Department of Housing Local Officials Toolkit Update
DOH, Enterprise, and Community Builders recently completed five outreach sessions with stakeholders throughout Colorado, broken down by market type, and heard insightful feedback to help formulate the new, improved and more comprehensive Toolkit for Local Officials. DOH will be crafting the application with Enterprise and Community Builders soon, which will likely be through Neighborly or directly via email.
This toolkit is for elected local officials or local government employees only. The Local Officials Toolkit is intended to help local communities identify possible housing opportunities and streamline their processes to achieve housing faster. DOH expects there to be two types of technical assistance available, light and heavy touch. Lighter touch technical assistance will be available through what’s being considered a “call center”, where local governments can call for assistance with minor affordable housing related issues. DOH expects this to be available toward the end of this year. For communities wanting more intensive technical assistance, DOH will solicit applications early 2023.
The format for the toolkit is shaping up to be:
- Affordable Housing 101 – high-level overview of affordable housing, i.e. “What is affordability?”, explanations of the housing continuum, etc, geared towards educating local officials who may have only had to consider the affordable housing crisis recently in their public work.
- Affordable Housing Trainings – initially conceived of as a 1/2 to 3/4 day training that would be a deeper dive into the financing of affordable housing in the first half, and focused on policies that incentivize affordable housing in the second half. DOH heard from folks around the state that dividing this up into focused, hour long, digestible chunks would be more desirable and doable for local officials. DOH is also considering half-day, in-person trainings that will deal with issues in specific regions around the state.
- Online web resource – DOH will host a web-based resource similar to CHFA’s Developers Guide, but focused on policy rather than the development process.
- Technical Assistance – see above.
