All right, let's get started. Good morning. And thank you for your interest in the CHIP application and the 2021-25 consolidated plan. The purpose of this meeting is to better inform residents and stakeholders about funding available to assist with Community Development and housing needs as well as to get input on the most impactful ways to utilize funds, to make [unclear] in our community, and In little bit, Andria will explain the best way for folks to interact with us during the meeting, but I'd like to start off by just having everyone that is involved in this meeting introduce themselves.

I'm Angela Brown and the Community Development Division Manager for the City of Kettering and our department or our division is the one that is responsible for submitting the application, running all of the programs and providing feedback to the public and to funders. Andrea. My name is Andria Perkins. I'm the Community Development Program Coordinator. I work with Angela or work for Angela. I help to run the programs like the housing rehabilitation program. I accept applications through underwriting and work on eligibility for programs, the homebuyer program, and I've worked with sub-recipients and I'm working with people to make sure that they have the ability to learn about the funding that we receive, comment on our funding, and participate in this planning process by taking surveys and engaging with us.

Hi I'm Katherine Haynes. I'm the Community Development clerk. I do document preparation. I do payment processing and correspondence, and today I'm tech support. So we also do have a guest in the room with us live. So we also do have Tom Luckett who's also part of our Community Development team. So I just wanted to introduce him because he doesn't have a mic. He does a lot of our work on-site with the contractors and our clients. He's a great support person with our programs. We really appreciate him being here with us today. So thanks. So, so I wanted to tell you about how you can participate in the meeting today.

The way that you would do that best is to participate by phone. To participate by phone, you're going to call (512) 580-8850. Okay. So, so now you can see it on the screen. So (512) 580-8850. The meeting code is 6617. So it's *1 to listen, *2 to leave a voicemail. So those comments then will become part of our record. We use those comments to help determine how we move forward with applications and programs. *3, if you want to speak after the rest of our presentation today, we will be accepting questions and comments at the end of our program today. So you can also text KETTMEET0521, which is the date of today to that same phone number, to text a comment. And that will become part of our record. You can also email KETTMEET0521@publicinput.com to email comments. So all of those are options for you today.

Okay, well, why are we having this meeting? What is the consolidated plan? And the action plan plan? The Consolidate Plan is a five-year plan that identifies community resources and needs. And then we try and match those together to create programs to address. The action plan is an annual plan that specifically looks at the programs, goals and objectives for each year that we're going to try and meet with the HUD funding that's submitted to HUD each year. So kind of already talked about what the consolidated plan is. That was like the official, official [unclear] that just went past very quickly. And really the goals that we need to address in the plan are how we're going to provide decent housing, suitable living environment, and expand economic opportunity for all Kettering residents, but primarily those that are low and moderate.

So what is the CHIP program? Well, the CHIP program is a funding that the state gets through their consolidated planning process and the CHIP program has offices CDBG, the Community Development Block Grant, home investment partnership firms. Those are both from HUD. That's as well as the relevant other statements that are from this program provides communities and opportunities to preserve and improve housing stocks with primarily just focusing on allocations. So the things that we can do with CHIP in Kettering are, I think you had that slide. All right, we address, we can have homeowner rehabilitation for homeowners and renters, down payment assistance, new construction with Habitat and tenant-based rental assistance which sort of operates like the section 8 voucher program only it's run locally through, through these different setup. Required as a required to get feuding is that we have to ensure we citizens are informed about the applications and kind of about what we're going to use the funds for and the planning process that we used to go through that.

So ways that we ensure citizen participation are by holding public meetings, public hearings, and now we're kind of doing a virtual hybrid sort of thing where we have people in the session live and also people can, can be virtual and also it will be recorded so that citizens and stakeholders seen view it at their leisure. We do have to do public notices and give a public comment period time. And then we also contact individual citizen with letters, texts, and we also do surveys. And I'm going to let Andria tell you a little bit about the survey that we will do in a bit, but the required information that we have to give to all of our citizens are the amount of funds that we're expected to get through our grant applications, the range of activities, which we sort of discussed a bit earlier, beneficiaries of the activities, who is going to really benefit from the programs of that, that we design and a plan to minimize any displacement. And that really means that we're not going to take away people's housing in that, in that, in also take away affordable housing units without sort of replacing them with additional affordable houses. Okay.

