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Can you tell us a little about SAHF and its mission?
We are a unique, mission-driven policy and practice collaborative. We're comprised of 12 of the country's largest nonprofit multifamily, affordable housing developers. Our members come together to realize a vision of a world where every person has a healthy home and a thriving community. And we do this work of policy and peer exchange, drawing on the real-world experience of our members to advance policy and practice that takes good ideas and implements them on the ground and in a resident-centered way.
What does the work SAHF around health look like?
We understand our role in health and housing in three parts. One is going upstream to think about social determinants or systemic drivers of health and how those connect to housing. What are those relationships? The next is thinking about how then do we connect to those other drivers to health through housing, and that's where we think about the practice of residents services coordination. And then the third is thinking about how are we accountable for actually creating those improved outcomes.
So it's a three-part strategy. And each one of those has had its policy or practice products. The resident services work began with a community of practice recognizing that many practitioners can point to a single community where they do resident services really well, but that sort of commitment and systemic investment needed to consistently provide and replicate high-quality, resident-centered services was more challenging and lacked a standard definition. That makes it challenging for policymakers and funding partners interested in supporting resident services to identify those actors that have that commitment and capacity to really deliver a quality services program.
Out of that community of practice, we developed our Framework and Guidelines for a System of Resident Services Coordination. And eventually, that framework became the basis for our partnership with Fannie Mae around Healthy Housing Rewards- Enhanced Resident Services and the Certified Organization for Resident Engagement and Services (CORES) program. CORES recognizes organizations that have that capacity and commitment to providing resident services at the enterprise level.
But we also, at the same time, think a lot about outcomes for the people we serve- both to ensure that homes and services we provide are impactful and as a tool for advocating for housing. Our members want to know that the services they coordinate are making a difference and they know that a big part of advocating for housing and for resources across sectors, in particular, is being able to demonstrate the value of a stable home on other life outcomes. So we are in year eight now of our Outcomes Initiative. We have developed 24 different resident outcomes measures, many of which are drawn from validated measures that have larger bases of comparison. And we collect those across our members. We are able to analyze outcomes for roughly 100,000 households on some measures.
While this is real-world data and not rigorous academic research, we have some outcomes where we can begin to really understand the impact of a stable, affordable home with services. For instance, we know that our members are succeeding in creating great housing stability. Residents of SAHF member properties are only about half as like to experience housing stability as the rest of the population. We also see positive outcomes related to health such as higher rates of regular places of care and lower rates of emergency room use.
Those two initiatives — a framework for resident services and the outcomes measures — together with this upstream work around social determinants of health have allowed us to forge a number of partnerships, not just with Fannie Mae. We are using these outcomes measurements in a partnership with the UnitedHealth Group (UHG), where our syndicator affiliate, National Affordable Housing Trust, is helping UHG make equity investments. And SAHF is helping UHG administer grant funding for health-supporting services in those properties and measure the outcomes for people living in these quality, stable homes with accompanying services.
And as we’ve talked about this work, we've had impact investors and policymakers call and tell us that they’ve taken our outcomes framework and asked borrowers to use some or all of it. We’ve spent a good amount of time talking about why diving right into a full outcomes collection might not be the best place for every property to begin. The Outcomes Initiative framework was built in the context of affordable housing with some sort of onsite service coordination. Even with those things present, this is a lot to ask of residents and owners right out of the gate, and you need to really be thoughtful.
After a year or two of those conversations with folks who were really trying to be thoughtful about implementing the resident services and outcomes framework, we realized it would be helpful to write these things down in a way that connects the dots between outcomes measurement and resident engagement and services. So we created a toolkit that provides questions and resources to let folks make their own decisions about how the framework might apply to the outcomes they're trying to drive and what systems they need to build to successfully track outcomes.
Can you tell us about SAHF’s housing stability work?
Like all multifamily operators, our members saw their residents really struggling through COVID. We were very fortunate to have some philanthropic support that allowed us to help our members both augment resident services and reduce the rent that was owed to them- it was a sort of an innovative owner-side payment system.
What we learned from that was there were a lot of good ideas and new things being tried, but what was really working was emergency rental assistance, and to some extent, eviction moratoria. And that sort of obscured really understanding what else works. And so we have formed an 18-month cohort around housing stability, bringing together resident services and property managers to really talk in a very tactical way about what they're undertaking to keep people’s housing stable and how their thinking is changing. That is part of a commitment we’ve made in the White House Resident-Centered Housing Challenge around housing stability. Our members have made commitments to continue to offer payment plans to residents that are in touch with management, and also some explicit stability measures that, as operators of largely regulated, affordable housing, are things that are expected of us and we think can be achieved. It looks different in other parts of the sector, and we understand that very well. But we're hoping we can identify some lessons around implementing these measures and share them with policymakers and the sector.
The key to our success, the sort of fourth leg of the stool for us, is we have this partnership with the National Affordable Housing Trust (NAHT), where we're taking a lot of this work and thinking, “Okay, how do you pay for it? How do you build it into the capital structures?” Our partnership with United is one way of thinking about how you pay for resident services by understanding the impact they can have. We're talking with NAHT around implications of our work on housing stability and sustainability. We’re excited to see where all of this leads, which is hopefully to some changes within the system.
And what is SAHF doing around sustainability?
Our members are leaders in this space. Almost 15 years ago, they really understood that the built environment is a huge contributor to both energy consumption and pollution, and started down a path of trying to reduce their footprint.
In 2013 we made a commitment to reduce our energy and water footprint by 20% by 2020- The Big Reach. And we achieved that handily, exceeded those savings in both categories, and are now thinking about how we build on that.
A big part of that Big Reach success was how we think about ourselves as a collaborative. The members challenged and learned from one another and set a collective goal. SAHF did a lot of data collection. And we provided a lot of peer exchange opportunities for SAHF member staff to say, “I tried this, and it really worked. Here's what I'm running up against and here's the policy we've got to fix if we want to unlock this technology or this funding source.” And SAHF took that feedback and developed tools and advocated for policies to help members – and the field- advance towards the goal.
We want to build on that success and think about carbon emissions. And so our sustainability team has just launched a portfolio carbon calculator. There are some great tools to think, on a building-by-building basis, what your carbon emissions look like. As multi-state actors, like many multifamily actors, our members want to look at a whole portfolio to understand emissions and think about strategically, are there types of interventions I should be undertaking? And how should I think about prioritization if I have limited time and money? And so this does that taking into account fuel sources at the building, as well as your grid.
This calculator is a first step and will feed into something we'll release later this year- a carbon roadmap. The roadmap will help portfolio owners thinking about, “Okay, if these are our emissions, what then are those interventions that would have the greatest impact and be feasible? What would it look like to build yourself a strategy and set a goal for carbon reduction?”
We began building these tools because we see local carbon reduction and climate initiatives and federal actions, such as the Better Climate Challenge, that many owners of affordable rental housing may be interested in or subject to. We think there's will on the part of some owners, but there's been sort of an information gap. There are a lot of operators that don't know enough about their own emissions and how they might change them yet to be comfortable making a bold commitment.
The calculator is on our website, available to anybody that wants to check it out.
We're happy to hear from folks that are trying to use it. And the same will be true of the roadmap when it is released this summer. While we started this work before there was an Inflation Reduction Act, we are really glad there are now some resources to help reduce emissions and improve efficiency in affordable rental housing. We think these tools will be useful in thinking about what strategies to undertake and perhaps what funding sources to ultimately pursue.
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