of the front page of the website is how to donate. On the immediate front, there is a COVID Recovery Fund that the Community Foundation has put together and I think they raised $17 million. I'm on a task force of people who are asking them to make some of that available for rental assistance. That's kind of a complicated way to do it, but it's a necessary step. Beyond that I don't have any immediately. There are a lot of good nonprofits. There's the Urban Neighborhood Initiative. There's Local Initiative Support Corporation. There's Northland Neighborhoods. There's Westside Housing. There's a lot of good nonprofits who are worth supporting who are doing good work.
Fr. Justin: So back to your point: find your passion, get educated, find a cohort, don't be afraid to get proximal and get political. Those are kind of the big four things. So I really want to make sure people know KC Tenants, as Colleen said. Colleen, I really appreciate you bringing your wisdom, your experience, your passion, your time, and for being the social leader that you are inspiring us and bringing these issues close to home.
Colleen: Well, Father, thank you for what you do at Reconciliation Services. It's the leading nonprofit in the field, just nobody is doing it better than you.
Fr. Justin: I am deeply, deeply honored to hear you say that. So hang with me for a few minutes as we wrap up. And again, thank you so much. Well, my friends, we've reached the end of another show and I want to say thank you for listening today. If you like today's podcast, I have a favor to ask. Please follow the podcast on YouTube, iTunes, Spotify wherever you get your podcasts. Make sure that you smash the like button and you hit the little bell so that you know whenever we go live. This is going to really help us share The Social Leader podcast with more people and begin to continue to build relationships and build that educational base with folks who want to advance their social leadership. Also, you can tune in to watch this show live on the Reconciliation Services Facebook page and on our YouTube page every Tuesday right around 12:30pm central. So lastly, as we wrap up, I want to tell you that if you liked today's show and you want to learn to lead with greater social impact, you want to do more of the things that Colleen was talking about, then I want to encourage you to go to TheSocialLeader.org, sign up to find out more about a new e-course that's getting ready to launch very soon called The Social Leader Essentials, answer a few short questions, give us your email, and one of our team members is going to reach out to you right away to see if the course is right for you. Once again, TheSocialLeader.org. My friends as we wrap up again, it's important for us particularly in the wake of the things that have happened across our nation in the last week, which really are only the latest sentence in chapter upon chapter upon chapter in our country of the conditions for the poor, and particularly for communities of color, it is important for us to stop, to be okay with being uncomfortable for a minute and to get comfortable with being uncomfortable. We need to look at the issues, set aside the common sense answers that we normally bring, the normal objections, the things our parents told us, the things we read, set those aside for just a minute. And listen, listen to the lived experience of our neighbors, listen to experts like Colleen, who have told us from 30 years experience what the reality of living on the margins of our communities feels like, and get involved, get educated, build relationships, get involved. With that, I'll look forward to being with you on the next episode of The Social Leader. Stay tuned and please until then learn to lead with greater social impact.