So Angela was talking about the, how we surveyed people and how we have gathered data for these plans, for the applications that we are submitting, but for CHIP and for our five-year con plan and for our annual action plan. So we have done a survey through the Public Input platform. So we've had a hundred respondents we've asked residents, stakeholders to tell us how they feel about our community in terms of housing, neighborhoods, what are the positives, what are the negatives. We've asked them about programs. What are the things that are most important to them? So that we can help decide how to go forward in the future with things that we are allowed to do with the funding that we have or can apply for. So we also use data from the census and HUD, and then we use research from other groups studying community issues to formulate these plans and applications.

So what we have discovered is that there are both positive and negative community impacts that we have to take into account. So Kettering here has great schools and affordable cost of living. There's fantastic recreation, diversity of housing types. Many people want to be involved in this community. There's a lot of green space and trees, realtors report great sales, very quick sales. Awards for being a great community. However, there are several deteriorating neighborhoods, a loss of affordable housing for some low income residents, low income residents have an inability to afford repairs, some loss of jobs, especially high wage jobs and aging housing stock we've had, especially in the Dayton region an addiction pandemic. And then as everyone knows, the coronavirus pandemic has hit everyone particularly hard.

However, we do have some great news. We've seen a wonderful report from the Dayton realtors, the local economic area report, where they were talking about how fast the housing is moving. They feel really excited about the future of Kettering, and it made us really excited too. We also see that our schools are doing really well. We have highly rated schools, they have above average growth, and more than two thirds or about two thirds of the students, which is great for a school district that has a rather large percentage of low-income students. And we'll get to that in a few moments, but some additional Kettering positives as compared to national, state, and county, we have a lower unemployment rate. Our Kettering police department has been accredited for both the department and the jail. The parks recreation and cultural department has twice received a gold medal award.

Also one of only 10 departments in the U.S. to be nationally accredited three times. So again, back to that really interesting report from the Dayton realtors, they segmented different groups of people who kind of live in Kettering to help us kind of like think about the different types of people who might be buying housing. But I also just think that the information at the top of the page is really interesting. So the median income, $53,700, the median age of 42, and kind of the rust belt tradition. So thinking about the history of our community, where we came from a manufacturing community, but now we have sort of gen X-ers some comfortable, empty-nesters, some people who are in midlife, some seniors who are living here. So thinking about those kinds of groups, of people who are living in our community and thinking about that as we go through this and the rest of this information, that's helpful.

So, but our funds in particular, and the reason that we have them are because we have a certain amount of low-income people that live in Kettering. So we have more than 12% of our community qualify as low income. And that allows us to be an entitlement community to receive Community Development Block Grant funds. Also, if you see on this map here, the neighborhoods that are highlighted are also what are called block groups that are qualifying a low to moderate income population by block group. And that means there are enough people in those neighborhoods who qualify as low to moderate income. So we have a certain number of neighborhoods that qualify as well. So those are the things that allow us to be an entitlement community, where we get a direct allocation of funding from HUD. So, so we have to use our funding then to support these neighborhoods and low to moderate income residents and our programs have to be targeted to these neighborhoods and to these residents.

So then we're thinking about, how are they doing? What's going on with them? So 72% of the people on our survey said, people at Kettering are in need of food assistance more now than they were five years ago. We have about 38% of the students in our schools are low income and are getting food assistance. Right? And then the other thing I wanted to think about is 18% of Kettering's population is 65 and above. Now that doesn't mean that they're all low income, but most of them are on fixed incomes. And we know that the value of money over time doesn't stretch as far. So at least 2,500 of them are low income, probably 5,000 are middle income.

So here are the poverty numbers, 6,790 people are in poverty. Again, 12% of the population is, is poverty under the poverty level. And again, approximately 10,000 people in Kettering are above 65. So who are the people we can serve? Who benefits from the CDBG and CHIP programs? So our absolute income limits are 80% of area median income. That's this very bottom number, but sometimes we will limit certain programs to like the 50% level. So we may give a grant instead of a loan for some of the lower income limits. But for example, if you are one individual living alone, you can't make more this year than $42,400. And the reason is we want to target people just under that median. And those are the people who really start to feel the pinch and have, have a, more of a struggle. And that's, that's what HUD and our federal government has said. That's who we want to target with this funding.

