Building Relationships Together

Housers don’t operate alone — we build communities together, as proclaimed proudly in the NAHRO logo. Housers don’t build and maintain affordable homes in a vacuum — each home, each building, and each development is made possible by an interlocking and interdependent system of team members, residents, business partners, allies and supporters. Housing agencies work closely with a plethora of stakeholders; staff, residents, local businesses and organizations, and elected officials both local and national. And it takes focused engagement to keep those relationships strong and to continue to build new ones.

Engaging in August Advocacy

During Hill Day in the spring and August Advocacy in the fall, NAHRO works with precision and determination to help you build stronger relationships with your members of Congress. Thank you, NAHRO advocates, for your engagements, calls, and letters! Those letters – more than 60,000 of them this year! – and phone calls continue to be vital parts of our advocacy strategy. We’re also thrilled to see more op-eds, like these two from the Housing Authority of Danville and the Oakland Housing Authority, making local cases for affordable housing. They’re outstanding examples of the creativity and energy you brought to engaging with legislators, officials and partners at all levels.

This year, we made an intentional transition to highlight in-person engagement, and are particularly excited and energized to see you in action! Building and maintaining strong relationships with your elected representatives helps ensure that they know about the work you do and understand how to help you keep doing it. And we’ve committed to providing you with resources — including four new toolkits! — to successfully engage in a variety of modalities.

Whether it’s hosting your member of Congress’ staff, or your senator, or something else entirely, advocacy engagements do much more than signal your support for affordable housing. They become part of an ongoing dialogue about your role as a houser and the housing needs of your community.

We need those dialogues to continue, even after August Advocacy is over.  I hope you’ll keep talking with our elected officials, showing them the homes you build and maintain, and telling them what you need to continue to fight the affordable housing crises in your communities. And continue to keep us in the loop!

Raj Chetty

We don’t just build relationships with our elected officials. At NAHRO’s conferences and events, we hear from and connect with thought leaders, including speakers such as Eviction Lab’s Matthew Desmond, Just Action author Leah Rothstein, Injustice of Place authors Kathryn Edin and Timothy Nelson, and more.

Just a couple of months ago, at NAHRO’s Summer Symposium in Nashville, a packed house was enthralled by Harvard economist and Opportunity Insight Director Raj Chetty’s latest research on economic mobility. All around me, I saw eyes narrow and pens start scribbling as members absorbed his findings and started thinking about how to apply them in their own communities.

The conversation continues in this issue of the Monitor, with his answers to our questions about HOPE VI, social connection as infrastructure, mixed-income communities and more. Raj Chetty’s work has been instrumental in crafting better housing policy and innovative programs, and I am appreciative of our continuing engagement.

#NatCon26

And of course, there’s no better place to build and deepen relationships than our National Conference and Exhibition in Denver. You’ll join well over 1,500 members as we learn from our plenary speakers and 40+ concurrent sessions, celebrate the innovations of our Awards of Merit and Awards of Excellence winners, explore an exhibit hall filled with business partners, and of course build connections with housers and community builders from all across America.

Meet. You. There!