My Kind of Town

NAHRO family!

It was an honor and a pleasure to welcome more than 500 of you to my home state and NAHRO’s birthplace—the city of Chicago, in the great state of Illinois—for the 2024 Summer Symposium.

These gatherings are great opportunities to learn, network and celebrate together, but they’re also a lot of work. I’m so proud of our NAHRO leaders, many of whom arrived nearly two days early to do the strategic work that keeps our association healthy and strong. Congratulations to Strategic Planning Advisory Chair Jennifer Keogh and the rest of the SPAC and to our Board of Governors for passing NAHRO’s new, updated values!

These nine words stand alongside our vision—thriving communities with affordable homes for all—and our mission: to advance the creation of strong, sustainable and affordable communities through advocacy, professional development, and the empowerment of our diverse members. Together, our mission, vision and values define what we want our organization to be and do, and our recently passed strategic plan is a roadmap of where we want to go.

Now that we have the roadmap, we’re setting up milestones and measurable outcomes so we can track our process and hold ourselves accountable along the way. You can see a few of these in our strategic plan summary, and you’ll hear more about them soon.

Then came the symposium itself: an ambitious, two-day dive into the past, present and future history of affordable housing. With the help of the National Public Housing Museum, we took a steady look at our industry’s past. On Thursday morning, a panel of former public housing residents – Sunny Fischer, Troy Gaston and Rev. Marshall Hatch – shared how their homes and communities shaped and transformed their lives. That same evening, former Henry Horner Homes resident and award-winning musician Reginald Robinson treated us to an amazing and virtuosic piano performance of classic and original ragtime music.

We also dug deep into our present and what we must do now.  In addition to several sessions on current programs and issues, including public housing, Section 8, Moving to Work, Inflation Reduction Act funding for small agencies and more, we also had a deep discussion with sociologists Kathryn Edin and Timothy Nelson about their research on generational poverty and the communities that struggle with it.

And then, of course, we looked to the future. I moderated a discussion with University of Chicago Professor Philip Garboden and Chicago Rehab Network Executive Director Kevin F. Jackson on their strategies for building and evolving affordable, sustainable communities. We also had concurrent sessions focused on developing future leaders, preserving public housing, and more. We also got ready for our upcoming August Advocacy campaign by releasing the 2024 NAHRO 360 report and a sneak peek at our new advocacy platform. Of course, all these resources are available to all of you on the NAHRO website. I was glad to greet so many of you in Chicago, and I’m looking forward to seeing even more of you in September at our National Conference and Exhibition in Orlando.

Acknowledgements and Shout-outs

I’d like to acknowledge the following leaders and their housing agencies:

• Mike Gerber – Housing Authority of the City of Austin
• Terri Lee – Atlanta Housing
• Michael Simelton – Housing Authority of Joliet
• Ralph Jordan – Aurora Housing Authority

I’d also like to give a special shout out to the Housing Authority of the City of Shreveport on their Choice Neighborhoods Initiative project: Bayou Grande Phase III.

Have a great summer!