morning talking about veterans' issues. speakers we expect to hear from include deputy veterans affairs secretary scott giewld and johnny isakson. we'll also hear about homelessness. we've had a couple of it can call issues we're working on, and as soon as we have those sorted out, we'll have live coverage for you right here on c-span2.

>> and, again, we're working on our technical issue to bring you live coverage of the national housing conference that's going to come to us this morning from the grant hyatt hotel here in washington d.c. we expect opening remarks to be getting underway shortly. hopefully, we'll have all of those for you live. and this conference hosting a series of panel discussions on veterans' issues. so oops we're able to get the picture for you, we'll have that right here on c-span2 this morning.

>> and we're waiting for our signal to come through from the national housing conference. a couple of panels this morning, we hope to bring you opening remarks and a panel on veterans'

homelessness and rental housing. that's followed about 11:30 with a panel on foreclosure prevention and homeownership preservation. so as soon as we're able to get the technical problems solved, we'll have live coverage for you. as we wait, we're going to bring you an event from earlier this week with secretary of state hillary clinton talking about human trafficking at the state department. [inaudible conversations] [applause]

[applause] >> good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to the department of state. it's wonderful to have you all here. um, i want to specially welcome will smith and jada pinkett smith for being here with us. thank you for being here. [applause] every year this event brings together committed leaders and activists from across the anti-trafficking movement. um, and the enthusiasm that's surrounding this shows us the momentum that we have built in the struggle against modern

slavery. i am maria otero, undersecretary for civilian security, democracy and human rights. my office oversees the bureaus that help countries and governments create just societies, societies that are grounded in democratic principles, that guarantee respect for human rights and that apply the rule of law. whether we're helping strengthen judicial systems or we're denouncing human rights abuses or helping build strong law enforcement capacities or combating trafficking in perps, we're aim -- in persons, we're aiming to help countries protect the individual citizens in their countries. trafficking challenges are one of the problems that we have, and it is also the one area that deals with one of our most fundamental values, that is the basic freedom and dignity of every individual. trafficking also tears at the

very fabric of society. it rips families apart, it devastates communities. it holds people back from becoming full participants in their own political processes and their own economies. and it challenges the ability of countries to build strong justice systems and transparent governments. that's why fighting modern slavery is a priority for the united states. in that fight we partner with governments around the world to improve and increase the prosecution of this crime, to prevent the crime from spreading and to protect those individuals who are victimized by it. while governments bear this responsibility for protecting their individual citizens, this fight depends on a broader partnership as well. without the efforts of civil society, the faith community, the private sector we would not be able to advance, and we would

not be able to see the advances that the report highlights. the report that we are issuing today guides our work. it represents the very best knowledge and information on the state of modern slavery in the world today. it shows the fruit of partnerships around the world. it shows the strides that we've made in protecting individuals, and it shows how far we yet still have to go to assure the basic human rights. i want to thank everyone who has worked this last year to compile these reports. from the ngos that submit this information to the governments that provide us with data, from the diplomats in our overseas missions to the staff of the office of monitor and combating traffic b -- trafficking in persons who are here today. and today really is the culmination of tireless work over many months that they have

taken on. and for that reason it is really my pleasure and my privilege to be able to introduce my colleague who runs that office and who has shepherded and given leadership to this process, our ambassador at large to monitor and combat trafficking in persons, luis c. debaca. [applause] >> thank you, madam undersecretary, for the introduction and for your leadership here at the state department bringing so many different issues together under this label of civilian security over the last year has allowed room here in the state department and across the u.s. government for constructive collaborations. whether we're dealing with human rights, migration, criminal justice, war crimes,

counterterrorism or, as today, human trafficking. because building democracy, growing economies, unleashing the full potential of the individual, these things don't just happen, they start with people. around the world in the last year we've heard those people, their voices calling out for democracy, for greater opportunity. finish we recognize that sound. it's the sound of hope. and traffickers ensnare their victims by exploiting that hope. especially the hope of the vulnerable. come with me, i'll help you start a modeling career. pay me $10,000, i'll get you that job. i love you, i'll take care of you. just do this for us. as long as the trafficking in persons report is needed, we will find in its pages account after account of traffickers peddling false hope.

but that's not all that we find in the pages of this report, because every year that passes those false hopes are overtaken more and more by real hope. the real hope that the modern abolitionist movement provides. and just as trafficking takes many forms, the way that we fight slavery today, the way that we provide hope for those who have been exploited is growing. it is growing more diverse and more innovative. and so are the people who are stepping up. we see it in the private sector where corporate leaders are using their business skills. they're hearing from consumers who don't want to buy things tainted by modern slavery. leaders like ceo tom ma that. when he read a report about forced labor in the fishing industry, he wasn't just shocked, he acted. he wrote two letters. the first was to the company he used until that day to source calamari. the second was an open letter to all of his customers telling him

that his brand was his family, his family name, and he would not taint it or his customers' with slavery. in his supply chain. we're inspired by his principled stand. we see it among activists like jada pink et smith and her family who have a unique platform with which to act. when her daughter willow began asking about these types of subjects, she didn't just explain it away as something that happens over there, she got to work. she's launching a new web site as an information hub for those who seek to learn more about this crime. jared da, we thank you for your -- jada, we thank you for your advocacy. we see it in people's day-to-day lives, like when abram was watching cnn one day. he saw the story of a young boy castrated because he refused to take part in a begging ring. he wasn't just horrified by the reality of modern slavery, he

did something. he got in touch with the boy's family, and he paid for him to come -- >> and we're going to go away from this taped program from the other day and take you live as promised now here in washington to the national housing conference just underway a couple of minutes ago. we're listening right now to remarks from deputy veterans affairs secretary scott gould. live coverage on c-span2. >> six times the level of acceptance in a normal civilian job fair. and next week in detroit, michigan, we're going to take that model and expand it. we have 24,000 jobs available in detroit next tuesday and thursday at the kobo center. and not only have we combined coaching, resumé building and the like, but we're also bringing in 500 procurement decision makers, 500 from 16 different agencies across government who are the buyers. so you're not talking to the small and disadvantaged business

unit expert, you're talking to the person who looks and says i need a product or service you may have, and i'm here with the capacity to get you engaged in a competitive process, rapidly down select and be able to make that connection. and a third aspect is we brought all our services together, one big horseshoe table, and if you have a medical issue that you need evaluated, literally, private exam rooms, physicians on site. we'll go back and pull records from dod. you might be missing you, dd214 or perhaps your ability for a loan program and so on, and you can go through that one-stop shopping and get to the end of that with everything, certainly, that we have to offer. i remember being struck at the washington conference center several months ago now, a youngster came in off the street, a veteran, had his id, had been a trigger puller, if you'll forgive the colloquial expression. you know, e a guy who'd been in the infantry, out on the front line in afghanistan. and the guy came up, and he was

in a t-shirt and jeans. and he said i'm here to interview for my job. and in that one interaction i realized again how much work we have to do to make sure that people are job ready. did not have a resumé, really didn't understand how the process went, graduated from high school, right into the service, spent four years there at the gonzo station, right? living in a ditch, living in a tent overseas. and four years later at age 22 you bring him back into washington, d.c. with the traffic and the lights and, you know, how are you going to get a job. and so we have really retrenched and redefined our employment programs around veterans talking to veterans, let me walk you through this process, let me translate your skills into civilian speak, let me help you with that job process, let me get you set up. let's bring employers who want to hire you. one company, accenture, next week is bringing 500 jobs.

and the jobs are good ones, range from blue collar to white collar. we have the automotive companies there. it's really quite an event. please to take note of that. we will be joined out there with representatives from the first lady's joining forces initiative. we have the u.s. chamber of commerce there hiring our heroes program. we actually only paid 25% of the bill to put on the jobs conference, so the private sector's picking up the other 75%. that's a great example of leveraging. and we've, of course, got hiring managers from the federal government as well bringing 4,000 jobs to the site with a veterans' preference which means you can go in and hire them fairly quickly. we'll all be on site. it's going to be a heck of a three-day period. and simultaneously we're working to make sure that this open house that i mentioned is providing a full-service experience for our veterans. y'all remember the movie "fourth

of july," "born on the fourth of july," from a long time ago? it spoke to an era where you couldn't go to the va and expect good service. it is a different va. it is in the top quartile of health care performingers in the -- performers in the country. we're the largest direct health care system in the nation and the second largest in the world n. the '90s the va shifted to a vaulted-style approach which as you know as managers and leaders is quantitatively quantitatively-oriented health care. we've got a very, very different va that we're bringing to the table to offer health care to our veterans. we all know that for a lot of americans the slide from home to homeless is a slippery slope. even for the 1% of americans who are veterans. highly disciplined, highly motivated, they go from a leading edge performance in special operations and at the

tip of the spear to a year later being homeless. what's wrong with that picture? how did we fail them? highly disciplined and highly motivated, they've got that can-do spirit somewhere in there, we've just got to reach in and get it back. and yet when they return home, a small but significant percentage of them end up homeless. they suffer depression, substance abuse, outsized percentage of joblessness, all the factors that contribute to homelessness. in this country, the world's richest country, on any given night tens of thousands of veterans are sleeping on the streets. we see them here in washington d.c. i know i do when i go out in the winter to perform the point in time count. words worth once said and homeless near a thousand homes i stood and near a thousand tables pined and wanted for food. now, in concert with our sister

agencies va has taken the lead in challenging that, and it started at the top. nearly two years ago president obama told our country's veterans we won't be satisfied until every veteran who has fought for america has a home in america. and under my boss' leadership, secretary shinseki, we moved out smartly to make good on that pledge. and together we set an ambitious goal, a crazy goal, a wildly out of bounds goal in washington d.c. we said we would end veterans' homelessness by 2015. now, for those of you who haven't lived in washington for a while, you know that it's just a great fib. you've actually said a measurable outcome, and you've time phased it. and it would be so easy to say it's an aspiration or something we're going to do in the future, but the president and secretary shinseki were going to end it, and now that's just three years

from now, and now we're holding ourselves accountable from moving down that line to zero. and the president and congress have stepped forward with the funding to get the job done. we had in 2009 $376 million at our disposal for rescue. now, va has billions of dollars that it puts into prevention on the health care side, but rescue was underfunded. we moved to a billion dollars in 2012. the 2013 budget request is for $1.3 billion. but we know that that commitment and compassion are not measured in terms of the dollars through the system. i just offer it as a way to give evidence of commitment. it is not the same thing as results. and here are the results that we have so far. in 2009 the estimated number of homeless veterans was something around 107,000. by 2011 the number was down to 67,000. what we believe hud will announce later this year is a count that takes us below

60,000. and that will keep us on track for the next data point goal of 35,000 by the end of 2013 as we work to end the rescue phase of homelessness in 2015 on target. now, ending veterans' homelessness has many facets. it's literally a test of all that va has to offer; our outreach effort, our health care and mental services, housing programs, our claims and educational benefits, our hiring initiatives as i've tried to argue over the last few minutes. and our challenge is twofold. it's to rescue the veterans who are already homeless but, boy, how did that happen? and it just consistent make any -- doesn't make any sense to let that happen. so we've got to prevent those at risk to homelessness from sliding down that slippery slope, and we're trying to leverage every weapon we have in our arsenal, and housing figures prominently in that. here, briefly, are some of the

programs va has specifically in housing. we have a grant and per diem program that helps provide over 14,700 transitional housing beds and services through partnerships with 600 community-based projects nationwide. our goal is to return veterans to ip dependent living and employment as soon as option. possible. our enhanced use lease program makes long-term leases available to public and private organizations such as homeless providers to use underperforming va properties. so believe it or not, we have 65,000 buildings, 165 million square feet of space and 33,000 acres of land in the va. simple idea, someone had it now three, four years ago, and it was, look, if we've got some unused land, maybe we could advantage a housing partner, an ngo or state or local government to use that property. we'll give them a long-term lease, they can build something

on it, it gives them something of financial value which they can then leverage and go out and build a property, then take a represent, and we'd be happy to see -- in fact, we'd condition it -- on seeing veterans housed in that facility among others. so in 2011 we provided 1100 housing units for veterans and their families and survivors using that method. in 2009 we launched the building utilization review and repurposing initiative to reuse vacant and underutilized va land and buildings to house homeless veterans and their families. if i have a vacant building and a chain-link fence around it and someone to walk through and make sure fire prevention, $1-$4 a square foot. i've got to pay that out of the public fisk. why not use that property and transfer to it? so you've got to have money to refurbish and get it up to standard and so on, but it's a way to do that. and through that method we have added another 4300 units of affordable and supportive

