PART III: Coordinating HUD Programs
Coordination Among Applicants

Coordination among applicants is one of the most effective ways to promote the successful use of HUD's programs. This type of coordination occurs when you join forces with one or more other organizations to submit one application for a grant program to jointly implement the funded activities or when you and other organizations submit separate applications for different grants with the intent to coordinate the use of the money if awarded. Coordination among applicants is important for several reasons:

• It eliminates duplication of efforts.
  
  
• It helps to prevent the implementation of conflicting programs by the different applicants.
  
  
• It enables each participating organization to leverage the expertise and resources of other participants, which enables more comprehensive approaches to problems.
  
  
• Most importantly, it fosters collaboration and communication among different organizations working in the same or related fields or neighborhoods.

Such communication and collaboration can foster solutions that go far beyond the reach of HUD's or any other governmental agency's programs. You should remember that truly effective coordination does not occur by simply including as many organizations as possible as sponsors of your application. Instead, it comes about by carefully selecting the most appropriate partners for designing and implementing your particular strategy. Your choice should be based on such criteria as areas of expertise, resources, missions, and the ability of the organizations to work together to complement one another's activities.

Example 1: Continuum of Care Homelessness Assistance

A growing city in the Southwest had reached a critical point in its expansion. Its economy was thriving—creating a healthy supply of well-paying jobs and a strong housing market. While these dynamics were celebrated by city boosters, politicians, and residents, they had a negative side—increased homelessness. The problem was caused by a combination of factors, including the tight housing market; an in-migration of poorer, lower skilled residents seeking jobs; and other more subtle factors that the city leaders were unable to disentangle completely. Having witnessed the experiences of older cities where homelessness problems had become significant, political, business, and community leaders decided to forge a strategy to address this emerging issue.

City leaders held a summit of government officials; community groups; homeless housing providers, care providers, and advocates; foundation representatives; and members of the housing industry to discuss homelessness. The result of the summit was the formation of a community-wide planning process to develop a comprehensive Continuum of Care system to address the growing problem. The city integrated this planning process with its efforts to conduct housing and homelessness needs assessments and a housing market analysis, as required for its Consolidated Plan. The first step of the planning process was to assess the extent of homelessness and the needs of homeless people in the community. Once this was completed, the community evaluated how it had been responding to those needs. The evaluation revealed that some organizations were addressing the issues, but their efforts were not coordinated in any significant way. Moreover, many of the organizations needed help to increase their capacities to deal with issues. The community then took the third step—designing a way to meet the needs of homeless people. HUD's Continuum of Care programs for homeless individuals and families were viewed as a strong source of support for meeting these needs.

The first step in implementing the homelessness strategy was to improve the provision of emergency shelters. The city used its formula-based Emergency Shelter Grant (ESG) funds to set up a homelessness prevention program that paid rent for persons receiving eviction notices and increased the service capacity of an over-burdened emergency shelter system. Emergency shelters were only a temporary fix, however. They did not address long-term housing needs, nor did they tackle the problems that lead to homelessness. To address some of these needs, a local nonprofit applied for funding from the Supportive Housing Program (SHP) to provide both transitional housing and support services to help the homeless overcome some of the problems that made them homeless, such as lack of jobs and poor health. SHP funding also enabled the nonprofits to assist the homeless in obtaining permanent housing. The public housing agency helped by assisting a private, nonprofit owner of a deteriorating single-room-occupancy facility to acquire a Section 8 Moderate Rehabilitation Single Room Occupancy (SRO) grant. The grant provided rental subsidies to the owner of the facility for homeless individuals renting units that were rehabilitated by the owner. The owner used a portion of the rental assistance to help pay for the debt incurred for the rehabilitation. As a by-product of the homelessness planning process, community leaders also recognized a housing issue that the community had not addressed-the enforcement and awareness of fair housing laws. Although housing discrimination did not appear to be a major problem, some community leaders were concerned that the continuing influx of Hispanic immigrants might cause discrimination to become an issue. Discrimination did not seem to be a major cause of homelessness, but it did relate to the availability of housing for minorities, which could impact the extent of homelessness and overcrowding. The community felt that increasing awareness and enforcement of the issue would be a useful tool in the overall housing strategy; however, no qualified fair housing enforcement organizations existed in their region. Community leaders convinced a qualified fair housing enforcement organization from outside the community to apply for a Fair Housing Initiatives Program Fair Housing Organizations Initiative grant to create a new fair housing enforcement organization to conduct fair housing activities in their region.

Example 2: Public Housing and Community Revitalization

A public housing agency (PHA) in a Southern city wanted to transform one of its obsolete public housing sites into a more viable and sustainable community. The PHA knew that HOPE VI Revitalization Grant funding for such a project was available, but it also realized that it needed the cooperation of many other participants to have any hope of reaching its ambitious goals. It undertook an extensive, participatory planning process for preparation and implementation of the revitalization plan. HOPE VI funding covered the costs of the partial demolition and rehabilitation of the physical housing structures and initiatives to promote resident self-sufficiency. It also provided Section 8 vouchers and mobility counseling for displaced housing residents. Still, more programs and funding were needed.

The city in which the PHA operated administered a Youthbuild program that provided training in housing construction and rehabilitation to young high school dropouts. The PHA convinced the city to target a portion of its Youthbuild program to train residents of the public housing project who were high school dropouts. Youthbuild participants contributed directly to the reconstruction of the obsolete public housing buildings while gaining experience in an employable trade. Still, more residents needed jobs if the PHA was to be able to create a viable mixed-income community. To secure additional job training for residents, the PHA involved the public housing resident management corporation (RMC) and a local university. The RMC decided to apply for a Resident Opportunity and Self Sufficiency (ROSS) grant under the FY2000 SuperNOFA.The university decided to apply for a Community Outreach Partnership Centers (COPC) grant. The ROSS program focused on training residents for jobs that were available in the public housing complex and the neighboring community while the COPC program focused on job opportunities in the broader metropolitan community.

Some of the residents of the old housing project were displaced as a result of a reduction in the number of units in the new complex. These tenants received Section 8 tenant-based vouchers and were provided mobility counseling to encourage moves to low-poverty neighborhoods. To complement the HOPE VI assistance to these tenants and more broadly meet fair housing goals, as required in the HOPE VI grant, the PHA solicited the assistance of a local fair housing organization to provide additional fair housing counseling through a Fair Housing Initiatives Program Education and Outreach Initiative (FHIP-EOI) grant. Since the HOPE VI Revitalization Grant funded counseling for the residents being displaced, the FHIP-EOI program focused on educating landlords about the requirements of fair housing law.

Finally, drug-related crime was a dominant and highly damaging problem in the old public housing complex. While the One Strike and You're Out program would speed up eviction of those residents involved in such activity, the PHA wanted to use a more pro-active approach. It did so by implementing a drug prevention program and voluntary tenant patrol with funding from a Public Housing Drug Elimination Program (PHDEP) grant. A local nonprofit that owned a federally assisted housing complex within a block of the public housing site was concerned that the drug activity from the housing project would relocate to its property. To avoid this potential disaster, the nonprofit secured a Multifamily Housing Drug Elimination Program (MHDEP) grant to implement a number of prevention programs in conjunction with the surrounding community and law enforcement officials.