III.  EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Summary of Priorities and Use of Funds

Affordable housing continues to be the city’s highest overall priority under this Consolidated Plan. In 2005, the Burlington City Council identified affordable housing as one of its top three priorities. Community-wide surveys conducted by Fletcher Allen Health Care, the United Way of Chittenden County and the Champlain Initiative in 2004 and 2006 consistently found that affordable housing is the major community problem. The local faith-based community, acting through Vermont Interfaith Action, has also brought an organized group of citizens into the debate over how to create housing that is affordable to low-income residents.

There are a total of 433 affordable units in the city whose affordability restrictions will expire in the next five years. Of those, 88 are at high risk of loss of affordability and six will be lost to the city’s affordable inventory. Preserving as many affordable units as possible will be one core item on the city’s housing agenda for the next five years. The city will continue a successful preservation initiative which has transferred hundreds of apartments from the private sector to nonprofit ownership, thus assuring their perpetual use as affordable housing. The Burlington Housing Authority has been designated by the city as the lead agency for this preservation initiative.

Other core housing agenda items are creation of new affordable housing (including units accessible to Section 8 participants), rehab activities and support of homeownership. And, the city views investment of CDBG resources into activities that help residents to become and/or remain housed and living independently as an effective investment.

The city uses its CDBG funds in the affordable housing arena principally to support “soft costs,” i.e., project staff and predevelopment expenses. This use of funds best fits the city’s housing objectives because (a) there are other, larger fund sources available for “hard” project costs, i.e., bricks and mortar; (b) there often are not other, or are insufficient, fund sources available to pay for program delivery costs; and (c) the amount of CDBG funds available is not large enough to accomplish much if used for hard project costs. The city does use CDBG funds for hard project costs on small housing rehab projects and emergency repairs, for access modifications, for free paint and for special projects (such as shelter renovations), where other funds are often not available. Funding for “hard” project costs for acquisition, new construction and large-scale rehab of affordable housing comes principally through the HOME program; the Low Income Housing Tax Credit (allocated through the Vermont Housing Finance Agency); the Vermont Housing & Conservation Board; the state Community Development Block Grant program; special needs HUD programs such as the 202 and 811 programs (for housing for the elderly and disabled); bank debt; and/or the Section 108 program (a federal loan program where in the addition to the property serving as collateral, the loan is guaranteed by the city’s future CDBG allocations).

Economic opportunity is the city’s next highest priority. As the state’s largest city, Burlington must continue to be an economic engine for the region and for the state. At the same time, the city is also, by necessity, home to a concentration of residents living in economic insecurity – people in crisis or one step away from crisis; the working poor and the unemployed; families with children and the elderly struggling to make inadequate income meet rising expenses – all of whom need the affordable housing and social services which are also concentrated in the city. The city will continue to tap both local and national strategies to increase earned income to livable wage levels; to increase and protect asset accumulation; to reduce debt levels; and to help residents access income supports and overcome economic barriers.

CDBG is the city’s principal economic development funding source. The city uses its CDBG resources in this area principally to support job creation and retention through technical assistance and gap financing for businesses, and to support low-income residents in business ownership through entrepreneurial training and loans. There are also opportunities for commercial “bricks and mortar” projects where it makes sense to invest CDBG dollars – usually a relatively small investment, but often a critical “gap closer” that allows a project to move forward. These uses of CDBG resources have proven to be effective and cost-efficient in creating and retaining businesses and jobs; in leveraging other resources; in increasing tax revenues to support city services; in supporting local ownership; and in revitalizing neighborhoods.

The city has also historically used CDBG resources to address barriers to economic opportunity, and will continue to do so. Affordable quality early care and education is one example; this is an identified community priority, and an activity which has multiple long-term impacts – the ability of parents to get and keep a job and be productive at work; children’s success in school and, ultimately, the quality of the local workforce; and even public safety costs. There are other barriers as well, such as limited English proficiency, which will sometimes call for the investment of CDBG dollars. The city chooses to be flexible in its funding choices in this area in order to respond to shifting needs and resources, emerging opportunities and crises, and changing economic conditions.