housing that are under development nationwide as a result of these two programs. and we also have a wonderful partnership with hud. and it's called the va's hud/vash voucher program, and it remains absolutely the nuclear weapon in our arsenal. it's flexible, it's responsive, it moves homeless veterans and their families into permanent housing quickly. here's how it works. hud provides housing assistance, traditional section 8 vouchers, that allow homeless veterans to represent privately-owned housing. at the same time what we do is we wrap around that individual now in a home the intensive clinical and support services that would actually keep them there. and since 2008 hud has made 37,500 vouchers available that were fully funded, about 10,000 each year at an annual cost of $75 million a pop. at present roughly 36,000 are in use with 5,000 veterans have the

vouchers, and they're just waiting to find the house, so there's a little bit of a they there. in the president's 2013 budget request, there's an additional $75 million for another block of 10,000 hud vouchers. it recently announced that it was making 10,000 more vouchers available, that'll bring our totally up to 48,000, and great news as we drive down the number of homeless veterans by ramping up this incredibly flexible and powerful tool that we have. and we're so very, very grateful to hud in this capped environment when they're making that statement, they're taking their program down elsewhere to be able to help us out. so we're also working to leverage new technology that can better direct resources, and this one was a lot of fun. about three weeks ago i did an announcement with the singer jon bon jovi, anybody know? all the women that i tell that to kind of, you know, they get the fan out there. jon bon jovi, and the keepty

sec -- deputy secretary of hud, and we were announcing the winners of a competition. and check this out. any of you have a smartphone? of course you do. any of you have an app for starbucks? okay, i do, all right? so you punch in your location, and all the starbucks come up. so we had this idea, what if you were standing on the corner of third and elm, and you saw someone who was homeless, and you had an app that you could enter your location, it would tell you where the nearest hot meal, medical attention and a bed were. and we didn't have any money to go do that, but we decided to scrounge around some dollars and create a competition, a nationwide competition. so went out to the developers around the country, and we said we'll give you a $10,000 prize if you can solve this problem. by the way, i'm an old ibm executive, and we can and do charge money for the software we used to develop, and i went out

and said what would it cost to do something like that? hundreds of thousands of dollars. five teams developed five apps that met all the criteria in three weeks. one was two guys in a mcdonald's before they left for camping trip. [laughter] developed this application. it was fantastic. now, they're all competing together, and we're checking -- so there will be a grand prize winner that will get $25,000 at the end, but for basically $75,000 worth of cost, and the wonderful contribution of jon bon jovi who gave a lot of attention to this, we were able to create something really extraordinary. i think it is an amazing example of how to innovate and use technology. what we had to do on the government side was hang the data outside, describe the tagging system and the interface standards to be able to get to that. so it's a strategic use of data. it's the public's data, so let's just make it available to everybody. and now the application developers can use that. so in august we'll have the

final results of that contest. now, there's -- and it's an old irish proverb, raised as irish catholic, so honest to gosh my mom used to say this, in the shelter of each other that people live. and i think those words frame the operating paradigm being brought to bear on the issue of homelessness. so i get to sit up here and stand and talk a little bit about what va has done, but i have no illusion about how this problem is really getting solved. it's national, it's community organizations, it's neighborhood advocacy associations, it's faith-based groups like my church that does this work one, two, three, four at a time like that. we all share in a common purpose. and we're insuring that our former defenders are provided one of the most basic human physiological needs for shelter and safety. and the truth of the matter is that there's no one agency in government can do that.

and no one private sector organization that can do it all. partnerships and collaborations are absolutely essential to achieving results in the 21st century. we only have to look at our housing heroes of this conference to confirm the power of partnerships. collectively, we've moved beyond merely managing homelessness, right? we're actually trying to end it. we're working to prevent it and to end it. and we're making good progress in that effort. i think it says a lot about who we are as a nation and about the commitment and advocacy of each of you here today. in closing, let me again extend my thanks and congratulations to the 2012 housing honorees, it's great to see and to meet you today, and to the national housing conference. as ethan was mentioning a moment ago, you're here to talk about this and work at that. i want to thank you all for the opportunity to speak to you today. thank you. [applause]

>> thank you very much, mr. deputy secretary. um, it is a pleasure to have the va here and demonstrating its strong partnership with hud and with all of us in addressing the challenges we face. now i have the pleasure of introducing senator johnny ice actson from georgia finish isaacson from georgia. -- johnny isaacson from georgia. he has been a thoughtful and voc champion of housing and of veterans, and you have a long bio in your packet that you can realize, but nothing substitutes to listening to the man himself. so welcome, senator. thank you very much. [applause] >> well, thank you very much. it's an honor to be here today, and i want to pay tribute to the national housing council for their focus on an issue that's dear to my heart. i was in the real estate

business for 33 years selling residential houses, renting residential houses and building resident can cial houses and working with veterans because i started right next to dobbins air force base making fha and va loans in 1968. so it means an awful lot to me. i also want to pay tribute to the home depot foundation and the home depot company. their commitment to our veterans and their commitment to housing are unparalleled in the united states, and the first lady is here today, liz blake, who i understand was honored last night. she's the first lady of home depot, but she's also the first lady of habitat for humanity and many other organizations that provide affordable and safe housing for the american people. but home depot is a company -- as a company is a shining example of meeting the responsibility all of us have, i think, to our veterans and doing everything they can to make an investment in our veterans and to protect those families when their employees are called up and activated and go to serve overseas. they help take care of the

family at home, and when the guy comes back or the lady comes back from service, the job is there. they deserve the commendation they're getting and, liz, i know you deserve the reward and recognition that you got last night. .. . jobs fall lot of problems. with jobs come in, and with income comes ability to pay a monthly payment and that gives

you the chance to amortize your debt and build equity so jobs is job 1 and it is important to focus on that. number 2 we mention the word partnership. i can't think of a better word to describe how to turn around housing market in the united states not just for us but all americans. think about partnerships. working together. va has done a remarkable job in the last six years since i have been on the veterans committee reaching out to veterans and helping them make that transition from active duty service to veterans status. quite frankly veterans who have va loans and mortgages have something on their behalf in the va. i know from being in the business the 4 years that no lender wants to foreclose on anybody's house. the worst homeowners in the world are lenders who for close. the houses deteriorated. they don't know how to manage them and they don't forget about them or think about it anymore. they want people to stay in

their houses. a lot of americans are afraid to go to their lenders and say i have a problem. some way we can work this out? the va doing a phenomenal job reaching out to veterans when they get in trouble, bringing them in and working with them and their lenders, to work out the loans so the veterans stays in the house. there foreclosure rate is lower than that of any type of loan in the country and their turnarounds are great and there default rate is in margins that are acceptable because the va is working to keep the veteran in the home and work with a lender who has the lone the va guarantees they get the services. we have the same relationship between every lender and every guarantor as we had at va and lenders who make va loans we would have less problems in the united states today so partnership is a key in reaching out. jobs are key and getting the housing market back is one of the ways to get unemployment

from 8% to 6%. don't fool yourself. one reason for the increase in unemployment and the sustained unemployment rate is lack of housing construction and residential development and housing development. i tried to put my money where my mouth is and propose a solution to the problem of liquidity in the mortgage market in the united states. aside from fha and va the principal source was fannie mae and freddie mac. guaranteed to securitized and rap loans in the presidential mortgage. when they came under tremendous pressure and i mean tremendous pressure in the sub prime crisis freddie and fannie went under a lot of dress and became a wounded brand and are now in a conservatorship. they marco --demarco is doing a good job but they're not where they should be. there has to be something to

replace fannie and freddie. everyone says get rid of them. if you do that you have nothing to back them up. people forget when the depression hit banks got out of the business of making loans. we passed laws to encourage savings and loans and gave them a preference against banks so they could accumulate capital and make loans. after the 1986 tax act savings and loans went under. we had the rtc. would replace them? freddie mac and fannie mae. if they leave there is nothing left. i want to tell you what my recommendation is because it brings liquidity to the mortgage market that will bring about jobs and improve home sales and help access to affordability not just to veterans but all americans. freddie and fannie mae and bad mistake and securitized and guaranteed sub prime loans but that was forced on them by congress. congress told them to own 13% of its paper in affordable housing which of markets and wall street determined to be some prime

borrowers so credit started getting prime loans and started defaulting when economy went down and guarantees got called against freddie and fanny and they lost $171 billion. that is a problem we will never correct and we got to solve with a new agency i propose which is the mortgage finance agency. the goal is to guarantee, securitized and rap residential mortgages and phase themselves out over period of time. put freddie and fannie into receivership like structured bankruptcy and wind them down and open the mortgage finance agency which will guarantee and securitized qualified residential mortgages. the recession in america that began in 2006 and still going on today was not a recession of overlending but underunderwriting. bad loans to bad borrowers who were not prepared to the

borrowers. we had a crescendo of difficulties in the housing market. what is the qualified residential mortgage? you have to have 5% down payment. you have to buy private mortgage insurance on the amount of loan from 70% to 95% and supplemental insurance from 50% to 70% so have the obligation of the taxpayer is in short when you make the loan. the bar were actually has to have an income that demonstrate they can make the claim. has to have a credit report demonstrating their responsible -- the back to the old-fashioned days of putting money down, having a job and good credit. that way when you securitized and guaranteed loans as a federal agency you are securitized in loans that won't get foreclose on and will be repaid. one of the requirements of the mortgage finance agency will be to have the ten year plan from

its inception to privatize. it is possible in the same way catastrophic insurance in great britain where you take guaranteed fees collected at closing and put those guaranteed fees into a catastrophic fund that becomes the first backstop to protect the american taxpayer from having to pay guaranteed loan. that is a brief description of a way to take us from where we are which is webmac of liquidity in the mortgage market to where we need to be which is privatize guarantee agency that works. is going to be a transitional bridge and i've will do everything i can to be a partner with other members of the senate and house to create an agency to bring more liquidity to residential lending in america. you have been very gracious to have me today. my time is up. i think that is what that says. if you want me to take a question i will. if you want me to sit down and shut up i will do that. anybody got a question? yes, sir?

>> senator isakson, you're qualified presidents the 25%. we're having a discussion with the definition of regulatory standpoint of how bad is going to be engaged with trying to get the administration at 5% instead of 20%. >> i appreciate the question and your commitment to the mortgage industry in america. government is doing in housing what government always does. the pendulum goes way over here. the fdic and federal reserve and quality residential mortgage committee came up last year and circulated a rule that said qualified residential mortgage means you put down 20% and if you put down less than 20% the lender retains 5% until the loan is paid off. talk about not having mortgage money. would not have any mortgage money for mainstream america with that requirement which

brought about my creation of this second way of doing business. my proposal is like having 50% down because the guarantor is protected. 50% of the value of the property. they pulled the rule back and extended the comment period and when it ended in august they pulled it back and they don't have that anymore but is sitting in limbo so every time i have somebody thoughtful enough to ask that question i tell you to run into anybody yet fdic or talk about 20% down as the minimum down payment you talk to somebody talking about having compound effect on our recession and housing for years to come so i appreciate the question. quality means underwriting doesn't mean down payment. one more question? anybody have one? if not i want to thank you for having me and congratulations on upgrade conference. [applause]

>> thank you, the issue of mortgage finance reform is something nhc has been working on for several years and we appreciate your energy and focus on it. it is essentials for housing moving forward. it is my pleasure to introduce mark johnston. they secretary of planning and development in the department of housing and urban development. his most recent position, he has a long history of government serve a strengthening communities particularly as assistant secretary of special needs. he knows this area very well. i would like to welcome him up here to address us. [applause] >> good morning.

great to be here. i was very impressed with the remarks i have heard. i had a chance to work with scott gould, real partners in a lot of ways on trying to end homelessness by 2015. as you can tell a very hands-on guy who has set a goal and is trying to get there every way possible. is inspiring to work with him and others at the va. also quite impressed with the knowledge of our senator in terms of his acknowledge on housing. you want to thank the national housing conference for holding the symposium especially the sessions that would follow. one that is near and dear to my heart is homelessness. i want to talk about two topics that hud is involved with, homan

licht -- homeownership and homelessness. the servicing agreement you may have heard about in the press but may not know all the details on, really historic settlement between a number of federal agencies and state partners that resulted in providing $25 billion and this came about because of a lot of unfair lending practices around mortgage servicing and the vast majority of those funds the dismal $25 million will be going to homeowners. really got leftover in a lot of ways. many were veterans. i wanted to highlight in thing -- things in this agreement that are relevant to veterans. and four five. payment of lost equity and interest. in addition to that, additional compensation. full refunds for those who

requested help but still charged excessive interest. short sale agreements and waivers being provided to those who had to sell their homes at a loss due to military orders that forced their relocation. i live close to, co and i feel this all the time in terms of families having to relocate and having no idea that was going to happen and they purchase their own homes. that is great relief to many service members around the world. the last one that i am going to mention but there are others that relate to service members and veterans is foreclosure protection for service members that have been receiving hostile fire in imminent danger pay even after their initial foreclosure notice. there are a lot of protections in place under the servicing agreement that the particularly to service members and veterans. i would like to spend the remainder of my time talking about the other end of the

spectrum. as we all know it is a shame for men and women to risk their lives for us in iraq and afghanistan and earlier engagements only to come home and literally have no home whatsoever and be living on the streets or in their cars. that is one reason secretary donovan from hud has been arm in arm with the secretary of the va in finding ways to literally end veteran homelessness by 2015. it is very complex. when i was listening to deputy secretary gould he identified different interventions and because i had a chance to work with va i am familiar with those interventions. we realize there is no single solution to ending veteran homelessness or homelessness in general. one of the key things that really does matter that is harder to measure is key working

relationships and i have seen for instance between hud and va he and i worked together for a long time, what i have seen in the last three or four years has been phenomenal in terms of real engagements around this program that scott gould talked-about, the supportive housing program and was reignited as a program in 2008 thanks to vote leadership of senator murray. i had a chance of being on a small team 22 years ago. two or three of us in hud and three people from the va that thought we could do better in terms of using mainstream resources and solve veteran homelessness and a really fantastic success. i look around government and there are very few examples i have ever seen and i have been in government 30 years where you have two agencies that work together well and co administer a single program. it is not easy to do.