So the funding request that we will be putting in for this year are at $250,000 to the CHIP program. And that's the maximum amount, and it is a two year grant. So we would have two years to spend it before being eligible to reapply. And for the amount that we'll be asking for from HUD. HUD kinds of give us our number. HUD says that based a variety of criteria, this is your number for this year. It is $576,194. No cents. And we anticipate around $3 million to be available for the five-year plan starting this year. So going back to the survey that we did, I told you that we asked, we asked you about to make some choice-limited decisions about programs. So this is what they said, the things that are really important to them, they want properties to be maintained in our community. Recreation is highly important. Housing rehabilitation is very important.

Infrastructure improvement, affordability of housing, job creation and retention, digital connect connectivity, excuse me, emergency repairs, homebuyer assistance, assorted public service programs. Now the blue arrows that you see, those indicate where we funded some programs in the past. So for example, we will use Community Development Block Grant to provide funding to repair homes, to keep homes in good shape. And so that maintains properties. Again, housing rehab, we might do a comprehensive rehabilitation of a home or accessibility of a home, or emergency repair affordability of housing. We might help subsidize a new build of a rental property. That's going to provide low-income housing on occasion, or sometimes we help habitat for humanity to build a property. And we help lower the cost of that by providing some subsidy to that property, job creation and retention. We often provide loans to businesses and back, but the interest rate is very low, so that it's easier for them to start their business or expand their business.

And they create jobs then, and they have to report on those jobs. The jobs often have to be targeted to low-income people. So again, we do emergency repair programs. Homebuyer assistance that we like to do. And then we do an assorted array of public service programs. So we have done these kinds of programs in the past. So we highlighted the ones that people said were important and, and the ones that we have done in the past. Now I wanted to explain, often we haven't done recreation because at the City of Kettering, our recreation department is mostly self-funded and the City funds it. They charge fees at the recreation department for classes, for tickets, if you want to become a member of the, the recreation, the rec center. So it's mostly self-funded. And so we haven't had to fund any recreation projects. There could be an instance of something if it was targeted to something very specific to a low-income neighborhood.

And I would add Andria, that they often give grants for low-income people to participate. In the past we have funded some summer grants for them, but primarily, yeah, Yes, it's not, it's not a typical thing, but that's very well-funded in our community. So, so it's not an area that we have seen a huge need for. And infrastructure improvements, the State of Ohio provides a lot of grants for that. So we haven't had a need to provide for that, unless it's something very targeted to a low income neighborhood, where there is a big need for our funding to come in and then we have stepped in. So, and then we've looked at digital connectivity several times recently, and other times other people were funding it. When we, when we did look at it. So we haven't had a need to step in there. So we just wanted to point that out that here, here, there are the things that people are saying are important, and here are the reasons why we did or did not fund them.

So survey responses that people said were important. So I wanted to share these with you. So 67% of survey respondents believe that it's harder for low to moderate income people to buy a house in Kettering all than it was five years ago. Crime, high cost of housing, and a lack of a sense of community highly contribute, contribute negatively to respondents lives, economic wellbeing, neighborhood quality, safety. school, and recreation can have a high, positive impact on respondent's lives in Kettering. And the pandemic has really shown the digital divide for the deep gap. It is, and businesses and individuals continue to need support during and after the pandemic.

And then I also wanted to share, we asked people during the survey to actually put pins on a map where they think their neighborhoods or corners or places where the neighborhood needs revitalization, and these are the pinpoints that they pointed out. So we might do some targeted work in those places in the future. So we take this, this feedback very seriously. So here are some of the research that we're considering as we make our plans for the future. So high cost of repairs that residents can't afford on their own as the federal reserve bank has done some research on that. And high cost of housing, high cost of evictions, and that costs the community as well. Transportation needs and corridors will continue to grow, making roads busier and noise levels, higher. Affects neighborhood quality of life. Our original equity profile indicates more needs to be done to level the playing field for minorities and single parents. And we're losing affordable housing very quickly. So I wanted to give you a visual example of the loss of affordable housing.

