-- i have public comment. >> good afternoon, bill herb wood with the panel. i would like to thank the mayor's office for working on this issue. i have been one of those interested in this happening for many many years now. i'm very excited to see it moving forward. i just want to say that, i do think that the biggest area of concern is around making sure that you have updated and good information in the data base. while the common application piece is great and nifty, really it is only as helpful as the information that is in the system. and where this process has fallen down in the past has been around the effort to get current updated information from all the housing providers. and by all of the housing providers, i mean not just the bmr's which are a very small set of affordable housing and

not really affordable to folks that we are talking about, but public housing certainly the non-profit housing brian as you mentioned the affordable housing that has a for profit developer that manages it but also a lot of the city run houses is only accessed by some internal referral mechanism. so the department of public health has access to the housing programs and you can only be referred through the department of public health. so all of that is really an important part of the process, all the residential care, facilities that are really part of the whole fabric of housing. so just want to stress that. >> thanks. >> i have a comment coming from the bridge line. >> hello.

>> hi, this is jessica layman from senior and disability action. can you hear me? >> yes. >> wonderful. i'm sorry i couldn't be here with you but thank you for this important discussion on this important issue. i'm sorry. the issues that i wanted to raise was about training and on going assistance with using the data portal. i think making sure things are fully accessible is a really important step but even when they are as accessible as they can be we are going to have a lot of people who aren't familiar with computers and going online and people who don't speak the language at all and are going to need some assistance. i'm trying to figure out where people can go and get assistance from either existing service providers and how will those

service providers tv capacity to provide that one on one service needed and a conventions of possibilities and different places all over town where people go and get some of this assistance. part of that is having some conversation starting now about what does that look like and how to get it in place so people are ready to go to get the kind of help they need. i know there have been some good workshops and discussion about an application and how to make that really useful and i hope that would be a similar workshop in bringing together stakeholders to talk about how are we really making this usable for folks. thank you. >> thank you. >> mam, would you like to make a public comment? >> my name is elizabeth griffin.

about accessibility usage. you can go on the website and how accessible it is. accessible the apartments are. i mean to say this to the board what you guys call accessible may not really be accessible. it takes somebody

with a disability to come out and really see something that's accessible. so i encourage you guys to really have somebody that uses a wheelchair or somebody who is blind or maybe impaired to really test out your apartments before you really call it accessible because if you just go around saying it's accessible without having somebody with a disability check it out,

to me it is false advertisement and not accessible. that's not really ada compliant to me i really hope that these affordable units are really for with disabilities and not just for people who are low income, but people who have, people who are really disabled, and not just have a low

budget or whatever because a lot of times places for people with disabilities and you find all kind of people moving in and you have people in the units. so i would be very weary of that. thank you very much. >> thank you. >> any further public comment? we are going to take a 10-minute break.

>> >>

>> welcome back, everybody. we are up to agenda item no. 7. we are going to hear from the aids legal referral panel. mr. bill hirsch.

>> good afternoon, it's a pleasure to be here. i have had the pleasure and opportunity to work with the mayor's disability council and i appreciate the collaboration. i will be giving a brief presentation on the services that are provided by the aids legal referral panel. i will talk a little bit about the recent aids adopted housing plan and the one challenge we see for the housing for people living with hiv and aids. the aids legal referral panel is a small non-profit that provides legal services for people living with hiv and aids. we serve seven counties. traditionally legal services programs

are usually very limited in the kind of services that they can offer and sometimes they maybe specific to certain populations or to certain issues. arp has now ten staff attorneys who can handle a number of cases in-house mostly insurance and housing. i'm talk about housing in a moment. we also have a panel of over 700 attorneys who volunteer and can provide assistance in a much broader array of civil legal matters. so we have attorneys on our panel who can handle immigration and employment and credit and bankruptcy issues as well as matters involving wills and powers of attorney. i will date myself. when i got out of law school in 1986 and i got trained by panels to do wills

and that's what we were doing at that point in running the epidemic is running to hospitals for those who would die within a very short period of time. wills are probably about 85% of what we were doing back then, wills are now 10% of what we do i share that statistic because i think it speaks volumes about how the epidemic has changed over 30 years. our clients are coming to us much more for issues related to living with hiv than dying of aids. there is no issue where we see that more starkly than in the area of housing. and everybody knows that there is an affordable housing crisis for people with disabilities, for people with very low incomes. it has been a crisis for many years and it is a crisis unprecedent in this history at this point in time. so the housing

crisis really forced alrp to rethink how we provide services because we simply weren't able to find enough attorneys to handle all the housing cases that were coming our wait. so in 1998 we started to have attorneys in house to provide more in depth direction representation. we have stepped up our game recently in our collaboration with other service providers in town and we are providing full scope representation up to and including trial. so we are taking as an aggressive posture as we can with landlord attorneys letting them know that if they are going to be evicting folks they are going to have to fight at the top of their game and we have already seen a dramatic improvement in the results that we are able to get for our clients. i think

landlord attorneys assumed that tenant attorneys would not have the resources to go to trial and they are seeing that is not the case any longer. it is a bit of a game changer. at the same time the number of eviction are rising so dramatically that it is overwhelming for our small office and we still need more resources in order to handle the housing cases that come in our door. i can't say that we save someone's housing everyday, but we do save it every week and there is days where we save three people's housing in a day and i'm incredibly proud of the work that our attorneys are doing. i think i have been around for each of the now four aids housing plans in the city. there was a time when the first aids housing plan was developed where it called for a great many more

hospice beds to be created and even a new category residential care facility for the chronically ill was a licensure category. now there is only one hospice targeted for people with hiv and even that program does not serve exclusive people with hiv and many of the people who go into that program get tune ups and get more focused medical attention and are then able to leave the hospice which is a pretty remarkable transformation from where we were even a few years ago. there is a huge unmet need for affordable housing, for people with hiv and aids. it is almost impossible for people living with the disease to manage their disease if they do not have stable affordable

housing. and while many communities are impacted by the affordable housing crisis, for people with hiv and aids, they risk not only homelessness, but they risk losing access to all the services that have helped to keep them alive. we fight to help keep them in their housing. one good job of describing the need, it does not do a very good job unfortunately of identifying the resources needed to address that need. and unlike plans in the past where we've had some very specific targets that have been generated as a result of the planning process i think this effort was much more focused on issues related to maintaining the residential care facilities that are at risk of losing funding through the