it certainly brings added value you can never get by just rely on one entity to do everything. that is the case of providing housing and services to homeless people. as scott indicated there are 40,000 doctors out there and it has made a difference in large part because the vast majority of those vouchers are going to people who are chronically homeless. people out on the streets or in shelters for extended periods of time who have disabilities and without a permanent solution will never get out and cost communities exorbitant amounts of funds. i saw a study in the journal of medicine for seattle that talked-about $50,000 to do nothing for a homeless person in the city because they are bouncing around from emergency shelters and hospitals and jails and at the end of the year they are still out there so the city of seattle and across the country incurred exorbitant

costs in letting this failure continue. as opposed to providing a real solution that costs less in housing and services to end that person's homeless problems so they can focus on employment and other factors of their lives. it is important to be focusing on people that are currently homeless. it is also important to figure out how to prevent it. senator murray provided great readership in saying let's figure out what we can learn to better prevent homelessness for veterans just now returning from the war. we selected five sites, very diverse sites that represent different military departments. not just the army or the marines. and sites with large numbers of returning soldiers. we are going to learn from -- favorite tough thing. we are learning to prevent homelessness. to really know who is at women in brisk of going from their

housing to the streets. we hope to learn more in this demonstration. about halfway through now. one lesson we really learned a lot from is the recovery act program called the homelessness prevention and rapid housing program. the most exciting program worked on for many years because it tries brand new things. it tries homelessness prevention and for me more substantively it provided rapid housing, a concept we knew something about. we have been doing some demonstrating that never went to scale on and the concept of saying if somebody is homeless let's immediately stop that state and moved them into their own apartment and provide rent and utility assistance and minimal services and see how this works. we are just ending this. has been going on three years and city after city after city that i talk to finds 90% of all the homeless persons they have been serving did not fall back

into homelessness once they got this short-term assistance. this could be 3, 6, it is not an extensive intervention. it has incredible great success. we need to be thinking creatively about using different interventions. about 1 -- having to dig deeper, and end homelessness overall. in particular veteran homelessness by 2013. and a lot of resources. it is doing things -- more creatively using resources like rapid housing and tracking of the performance over time to insure we are getting the out, we are expecting. one of the great examples of innovation is coming from the

private sector. common ground. you will hear from at symposium section. has done neat things about staying in new york city and other cities hud bash has not been working as well as it shld be. it is taking time. new york city was taking 275 days to house a veteran. that is ridiculous. the problem was there is a lot involved. local public housing agency and local va so they did a boot camp. in a couple cities to begin within l.a. and new york city i went to the one in new york city and it was fascinating. they took away their shares. we couldn't sit down until we solve the problem and after a couple of hours you are thinking quickly. throughout the day was like that. we were looking at every step new york city was using and it was something like 90 steps to

house a single homeless person between the va and local housing authority back and forth and back and forth. we realized after standing up for a number of hours we could eliminate these problems and new york city has a plan in place where they get it down to 76 states. a 70% reduction. los angeles has 82% reduction from 168 days to 30. that creative thinking a group like common ground who partnered with va and had to make it happen will make it happen so we recently had three regional sessions with many cities from around the country to reduce this long upgrade in the hud-program to house veterans in a quicker way. it takes great contributions like we heard already this morning and heard last night about the home depot foundation, stepping up and thinking about how they could assert themselves with their interests to make

real difference for veterans in this country including homeless veterans and obviously it takes a huge commitment -- commitment by nonprofit. to solve these problems. using creative ways and focusing on outcomes to make sure we get the outcomes we need to prove to congress but more importantly to ourselves we can do this in a smart way. in closing i want to end with a personal story. as i was coming into the conference today i take a train. and an hour south of here and i was taking the train and got off the train and i see clyde who is a homeless veteran, vietnam era who lives under the train bridge. i have been engaging him for four months trying to see if we could get him a voucher. outreach workers come many times. i will show up and clyde is still there. what is going on? why are you still here? he is a there are situations.

it will all work out. so i called the case worker and he said he refuseds to get in the car to go to the interview so we can't get him the housing. we can't get in the housing authority and social security and food stamps because he won't get in a car. a powerful reminder to me that we solve this problem one person at a time by looking at what they need and figuring out how to make that a solution. he will get housing one day but we can't give up on him. he served our country for years and there are too many clydes out there. there are 276,000 veterans on the streets or in emergency shelters. many of you are working on this day in and day out to reduce the number of applieds in this country and thank yand thank yo. [applause] >> we have a couple of

questions. >> yes? here? good morning. [inaudible] >> that the local community, the housing authority has been administering -- should pay the payment standard of the community where the housing is located. is that correct? >> there's a fair amount buried by the cost of housing in that community. so yes. >> what would you suggest that one do if one is working with the housing authority to pay the payments with the community and housing? >> i will talk to mark after the session.

>> two questions. what is the contingency plan of a new congress decides to cut funding to hud or vouchers and secondly when the program is put in place is there any thought how furniture would be donated to homeless veterans? >> good question. in terms of the first question my experience over my career has been homelessness has never been a partisan issue. it doesn't matter who is in the white house or congress. for various reasons everybody wants to end homelessness. the program was created under a republican administration. i don't think it will be a partisan issue. dubee an issue of lack of resources if it comes to a point where we won't get any more bash

resources going on. the congress agreed we needed 60,000 vouchers to end the problem of chronic homelessness among veterans and we are essentially there with the 2013 level. we realize if we are requesting funding in 2014 and beyond we need strong rationale how those resources need to be targeted. in terms of your second question on furnishings we have been approaching groups to see if they can help out -- what i have seen in terms of furnishing is visiting salt lake city your ago i was visiting a whole bunch of homeless projects including salt lake city and i saw that every room had the same kind of furniture. nice wooden furniture with cabinets and a bed and kitchen

tables and we left that and went to another project which was for chronically homeless. wasn't focused on veterans. they had the same furniture and everywhere i went they had the same furniture. there was a church in that community that donated all the furniture from all the homeless facilities there. there's a lot of that going on. there's a lot more that could be going on if we asked at the local level. i believe that to be the case. one remaining question. >> thank you. this is not so much a question as a thank you. thank you to your efforts and mr. gould's efforts on these programs that help veterans. in the city of manassas my little program housed two veterans sins january and one of them was homeless and another the last 30 years was

approximately 15 years homeless. a lot of what you said about not having id, people who knock out the community, the first step and connection to va and hud. thank you. >> thank you very much. [applause] >> one more round of applause to our speakers. thank you very much. [applause] >> we are going to take a ten minute break and come back promptly for our first panel on veteran homelessness and housing solutions. [inaudible conversations]

.. [inaudible conversations]

[inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] >> so as you heard, a short break here and then this compose yum or symposium, i should say, will come back with a panel on veterans' homelessness and rental housing, talk about proven ways to end homelessness through veterans, particularly in support of housing. until then, here's a portion of morning's "washington journal" with some of your calls and

e-mails. >> host: let's just take a quick look at a few of them. right above me from the cleveland, ohio, newspaper. grover norquist defends anti-tax pledge on capitol hill. bloomberg, schumer and norquist trade blame for impasse. and the los angeles times above that. grover norquist meets with house gop to reinforce anti-tax pledge. if you're not really sure, you've heard grover norquist's name and this tax pledge, let's show you the language of it. this is what it says and that candidates are asked to pledge. i, insert your name, pledge to the taxpayers of my state and to the american people that i will: one, oppose any and all efforts to increase the marginal income tax rate for individuals and businesses; and, two, oppose any net reduction or elimination -- if we can continue -- of -- i've

missed page here -- elimination of deductions and credits unless matched dollar for dollar by further reducing tax rates. sorry, took a while for that page to catch up with me. oppose elimination and deduction of credits unless matched dollar for dollar by further reduction, reducing tax rates. according to americans for tax reform, 2378 representatives and 41 senators have all taken the pledge in the 112th congress. there's a list of a number of republicans, both house and senate, who are nonsigners. we will show that to you later, and there are a couple of democrats in the house and one in the senate who have signed the pledge. our question for you this morning is, if you were running for office, would you take a no-tax pledge? tell us yes or no and why or why not. let's listen in to the senate democrats as they reacted to the news that grover norquist was on

capitol hill yesterday talking about the anti-tax pledge. >> the leader of the republican party is up here today on the hill, but you may be surprised to learn that it's not mitt romney, not john boehner, and it's not mitch mcconnell. you know who it is. it's grover norquist. nearly every republican in congress has signed grover's pledge. mitch mccardiology signed it. mitt romney has signed it. and he's sticking to it, mitt romney. >> host: harry reid yesterday along with a group of his colleagues on the senate democratic side expressing their concern, reaction to grover norquist being on capitol hill. let's take a quick look at the list of nonsigners on the republican side, so that will mean all others have signed it. these are the non-pledge signers in the house. new york, richard hanna. georgia, rob woodall.

pennsylvania, todd last, virginia, rob wittman, virginia frank wolf, and kansas, kevin yoder. a new in the senate have not signed it, and all of those in election selections, olympia snowe not running, richard lugar just lost, susan collins of maine, thad cochran of mississippi, john barrasso who's part of the senate leadership team of wyoming, and john hone. let's show you a couple of the democrats who have signed, rob andrews of new jersey, ben chandler of kentucky and nebraska senator ben nelson. that's the current situation in the congress. grover norquist was talking about how many people running this year have signed, but our question to you is, would you take an anti-tax pledge if you were coming to town with all the discussion and debate about the economy, the budget deficit and the like. tell us why, yes or no. let's begin with a call from jacksonville, florida. this is stuart, an independent.

you're on the air. >> caller: no, i would not sign -- i'm sorry, can you hear me? >> host: yes, sir, we can. >> caller: yeah. i would not sign the pledge because these politicians, the senate and the white house both seem, it seems apart that they're owned by the multi-national corporations. i tell ya, pat buchanan had it right. you tax, you impose import tax on all goods coming to the united states, and also at the same time you give any company that hires any -- must be, they must hire american workers -- give them tax exemption. there's no taxes on any corporation that hires american workers in this country. that would create more small businesses, it would create tax revenue by the billions because we have a $500 billion tax, or

trade deficit in this country. if we legalized, regulated and taxed marijuana, there would be millions of dollars in tax revenue. it would take a lot of the nonviolent crime away, and it would free up our jails for violent criminals. there's all kinds of solutions that they're not even talking about because they don't want to do these things because they're in the, they're doing what their corporate puppet masters tell them what to do. >> host: next is a comment from bill, a democrat in virginia. hi, bill, you're on. >> caller: yes. when a people, regardless of which state they're from, send a representative to capitol hill to represent us, well, whether they are to the house or to the senate they are obligated to us, not to one man, this grover norquist, whoever he is and whatever he have over the

people. they are -- he's not, he's not, he's not obligated to him. he's obligated to us. and when, when whoever the representative is or are, may be, well, when they sign that contract, well, he's obligated to grover. he's not obligated to us. and no one goes to capitol hill without compromise. and when you say that you're not going to compromise, well, then you're going against the country. and that's all i have to say. >> host: thanks so much, bill. we've posted this on facebook. let's check in and see some of the reactions there. bonita says who does he think he is anyway, that's what i want to know. the economic stability is at the hands of one individual. now, this is true representative democracy. jodi writes, as conservative as i am and completely against any

tax increases, this really irritates me. if our representatives can't do their jobs without this pledge, they don't belong in the position they're in. next up is a call from lakeland, florida. jim is an independent there. hi, jim, you're on. >> caller: okay. it's nice to talk to you this morning. >> host: thank you. >> caller: i appreciate you taking my call. but it's bad reasoning. >> host: how is it? >> caller: we have a bad deficit, and somebody's got to pay for it. somebody's got to feel some pain. and every economist and every non-biased person says something has to come from the revenue side and some has to come from the spending side. there's nobody says they've got to gut all of medicare and social security and medicaid and stuff like that. we've got to get some from both

