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.
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 talked a little about Tory's personal housing story. We then covered the first 2 points 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 third 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
01:17 Intro to episode
02:27 Beginning of interview
03:55 Tory's home story
07:50 Tory's rural experience
14:14 Tory's job at the Cambridge Housing Authority
17:00 What Houston has accomplished
20:48 Chronic homelessness
21:58 Overall homelessness decreased by 60% from 2011-2017
22:13 Tory's Keys to Success in Houston
22:37 #1 Leadership Support from the Top
28:16 People experiencing homelessness are worthy and deserving of our respect and support
29:20 Leaders were empowered from the top
30:47 Intelligent support from the heart and funding
31:35 #2 Low Ego in Leadership
34:10 Good, smart people in government
35:50 HUD provided technical assistance
38:42 United States Interagency Council on Homelessness
41:44 100 day goal decision
43:10 Housing 100 veterans in 100 days
46:45 Completing the goal created high morale
48:20 Tackling systemic problems and creating a new process
52:10 Department of Housing and Urban Development
53:04 Risk taking is really rare
57:50 Less expensive to give people housing
59:47 Resource allocation
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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.
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