Councilmember Thomas-Henry asks about readiness training and marketing of vacant units
Thomas-Henry asks what the readiness training consists of and who administers it; Adler explains UHAB administers training on co-op governance, budgets, and legal matters. Thomas-Henry then asks how the 31 vacant units will be marketed, and Adler and Tompkins explain the Housing Connect lottery system and local preference via insider units.
Okay.
I'd like to now recognize my colleague, Councilmember Thomas Henry, who has a few questions.
Good morning.
Thank you, Chair.
What does the readiness training consist of and who administers that?
The training is administered by UHAB.
UHAB has worked with HPD for a number of years.
They've worked on all of our ANCB projects and have ensured tenant success in all the conversions that we've had so far.
The readiness training and...
Daniel, chime in if I'm forgetting anything here.
The readiness training consists of tenants learning all about how a co-op board works and operates, how to do the budgets for them, how to distribute costs,
how to ensure co-op voting, any possible legal things that are...
Although we do have it budgeted in the maintenance costs, basically line items for call-out monitors and legal as well.
Anything I'm missing there?
Yeah, I think that's about right.
You know, training about bylaws, holding elections, property management, things like that.
Okay.
And the 31 units, I know you said there's like a marketing plan.
So do those go through a lottery system or are they marketed through the...
Agent, did you mention, or the broker, how are those units going to identify potential buyers?
And will you look locally?
Is there a local preference at all?
So the local preference is fulfilled by the insider units that I think it's like 60-something percent or like 58% of the building.
That's how it's worked on ANCP buildings before.
For the actual marketing of them, these go through Housing Connect, also known as the Housing Lottery.
So that's the system by which we do it.
It gets put up on that Housing Connect for the ads up for usually about two months.
There are usually thousands of applications.
And then we have a specific marketing team that goes through this through...
Restoring communities?
The sponsor will select a marketing agent from a pre-qualified list that HPD works with that will work with HPD's internal Housing Connect marketing team to qualify tenants through the lottery.
Yep.
And so through the lottery system, they will select...
A certain number of tenants each round to try to
fill these units.
They'll go through them.
They'll look at their income documents to see if they actually qualify.
And they'll then show them the units.