sides. and anybody that takes a pledge other than to pledge to the united states of america is not worthy of being in congress. >> host: thanks, jim, lakeland, florida. jodi on twitter says i wouldn't sign it, and because they did sign it, they have limited their actions. now they have no room to pith. hard politics -- pivot. hard politics. next up, dree is a republic on the air. >> caller: thank you for "the washington journal," good morning. >> host: morning. >> caller: well, you know, common sense will tell you, ma'am, that the nation needs tax. we need the roads fixed, we need, um, things taken care of. that's plain and simple. um, i was in a high-tax bracket in my 30s. i was making over $100,000 a year, and i was at 48% tax. um, i just think the nation's getting overtaxed. i could see where the

gentleman's going with no new taxes and, you know, read my lips and all that, but we have to have taxes. we just can't have this overspending by these politicians. i mean, what nerve harry reid and pelosi had parading around washington still when they have such high unemployment and problems in their state. we've really got to hit bottom, i think, before we start fixing the country. i mean, it's, it's pretty sad, but we can't tax and spend our way, you know, out of this problem. you're going to tax and spend your way into a bigger debt. >> host: thank you. let's -- >> back live now to the national housing conference, a panel discussion just getting underway on veterans' homelessness and rental housing. live coverage here on c-span2. >> i'm pretty sure i see carol lambert back there. [inaudible conversations]

all right, welcome back. for our first of two panel discussions that will cap out today. this one is about veterans' homelessness and supportive housing as a solution among many to that challenge. i am very pleased to introduce our moderator, nan roman, the president and ceo of the national alliance to end homelessness. she is also a longtime nac board member and a great source of wise advice and counsel to us as we bring all of the housing stakeholders together to address a whole range of issues, but in particular today we're going to focus on veterans' homelessness. so i will let her introduce the panel and let them take the discussion from there. so, nan. >> okay. well, thank you, ethan. and i want to thank, also, our keynote speakers this morning. i thought it was a illuminating

set of presentations pointing out some of the housing and related issues that veterans have. we certainly -- i think one thing that we've certainly experienced at the national alliance to end homelessness and i'm sure the other panelists as well that there really is something of a unique moment with respect to veterans and homelessness and housing issues. in particular there's a lot going on, there's been tremendous leadership from the congress including senator murray has been really remarkable on that front as well. the agencies are working together which was pointed out doesn't always happen, and it really -- there really is a moment of opportunity, i think. and i also just wanted to congratulate the fantastic award winners from last evening. it's just an honor and a pleasure to be here with them. you know, a few years ago at the national alliance to end homelessness we decided to take

a look at veterans' housing overall. we knew that veterans were overrepresented in the homeless population, and so we wondered if this meant that veterans had housing problems more generally. and what we found when we looked at the data was, frankly, a little surprising to us. we found that on the whole veterans are very well housed or were -- this was, again, a few years ago -- better housed than the general population. they had a higher rate of home ownership, and they had a higher percentage of their mortgages paid off. fewer veterans had severe housing cost burdens as a percentage of the population. they were somewhat better off economically, also, with higher incomes and a lower poverty rate. however, there still were an unacceptable number of veterans who had housing problems. the sheet in your packet says that 1.5 million veterans paid more than half of their income for housing. veterans with a disability are

more likely to have severe housing cost burdens. female veterans are more likely to have severe housing cost burdens. unmarried veterans are more likely to have severe housing costs and older veterans are more likely to have housing problems, we found. and, of course, as has been mentioned, veterans are disproportionately represented in homeless populations. and we found that housing affordability was a driver in those housing, it is a great deal about housing. so veterans like everyone else, as senator isaacson pointed out, would be better housed and do better if we addressed housing affordability issues better generally and overall. but we also know that veterans have some particular housing needs. some have physical disabilities and need accessible housing, some have traumatic brain injury, military sexual trauma,

other kinds of trauma, and these can effect their stability in housing. some have behavioral health issues, mental illness, substance abuse disorders, and they need supportive housing. some need to be near treatment facilities like va hospitals because they're in treatment, and they need their families to be nearby them there, and they can't find affordable housing. some generate, as mark pointed out, very high medical costs because of their instability? housing. so veterans need affordable housing, and if they have special problems, they certainly may need, they need stable housing to deal with those problems, and they may need specialized housing as well, just like everybody else as was also pointed out by our speakers. so we have with us today a terrific panel of folks who are going to discuss the housing needs of veterans, most specifically around veterans who are lower income, people with disabilities and also people who are renters. and most importantly, i think, what we might do to address

these problems, what are the solutions. we know what the problems are, but we have an opportunity, i think, as we've been hearing over the past two days to really implement solutions, what are those solutions. so you have full biographies in your packets, but i'm just so delighted to be here today with a talented and skilled colleagues. john driscoll, who's the president and ceo of the national coalition for homeless veterans, a close ally and colleague. rose an haggerty -- roseanne haggerty, she used to be the president of common ground which mark described in terms of a boot camp that's actually community solutions that's implemented the boot camps under roseanne's leadership and many, many other things also which she'll discuss. and patrick sheridan, senior vice president for real estate development and volunteers of america, another tremendous organization and great ally.

so you should read later the details of their illustrious, their ill husbandtous careers. first, i was hoping that we might talk a little bit about what you all see, so i've given a snapshot from my perspective, i guess, of some of the needs for veterans for housing, the role affordable housing plays, the associated service needs. um, how do you all find that veterans' housing needs compare to housing needs of other, of the general population or the low income population? >> i'll jump in, nan. i don't see them as particularly different. one of the things that we've been discovering in working with cities throughout the country is that especially for, um, all homeless veterans but especially those who are chronically homeless, a surprising barrier just around having good data at the community level. a lot of the veterans who are homeless are not known to their local systems as veterans.

they're not connected to the va. and so a singular challenge but one that there are ways that communities are taking on very successfully through the 100,000 homes campaign is to actually identify who the homeless veterans are by name and prioritize people on the basis of their health risks. and that whole data connection process can actually drive a lot more effective housing resource allocation. so it's a surprising insight, but the fact that we just don't know who these individuals are is one of the big barriers to getting the remaining homeless veterans housed. >> yeah. if i could step in, i'd like to just add on that, first of all, we want to thank the national housing conference for inviting nchv to be a participant here. this is a critical moment, nan, i think you said that very eloquently, a critical moment in terms of helping bring veterans

into the fold as it were. and it addresses your point. prior to 2011 communities were not required to report veteran data in their hmis systems. we had long said that would help identify the problem, scope of the problem which was not really understood until about 1999 or the year 2000. with the analysis of the national survey of homeless providers and clients which showed the disproportionate share of homeless folks who are veterans. so the whole idea of identifying the scope of the problem, the numbers that communities are dealing with, that is a relatively new development. i believe that the federal agencies that presented this morning have been working on veterans' issues and veterans' homelessness for about 20, 22 years and chv has been a partner

in that. now we understand the scope, and i believe the requirement of the veteran data in hmis is going to open doors, access service for veterans that maybe before veterans never even thought to walk through. and certainly communities weren't focusing on keeping those doors open. >> is it, you know, we always think that if we want to serve veterans, it would be through the va but, john, i've heard only about 50% of veterans have any relationship at all with the va, and is that true? >> well, i think -- >> you can't only rely -- >> i think that might be high, 50%. i know on the medical side it's about 20%. and then when you think that we're talking housing, we're talking veteran housing, i've been with nchv for 12 years, and prior to 2008 we never talked about housing and veterans in the same discussion.

there are folks in this room that i'm proud to say that i've known for that 12 years, people that were honored last night among the real foundation of nchv started developing housing specially designed for veterans with integration problems, formerly homeless veterans. you know, you've heard and i know you and i, nan, have talked about va developed a transitional housing assistance program some 25 years ago because that was the only game in town. and in many communities that was the only help homeless veterans were going to have. what was interesting about that was it grew out of the veterans health administration, so the veterans health center and its attendant per diem programs were, in fact, an integrated service delivery system. we weren't calling it that then, but that's what it was.

that has had the greatest impact on driving down the number of homeless veterans up until hvash which is immediate access to affordable housing which prior to 2008 was not being done on any appreciable scale. so you heard mark talk about that. that is, that changed fundamentally the world we live in. but it doesn't replace the need for that transitional system that is 20 years in the making, provides homeless veterans with a wide range of services, health services, housing stability, and that doesn't work for everybody either. but, but if you have affordable housing on the other end of that program, something that those clients can work towards and i think this is what i hope this audience will hear, that there's 1.4 million people that, hopefully, will never have to go

through a per diem program and be stabilized and then be looking for stable housing. but that system as it's in place, hud/vash built out to 60,000, and then the housing industry across the country and communities making affordable housing available, i think that brings us to the goal we're looking for by 2015. >> do you find that as when people, veterans' housing needs change over time that they have different needs when they first start detaching from the service than they do later? >> i think that both mark johnston and deputy secretary gould made a very important point for us to be mindful of which is we should assume strength in these individuals as they return from service. just the remarkable discipline and resilience and courage and our rush to pa thol eyes is something we should really question. certainly, there are so many men

and women coming back with physical and psychological injuries that need to be addressed, but not all of the veterans that will be coming back need anything more than good information and good access to stable housing. and so the mainstream housing industry and the mainstream affordable housing industry really can handle most of this, the kinds of services that john is describing really are -- and i thought it was a wonderful framing that deputy secretary gould made around rescue services. let's try to avoid meeting those by doing more on the affordable rental front. and, in fact, i think maybe the call to arms for our industry is much more about how do we make good access to mainstream housing available to every rushing veteran -- returning veteran by making the process of accessing it, you know, the best customer service experience anyone has ever had. right now, i think, the information gap. where do you go for help if you

need it. that leads people down that slippery slope that we know too well into a situation where they may need much more rehabilitative services. but for the most part, you know, these are men and women who, basically, need assistance navigating, you know, a too-complicated often local affordable housing market. >> patrick, voa provides housing for many, many populations, so how have you seen this playing out in terms of veterans? >> well, it's kind of interesting. first of all, i'd like to also give my appreciation to the national housing conference for honoring volunteers america -- >> we can't hear. [laughter] >> okay. i'd like to thank national housing conference for honoring volunteers america last night and, you know, we certainly do appreciate it. our organization's been serving veterans for many, many decades, and a lot of it's been more around the human service side and the transitional housing side. and i think that one of the things i've seen certainly just

over the past three to four years is the concept that we can take a lot of these affordable housing programs that are out there and use it for permanent supportive housing which wasn't necessarily true before. i think the advent or let's say the better use of the vash voucher has been extremely important in that we can then provide, you know, tenant subsidies in permanent housing for veterans and also have the wrap around services involved, too, which we wouldn't have had previous to vash. it would have been a case of if we were lucky enough to get project-based section 8 from a housing authority or some other source, it could be from rural development or something like that, at least you get the tenant subsidy, but then you're hunting for the service dollars. so it's been critical. but i think the other piece, too, was the concept we could use low-income housing tax credit to develop a lot of the newer facilities that do have the permanent housing as part of it, but also has the community

space involved that's needed for the service provision and the socialization that needs to happen. >> so in terms of housing affordability then, obviously, it's rose zahn pointing out that for a lot of veterans it's just an affordable issue, and that was raised also by an earlier speaker in terms of employment and poverty, and people coming back simply can't afford housing. so that's an element of it. and then -- but there are people who have higher needs. do youdo you have any sense of w much of this is really driven by just the affordability side of things, rental housing shortage? >> well, as we know it's not -- >> is her mic working? we can't really tell up here. you can't hear? >> okay, sorry. the issues around housing need are, they vary by person, and they vary by region. and so, you know, i guess the

challenge to all of us is creating enough diversity and options so that people who are returning from service, service members from past conflicts who are homeless now get what they need and get it quickly. so in terms of what's different about veteran housing needs, i'd love to hear more from both of you. but my sense the is that, you know, we need to make this whole array of housing option much more transparent and accessible. and then for those returning veterans who do have need for support attached to their housing, some of it is for appropriately-designed housing, housing that is built to universal design standards and housing -- and we heard about the amazing work of the home depot foundation and others who are adapting homes. so, you know, that mindset and creating that ease of actually adaptation of housing housing ad appropriate physical environments. one of the things that all of us

who have worked in supportive housing know is that services and the need for them can dial up and dial down. so i think this, as you point out, nan, is an unusual moment for us to learn vital things for the whole array of individuals and families experiencing homelessness. how do we calibrate the services better? because, again, assuming strength, you know, i don't believe even people who have had very profound traumas and injuries need necessarily to be assumed to be incapable of moving into greater capability. and how do we create housing and services that are fluid and build people's capabilities up, i think, is something we need to learn for the whole field of homeless services. >> yeah, and i -- i could add to that, and i've already talked about since the advent of the federal strategic plan which was critical in this nation's history and service to liberty

for special needs populations, it really is a new frontier, a new world to conquer. and we've seen from this administration a commitment of resources unlike anything that we've seen probably since the great society of the lyndon administration or at least from the veterans' perspective, that's what we see. and so going back to the transition aal assistance program that was 20 years in development, each of those programs is already connected to services. they're not necessarily on site, but in many of the more successful grant per diem programs they are on site, and they are health -- i saw i think it was a study from corporation for supportive housing just recently that was released that showed the importance of health services for persons in supportive housing and how that impacts housing stability. that's actually been an the core of the grant per diem program

for 20-some years. but then growing from that organizations that have been working and developing those systems of care, housing stability with services as a vital component are now and have been for some time are exploring longer-term, permanent housing solutions where they're still connected with many of those attendant services. so it's a little bit different, actually, in some places it's a lot different than what enough the nonveteran service provider commitment. we at nchv have said to va since the beginning of the program the grant per diem programs are the springboard for the evolutions that are necessary to get veterans who have coming out of crisis situations into permanent housing. what's interesting is we had a housing conference last year in

san antonio, and one of the most profound statements anybody said to me was and, you know, it doesn't have to be programs. and i thought for a minute. i don't even know what that means. and so i asked. i said, can you expand on that? and it was interesting. they said, when you get right down to it, every community is different, and every homeless person is different. therefore, you have to have a responsive community entity, whatever that is whether it's a service provider of grant per diem in an area that doesn't have any other alternatives, but it's the local response and planning, service providers, local government and housing officials, community planners that are really going to be able to come up with the blue print to make housing, affordable housing, you know, available with the level of services just as you said. everybody needs a different --

