AFFIRMATIVE MARKETING OF AFFORDABLE UNITS - How to list and find affordable, accessible, and permanent supportive rental housing on the Los Angeles County Housing Resource Center website

This web-based training is designed to help developers, lenders, property managers, housing locators, advocates and other housing stakeholders understand the process for registering and finding rental housing on the Los Angeles County Housing Resource Center (LAC-HRC) website. This website is found at www.housing.lacounty.gov.

In 2015, two important changes happened which also affect and improve the reach and effectiveness of this website.  In May 2015, a partner website called the City of Los Angeles Housing Resource Center (www.housing.lacity.org) was launched under contract with the Los Angeles Housing and Community Investment Department (HCIDLA).  Both the City and County websites share the same database and property registration is required for both City and County-funded projects. Additionally, in August 2015, Emphasys Software acquired Socialserve.com, the national nonprofit that operates these websites. This new partnership brings exciting opportunity for improvements and new features in the future.

Affordable housing developers who obtain financial assistance from either HCIDLA or the Los Angeles County Community Development Commission (CDC) are required to register their properties on the Housing Resource Center website.  Both the City and County are actively enforcing the registration of affordable units on the website in order to comply with fair housing laws and to promote increased awareness of affordable units that have accessibility features.

This one hour webinar, presented by Sheila Roberts and Nina Miller of Emphasys, will have two parts. The first half of the presentation will be an overview of the LAC-HRC website’s free-to-use housing locator features, and an explanation of the differences between the County and City requirements and websites.  The second half of the webinar will focus exclusively on the process for registering properties at the time of initial lease-up, with an emphasis on optimizing the marketing of accessible units as well as a discussion about how to register Permanent Supportive Housing units that are required to be in the Coordinated Entry System. This part of the presentation will be of particular use to property managers, project managers, and management companies involved with publicly-funded affordable housing developments.