Podcast
Conversations about affordable housing.
Here at Affordable Houser we’re interviewing people who have helped their cities and communities make great strides in developing affordable housing and alleviating homelessness. These are people using good data to make intelligent decisions to help people. They work with their hearts truly turned to the people they’ve served.
Tory Gunsolley is currently the Chief Program Officer for Harris County Housing & Community Development. In this episode we discussed a time period when he was serving as the director for the Houston Housing Authority. Tory came to me and outlined 7 key things he believes were integral to reducing homelessness in Houston. Tory is a sort of technocratic genius with a real heart and passion for the people we serves. He is a great leader with a deep reservoir of knowledge gleaned from tackling seemingly insurmountable challenges successfully. We spent almost 2 hours together, so we are releasing this conversation in two parts. This is part 2. If you haven’t watched part 1 I’d suggest going back and watching that first.
There is a lot to learn from Tory and all our guests. If you'd like to receive our notes from this episode, please sign up for our email list. We want to make this podcast as helpful to you and your communities as possible. We will let you know when new episodes air along with forwarding our key takeaways.
In this episode we covered points 3-7 in Tory's list of 7 Keys to Houston's success.
Tory's Keys to Houston's Success in Reducing Homelessness:
1. Leadership Support from the Top
2. Low Ego in Leadership
3. Collaboration
4. Data Driven Decisions
5. A Belief Your Team can do Hard Things
6. Key Staff and Empowering Them
7. Market Conditions
This is the fourth episode in my series where I interview people who played key roles as part of a team who helped decrease chronic homelessness in Houston by over 70% in a span of 3 years.
While I am an attorney, none of the information in this podcast is legal advice. This podcast is intended for educational and entertainment purposes only.
Check out Tory's work with Harris County Housing & Community Development here:
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In this episode:
00:00 Show preview
01:03 Intro
02:32 #3 Collaboration
03:35 building trust
06:16 broad, deep and high impact collaboration
06:59 PSH definition (Permanent Supportive Housing)
08:58 coordinated application
10:02 funding sources explained
11:45 pipeline committee
12:53 #4 Data Driven Decisions
14:23 The Women’s Home
16:12 changing the system
17:13 CoC definition (Continuum of Care)
19:18 3.5 Billion for CoC
19:21 funding from Congress
21:16 data driven process nationally
24:19 do something now
25:28 blue ribbon panels
27:36 #5 Believe You Can Do Difficult Things
28:00 book recommendations
30:55 system change
31:09 #6 Key Staff & Empowering Them
33:15 quick decision making
34:48 roadblocks
35:25 possible but not easy
36:58 #7 Market Conditions
38:30 system gap analysis
39:55 where we stand today
42:04 reducing homeless encampments compassionately
43:34 we need new intervention models
44:05 cliff of funding is coming
45:02 we could have big reversion or spike without the funding
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Here at Affordable Houser we’re interviewing people who have helped their cities and communities make great strides in developing affordable housing and alleviating homelessness. These are people using good data to make intelligent decisions to help people. They work with their hearts truly turned to the people they’ve served.