[inaudible] >> yeah, i'd like to comment on the affordable angle and also with the veteran population, especially veterans returning from iraq or afghanistan in mar. you know, what would just be a normal thought process here is that the average veteran just coming back is not going to automatically go into a high-paying job. that puts them in the lower income brackets meaning they need the affordable housing more than probably someone, obviously, that has been back for a while, maybe got themselves established. so even without a need for programs, just a veteran that needs housing, needs affordable housing more than anybody else potentially. and i think what we're seeing right now with the market and the economics of the affordable housing world and of the rental world is that we're experiencing very low occupant or very low say can i rates -- vacancy rates

in rental housing. whether it's certainly affordable housing model, and that's just creating a bind because we're seeing rent trimmed up as the market rate folks are able to raise their rents based on the occupancy levels. so we're at a critical juncture right now, sort of irregardless of whether you're a veteran or not in affordable housing and how do we increase the amount of affordable housing units out there particularly when you've got very low-income people or low-income people, and you need to provide them with some kind of tenant subsidy. of course, we're looking at shrinking rental subsidies with the section 8 program and saying the v ark sh -- vash program has been funded, and it's been a god send for veterans, but we're still having a struggle to locate veterans into whether it's, you know, poverty -- [inaudible] also where we're working with housing authorities trying to find rental units that might be

in the open market with other market rate landlords. they're just not as interested taking them on with a vash voucher when they can turn around and rent that unit with somebody they don't have to deal with the government subsidy program. so it's a bit of a bind out there right now, and i think it might be something that will trend away in a few years as the economy changes and maybe the rental supply market catches up somewhat in the marketplace, occupancy rates come down a little bit. but there's a bind in the market that, i think, is affecting everybody, but particularly veterans on the lower income side. >> so it seems you're pointing out is for a large majority of veterans who have housing needs, it's really just an affordability issue. there's a smaller subset that have more, that have particular needs and more serious needs and need services attached. but just on the affordability side since -- and i think what you're saying, patrick, also

you're pointing out that, you know, people have short-term orfy neat- or finite term crises also. they have very low incomes that impedes their ability in a tight market to get housing. that doesn't only happen to veterans. but we're at a moment in terms of veterans where there's a lot of support. do you feel is there, are there some ways that we can use, you know, taking advantage of this from helping veterans and also pointing out the affordability needs more generally, and do you think there's any appetite for a broader support for a benefit to veterans that they're left with to assist with housing? >> i think we all agree that the right g.i. housing bill for our time is an affordable rental bill that would assist not just veterans, because i think veterans typically from everything we've read and seen

would like to live in mixed communities, not simply communities only of veterans. and so i guess there should be at least two components of that, building on the political will we've seen now. one that maybe is a production program, but how do we also deal with this problem now. and so is it around some type of additional rental subsidy? there's an interesting proposal that columbia economist dan o flairty has circulated around rental insurance for veterans for those who do have a transitional need and crisis and at are disadvantage because there is such an elevated rate of unemployment around veterans. maybe that's what the country should be thinking of as we heard earlier the g.i. bill was the most successful social program in the country. there's a housing piece to that, and what should our general ration's g.i. housing bill look like. >> yeah, i -- i'll go back to my

general thought that each community will have to have its own response. but it occurs to me as we're talking about maybe veterans who have disabilities, whether mental illness, emotional upheavals, physical disabilities that may adversely impact their earnings potential. to me, it's very clear what those folks need, and that is affordable housing. of course, that's a label. we have people in this audience who actually have made careers out of putting together public/private partnerships to develop multifamily housing units, property renovations and new construction. primary communities was awarded last night because of that close to 3,000 units. u.s. vets has transitional, but they're also working closely with other communities. so you have those collaborations, public/private

funding. and that goes right to what the person said to me very clearly that it can't be government funding response all the time. there's going to have to be those local initiatives to scale that will benefit those specific commitments. and then the other thing -- communities. and then the other thing. the home depot foundation which has very graciously been an active partner with the national coalition for homeless veterans, i'm just amazed when i think of what they've done in the first year. we're just very proud that they partnered with us, with a lot of the organizations that we represent. but corporate and philanthropy increasingly are playing a major role in this time that we see. so we have the federal agencies, we have a president saying they can't do it all, corporate has to step up, and i think we've seen this happening just

increasingly. so i think that's part of what i would say. congratulations to the awar dees from last night. you represent, you know, i believe, in many commitments -- communities where the most immediate beneficial impact is going to come from. >> yeah, i think that's a good point. it is an interesting time because there is so much interest in housing right now because a lot of players that weren't there three or four years ago, and now they're at the table talking with us. we do a range of different types of housing, transitional housing being one that we have been in for quite some time which was very va-dependent as far as the grant per diem program. but moving it to projects such as our home manor project we did in chicago, a tax credit permanent support of housing project just sort of demonstrates the type of

cooperation we're getting from so many different sources to be able to make something work. in that case the city of chicago donated initially some nsp land that they had, but we were able to get donation tax credits in the state of illinois along with energy credits from the state. we received a grant from energizer battery company for additional solar panels. i think we had about eight or nine different levels of financing. but looking at the traditional partners and doing any affordable housing project, tax credit investors, what we're finding now is a lot of the big financial institutions that tend to be the typical buyer of tax credits are extremely interested in doing veterans' permanent housing. that wasn't the case a few years back, and i wouldn't necessarily say it was about veterans. but if you were to present a permanent supportive housing project to an investor for, you know, potential investment, they would usually make that one of their lower priorities. so instead of seeing that, we're

now seeing them step forward. we're seeing, obviously, the philanthropy that john mentioned. our partnership with home depot has been fantastic. and, you know, it's allowed us to do everything from fix up individual veterans' homes to our transitional housing and now moving more toward, you know, working on permanent supportive housing and helping fill the gaps. so i think there's a lot of interest both at the local governmental levels where they're able now to commit either vacant land or home funds, things like that right on up through the corporate, the foundations and such. and that's been wonderful. but i also do want to point out that it's not without its pitfalls in the local communities because we've got in many cases great support. you go in and talk to community government, we still run into the nimby issues when you're talking about permanent supportive housing in individual communities. so it's something that has to have a lot of attention paid at

the community level to make sure these deals actually work. >> that's, that's interesting about the nimby and a little by surprising. have either of you, do you feel like doing a project for veterans helps with the nimby issue or hinders it, makes it worse? any observations on that? >> we have two underway now, one here in the district and one in new orleans, and i think the veterans' component has actually been part of the strength and the popularity in the community. so i guess it depends. >> yeah. i would just say, and i'm sure, nan, you know that, that nimby is one of those things that you put in your project plan, and you just know you have to have a contingency, and you're going to have to address that. i would be very gratified to feel that because a project is going to primarily help veterans, that that would make it more appetizing to a community.

but it depends on which community you're talking about because veterans are veterans, but there are veterans that have health issues, there are veterans that need intensive assistance. so i'll touch real quickly on the housing needs. if we look at the numbers that va envisioned when they started the five-year plan, they were thinking 90,000 units, that's what they said, 90,000 units of permanent housing would probably meet goal for ending veteran homelessness by 2015. the definition of ending veteran homelessness isn't that a veteran will never again become homeless. what it really means is, if that happens and you haven't helped me before that happens, there's going to be an access to help somewhere that i can walk in and get help. so some folks are always going to need those intensive needs and the most multifamily units, the vash vouchers, the developments that you would be

able to utilize, low-income housing tax credits, i think nimby is always going to be part of your plan. but we also know that's going to be necessary for those more intense need veterans because we can't spread the demand for services out gee graphicically -- geographically if we can concentrate them closer to the providers of the services that they need. >> i guess i may take a little bit of issue with that, john, because for both the reason that nimby happened and the urgency of the task. using mainstream housing resources and, you know, basically enlisting the whole of the housing sector in every community really has to be our starting point. and i think for those individuals whether veterans or not who need more regular services absolutely, you know, their proximity to services is vital. but, again, people are different. and i don't think we need to be

so constrained and so limiting in thinking we just have to build congregate, permanent support of housing. i think we basically have to put every bit of our, you know, ingenuity and our assets to work to make sure we end veteran homelessness and prevent -- >> can i just -- so i'll just go back to i prefaced my comment with there is that segment of the veteran population that is going to need intensive services, and that, i believe, will necessarily create the nimbyism maybe to an intensity. i'm not saying that you don't want to or that you want to consolidate everything. so i hope you didn't take what i said out of context. i'm saying that as i understand it, the connectivity between housing costs and fs costs -- and service costs, it makes sense in some respects to concentrate those housing units

near the services that are available. >> but there certainly are models that have emerged that house people in the community and deliver services to them in a scattered way. that's big technology that's been developed in the how manylessness field through housing first. so probably at the end of the day there's going to be a mix of even high-need people being in facilities or, you know, single-use buildings and scattered in the community. that's already happening. >> yeah. well, i'd like to clarify, too, on the nimby issues is that if you are comparing permanent supportive housing project with one that's designated for veterans, it does degreece -- decrease the nimbyism. you do end up with some issues here. but what you're talking about, nan, was a good point because i think that models such as our

hope manor project which is a heavy service-intensive project is only just one component of it. oneover the other areas that i think -- one of the other areas that i think makes a lot of sense, too, in keeping with the rental theme is to look at, you know, a lot of the rao properties coming out of financial institutions. and i know we've had discussions already about those. and are there opportunities in that situation to be able to take abandoned properties, use, you know, resources like home depot's funding to fix them up to be appropriate for veterans and then use vash vouchers in a individual setting situation. again, the issues there are can you serve them, provide them the services they need, make sure they've got the transportation to be able to get to those services if they're not in one location. again, i think it's another good opportunity. >> i just want to second pat's observation there. one of the things that's important to know about veteran

homelessness is we're not going to end veteran homelessness as a country if we don't end it in california, texas and florida. it's very disproportionate in those states. and what you also see in many of the same communities and counties are unbelievably high levels of foreclosure. and so pat's observation that we could actually, um, achieve a profound win/win here, you know? get to our country's goals of reducing veteran homelessness and help make a dent in some of these rao-swamped communities is a really important insight. >> yeah. >> i just, i pull out a map we did that shows where the distribute of homeless veterans, and this is from the point 2010 count, so a little bit different now. but 19,000 of them are in california, basically 8,000 in florida, 5,000 in texas, 6,000 in new york. those are the biggest states.