A suitable living environment is the city’s third priority overall. The city has a limited capacity to fund social services out of municipal resources, and has historically used the maximum (15%) available CDBG resources to support the provision of social services by local nonprofits. The city also uses CDBG to support public facilities and infrastructure, as well as nonprofit facilities, where there is identified community support for the project and where there are not other sufficient, more appropriate resources. CDBG is not a large enough pool of money to fund major projects, but it can play a vital role in:

1. Large infrastructure projects, such as the North Street Revitalization Project, where a relatively small investment of CDBG can leverage large amounts of state and federal funding, where the project significantly contributes to community revitalization, and where CDBG can effectively be used for program delivery costs.
2. Small resident-generated projects, which empower residents to come together to improve their neighborhoods. CDBG has been for many years an important resource for resident-generated traffic calming, tree planting and sidewalk improvement projects, but has become less important in those areas since the passage of dedicated streets and trees taxes in 2000. Based on grant application activity and on resident surveys, there has been less resident interest in recent years in physical neighborhood improvements and more interest in strengthening community connections and addressing social issues. However, CDBG continues to be a resource around which residents can coalesce to improve parks, playgrounds, community gardens and other neighborhood facilities.
3. Both new and improved public and nonprofit facilities, where a relatively small CDBG investment can fill a gap, leverage other funds, meet a renovation need which cannot be met with other funding, and/or support the continued provision of services which are vital to the community.

Finally, the redevelopment of brownfields is a priority for the city because it meets multiple objectives: it increases the tax base, reduces environmental hazards and, often, allows for the productive reuse of historic structures.

The city’s annual CDBG allocation is now almost a quarter of a million dollars less than it was seven years ago. As federal and state resources continue to shrink, the city cannot make up the difference – not with public municipal resources and not through leveraging private resources, even though the city has always been highly successful in that area. The gap between needs and resources is simply too great, which means that some needs will go unmet. The challenge for the city’s citizens over the next five years will be to make the hard choices among competing needs as they allocate funds through the citizen-based CDBG decision-making process. The challenge for the city and its partners, both private and third sector, will be to become even more creative in stretching resources and finding new solutions.

The Next Five Years

The chart that begins on page 10 summarizes the city’s housing and community development goals, strategies, objectives, and outcomes for the next five years. For purposes of this Plan, a strategy is a collection of activities which includes the work of our partners and which we believe will create results that will move us towards our goals. Examples of such activities are included in the chart. Some, but not all, of these activities would be funded with CDBG and/or HOME dollars.

Under each strategy are one or more numbered objectives which define the targets we hope to achieve in the five-year period covered by this Plan. The objectives are numbered so as to correspond with HUD’s national performance measurement system, which defines three outcome categories:

1. Availability/Accessibility: This outcome category applies to activities that make services, infrastructure, public services, public facilities, housing, or shelter available or accessible to low-and moderate-income people, including persons with disabilities. In this category, accessibility does not refer only to physical barriers, but also to making the affordable basics of daily living available and accessible to low- and moderate-income people where they live.
2. Affordability: This outcome category applies to activities that provide affordability in a variety of ways in the lives of low- and moderate-income people. It can include the creation or maintenance of affordable housing, basic infrastructure hook-ups, or services such as transportation or day care.
3. Sustainability: This outcome applies to projects where the activity or activities are aimed at improving communities or neighborhoods, helping to make them livable or viable by providing benefit to persons of low- and moderate-income or by removing or eliminating slums or blighted areas, through multiple activities or services that sustain communities or neighborhoods.

When the outcomes are combined with the three statutory objectives – decent housing, economic opportunity and a suitable living environment – HUD is able to aggregate results across a broad spectrum of local programs so that the impact of housing and community development programs can be measured at the national level. This combination creates the following matrix, with a numbering shorthand system as follows:

In the area of economic development, we are ahead on all of our targets:

We are meeting and exceeding all of our public service targets except in youth programs. Youth service providers have had to meet the challenges of welcoming and integrating refugee children and youth (many with limited English and significant trauma history) into their programs, often without additional resources – straining their capacity, leading to staff turnover and causing some programming cancellations.

Table of Contents / Next / Previous