This is gonna take us out of here, and it's gonna take a moment for me to zoom into the link. You will give me a moment. All right, it just zoomed back out, didn't it? Okay. Okay. Here we go. So what this map is showing you is over 10 years, it's showing you low income housing that is losing its affordable affordability restrictions. So typically these would be low income housing tax credit properties. For example. Here's an example of a property in Kettering that went offline like two years ago. It was right across the street from a very popular shopping destination. People living in the property who had housing vouchers. They, as soon as they weren't required to accept those anymore, they quit accepting them. When their leases were up, they did not renew them. They raised the rent by $200 immediately. They started rehabbing the apartments to make them nicer, so that they could attract a different clientele.

They rehabbed the exterior to make it look different, so that it was no longer associated with the look that they had before. And they basically tried to push out every single one of their low-income clients. And we ended up having some homeless families from that transition. So what we wanted to show you from this map was that there are about four properties in Kettering that are coming, going to be over the next 10 years, coming offline. And so as a dot comes onto the map, that means a property is losing its affordability restriction over the next 10 years.

So armed with a little of that background, you can probably understand why we selected these programs to be the ones that we focus on for our 2021 plan. For our CHIP program, we're going to focus on two things. One is homebuyer assistance since, you know, 67% said housing is becoming less affordable to purchase. And we are going to put approximately $145,000 of the $250,000 grant towards down payment and closing cost assistance. We anticipate serving between 14 and 18 low and moderate income homebuyers over the two year grant period. Additionally, we will partner with the Habitat for Humanity, giving them approximately $80,000 based on underwriting to build two new homes for low-income families. Just kind a brief overview of what's required for the consolidated plan. The goals: providing decent housing. And you can do that by housing affordability, making housing accessible, and the ability to maintain decent and sanitary housing.

So those things are also true for the CHIP program as well. For CDBG, for the consolidated plan. Also a goal is to provide suitable living environment. And you can see there on the slide, some of the programs that are directly associated with that goal. And then expanding economic opportunities. And Andria talked a little bit about either job creation, business creation, and then there's also, you can provide goods and services to, to a community, a low to moderate income community. And those things are all eligible programs. But talking a little bit about the CHIP applications, we anticipate publishing the CHIP application for public view on May 27th. We'll accept comments until June 7th. We'll have council approve the submission at their June 8th council meeting, and then we will submit to the Ohio department. Oh geez. ODSA on the deadline by or before June 23rd. The total budget would be $294,000. And this includes $44,000 of program income from prior year CHIP grants.

And then, in terms of the consolidated plan, we anticipate publishing that plan for public view by July 1st. We'll accept public comments until July 31st, and then have council approve it at their August 10th city council meetings. And by statute, we have to submit it to HUD no later than August 15th, 2021. The total budget will be approximately $3 million over a five-year period. So we will be having our second CHIP and third consolidated plan public meeting June 4th, anytime comments received prior to them will be discussed at the meeting. Any changes to our plan would be based on those comments. And then we will also update any dates of proposed adoption by council at that time. And I did kind of want to, we didn't have the slides, but go over, because it will be in the publication for the third consolidated plan. And it would kind of list the projects that we are interested in funding.

Those would be housing rehabilitation. And again, that was the funded at $702,000. And this is because we have about $500,000 that we're rolling over her prior year grants. So we'll have about $1.2 million that's available for projects. We'd be doing public services about $93,000. And that's up to the actual statutory cap for public services. For neighborhood revitalization, which includes acquisition and demolition of blighted properties, as well as relocation on hearing relocation for any of our rehab clients that have lead based paint issues that we need to address. We'll be funding that at roughly $90,000. Public facility and infrastructure, we'll be continuing to work on the brownfield cleanup at the cheerheart site, as well as providing funds set aside for the Maplecrest water and sewer project. We will have funds available for business loans and about $60,000 worth. And then planning and public administration would be roughly $120,000 at that budget.

Just wanted to get that in there and it will be in the publication. So we'll, we'll have more details available on that. Yeah. Again, it'll be available at the library, at the offices coming out soon, and we will have it for more discussion at the June 4th meeting. That's our 2021 annual action plan or CDBG funds. Yep. Yep. So thank you everyone for your time and attention today. We did want to have you go ahead and sign up as a subscriber. Publicinput.com forward slash conplan 2125. If you go there and enter your information, you can get updates about our next meeting date. Our plans. We'll stay in touch with you. And really want to have your feedback as well. We love to have comments. We incorporate those into our consolidated plans. We incorporate that feedback. [unclear] Thank you so much for your time.