and also with the exception of texas those are the states with the highest prevalence or rate of homelessness. versus the general population. so roseanne is right there, it's definitely a geographic component to this as well, and there's opportunity in some of those geographies because of the remainder of the housing market. >> one of the things i'll just add to that that we've seen in this work around the country through the 100,000 homes campaign is once communities know by name who the veterans are in their communities who are homeless, we see this unbelievable resolve and ingenuity to just solve the problem. it's like the real estate community comes forward, housing authority, local landlords, public hospitals, the va. and so i really think that there's an awful lot more opportunity to get ahead of this issue and that this, you know, seemingly extraordinary goal that the president and secretary have sent is really within our

grasp of ending veteran homelessness. and there's so much we can learn in that process that can help us prevent new veterans from becoming homeless. >> let's come back to the collaboration in a minute, but i wanted to just follow up on some of the -- so we've heard about transitional housing and permanent supportive housing and a little bit about the opportunities from rao. what are some of the -- roseanne, you mentioned universal design as something that seems, you know, if we had more buildings with universal design, certainly we'd have more opportunity for people with disabilities. i know a physical disability, when i was here in the district on a housing task force, one of the things that was rapidly pointed out to us if you needed an accessible unit, it's virtually impossible. there's no place to go to find out even where they are. so any thoughts about that and the job that needs to be done there? >> sure. i mean, there's, as we heard home depot and others are doing an amazing and systemic job of

making adaptation assistance available around single-family homes. but you're really in a conundrum if it's an apartment building. it hasn't been designed to be universeally acceptable. the notion of universal design, i think we're all familiar with it, which is, you know, we all benefit. carrying our groceries or parents with a stroller, to just kind of single out individual units to be handicapped-accessible given the kinds of importance we all know around integrating returning veterans into mainstream housing in communities, having multifamily buildings, affordable rental buildings that are designed to not call out people's need for adapted housing, be i the whole building is designed -- but the whole building is designed to be accessible, you know, in terms of hallway width and where appliances are positioned, sizes of rooms, turning radius issues.

it creates more comfortable housing for everyone, and i think this, you know, this could be a particularly valuable thing that gets added to our way of thinking about housing in this country as a by-product of thinking about the need of returning veterans who are injured. just help us think about better design for everyone using the veterans' needs as a leading edge. >> yeah. i think that's an excellent point. and one of the things that's probably understood by everybody but is probably worth pointing out is a change in who the veterans are, also, because so much of what we were building for, say, two, three, four years ago would have been the vietnam-era single, male veteran. and you may not have had as much need for, you know, complete universal design so much as just a smaller percentage. and what we're seeing now, of course, with the returning iraqi and afghanistan vet is the the higher injury rates.

the other thing that we're looking at design wise, too, in our newer properties is building more rental units for women veterans with children which would, again, not have been something we would have probably planned for, say, four or five years ago when the average homeless was potentially a single male from the vietnam era. >> and, patrick, in thinking about that both women veterans and also, i think, we certainly hear more about each if the veteran is male that they're being with the family is very important supportive issue. and so family housing is becoming more important. often low-income families, so are you thinking about -- [inaudible] support net hoizing for families that are sort of what john, i think, was talking about in terms of more conventional treatment supports in the housing. >> yes, very much so. we're in process right now with our second chicago property, and that one instead of just being a

single building is a set of buildings, one of them being a larger building that's pretty much just one-bedroom units with the support services there on the ground floor similar to our first property. but the balance of the units are four townhouses with two and three-veteran units and then four buildings that have four units, again, with multiple bedrooms in them. sort of a campus concept, but having the services on the campus. but, again, some privacy afforded by having separate buildings. >> let me turn a little bit to the hud programs. of course, we all know that, you know, the federal debt and deficit are going to be squeezing programs in general. what are the key hud affordable housing programs that support veterans housing and other affordable housing, and what would cuts to those programs mean in terms of housing

veterans and your ability to do that? >> i'd really rather not have to answer that question. [laughter] i think we've all been aware that the incredible resourcing that the obama administration has brought to bear isn't going to last forever, and we've heard assistant secretary johnston actually say that everything that's on the table now is going to have to be re-examined, and we know that there's going to be flat funding coming up which is another appeal to the community, business community, housing to become more involved in your local planning. i think hud vash, the thing that was exciting to us when it was projected to build out to 60,000 units is that those 60,000 units

will be held for veterans so long as appropriations are available, and that's a huge departure from the original legislation. so that, and we know that there will be a certain number of veterans in the those units that'll lose eligibility because their incomes go up or they just decide they want to move out. those vouchers will remain available for veterans. so that's a huge thing. and there should not be as long as the funding continues for the units that are established, that won't have an impact. i kind of agree with the panelists that beyond that, you know, there isn't really a differentiation between the veteran and the non-veteran population. and as data integration becomes more sophisticated and we see what the veteran representation is in the special need populations, it's going to be all rolled into a community's need for subsidized housing,

section 8 rental subsidies, senior housing, any number of things that are going to be scrutinized anyway. those programs help veterans. the data will show to what degree veterans are helped by those. so i think at that point nchv has to come over and say, okay, what is the collective voice for housing opportunities for distressed populations with dwindling or limited federal resources. that kind of worries me. i know that's been at the center of what national alliance has stood for. but i don't think those become veteran-specific. i think at that point we're talking about helping as many people as we can and advocating for the resources necessary to be effective. >> um, i agree with john. i think we have an important and

really urgent moment, um, where the country understands that without adequate transitional assistance housing and jobs, we're really looking at a really cataclysmic problem with people who deserve our best thinking and support. so it really is a moment where i think a call to arms around rental housing for people who need it -- including veterans -- and how important that is to the baseline capability builder for participation in the work force, for maintaining health, that framing the overall need we know we have as a country for affordable rental housing around the veterans is something we might want to be, you know, putting our heads together on. ..

the hud budget over the next years has been you know huge cutbacks in the hud 202 program, and the programs were each one of them are looking at potentially the low income housing tax credit program as being the solution for it. while they haven't increased the allocation of the tax credits out there, so it's not a case of more credits being available to do more housing, so we have got increased numbers of project sponsors from everything from supportive housing under the program 202 developers to what

would be your mainstream tax credit developers all looking for the same credits, and what we have seen sort of in the competition for those credits at the state levels have been competitions of 3-1 to the credits becoming 5-1 or six to one and it's not a case of that many properties that are being sponsored having flaws in them. they are all good properties and all needed, but again competing for this dwindling resource under the tax probe and that is supposed to be a solution to being able to provide affordable housing we have. so again, what we have seen i think, which is encouraging, is a large number of states fired tice supportive housing is one of their main pirate ease for providing credits. some of them have even gone so far as to give additional points for veterans housing. louisiana being one of them here recently. so there are some opportunities there for us to particularly focus on veterans housing and be

able to see credits but it's been tough out there as far as trying to find these resources. >> real quick, the other thing that i would say because i think it reflects on the question as well as some of the response, is you know, helping veterans is really a bargain if you are thinking in of expenditure, public assistance funds and what that ultimate total cost is going to be. veteran status, person who is an honorably discharged veteran has access to health services and has access to services provided by veteran service organizations to help them qualify for benefits packages. you know, to some degree financial counseling. there are benefits that you are invited being a veteran and the g.i. bill is a perfect example. even if that doesn't translate into a real increase in your earnings potential, it's a

benefit that you have got that non-veterans don't have. so if you're thinking in terms of what is the total cost of the housing support plus services, whatever that looks like even if it's just affordable housing, veterans are actually a lower cost. if i may, i want to be careful here when i say that, but there are benefits to helping veterans because the veterans have access to other assistance, so it's less of a risk in some ways and so i just wanted to throw that out there. >> now i think we will open up the floor to questions, observations from the audience if you have any. >> there are two mics, one right here and one over there. >> come to the mic. >> i am matt carry director of the mayors office mayor's office of veterans affairs for d.c..

and i definitely thank you -- think you hit the target by talking about targeting this at the local level. however, as john driscoll knows, the u.s. conference of mayors passed a resolution dealing with coming home issue since 1974. so, what you need to do i think is call a summit of the governors, mayors, county executives, non-service providers, the chamber of commerce and their local people to target this whole issue. we have less and less elected officials who have a military background, and so there is a huge education issue that needs to be done, and the nimby thing is not going to be addressed until we get right down to the local advisory neighborhood commission levels, where we are

actually telling people that, putting veteran housing in their backyard is not going to result in massive shootings in the population etc.. secondly, i think it's time for dod to take a portion of their budget, maybe 3%, and reinvested in the coming home issues for veterans because there is a cost to doing war, and they need to be aware of that. and so a lot of that money that they are spending on war machines etc. could be reinvested back into the community. thanks. >> is there anyone here who would support using dod money to house veterans? >> do you mean opposed? >> and observation and i may be reinterpreting this in cracker that in a way there is a lot of political and public well at the

national level that may be somewhat less. you charitably said with education, and maybe a little bit less at the local level. do you find that to be true? >> i may be seeing some of the exceptions where there is a lot of local concern, but a real conundrum is no one knows who these veterans are. who are going back to the local communities. there's just a very strange data disconnect. the department of defense does not alert the mayor or the local va, nothing like that. a group of people are coming back to a community and so it does kind of thwart the local effort to not be able to aggregate it well, because there is not a transfer of information. >> we know the va has not always communicated with community groups either. >> well, there are questions of privacy.

you know, because i would think intuitively that the easiest thing to do was for dod to be telling the va who is coming home and require -- require to go out and find these folks and then asked them, do you have problems and do you think you need help or whatever. i was an air fact medic, tenure service and i've never seen the inside of the va medical center. i don't have anything against va. i just have private health insurance so i identify with veterans, but veterans oftentimes stand on their own. is hard for them to ask for help a lot of times. so they do self-identify. i think that it would be problematic to say to the va everybody who comes out of the department of defense you have to track down and make the follow up. you know, we hear va take a bad knock because they say our doors are open and some people feel

that's not enough. you need to go out. that is what it's about and trying to find better -- veterans who are in the public assistance arena. i don't know that there is an easy answer. i think that to offer training of troops as they are getting out, that these are your benefits so when you start feeling the strains, you need to walk through that door and ask for what is yours. i think we could do a better job of that. >> yeah, i comment is a little different than that in following up on may be using defense department and va resources a bit more than we are able to do right now. one of the items that deputy secretary gould mentioned was the enhanced to use lease program which was use fairly successfully last calendar year but unfortunately the statutory authority ran out at the end of the year, so i know we had a

couple of applications pending that were just in essence cut off because the statutory authority didn't move forward with the lease but there is quite a bit of va property out there in buildings that can be converted into permanent supportive housing or just even senior housing for veterans. that would eliminate many cases some of the nimby issues but also then provide much closer location to where services can be provided. and similarly with the base realignment, access defense department properties and other potential sources. i think there may be a few other places where the government can step forward and provide some of those shuttered buildings and empty lands to be able to provide some of these resources. >> cans watkins, national academy of housing. one of the things that we are in courage in is the moving to work housing authorities around the

country have a lot more flexibility as many of you here know. in terms of what they do with their funds and how they co-mingle and mix their funds and using vouchers and public housing funds together. and, in working with housing authorities like columbus georgia right next to ford hanning, san diego with rick gentry out there with what he is doing with a naval bases and other moving to work housing authorities that are near large installations like this. i guess my question is, are the groups up on the stage, had they looked at this overlay for example of the moving to work housing authorities and how close they are too to which installations and then the next being the 160,000 or whatever the figure is of returning veterans and more. are they coming back, some of

them or many of them, to the sites where many of them trained and stayed over the years through different assignments? >> i will take a stab at that. the second part of your question, yes there seems to be a pattern of soldiers returning to the areas where they were deployed from. you have some really odd clusters of homelessness like an oklahoma near fort sill so there is a pattern that relates to the base locations. on the moving toward housing authorities we have been with the va and hud taking it from another angle which is where there are the largest clusters of homeless vets and approaching, those local businesses and housing authorities and helping them to streamline their process. i think you're absolutely right. this is equally, ending homelessness among veterans is equally about the country really taking on this mission.

and, you know there have been some amazing local leaders who haven't been in a high-density area who have just stepped into this but i think your point is a very good one, that there could use some other particular groups of housing authorities who we try to enlist. >> hi there. i am with the state of maryland. i just finished the brac work for the state and i'm now with our department of housing and community development. i believe there is a whole lot of wonderful programs out there to help veterans and also i made marine corps wife myself. i found though in talking to a lot of the servicemembers and with the families that they don't know how to access these services, and i mean a lot of them keep coming back and spiraling down into this homelessness and they have a lot of services that are available but they just don't even know about that. the other comment is that the servicemembers coming back now

from iraq and afghanistan are very different than the ones that came back in the first gulf war from vietnam. they don't go to veteran service organizations none of the traditional places where we do outreach so the question is, how do we reach the younger servicemembers and do you have any best practices or ideas that -- because we do have a lot of privacy issues with the department of defense and va for medical and other reasons. what are some of the best practices and trying to read some of these younger veterans so we could help them before they end up in that spin down of homelessness? >> well, i guess when i hear your question, and this is just because we are looking at homeless veterans and those that which would be the prevention piece. when i hear what you just asked i see that it's a much broader

concern, and it's more about easing their reintegration and process, which does not necessarily mean high risk of homelessness or eminent risk of homelessness. the most immediate answer that i would give you is that if somebody is in a crisis mode, or they just feel that things aren't adding up and they need help dealing with or finding somebody who can be their mentor, their reintegration if you will, anybody who has been in combat -- i still have six of my own all these years later. there is a number -- that the va has a referral service for crisis, which is connected with their suicide prevention. if you engage our web site we have a whole list of organizations throughout the united states in every state that help with veterans in

crisis. there is no easy answer to what you just asked, but there are certain flashpoints that veterans can access. one would be the va crisis center and i think that's important. >> i guess kind of a follow up, the veterans would have to know that what are we able to do to proactively go out and find them? they may not know about their services or numbers and whether facebook campaigns, there are new ways they communicate and i'm just hearing that we have some ideas on how the best ways are to reach out practically to these people. >> i think you have named the singular challenge. a lot of good efforts that are not reaching the people who need them at the time they need them. the one thing that i do see and i think you nailed it, these are veterans who aren't going to like the american legion hall. their meeting on facebook and one organization board, iraq

is fanning the -- afghanistan veterans of america. there is a community of veterans that is an on line social media oriented way of connecting veterans to help and i think we need more of that and i think we have to make it easier for people to get what they need. i don't think there's an answer yet. >> tim campbell. i try to touch on this last night. the clock hit 31 seconds and i had to wrap up too quickly. it really is an affordability issue and that availability in the country. that has been going on for a long time, and we are hanging our hats really on the classic tools of developing affordable housing, and to those of us that are doing better in specific

housing, we are in their competing for that same scarce resource and depending on where you are, it's oversubscribed 10-1. depending upon how they state plans organize their priorities it's impossible to win. you just can't get enough points. we find ourselves dressing up the developments to get points, and then that comes back around and hammers you on what you are really trying to do sometimes. so it's really at the macro level as a country we are not producing enough affordable housing. so absolutely, that is what the conference has been for decades. now we are looking at a subset and the veterans of the veterans. there's another subset, very high need, great amount of service requirements. john said this. huge investment over a 20-year period period of time moving

from virtually no specific resources and the community for homeless veterans to now this tremendous infrastructure. the body of the national coalition for homeless veterans, the vast majority are made up of those service providers. i believe there is an opportunity to meet and talk about all of this and it's crucial. those that are in fact, we are housing developers so we are not really the beneficiary of the per diem but many of the service provision is built up around these. it would be very important as this transition begins, and it's beginning, that wonderful resource not be cratered, and that gets transitioned into a way to support the permanent housing components and maintained this deep services where it's necessary for the

high need and high service requiring that. the second thing is, that veteran population around which thou service network was developed is ancient. i just did a little checking and went over to the aarp for interviewing and thought i better do a little homework. our average, 78.6% are over 55 and they are getting older, faster and their needs are really shifting from what the grant per diem was set up to be to really being how to serve this aging population. that is not really been focused upon. that is who this group is turning out to be. that is a different group with a different set of needs. and surely, these things that are being discussed and talked about, how we can make that linkage in an informational piece, it's a way to connect

folks into housing. all of that is true. and what we do in the country where we need so much affordable housing and veterans need that housing. we have this wonderful resource of service networks built up out of grant per diem that we don't want to crush and figure out how to reuse that and reapply that. then we have a pool of sets to aren't defined as homeless anymore because they are somewhere at some level of housing, but they won't qualify for the voucher because they are not technically homeless anymore. in the lower-cost markets that's not a big problem or a bigger problem but in the higher costs markets where you do with somebody who is on $900 a month va pension, and there is not -- [inaudible] what to do with that? we need some mechanism of shallow subsidy or something that will pick up that piece, and i can't give you the numbers

on it but it's a huge batch. the last piece is, that voucher is the nuclear weapon in the arsenal i think is what the secretary said. it's a terrific resource. there is not enough of it. there's not going to be enough of it and we are leaving behind all of those who can't get sustainable housing because they are not -- they are too old or too damaged to compete in the workplace. they are not going to make any more money. what do we do about that piece? the va has held out as the place where all that supports service is going to come from. we all know that is not possible at one fte for every 25 veterans being case managed. that is another issue and i am hoping we will all be thinking about that. >> you have a lot of points in there.

i hear you about the chasing points is the term by the allocation plans for credits and frankly we just killed the deal yesterday because we couldn't be a family project that happened to be half a mile from a grocery store even though we were joining a va medical campus for permanent supportive project housing and he got more points for being close to the grocery store. so those types of things happen and you really can't change your deal so much just to change points to be able to win the award that you really don't end up with what you were intended to do. but your point about changing populations i think is really relevant. we see this in our senior property to where we build a hud 202 project 30 years ago and all the residents are still there. now they are 30 years older and what they need today is a lot different than what they needed when they moved in. i think we have to look at that as populations were building

permits. particularly if we are focusing on the vietnam era vets. we are looking in a much more frail population may be then certainly we would he with the returning vets other than the injuries they might have. and i think that rosanne's, and about the university design may help more than one way in this population is aging and maybe there is individual, individuals staying in permanent supportive housing don't move on. at least they will be in a property that has universal design and they will be better set up for somebody who is more frail. >> well thank you. i think what we just pointed out is we have an administration that has made a commitment to end homelessness from our veterans by 2015. they have put a lot of tools in this communities to do that. maybe not enough tools, but this is a very congregated question. it has a lot of facets to it. we are starting to come up with

some answers. these answers are also transferable i think many of them to the housing needs of people generally. we know for example the aging issues of the homeless population is aging overall and the reason is because we are all aging over all. the whole demographic is shifting and these are a few issues we are going to have to deal with much more broadly than just with veterans. but we have an opportunity on the veteran side, the panelists are people who been testing them out so please join me in thanking them for what they do. [applause] >> thank you nan and thanks to our panel for a wonderful presentation. we will be back in 10 minutes at 11:35 and i appreciate you bearing with us as we deal with the sound issues. there's a little bit of feedback. the other thing i would encourage you to do is look in

the packets you have, the last sheets is in a valuation form. think about everything except the sound and give us feedback. we know about the sound. we will see you in just 10 minutes. thanks. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] >> about a ten-minute break as we heard and as we wait for this national housing conference to get back underway, remarks a little bit earlier there by georgia republican senator johnny isakson. [applause] >> thank you very much. it's an honor to be here today and i want to pay tribute to the national housing counsel for their focus on an issue that is dear to my heart. i was in the real estate

business for 33 years selling residential housing and building residential houses, and working with veterans because i started out right next to dobbins air force base making fha sales and fha and va loans in 1968. so it means an awful lot to me. i also want to pay tribute to the home depot foundation and the home depot company. their commitment to our veterans and their commitment to housing are parallel to the united states and the first lady is here today, liz blake who i understand was honored last night. she is the first lady of home depot but she is also the first lady of habitat for humanity and many other organizations that provide affordable and safe housing for the american people. home depot is a company and a shining example of the responsibility all of us have a thing to our veterans and doing everything they can to make an investment in our veterans to protect those families when their employees are called up and activated and go serve overseas. they help take care of the family home and when they come

back, the guy comes back or the lady comes back from service the job is there and they -- lives you deserve the recognition that you got last night. [inaudible] >> kelly is easy on the ice too. i met her earlier. she is very pretty. good to see you, kelly. [applause] the secretary gould said two things that i want to say the beginning and i want to close with because there where are two words you mentioned in his speech that really are the key to solving the housing problems we face in america, not just for our veterans but for the american people. one of them is jobs. jobs solve a lot of problems because one jobs, income and with income comes the ability to make your pop -- monthly payment and to amortize your debt and build equity so number one, jobs

is job one and it's very important for us to focus on that. number two you mentioned the word partnership. i can't think of a better word to describe what we need to turn around the housing market in the united states of america, not just for veterans but for all americans and that is think about hard airships. think about working together. the va has done a remarkable job in my judgment and in the last six years since i've been on the veterans committee, really reaching out to veterans and helping them make that the transition from active duty service to veterans status. quite frankly veterans now who have va loans and mortgages and get in trouble have an ombudsman on their behalf at the va. i know from being in the business for years that no lender really wants to foreclose on anybody's house. the worst homeowners in the world are lenders who foreclose. the houses deteriorate and they don't know how to manage them and they write them down in the books. they don't think about them anymore so they really want people to stay in their houses but a lot of americans are afraid to go to their lender in say hey i've got a problem.

is there some way we can work this out? the va and the veteran service organizations are doing a phenomenal job reaching out to veterans when they get in trouble, bring them in working with and working with them and their lender, to work out that loans of the veteran stays in the house. their foreclosure rate is lower than any foreclosure rates and any other types of loans in the country and their turnarounds are greater. their default rate is within margins that are pretty much acceptable because the va is working to keep the veteran in the home and to work with a lender that has alone that the va has guaranteed to see to it that the veteran gets the services. if we had the same type of relationship between every lender and every guarantor as we headed va and the lenders that make the va loans we would have a lot less problems than the united states of america. so partnership is the key and reaching out. jobs are a key and getting the housing market back is one of the ways to get unemployment from 8% to 6%.

don't fool yourself for a minute. one of the reason for the great increase in unemployment and the sustained unemployment rate in america is the lack of housing construction am a residential development and housing development. to that and i have tried to put my money where my mouth is and propose a solution for the problem with liquidity in the mortgage market in the united states of america. aside from fha and va the principle source of mortgage money in our country with fannie mae and freddie mac. they are guaranteed securitized and wrap loans and residential mortgages. when they came under tremendous pressure, and i mean tremendous pressure, in the sub-prime crisis, freddie and fannie went under a lot of duress. they became a wounded rand. they now are in a conservatorship. demarco is doing a great job and quite frankly they are not the agency they really need to be and they aren't because of politics but there's got to be something to replace fannie and freddie. everybody says get rid of them. if you get rid of them you don't

have anything to back them up. people forget after -- when the depression hit the banks got out of the business of making loans. we pass laws that encourage savings and loans to be created and we give them preference against banks and the interest they pay so they can accumulate capital to make loans but after 1986 tax act of savings and loan when under. we had the already system and they went down and what should replace them? freddie mac and fannie mae. if freddie mac and fannie mae believe there is nothing left so quickly the succinct way i want to tell you what my recommendation is because i think it brings liquidity to the mortgage market and it will bring about jobs, improve home sales, help access to affordability not just to veterans but to all americans. yes fannie and freddie made a bad mistake and they securitized the bad sub-prime loans but that was a mistake force on them by congress. congress told fannie and freddie to own up to 30% in affording housing which the markets almost are determined to be sub-prime borrowers. so be c&d credit started getting

prime loans and they started defaulting on those loans. the guaranteed got called against freddie and fannie. freddie and fannie lost $171 billion. if that's the problem we will never appeal to resurrect and we have to soleh with the new agency i propose which is the mortgage finance agency. whose goal is to guarantee securitizing residential mortgages but phase themselves out over a 10 year period of time. put freddie and fannie from conservatorship to receivership like a structured bank and wind them down, open the mortgage finance agency which will make and guarantee a securitized, qualified residential mortgage. the recession in america that began in 2006 and is still going on today was not a recession of over lending. it was underwriting. we made bad loans to babar words, people who weren't really the repair to be homeowners. when they foreclosed foreclose him we had a crescendo of difficulties in the housing

market. what is the qualified residential mortgage? you have to have at least 5% down payment. you have to buy the private mortgage insurance on the amount of loan from 70% to 95% and then supplemental insurance run 50 to 70% so that half the obligation of the taxpayer is already insured and backstopped when you make the loan. secondly the borrower actually does have an income to demonstrate they can make the payments. the borrower has to have a credit report that demonstrates their responsible creditors. they have the aftab appraisal that says the property is worth what it's paid for and they have to have title insurance to guarantee its good. another was go back to the ovation days of putting money down, having a job, having good credit. that way when you securitize rather guaranteed loans as a federal agency york securitizing loans it won't be foreclosed on that are going to be repaid. one of the requirements of the mortgage finance agency will be for for and that they do have a tenure plan from its inception to privatize. and that i believe is possible in the same way that

catastrophic insurance was done in great britain where you take the guaranteed piece collected at closing and he put this guaranteed fees into a catastrophic savings fund and it becomes the first backstopped to protect the american taxpayer from having to pay and guarantee the loan. that is a brief description of the way to take us from where we are now which is were lack of liquidity in the mortgage market to where we need to be and it's a privatizing guaranteed agency that works but it's going to have to be a transitional rich and i'm going to do everything i can to be a partner with other members of the senate and a the house to create an agency that can bring us liquidity for residential land in america. you're been very gracious to have me today and my time is up. i think that is what that says. if you want me to take a question i well and if you want me to sit down and shut up, we'll do that. does anybody have a question? yes, sir?

senator isakson your proposal in qualifying residential -- edition is -- how is that going? you have been very engaged with trying to get the administration to define it in at 20%. >> i appreciate the question and i appreciate your commitment to the mortgage industry in america. the government is doing right now and housing with government always does when it has a problem. the pendulum goes way over here. the fdic and the comptroller of the currency and the federal reserve and the quality residential committee circulated world is that a qualified residential mortgage means you have to put down 20%. >> put down less than 20% a lender has to retain 5% risk retention until the loan is paid off. you talk about not having any mortgage money, you wouldn't have any mortgage money from mainstream america with that type requirement which is brought about the creation of the second way to go about doing the business.

my proposal is like having 50% down because the guarantor is protected to 50% value for property. fortunately, they pulled the rollback and extend the comment period and they pulled it back and they don't have a comment period anymore but it's sitting out there in limbo. so every time i come up and have somebody that is thoughtful and asking a question i tell all of you to if you hear anybody talk about 20% down is the minimum down payment for housing, you are talking somebody is talking about having a compounding effect on our recession and a compounding effect on housing for years to come. so i appreciate the question and i think quality means underwriting doesn't necessarily mean down payment. one more question. if anybody has one. if not, want to thank you for having me and congratulations on this great conference. [applause]

>> thank you. >> we are back live with a national housing conference, the second to panel about to get underway. our live coverage continuing on c-span2. >> until his most recent selection he has been running the north carolina housing coalition, which at a state level brings together a similar range of housing groups at nhc, this broad stakeholder group of advocates and industry for-profit, nonprofit public and private sector and i couldn't be more pleased to be working with him and really look forward to what we are going to see from the national housing conference and the center for housing policy going forward. so with those two announcements, let's move to the last panel. i am very pleased to have eileen fitzgerald the ceo of neighborworks america, moderating the panel. i will let her introduce all of the panelists, but i will say she is not only a longtime board member of the agency and a

source of great wisdom and inspiration to us but is also a newly-elected member of the executive committee of the board, so we look forward to extracting even more unpaid work from her over the years to come. with that i'm going to going to turn it over to eileen to introduce the panelists and take up the discussion of foreclosure prevention and homeownership preservation with a particular emphasis on the needs of the veterans community. >> thank you. can everyone hear us? so, good morning. it's almost good afternoon and thanks or rebut a particularly many of you who are out late last night. thank you for being with us today. in today's discussion we are going to be talking broadly about her closure prevention and homeownership preservation, and then places where it's apical drill down a little bit into the veterans issues and active military duty members and how the foreclosure situation is

impacting them. so i have a great panel. i told them i would just briefly introducing them because we want to make sure we get on it and get you out of here in time. joe is the senior vice president for community and client relations at wells fargo. there he oversees community outreach activities to help promote home preservation programs. paul is a the general counsel and executive vice president of the financial corporation which is an independent mortgage loan servicer. christopher tomey is the director of federal agency -- federal relations, where he focuses on u.s. domestic policy. and then finally mike is the present of the center for responsible lending, a nonpartisan research and policy group that works to educate the public on financial products and the push for policies that put an end to predatory lending practices. i am really excited to have all

these gentlemen. they bring tons of experience and expertise. we have a series of questions that you have outlined and hopefully we will get through those and have a little time for questions at the end. so i'm going to ask mike to frame this for us a little bit. mike while we know we will always have concerns about foreclosures due to individual situations how long do you expect the current foreclosure crisis to last? >> i think the news is that we are approaching the halfway point of getting out of the woods on the foreclosure, so if you look at it, we have had well over -- for people who have completed homes in the last few years. we expect at least that many more, and you can see that for example, that there are more families who are currently

severely delinquent, meaning more than 60 days from the industry standard. today as we sit here than there are who have been foreclosed up to this point. and then also, if you look at the issue of underwater borrowers, and i am sure you have all heard much about that. there are a couple of statistics on that so roughly 50 plus million mortgages out there, over 10 million people are underwater on their loans. and, if you include home equity lines as well, that number jumps to close to 30% of homeowners between their primary mortgages whether it's a first or first and second, and if you include a home equity line of credit as well. there is more a vote against their house and if they sold their house they wouldn't have enough to pay off all the links

they have against it so that is the financial problem as well. real quickly, the type of markets and foreclosure markets hit very differently in the so-called bubble markets than in other markets. it also has a very different impact for different communities, so for example, if you look at pretty conservative numbers, we project that in the wing, neighborhoods, 25% of homeowners ultimately lose their house and go through the foreclosure. if you look at african-american and hispanic households, about 20% of them will lose their homes across all income spectrum's. and it is driven a lot by loan characteristics. the sub-prime levels where you are pushing a foreclosure rate of nearly 50% are the ones

getting hit the hardest and that goes back to if you look at african-americans and hispanics, borrowers who had good credit, they were three times as likely to get one of those sub-prime loans as other households were, so that is driving a lot of the numbers there. the pictures a little bit brighter in terms of housing prices, where a lot of people are thinking that we are approaching the bottom on the housing market although it's it still varies obviously. there pieces of paper about bidding wars in some california towns now and cleveland and detroit and all. that is the big picture that we see. >> thanks. sojo what particular challenges has wells fargo seen for veterans and active-duty veterans in foreclosure? >> i think a number of the challenges facing servicemembers

are really the same that are facing consumers and customers in general. there are complicating circumstances and factors the impact servicemembers a little bit differently, but in general, we see customers unsure of who to call, when they call, what options they have available for them. the big issue out there right now as collateral value of a property being less than what people -- creating a difficult situation. at wells fargo the vast majority of our loans are strict guidelines by the investors and what we can do. so all these challenges apply to servicemembers as well, but when you look at the stress and emotional issues that are going on with servicemembers who have been deployed and potential separation for months and years there other are other factors that come into play. there are some circumstances that are of more unique to the

military customer. one of those, an example of those could be the need for orders to be given to a servicer in order to apply for protection under the scra at. it sounds like an easy thing to do, but when coupled with distress and the challenges, that can be a very difficult task to administer. so one of the things that we have been a big opponent of us trying his trying to streamline a process to facilitate these orders, leveraging the department of defense web site and the standards and try to make this process as easy as possible for our servicemembers. there are a number of support mechanisms that we have put into place for servicemembers including customer service call

lines, a low modification relief program that is unique for those under protection and wells owned loans, reducing interest rates levels below 6% requirements at 4%. outreach conducted in collaboration with industry partners to the military focused focused -- [inaudible] sponsored by hope now and others. their support to the industry put in place that really is designed for this different audience, but still overall, the challenge typically remains the same. one piece of good news this week was the fhfa announcement yesterday regarding short sales and military homeowners with fannie mae or freddie loans eligible for liquidation and specifically short sale and this

includes those loans that are current. so it's a big lift for those who are in the military where we find that the hardship is a retention or one that is focused on low modification. really really hideaway move as a result -- [inaudible] we see it now is a big win. >> so, i wanted to ask paul also and he the announcement that came out from the regulators of dod yesterday. is there anything else you want to share about your perspective on that? >> i agree it's a big win and an hsa is moving out with a creative response to the short sale management. this of course alleviates to some extent the very difficult choice that servicemen are

receiving pcx orders have, the changing of the rule. the change of the rule, when there is a short sale by definition, there is some shortfall with regard to the payback on the outstanding principle balance. in many states, that actually can be the subject of what is called a sufficiency judgment. and another instances, the gse fannie and freddie negotiates -- with the short sale for the homeowner including military service persons, where they continue to have that debt going forward even after the short sale. so it's not a freebie. it's not like they are completely out from under the negative equity situation. they carry forward in many instances that short portion in ongoing debt.

and it's also a subject of a credit reporting. so the fha announced yesterday, they have determined that to alleviate the problem of the servicemen having to decide whether to short sale and carry that debt going forward in the form of a deficiency judgment or otherwise versus not shortselling and carrying two mortgages basically are having to manage that mortgage from a distant location where they have been transferred. the agency has eliminated the deficiency judgment or any debt going forward. so while it's not the equivalent legally of an outright principle write-down on the underwater portion of the mortgage, they just -- they are headed in the right direction. >> i remember last year i did a whole series of articles in the post about families staying apart because of that which obviously raise more attention

because they were staying in the home that was underwater. kind of going back to the bigger picture, the industry is change substantially over the last five years as we have gone through this foreclosure crisis. i know that we have worked with housing counseling agencies and we have seen tremendous changes and practice in those agencies, improve triaged and better data. despite that many consumers feel very long wait times for resolution. i was going to ask paul and joe again very briefly if he could tell us two or three improvements and servicing over the last several years and 81 or two of the remaining challenges, helping families get to both veterans and non-veterans to get to resolution. >> be sure. ever since the onset of the mortgage crisis and i'm sure joe -- is as compared to our

services, the name of the game is increasing staff, customer care, loan modifications experts and so forth. so there has been a high rate of frenzy i would say in order to meet the precedent -- [inaudible] so that is one thing but what that is led to has been in our experience the second sort of iteration of that problem and that is, at this point in time we are finding that most anybody who has had experience in a mortgage call center has been stopped up by demand. so now we have to reach outside the experienced mortgage call center and hire folks who do not have that experience. hopefully they can spell mortgage but they don't have hands-on experience at a call

center. so what we have done to attempt to address that is to bring into our servicing technology behavioral science research, and there are two sides that point. one is with regard to the hiring and recruiting of individuals to sit in the hot seat really to deal with distressed borrowers stay day in and day out -- i listen to some of these calls and as you can imagine it's a difficult position. so we developed a protocol that doesn't necessarily relate to experience but rather relates to cognitive abilities and personality profiles and behavioral characteristics and we have found through behavioral science and testing on small performance in that very difficult position. and we have experimented and change those and adapted those overtime, but we have sort of a

philosophy. is sort of the vince lombardi school of drafting. we don't necessarily go for the quarterback of the left tackle. we go for the best athlete available, break the mentor system, provide training tools and hope that they can contribute to the success of the team. the flipside of that coin briefly is, the study of delinquency and the psychology of delinquency by our dhc that we have on staff. and in that effort, this could be the subject of an entire separate program, but in short, we are beginning to understand the modes of communication right down to the specific words and phrases that are customer care

representatives use in the dialogue that we attempt to build with the homeowners in distressed. and through that again we are testing and refining and we build those into scripts that are generated by artificial intelligence to assist the folks in the call centers to better communicate with optimal results and get them talking to us again. obviously we can't get the homeowners in distress communicating with us if we are not prepared to help them. >> joe, how about you? what are the improvements or maybe some current challenges? >> the landscape of how we service loans has changed dramatically as you can imagine and we have invested millions over the past couple of years. we have stacked up tremendously tremendously -- staffed up and how we approach mortgage servicing on a daily basis. when i look at staffing alone i think we have increased by 140%. we now have 17,000 people who are working with homeowners at

risk of foreclosure. and the specific process changes and one that i will highlight is back in june of 2010 we started signing one individual representative to a customer as they enter what we call preferred loss mitigation. this person is responsible for working with a customer from beginning to end. that has been expanded so if the customer falls outside of preservation loans mitigation and enters foreclosure, still that point of contact will remain the primary person to work with that customer in the entire transaction, so a completely different model than we have ever had in place in the industry. you will hear that model referred to as an appoint contact. is still being refined by many services out there but it should substantially enhance the overall experience, the customer experience, when working with

their service or. now we are spending a lot of time in implementing the national standards that are part of the recent attorney general's agreement. and really, this again will completely overhaul the process that is utilized by the servicers. it focuses on things such as legal and proceedings to how we communicate on a daily basis with customers to establishing much more rigorous discipline around process and timelines and then as you heard this morning, there is an aspect of the servicing standard that focuses on guidelines for assisting customers who are military servicemembers. >> chris, this one is for you. despite all the -- on our interest-only sub-prime we know that there is a more nonstandard typical product that has worked for consumers and customers that

promotes sustainable homeownership. but, if those families face unemployment or something, despite having the best product out there they can still face foreclosure and delinquency challenges so can you share with us a little bit more about how to tax lending products and your specific approach on foreclosure intervention? >> thank>> thank you eileen ands to the national housing conference. there are several aspects that i will point to in our model that enable our homeowners to be highly successful. throughout the housing crisis and recession, i can summon up in one word which is partnership. they are mortgage lenders that their relationship with families extends far far beyond that. is not really contractual relationship and we understand

that families are all in it together. i think that eases when there is a problem and partner in family snow. our partner for families know there's a process and there's a family services coordinator and affiliate there to help them to work through the problem with them and to come up with a plan that can get them back on course, and the affiliates will admit to that. affiliates and partner families are invested in one another and invested in the communities they are serving. it really is the core of the success of the model. a couple of particular aspects that are important, our family selection process is certainly an important aspect of what we do and in making sure that the family not only has the ability to repay their mortgage but is a partner and has that relationship.